Sir, – The Irish Times is to be thanked for its extensive, detailed and sensitive coverage of the death of Dermot Healy (Patsy McGarry and Eileen Battersby, July 1st).
He was an original and daring writer whose work deserves to be more widely known.
I first met Dermot when I was associate director of the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo in the late 1980s.
At some stage in the second week of the summer school, Dermot would appear, declare “you and I need to go for a walk” and lead me away into the magnificent Sligo landscape, where we would walk and talk for hours, before returning me restored to the school.
On one such foray, he brought me to the outermost edge of the Atlantic Ocean to show me the house he had just bought, the outpost where the memoir, novels and poems of the past 25 years would be written.
His death is a great loss. I will console myself this summer by going for a long walk and rereading the great works Dermot has left us. – Yours, etc,
Prof ANTHONY ROCHE,
School of English,
Drama and Film,
University College Dublin,
Belfield,
Dublin 4.