THE SIGHT of a woman on a tractor is still relatively rare in Ireland, writes Frank McNally. The sight of two women on a tractor is even rarer.
So if you witness such a spectacle in the near future, and if the tractor is a New Holland T7030, it may be safe to assume that the females on board are Jill and Louise Barrett. In which case you should give them money.
There's a good chance you will meet them somewhere, because the Barrett cousins plan to drive their tractor through all 32 counties, starting next week, in aid of a very good cause. The odyssey begins in Kildare on April 17th, spiralling north through the midlands into Ulster, then down the west coast and up the east, before ending back in Kildare on the 30th.
Madcap endurance events are all too common these days. And a perfectly understandable reaction to what is billed as "Ireland's first all-female driven and longest tractor run" might be: "Why?" Luckily, the Barretts are on the side of the angels in this case, and not just because the tractor runs on biofuel.
More to the point, the novelty element of their fundraiser serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, it draws attention to their cause; while in another, it distracts from it. This is a paradox for which donors may be grateful.
After all, nobody wants to think too long about the concept of a children's hospice, which helps explain why the Republic still doesn't have one. That deficiency is soon to be corrected. But in the meantime, Ireland's only such unit is in Belfast - one of more than 40 children's hospices founded in the UK since the movement began there 26 years ago.
Money raised by the tractor run will stay in whichever jurisdiction it comes from, which is only fair. The sterling is to benefit the North's existing hospice. The euro will go to one planned for south Dublin - the fruit of a merger between the Children's Sunshine Homes and the "Laura Lynn Foundation", whose mellifluous name masks one of the saddest stories I have ever heard.
THE DEATHof one child is a calamity from which parents never recover. The death of two, in quick succession and from completely unrelated medical conditions, is barely imaginable. But that is what Jane and Brendan McKenna went through. And the way in which they lost their daughters added an even more cruel twist.
Born with a hole in her heart, Laura McKenna had already survived two serious operations at Crumlin Children's Hospital before she died during the third in August 1999, aged four.
The family - including Laura's 13-year-old sister Lynn - were at the hospital, still awaiting the outcome of the final operation, when Brendan noticed that Lynn was unusually pale. In a family under strain, such a thing might go unremarked. But in the hospital café the teenager found that, suddenly, she couldn't eat. So they brought her to casualty for a check-up. And on the same night that Laura died, Lynn was diagnosed with leukaemia.
By another terrible coincidence, a close friend of hers had it too, so Lynn knew the drill. Her first questions to the doctor were whether she would lose her hair (yes) and whether she would need a bone marrow transplant (no). A similar maturity beyond age marked the rest of her short life, during which she had to cope with the loss of her beloved sister and her friend, before she too succumbed, aged 15.
Different parents react in different ways. Matthew Engel, the English journalist and former editor of the cricketers' bible Wisden, has written a very moving account of his son's death at 13 from a rare form of cancer. And when, after their initial disbelief and denial, he and his wife came to terms with the illness, they made two related decisions.
One was that their son would die at home, not in a hospice. The other was that, no matter how bleak the prognosis, he would be shielded from the full truth, so that he was never deprived of hope.
This, as Engel found, is an issue on which there are strongly differing opinions, both among families and medical professionals. The McKennas took a different decision. Lynn always demanded the truth and lived her last three weeks in the full knowledge of her situation. In the event, her last wish - happily granted - was to die at home, rather than in a hospital as her friend and sister had done.
Jane remembers those final weeks with her daughter as a "wonderful" time, more about living than dying. But her reaction was to found the Laura Lynn Children's Hospice Foundation in 2001, because she knew that circumstances might not have allowed Lynn, or any other child, to spend her final days at home.
In any case, hospices do many other things than help people die. They also cater for short visits, giving respite to families - sometimes just a good night's sleep - in cases where the patient needs 24-hour care. More than that, they aim to maximise the time that illness is curtailing. So besides the loving kindness that comes as standard, the best kind of hospice is a fun-filled place that sick children actually enjoy visiting. "It's not about death," says Jane. "It's about life."
More details about the Barretts' fundraising tour and how to donate are available at www.tractorontour.ie