Shay Healy: All-round entertainer who played a pivotal role in the downfall of Charles Haughey

“I know it infuriates some people when you don’t pigeon hole yourself, but I don’t take on anything that won’t stand up to public scrutiny,” he once said.

“He has been a star for as long as I have known him,” singer Paul Harrington told a special tribute show to Shay in The Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in 2019.

“He was a great guy, he told some great stories and we’ve had some great chats since I used to stay in his house when I was playing in the Braemor Rooms many years ago,” said his friend Paddy Cole yesterday.

Apart from songwriting, Healy is probably best remembered for Nighthawks on RTÉ 2 television, a louche late-night show with the fluid formula of a nightclub.

Guests would sit at tables drinking bottles of beer in a makeshift bar as Healy conducted interviews with a loose collection of ‘movers and shakers’ between live music and entertainment.

The show ran from 1988 to 1992 and is credited with dramatically bringing down the curtain on the career of Taoiseach Charles Haughey.

Through his connections in the music business Shay was friendly with the “country and western” wing of Fianna Fáil and in particular Albert Reynolds, who had been sacked as Minister for Finance for challenging Haughey’s leadership of the party.

In what some believe was part of an orchestrated campaign, Sean Doherty, a former Minister for Justice, appeared on a special edition of Nighthawks in January, 1992. He revealed that during his tenure as minister in Haughey’s previous government a decision was taken to illegally tap the telephones of journalists.

“There was a decision taken in cabinet that the leaking of matters from cabinet must be stopped,” he said. “I, as Minister for Justice, had a direct responsibility for doing that — I did that. I do feel that I was let down by the fact that people knew what I was doing.”

Details of the programme had been strategically leaked beforehand and when it was broadcast on January 5, former cabinet minister Des O’Malley, now leader of Haughey’s coalition partners the Progressive Democrats insisted that it had not been discussed in cabinet at the time.

Doherty said nothing further for nine days as media speculation went into overdrive about ‘who knew what’.

Then, at a dramatic and hastily called press conference in the Montrose Hotel in Dublin on January 21, Doherty, arrived accompanied by his wife Maura.

He opened proceedings by declaring: “I am confirming tonight that the Taoiseach, Mr Haughey, was fully aware in 1982 that two journalists’ phones were being tapped and that he at no stage expressed a reservation about this action. Here are the details...”

The following morning members of the Progressive Democrats refused to attend a cabinet meeting and later that day Haughey signalled his intention to resign rather than cause a general election.

“We have nothing to fear from our enemies without,” he told his colleagues, who had been highly critical of the PDs, “it is our enemies within we must fear.” He was replaced as leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach by Albert Reynolds.

It was the high point of Healy’s television career.

The popular show was axed later that year and Healy’s contract with RTÉ terminated in 1995.

Ironically, Shay Healy, who wittingly or otherwise, had orchestrated Doherty’s admission, came from a strong Republican family.

His father was a civil servant and part-time actor, and his mother a noted traditional singer.

He grew up in Sandymount, Dublin, where he lived for most of the rest of his life, and had begun his career as a trainee cameraman in RTÉ in 1963.

He was also immersed in the so-called “ballad boom”, performing and writing songs for traditional music groups like The Johnstons.

Soon he was on the other side of the camera, presenting a show called Ballad Sheet which featured his friend Billy Connolly, then a folk singer rather than a comedian, the Dubliners and many others who would go on to become enduring international stars.

He reputedly spent years and a large portion of his earnings from What’s Another Year, on a musical called The Wiremen.

Premièred at The Gaiety Theatre in Dublin in 2005, it celebrated the rural electrification scheme of the 1950s.

The production, which was backed by his friends John McColgan and Moya Doherty, of Riverdance fame and fortune, ran for six weeks.

By then Shay Healy was in the early stages of Parkinson’s Disease, something he talked openly about and tried never to let interfere with other aspects of his life.

He and his wife Dymphna, who died in 2017, lived with their two sons in a fine house on Prince of Wales Terrace and enjoyed hosting parties and musical gatherings.

After Dymphna’s death he moved to an apartment, also in Sandymount, before spending the last two years of his life in a nursing home in Foxrock.

Over the years he was constantly dreaming up new schemes, writing songs, books, parodies and articles.

He was genuinely one of the few people in the entertainment business that nobody had a bad word to say about.

Online Editors