Hugs, kisses and tears as Eve moves into dream home

The incredible desire of a community to reach out and help a young girl and her family faced with the most difficult of life challenges has created a magical outcome.

This week, Eve Creamer, known as the warrior princess, her sister Ayryn and parents Robbie and Sabrina walked into a beautiful home in Emly lovingly built by a remarkable group of volunteers over the last year. The family were overwhelmed with emotion and the hundred volunteers moved to tears as two-year-old Eve, who is battling a rare and incurable cancer condition, danced with joy and spent hours hugging men and women who had travelled from all over the county and beyond to create the dream home for the Creamer family that they so urgently needed.
For months Eva had been looking out of a mobile home on the site watching the progress those volunteers had been making on turning what had been a derelict cottage into a dream home.
The Creamer family were not only gifted a beautiful home they also gained an extension to their own family with lifelong friendships forging an unbreakable bond. The new home will transform the lives of the Creamer family and give them the stability they need to support Eve who was born with Congenital Melanocytic Naevi (CNM). It is a rare gene mutation that caused more than half her body to be covered in moles/birthmarks and the cancer condition is also on her brain and spine. In the first two years of her life Eve, who captured the hearts of the country when a fund raising campaign was set up, underwent seven major operations as the family engaged with Crumlin, Temple Street and Great Ormonde in London for her care.
The sheer joy on the face of Eve on moving in day brought such an unimaginable sense of fulfilment to Martin Barry, one of the driving forces behind the build, and every single person who made so many sacrifices over the last few months to build the house.
“It is all we wanted to see. We all know what this means to the family. No words were required,” said Martin.
Aware of the illness that Eve was fighting and of the urgent needs of the Creamer family Martin made a clarion call to his friends in the building trade and the response was nothing short of amazing.
Martin had experienced first hand just how incredibly powerful a community can be when they set out to achieve a goal.
In September, 2019 Martin had witnessed how a group of volunteers had transformed the lives of his late brothers Micheal’s wife Sinead and her three children when the DIY SOS team rolled into Dundrum to finish the dream family home Michael was in the process of building before he died suddenly from cancer at the age of 34.
Martin was one of the volunteers who came forward when DIY SOS put out a call for people to work on the Barry home and the realisation of that dream was captured in a programme broadcast last month on RTÉ.
“Michael’s house was picked by the television company behind the DIY SOS series but the Creamer family applied for the same programme and were not so lucky. When we finished Michael’s home in September of last year I was aware of the situation the Creamer family were in and I wanted to go again to help the Creamer family and a lot of the same volunteers who worked to finish my brothers house came on board again without hesitation,” said Martin.
“This home will make a world of a difference to us. It will help us to cope. We finally have a home suitable for Eve’s needs. We have stability, we can move on now. The uncertainty about where we were going to live is gone and Eve has the space and home environment she needed. We are never going to have a normal family life but this beautiful home will help us to have the best life we can,”said her mother Sabrina.
“Moving into the house was such a relief. It takes away a lot of the anxiety and worry that we had. When Eve was born we were in the process of getting planning permission to make the cottage habitable but everything was put on hold when we realised how serious an illness Eve was born with. Freedom and space is what she needs. The home is beyond anything we could ever have dreamt about,” said Sabrina.
Sabrina paid tribute to all of the volunteers involved.
“Work started on November 8. They came that day and kept coming every weekend. It was surreal. We just did not know what to say. We could see them turning up every weekend from the mobile home. It was very humbling , you never get used to it. All we could do is feed them, we did not know what to say, we could never thank them enough,” said Sabrina.
Eve’s father Robbie said moving into the house was like a dream come true.
“We found it very hard to look forward to the future. But now we have a home it puts us in a much stronger position to deal with things,” said Robbie.
Robbie said it was a very humbling experience to see so many volunteers arrive on site every weekend to get to work. Most came from the locality and others travelled every weekend from Fethard, Urlingford, from Kanturk in Cork, three young men from Malin Head in Donegal responded to an urgent social media appeal for plasterers and they came down to Emly.
“They travelled from all over. They had their own jobs during the week and at the weekend they came to us. They made massive sacrifices leaving their own families at weekends. They all gave up so much to help us. They are all very much part of our family now, lifelong friends.
“We will all have so many wonderful memories. I will be sitting here in years to come and looking at some corner of the house and I will be able to remember the person who did that job and the sacrifices they would have made to help us. We know what so many people did, that will give us such a warm feeling for the rest of our lives,” said Robbie.
“They all left a bit of themselves here. They have done much much more than just build a house,” said Robbie.