Irish in Lebanon: 'I can’t tell people it’s 100% safe. It’s still possible there will be a war'

Two Irish women tell Hannah McCarthy about life in Lebanon amid the escalating threats of conflict in the beautiful Mediterranean country 

Mayo woman Deborah McConway: 'I always say that the Lebanese and the Irish are kindred spirits with a similar kind of history and a similar mindset... We have to prove ourselves — we’re such a small nation.' 

Deborah McConway moved with her family from Ghana to Lebanon less than a month before the war in Gaza began last October.

Since then, there have been near daily exchanges of fire and rockets between Israeli forces and the militant group Hezbollah that controls southern Lebanon, where over 300 Irish troops are stationed.

McConway says that through friends and work connections “we were assured it would be safe where we live and we have contingencies in place if things escalate”.

Originally from Castlebar in Mayo, the qualified solicitor says “Lebanon had never been on the cards”. Until last year, McConway had been living in Ghana, where she had moved to from London over 10 years ago with her husband, a former member of the Defence Forces. 

She first worked as a lawyer for a construction company in the Ghanaian capital Accra, before joining a Lebanese-owned conglomerate that is about to launch a Revolut-style mobile payments and digital wallet company in Lebanon called Mojo.

Street violence during a student protest over fees in Hamra, Beirut. Lebanon is an attractive place to live but economic instability and regional issues including the bombardment of its southern region by Israeli forces have upped tensions. 

The Lebanese diaspora has a well-established community in Ghana — “I had a lot of Lebanese friends in Ghana,” says McConway.

“I always say that the Lebanese and the Irish are kindred spirits with a similar kind of history and a similar mindset: When we get down, we just get up again, and we brush ourselves off, and we move on. 

We have to prove ourselves — we’re such a small nation.”

A move to Lebanon wasn’t part of the plan until Charles Chedrawi, the Lebanese chairman of a conglomerate that McConway began working with in Ghana visited Lebanon in 2021. 

Two years previously, in 2019, the local Lebanese currency had begun to rapidly lose value and overnight the banks heavily restricted the amount of money customers could withdraw from their bank accounts. 

Since then, a spate of armed robberies have taken place where bank customers have demanded the return of the deposits in their own accounts.

Irish woman Deborah McConway in her office at Mojo, the digital wallet firm she has co-founded in Lebanon. Deborah moved to Lebanon a month before the current Israel-Hamas conflict began. 

Lebanon has since reverted to a predominantly cash-bashed economy, with many prices now unofficially pegged to the US dollar after hyperinflation caused the Lebanese pound to lose 90% of its value. 

When Chedrawi visited Lebanon in 2021, he found himself without enough cash to pay for a dinner one night, as his international bank cards didn’t work. He thought mobile payments apps could offer a solution.

Digital and mobile payments were already common in Ghana, where much of the population lacked a traditional bank account and instead used phone apps to make payments. 

In Lebanon, the population had, in contrast, relied heavily on formal bank accounts, with many banks promising high interest rates which subsequently turned out to be part of what was effectively a large-scale ponzi scheme.

A Lebanese Communist Party rally in Beirut protesting ‘aggression against Lebanon and Palestine’. From Israeli attacks to conflicts involving Syrian refugees, tensions have been rising in Lebanon. Picture: Hussein Malla/AP

Amid so much instability in the Middle East, McConway hopes that Mojo can help restore consumer’s trust and make it easier for Lebanese people to make payments and transfer money from abroad. 

“Because banks played such a prominent role in the crash here, people are slow to move on from that,” says McConway. 

“People have a trust issue clearly with anything other than having cash in their pockets, or under their mattresses, or in their safe where they can see it.”

Lucy Turner

After visiting Lebanon while working as a teacher in Dubai, Lucy Turner moved to the small Mediterranean country eight years ago.

“I love the mountains and the beach and I know I don’t have that at home,” she says. 

The Meath native regularly shares pictures of picturesque Lebanese guesthouses and morning coffees overlooking the sea to her 72,000 Instagram followers. 

After getting asked for travel tips from followers, she began regularly organising tours of Lebanon, alongside her work as a copy editor a few years ago.

Irish copy editor and teacher Lucy Turner became a popular influencer on Instagram, building up 72,000 followers as she shared pictures of her life in Lebanon.

“Last summer was amazing for tourism in Lebanon,” she says. After the start of the financial crisis in 2019 and the devastating Beirut port explosion in 2020, the country seemed to be slowly getting back on its feet. 

“Everywhere was booked up and the beaches were all full,” she says — although noting that many of the people visiting were Lebanese who had been forced to emigrate because of the economic crisis.

On October 7, she had planned a tour to a small Christian town in southern Lebanon near the border with Israel, where a small group of Lebanese and foreign tourists would pick olives as part of harvest season.

As news of Hamas’s surprise attack on southern Israel broke during the morning of October 7, Turner decided to cancel the olive tour to the border town. 

“I’ve always been focused on getting people over from Europe to see Lebanon but every time I do it feels like something happens,” she says. “I haven’t had one inquiry for a tour since October.

After Insta followers began asking for tips about visiting Lebanon, Meath woman Lucy Turner began running tours, and had one scheduled for October 7, 2023 — the day of the Hamas attack.

“I can’t tell people it’s 100% safe,” she says. “It’s still possible there will be a war.”

Turner says her everyday life in the town of Adma in northern Lebanon hasn’t changed much despite the war.

“At the beginning I was anxious about how it would escalate and whether I should leave,” she says. 

“I don’t have those feelings anymore and I’m looking forward to the summer. I earn dollars — I’m OK but I’m not oblivious to what’s going on.”

The air strikes and rocket fire have been overwhelmingly concentrated in southern Lebanon, where 90,000 Lebanese people have been displaced from their homes. But earlier in the year the Bekaa valley near Syria was struck by Israeli forces, just a day after Turner visited for lunch — “I’m much more careful about going places by myself now,” she says.

Then, last month, in the town of Byblos not far from where Turner lives in Adma, a local Christian Lebanese political official was murdered, allegedly by a Syrian criminal gang. 

The killing triggered a wave of violent anti-Syrian demonstrations with several Syrian refugees beaten and calls from several Lebanese politicians for the refugees to return home to Syria.

“There are still checkpoints checking every car entering and leaving the area,” she says.

“I’ve built this reputation for being positive about Lebanon but it’s hard at the moment,” Turner says. “Socially, this country will always thrive somehow but you have to be willing to take this uneasiness.”