The two flags flying over the youth hostel on Arranmore, off Burtonport in Co Donegal, are visible from the ferry as it pulls into the island’s tiny port: the Tricolour and the blue-and-yellow banner of Ukraine.
Yaroslava Risukhina, a refugee from Ukraine, remembers the joyous feeling that swept over her when she saw the flags fluttering above the village. “When we arrived by ferry it was the evening, and it was beautiful,” she says, marvelling at the view from the room her family shares at the hostel. “Here, everyone knows everyone, everyone says good morning, and for us that’s unusual.”
Since the middle of this summer, she and her children have been among 25 Ukrainian refugees living on the island, where the population had been steadily dropping for decades.
They are among the countless Ukrainians grappling with the uncertainty of how the next chapter of their lives will unfold as the war with Russia grinds through its seventh month, making it clear that their temporary displacement could become long term. But the communities hosting them are also confronting the complexities of assimilating and providing for newcomers as they face their own economic and social challenges.
Across Donegal at least 5,000 Ukrainians have been put up in hostels, hotels and other private accommodations, and more are arriving every day, according to local authorities. The arrivals are placing their children in schools and seeking jobs and housing.
It makes for a strange and untested alchemy as Ireland works to accommodate the largest number of refugees the country has ever accepted, mixing Ukrainians fleeing war with locals in the largely homogeneous towns and villages of its more rural corners.
Risukhina and her son and daughter are from Sievierodonetsk, a city in Ukraine’s east that was largely destroyed this summer after it became a battleground. She doesn’t know if, or when, she will be able to return. For now she is focused on getting her children started at the small local school.
“But it’s like walking in the fog,” she says. “You just take it step by step.”
About 50,000 Ukrainians have come to Ireland in the months since Dublin announced visa-free travel and offered housing and support for the displaced in line with the European Union’s temporary-protection directive.
The number hosted in Ireland is just a fraction of the more than seven million Ukrainian refugees that the United Nations has recorded across Europe since the start of the war, in February. But it has proved to be a logistical challenge for a country with a population of only five million or so, which is already experiencing a housing crisis and a shortage of doctors and teachers.
Newly arrived Ukrainians are taken to an emergency centre in Dublin, which has increasingly been overwhelmed, before being sent to privately owned hotels and homes that the Government has contracted with across the country. A number of departments in the Government involved in the programme did not respond to requests to comment for this story.
For the Ukrainians in cities and larger towns, it is often easier to find work and get to shops and schools.
Artem Baranovskyi, who is 35, has been living in a hotel in the centre of Letterkenny with hundreds of other Ukrainian families. He already has two jobs — as an electrician and a healthcare worker — and is planning to move his family into an apartment and buy a car.
As he takes his son to school, he says, “I keep reminding him how lucky we are to be here.”
But with the new academic year under way, some Ukrainians who had been put in student housing in cities have been relocated to rural communities. For now, much of the co-ordination happens at the local level, where many describe a sometimes chaotic response, despite a great deal of goodwill.
Across Donegal, an initial outpouring of support has given way to a patchwork of local agencies, charities and volunteers left to find ways to settle and support the Ukrainians. They help the newcomers navigate the bureaucracy to register with scarce doctors, find places in schools and hunt for jobs in an area where work has historically been hard to find.
Two people vital to the efforts here are Oksana Krysyska and Switlana Pirch, who are both from Ukraine but have lived in Donegal for years. They now spend their days answering questions from the thousands of Ukrainians scattered across the county.
“I am just trying to do what I can,” says Krysyska, who has dedicated her time to this work since the war began. Volunteers at first, the two now work with Donegal Local Development, whose work includes supporting refugees, from their base in Letterkenny.
“There are so many traumatised people in these groups,” Krysyska, who is 38, says. “And the number of people coming is constantly growing, while the number of people helping them has stayed the same.”
Even on Arranmore, where the Ukrainians say life has been idyllic, the situation is not rosy for everyone.
Darragh Ward, who is 44 and grew up on the island, says he worried that the schools his children attend will be overwhelmed and points to Ireland’s broader housing crisis. “I think it’s wrong. They should provide for their own first,” he says of the Government as he has a drink in a pub next to the hostel.
Aid groups and volunteers have called for better co-ordination and communication on the national level to calm the fears that have driven these pockets of discontent.
Fiona Hurley, the chief executive of Nasc, a migrant- and refugee-rights centre, says it had been advocating for a national governmental lead to be appointed to co-ordinate the response.
“We need to really get away from emergency planning and into medium- and long-term planning,” Hurley says.
Paul Kernan, a community worker with Donegal Intercultural Platform, an independent group in Letterkenny that promotes inclusion and equality, says that some resentment has built up because of a system “pitting the disadvantaged against each other” over limited resources as organisations scramble to provide for everyone.
“We’ve had posters put up — ‘Stand up. House the Irish,’ all the rest of it,” he says. “And not a word had been said by an agency or authority.”
His group is working with local partners to provide English-conversation classes, among other services, but he worries about the lack of resources for needs such as mental healthcare.
In many cases, those hosting the Ukrainians have gone above and beyond to offer help, many local groups say, as have volunteers.
Nataliia Zhukova and her husband and son are among 32 people living in a converted guesthouse in the Donegal village of Doochary, little more than a cluster of houses and a pub at a crossroads.
“I like it here,” Zhukova, who is 51, says as she praises her hosts. She misses her home, of course. “But the business we had, the house, those are not important,” she says. “The most important thing is our lives.” Each week the property’s manager drives them to the grocery store a few kilometres away and is in constant contact to see what they need. Neighbours have donated bikes for the families to explore the area.
Zhukova is trying to learn English and has taped small pieces of paper with Ukrainian words and translations around the house, where the scent of a large pot of simmering borscht wafts in the air.
Like Arranmore Island, Doochary is in the Gaeltacht, so some classes are taught in Irish. Zhukova says she is just happy to have her son back in a classroom after months of uncertainty.
Margaret Mulvaney and her husband, who live across the road, wave to their new neighbours as they tend flowers in front of their house.
“It has brought a bit of life back here,” Mulvaney, who is 78, says with a smile, noting that the local shop has recently reopened and that enrolment at the village primary school, once on the brink of closing, has more than doubled, to 15 students.
Farther south, the seaside town of Bundoran, normally a prime tourist destination, has also seen many of its hotels shift their businesses to host Ukrainians, attracted by the stability of a Government contract even as European tourism revives. Alina Popova, who is from another seaside place, Odesa, in Ukraine’s south, fled to Ireland with her five-year-old son and is living in a hotel in the centre of the town.
Life is a challenge for now. Popova, who is 30, is taking classes and has a job at a cafe but relies on sporadic public transportation. Or, when the weather is good, it’s an 80-minute walk each way.
Still, sometimes she is transported in other ways: “I close my eyes, and I can hear and smell the sea, and it feels like I am home.” — This article originally appeared in The New York Times
