THREE years from the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Clare TD Timmy Dooley (FF) reflected on his experience in the country as war began, while he argues that Ireland needs to commit more resources to defence.
Deputy Dooley arrived in Ukraine in the early days of the invasion, as thousands of people were going in the opposite direction.
“The first time was the most shocking when we crossed the border and saw lines of people queuing up to leave on foot, that was the most striking thing. There was panic in their faces but they were resolute and they were quiet,” he said.
“The line was probably 5km to 10km long, people standing in line waiting to cross the border in silence.
“There were elderly people with all their belongings in a bag, some elderly parents pushing an adult child in a wheelchair, their son or their daughter being pushed to the border. Further inland you met these checkpoints, the Ukrainian army but also local resistance.
“There was just a sense of fear and that quietness, people were really concerned and at that stage nobody knew what the next phase of it was. There was some bombing and bombardment, but they were preparing for Russian tanks to come.”
He was back some time later after the Russian attempts to take Kyiv.
“The second time I went to Kyiv and at that stage they had pushed the tanks back from the outskirts of Kyiv. About a week earlier the Russians had retreated,” he said.
“Work was ongoing on excavations of mass graves, the Russians had come into the towns of Irpin and Bucha and just slaughtered people on the streets.
“As they moved on one of the local clergymen had organised local men to bury the dead that were buried on the streets, purely from a humanitarian and a health perspective.
“Once the Russians had been pushed back the authorities came in and started excavating those mass graves, to try and identify them, give them a formal burial at a latter stage and reunite the bodies with families.
“We just stood there in silence with international media, just watching the small excavators scraping away the sandy soil and men with shovels cleaning the soil off the bodies before taking them out of the ground.
“Some were put into body bags, some weren’t because they had run out of them. Bodies were being put on the back of a pick up truck in tens and brought to the city morgue. That brought a harsh realisation of what had happened.
“You can see it on TV and hear about it, but until you see the lifeless bodies of men, women and children being thrown onto the back of a pick up truck… It was heartbreaking.”
He said that Ukrainians cannot be excluded from discussions on the future of their own country, while he also feels the EU needs to play a role in potential negotiations
On a domestic level, he feels Ireland needs to do more on its own defence.
“We are a long way from an aggressor but we’re not a long way from having our economic activity disrupted. We saw towards the end of Covid a cyber hack on the HSE’s computer systems, that was perpetrated from Russia. We have a strong financial services sector here and we want to ensure that we have appropriate protection against hacking on our primary cyber infrastructure.
“We have to invest in that. We also have to invest in military hardware at sea. There are a lot of undersea cables that cross the Atlantic, much of it routed through Ireland and our territorial waters.
“We have to be able to protect that because if a ship were to drag an anchor along the sea shore in our waters it could destroy so much of the Irish and European communication with the United States.
“It’s our job to protect that and we’re pretty poor at it. A byproduct is we’re not sufficiently tooled up to protect our fish stocks against outside attack and neither are we well enough equipped to deal with drug importation.
“We regularly hear of drugs being found on ships but it’s only a drop in the ocean compared to what’s getting through.”
Owen Ryan has been a journalist with the Clare Champion since 2007, having previously worked with a number of other publications in Limerick, Cork and Galway. His first book will be published in December 2024.