They still call him Peach

Almost everyone in Kiltimagh called Shane Freeman Peach. Next month 55 people from that town, and from Swinford, Charlestown, Castlebar, Westport and Mayo families now living in Dublin, will run the Irish Life Dublin Marathon because of him.

The race is on Sunday 25 October, the 45th time it has been held. Orla, his wife, told the Western People that a few people running in his memory has become a team in which every one of them is taking on the full distance. She thanked them for the care Peach received at Mayo Hospice in Castlebar, and for the support the family were given. "Peach would be absolutely blown away by this."

He died there on 2 September 2025. He was 44 when he was diagnosed with cancer. For six years he lived with it. In an account published with the hospice earlier this year, Orla was careful about the words he used. He never saw the illness as a battle. It was like a travelling companion, and one he would not let slow him down. There were more than 35 rounds of chemotherapy, four surgeries, and radiotherapy.

He was reluctant to go into the hospice at first. For the last 11 weeks of his life he did. Orla stayed every night. There were day trips and nights at home. They had golf lessons with their three sons. They marked a wedding anniversary in Castlebar. The team managed his medication so that life was possible, not only bearable.

"Palliative care isn't about keeping you alive, it's about keeping you living," she said. "It allowed me to be Shane's wife, rather than his carer."

They had been together since she was 21. She had already lost both of her parents, and still found this grief different. "I thought I knew everything about grief, but losing a partner is different." What the hospice gave her, she said, was a "clean grief": she had been his wife in the room, not his carer. He planned the funeral with her. He made sure she had the passwords. He asked her to deliver the eulogy and to thank people for six-and-a-half years of help. He wanted them to know he had lived fully, and that he had no regrets. "When I stood up to deliver the eulogy, I wasn't talking about Shane, I was speaking on his behalf."

Before that he taught French and Business Studies at Sancta Maria College in Louisburgh. At Ballyhaunis Golf Club he played off a handicap of 2.0 and spent summers as junior convenor on the fairways at Coolnaha. Golf Ireland remembered a Connacht junior team manager.

The fundraising page for Peach's Runners has now passed €16,000 for Mayo Roscommon Hospice Foundation. Martina Jennings, the foundation's chief executive, thanked the family. The money, she said, will go towards palliative care in the hospices and in the community.

Mayo Hospice is a 14-bed unit. The foundation dates to 1993, when there was no specialist palliative care in the two counties. Roscommon's eight-bed hospice opened in 2023. Families are not charged. Clinical teams work in partnership with the HSE. The foundation still raises money for the buildings and the equipment, and for family therapy. Orla still goes back to Castlebar. It is where she feels closest to him, and where he could see that the family would be held after he had gone.