The novelist, poet, playwright and short-story writer, Dermot Healy, who has died suddenly at the age of 66, was, according to Roddy Doyle, possibly the best writer in Ireland of his generation.
Seamus Heaney once described him as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh and, in this paper, Michael Harding wrote that Healy's work "was the most eloquent celebration of heaven in the ordinary that has come from his generation of writers". Peter Fallon of Gallery Press, who published his collections of poetry, said: "For its variety, richness and its truth, he has left us a very special body of work."
As a social commentator, he has been compared to John McGahern and John B Keane, while in his commitment to rural Ireland, its rich dialects and world views, he shared a kinship with Eugene McCabe, Pat McCabe and Tom MacIntyre, among others.
He was born in Finea, Co Westmeath. His father, like McGahern's, was a garda, and he moved his family to Cavan, when Healy was very young, having been posted there. The upheaval this caused the family is seen in his 1996 memoir The Bend for Home.
Healy said he found it difficult to settle in Cavan because the move was “a leap from a village to a town, from a familiar world to an alien one”.
His father died soon after they moved to Cavan and his Aunt Maisie and mother ran a busy bakery and tearoom in the town. He received his schooling locally but was expelled from St Patrick’s secondary because, according to himself, he went to a pop concert when he should have been studying. Periods of work as a barman followed in Dublin and London, where he lodged with relatives. He then went to UCD to study for a BA but dropped out at the age of 18.
London exile A prolonged period of exile in London followed. He worked for two years as a security guard in empty factories near Heathrow airport, whiling away the long hours reading Dylan Thomas. Much of his time in London (up to 15 years) was spent working in casual jobs and living as a squatter at times – an uncertain, subsistence existence – but he read avidly, wrote stories and poems and his London experiences would feature in future works.
His first book, Banished Misfortune, a collection of short stories, was published in 1982. It was regarded as an uneven but promising debut. A novel, Fighting with Shadows, followed two years later. It is set in Border Fermanagh lake country and is informed by the tragedy of the Troubles; this paper's literary correspondent regarded it as a contender for the most underestimated Irish debut novel.
A series of plays followed: Here and There and Going to America (1985), The Long Swim (1988), Curtains (1990), On Broken Wings (1992) and Last Night's Fun (1994). He directed some of these plays, wrote a number of screenplays and acted in both films and plays.
Poet of distinction What many regard as his greatest novel, A Goat's Song, was published in 1994. He had lived in Belfast for four years in the 1980s and the Troubles echo through the book. It deals with the issues of destructive love, alcoholism and the problem of not belonging, all set against a background of growing sectarian violence.
Healy was also a poet of some distinction and two collections, The Ballyconnell Colours (1995) and What the Hammer (1998), were published before his next novel. He had lived in Rosses Point in Sligo in the late 1980s and eventually settled in Ballyconnell, in the same county, with his wife, Helen, at the end of that decade. His other collections of poetry were Neighbours' Lights (1992), The Reed Bed (2001) and A Fool's Errand (2010).
His poetry has been seen as steeped in the same rural tradition as Kavanagh’s but he was no mere imitator. It also reflected his calmer, gentler side. Peter Fallon said that his voice and way of seeing were so singular that it was difficult to compare him with other Irish poets.
His memoir, The Bend for Home (1996), was published to great acclaim. Fellow writer Pat McCabe described it as "probably the finest memoir written in Ireland in the last 50 years".
His next novel, Sudden Times (1999), drew on his peripatetic existence in London. It tells its story twice, first in the form of an almost continuous hallucination and then as the main character is cross-examined by a barrister. Long Time, No See (2011) was his final novel. Like McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun, it is an intimate portrait of a rural community.
Dermot Healy is survived by his widow, Helen, and his children, Dallan and Inor.