12-year-old Ukrainian girl & her granny to move in with Dublin teacher

Catherine Flanagan, a secondary school teacher from Glasnevin, Co. Dublin has opened up her home to 12-year-old Ukrainian refugee Yeva and her grandmother, who have nowhere else to go.

Catherine first heard about Yeva’s harrowing experience while watching a news broadcast on Channel 4. During the segment, Yeva spoke about planning to travel to the UK, after her and her grandmother’s home in Kharkiv was destroyed during the Russian invasion.

Ms. Flanagan was instantly moved by Yeva’s story and reached out to the Channel 4 journalist on social media, saying that Yeva and her grandmother should come to Ireland instead and come and live with her.

“She was talking about wanting to get to England, but you can’t go to England they’ve closed the borders,” Catherine explained when speaking to Independent.ie. “So I tweeted Paraic [the Channel 4 News reporter] and I said ‘tell her to come to Ireland and I’ll look after her.”

Fleeing Ukraine, Yeva and her grandmother made their way to Hungary, and are due to arrive in Dublin Airport later today as Catherine booked flights for them from Budapest. Tthey will both stay with Catherine, her husband, who is also a school teacher, and their 20-year-old son

“Their apartment was bombed, so they made it all the way over to the west but they couldn’t get over the border because they had nowhere to go to,” Ms. Flanagan continued.

“And she is a sweet little girl and she is writing a diary with some lovely little bits of English so I was looking at her and I thought ‘she’s like any of my first-year students’.”

Catherine explained that Channel 4 put her in touch with the young girl and they organised a zoom call to talk about details. “They [Channel 4] linked me up with her and gave me her number and we zoomed and talked and granny had lots of questions because she wanted to know who is she bringing her granddaughter to.”

“So, it all totally snowballed from there. We don’t have much, we live in a very ordinary house with one bathroom, but we are both teachers so we knew from that point of view that we could help them and help them to navigate.”

To help Yeva and her grandmother with their start in Ireland, Catherine has set up a GoFundMe page in order to raise funds for the Ukrainian family.

“They have nothing, they have no access to their own bank accounts, their extended family is in Russia and because of financial restrictions they can't send any money to them, so yes, they are entitled to social welfare but how do you live in Dublin on social welfare with a 12-year-old girl?”

“So we will hand over that money [from GoFundMe] to them for whatever they feel like they need. If they did plan to stay in the longer term they would need a deposit for somewhere, so there’s so many things they would need it for,” Catherine explained.