Barretstown children charity have launched their national Christmas appeal to help ‘Sprinkle Some Magic’ for children affected by cancer and other serious illnesses.

Barretstown’s mission is to rebuild the lives of children and families affected by cancer and other serious illnesses through the provision of therapeutic camps and programmes.

Aoife Lawless, who was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis (NF) just before her fifth birthday, and her father Colm told The Pat Kenny Show about the impact of their families trip to Barretstown's family camp.

Aoife, who is now 11, underwent 84 weeks – nearly two years – of chemotherapy to treat her disease.

“So, basically NF is a genetic disorder which can cause little tumours to grow on nerve endings,” Mr Lawless said.

“Obviously there’s nerve endings all across the body. In Aoife’s case, she unfortunately got a little tumour growth at the back of her eye on her optic nerve, and that caused Aoife to have some vision problems.

“Aoife would be registered as blind at the minute - so Aoife doesn’t see at all really out of her right-hand side. She has a little bit of vision on her left-hand side, and that keeps her functional. "

Aoife Lawless (L) amnd her father Colm Lawless (R). Image: Newstalk. 18/12/24

Mr Lawless said the trip to Barretstown gave his family some much needed relief.

“It was sold to us as a break, as a respite, that’s kind of the message we got,” he said.

“So, we got there anyway, and you kind of get to the gate and there’s a really friendly face that meets you there. You drive up the laneway and you open up onto the castle. And it’s a beautiful, beautiful sight.

“You come into the car park and we kind of get out of the car and there’s two or three people over to take your bags, and they’ve got the biggest, happiest smiliest face that you can imagine.

“We were like, ‘jeez, everyone's so happy here’. And you go and you check in and you’re brought – you stay in chalets, and your bags are brought to your room, and they explained to us, this is the med shed.

“In the med shed, there’s nurses and if there’s anything that we need, if there’s anything to do with dressings or if there’s anything medical related, that’s on us – effectively, we are told, ‘We will be responsible for you this weekend’.”

'Really loved'

Aoife said that her time at the camp left her with beautiful memories, and allowed her to enjoy being a child again.

“One of my favourite memories from that camp is at the end, they actually had like a video with all the pictures taken throughout the week," she said.

“The carers got this thing on a tablet for me so I could see it properly – but in that moment I felt really, really like, loved.”

Fundraising

Mr Lawless said that after the help his family had received from Barretstown, he felt it was ‘only natural for us to give the help back to them’.

“It’s just 4% of their funding is provided by the State,” he said.

“Obviously it’s a very, very small amount  - which needs to be addressed - but either way the funding has to be sourced.

“So, 96% of funding [is] self-raised by Barretstown.

"Effectively, as we’re here telling people our story, we hope people are listening to us and figuring out the good time we had, that was provided to us because Barreststown had funding.

"So we’re looking for help effectively.”

You can donate to the charity at barretstown.org.

Listen back here: