Aiming to get back on track

CHARLESTOWN in East Mayo is quiet but alive some 35 years after journalist John Healy wrote about its death.

Healy's best-selling book, "Death of an Irish Town" highlighted how a lack of State investment in the west desolated small towns leaving only corpses.

"I couldn't go down the town for six months after that was written. My friend I was best man at his wedding didn't speak to me for eight years. I was never able to let my mother see that book either," Healy's brother Gerry remembers.