To mark World Cancer Day, five secondary school and community choirs combined to highlight cancer awareness at a unique lunchtime choral event in the O'Brien Centre for Science with the help of Irish singer/songwriter, Don Mescall.

Each choir sang a song that has a special meaning to them followed by a combined performance of the Don Mescall song, ‘Your Love Carries Me’.

Don Mescall and the pupils of Mount Sion Choir, Waterford recorded ‘Your Love Carries Me’ in tribute to people whose lives have been touched by cancer.

In this first live performance of the new single, they led the UCD community choir, Midlands Irish Sign Language Learners choir, the Solas Cancer Support Centre men’s choir and the choirs of St Mary’s Newport Secondary School, Oatlands College and Loreto College Foxrock.

All proceeds from the recording of ‘Your Love Carries Me’ are being donated to the charities; CanTeen, CanCare4Living and the Solas Cancer Support Centre. The single is available for download.

Earlier in the morning, the school choirs visited UCD Conway Institute to hear the very personal stories of those whose lives are touched by cancer as well as those of researchers focuses on finding new ways to diagnose and treat cancer.

'Cancer Stories' participants included patient advocates, Vicky Phelan and Stephen Teap as well as Róisín Ní Chadhla and Jovana Gajic, second year students at Ardscoil na Mara, Tramore whose HPV vaccine project was highly commended in the 2019 BT Young Scientist competition.

 

Miriam O'Callaghan, RTE was the MC for the session that was organised by Professor William Gallagher, Director, UCD Conway Institute and BREAST-PREDICT, the Irish Cancer Society’s first collaborative cancer research centre.

Cancer reserach is one the key areas of focus under the Personalised & Translational Medicine strand of the Institute's research strategy.  

 

About World Cancer Day (https://www.worldcancerday.org/)
Each year on 4 February, World Cancer Day empowers people across the world to show support, raise our collective voice, take personal action and press governments to do more. 2019 marks the launch of the 3-year ‘I Am and I Will’ campaign. ‘I Am and I Will’ is an empowering call-to-action urging for personal commitment and represents the power of individual action taken now to impact the future. More than one third of cancer cases can be prevented. Another third can be cured if detected early and treated properly. By implementing resource-appropriate strategies on prevention, early detection and treatment, we can save up to 3.7 million lives every year.