Aisling Dolan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

After a decade of fundraising, coffee mornings, tractor runs, quizzes, cycles and marathon runs by clubs, schools, businesses and everyone, the Mayo Roscommon hospice, in Roscommon, will be officially launched this Friday. It is due to incredible fundraising over decades. It is phenomenal. The hospice will cost an estimated €6 million to complete and is an eight-bed inpatient unit with full day care facilities. The Mayo Roscommon hospice has been fundraising for these community palliative care facilities for families. Every family in Ireland has lost loved ones to cancer. We know the painful end to this disease and condition and the palliative care that has been put in place is incredible.

In Roscommon town, each of the rooms in the hospice will have a door and a private garden in order that family members will be able to visit their loved ones. I thank the volunteers and the fundraisers and acknowledge Martina Jennings, CEO, and her team and the board of the Mayo Roscommon Hospice Foundation which has funded two hospices in Castlebar, which the Deputy Leader would know very well, and one in Roscommon which will launch on Friday. It is absolutely incredible. There are such advocates at local, regional and national level and even at a global level. President Joe Biden has close links with Mayo and especially with Larita Blewitt and the Blewitts and wrote this year to say what it has meant to have been involved in this project since the start.

I thank Tony Canavan, CEO of Saolta University Health Care Group, and Mary Garvey, Roscommon University Hospital, as this facility will be adjacent to the hospital and will help and support its services. The Minister, Deputy Donnelly, and the Minister of State, Deputy Feighan, will be there to celebrate this launch on Friday.

What can we do? We can support it by making donations at hospice.ie. These community pallative care services have to be fundraised for every single year. There are also the hospice shops. Every single time you see those wonderful charity shops, do not forget to think of the treasures that lie within and of supporting them with a few euro or even donations?