Tired but happy to be home from Middle East

Síofra Grant

“The fear we had when we heard them, knowing we were 99% safe, compared to what on earth those people might feel when they hear that, and they have no protection.”

These are the words of Noeleen Lynam, who recently returned from the UAE but her thoughts are in Gaza. “I don’t know how they will ever be right after it,” she added.

Noeleen’s journey home included stops in Dubai, to Glasgow, to Dublin. “I was in Abu Dhabi to visit a friend and it just happened we were going to Dubai on the Saturday when everything kicked off,” she says of the US Israeli attack on Iran and the Iranian response.

“We were driving along and Jennifer, the friend I was over with, got a call saying have you heard there’s been an explosion in one of the areas. First we thought it must have been a gas explosion or oil, because the rigs would be there.

“It was only later that we heard that Iran had attacked. It was later that night, we were in the Global Village in Dubai when there was the first missile strike in Dubai. It’s probably the only drone that we saw.”

Noeleen made clear that the situation in Dubai and Abu Dhabi wasn’t as dramatic as it was made out to be on social media. Her main worry while there was how to get home, as her flight, originally set for March 12, had been cancelled.

“It’s only having come home, the footage everyone was seeing, it actually was nothing like that. I mean, I didn’t see any fires, there was no direct hit and life went on as normal. It was just the alert that would go off, and If they went off in the middle of the night, that happened once or twice.

“You’re asleep and your phone goes off, you woke up and you were thinking oh my gosh.”

“Every day there were 200 or 300 flights out of Dubai, and it was reduced to 20 to 30. You’d look up the schedule and see cancellations and then I was on a group on Facebook of people travelling with Etihad.

“It kept getting more and more frightening, cancellations at the last minute and trying to get through to rebook or get a refund. People were on the phone for six to eight hours and not getting anywhere.”

Noeleen said she had even heard rumours that people were being scammed with the promise of flights that weren’t real.

Following the cancellation of her own flight home, Noeleen “looked online and anything coming up at €10 to €15,000 to get home”.

“Luckily my friend Jen, she’s very calm and composed, went on online. I said I want to go to Emirates, and they weren’t flying to Dublin. Dubai to London was €10,000. “And I said I can’t afford that, and then Jen found a Dubai to Glasgow flight for €3,500. That sounds like a huge price but it was a bargain compared to €15,000, so I got that for Sunday.”

Prior to their fight, Emirates sent a car for the two women to ensure they got there safely. “That was a relief, I didn’t have to figure out if the flight was cancelled or not because they wouldn’t have sent a driver to bring me there and back.

“The most worrying part was the airport was more likely to be targeted and then you had to get out of UAE airspace, knowing there were missiles going around.

“When we got to Glasgow I thought perhaps I must be jinxed because I got to Abu Dhabi and the war started. I got into Glasgow and there had been a huge fire from that vape shop and the centre of the city had been shut down.”

Thankfully Noeleen had no problem getting back from Glasgow, and while she was feeling exhausted from the long journey, she was happy to be home.