Adi Roche: ‘This is my passion, and it is my life’

Adi Roche, voluntary CEO of Chernobyl Children International (CCI), won’t allow herself to be described as saintly or even altruistic (which she clearly is), saying that her work with the charity she founded in response to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 has a lot to do with maintaining her own sanity.

“It actually is about my own salvation, my sanity and my sense of humanity, because otherwise, I think I would be paralysed. I wouldn’t be able to function. I often say I’m impassioned with life to be able to do this,” she says.

Adi, who turned 70 last year, but looks years younger, always stresses the generous aid that CCI receives from the Irish people as well as the work of volunteers that keep the charity going. (There has been aid delivery worth €108m to impoverished communities and children across the Chernobyl region and some 26,500 children have been given rest and recuperation holidays with host families in Ireland.)

“I often think the compassion we Irish feel is rooted in our own colonised past.”

She believes in race memory and our collective hangover from the Great Irish Famine of 1845.

“It’s why Ireland gave more money per capita to Live Aid than any other country in the world. This compassion is a gift from our ancestors.”

Asked if she is religious, Adi says: “Yeah, we would be a religious house. My husband (Sean Dunne, retired music teacher and music fanatic) is very involved in our local church, St Michael’s. While I’m not a daily Mass goer, I believe in a living faith. I hope that’s what I try to do. The message of Jesus Christ was about love, compassion and justice. There things are rooted in the philosophy of how I approach things. When somebody asks if I take sides, I say, ‘absolutely.’ The side I’m on is the side of peace, but not just peace by itself, because you can’t have peace without justice.”

Adi, the youngest of four, grew up in Clonmel, Co Tipperary. Both parents were from Co Cork with her mother from Liscarroll and her father from Doneraile. Growing up, Adi remembers the Holly Bough being posted to the Roche family every year in the lead up to Christmas by her maternal grandmother. The other treasured memory was the lighting of the candle at a window in the family’s home for the passing stranger.

“Even to this day, the lighting of the candle is a huge thing for all of us and we each do it in our own homes. My parents would say that not everybody has a home or food on the table or coal in the fire. Even at a young age, without any preaching, we had a sense of being very lucky. We had a sense of responsibility and conscience towards others. I often say that my life was shaped by my own personal history. The language we use today has changed. We would now say that my parents were social justice activists.”

Adi’s father, a technical engineer, ran Meals on Wheels in Clonmel. “And both my parents were very involved in St Vincent de Paul. Both were politically active in the local Fianna Fáil cumann.

“They also worked with the Travelling community. We’d have Travellers coming to the house. We got great example. There were always debates around the dining room table. I remember discussions about war and Vietnam. Often, there were raised voices and rows.”

Later, what “almost destroyed the family” was the wrongful dismissal of Adi’s brother, Dónal de Róiste from the Irish Defence Forces. He was eventually exonerated over 50 years later but the Roche parents didn’t live to see their son’s name cleared. The controversy was brought up by the press during Adi’s presidential campaign in 1997 when she ran for office backed by the Labour Party.

Adi, who has been garlanded with awards, accolades and honours, including addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2016, has no plans to stop working.

“People say, ‘will you not retire?’ Do you know what, as long as I have my legs under me and the brain is still functioning, this is my passion and it is my life. I’m a lifelong advocate and activist for peace, justice and the environment.”

She left her job at Aer Lingus in 1984 to work as a full-time volunteer for CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and still believes in the ideal of a nuclear free world.

Her campaigning is, she says, in her DNA.

“It’s not like it’s a chore. I think it is such a privilege to be able to reach into the life of another human being and to say we’re all brothers and sisters, part of the shared humanity. Is ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine (We live in the shadow of each other).”

Adi admits that she can no longer look at the gruesome images coming from Gaza and from Ukraine.

“All I want is for solutions to be found.”

She says she prefers to operate collectively in her campaigning work.

“We don’t have to all love each other but we can learn to respect one another and negotiate. Love is at the core of everything.”

2026 will mark 40 years since the Chernobyl disaster.

To mark it, Adi hopes that she can get City Hall involved. There will also be the unveiling of a sculpture by Sandra Bell, donated by Bill Keary of Keary Motors.

“The sculpture will embrace the work that we have been doing. It’s important to humanise the history of what happened 40 years ago, to tell the story again, in order to ensure it never happens again.”

This feature originally appeared in the 2025 Holly Bough .