CHERNOBYL Clonmel Connection
E
ven before Russia’s brutal invasion started a few months ago millions of Ukrainian children and their families were already coping with another catastrophe inflicted on them by their oppressors. Located close to the northern Ukrainian city of Pripyat the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was – like the rest of the country – a part of the United Socialist Soviet Republic (U.S.S.R), aka the Soviet Union. On April 26 1986 a safety test on a steam turbine went wrong and led to the meltdown of No. 4 reactor and explosions that blew masses of radioactive material into the immediate area and sent clouds of the stuff across the rest of Europe. The Soviet response was to deny anything had happened on the international stage and was forced to admit to the accident when the Swedish government was about to lodge an alert with the
18 | THE IRISH SCENE
International Atomic Energy Agency. Even then they first tried to portray it as a minor incident but when they had to evacuate the entire population of the region – some 100,000 people – because of the danger posed by dangerous levels of radioactive fallout they could no longer hide the full extent of the incident. This terrible chain of events started another reaction in Ireland that is still going today. In 2001, five years after the meltdown and the same year Ukraine became an independent country, desperate doctors using fax machines sent out the call begging for anyone who could to take children away from the radioactive environment in the region – including Belarus and Western Russia – to give their young bodies a break from the highly toxic material. One of the people to see that fax was a woman from Clonmel, Co. Tipperary Adi Roche who
