Housing challenges a looming and pressing problem as several hotels eye return of tourists.
Orla Ní Eilí carries with her an imperishable image of the moment when the consequences of the war fully sank in. In Ballyvaughan, an afternoon in mid-March, the long-time “peacenik” met the newly displaced, listening as a young Ukrainian woman earnestly asked her what would happen next: her fiance was fighting in Ukraine. When he arrived here, she asked, would he be able to learn English?
Her gaze was wide-eyed and intense. Could they live somewhere in the countryside? “It killed me because looking at her, it felt that all that happened in the 100 years since the first World War is that the means of communication had speeded up. ‘When the war is over’. God knows what has happened to him in the meantime,” she says and momentarily chokes up.