Obituaries

Jerry Healy obituary: Renaissance man was ‘exemplary’ counsel for Moriarty Tribunal

Senior legal figure was noted for his patient, forensic questioning during tribunal sittings

Jerry Healy was a respected and much-liked lawyer and a polymath

Sat Dec 18 2021 - 01:00

Born: August 25th, 1952 
Died: December 7th, 2021

Jerry Healy, who has died aged 69, was counsel for the Moriarty tribunal when, over a 14-year period from 1997, it examined payments to certain politicians.

He was noted for his patient, forensic questioning during public sittings of the tribunal, which examined, among other matters, the relationship between businessman Denis O’Brien and former minister for communications Michael Lowry.

His style was to stand slightly side-on to his quarry in the witness box, and, looking into the middle distance, preface his question by asking: “Would you agree with me, that. . .”

READ MORE

Mr O’Brien found the experience of the tribunal far from agreeable and was accused of seeking to undermine it and Healy by claiming the barrister was compromised because of work he carried out prior to his retention by Mr Justice Michael Moriarty.

Healy was passionately interested in architecture and its associated heritage, in furniture and art (he also painted), literature, sport and the Irish language

In his report in 2011, Moriarty found that Lowry “secured the winning” of the 1995 mobile phone licence competition for O’Brien’s Esat Digifone. Moriarty swatted away efforts to undermine Healy as “opportunistic and reprehensible”.

“The tribunal is satisfied that Mr Healy’s conduct in this matter has been exemplary, and beyond reproach,” said the report.

Healy’s long association with the tribunal turned into something of an ordeal. The tribunal was hugely controversial – for the length of time it sat, the anger it provoked in some witnesses and the fees earned by lawyers.

“Some of the [media] coverage was vitriolic and he had no private life,” recalls fellow tribunal lawyer, Jacqueline O’Brien SC.

That view is echoed by Healy’s family and friends who recall him apparently being followed through Dublin’s streets during breaks in tribunal sittings.

Jacqueline O’Brien points out that despite the rubbishing of the tribunal’s reports (including adverse findings on Denis O’Brien and Lowry), no judicial review has been mounted against them since they were published.

“Those reports stand completely undiminished in any way,” she says.

In 2018, it was revealed that Healy and Jacqueline O’Brien were among 19 people targeted during an alleged data breach trawl of emails within Independent News and Media, then controlled by its major shareholder, Denis O’Brien, on the orders of the O’Brien-nominated chairman, his long-time associate Leslie Buckley.

The revelation, which remains the subject of investigations by the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement and the Data Protection Commissioner, appalled the pair.

“It was disturbing. Very disturbing,” says Jacqueline O’Brien.

Healy kept his own counsel on the matter – “He never spoke about it,” according to his his wife Rosemarie – but neither he nor Jacqueline O’Brien were overly concerned as they had never engaged with the media while working for the tribunal.

Away from the limelight of the tribunal, Healy was a respected and much-liked lawyer and a polymath. He was passionately interested in architecture and its associated heritage, in furniture and art (he also painted), literature, sport and the Irish language.

Together with his wife Rosemarie, they restored Ballybrittan Castle, an 18th-century Queen Anne farmhouse attached to a 15th-century tower house in Co Offaly.

He enjoyed country life, riding with the Duhallow Hunt, among others. Gregarious and playful in company, he was a snappy dresser, dispensing sartorial advice, only partly tongue-in-cheek.

“Always buy your shoes in London,” he once advised a youthful, and at the time impoverished, friend.

Jeremiah Joseph Healy was born in Cork city in August 1952, the first of six children of Timothy Healy, a broker with Royal Liver Assurance, and Eileen Healy (nee McCarthy), a former shirt-maker who became a full-time homemaker.

He went to Turner’s Cross school (Coláiste Chríost Rí), primary and secondary, before transferring to St Colman’s College in Fermoy after a family move there. He was educated in Irish, the origin of a life-long love of the language, and was a distinguished middle-distance runner at inter-provincial and national level.

He sat his Leaving Certificate aged just 16 and went on to study arts (English, Irish and mathematics) at University College Cork.

During this period he had a dalliance with Maoism and he became a familiar figure on the campus, handing out copies of the chairman’s Little Red Book and was seen on picket lines and protests while contemporaneously dressed in tweeds and acting as a runner for a horse dealer.

After the tribunal, Healy returned to private practice, specialising in Nama-related work and debt resolution and insolvency cases, as well as planning and environmental cases

Healy outgrew the soulless ideology, however, but there was a lasting impact: a mutual friend in the revolutionary cadre introduced him to Rosemarie Manning, a medical student. The pair fell in love and married in 1974.

The following year, Healy returned to UCC to study law (earning a first-class honours degree) and as a tutor in the Irish department under the direction of the poet and playwright Seán Ó Tuama. He was spotted by Dermot Gleeson, then a junior counsel lecturing in constitutional law and later the attorney general, who regarded him as brilliant and recruited him as a researcher.

He won a scholarship to Cambridge where in 1979, he was awarded an LL.M Cantab, with distinction, but the experience of working with Gleeson convinced him to go for the Bar rather than become a solicitor.

In 1980, after devilling in Dublin, he struck out on his own, working for 15 years as a junior counsel on the Cork circuit.

In 1995, he took silk and, as a senior counsel, began practising in Dublin, specialising in personal injury cases, competition and public procurement law.

“He was an impossibly glamorous fellow,” remembers a close colleague. “He was a Renaissance man. He was at ease at a Muster final in Thurles as he was among the dons in Cambridge. There were few subjects on which he did not have a worthwhile opinion.”

After the tribunal, Healy returned to private practice, specialising in Nama-related work and debt resolution and insolvency cases, as well as planning and environmental cases. Within the Law Library, he was known as approachable and helpful, especially to more junior colleagues.

His love of architecture and heritage found an outlet in the Irish Georgian Society (IGS). He championed the society’s move, in 2013, from Merrion Square to permanent new headquarters in the City Assembly House on Dublin’s South William Street.

Healy was also the IGS nominee to the board of the Alfred Beit Foundation, which manages Russborough House, Co Wicklow.

He died during Storm Barra and is survived by his wife, Rosemarie Manning, and children, Eibhlín, Kate, David and Lydia, and their partners; grandsons Noah, Sam, Lucian, Auberon and “Jerry Baby” (Jeremiah Timothy); his sisters Deirdre, Aileen, Fiona and Frances-Claire; and his brother, Barry.

LATEST STORIES