A few miles before you reach Charlestown, Co Mayo, going west, you come, on your left hand side, to John Healy's Forest Park. Turn down and there is a widening of the road at a huge stone bearing a plaque, which says: "It isn't much of a road and it doesn't lead to much of a holding. The road is clay-topped and rutted. The holding is just over nineteen acres. . ." These are the first lines of John's great book Nineteen Acres. And at the opening ceremony Padraig Flynn, then an EC Commissioner, gave the address. May the trees prosper and be well cared for.
Everything John did was with all his heart. He was a brilliant political observer and columnist; a good colleague and a steadfast friend. And this book Nineteen Acres, based around his uncle's smallholding, will, writes Brendan Kennelly in the foreword to the second and later editions, "be read a long time from now by people yet unborn; and I know full they well will enjoy it as much as I did because they, too, will be riveted by this story of the truth of one man's life told in a way that cannot fail to enrich the lives of all those fortunate enough to read it."
The nineteen acres belonged to his uncle. The book is essentially John's autobiography, with the theme of the life of the smallholders of Ireland threaded throughout the pages. John's mother was an O'Donnell. When she died, he wrote of her death and her family in The Western People. A colleague told him, "That's the beginning of your next book." And so it was. In the first chapter he had the scene when the O'Donnells, one by one, went off to America. The farewell was short and simple. Mary was bound for America and Brooklyn. "Keep your mouth and your legs closed. Keep your ears open. And send home the ticket for Anna [the next daughter]." Nora O'Donnell was John's mother: "The last of a great generation of a great, if anonymous, people who lived and loved and sweated and laughed and cried and worked again on and over this now economist-despised holding of nineteen acres."
And so on to John's life and happy marriage to Evelyn and his earlier travels to America and later to Strasbourg. Not forgetting his success with Death of an Irish Town, a book from a series of articles in The Irish Times. As Backbencher he was known throughout Irish life. Back to Nineteen Acres. It is reprinting, Easons said. Another shop reported a waiting list of buyers - all this over 20 years after the 1978 launch! Brendan Kennelly was right.