Jimmy Plunkett Kelly — author, trade unionist, hater of adjectives

Even before brown paper bags, the wiseacres used to say it. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know that matters.”

Not knowing anybody of any importance seemed set to doom me and my sister to a life of miserable mediocrity. The one person of importance the family did know was neither a politician or a big businessman. He was at the other end of the scale, and a peculiar hybrid at that: a short story writer and trade unionist.

Plus, we never referred to him by the name for which he was known James Plunkett but by what my father called him: Jimmy Kelly. Name-dropping in genteel reverse. Try impressing anybody by telling them your da knew Jimmy Kelly. The payoff is negligible.

The very fact that we used the not-famous version of his name was a tribute to the kind of man he was. James Plunkett Kelly, who died just before the weekend, was the master of modest understatement. Strumpet City, his bestselling novel, became a TV series sold by RTÉ to fifty-six countries, but it won no six-figure advance, and the book was not speedily banged out to capitalise on the success of his earlier collection of short stories.

"He'll take his time," my father used to say, approvingly, throughout my teens, when I would ask when Plunkett Kelly was going to produce a second book. He did take his time. Ten years intervened between that first collection of short stories and the novel, mainly, it is fair to assume, because publication was a secondary consideration for Plunkett. He wrote, first and foremost, to understand his own life and the life of the city he loved.

"In reflecting ourselves and our neighbours and the world we live in, and in doing so with validity and faithfulness, literature pins it all down for our consideration and absorption," he said.

Plunkett lived through times and events that required much consideration and absorption. At twenty-seven, he marched through the slush of a snowy February day in the funeral procession of his hero, James Larkin, "the last of the great revolutionaries". Larkin always claimed to be preaching "a divine mission of discontent" about early twentieth-century Dublin, where one-third of the population lived in poverty so abject as to be almost unimaginable these days. This was a city where several families lived in one room, where one outside toilet served up to ninety people, and where the death rate was over twice that in comparable British cities.

It was also, when Larkin set out to change it, a cellular city, where the decent lower middle-class (whence came Plunkett) viewed the tenement-dwellers as "a breed apart, to be avoided, and often enough, despised".

Plunkett by contrast not only went to Synge Street school the definition of privilege to many slum children forced to contribute to family earnings by working in their early teens but even learned the violin. This got him jeered and chased by poorer kids, but he persisted.

"I graduated as most musicians did in those days, playing first with amateur music societies and providing chat music at high-class dinners, then for opera and ballet and finally with the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra, where my professional career ended," he later wrote. "After a few seasons I came to the conclusion that as a professional I was a bit of a fraud. I felt I wasn't good enough and got out."

"A bit of a fraud" is a classic Plunkett self-derogation, based on comfortable certainty of his own competence across a range of media. The same comment, made by someone else, would be an invitation to the listener to contradict and flatter, but Plunkett didn't need the praise of others. In his later years near the top of the RTÉ hierarchy, he used his slight deafness to avoid having to cope with flattery, which he clearly found irritating rather than nurturing.

Throughout his young days as a musician and occasional short story writer, he was deeply involved in trade unions. He saw the trade union movement as key to the continuum of progress initiated by Larkin's fighting words. But Plunkett was no Young Covey. He wore his convictions lightly, advancing them in a matter-of-fact monotone as obvious imperatives, rather than yelling about them as if they needed to be hammered home.

That didn't prevent the Church painting him as dangerous and disloyal for visiting Moscow in the fifties. It's difficult to imagine now, when the boot is so much on the other foot, how real and present a threat the Church's disapproval presented to a man's economic survival in Ireland at that time. The controversy about Plunkett's Russian visit happened before television, before local radio, when the national radio station was on the air only a few hours a day. It became, nonetheless, a national morality play, with Plunkett cast as heretic and traitor, his crimes somehow exacerbated by him getting off the plane wearing a Russian hat.

My father had, along with Plunkett, set up the first trade union in the Dublin Gas Company. An inscribed copy of Plunkett's short stories was one of his most precious belongings, and Plunkett's spare, undecorated literary style ("Jimmy Kelly hates adjectives") was constantly held up in our house as the quintessence of good writing.

James Plunkett was one of my father's few heroes, and although he was in many ways the most committed of traditional Catholics, serving Mass at the local convent each morning, Dad quietly (and, as it turns out, wrongly) rejected the Catholic church's portrayal of Stalin's USSR as cannibalistic, coercive and totalitarian, rejecting also the condemnation of his friend's visit to Moscow. When his impassioned defence of Plunkett's Moscow visit ran on the front page of the Irish Catholic or some similar weekly, it was a source of mixed family pride. We thought he was great, but wished he'd pick on someone his own size, as opposed to the Universal Church, with its substantial back office and access to weapons of individual destruction, like thunderbolts.

The controversy faded. Strumpet City became a blockbuster. Plunkett became a major figure in television production. Fame rarely stays in the present tense, and so, this weekend, it was sad how few people listening to tributes knew of him, sad how distant and dusty were the struggles with which he had been associated.

And yet, to open at random a collection of his essays is to hear the hands-in-pockets tone of the way he spoke, preserved in the way he wrote about his trade:

"It records the bouts of laughter at little or nothing, the unspectacular virtues, the petty villainies."

But a teenager who never heard of him, picking up a tea-coloured old paperback by James Plunkett, can still know the Jimmy Kelly my da knew.

That's why books are so important. They allow a self-deprecating drawl to be heard across time and distance. They are the half-life of our fathers' heroes.