Alison O'Connor: Ukraine is in agony — and the true horror is that this is all deliberate
Millions of people are fleeing their normal lives clutching what few belongings they can carry such as here at Irpin.
How far we have come from the toilet roll panic. Consider this: right now I am — in all seriousness — contemplating which section of our urban garden could be used to grow vegetables for next year. For the shortages.
There is a sense of unreality about what is going on in our world right now. We are all teetering in that heretofore unimagined space between what we’re hoping might be the last of a global pandemic (6m dead) and a possible world war. Who’d have thought it would be ours to ponder which was worse — a deadly virus that kept sweeping the world and forced us all into isolation, or this horrible invasion so close to home that is seeing so much human suffering.
A decade or so ago, we were in the midst of a global financial crisis. We were suffering acutely and some of the effects of that time can still be felt today. If you’d been told then that these other events were in your future, it would have seemed too fantastic to be possible. Think of your response once you got the added piece of information that we wouldn’t be over one of those seismic events, before the second one kicked off.
In between all of that there would be a Brexit vote in 2016 that would deliver an international shock of a different type and provide regular cliffhangers in the years since in terms of what Britain would try on next. Apart from how it might all affect peace in the North, the rest of the worries seem junior league now in comparison.
Like virtually everyone else, I have been immersed in the awful detail of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But I do feel like a moral coward that I am mostly avoiding visuals. What I mean by that is the television footage and social media videos. But not watching it feels as if one does not bear witness to the absolute horrors being inflicted on Ukrainians — such incredibly brave and resilient people.
But after two years utterly immersed in the detail of Covid, it feels a step too far for my mental health. It’s this perpetual state of living on your nerves.
Covid immersion, in hindsight, was easier, despite the incredibly high levels of stress and fear of the unknown.
The other day I spoke to a doctor and she said she found the situation in Ukraine far more stressful than the pandemic. This woman, a GP, had been on the frontline of the Covid fight.
This war is deliberate. We have an absolute madman on the loose with a possibly itchy finger near a few nuclear buttons, coldly setting out to destroy a country and its people.
In a pandemic, you can hate the virus, but know that it is simply doing what viruses do in trying to replicate like crazy and infect as many people as possible. Outside of that it is mindless. But the absolute horror here is the utter savagery being wilfully inflicted on the citizens of Ukraine.
We are also being told this conflict could last for years. This week the Cabinet was told that millions more refugees are likely to flee Ukraine, in addition to the 1.5m who have already done so. For every one million Ukrainians seeking refuge in the EU, Ireland is expected to be asked to accommodate around 20,000. The Government has been attempting to prepare its citizens that these sorts of numbers will put pressure on health, education, and social services.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin said this week in the Dáil that it will be an enormous challenge at a scale we have never dealt with before. Given that we have just spent 24 months or so doing things on a scale and of a type we would never have even dreamt of before, this is yet another once in a lifetime moment coming in rapid succession after a previous one.
Not that long ago, we would speak about living in the Ireland of past decades when the national coffers were skint and mass emigration was the answer to our problems. But we can say with some confidence that recent events now give those times some context.
When not feeling heartbroken for the people of Ukraine, much of my time recently has been spent thinking of the effects of all of this on our children. Adults are old enough to remember “normal times”. But today’s young teens, born just before or during the crash of the Celtic Tiger, entered the world at a time of national existential crisis and, for so many, their early years involved serious economic hardship in their family circles.
From there it moved on to the other aforementioned seismic events, We haven’t even mentioned the climate crisis yet! The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported two weeks ago that many of the impacts of global warming as now simply “irreversible”. But there was so much else going on in the world at the time that this barely got a mention.
How, as a parent, can you hope to instil any sense of safety when we all live in a world that is so chronically uncertain?
As an adult, it is difficult not to descend into a state of despair, but for children the damage may just be incalculable. You can try as a parent to “curate” the experience as much as you like, family discussions and all that but, just like you, they are seeing it in all its horror online too. Many of them do not remember what a “normal” world looks and feels like.
Like us they will take comfort — and we should make sure to tell them — from how wonderfully we are responding as a nation to this war, led by our Government which is supported by the opposition parties. We are throwing open our doors to displaced Ukrainians and uniting with the rest of Europe. Because, whatever about our children the damage to the children of Ukraine is incalculable and unfixable.
The Government has said we will provide accommodation and access to childcare and education, and social welfare.
Some of these — accommodation and childcare in particular — will not be easy, but it is the right thing to do our absolute best. There has been an incredible response to the initiative for Irish people to provide accommodation across the country. Almost 12,000 people have offered to take in Ukrainian refugees. Over €3m was raised in last week’s Red Cross Late Late Show appeal for Ukraine, with the programme watched by over 600,000 people.
In fact, another rallying message to our children should be how quickly the majority of the rest of the world united against Putin. These are harsh, horrible times that we are living through and we can only hope that they will, sometime soon, revert to being less interesting ones.
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