Revisiting Sligo’s Dermot Healy: Listening for absence in monumental sounds of silence

When Dermot Healy’s coffin was carried out of his home in Ballyconnell, ­Sligo, 10 years ago, the sound of Tuvan throat-singing could be heard from the bedroom. Amid the silence of the mourners and the carriage of the wind, those otherworldly notes would have travelled far from the cottage where Healy and his wife Helen lived on the edge of the Atlantic. In a faraway field, you can imagine a donkey pricking its ears or a hare stopping in its tracks to appraise the sound.