SOME
NOTEWORTHY
HEALYS
The Irish surname Healy is an anglicization of the Old Gaelic name "O hEalaighthe", which means "ingenious." Although it is a genuine Gaelic name, it is now very rarely found with its prefix "O". Healy, however, was a few decades ago the forty-seventh most common surname in Ireland.
Healy is the name of an old and illustrious Irish sept. They possessed territory at the foot of the Curlew Mountains in the western corner of County Sligo. The first of the numerous references to the family by the Four Masters is to Dermot Healy who died in 309 A.D. He is described as a "princely farmer, the best of his time." There was also a Munster sept of this name. (Cork is in the province of Munster.) Although this family was dispossessed of their lands in the seventeenth century, they remained in this locality and one of them, having become a Protestant, was created Earl of Donoughmore.
Several places in Ireland perpetuate the name Healy; Ballyhel in County Sligo, and Ballyhely and Healysland in county Wexford. There is also Healy's Bridge across the north fork of the Lee north of Ballincarrig and about 10 miles west of Cork city.
One notable bearer of this name was Tim Healy (1855-1931), the irrepressible Irish nationalist Member of Parliament, who became the successful first Governor-General of the Irish Free State. In Tenants of Time, Tom Flanagan paints this Healy as one who, in 1890-1891, betrayed the "Parnellites by using Parnell's (technically adulterous) relationship with Kitty O'Shea (who bore him two children without a peep from her estranged husband) to discredit him and clear his own path to power in the nationalist movement.
A Healy was captain of a US revenue cutter in the North Pacific during the 19th Century. He has been designated the "Father of the United States Coast Guard." A Coast Guard ice-breaker has been named after him. One of his brothers was Bishop of Maine at the time Bartholomew Healy and Hannah Bone went to Sanford. Another was a Jesuit who was President of Georgetown University in the nineteenth century. This interesting family, progeny of a southern planter Michael Healy and his slave/wife, Mary Eliza Healy, has been the subject of some fascinating web pages put up by Prologue, The Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration. (The issue for Fall 1997, Vol. 29, no. 3). Their sons James and Patrick Healy both became priests. James Healy was the first African-American to be ordained a Catholic priest. He served for 25 years as Bishop of Portland, Maine from 1875 - 1900. Patrick Healy S.J. was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D., which he earned at the Catholic University of Louvain.
More recently, another Timothy Healy, another Jesuit, was President of Georgetown University, Chancellor of the City University of New York and President of the New York Public Library - The Research Library. Kathleen and I (and 6 others) had the pleasure of sharing a table with him at a New York Library Club Banquet in 1991 at which he was the guest speaker. He was obviously a person of superior quality. After his death in 1993? it was reported that he was actually adopted and was part African-American. I have not documented or verified this but it would be interesting to do so. There was no evidence of this suggested background in his physical appearance. One wonders whether he was related to the Healys described in the preceding paragraph.
The current governor of Massachusetts is Maura Healy. (4/2026)
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