Simon Coveney (26), who announced his candidature for the vacant Dail seat in his late father's constituency of Cork South-Central last week, has just returned from Belarus.
"Very shocking, very moving" is how he describes his experience over five days, when he visited orphanages supported by the Chernobyl Children's Project, and drove over acres of apparently fertile land where no crops can be permitted to grow. He held children who will not survive, and some who - in spite of horrific disfigurements - will. He met old people who had refused to leave contaminated villages after the nuclear accident of 1986, and are now resigned to dying lonely and alone.
In one restricted zone, his group was accompanied by a police escort and the geiger counter measuring radiation levels went "berserk".
As a farmer himself, Simon found it infinitely depressing. "Here were areas that seemed to be unbelievably fertile, like the Golden Vale. Nothing can be planted except for trees, to try and reduce radiation. Some of the best roads in the county have been built in here, also, to try and keep dust levels down. But it is very encouraging in other parts to witness the work being done."
Accompanied by Ms Adi Roche of the Chernobyl Children's Project, Simon's main aim was to earmark specific programmes for funds raised by his family's global circumnavigation. He saw the conditions, and the daily struggle experienced by local staff, for himself.
In many institutions no distinction is made between children with physical and mental handicap. "Some of those kids have been abandoned with minor defects like a hairlip," Simon explains. "They are consigned to be driven mad, literally, by being left in wards with kids with far more serious impairments."
The air of pessimism in Belarus is all pervasive. "Many young people don't want to have children because they are still afraid of possible contamination. The foetus is like a sponge with radiation, and they have seen the tragic results."
He accepts that miracles cannot be worked, but that there are opportunities to alleviate pain and suffering. From his own background in sport, he was able to see how physiotherapy could help some children with twisted limbs to walk. "So we approved financial support for this."
The Novinki orphanage, which was also visited by his younger brother and now Sail Chernobyl skipper, Rory, before the crew set off last year, has witnessed remarkable improvements since the Irish became involved. Simon has much praise for the work done by Irish medical staff for the charity. "I never fully appreciated the job they were doing, and the whole scale of the problem, until I saw it for myself."
Ironically, memories of Chernobyl have not dimmed Russia's nuclear ambitions. Moscow recently gave approval for construction of the first nuclear powered stations since 1986, in spite of a virtual moratorium in the west on building new plants. The Russian government aims to increase the proportion of electricity generated by nuclear power from 13 per cent to 20 per cent by the year 2030.