Tag Archives: lena madden

DOCTOR Lena Madden woke up on Thursday morning to text messages offering condolences after the invasion of her home country by Russia. An Ennis-based academic, Lena has lived in Ireland for 20 years and in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine she is very concerned about the prospect of thousands of deaths. “The thing that people don’t talk about is loss. The biggest thing is loss of human life. How many people will die? How many children will die? The soldiers are someone’s children too.” Dr Madden’s father and step-mother were already here visiting when hostilities started, but her mother is living in the east of Ukraine. “I’m from Donetsk, the place where the war is happening currently and where it started in 2014. I moved to Ireland in 2002, that’s 20 years ago. I didn’t live through the war, but my Mum says she has lived through war already. She’s got an approach that she …

AS international attention focuses on the crisis in Ukraine, one Clare woman has a powerful but unenviable insight into the political crisis. Lena Madden was born and reared in Ukraine but has lived in Ireland for the past 12 years. She is an Irish citizen but both her parents still live in Ukraine. Divorced and in different cities, they are on opposing sides of the political and ideological divide. “One of them is based in a Russian-speaking region and the other one is based in a Ukrainian-speaking region, so I have two stories and they are totally different. Things have polarised in both areas,” Lena told The Clare Champion. “My biggest fear is that war will break out,” she said. In late November, protestors took to the streets of Kiev after the Government decided not to sign an agreement fostering greater integration with the European Union. Instead, it announced it would begin looking to improve co-operation with Russia. On February …