John Healy's Nineteen Acres : Mayo, America, and History from Below

In Ireland, the name of John Healy (1930-1991), author of the 1978 memoir Nineteen Acres, remains synonymous with honesty and bluntness, passion and occasional anger. A crusading journalist and outspoken political commentator, Healy championed such unfashionable causes as the survival of the rural West of Ireland, which he believed—accurately or not—to be only a minor concern in the Dublin-centered world of Irish politics during his lifetime. In his journalism in the Irish Press and the Irish Times, as well as in books that arose out of his newspaper work, including No One Shouted Stop: The Death of an Irish Town (1968), he voices the concerns of forgotten citizens, particularly those in the West of Ireland, in the face of larger forces emanating from Dublin or Brussels.¹

Healy writes as someone who was born and grew up in the West before relocating, both geographically and socially, to the capital; thus, he gives both an insider's and an outsider's view of life in rural Ireland. His studies of small segments of small communities are nonetheless valuable for their exemplarity. Such communities are replicated, not just all over Ireland, but also much further afield. The confined society he depicts is always also a microcosm of the larger reality. In this sense, Healy's work may be understood as an interesting and valuable example of the school of history that was pioneered by French historians as la nouvelle histoire. Tracing its origins to the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, "new history" radically altered the practice and understanding of historical writing by shifting the center of attention away from famous historical figures, and, instead, attempting to understand the everyday lives of ordinary men and women. Moreover, the new history resisted giving an account of events in sequence: it sought to describe larger historical patterns, delving in particular into the history of morals and mentalities. In France, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Fernand Braudel are its most famous proponents. This approach has transformed historical writing in the English-speaking world as well, shaping the work of such noted scholars as Eric Foner and E.P. Thompson, among countless others. The French historian Jean-Claude Schmitt described the people who are the subjects of this school of historiography as "les muets et les exclus de l'histoire traditionnelle"—those who are voiceless and excluded from traditional history.² As a document of an unchronicled rural community in the years of the Economic War and the Great Emergency, Nineteen Acres attempts to write an Irish history from below.

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Healy's early memories of life on a Mayo farm have a dreamy timelessness about them; reading Nineteen Acres, one is reminded of the assertion of the eminent medievalist Jacques Le Goff, that the Middle Ages lasted at least until the mid-nineteenth century for most European peasants.³ The supposed changelessness of rural life is evident in such passages as this:

The three big cats purred contented and, as if mimicking Grandda, they, too, gazed deep into the red coals. You felt that they had been there centuries ago and had spent this hour alert and wide-eyed at the dawn of time, waiting for the sight of the first crickets ever to sing from the hidden hearth.⁴

Yet these fond recollections are underpinned by a sense of urgency, a realization that these idyllic days are numbered not just for the child in question but for the entire rural community as the economic policies of what was then known as the European Economic Community begin to bite, in Mayo and elsewhere.

Nineteen Acres concentrates on Healy's early, formative years. Its narrative is framed by scenes that involve his mother's death, an event that occurs long after he leaves home, when he is married and working as a journalist in Dublin. The chapters bear such solemn titles...