Nineteen Acres

by John Healy and John Healy

Book Overview

John Healy, the author, has spent all his working life in journalism. He joined "The Western People", Ballina, as a cub reporter in 1948 and moved to Dublin in 1950 to join the Irish News Agency.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0951263900
• ISBN13: 9780951263907
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: House of Healy
• Length: 141 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Irish Roots Reviewed

A book which covers familiar ground only to transform it utterly! John Healy's book covers Irish poverty, bereavement, land-hunger and emigration but it does so with such passion, courage, sympathy and perhaps most importantly, with such grinding honesty, that anyone from the West of Ireland can immediately recognise the terrain, only to realise with a shudder that that Ireland has disappeared. A personal memoir of his growing up in Charlestown, Co. Mayo, the one-time Irish Times journalist lays bare the true story of his mother's "people" from nearby Carracastle. The farm on which they were born and raised, the "Nineteen Acres" of the title, has been central to the lives of his mother, her three sisters and her brother. "Keep your mouth and your legs closed. Keep your ears open. And send home the ticket for Anna." were the parting words the eldest sister Mary heard from her mother when she emigrated to the States. Each sister in turn would hear those words, with only the last name changed each time as they followed Mary, one by one, to the land of opporunity. What they did not see were her tears as she walked back home. Only Healy's mother Nora would return, to marry Stephen Healy, the tall and handsome but "soft" insurance agent, whose generosity to his customers leaves his family in dire straits with his early death. Meanwhile Nora's brother Jim, now farming the nineteen acres, has married the luckless Mary-Anne, whose failure to concieve makes her family, the "long-tailed crowd from Barroe", the most likely inheritors of the patch of land which spawned the O'Donnells.This story is not just about Nora's burning ambition to outlive Mary-Anne, but about the heroism of generations of Irish people who emigrated and whose toil and sacrifice and deep loyalty to their families, kept the wolf from many Irish doors. They also sustained the "mixed" small-farming way of life long past its economic "due-by" date. Their mammoth sacrifices, like Mary O'Donnell's tears for her emigrating children, often went unseen.This book is an obituary for a mother, a family, a way of life and an Ireland that has passed away. It would make timely reading for the well-fed Celtic tiger cubs of today, whose memories don't quite reach back to the "Aran Banners", the poor man's potatoes of 50 years ago, but whose roots are as surely grown from the self same soil.