The bog road from Kilgarvan rises steeply northwards until it reaches the lower slopes of Mangerton, the big brooding mountain that dominates this corner of south Kerry. There are some green fields here but for the most part the land is unforgiving.
One of the townlands in the shadow of Mangerton is called Reacaisleach, or Rae, for short. From this impossibly remote corner of Kerry has come one of the most idiosyncratic and durable political dynasties in Irish politics.
This weekend the Healy-Raes celebrate 50 years of public life with a high-profile bash in Kerry: a “dance” in the ballroom of the Gleneagle Hotel in Killarney attended by various generations of the family. The second generation currently has two TDs in the Dáil and, at local level, three councillors drawn from the third generation.
The Healy-Rae brand is associated with a thick Kerry accent, a flat-capped Darby O’Gill caricature, a reputation for endless work and a form of politics that is rooted in populist and unashamed clientelism.
Jackie Healy-Rae, its patriarch, was born in 1931 – the Rae part of the surname refers to the townland – into great poverty. When he was eight, his father had an accident that confined him to a wheelchair. It was left to Jackie and his mother to provide for his five younger siblings.
“Their main source of living was cutting turf and selling it,” said his eldest son Danny. “My grandmother could cut it as good as any man and he was certainly as good as any fellow in any bog from the age of eight.”
That endless appetite for hard work has become something of a family trait. Jackie, despite his lack of education, had other talents. He was a strong hurler and a musician of note who played with local bands on the accordion; he also learned how to play the saxophone. He had an entrepreneurial streak; he started a plant hire business and bought a pub. He was keen to be involved in his community.
He also knew how to attract attention and get noticed. For one, his mellifluous idiom often drifted straight from the 19th century. And from the time his hair receded in the 1960s, he never appeared in public without a signature hat: first a Russian-style Ushanka fur hat and then a tartan flat cap.
“He was known for being a colourful larger-than-life figure, and that certainly didn’t do him any harm in politics,” says the Kerry-based historian, Owen O’Shea.
“Historically, Jackie might have been dismissed because of the accent – and we Kerry people are proud of our accent – but behind it all, he was articulating, in his own way, the various problems and issues of concern to people he represented.”
Healy-Rae emerged as an influential background figure in the Fianna Fáil organisation in the 1960s. There was a byelection in South Kerry in 1966. Niall Blaney was Fianna Fáil’s election guru at the time. He was impressed by Healy-Rae.
“Jackie’s strategy was based around making a fuss, rallying the troops, organising people on the ground,” says O’Shea.
“He had a reputation for using razzmatazz: the marching bands, the motorcades, the parades with men carrying pitchforks with blazing sods of turf. The theatre marked him out.”
When Blaney left Fianna Fáil, Healy-Rae became the go-to expert in the party for byelections. Danny remembers travelling to Galway, Cork and Mayo with him in the 1970s where he directed campaigns. He was also director of elections in Kerry for three decades.
His sons, Michael and Danny, were steeped in politics from childhood.
“I was in it with him every step of the way,” says Danny. “We’d milk the cows in the morning and he’d be off to meetings. There was one phone in the house and fellows would be ringing from quare places and I had all of them off by heart. Nothing was strange to me . . . I was in the cumann, and a delegate to the Comhairle Ceantair, and stuck in all of it.”
Jackie’s first break came when he was co-opted on to Kerry County Council in December 1973. Despite his best efforts, it took a quarter of a century for him to get his first shot at national politics.
When John O’Leary retired in 1997, Healy-Rae, then 66, believed he should be his successor in South Kerry. Fianna Fáil chose O’Leary’s son, Brian, instead. Jackie pushed the nuclear button and ran as an Independent and won a seat against the odds.
Former Irish Times parliamentary correspondent Michael O’Regan, a Kerry native, has closely observed the Healy-Raes since the 1960s.
“One thing about them was they were incredibly good at PR. Margaret Thatcher had Saatchi & Saatchi. The Healy-Raes had the Healy-Raes,” he says.
“They are quite capable of playing to the caricature. Jackie did it all the time. It always generated interest.”
Dr Theresa Reidy, a lecturer in politics at UCC, says Jackie was astute in his dealings with taoiseach Bertie Ahern in the Dáil following the 1997 general election but is critical of the kind of “pork barrel” deal struck between the Fianna Fáil government and Independents that favoured one constituency over another.
[ Miriam Lord writes in 2019: Healy-Raes show the true meaning of party politicsOpens in new window ]
“What was interesting was that Jackie was very strategic in extracting benefits for his constituency in return for conditional support for the government. He used to famously be out of the traps before John O’Donoghue [the Fianna Fáil minister from South Kerry] telling the local people what he had got.”
Danny met The Irish Times in his pub in Kilgarvan this week. It’s a spotless old-fashioned country pub, a picture-perfect John B Keane set, complete with a blazing fire. Around the walls are dozens of photographs and posters recording the political and personal lives of the Healy-Raes. Outside, the village itself is well covered with the Healy-Rae name and images.
It’s clear that Danny and Michael are different but both are unmistakable chips off the old block. Take their organisational skills and discipline. Michael was the first to be elected in 2011.
When Danny was elected five years later the brothers ran the campaign like a military operation, mapping the whole of Kerry into separate Danny and Michael territories. It all came straight from Jackie’s playbook.
Reidy says their ability to retain their seats and expand the dynasty has been no surprise.
“Their visibility is not an accident. They are two of the most hard-working politicians and have a good sense of what matters to their constituency. I also think they’re able to map national issues back to their constituency in terms of what’s relevant and matters,” she says.
The family have other businesses and are sometimes criticised for not putting clear blue water between them and politics. The evidence points to not inconsiderable wealth within the family but they live modest lifestyles, without ostentation.
The family’s reputation for modesty was dented by Jackie Healy-Rae jnr, an Independent councillor on Kerry County Council and his younger brother Kevin, sons of TD Michael Healy-Rae, being given suspended sentences for a late-night assault at a chip van in Kenmare on December 28th, 2017. The assault stemmed from Kevin jumping the queue for chips and shouting: “This is my town.”
Reidy notes that, politically, the Healy-Raes are masters of ambiguity. She gives the example of them siding with rural communities over the controversy about migrant accommodation, while Michael, from a business side, has been involved in providing accommodation to migrants.
Beyond everything else, however, politics is the family business and that means both TD brothers, Michael and Danny, try to leave no phone call unanswered.
“Isn’t it great that one family has been doing it for 50 years?” says Danny. “I get no better satisfaction in life than being able to help out a fellow to get a few bob, or get approval for a road, or to get a hospital appointment.
“I believe in answering the phone any hour of the day and night, and I get calls late at night for different things. Someone on a trolley in Tralee maybe for 12 or 14 hours, that’s 86 years of age, and some family member would ring.
“That’s the appreciation that we get from the people for being available.”
Two of Danny’s children, Johnny and Maura, are councillors, joining Michael’s son, Jackie jnr, on Kerry County Council. Maura, a secondary schoolteacher in Bandon, drives up to South Kerry almost every night to canvass, to go to meetings, or to hold clinics. Her accent is softer than her father’s but it’s clear that the approach of this generation will not vary.
“The most important thing is being available,” she says, echoing Danny.
“The most frequent thing people will say is at least the Healy-Raes will get back to you anyway.”
Does this generation have a different world view to their parents and grandfather? No, says Maura.
“For the most part, we would share the same thoughts. The issues that I’m dealing with in Kerry County Council: roads, housing, health – we agree on all those things. You know, we’re dealing with the same people most of the time.”
Society is changing. Voters’ engagement with politics is changing. But for now, none of that looks like it will have any impact on this singular dynasty.
“They got one in every three votes in Kerry in the last election,” says local historian O’Shea. “You cannot deny their enduring success.”
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