Local volunteers go the extra 400 miles to reunite dogs with their Ukrainian refugee owners

A local courier who spent the past fortnight volunteering at a centre for Ukrainian refugees in Poland cancelled his original ferry home and drove an additional 420 miles so that he could reunite two families that came to Ireland with their beloved pet dogs.

Mullingar's Colm Smullen and his son Dara decided to bring the pets home with them when they saw how distressed their owners were saying goodbye to their dogs in the refugee centre in the Polish border town of Przemysl.

The Smullens were originally booked to get a ferry from French port of Calais to Dover but were unable to do so as the customs officers would not let them board with the dogs as they did not have electronic passports for them.

Eager to reunite the animals with their families, who were relocated to Mayo, the father and son spent the night in Calais before making the 690km/420mile journey to Roscoff to get the ferry to Cork.

“I ended up getting a ticket for us and the dogs and told the man on the phone that I had everything the dogs needed to get on the boat, knowing that I hadn't,” Colm told the Westmeath Examiner.

“I got to Roscoff and I fought with the one [in customs] in Roscoff for it must have been 40 minutes. Because she couldn't get through to the Department of Agriculture In Cork, in the end she gave up arguing and said: 'Get on the boat, I'll send an email to the department and they will be waiting for you'.

“I got in Cork and bumped into the fella who was waiting with his clipboard for Smullen Couriers who were getting off the ferry with two illegal dogs. He said: 'Don't worry I have two Ukrainians living with me at home. He brought me in and gave the dogs two worm tablets and said off with ye.”

Colm drove to Westport on Tuesday to reunite the dogs with their owners, who were staying in a community centre. Their living conditions in Westport were basic, so much so that when Colm arrived back in Mullingar he put a call out on Facebook to see if anyone would have suitable accommodation for two women and their children.

Within a day a business man from the Delvin area got in touch with Colm offering accommodation and the women and their children are set to move shortly.

It was a fitting ending to what was a hectic but deeply rewarding couple of weeks for Colm and Dara, who travelled to Przemysl with vital supplies but decided to stay for two weeks to help in the centre.

Dara spent much of his time working in the dormitory, a disused supermarket that has been repurposed to sleep up to 500 people a night. Every morning the camp beds had to be folded and moved to the side so that the space could be cleaned to keep it as hygienic as possible.

Colm performed a wide variety of tasks, including ferrying people to airports and train stations. On one occasion, he drove 700km to Poznan to drop an Ireland bound woman and her child to the airport as she was terrified that she and her son would get picked up by traffickers.

Another time he drove a 75-year-old woman with cancer to an airport to catch a plane to Dublin where her daughter has lived for a number of years. The woman's treatment was stopped at the start of the war. She was travelling to Ireland to be reunited with her family and hopefully resume her cancer treatment.

Colm and Dara worked closely with fellow Irish volunteer Joby Redmond from Dublin. Joby and Colm are using the money donated by Irish people to purchase plane tickets to destinations around Europe for refugees looking to flee their homeland.

Colm has received thousands of euros in donations from local people and businesses in the Mullingar area and the money is still coming in. Every cent donated is being used to help the refugees, Colm says, whether its buying them plane tickets, food and water, or giving them a small bit of money to help get themselves settled up when they arrive in their host country.

Already planning his next trip over and still processing pallets of donations that will be given to refugees arriving in the Mullingar area, Colm says that he and Dara have been deeply moved by their experiences.

“It was hectic, it was emotional. You could right a book amount of stuff that happened.

“...The kids are terrified. There is a lot of trafficking going on. They have probably been told by their parents not to interact with anyone they don't know. I used to go to McDonald's some evenings and I'd bring back 10 or 20 extra bags of chips and hand them out to the young lads. They were that scared they wouldn't come near you. You'd have to leave the bag of chips beside them and walk off. You walk by later on and there they are munching away on the chips.”