William J Heaney - the ‘quintessential Nenagh man’

Nenagh will soon mark the 20th anniversary of the death of one of its favourite sons, newspaper columnist William J Heaney.

Once a familiar site on Nenagh's streets with his bicycle, pipe, notebook and pencil, Heaney gathered news from people of the town for over 25 years. He printed their tellings in his hugely popular newspaper columns, first in the Tipperary Star under the title ‘Diary of a Nenagh Man’, then in the Nenagh Guardian with ‘In the Passing Parade’.

Described by the late Guardian Editor Gerry Slevin as the “quintessential Nenagh man”, Heaney had a unique style of writing and an ability to entertain his readership with everyday life in Nenagh.

PARISH GOSSIP

The Ormond St resident once referred - in 1974 - to his style of reporting as the “morsels of parish gossip that I trade in”. He was at that time writing in “the impoverished time of year known as the ‘silly season’ to every journalist who pokes about for a source of his daily bite and sup in the sequestered and comparatively uneventful backwaters of the human jungle”. Interestingly, this ‘silly season’ occurred in February whereas the phenomenon - insofar as it still exists - latterly happenes in August.

“Since I myself am too conscientious a cook to believe in watering the soup, here it is straight,” he wrote, “my offering in the interests of your joy, education, edification, and thirst for parish gossip.” He added: “The unprintable is at all times the most readable, of course, and I greatly regret that our editor won't permit me to publish it.”

HOSPITAL PATIENTS

Heaney remains fondly remembered for visiting Nenagh hospital as a source of news. He commanded the respect and trust of many local people, and his regular visits to the hospital, where he chronicled the progress of patients, often presented a tonic greater than any conventional medicine.

He was also known for penning vignettes of local people he encountered who had returned home from abroad. On an otherwise long, wet and quiet Christmas 1979, Heaney filled his column with observations of people who were home for the festive season.

“In town these days I see: Rev Luke (Charles) Cavanagh, SDS, Friar St, Nenagh, from Masasi, Tanzania, E Africa; Dr William A Courtney, 22 Summerhill, from Vancouver, BC, Canada; Mr and Mrs Brendan Carmody and son Colm, 38 Sallygrove, and Summerhill, formerly, from Leaf Rapids, Manitoba, Canada; Mr Benny O'Connell, St Flannan's St, from London; Mr and Mrs Patrick Leo, 4 Tobar Mhuire, from Birmingham, Mr Joseph O'Meara and his wife Peggy (née Gunnell), both of Nenagh, from Haverhill, Suffolk; Miss Bridie Shoer, 20 Knockanpierce, from New York, and her cousins the Misses Elizabeth and Carmel Callery, 20 Knockanpierce, from London.” He proceeded to write short bios of several of these people and updates about what they were doing at the time.

Heaney's writings got people talking - and sometimes writing themselves whenever he courted controversy. In a lengthy letter published in the Guardian in 1975, an angered farmer in Ballymackey hit back at Heaney's inference that “farmers are always complaining”.

'A MONUMENT TO NENAGH'

In his youth, Heaney was an amateur boxer who took part in several tournaments. He spent 16 months in a sanatorium with TB in the 1940s; he later wrote about the experience in a book, House of Courage: Life in a Sanatorium.

The writer was also a keen dancer, member of the Church Choir, Nenagh Choral Society, Nenagh Players, and Muintir na Tíre. And he was an avid photographer, whose pictures - many of which can be seen in the books of local archivist Brendan Treacy - made as valued a contribution to Nenagh's social history as his words.

“William J Heaney can truly said to have been a legend in his life time,” Gerry Slevin wrote after the death of his colleague - in Nenagh hospital - in February 2001. He was as “synonymous with his native town as he is the Castle. His style of writing, the way in which he chronicled the happenings in his beloved Nenagh, the social events, the weddings, the deaths, the hospitalised, the visitors, had a distinctive flair about it that could only be the product of a fertile and imaginative mind”.

The words Heaney left behind were “a monument to Nenagh and its people, inspired and created over a quarter century. His was a social history of Nenagh that was particularly appreciated by exiles. It was a link to the home town that no words could properly estimate.”

Buried in Tyone cemetery, Heaney would perhaps have considered himself unworthy of such exaltation. In a particularly thought-provoking Passing Parade column - ‘A Mere Name on a Headstone?’ - written in November 1974, he appeared quite content with his lot as an “ordinary man”:

“It is unlikely that I'll ever be famous. The stuff of fame hasn't shown any traces in the clay I'm made of, and I'm doing the best I can to live at peace with the prospect that the only mark I'm likely to leave behind me in this world is my name on the family headstone.”

He hoped the sculptor would spell his name correctly and not overlook the ‘J’ he liked to use.

“I don't regret that I'm not a man of fame, or of popularity, or of substance and social importance. All that kind of thing is won by contest, and the ring in which the contest is fought is one into which I've never had the courage to throw my hat. I'm enjoying, in fact, just being an ‘ordinary man’.”