Editor of The Irish Times, 1907-1934.

For details on his wife and children, see the bio of his wife.

John Healy was the longest serving Editor of The Irish Times, holding the position for 27 years which included the most tumultuous years of the 20th century in Ireland. For all of that period, as his obituary in The Times of London noted, he was the protagonist of a losing cause.

He was born in Drogheda in 1872 to a solicitor father and a mother who was the daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman. He went to Trinity College and thought for a time about becoming a clergyman. He studied classics and literature while also teaching at a school in Rathmines and lecturing in Alexandra College as well as writing for newspapers, mainly leaders for the Evening Mail. After graduating, he got a staff job on the Daily Express, then edited by the nationalist T.P. Gill. He subsequently became editor of the paper after it had been taken over to become a conservative unionist mouthpiece by Lord Ardilaun.

Meanwhile, he had begun working as the Dublin correspondent of The Times in 1899 – a position he occupied for the remaining 35 years of his life – the same year he married Adeline Alton, the daughter of a Trinity College professor. He gave up the editorship of the Daily Express after two years to study law and was called to the bar in 1906. Shortly afterwards, he was offered and accepted the editorship of The Irish Times for which he had been writing occasional leaders.
As a staunch unionist in Dublin, Healy found himself on the wrong side of history as events trundled from the 1913 Lockout to the Home Rule Bill, the first World War, the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, the Treaty, the Civil War, and the formation of the Free State. He opposed partition vigorously, seeing it as among the worst possible solutions: in a private letter to the editor of The Times in 1913, he predicted that a Northern parliament unleavened by Southern conservatism would be dominated by socialism while a Southern parliament unleavened by the character and brains of Ulster would be another Tammany Hall.

Frequently the target of verbal attacks in those highly-charged times, Healy refused all offers of protection for the newspaper's offices, his Pembroke Road home and his person from the British Army and, later, the Free State Army. On the evening of Bloody Sunday in 1920, he and his assistant, Bertie Smyllie, were detained on their way to the office by drunken Auxiliaries who threatened to shoot them as Sinn Féiners until they were rescued by British army officers. At a later period, shots were fired into his home by republicans.

He turned down numerous offers of journalistic posts in London to stay on in the occasionally hostile environment of Dublin. Seen in his later years as aloof and austere, he was described after his death by a colleague (probably Smyllie) as having the habits of a recluse rather than those of a man of affairs.
He died in 1934 at the age of 62 and was survived by his wife Adeline and two sons, one a flight lieutenant with the RAF, the other a journalist with The Times.


His successor as Editor
Robert Maire "Bertie" Smyllie