Kelliher struggled hard against his illness and used various alternative therapies in addition to standard treatments including surgery and chemotherapy.
"I would do anything to survive for my daughters," he told the Herald last year. "That's my only thought. I don't entertain anything about not getting through this."
He had been diagnosed with bowel cancer at 40, after experiencing delays.
The diagnosis was made by a colonoscopy he had waited for three months on an "urgent" waiting list. He was referred for the investigation after passing blood.
Kelliher had already been on a lower-level waiting list for six months after experiencing a tiny amount of bleeding that had been ongoing for about a year and had been attributed to haemorrhoid's.
He had surgery to remove a large section of his bowel. He later had part of his liver removed, following a treatment called selective internal radiation therapy in which radioactive beads are fed into the liver through a tube slid into a blood vessel in an incision at the groin.
The radiation therapy shrank the liver tumours enough to permit surgery. But tumours were later found in his liver and also in his pelvis.
