HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION: It could be the script for a movie: the Irish nun who speaks no Hungarian teaching 51 refugee children who speak nothing else. The children are aged from 3¼ to 18 and have just emerged from the terrible trauma of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
What should we call our film - Mission Impossible? In fact, Mission Accomplished would be more appropriate.
Meet an Irish heroine: Sr Immaculata from the Mercy order. She carried it off with sign language and improvisation and now her charges are parents and grandparents with successful families of their own, who write to her in perfect English and send photographs from all over the world.
Ninety years old at her next birthday, Sr Immaculata smiles now at the memory of it all. The children had been flown into Shannon by Aer Lingus and deposited with their parents at Knockalisheen refugee camp outside Limerick.
It wasn't a custom-built refugee camp by any means, just a collection of wooden huts used for summer training by the Army. The issue of schooling for the children arose fairly quickly. "I was asked to teach them," Sr Immaculata recalls. "They came by bus from the camp to Ballynanty School."
There was just one big room set aside and she was the only teacher. Some of the children had picked up bits of English here and there but when the nun from Cork city started to speak, her rich, lilting Leeside brogue caused total confusion. "They hadn't a clue," she laughs.
But there was a deep hunger for learning on the one side and a passion for imparting knowledge on the other. Sign language played its part and, gradually, the older children became a channel of communication to the young.
This was the mid-1950s and the exiles from the Soviet bloc learnt enough of the old-time religion to perform a nativity play, in flawless English, for the Christmas season.
There was lots of music and singing and so much fun you almost wish you were there yourself. "I have some of their copybooks still," she says proudly.
The first official language was not forgotten either: the young Hungarians were greatly taken by the Irish national anthem and insisted on being taught the words of Amhrán na bhFiann. Truly, the Hungarian Revolution had some surprising consequences.
It was a day for memories at Knockalisheen yesterday. Hungarian ambassador Janos Balassa, with Minister of State for Education and Science Síle de Valera in attendance, unveiled a plaque in English and Hungarian which read: "In memory and honour of the Hungarian Revolution and Freedom Fight of 1956 and the Irish people who received the Hungarian refugees with compassion and generosity."
Although there were 541 Hungarian refugees officially admitted to Ireland at the time, some of them clearly made their own arrangements because only about 350 ended up in Knockalisheen.
The Celtic Tiger was still a faraway fantasy and conditions were primitive.
It was meant to be a transit camp, but the wheels of bureaucracy moved slowly. Such was the frustration of the Hungarians that they finally staged a four-day hunger strike. They may have learnt this tactic from studying Irish history and it paid off, because most of them were allowed to go to the US and Canada, where employment prospects were better than in the Ireland of the 1950s.
One of the refugees who stayed in Ireland was Anna Letoha, who now lives in Glasnevin, Dublin, with her husband, Janos. Arriving in Ireland was a strange experience for the Letohas.
"It was an end and it was a beginning." The dreams of freedom aroused by the revolution had turned to dust and they were homeless, jobless and spoke no English But it was also a new beginning: "We were welcomed with open arms and great generosity."
She said that one Irish couple in particular, the late Geraldine and Joseph Fogarty, "will stand in our hearts forever".
Happily for all concerned at the time, a native speaker of Hungarian, Dorrit O'Shaughnessy, lived at nearby Glin, Co Limerick, and was soon employed as the official interpreter between the refugees and the authorities. It was a tough and challenging task, but at yesterday's ceremony she spoke of the refugees with warmth and affection: "I loved them all."
It is an irony of history that Knockalisheen, or Meelick as it is now called, has once again become a camp for asylum-seekers. Today's residents have come from about 20 different countries around the world. Some of them could be seen on the margins of yesterday's event, looking slightly bewildered by it all.
Their conditions are infinitely superior to the accommodation provided in 1956 when many Irish people had never seen a foreigner and would come to the camp to see what Hungarians looked like.