Event celebrates career of John Healy

JOHN HEALY was horrified at the complacency and apathy of the Irish political establishment when  hundreds of thousands of his contemporaries were forced to emigrate, a weekend seminar in his native Charlestown heard.

Guests attending the John Healy Memorial  Weekend were told the wave of emigration which continued through the 1940s and 1950s had a huge impact on the late Irish Times journalist and had influenced all his writing.

Bernard O'Hara, registrar with Galway Mayo Institute of Technology,  said 60,000 people had left this country in 1958 alone, and that it had been estimated that four out of five children born between 1931 and 1941 had emigrated in the 1950s.

"John Healy was an angry young man who despised indifference, apathy, cynicism and lack of leadership and vision, while the brightest and best of our young men and women left our shores."

The academic and author gave an insight into Healy's love for the GAA, pointing out that the pioneering journalist (who famously told young reporters that objectivity was a myth), used to pen a sports column under the name the Kipper, in which he had no qualms about documenting his own success  on the field. "The Kipper used to say things like 'young Healy in goals could not be blamed for the two shots which got past him'," Mr O'Hara said.

The community of Charlestown organised the three-day commemorative weekend 40 years after Healy immortalised his home town in the book Death of an Irish Town which documented what mass emigration had done to local families and to the community.

The event also marked the centenary of the Maypole mining disaster, one of the worst  tragedies in British mining history  in which 75 people, many of them from Mayo and Sligo, lost their lives when a coal mine collapsed in Wigan, Lancashire, in 1908.

Saturday's keynote address was given by archeologist Prof Séamus Caulfield who used the occasion to highlight the "pernicious and vicious" manner in which people over-65 were being forced to contribute to a national pension fund which will be of no benefit to them as it cannot be touched until 2025.

Prof Caulfied castigated the Government's readjusted medical card scheme for over-70s, which he said will see many people losing their cards "on the blackest day of their lives". It was "obnoxious" to talk about Ministers and High Court judges forming the 5 per cent not entitled to a medical card when there was a significant number of retired teachers, nurses,gardaí or other public servants who would have their card taken from them as they bury their loved one.

Couples where each partner was on a public servant's pension of  €30,000 were entitled to 50 per cent of their spouse's pension after death, which would give the surviving partner  an income of €45,000,  pushing them over the  limit for a medical card, he said.

Prof Caulfield  said it was a "joke in very bad taste" to tell people who were over-65 or 75 that they were contributing to a pension fund worth billions which would not be cashed in until 2025. People over-65 were increasingly been presented as "bed blockers and house hoarders"  who were unsustainable  and who were not moving off the scene fast enough.