IF EVER there was a prophet without honour in his own country, it was Joe Heaney.
The great sean nos singer from Connemara was the victim of an unforgivable sin of omission committed by his native land.
Throughout his life, Ireland treated him with singular disdain interspersed with occasional bouts of lip service.
The establishment never went out of its way to celebrate his pricelessly rare talent or sought to ensure that its spellbinding effects were experienced by larger numbers of the general public and not just the small circle of devotees.
He was consigned to the artistic purdah reserved for some of our most creative and original people through a combination of thoughtlessness and begrudgery.
There's a sour note in the notion that the official neglect of Heaney coincided first with the government's obsessive endeavours to revive Irish language and culture to a living and healthy state, and then with the renaissance in Irish folk music that took place in the 1960s.
Heaney should have been an icon of the purest kind of Irish music, but he seems to have got lost in whatever cultural awakening took place.
His peculiar musical gifts were arcane and the style of singing of which he was a master is forgotten in most parts of Ireland, now surviving in its truest form only in Connemara.
Certainly the sean nos tradition is in danger of becoming entirely extinct, and this might not be so had people such as Joe Heaney got greater encouragement and support in their homeland.
It strains belief that an organisation like Aosdana never saw fit to take Heaney under its wing. Aosdana was founded for the purpose of encouraging and assisting people in devoting their energies full time to the expression of their artistic talents.
In the end it would appear that Heaney was better known and more appreciated abroad than at home, even though his wish always was to be singing in Ireland and not thousands of miles away in New York or Texas or Seattle.
Those who listened to him in those places loved it, though, and he was particularly treasured in universities where he was recognised as a here and now living source of an instinctive ancient form of music making where a virtuoso human voice was the sole instrument.
Much of this was touched on in Michael Davitt's excellent documentary on Heaney, Sing the Dark Away, shown on RTE last week.
He undoubtedly was a drifter, moving from his native Carna to Glasgow where he married and had a family, but then vanishing from home and turning up in London before eventually arriving in New York. Without ever reuniting with his Glasgow family, he died in Seattle in 1984, succumbing to emphysema.
One of the people who knew Heaney in Seattle, where his atavistic musical lore enriched a university's music department, spoke in the documentary of his longing to be back in Ireland singing his songs. But the film made clear that from the very start Heaney was to be denied finding fulfilment in Ireland.
As a young man he won a scholarship that enabled him to study for a teaching career, only to be expelled from college for the innocent transgression of smoking a cigarette. That monstrous injustice ended his chance of ever becoming a teacher, a profession that might have enabled him to hand down his musical heritage to the young. Instead he was forced to emigrate.
In the film, poet Mary O'Malley, herself a Connemara native, speaks of the fates that bedevilled Heaney:
Christ! and man is dogged from cradle to grave:
First it was your own steps behind you on the Carna road
Coming late from a dance
You were kicked out of college for a cigarette
And met your father's coffin on the way home
Sunday shoes on the gravelly path.
You quick stepped back to Dublin
Before the bog could suck you in
Or the sea swallow you
And went where thousands went before
To plough the rocks of a foreign city.
You took the boat, your cardboard suitcase tied with a belt
An address in Glasgow on the back of a cigarette box
"Flow gently sweet Afton among thy green braes."
Some of his friends and sponsors on the other side of the Atlantic might have done better by Heaney, too, when he arrived in New York.
Enough of them had influence to pave the way for him to make a living full time as a singer at a time when traditional singing of all kinds was selling records and filling concert venues. People like Pete Seeger saw Joe as the embodiment of something pure, authentic and timeless - a voice and style echoing down the centuries.
Yet he never became established in a full time singing career and seems to have been trotted onstage as some kind of oddity rather than the most genuine folk singer of them all.
He was treated more like a relic than the living passionate man that he was, producing an ancient form of singing for any of the modern generation who wanted to listen.
I was among those at the funeral when they brought Joe Heaney back from the US for burial in Carna on a May day in 1984. After the coffin was lowered into the earth a silence fell on everyone as an uileann piper played lonesome music from the past that Joe would have known well and to which he could have added his own inimitable grace notes.
I suppose you could say the honour that had been denied this musical prophet in life was accorded to him in death. Yet how much different and better it, would have been if the man had been showered with the praise and encouragement that were his due when he was alive.