John Healy' s legacy celebrated in home town

JOHN HEALY would be delighted that a Government department is to be located just a few metres from his family home in Charlestown, Co Mayo, the late journalist’s brother has suggested.

Gerard Healy was speaking as the inaugural John Healy Memorial Weekend was launched  in the writer’s hometown last night, a place immortalised by him in No One Shouted Stop (Death of An Irish Town). The event is being held 40 years after the book’s publication and a year after the €81 million John Healy Charlestown bypass was opened.

Contributors are expected to examine the legacy of the journalist, who first chronicled  how unemployment and mass emigration had decimated rural Ireland in a series of  columns in The Irish Times.

“I think he would be very proud to be honoured by his own people in this way,” said Gerard Healy, who still lives in the Healy family home. “Of all the honours he received, I think this weekend and having the bypass named after him would be the ones which meant most to him.”

Mr Healy ruefully pointed out that Death of An Irish Town was initially not well received by some people in Charlestown, who objected to the notion that their town was dead. “They did not want to accept it, but after a number of years they got the message and they saw that he was trying to get something done and to stop emigration,” said Mr Healy, who has joked he couldn’t go down the town for a drink for six months after the book was published.

Journalist John Waters gave the John Healy Memorial  lecture. Contributors today include archaeologist Dr Seamus Caulfield, who was cutting turf with his father on their Mayo farm in the 1940s when they hit stones which he later  identified as the ancient field system now known as the Céide Fields.

He will examine how Healy kick-started the debate about rural regeneration in the 1960s, and ask what the future holds for towns like Charlestown. Other speakers will include writer and historian Sinead McCoole and Bernard O’Hara of GMIT, author of a book on Michael Davitt.

Charlestown-based Mayo county councillor Gerry Murray, chairman of the organising committee, said local people felt it important to honour the father of modern Irish journalism and the man who invented the concept of rural regeneration.

“He was a very important figure in many respects. He had the ear of Charlie Haughey and that was crucial in getting support for the development of Knock airport.”

He said John Healy would welcome the proposal to locate part of the Department of Rural, Community and Gaeltacht Affairs there, “especially when the site is a metre or two from the house where he was raised”.