THE late Seamus Heaney compared Dermot Healy with Patrick Kavanagh as the best Irish writer of his generation, as did Roddy Doyle. His significance as a writer means that no less a person than the Irish President Michael D Higgins himself attended his funeral.                                                                                                 

When Dermot left Ireland he had won an award for a short story. On the strength of this he borrowed money from the bank to head for London from Cavan town where he hailed from. 

Every now and then there would be a letter from the bank manager asking how the novel was coming along and urging that at least a few bob be paid off the loan. Most of Dermot’s creative writing at that time went to explaining to the bank manager how well his non-existent novel was progressing.

In London’s Pimlico, where Dermot ended up, he formed close friendships with members of the Communist and Socialist Workers’ parties and at weekends — and the odd weekday — after the pubs closed they would go back to a local flat dubbed the “Cavan Hotel” where the discussion would go on late into the night. Dermot was not involved in any political group but it is fair to say he was on the left and an Irish Republican.

It was clear even at that time in the 1970s  that Dermot had a talent but it was not clear where it could go or indeed if it would go anywhere beyond conversation.

He was a great man to talk but half the time you would not know what he was talking about. Not because it was literary or fancy — it was just complicated ideas he was trying out in his head, often ending with someone saying:  “For fuck’s sake Dermot, will you talk English.”

Dermot moved back to Cavan in the late 1970s and produced the novel A Goat’s Song, a wonderful work. 

Unlike Irish writers such as John Banville, whose characters are cold, detached and from a certain strata of society, or the late John McGahern’s beautiful little time capsules about rural Ireland from an era which has clearly passed, Dermot’s novel gets you involved with all its hopes, despairs and meanderings.

It’s set in Belfast and the west of Ireland and catches the horror of the Troubles — what was happening in the north of Ireland and the unspoken fear that it would spread to the south. 

It is also a love story, with an acute sense of waiting for somebody who is never going to come back. You never get the feeling that the writer is detached from the narrative.

 Another of Dermot’s novel’s, Sudden Times, is set in London and Sligo. A dark fiction, and not easy reading,  it comes across a bit like a detective story as it moves through the underground of London. Yet it’s not so much the criminal milieu as the underbelly of the capital, a city of building sites, sub-contractors and working-class pubs peopled by the Irish, Poles and West Indians, all seen through the eyes of a damaged, half-mad man who has moved back home to Sligo. 

It is as if you had turned Shane McGowan’s song A Rainy Night In Soho into a novel and while at times you might ask what Dermot’s direction of travel is, it is well worth the trip.  

His non-fiction book The Bend For Home is all about about growing up in Cavan town. Soft,  gentle and as perfect a time capsule as a McGahern novel, there’s a memorable passage describing the shops shutting on their half-day closing. It has a Cider With Rosie quality about it as he goes at a leisurely pace down the street, describing each shop and its owner. A time gone, never to return. 

Dermot wrote plays and poetry as well and in 2011 was shortlisted for the Poetry Now award for his collection, A Fool’s Errand, Long Time, No See.

Strangely enough,  in all the obituaries no-one seems to comment on the film Dermot starred in with Stephen Rea, I Could Read The Sky (pictured). 

Made in 1999, it’s set in a bed-sitter in Kentish Town where an old Irishman — Dermot — reminisces about when he left the west of Ireland as a young man to go to work in London, friends, pub society, wife, widowhood and hard work.  He was made for the part and the part was made for him.

When he had a few drinks Dermot loved to sing but he had the worst voice in the world and could clear a pub. He did some sort of moan he called “Bulgarian mouth music” and, if he starts that up, he’ll clear the graveyard.

Martin McGovern