Edenderry raffle to help with 3-year-old Niamh's cancer battle

An ill child tugs at the heart strings at any time of the year, but never more so than at Christmas.

As well as Santa, this year three-year-old Niamh Fitzpatrick’s Christmas will include fighting a rare Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DPIG) tumour that was diagnosed at the beginning of October.

Until last year Niamh, her sisters Kerrie (14) and Aoife (12) and her parents Emmet O’Connor and Anne Marie Fitzpatrick lived in Edenderry. Though now resident in Monaghan, Anne Marie’s sister Jillian and her partner Ciaran Curry in Edenderry are hoping locals will put their hands in their pockets this festive season to support a raffle to raise funds for Jillian’s little niece.

Niamh’s tumour is so rare it’s thought she might be the only child in Ireland with one of its kind. Diagnosed when she was only two, her parents were told the tumour couldn’t be treated with chemotherapy or surgery. Next week she finishes a bout of radiotherapy, which is the only treatment that has a chance of beating the tumour.

“It’s been very fast,” Jillian explained, adding that she and Ciaran are now “just trying to do something” for the family.

Funds raised from a raffle to be held in Scanlon’s in Edenderry (formerly The Long Bar) on December 21 will go towards perhaps getting the family to Lourdes early in 2014, or else will go towards paying for any alternative treatment that might become available.

With Niamh due to undergo an MRI scan early in 2014 to see whether radiotherapy has worked, Jillian said things are uncertain at the moment. “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.

For just €5 locals can help the good cause, while also putting themselves in the running for prizes including a trailer of turf, 20 bags of sticks, an oil voucher, a meat voucher and a hamper.

Tickets can be got from relatives and friends in Edenderry, in Scanlon’s bar and shortly from a number of other businesses in the town.