Irish Examiner view: The death of Shay Healy

The former RTÉ broadcaster and Eurovision winning songwriter could easily be described as the very epitome of craic

Shay Healy died aged 78 after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease. Picture: Marc O'Sullivan

Though he was more than happy, and determined, to be many things Shay Healy, who has died aged 78 after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease, may not have realised he was a kind of Rosetta Stone too. 

He was once invoked as an example to try to explain one of the enduring mysteries that separate the Irish and what might be called the world of the Reformation.

An Englishman, as staid as he was befuddled, once asked an Irish cousin what craic was. The Irishman, as most of us do, struggled to convey the spontaneity and unfettered invention involved in real, spur-of-the-moment craic. In exasperation, he declared that "Shay Healy is craic". 

That as anyone who knew him as a songwriter, a broadcaster, or whatever other hats he wore, hit the nail on the head.

That Charles Haughey's public halo began to slip only after an episode of Healy's TV magazine programme Nighthawks when former Justice Minister Sean Doherty contradicted the accepted version of events offered by Haughey shows that there was a sharp side to his fun as well. 

Haughey's reputation never recovered.

Described by the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin as a "national treasure" his Eurovision success, with Johnny Logan may have been the highlight, in recognition terms at least, of his career. 

However, he was an engaging, modern polymath — a description he would have dismissed with the kind of self-disparaging humour that made him the very epitome of craic.

Thanks Shay.