Set sail with this seaside home with lush grounds and stunning views

THE seaside setting of this Glengarriff, Co Cork, house could have been custom-tailored for its owner of several decades — he was a former US Navy officer in WWII, but carved a huge half-century career and reputation as a maritime lawyer.

With proud Irish roots, US-born Nicholas J Healy, who died in July of this year in Bantry, lived to be 99 years of age and spent happy decades of retirement at this Co Cork coastal property.

He was adjunct professor of Admiralty Law at New York University, and had set up his own law firm Healy & Bailie on St Patrick’s Day, 1948. He authored numerous books on the subject, and was considered the pre-eminent expert in US maritime law. Among shipping incidents and cases he worked on were the 1967 Torrey Canyon supertanker grounding which spilled 31 million gallons of oil off the Scilly Isles, and the devastating spills in 1978 from the Amoco Cadiz, off the coast of France. Coincidentally, a shipping disaster came almost to his west Cork doorstep, when the Betelgeuse oil tanker exploded in Bantry Bay, at Whiddy Island in 1979, killing 50. Mr Healy was even called as a an expert witness on a RMS Titanic-related case in 2000, to do with a disputed salvage case.