You can tell Sally O'Neill has gone native from her speech patterns on the radio ads for Trocaire. Those gentle but firm Tyrone vowels have been overlaid with the rapid-fire diction of Latin American Spanish.

She first went to Latin America in 1972, and has spent much of her life since in the region. Her husband, Roger Sanchez, is a Honduran biologist and her three children are fluent Spanish speakers.

As Trocaire's director for Central America, she has been at the eye of the storm since Hurricane Mitch wreaked devastation on Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador last month. Three decades of experience have been put to good use in contributing to the relief effort, explaining the politics of poverty and disaster and raising cash for Trocaire.

A small, intense woman with determination ringing from her every syllable, O'Neill has succeeded in bringing home the scale of the disaster to ordinary Irish people.

In Dublin this week for a short visit home, she looks like an average mother in town for a shopping trip. In fact, it's this ordinariness which has helped her relate to the public who have heard her eyewitness testimonies on radio over the past month.

Yet she is a child of 1968, one of the few people of that generation whose passion and idealism have not waned. One explanation for this may lie in her early experiences of discrimination and harassment at home in the North.

Her parents marched in the first civil rights demonstrations in the North in her home town of Dungannon, and she has childhood memories of the B-Specials emptying her lunchbox on to the street when she was on her way to school.

She studied home economics and nutrition at the University of Ulster and first developed an interest in Latin America when a friend of Che Guevara came to speak on campus. As the violence flared up, she left the North to work in Peru on a British government aid programme.

While there, she was contacted by Trocaire to set up its Latin American division. In 1979 she arrived in a Central America riven by the bloody conflicts in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

"Nicaragua had all the elements that grabbed public attention; an outrageous dictator and young revolutionaries with brave new ideas. It's depressing how easily the gains the Sandinista revolutionaries made in health and education have been reversed over the past 10 years."

Latin America had a huge influence on Trocaire. O'Neill and her friend, Bishop Eamonn Casey, radicalised the Catholic Church organisation, placing a new emphasis on human rights and a political strategy heavily influenced by liberation theology.

"The first grant Trocaire made in Latin America was for victims of human rights abuses in Chile. So you can imagine how I cheered when the news came through about Pinochet's extradition."

Over the past decade, Latin America disappeared off the radar screen as far as the world's media were concerned. The Cold War was over, many of the dictators were deposed and the flow of aid was stemmed.

The result, she says, has been the "Africanisation" of Central America. Infrastructure has collapsed, huge debts have accumulated and the poor have paid the greatest price. And that was before Hurricane Mitch.

On her visits back to Ireland, she finds Dublin an increasingly "tense" city. She expresses disappointment that the Government is reneging on its commitments to increase the aid budget.

Hurricane Mitch - and the travails of Gen Pinochet - have at least focused attention again on Latin America. Thanks to O'Neill and others, the coverage of disaster has been accompanied by a cogent analysis of the causes of Central America's problems, in particular its huge debt burden.

Immediately after the hurricane, O'Neill organised the distribution of emergency food and medical supplies. Today Trocaire is providing assistance to 250,000 people. O'Neill's term in Honduras is scheduled to end next year. "I've a feeling, though, I may be here a little longer."