Chernobyl children’s trips to Ireland banned

IRISH families, who provide annual holiday respite for children suffering the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, have been told that future trips are banned.

The Department of Foreign Affairs is in talks with the Belarusian authorities to try to establish why the ban has been imposed. The ban initially applied to the US, but has been extended worldwide.

Chernobyl Children’s Project kingpin Adi Roche last night described the announcement as shocking.

Meanwhile, leading Belarusian scientists and medical experts discuss the problems facing the country, where two million people still live in the Chernobyl nuclear contaminated zones, in a RTÉ documentary being screened tonight.

The work of anti-nuclear campaigner and humanitarian aid worker, Ms Roche, is the central subject of the film to be shown on RTÉ One at 10.45pm.

The Children Beyond Chernobyl was filmed in Belarus this summer as the Clonmel-born activist and a 100-strong team of Irish aid workers returned to the world’s most highly contaminated nuclear accident radiation zone.

“People here don’t always agree on the scale of the problems caused by Chernobyl,” says consultant paediatrician Dr Irena Kalmanovich, of the Children’s Regional Hospital in Gomel, “but we face huge problems where we have to do things and perform operations on children which would never be considered in Ireland or any other western country. But that is the way things are in Belarus today.”

It was Ms Roche’s 55th journey to Belarus, the country that has suffered most from the disastrous 1986 Chernobyl explosion, and her 14th time to go back into the exclusion zone close to the reactor.

The documentary, presented by RTÉ’s Western editor Jim Fahy, follows her on a journey to remote mental asylums where young and old are locked up together; orphanages where abused and abandoned children live hopeless, despairing lives and hospitals where operations are carried out without anaesthetics.

But her latest journey is also one filled with moments of hope and great joy as children — some rescued from brutal backgrounds and others with severe physical and mental illnesses — are being given new lives with the help of Irish aid programmes.