A Donegal man is putting to use his passion for agricultural machinery to raise money for a cancer charity that is close to his heart.
Billy Bustard from Donegal Town purchased a Massey Ferguson 35 six months ago. Over the last number of weeks and months he stripped the tired old machine down to the bare chassis and restored the three cylinder engine to a great condition.
It’s been given a new battery, starter, injector pump, tyres, rims and rev counter. The engine is fully rebuilt while there’s a new seat and mud guards. It’s been freshly painted and comes with a folding roll bar.
“I’m hoping to get a lot of interest and make a good sum of money that I can give to the charity,” he said.
Billy will donate the funds raised by raffling off the tractor to the Good and New Cancer Charity. The Letterkenny-based charity managed to keep its bus on the road for the 40 weeks that its second hand charity shop was closed.
Cancer survivors Eamonn and Lynn McDevitt have been organising buses for patients making the journey to Galway for treatment since 2009.
“It’s a 600km round-trip for some patients. There was no service to Galway at the time and we felt we needed to do something. Maybe naively, but we thought that someone might have taken over the service since then.
“We’ve tried to get funding from the HSE and from cancer charities but we never got a penny from anybody. If it wasn’t for those donations and the support of ordinary people like Billy our service would end,” he said.
“Because of the Covid pandemic our charity shop was closed for forty weeks in total. The second hand shop is the main fund-raiser for the bus but we still managed to keep the bus going all that time,” he explained.
The bus leaves Donegal on a Monday morning and returns home on a Friday evening. It costs more than €1,000 a week to maintain the service. Over the past twelve years more than 2,600 people have used the Good and New Cancer Charity bus.
“It’s been a very tough time and it was coming to the stage, had the shop remained closed, where there was a very high risk that the bus would have been in jeopardy,” he admitted.
“When we started out we also set up a cancer fund to help families on their journey and, to date, we have donated €425,000 to families. There’s a lot of families in need but, maybe, we weren’t that professional in the way we did things at the time,” he said.
The Letterkenny-based charity was shrouded in controversy back in 2018 after it was reported in the Sunday Times that they had received €400,000 more than they spent. The charities regulator threatened legal action at the time if they did not get their accounts in order.
“If we heard that ‘Joe Soap’ was sick and going to use the bus we would ring someone familiar with the area in which the family lived and ask: ‘Does that family need help?’. If the answer was yes we would find out how many people were in the family and donate a sum of money to that family. We had a scale we worked with and that’s what we done.
“As I said earlier we were probably naive in the way we went about helping families in need at the time but that was our only crime,” he said.
He has noticed in recent weeks that the numbers using the service are beginning to rise.
“It’s obvious that people are now starting to look about themselves once more. They’re going to their doctor, getting diagnosed and going for treatment.
“The shop would be steady source of income. It can fund the bus for us and that’s the most important thing we wanted,” he added.
Billy Bustard, who lost his brother Norman to cancer, is a cancer survivor himself. He underwent open heart surgery last year.
“I’ve been running fund-raising dances for the Cancer Bus in the Abbey Hotel for the past twelve years. Unfortunately, dances have been postponed for the foreseeable future due to Covid 19 and I felt that I had to do something.
“I have refurbished this tractor and I’m raffling it to raise much needed funds for this amazing charity that helps to give the people of Donegal one less worry on their road to recovery.
“Thanks also to the Abbey Hotel and Central Hotel for donating prizes,” he said.
Billy has raised tens of thousands of euro for the Good and New Cancer Charity over the years.
“I like to try to help them as best as I can. I took the tractor to Dunfanaghy on the back of a trailer last weekend and sold a few tickets while I’ll be taking it to Falcarragh on Friday. I’ve also been to Bundoran, Killybegs and Ardara.
“The response has been fantastic and, hopefully, I’ll manage to reach my €15,000 target before the draw which takes place on Friday, November 19.
To support the draw visit www.idonate.ie/raffle/12698_donegal-cancer-bus-raffle.html
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