Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will give some further information on the breakdown of the fund I recently referred to, but now I will address the issue specifically mentioned by the Deputy.

We believe that up to 20,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly removed to Russian detention camps or into forced adoptions in Russia. I am particularly interested in this area because on the second anniversary of the illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia last February, I attended the second anniversary on behalf of Ireland at United Nations and spoke strongly on the issue. The United Nations felt this situation was so serious, there was a major meeting at that conference, which I was very pleased to attend, on what they called the stolen children. For example, if there was a bomb in an area and the Russian soldiers found children unaccompanied where the parents might have been in some other part of the displaced building or might have been injured, or if a child arrived in a hospital with no parent, they took those children back to Russia and gave them to families in Russia who wanted to adopt children. There have been some heroic efforts by individual Ukrainian people to find some of those children and bring them back. They are, however, moved from city to city so people would not be able to trace them. We are continuing to work on this. We do not have any official figure on the numbers for those being returned but it is quite small. This will be a lasting sore when, ultimately, peace comes and we have to reunite those families in the long term.

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