Adi Roche describes the human cost of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
On 26 April 1986 an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine (then called the Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic) near the city of Pripyat led to a nuclear disaster. Ninety times more radioactive material was releases into the atmosphere than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
Neighbouring Belarus was the most affected, receiving seventy per cent of the nuclear fallout, with agricultural land and forestry in the radioactive exclusion zone now deemed unsafe for a minimum of six hundred years.
Adi Roche who is the national secretary of CND founded the humanitarian organisation Chernobyl Children International (CCI) in 1991 with Mary Ahern and Mary Murray from Ógra Chorcaí. For the past two years they have been bringing children from the Chernobyl region to Ireland for respite holidays.
To give them some small bit of rest and recuperation.
Last October Adi Roche and members of CCI went to Belarus to spend time with the children and their families. In addition to the hardships of living in a radioactive contaminated area, people also aware that another nuclear disaster may be imminent, as the concrete shell encasing the Chernobyl reactor is cracking. Local people described it to her as,
Their twentieth century Calvary.
This episode of The Late Late Show was broadcast on 19 March 1993. The presenter is Gay Byrne.
