Kazakhstan to honour Irish woman
Fiona Corcoran, the founder of the Greater Chernobyl Cause charity, will accept the honorary diploma and medal from President Nursultan Nazarbayev at the Ak Orda Palace in the Kazak capital of Astana next week in honour of her extensive humanitarian work.
“I am deeply honoured and humbled and I accept this on behalf of all our supporters through Ireland,” she said.
“This award will help our work tremendously in Kazakhstan and special thanks must be given to our chairman and co-founder Patrick McGrath.
“For the Greater Chernobyl Cause, it represents a triumph of sheer perseverance after years of struggle against bureaucracy and red tape.”
The charity, which has Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons as its patron, is the only Irish charity operating in the vast country.
It has worked tirelessly to transform the lives of some of the weakest and most vulnerable children condemned to live in desperate and dilapidated orphanages.
It has also been successful in organising the adoption by Irish parents of children from Kazakhstan.
Ms Corcoran said its work in Kazakhstan was a natural progression following its work with victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in neighbouring Ukraine.
Kazakhstan was used by the Soviet Union for decades as a testing ground for some 500 nuclear explosions.
They took place within 160km of the large industrial city of Semipalatinsk where Ms Corcoran’s charity works with abandoned babies.
“Even today, some mothers have a defective gene thought to be caused by radiation and have given birth to babies suffering from cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus (water on the brain),” she said.
“Abandoned in the first weeks of life, some of them have become victims of a system that hurls together children of all backgrounds into under-funded and ill-equipped orphanages.
“Many others have been handed over by impoverished parents unable to cope with their mental and physical disabilities.”
At one orphanage in Ayagus, a desperately poor city where temperatures plunge to minus 35 in winter, the death rate was so alarming that the charity successfully appealed for €500,000 to provide a new building with heated dormitories and classrooms, and to pay for a team of specialists to treat the children.
The charity has also carried out refurbishments at the Semipalatinsk Orphanage and at a complex at Ridder City in the southeast of the country, which houses more than 700 residents aged from 18 to 97.
