John Healy Weekend

Irish Times journalist to speak at John Healy Weekend


Anton McNulty

JOURNALIST and commentator John Waters will be among the many guest speakers at the inaugural John Healy Weekend which will take place in the Charlestown Arts Centre this week.
The weekend will mark and commemorate local writer and journalist John Healy, whose book ‘No One Shouted Stop - The Death of an Irish Town’ was credited with highlighting the decline of rural life in the west of Ireland on a national level. The weekend will also mark the centenary of the Maypole mining disaster in Wigan where most of the 75 people who died came from the east Mayo area.
The weekend gets under way this Thursday, October 30, at 8.30pm at the Charlestown Arts Centre and concludes on Saturday, November 1, at 9.45pm with a talk by GMIT Registrar Bernard O’Hara, at the same venue.
The Irish Times journalist and Castlerea native, John Waters, will be giving the John Healy Memorial Lecture at 8.30pm on Friday night which will be followed by a question and answer session chaired by Professor Seamus Caulfield.
Cllr Gerry Murray, the Chairman of the John Healy Weekend Committee, explained that the opening night will feature the documentaries ‘On a Wing and a Prayer’ and ‘My Own Place’ and will be followed at 11pm by the live broadcast from the venue of the RTÉ Radio One programme, ‘The Late Debate’.
He said that during the weekend they will be looking back at John Healy’s work and how rural Ireland has changed since he highlighted its social and economic decline in his book.
“We will be examining his legacy and how far we have come since he wrote about rural decline. We hope this will be an annual event and next year we hope to broaden the theme of the weekend,” he said.