Woman helps raise €18,000 in one day after her mum receives terminal cancer prognosis

A WOMAN from Co Limerick has helped raise €18,000 for charity after her mother received a terminal cancer prognosis. 

When the Irish Cancer Society were looked for volunteers to help raise money on Daffodil Day, Sinéad O’Beirne Brinn stepped forward to “give back to them”. 

“I saw they were looking for volunteers to help to raise money on their yearly annual fundraiser. At the time, my mom was dying with terminal cancer, so I wanted to give back to them because they were providing us with the palliative care we needed to mind mom at home,” said the Dooradoyle woman.

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“I pulled together 50 people from all the groups I'm involved in, they all came forward and we managed four shopping centres, doing 12 hours in each shopping centre and raising money on Daffodil Day. 

Sadly, Sinéad's mother, Teresa, passed away at the same time.

“Everybody had a reason for helping. The irony was, my mom died at that time, within a few days. She was dead before the collection,” she said.

This year, Sinéad understood for “the first time” the importance of Daffodil Day, the Irish Cancer Society’s biggest fundraising event of the year. 

“It was the first time I got to understand that Daffodil Day is the only place where the night nurses, the palliative care night nurses, it's the only place that pays them,” she said. “When mom got the terminal diagnosis, I was the person that looked after her medically.”

When her mother received her prognosis, Sinéad looked for guidance.

“I remember being with her the day that she got the terminal diagnosis, coming away feeling quite helpless and not knowing what to do. She was looking for me for guidance because there were choices we had to make.

“We would have experienced the nurses coming in and out to mom, we'd have been lost without them. I remember going into the support centre in the hospital the following day, to go to people that specialise just in cancer, and they were absolutely fantastic. It really kind of got my head straight on what I needed to do to help mom in her last few weeks,” she said. 

In June, Sinéad presented the Irish Cancer Society with a cheque of €18,000 alongside the volunteers she worked with, a sum they raised in one day. 

Speaking of the funds raised, she said: “It was phenomenal, it was unbelievable. Some days I'd be there with mom on night duty, nursing her at home, the cause was so close to the bone.

When we presented them with the cheque, they were blown away. The money helps people locally, so we're doing it for our own.”