Adi: My secret agony
Miscarriage heartache for hero who devoted her life to caring for Chernobyl kids
CAMPAIGNER Adi Roche has opened up on her secret heartache over suffering two miscarriages.
The founder of Chernobyl Children International admitted it was a blow to her and her husband Sean Dunne but said “it just wasn’t meant to be”.
Adi, 69, believes she would not have been able to help countless orphans from Belarus since the nuclear disaster there 37 years ago if she had a family of her own.
Speaking publicly about it for the first time, she said: “I’ve never had my own children. This is not something that happened by design, it was just not to be.
“I learned in the grief of that... that you don’t have to have a physical umbilical cord to be attached to a beautiful newborn baby to love and adore that life.
“I have had that experience endless times over all the years.”
Adi pours her heart out on RTE’S The Meaning of Life where she becomes emotional talking about her and Sean’s bid to start a family.
Fighting back tears, she said: “I was pregnant a couple of times but it just wasn’t meant to be.
“And that was equally hard for Sean as well... we’d always hoped that maybe it would happen.
“But on reflection... if I was to have become a mother myself and to carry a baby to full term I would have been 24/7.
“And I would have given every bit of breath in my body to that life, but I wouldn’t have been able to do the two.
“So I suppose in a way while this wasn’t to be I was gifted – there were so many others that came into my life in orphanages, in homes for abandoned children.
“I was able to pour my love and that passion into others.”
Tipperary native Adi also opens up about her failed bid in the 1997 presidential election and a “smear campaign” which targeted her elder brother Donal de Roiste.
Asked did she crumble, she replied: “I completely imploded. All I can say is I died.
“To get up every morning of the balance of that campaign
I was pregnant a couple of times but it just wasn’t meant to be
was horrendous. It took me three years to feel I could walk down Patrick Street in Cork. “I was afraid people would spit at me. I was destroyed. I was destroyed.” Adi said while political campaigns were known to get dirty she “didn’t have the stomach for it” and regretted Donal was dragged into it. He had been given a dishonourable discharge from the Irish army over alleged and unproven terrorist links in 1969 – but was later exonerated.
She paid tribute to her election campaign lawyer Joe Noonan whose firm took up Donal’s case resulting in a State apology and him being exonerated. She sobbed: “If it meant my political downfall for him to be a free man, for his children, for his grandchildren, it was worth it.”
Asked by Joe Duffy what she would
say to St Peter at the “pearly gates” of heaven she paused and then replied, her voice breaking: “Am I enough? “Have I been enough? Have I had a worthwhile presence? I might be dragged in [to heaven] hopefully. I’ve certainly tried my best.”
The Meaning of Life is on RTE One tonight at 10.30pm.