Adi Roche was born in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, in July 1955. She has been married for 20 years to Sean Dunne, a former seminarian who holds a music degree and teaches English, history and media studies at the Christian Brothers College in Cork city. Before her nomination was announced, she took temporary leave of absence from her unsalaried job as executive director of the Chernobyl Children's Project, the charity she co-founded with Mary Aherne and Mary Murray six years ago after an urgent appeal from doctors in the regions contaminated by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
She is the fourth and youngest child of Sean - a fitter/turner from Liscarroll, north Cork - and Christina Roche, nee Murphy, from Doneraile, both of whom still live in Clonmel and remain enthusiastic supporters and speakers of Irish. Adi attended the Presentation Convent, where she became a class prefect and a champion oarswoman. She was also a member of a national championship-winning debating team, in a final adjudicated by the late Cearbhall O Dalaigh.
In 1973-74 she went on to do a business and secretarial course at the Dominican Convent, Eccles Street, Dublin, and in 1975 she got a job in the personnel department of Aer Lingus in Dublin. From there she moved to the airline's Cork branch, where she worked in sales, reservations and PR.
Her consciousness of nuclear power was raised by the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, mainly because of her fears for her brother and his family, who lived near the plant, and she had her first taste of the anti-nuclear movement through the protest rallies organised against the Irish plant proposed for Carnsore Point in Co Wexford.
In 1984, the year Ronald Reagan came to Ireland at the height of the Cold War, she took voluntary redundancy from Aer Lingus and became a full-time volunteer for Irish CND. Part of this work entailed devising and implementing a peace and justice education programme for schools. Since then she has visited more than 70 schools a year, working within the framework of religious education.
At the same time, she was involved in lobbying the Irish and other European governments against the deployment of both US cruise missiles throughout NATO and Soviet SS-20s, and she showed solidarity with the women protesting at Greenham Common, where cruise missiles were based.
In 1990 she was elected to the board of directors of the International Peace Bureau (a Nobel Peace Prize-winning organisation and a founding member of the League of Nations) and, with her husband, who is currently national secretary of CND, has represented Irish non-government organisations at special sessions of the UN and at conferences in Geneva. She continues to carry out speaking engagements at schools, clubs and conferences and in May this year spoke as an international expert on Chernobyl at a UN conference in Moscow.
She is currently one of four vice-presidents of CND, the others being Senators Joe O'Toole and Brendan Ryan and Father Ray Maher.
Her work for the children of Chernobyl began in 1991. Visits to the affected areas laid the groundwork for a humanitarian aid programme which has since provided some £8.5 million worth of aid and 110 ambulances, delivered through half-a-dozen convoys, some more than a mile long, driven by volunteers across Europe to Belarus. With the co-operation of 70 "outreach" groups around the country and 900 host families, 4,000 children have been flown to this country for rest and recuperation and nearly 50 others for medical treatment and long-term care.
The Project is currently in the process of finalising child adoption agreements between Ireland and Belarus. She initiated, researched and developed the first documentary in English on the effects of Chernobyl on Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, which has been screened on national channels across the world, and she has also worked on related programmes for RTE, the BBC and for a joint BBC/RTE production, Chernobyl Legacy.
Her best-selling book Children of Chernobyl, published last year, has since also been published in the UK and more recently in Norway. She is currently working with Prof Nestorenko, the independent Belarussian scientist who is monitoring radiation levels in Belarus.
She has been honoured with many awards, including European Woman Laureate and Irish Person of the Year in 1994 and European of the Year Award for Ireland in 1996. As the rainbow government left office in June, the Fine Gael minister for transport, energy and communications, Mr Alan Dukes, made her the government appointee to the board of the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland.
