From Clonmel to the UN, Adi Roche champions the cause of Chernobyl children, innocent victims of nuclear disaster

In the second in our series on Tipperary Newsmakers, Chernobyl Children's Project International founder and inspiration Adi Roche explains how her upbringing in Clonmel gave her a strong sense of social justice and imbued in her the concept of giving neighbours a helping hand. She spoke to EAMONN WYNNE about her amazing journey in life.

It was out of desperation, she admits, that Adi Roche, the founder and public face of the Chernobyl Children's Project International blurted out on a radio interview on RTE's News at One during Christmas week that if necessary she would sell her house to alleviate the funding difficulties that one of the country's best-known charities was being squeezed with, as a consequence of the recession.

The interview was broadcast while her husband Sean Dunne, having opted for early retirement from his teaching post at the CBS Secondary School in Cork, was saying farewell to his colleagues, prompting them to suggest that they might need to hold another collection for the couple.

Adi says that she would have sold the house if she had to - “it's only bricks and mortar” - but her unflinching belief in the innate goodness of people meant that the roof over her head was never likely to be removed.

The radio interview was conducted over the 'phone in the arrivals hall of Dublin Airport, as she waited to greet a large contingent of children from Belarus who were spending Christmas with families throughout Ireland. For the next hour or two people who either heard or were made aware of the interview approached her with donations in different currencies amounting to j700.

When she returned home to Cork that night an old age pensioner had pushed their live savings of j1,500 through her letterbox. The day proved a humbling experience. “I didn't even know who they were. I get a lump in my throat thinking about it”, she says.

That remark about selling her house might have surprised many but not those who know this quite remarkable woman. For the past 24 years she has worked tirelessly to provide humanitarian aid to the 3-4 million children in Belarus, Western Russia and Ukraine that the United Nations recognises as affected by the world's worst nuclear disaster, which occurred at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986.

Under her leadership, the Chernobyl Children’s Project International has initiated 16 aid programmes and delivered direct and indirect medical and humanitarian aid valued at over €80m to the areas most affected by the nuclear disaster.

INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION

Her efforts on behalf of these children and a thorough understanding of the Chernobyl accident aftermath have brought her international recognition, while the Chernobyl Children’s Project International has received official charitable status in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Belarus and the United States.

Hers is an amazing journey that has taken Adi Roche from her childhood home in Western Park, Clonmel to the hallowed halls of the United Nations in Geneva and New York.

Despite her work on behalf of the Chernobyl children, she claims there's nothing altruistic in her involvement with the Project, one to which she has devoted her life. “I'm doing it as much for my own salvation and sanity”, she says, adding that the work gives meaning to her own existence on the planet while providing her with some sense that her life has been worthwhile.

A glimpse into her youth offers a clearer insight into her motivation, what makes her tick. Her introduction to radiation came in tragic circumstances when Anne Condon, her best friend and classmate at the Presentation Convent, was struck down with leukaemia and died.

Once diagnosed Anne, who lived in nearby Connolly Park (the family subsequently moved to Marlfield) and Adi went away and learned all about radioactivity and the nuclear weapons that had been tested in the 1950s. They came to the conclusion that Anne was affected by the nuclear fallout over Ireland.

“It had an extraordinary impact on me, it marked my entire life. I truly believe that the seed was planted there and then”.

Adi even believes that Anne, someone who she says she truly loved, might have guided her into this work, so that others wouldn't have to suffer the same fate.

An accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania proved another defining moment. Her brother Donal was living in Harrisburg at the time with his pregnant wife and they were evacuated amid the pandemonium that gripped the local community. It was 1977, the year she and Sean were married, and around the time that plans were hatched for a nuclear power plant in Carnsore Point in Wexford.

She says that she couldn't believe this was happening in Ireland and the couple regularly attended the Carnsore Point rallies, which attracted “ordinary people the length and breadth of Ireland, people who were concerned for the health of the country and for future generations”.

The anti-nuclear protests attracted musicians such as Paul Brady, Christy Moore and The Chieftains, as well as Native Red Indians, “powerful speakers”, who spoke about the desecration of their sacred burial grounds in areas of the United States including the Black Hills of Dakota, which were mined for uranium, the raw material for nuclear weapons.

When the reactor at the Chernobyl plant went into meltdown, with such devastating consequences, Adi Roche had gathered sufficient knowledge about nuclear energy to act. She describes her response to the Chernobyl accident, and her involvement with a charity that has devoted itself to dealing with the aftermath of the accident, as “a natural progression. I knew all the theory but this was the reality”.

A strong sense of social justice that can not only be traced to her childhood, but even appears to be embedded in her DNA, is also crucial to her story. She eagerly quotes the Irish proverb “Is ar scath a cheile a mhaireann na daoine” (literally translated, it is the shadow of each other that we survive; or, we need each other); and says she always loved the concept of volunteerism and active citizenship, which she describes as a broadening of the helping-hand philosophy, with an added political and democratic dimension.

She says that her parents Sean and Chris imbued the family (which includes sister Len and brothers Donal and Conchubair) with the concept of giving your neighbour a helping hand. The Roches were reared with the philosophy of “we can do something, even if it's very small. We learned at a very young age that it's a great blessing and privilege to be able to reach out and help another human being”.

FORMATIVE YEARS

With that background, she believes that her formative years in Clonmel shaped her path in life. Her parents were active members of charitable organisations including the Meals on Wheels and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, as well as helping the Travelling community. Her father was also a member of the local Fianna Fail Cumann and she recalls as a child crawling under a table in the Denis Lacy Hall, the party headquarters in Clonmel.

Adi also visited the elderly through her involvement with the Girl Guides and Legion of Mary. She admits that although she lived in a middle class world, all those organisations taught her about “a whole world of have-nots within our community, including Travellers who called to the house and areas where the electricity had been cut off (because people couldn't pay the bill) and where people couldn't afford a knob of coal for the fire.

Without it being preached, volunteerism was literally in my blood”. This sense of responsibility towards the rights of others is something she has carried through her life.

Her formal education has also had a major impact. Adi says she was very much influenced by the nuns in the Presentation Convent - “I was half-terrified and in awe of them” – and their stories about the African Missions and giving a penny for the Black Babies.

“All of those missionaries, men and women, were volunteers. Our inheritance is the richness we inherited from that generation, and a deep sense of justice and a deep sense of commitment to the community; and most important of all a respect for people, irrespective of class, race or sex”.

Because of that she claims that Irish people “have been able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, arm in arm with people who have been abandoned, forgotten or isolated”.

She was also impassioned in her childhood by stories of the Famine and other tales told to her by her grandmother.”I was like a sponge, I took it all in”.

She talks enthusiastically of her passion with life and a love of the earth itself and nature. She recalls time spent in her youth as a member of Clonmel Rowing Club, rowing from The Island in Irishtown to Knocklofty and the things you saw, heard and smelt, “things that showed the beauty of life.”

With all this in mind, she says “the least I could do as a human was to give something back”.

She decided she was well placed to start giving something back by early adulthood. Adi took redundancy from her job with Aer Lingus to work full time with CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as well as joining the environmental group Friends of the Earth. She devised a Peace Education programme and delivered it in over 50 schools throughout the country, speaking passionately about the danger of turning Ireland into a nuclear wasteland if a nuclear power plant was built here, as well as the importance of retaining Ireland's neutrality.

She was also one of the key organisers of the protests against American President Ronald Reagan's visit to his ancestral home of Ballyporeen – which occurred at the height of the Cold War, in 1984 - when she and other protestors chanted the old Black American song “we shall overcome”, which she believes is still relevant today.

Ironically, the presidency of a country was to again feature prominently in her life 13 years later when she was unanimously selected to stand as the People's Alliance candidate for the Irish Presidency under the leadership of the Labour Party, in 1997.

In 1986 the Chernobyl accident happened and, along with a group of doctors, she set up an emergency hotline to help families who were worried about their children and pregnant women concerned for the safety of their unborn children. She may not have realised it at the time but she had taken the first step on the road to becoming forever linked with Chernobyl.

Filled with compassion and zeal she founded the Chernobyl Children's Project International in 1991, deciding to take direct action, because “kind words never fed a hungry baby”. This philosophy, she says, translates into life-saving surgery for a child or giving them a proper home.

A prolific writer, Adi is the author of the bestseller The Children of Chernobyl, published in 1996, and Chernobyl Heart – 20 Years On, published in February 2006.

To mark the 18th anniversary of the tragedy in April 2004 she was invited to speak at the UN General Assembly at their headquarters in New York, using the opportunity to screen the Oscar award-winning documentary Chernobyl Heart, one of the many critically-acclaimed documentaries that she has produced.

In July 2003 she was the keynote speaker at the launch at the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva of the International Chernobyl Research and Information Network Implementation, a body that supports the ongoing international, national and civil society efforts towards the sustainable development of the affected territories.

Kofi Annan, then Secretary General of the United Nations looked to Ireland and particularly to Adi Roche to mount an exhibition of Chernobyl for the 15th anniversary of the accident in the UN Headquarters in New York in 2001. The Chernobyl legacy was demonstrated through digital imagery, photographs and sculpture. Entitled Black Wind, White Land, the exhibition was a month-long, cross-cultural event featuring the works of a diverse group of artists depicting the suffering caused by the accident. It was deemed an outstanding success by the UN and had its European Premiere in Dublin in April 2002.

She says that all of this exposure has helped to provide different ways of breaking the silence , re-kindling the story and telling it afresh. A recent, well-publicised trip to Belarus, when Adi was accompanied by Rose of Tralee Charmaine Kenny, also helped the cause.

An appeal that is 24 years old is bound to encounter donor fatigue, especially in an age of recession.

The harsh economic climate has affected all charities and voluntary organisations and she says that when the recession initially struck “we were running around like headless chickens”, wondering whether they could provide the same level of services and programmes. Last year, when she confesses to having “lots of wobbly moments”, two of their largest fundraisers in Dublin, which normally raised in the region of half a million Euro, were cancelled. She says she was “reeling” when this happened because she already spent the money on the group's Hospice programme and its Homes of Hope, which provide homes for children with foster parents.

VOLUNTARY CEO

But because the Project is a voluntary-based organisation she says it only has “tiny” administration costs. Adi may be the CEO of a very large international movement but is a volunteer CEO and receives no salary. That ethos has permeated through the organisation and she's proud that the 6,000-strong base of volunteers that it attracted through the Celtic Tiger years has never faltered or wavered.

During the heady days of the Celtic Tiger she thinks we may have lost sight of both the power of a good neighbour and a sense of community engagement, because we were all so busy with our lives.

Now, she feels, we're re-visiting the old values of putting people before profit, the value system with which we were reared.

Neither Sean nor herself are monetarist in their approach to life and she considers herself fortunate to be married to someone who's “so chillled out”.

She firmly believes that the wealth of the organisation isn't in its bank balance but in its people. She describes the work of volunteers including Carol Morrissey, the outreach leader of the Clonmel branch; Johnny and Anne Casey from Grange, Knocklofty, who provide a home from home for the Yerashok children from Belarus; and Eddie Cooney in the Civil Defence as “awesome stuff”.

A foster home funded by Clonmel people for ten children and their parents in Belarus is scheduled to open in a few months time. The Home of Hope, in the village of Zhitkovichi, will provide a refuge and a home for children who include the Yerashoks, who have holidayed regularly (including at Christmas) with Johnny and Anne Casey.

Adi says it doesn't get much better than knowing that families such as the Yerashoks will have a safe haven, their very own home funded by the people of Clonmel and Tipperary.

The Project has already established 21 Homes of Hope in Belarus, with 5 more to follow this year, and it's hoped the campaign will eventually shut the country's orphanages.

For someone who is so inspiring and uplifting to listen to, it's surprising to hear her say that she suffers from “moments of absolute bleakness and darkness”, which she attributes to mental and physical exhaustion. She has burnt herself out many times and her late mother Chris often told Adi she would be no good to anybody in the grave.

She describes herself as an eternal optimist but acknowledges there are times when she is “down to zero, zilch in terms of energy and her ability to carry on”. However she always lives to fight another day.

She knows there are moments when she has pushed her luck a lot. For this she has paid a price in terms of her health and relationships with friends, and has missed more wedding anniversaries and birthdays than she cares to remember.

But if she had her way over again she would still make those sacrifices. She considers her work as an honour and privilege that inspires and re-inspires her all the time. And she knows that she couldn't have done it without the benevolence of those who loved her.

Her ambition for this year and for 2011, which will mark the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, is “to let no candle of hope to flicker or fade in the winds of an economic recession”.

Whenever she's “emotionally on the ground, in bits” and feeling too exhausted to carry on, she draws on American President Barack Obama's “wonderful quote” for inspiration - “Lay our hands on the arc of history and build it once more into the hope of a new day”.

“I always look for the new day”, she says.

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