‘Here is a feeling of full safety’: Stradbally’s tented village for Ukrainians winds up

Katya Tolstikova’s seven-year-old son Zahar was afraid to fly out of Ukraine for Ireland in case a missile struck their plane.

Tolstikova recounts the experience, standing among neat lines of white tents at Stradbally, Co Laois. A little more than a month ago, the tents served as upmarket accommodation for Electric Picnic festivalgoers.

“Not often but there was a fire or missiles and I was afraid about the children and that’s why I took the children and go away because there is no life,” she says, speaking through an interpreter, of her family’s home in Vinnytsia in western Ukraine.

“But here is feeling of full safety, in full comfortable. We don’t feel any discomfort here. We don’t feel like something was happening with us . . . no dangers.”

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There is a strange ghost-festival atmosphere at the small site tucked away behind the walls of the Stradbally Hall estate. Rows upon rows of neat “glamping” tents, now mostly abandoned, crisscross a muddy field with stringed white lights and networks of temporary rubber footpaths and portaloos.

On the eastern edge, a large temporary hall houses a kitchen and dining area where children’s discos and adult band nights have been held. Empty wooden picnic tables lie around outside.

An adjacent dome construct is filled with chairs and neatly stored boxes of toys.

Nataliia Budianska, like many in her family, held a job at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant which became the focus of international alarm following its occupation by Russian forces and potential for disaster.

[ Hosting Ukrainian refugees: ‘It was the best decision I ever made’ ]

The plant workers, she recalls through broken English of the earlier days of the war, stayed “with nothing but Ukrainian flags for three days”. The flat Laois countryside seems a world away now.

“I didn’t know the country of Ireland,” Budianska says. “When I arrived in the airport volunteers took us to Citywest and after registration, a lot of documents, and then I got an address: Stradbally. I didn’t know, what is Stradbally?”

The Stradbally centre was unveiled at the start of last month as part of a Government scramble to secure enough accommodation to house hundreds of refugees arriving in Ireland each week.

The site, designed to accommodate up to 750 people at any one time, appealed due to its post-festival ability to provide ready-built facilities.

But last week, as the autumn weather turned, the field was cold. Although Taoiseach Leo Varadkar recently conceded that demand could force the use of such tent facilities into the winter months, Stradbally is being wound up this weekend.

Guests stayed for, typically, two to three weeks before being assigned to something more settled. Last Wednesday, fewer than 100 Ukrainian refugees wandered around the campsite.

“For children they have had arts and crafts, slime-making, circus tricks, that kind of thing. Whatever we can pull out of the hat quickly and affordably,” says Linda Loughnane of the Laois Integration Network (LIN), a voluntary body of more than 70 local people keen to make the experience “as good as possible”.

With financial backing from Laois County Council and St Vincent de Paul, they teach English, dry clothes, entertain children and ferry guests to the post office among a host of everyday services.

[ Ireland’s support for Ukraine is especially meaningful because of its moral authority ]

The conditions at Stradbally, Loughnane says, have not been ideal; toilet facilities are outside and there have been very wet nights. But it has gone better than anyone initially expected.

Residents are friendly and talkative, and although the volunteers keep a respectful distance from those they support, she says signs of trauma are sometimes obvious.

“When you have children that don’t speak and don’t smile and don’t move, that’s shocking,” she says.

“You get to see these children – not so much here in the reception centre [but] more last year when we were working with our zero-cost shop in Portlaoise – we got to see these children open up slowly over the weeks and come back to being children again. That was quite something.”

Many volunteers have stepped up their response, moving the Ukrainian refugees from tents to their own homes. In the dome structure, members of the Helping Irish Hosts (HIH) organisation, which supports such efforts around the country, have been invited in to talk.

For some Ukrainians at Stradbally, this can offer a more settled outcome, remaining in a home somewhere nearby. Others will move on to State-contracted hotels or elsewhere.

According to HIH, more than 7,500 people are now “hosting” almost 17,000 Ukrainians, about 20 per cent of the 83,000 who came here for shelter.

[ Ukrainians and Irish ‘understand each other because we have been through similar problems’ ]

Catherine, an Irish host, tells a modest gathering of about 20 people at the Stradbally dome how in May 2022 she got a phone call from Dublin Airport at 2am asking her if she could take in an elderly couple. Since then she has hosted a number of refugees.

“What we have to really remember is the trauma, what they’re coming from,” she tells the room.

“I thought I could fix that. I had a young girl over the summer and she stayed in her room. And [I said], come on come out, my kids are the same age as you. Come out and do.

“And I realised she actually couldn’t come out and do. And of course she was feeling safe in her room.”

Research conducted by the group has found three-quarters of hosts recommend it and the vast majority will continue to do it. But HIH is pragmatic, quick to point out it does not always run smoothly and they are on hand to help when it does not. A board behind the speakers lists potential “host challenges”: bills, cultural differences, a lack of integration.

Some questions emerge from the floor. Someone wants to know if Ukrainians can contribute to utility bills; another asks about Garda vetting. A woman wonders if it is possible to contact someone who has already left the village with an offer of housing.

An older man from Fermoy in Co Cork turns to tell of his experience as a host. After some trivial anecdotes about showers and transport he notes, almost as an afterthought, that in 1944 his own mother had been evacuated from the English home counties to a host family in Canada.

In so doing, among the practical distractions of bills and daily routines – and the movements of the last refugees outside – he briefly reminds the room of what they are all doing.