Lapland trip is back on after mystery donation

The December trip had been organised by Inspire NI – a multi sports and youth club for special needs children – and £18,000 had been paid off.

Although the group are hopeful of a refund of the money paid to Thomas Cook – which had not been transferred to the company who run the excursion (Transun) – it may not come in time to pay for the trip.

The story received a lot of coverage on Tuesday and yesterday – including in this paper – and subsequently an anonymous money lender came forward.

Alison Walker, whose teenage son Samuel attends the club, spoke to a number of media outlets. As a consequence she was contacted to say someone was willing to lend them the money to pay for the trip.

Gemma Reynolds who runs Inspire NI said: “Someone from UTV rang Alison to say they had been contacted by an anonymous donor who wanted to loan us the money for the trip and we could pay it back when we get our refund from Thomas Cook.

“We don’t know who the person is yet, but it’s an amazing gesture.

“The trip is protected, we’ll get the money back, but it’s just that we don’t know when.

“Everything is up in the air at the minute after the collapse of Thomas Cook. The priority is trying to get everyone home who’s away.”

Gemma runs Inspire NI, a sports and youth club for young people with special needs, on a part time basis.

The 27-year-old is also a part time nurse.

She said: “I’ve done judo for 20 years. I worked in Harberton Special School, I loved it. So many of the kids were so good at sport but there was nothing for them to go to.

“I put together a business plan to offer sport to young people with special needs. It started with judo and grew from there.”

Of the Lapland trip she said: “There’s 44 people going on the trip, that’s including parents and carers and coaching staff. There’s 20 kids altogether.

“It’s a day trip, we go first thing on Saturday and come home late on Saturday night.

“We’ve fundraised so hard for it. We were gutted but we’re so happy that it looks like we’re going to be able to go now thanks to this anonymous donation.”

Meanwhile at Westminster, a government minister said the repatriation efforts following the collapse of Thomas Cook are about twice the size of the £50 million operation when Monarch Airlines collapsed in 2017.

But Transport Secretary Grant Shapps did not give a total for how much the current repatriation operation will cost.

He said: “The final cost of repatriation for the Monarch situation was about £50 million, including Atol contributions.

“The repatriation efforts for Thomas Cook is now known to be about twice the size and more complicated.”

Mr Shapps said that bailing out the firm would have been “throwing good money after bad” and the government was concerned it would have had to pay for the repatriation of holidaymakers anyway.