He lived through the horrors of the Bosnian civil war. He saw the deprivation, the kidnapping, the disappearances, the killings, the shellings, the starvation and the epidemics.
He saw them all because he lived in the midst of the people. When other workers fled, he remained. He was neither a Serb, a Croat, nor a Moslem - he was Irish.
Brother Thomas O'Grady worked with the wounded providing emergency assistance throughout Bosnia and he negotiated the safe passage of refugees. At the end of the four-year war, he restored a TB clinic, a psychiatric hospital and two parish churches.
"I decided on Bosnia because I found that it was in greater need," he says. "The situation was absolutely the worst."
Brother Thomas was stressed and traumatised by the daily horror and was evacuated when he needed gall bladder surgery.
He still burns with zeal to fight injustice. "By every means I am determined to continue." The 62-year-old Wexford man, was recently granted honorary citizenship of Sarajevo. He has just begun work in community development of mental health services in Malawi.