Author(s): John Healy

Pre-Loved Books | Biography, Memoir | Collectable

John Healy was born in 1930 and at 18 entered journalism as a reporter on "The Western People". he was to become the youngest editor of a national Sunday paper at 29 and later edited Ireland's oldest evening paper, The Evening Mail.

"A minor classic which is in the great Irish tradition... it will take its place with Twenty-Years-a-Growing and 'An t-Oileanach' .. The most moving book to come out of rural Ireland for decades ... Nineteen Acres' will be read and cherished for a generation or more as a new Irish masterpiece .." These were the first reactions to John Healy's new book "Nineteen Acres." the story of his mother's family and how they lived, loved, fought and worked on, and for, nineteen acres of mixed land in Mayo, the battlefields of France, the Republican movement at home, or amid the sick of Brooklyn, New York. It is the story of every family born on the land of the West of Ireland and the struggle to maintain their small holdings through one civil war, two world wars and the economic depressions of the Thirties and against the Eurocrats of the Seventies who would dismiss such holdings as rural slums, and would see these holdings bulldozed into bigger economic units. Healy's first book: "Death of an Irish Town'" was an immediate best-seller when published in 1967, having been first serialised in The Irish Times under the title "No One Shouted 'Stop", a phrase which was to become common currency in Ireland. In that book Healy focussed on the decline of his native town of Charlestown between the Thirties and Sixties: it was the story of the neglect of the West of Ireland by various national administrations. It shocked the nation's conscience into a series of teach-ins at Irish Universities from Queen's College, Belfast to University College, Cork and out of the national debate came the programme of industrialisation which is now transforming the West of Ireland. In his latest book, Healy pulls the focus tighter still by concentrating on the smallest unit in the village: his mother's family farm. He brings to it the same angry compassion and insights which made his first book a best-seller. What makes it unique as a sociological study is that Healy not only brings us a vivid picture of his family in Mayo but follows the family to America and chronicles the success and failures of those who did not return. His mother was one of four sisters who emigrated to New York with the same parting phrase: "Keep your mouth and your legs closed: keep your eyes opened and send home the ticket for the next one".