These evenings on the hill where I live in Kildare, I can hear the noise of childish laughter rising up the slopes like the scent of the sea, washing in waves over the woodlands and hedgerows. It is the sound of indomitable happiness, a reminder of the days of youth when summers were full of the explorations and discoveries of the possible; but what particularly marks this happiness is its complete triumph. For some of the children whose giddy cries of joy illuminated so many grey summer evenings last year may now be dead. They knew then that they were in danger; yet their awareness of the ocean of deadly perils before them did not diminish their laughter or their vibrant, irrepressible happiness.
Barretstown Castle
Barretstown Castle is the place where sick children from some 21 countries have rediscovered the meaning of joy. The sound that I hear each evening is not that of a woebegone gallantry-in-adversity, the forced laughter of unconvinced youngsters pleasing their tiresome guardians. This is true joy rising in a warm tide up the hill, so real, so substantial you can almost reach and out and feel it between your fingers.
The thought that children might contract terrible diseases, that they might face long and arduous battles which disfigure lives and grossly distort relationships within families, is for all of us unbearable. Childhood cancer - the most common threat to Barretstown children - is a disease which commandeers the attention, the energies, the emotions and the central life of a family. Sometimes - not always, but always too often - that cataclysmic battle will end in death: to the normal harrowing gauntlet of grief must be added the other woes of failure, of guilt, not just over the loss of life, but over the preceding loss of childhood too.
The Barretstown Gang Camp restores childhood to children who have been robbed of it; it restores the joys of discovery to those whom cancer had previously encased in a cocoon of protective care and self-absorption. That cocoon is what makes malignant tumours truly malignant; not merely in what they do to the patients, but in the manipulation of family emotions. Just as cancer subverts healthy cells into being its their enemy's host, so it enslaves love as well, causing parents to limit freedoms, to outlaw the still-possible, to assist the tumour in the theft of joy.
Barretstown Gang Camp strips away the cocoon; what infirmity or protectiveness had made seem impossible now become radiantly probable. The camp redeems lost childhoods by activities which are both challenging yet safe. Children grown neurotic, introverted and incommunicative because of the insidious evils toiling within them and within the hearts of their family discover that they are physical creatures after all. The amputee can still climb, ride, swim, canoe and camp out overnight. At sunset, I can hear those children singing around the campfire in the woodlands across the valley from me, their songs erupting in gales of laughter and howls of joy.
Stolen childhoods
Barretstown is unique. It takes children-at-risk from any country, free of charge; and I know from the evidence of my own ears, from the sights before my own eyes when I meet them walking through the fields, that these are children whose stolen childhoods have been revived, restored, revitalised. Where there was brooding silence and a gnawing incubus of worry, there is now carefree gaiety.
Whatever future awaits them - and in some cases, it will be death - cancer has lost this particular battle. It wanted to steal the possibilities of happiness: and in this ambition it was gloriously routed.
The camp was founded five years ago by the actor Paul Newman on the lines of his Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in the United States. It is now self-funding, with virtually no support from the Government. Yet even though our Government simply cannot find ways of spending the tax revenues it is collecting, it still insists on taxing PAYE workers on income covenanted to charity. The Minister for Finance, to be sure, has changed the corporate tax laws to permit tax-free donations to charities, but PAYE rules remain as brutally unimaginative and witlessly punitive as ever. If we are to escape from the debilitating nanny-notion that governments should subsidise every health project, is it not both sensible and civilised to have tax-laws which encourage charitable covenants by individuals?
Joyous laughter
I know of no other charity whose primary purpose is to turn youthful despair into pure happiness. I know of no other charity which takes sick and maybe dying children and within a week covers a hillside with their joyous laughter. I know of no other charity which can rescue even a limited life and turn it into something rich and enriching, whose bright joys today might immeasurably lighten tomorrow's bereavement.
Were his last days happy? Did she rediscover joy before she died? Is it not truly a very great gift to have enabled a grieving parent answer proudly Yes?
I say again: Barretstown is not synonymous with death, but it is synonymous with happiness. Its main public fund-raising event is Fantasia '99, a dinner/show/dance at the castle in September. If you are interested in that, or in making a donation of any kind, contact Joanna Duffy at 045-864115. If you could only hear the sound that I hear nightly you would rejoice as I do in these children's joy.