Michael Harding: An Irish man told stunned Ukrainian refugees, ‘We had wars here but we didn’t leave our country’

I was talking to a woman from Kyiv recently who left her home at the beginning of the war. Her husband was about to sign up for the army but before he did so he pleaded with her not to join the queue on the Polish border with their young son, because he had heard reports of criminal gangs abducting women and children at the crossing.

So they found a bus going to Italy instead. It was a long journey and the final embrace at the bus station was something they hoped would last a lifetime; they savoured it until the bus was about to leave.

Then the boy and his mother boarded and waved through the window at the man waving from the pavement; a young warrior willing to die for his country. And they wondered would they ever see him again.

They reached Italy and were billeted in a hotel but couldn’t speak a word of Italian so they tried to find a way to an English-speaking country. Without much knowledge of Irish geography they ended up in Dublin Airport late one night and were packed off on yet another bus to a rural Irish town.

They had become refugees.

It was late at night, and the mother and son looked out the window at wet rainy streets and wondered where they were. That small room would be their home for almost a year. In the morning it was still raining, and the only thing they knew about Ireland was that apparently it never stopped raining.

She waited a long time for news of her husband who had gone to war, and sometimes other women in the hotel got news of their husbands, fathers or brothers who had been wounded. One day a message came from the military; her husband was not wounded but he had developed a virulent cancer and was near death. The war made it impossible to visit him so all she could do was remember that last embrace, as his life ebbed away in a hospital somewhere in Ukraine.

It’s a simple story and has no frills, but it’s one that is repeated in different forms again and again by Ukrainians. A story of loneliness and pain that cannot be measured by people who have not known war.

I suppose refugees are fragile creatures who respond well to small kindnesses. Which is why I was surprised one day recently when an Irish man turned up at a social event for Ukrainians in the local library of a rural town. As people arrived, they chatted together and drank tea and ate scones and biscuits, and then they all sat down in a circle to share their stories. The intention was for the Ukrainians to share their experiences. There was a musician from Crimea, a nurse from Kharkiv and a young student from Kyiv who was studying in Dublin. They all had tales of private wars; battles with loneliness and personal tragedies that people endure far away from their homeland.

Politics was the last thing on anybody’s mind that morning, but the bold Irish man was not to be ignored. He wasn’t there for the tea or biscuits. He took up his seat in the second row and seemed eager for the talking to begin.

“I’d love to know what you feel about the war,” he inquired bluntly. “Do you support Zelenskiy? Will you go back when it’s over?”

I doubt if he gave a solitary curse about the politics of Ukraine. He had a single point which he wasted no time in reaching. “Personally I would find it difficult to leave my country,” he declared. “We had wars here but we didn’t leave our country! So if you wanted to defend your country against Russia why did you leave it?”

Some of the women were visibly shaken. One of them chirped up that the Irish suffered famine and had to leave.

“Yes,” he said triumphantly, “but when we went to America we didn’t stay in five-star hotels.”

And on he went although he never quite provoked the argument he was hoping for; people were just stunned and silent and after a few more heckles he decided to get up and leave. Nobody was sorry.

Later there was more tea and buns, and someone joked about the weather. One woman said that the rain didn’t bother her any more.

“Although there are other things,” she said, “that are harder to get used to.”