The family trauma that brought an Achill Island emigrant home

Like that ache felt , Achill islander Orla Cafferkey always felt a visceral and magnetic pull back to her native place. But it was the terrible news of her brother Finbar’s death on a battlefield in Ukraine in April 2023 that ultimately compelled her return home. A graduate of the University of Galway and the London School of Economics, Cafferkey was at a crossroads in her life when, aged 32 in 2017, she set off on a solo trek along the Appalachian Trail. On her third day hiking, on top of a mountain in Georgia she met Brendan Sedlak, a surgical assistant from Cleveland. The pair completed the 2,200-mile trek together and within months were married and settled in a leafy suburb of the Ohio city where Sedlak had been raised. In time their two boys were born. Finbar is now eight and Luan is six. With Achill’s deep historical connections to Cleveland – more than 80 per cent of the Ohioan city’s Irish population can trace their origins to the Co Mayo island and its environs – it could be argued that Cafferkey was living in a home away from home. Orla Cafferkey with her husband Brendan and their boys Finbar and Luan. Photograph: Conor McKeown for The Irish Times “On the kitchen table late at night, I would make lists, pros and cons, for and against, comparative costs of living, but the numbers on that notepad never added up in Achill’s favour,” she says. “We were living in a great place to raise our two young children. But I couldn’t help it and I dared to want for more.” Everything changed on April 19th, 2023, when she received a phone call from home. Her much-loved oldest brother Finbar was missing in action in Ukraine, presumed dead. A lifelong activist for various causes, he was fighting alongside two other international volunteers with a Ukrainian unit in an attempt to keep a vital route to the city of Bakhmut open as Russians troops prevailed. “When Finbar was killed we were told first his body was in a field. We were given a Google map pinpoint. During that time there was nothing,” she says. “I wanted to do more than to go to that field and be with him, I would zoom in to that pinpoint and in my dreams I would tend to his strong, beautiful and now vulnerable body, close his eyes, take off his boots. “Then after a month, we were told that his body had been moved to a morgue. DNA samples and dental records were sent.