INTERVIEW:An uncle is at school with his nephews and niece. They all live together with their parents and grandparents on a farm in Wicklow and they, along with members of the wider family, are in business together, writes MARIE-CLAIRE DIGBY
WHEN ROY (9), twins Rowan and Rohan (7) and Rose (5) Healy go to school in Talbotstown, Co Wicklow, they hang out in the playground with their six-year-old uncle Melvin, and they will be joined at the school gates in September by their aunt Aisling, who is four.
The immediate family of organic vegetable grower and importer Denis Healy, whose Organic Delights produce you’ll find at farmers’ markets from Drogheda to Kilkenny, is confusingly cross-generational, and multinational too.
Denis lives in the farmhouse on his land in Co Wicklow with his German partner Henrike Lehmeier (known as Rike), and their two children, Melvin and Aisling.
The couple met 10 years ago when Rike came to the farm as a seasonal worker, and never went home.
Denis’s elder son, Duncan, and his Taiwanese wife, Cindy, who met in New Zealand 12 years ago, also live on the farm with their children Roy, Rowan, Rohan and Rose. Younger son Oisin and his Korean wife, Wangjong, live “two minutes up the road and are planning to build a house nearby”, Denis says. They met in Dublin, and have a baby son, Aaron, who was born in January.
Hilary-Anne Healy, Denis’s youngest child with his first partner, is getting married in July, to Declan Norton from Co Laois.
“She is following her mother’s route and is a primary school teacher, after her spells of indentured labour on the farm and at markets,” Duncan says.
Hilary Healy, mother of Hilary-Anne, Oisin and Duncan, separated from Denis about 15 years ago, and she too lives on the farm, in a house she built and shares with her partner, Ken.
Apart from Hilary-Anne, all of the Healys are involved in the family business. Duncan works with his dad on the farm and at the markets.
Oisin runs a crepe-making business, Crepes in the City, with his business partner Tine Cropp, as well as helping out on the farm.
Rike has a business called One in the Oven, baking bread and cakes in a yellow mobile bakery trailer at the Marlay Park and Dún Laoghaire farmers’ markets.
“Mostly, it is dream-like to have so many of my family here,” says Denis, who was raised in Summerhill in Dublin until he was 17.
“My grown-up children wanting to be where they were raised . . . that’s every parent’s dream. It’s fantastic to see my grandchildren playing with my two younger children.
“Sometimes we drive each other nuts, I’m the old stuck-in-the-mud who can’t accept change and thinks that his way is the only way to grow vegetables, and Duncan takes after me in every way. That can lead to very civilised debates.”
