Chef Rachel Allen has spoken out about her departed friend, Emma Hannigan, and has said how the mum-of-two ‘didn’t want to leave her children’.
Author Emma, from Bray, Co. Wicklow, passed away after an 11-year battle with cancer in March 2018.
Two weeks before her death, the 45- year-old shared a heart-wrenching post on social media about losing her battle with cancer and sales from her book Letters To My Daughters raised €136,000 for Breast Cancer Ireland.
Her most recent and last book, Gift of Friends, was published posthumously and became an instant bestseller.
In an upcoming RTÉ documentary, the celebrity chef opens up about how she met Emma as a teenager after Emma took a cookery course in Ballymaloe.
In 2005, Emma would discover that she was carrying the cancer gene BRCA1, leading her to make the decision to have a double mastectomy and to have her ovaries removed.
Ms Allen said: ‘She didn’t want to leave her children... so it was always just what she was going to do to, hopefully, only have a small chance of getting cancer.’
Fellow Bray woman and boxer, Katie Taylor said: ‘She was a person I looked up to but she was the one saying I was her hero and she looked up to me. I just couldn’t believe that.’
