an interview with the Irish Examiner<\/a> to draw attention to the need for people to get themselves tested for bowel cancer at all ages.<\/p>\nAccording to the Irish Cancer Society (ICS), bowel cancer is the second most common cancer among men and the third most common among women, with around 2,500 new cases in Ireland each year.<\/p>\n
Even though it\u2019s less common for younger people to be diagnosed with bowel cancer \u2014 about one in 10 diagnoses are in people under 50 \u2014 it\u2019s occurring more frequently now.<\/p>\n
Ms O’Byrne was also one of the main organisers of the recent Concert For Cancer, in aid of the ICS, which was headlined by Nathan Carter. She was the third generation in her family to be diagnosed with cancer: Her grandmother had breast cancer, and her mother \u200b\u2014 who died in 2020, aged 46 \u2014 had lung cancer.<\/p>\n
Of her family\u2019s cancer history and her fundraising concert for the charity, she said in June 2025: “Between my grandmother and my mom, the ICS have been a part of our family since the early 2000s, so we\u2019re just trying to raise as much money for them as possible.<\/p>\n
“(The concert)\u200b will go toward clinical trials, night nurses for palliative care, and volunteers who transport chemotherapy patients to and from treatment. We want as many people to survive cancer as possible.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ms O’Byrne said the realisation that she had the disease \u200bin November last year was a traumatic experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was the first day I met my oncologist,” she said. “He didn\u2019t go into too much detail that first day, because it was just so traumatic getting that information.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe did say I needed to begin chemotherapy as soon as possible so that they could attack the cancer as quickly as they could.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor myself, my own mental health, my kids, I focus more on the positives. It doesn\u2019t mean blocking out the negative, though. It\u2019s OK to sit and deal with the negative, too, but in small doses.<\/p>\n
\u201cI learned in counselling to make sure I\u2019m not diverting my attention away from the negative completely, but equally, you\u2019re dealing with it in a healthy manner.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a blog post on the ICS\u2019s website promoting Concert for Cancer earlier this year, she said: \u201cI find myself in my mid-20s living with bowel cancer. It\u2019s very hard to take but you have to get on with it.<\/p>\n
\n I want to turn my cancer experience into something positive. I\u2019m the third generation of my family to have cancer and I don\u2019t want that same thing happening to my children.\n <\/p>\n
She added: \u201cFor that day to come when hopefully nobody gets cancer, organisations like the Irish Cancer Society need funding so they can invest more and more in cancer research.<\/p>\n
\u200b”That\u2019s why I decided to organise the \u2018Concert for Cancer\u2019 and I\u2019m absolutely thrilled that Nathan Carter will be performing to raise vital funds for the Irish Cancer Society.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to her death notice on RIP.ie, Ms O’Byrne will be “sadly missed by her loving family, aunts, uncles, grandaunts, granduncles, cousins, neighbours and a large circle of friends”.<\/p>\n
She will be reposing at Coughlan\u2019s Funeral Home, Shandon Street, on Friday from 1pm, with family in attendance at 3pm and prayers at 4pm.<\/p>\n
Her Requiem Mass will be held tomorrow at 10am in the Church of the Annunciation, Blackpool, with the funeral afterwards to St. Catherine\u2019s Cemetery, Kilcully.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cork cancer campaigner Natasha O\u2019Byrne has died at the age of 26. The mother\u200b-of\u200b-two from Blackpool died on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":252240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[781,9,10,110,18,13,14,6,2741,19,17,11,12,15,16,5,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-252239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-cork-news","9":"tag-breaking-news","10":"tag-breakingnews","11":"tag-cancer","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-featured-news","14":"tag-featurednews","15":"tag-headlines","16":"tag-health-news","17":"tag-ie","18":"tag-ireland","19":"tag-latest-news","20":"tag-latestnews","21":"tag-main-news","22":"tag-mainnews","23":"tag-news","24":"tag-top-stories","25":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115785668030165490","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}