An Irish man who joined the French Foreign Legion at the age of 20 and has worked as a security expert all over the world is due to travel to Ukraine next month on a search-and-rescue mission with his specially trained K9 rescue dog.
Padraig O'Keeffe, from Kiskeam, Co Cork, served with the French military in the early 1990s with deployments to Cambodia and the Balkans. He has also worked in Iraq, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Kurdistan, Benin and Ghana in a private security capacity.
Padraig, along with his canine companion Cooper, plans to spend time in Ukraine searching through rubble in the hope of finding survivors, or bodies for burial.
He said that he couldn’t just sit back and watch what was happening in the war-torn country.
“I wanted to help in any way that I could and felt that our training and experience could be of immense use to teams searching for survivors and recovering bodies from bombed-out buildings.
“Like many people I have watched in horror at the devastation unfolding in the Ukraine and it was eating me up inside. I would not deny that there are concerns for our safety but I know from experience that once you start the work these go out the window and you fully concentrate on the job at hand.
“If we can help save a life or recover bodies allowing people to give their loved ones a proper burial, then it will all be worth it. It really is as simple as that.”
First encounter
Mr O'Keeffe first came across K9 rescue dogs in 2010 whilst working in Haiti in a protected services role for the BBC and the European Commission humanitarian organisation after a massive earthquake hit the country.
There he saw firsthand the work undertaken by the international search-and-rescue teams, in particular the urban search-and-rescue dogs and their handlers.
Mr O’Keeffe later trained as a K9 handler in the US and had a rescue dog, a German shepherd called Mambo, for 10 years.
Padraig says the pair worked on various missions, including the aftermath of an earthquake in Italy seven years ago.
"While Mambo was trained to locate live human scent under collapsed structures, he had a nose for locating the dead and he is credited with recovering six bodies from the rubble in Italy. We also helped search-and-rescue missions in Ireland, helping to recover another three fatalities," adds Padraig.
In 2020, when Mambo approached the end of his career, Padraig travelled to Greece where he was paired up with Cooper, who is now a trained K9 dog.
Padraig has a GoFundMe page where he is fundraising for his Ukraine mission. It can be found on GoFundMe at "Help Cooper Search and Rescue in Ukraine".