Vicky tried to give back €197k donated by public
CANCER campaigner Vicky Phelan has tried to return more than €197,000 given to her by members of the public following a GoFundMe appeal – but they refused to take it back.
The money was to be used to fund life-saving cancer trials and the appeal was launched two months before she won a €2.5million settlement.
At the time she set up the fund, she was facing a court case that she feared could take up to a year to resolve – but needed money to fund cancer drug treatment.
Last night, she told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘After I won my settlement, I tried to return the money but nobody wanted it back. They told me to hang on to it in case I needed it in the future.’
Instead of retaining it, however, she is using €60,000 of the money raised to fund a full-time cancer drug and treatment specialist who will be based at the Irish Cancer Society. Applications for the job – which she is creating so people diagnosed with terminal cancer can go to someone to discuss as many treatment options as possible – are due to be opened shortly.
And the Limerick mother of two, who has become a driving force in the campaign to get best treatment for cancer patients since discovering that she has terminal cancer herself, expects the job will be up and running by January.
Mrs Phelan sued after learning that a cervical smear test result was misread in 2011; even though the error was discovered in 2014 – when she was diagnosed with cancer – she was only told three years later.
She settled her case against Clinical Pathology Laboratories Inc in April this year without any admission of liability on the part of the company based in Austin, Texas. She has become a leading light and a very public face in the drive for reform of the national screening programme.
Yesterday, the Waterford Institute of Technology, where she works as the Literacy Development Centre manager, conferred on her an honorary fellowship. Speaking before she accepted the award, she told the Mail: ‘I went back to everybody on the GoFundMe page to return the money. ‘I talked to GoFundMe to see how I could do that, and they showed me a mechanism for that to happen. But nobody wanted the money back – and I don’t mean that in a bad way. They said things like: “No, we donated this for you”, or “You’ll be fighting this for the rest of your life, so keep it, that’s your money”.
‘Sadly, the reality is I might still have to go on a clinical trial.’
She added: ‘I was trying to do the right thing because I didn’t want people thinking it odd that they gave me all this money and here I was suddenly with this big settlement on top of that.
‘So when people didn’t want the money back, I decided I wanted to do good with this money, and that is how I am funding this specialist post,’ she said.
Another €30,000 or so will also be donated back to the local community in Annacotty, in Limerick, where she lives and where her fundraising efforts began.
‘Again, I am having arguments with the woman who helped organise raising funds for me because I want to give the money back, but she is insisting I keep it,’ she said. ‘But I have told her she is getting it back.
‘The money will be for a fund to help other people like me who get a terminal diagnosis and they can access funds right away.’
In her acceptance speech for the fellowship, she said: ‘I have used my education as a powerful weapon to expose the CervicalCheck scandal, or debacle, as I now prefer to call it.
‘A debacle is an event or a situation that is a complete failure. Following the publication of the Scally Report, we now know that the CervicalCheck screening programme was doomed to fail.
‘It failed me. It failed 20 women and families who lost their wives, mothers, daughters, friends.
‘It failed the 201 other women who, like me... are now either fighting to stay alive or battling horrendous side effects of treatment that may not have been necessary had their cancer been detected earlier.
‘It ultimately failed the women of Ireland who placed their trust in the programme,’ she said.
‘They told me to hang on to it, in case I needed it’ ‘I was trying to do the right thing’