‘THE age of honest indignation is dead in Ireland. We’re sophisticated now. We have learned to order the right bottle of wine and we take our salads in a side order and we have learned, too, that it’s not good breeding to lose your temper. . . In an age when television, for instance, sledge-hammers its cultural values home, one is supposed to obey the smart-set cocktailed rules of double-talk and double-think, to talk with a left-handed tongue, and wrap an honest protest in the unctuous language of a doubtful compliment. Yes – and be thankful when the reply is a lecture from the current economic archangel of the Establishment. Holy economic writ is all . . .”
Hard to believe it’s over four decades since John Healy wrote this, and harder to believe still that the author is 20 years dead this month. Healy, late of this parish, passed away on January 6th, 1991. Were Backbencher around now, one wonders how he would respond to current events, what monikers he would pin on the new voices of influence, and what he would have thought of Fianna Fáil and the Greens.
How would he have handled the revelations about Charles J Haughey, the man he dubbed the “golden boy”? How would he have recorded those years of the Celtic cat? Would he have taken to the social media – a Backbencher blog, perhaps? Or would he have become addicted to the concise wordsmithing demanded of tweets? Most significantly, how would he feel about his native Charlestown in Co Mayo where the “tatie hokers” of a new decade are once again taking the emigrant plane from nearby Ireland West Airport – a project, once knocked, that he always supported.
For it's in Charlestown that he is still remembered with great affection, and his acute observations in his classic works, Nineteen Acresand No One Shouted Stop!(formerly The Death of an Irish Town), are of painful relevance now.
Today’s emigrants may be more educated, more confident than those who “came and went again, keeping their failures to themselves and their loneliness”. But it might still be said that “no man came home and told the truth,” as he noted. “Apart from spoiling the tough-guy image, why worry the old people?”, he wrote in 1968.
Healy was an “insider”. The issues which engaged him throughout his career in journalism were those of the marginalised, NUI Galway political scientist and sociologist Dr Tony Varley said at the recent annual John Healy weekend, hosted in Charlestown. Tracing the history of agriculture and land ownership from the early 20th century, Dr Varley described the tension between Éamon de Valera’s view of the small cosy homestead, and the Department of Finance’s favoured vision of larger, more efficient farms.
The “treadmill effect” of a cheap food policy espoused by the European Economic Community, as it was then known, ensured that the Department of Finance won out, and its view became orthodox by the 1960s. Not only was it policy at home, but in the corridors of Brussels, where the Mansholt Plan to remove small farmers was drawn up and implemented, before being modified and replaced by the blueprint named after Ireland’s former agriculture commissioner Ray MacSharry.
As Dr Varley observed, two anthropologists had found that family farms were not quite so inefficient as the eurocrats would have people believe. Conrad M Arensberg Solon T Kimball were authors of a well-known social anthropological study, carried out in the 1930s, and republished by the Clare Local Studies Project in 2001. Known as the “Harvard Irish Survey”, the study focused on Ireland because it was a society in transition. Clare was selected as a county representing a “microcosm” of Ireland as a whole”.
Arensberg and Kimball undertook their field work from 1931 to 1936, and there are people alive today who still remember the two men. As Dr Varley notes, the anthropologists were impressed by the efficiency of such small farms, and their ability to withstand challenges such as the Anglo-Irish economic war. The same could be said for owners of smaller, versatile fishing vessels, before the EU opted for a “might is right” approach and put many off the water as part of its benighted Common Fisheries Policy.
Were Healy alive today, he would have concurred with the Harvard researchers’ view that smallholdings were much more sympathetic to the environment, Dr Varley said. As Arensberg had noted, small farmers might never have been awash with money – but they could grow their own food. Thus, they were spared the humiliation experienced by compatriots in New York forced to queue for sustenance during the Great Depression.
Healy's books are out of print, though one may come across a rare copy for sale on line. His work has inspired others in his native part of Mayo to collect placenames and record key events, such as the social engineering which first created Charlestown – as depicted in Doorways to the Past: A Social Atlascompiled by the local archaeological group with Seamus Bermingham.
Sinn Féin Cllr Gerry Murray, the Healy weekend organiser, says that many academics have suggested that the late journalist’s books should be published in several European languages. They all cite the same reason, Murray says, “His story could be that of any small European town or any farm.”