Dermot Healy and memory

The essay focuses on Irish author Dermot Healy’s involvement with memories of old people within two collaborative projects: the making of a film based on the documentary novel I Could Read the Sky by Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke (1997), and the development of a documentary drama with the clients of a day care centre in Co. Monaghan, entitled Men to the Right, Women to the Left (2001). It examines the methods used to record the material and its subsequent creative use, particularly in comparison with the technique of British verbatim theatre, and in the context of the imperfections of individual memory that are deftly explored in Healy’s memoir The Bend for Home (1996). The essay ultimately argues that notwithstanding problems concerning authenticity, Healy’s play, alongside O’Grady and Pyke’s book and Nichola Bruce’s film version of it, should be regarded as vital contributions to the formation of Ireland’s cultural memory, particularly as they powerfully reconstruct “the mundane everyday” that is so often lost