Thank you for helping my dying friend

Last weekend I stood in the beautiful hillside cemetery in Bantry, looking out over the Bay which is soaked in history. I was burying a dear friend from my university days. There were many of us, and we'd come from all over the world. But that is the way when you die young: your friends outlive you and they nearly all turn up to say goodbye.

But then, our friend was also one of a kind, someone who deserved every tribute paid to her. Ann O'Toole was brave, funny and strong. A fighter in her working life for those with nothing, she was cruelly taken by cancer in her 40s, just when she should have been reaping the benefits of family and career. As she said herself, once she was diagnosed earlier this year, she never got a break at all; it was bad news at every turn.

I first met her while at UCC. We were all very young, wild and crazy as hell. She was an excellent student, having no problem at all getting a very good degree in social science. Her life's work was as a housing officer and later housing ombudsman with London borough councils. How good she was at that could be seen by the number of her work colleagues from London who travelled to her funeral. She had spent her time trying to find housing for the homeless, terminally ill Aids patients and others who had no one on the inside to speak for them. She was someone, her colleagues said, who never allowed a feeling of self-preservation for her own career to get in her way when trying to do what was right. She was fearless in pursuit of justice for the disadvantaged, taking on her superiors, bureaucracy and institutional inertia, with no regard for herself or her own prospects.

With a great sense of humour, she was also a woman who put the F into feisty. To pay our way through UCC, she and I, along with her later to be husband and my close friend Ger, worked in bars. Once, we all took a job for a weekend at the Macroom Mountain Dew festival in Cork. The pub was owned by two of her brothers and at the time only opened for that weekend every year. We only sold pints of Guinness and bottles of cider and the clientele were dog rough.

At one stage she was sweeping up broken glass in the yard in the middle of a jeering mob of hells' angels. One of them made the mistake of pinching her bum. Without interrupting her sweeping, she swung her broom and smacked him in the chops. In the melee that followed as the gang were bundled from the premises, I remember roaring with laughter at the shock on her molester's face and at both at her bravery and her absolute refusal to be abused by anyone, no matter how many they were and how tough they looked.

When I last saw her alive in the world-renowned St Christopher's Hospice in south London, her illness had taken a terrible toll. The cancer showed her no mercy at all, but with the help of a wonderful staff, she was ready to meet the end. She had a serenity and a level of acceptance about her impending death that I know I will never achieve. That day, with the help of the staff, we were able to take her in her bed into the gardens and spent hours laughing and talking about old times. It was a terrific day. Anywhere else, the whole experience would have been distressing beyond belief.

She had only one request of me, that was to tell people about how wonderful the hospice had been for her. For nearly nine weeks St Christopher's had made her comfortable, and made Ger and the family she loved so much feel at home and at ease. It was a pleasure to visit, not at all what you would expect of a place where people spend their last days on earth.

St Christopher's, in Sydenham, south London, started a philosophy which has spread all over the world. Founded in 1967, it has trained more than 50,000 students to become doctors, nurses and palliative care professionals. Many of those who now work in hospices in Ireland trained there, continuing a tradition started by a remarkable woman, Dame Cicely Saunders, the founder of St Christopher's. She died there herself only last July.

It was my first experience of hospice care and brought home to me that all of them rely on charitable donations to survive. I, for one, will not forget what the hospice did for my friend.

Fergal Keane is a reporter with RTÉ radio's Five Seven Live