A sculpture will be unveiled in Cork later today [11am] to mark the 40th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster.
The city has long been associated with assisting victims of the nuclear accident, with Adi Roche’s Chernobyl Children International charity delivering more than €110 million worth of aid to communities there.
On 26 April, 1986, an accident at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant resulted in the release of 90 times more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
The results in neighbouring territories in Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia were devastating, with the World Health Organization estimating that the accident could lead to up to 4,000 eventual deaths from radiation exposure, and many thousands of others suffering serious long-term illnesses.
Last year, the UN ratified the spelling of the region as the Ukrainian ‘Chornobyl’ instead of the Soviet-era and Russian ‘Chernobyl’.
Ms Roche founded her Chernobyl Children International charity in 1991 to respond to the disaster and, since then, has delivered more than €110 million worth of aid to victims of the disaster across Eastern Europe.
This morning in Cork, Chornobyl Mother, a sculpture in remembrance of the child victims and survivors of the Chornobyl disaster, is being unveiled to commemorate its 40th anniversary.
The figure, by Irish sculptor Sandra Bell, represents the mothers of Chornobyl children and their quest to protect and save their children.
Among the speakers at today’s event will be Krystina Nikityonik, who will give a personal account of what it was like to have been born with severe disabilities in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster and growing up in an asylum, before she was brought to Ireland by Chernobyl Children International. She has now returned to Belarus, where she works and lives.
Today too, a medical aid mission sponsored by Chernobyl Children International got to work in St Nicholas’ Hospital in Lviv.
At the same time as history is being marked in Ireland, the work to repair the damage continues in Ukraine and in Eastern Europe.