Concert to aid Billy Riordan clinic in Malawi

A CONCERT to raise funds for the Billy Riordan Memorial Clinic in Malawi will take place at the end of the month.

Mary Black and former Saw Doctors members Leo Moran and Pádraig Stevens will join Philip King and Éilís Ní Chinnéide in a gala concert to raise funds for the centre where Mags Riordan opened an out-patient department in 2004.

Through extensive fund raising they developed an in-patient facility in 2008 and followed with a HIV clinic and laboratory in 2017, providing the only medical services in one of the poorest communities in the world.

The centre is named after Mags’s son, Billy, who died in Malawi in 1999. Billy had graduated from University College Galway and was backpacking in Malawi when he suffered a brain haemorrhage and died in a remote village on the shores of Lake Malawi.

Mags travelled to the village in 2000 and finding a community with no access to health care she returned to Ireland and raised funds to construct a health clinic in memory of her son. The Billy Clinic opened in 2004.

Supported by fundraising and contributions from individuals as well as voluntarty doctors and nurses from Ireland, the clinic has now grown to become a small hospital offering a wide range of medical services to the community of 16,000 people. It continues to be the only health service available in the area. Volunteer doctors and nurses from Ireland commit to work for a period of six months at the clinic, treating more than 30,000 patients per year.

While cataract surgery is available at the clinic, fundraising has begun to provide a desperately needed extension of the eye services provided by the clinic in an area of sub-Saharan Africa where blindness is widespread.

The concert will take place in St. Mary’s Church, Dingle, on Sunday, December 30, doors open at 7pm. Tickets cost €25 and are available from Neligan’s Pub and ticketweb.ie (search for Dingle).