Irish Cancer Society needs €30m this year to meet demand
Damien Duff with cancer patient Oscar Walsh at the AUL Complex in Dublin, earlier this month encouraging the Irish public to go all in for Daffodil Day on Friday, March 28. Picture: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile
The Irish Cancer Society needs to raise €30m this year to meet record demand for services, the charity has said.
Its transport service, for example, last year saw a 20% increase in bookings, covering 2.9km and bringing more than 2,500 cancer patients to and from their cancer treatments.
The charity also says its free nationwide counselling service increased of 8% to over 16,000 sessions and its Freephone Support Line, which provides confidential advice, support, and information for anyone affected by cancer, also saw an 8% increase in contacts to 10,700.
While a further 17,300 conversations took place in the society’s Daffodil Centres nationwide, more than 6,000 nights of palliative nursing care and end-of-life care were given to over 1,700 patients.
The appeal for funds has been launched ahead of the forthcoming fund-raising day Daffodil Day this Friday, March 28.
Irish Cancer Society CEO, Averil Power said: “Some 44,000 people are diagnosed with cancer every year in Ireland, and the Irish Cancer Society aims to be there for every one of them. But the State provides just 5% of our funding so we need to raise €30m to provide our key services.
“Daffodil Day is the biggest and most important fundraising event of the year.
"As well as dealing with the increase in demand for our services last year, we also invested over €4m in cancer research.
“Research means new discoveries, more effective treatments and more birthdays, Christmases, and other precious moments together.
"By donating this Daffodil Day, you’re fuelling breakthroughs that will save lives.”
Last April, she told the Dáil that without funding, "the national cancer strategy is a plan without action and a plan without action is not a plan".
"It is just words. Words are no comfort to someone languishing on a waiting list for a cancer test," she said.
Last June, when the charity launched its Budget 2025 Submission, it urged the Government to “stop underfunding the National Cancer Strategy”.
This call was backed by the Irish Society of Medical Oncologists (ISMO) and the Irish Society of Radiation Oncologists (ISRO).
The charity said that while funding for the National Cancer Strategy should have increased incrementally over the past years to be €110m higher in 2024 than in 2016, the actual incremental increase has only been €65m.
As a result, the Irish Cancer Society said, the cumulative loss of investment in cancer services from 2017 to 2024 is almost €180m.
New health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill stated in the Dáil that when the current national cancer strategy was published in 2017, there were 150,000 people living following a diagnosis.
That figure has, she pointed out, increased to 220,000.
She also pointed out that while there were 8,700 deaths from cancer in 2013, that figure had increased to 9,600 deaths from cancer in Ireland in 2021.
The minister said that of the €105m invested in the implementation of the national cancer strategy since 2017, some €23m had been spent on cancer services in 2025.
She said: "While still too high, cancer mortality rates in Ireland are falling faster than the EU average, having fallen by 17% between 2011 and 2021, compared with the EU average of 12%."
