Son’s tribute to Maurice Healy: a man who devoted his life to community development

The Maurice Healy Social Justice Awards recognise projects that contribute to peacebuilding, tackle the impact of poverty and austerity measures and/or give voice to excluded groups.

On the first anniversary of Maurice Healy’s passing, his son Frankie (21) remembers his father and how the catch-all term ‘community worker’ didn’t even begin to describe his lifelong commitment to building a brighter future for Northern Ireland:

When asked, ‘What do your parents work as?’, most children can answer that question as easily as they could tell you what their names are, but I couldn’t. I spent my childhood trying to find out the answer and quickly learned that the more information I accumulated, the harder it was to answer. Eventually, I settled for vague responses such as ‘community work’ or ‘in the community development sector’. In reality it was so much more than that, but I knew no one expected a five-year-old to say: “Do you have a minute? Pull up a chair.”

Maurice devoted his life to his work. He didn’t stop working when a meeting was over or an application was finished, he was always on the phone or going to see someone to find out what else needed done.

Set hours were unheard of for him and money wasn’t what he was concerned with, he was driven by doing what he could for the greater good of the wider community and bringing marginalised groups together.

Having two parents with this type of work ethic meant I regularly got to see community work being done firsthand. From no age, Maurice was taking me between houses and community centres across the country. I met people from just about every background imaginable and I thought that was normal.

I remember Maurice telling me how important some of those people are and how lucky I was to meet them, but it’s taken a long time for me to truly understand what he meant by that.

As a small child, I regularly sat quietly in the corner of some very serious rooms of people. They often asked Maurice how he had taught me to be so well behaved. Little did they know, I was utterly fascinated by the work he was doing and I was always trying to find a better answer to ‘the question’.

Sometimes, I would ask Maurice about various aspects of his job and when he couldn’t give me a straight answer, he would reassure me with statements such as: “I’m keeping secrets for half of Europe.” Then, I’d laugh and give up asking, but it wasn’t until his funeral that I saw how true that statement really was and how vast the work he was doing was. He was humble to a fault.

Maurice’s lack of self-pity in his last few days surprised us all and we couldn’t quite understand it. But now I think I can. He was only concerned with the wellbeing of those whom he cared about and he trusted us to attain his vision of a brighter future. I hope this award will allow community activists to continue to strive to achieve what Maurice stood for.

And, I hope that one day when someone asks my future children what I work as, that they have just as hard a time figuring out what ‘community work’ entails as I did.