For his career as a writer he dropped the Kelly surname, becoming simply James Plunkett, and he had a short story published in (the Dublin literary journal) The Bell in 1942. His first two efforts had been rejected, but the editor, Sean O'Faolain, encouraged him: "Why don't you write about your own experience and why don't you write on plain subjects?". He followed the advice and completed another story called The Working Class. This was published together with another story called The Mother, a title he changed from Hurler on the Ditch on O'Faolain's advice. The Bell devoted a full edition to his stories in 1954 under the title The Eagles and the Trumpets. This was later expanded and published as the short story collection The Trusting and the Maimed. I am wise enough to know now that these things were not 'of the past'; they are just as relevant today and if you look around you will find a Rashers Tierney existing not so far from where you live. We are all living in our own strumpet cities with politicians promising us heaven when they give us hell. Nowhere was this more evident than in drama. Although the national broadcaster had produced two well-written soap operas, most of its few attempts at historical fiction were embarrassing to watch. Badly scripted, badly structured and dominated by hammy scene stealing, they were seen more as an attempt to the drama department to justify its underfunded existence rather than as an attempt to entertain.

Many studies have been written about the quest for the Great American Novel. Anyone seeking its Great Irish equivalent need search no further. Strumpet City is authentic. Dublin’s pre-1914 atmosphere is recreated brilliantly; it is almost possible to smell. The characters respond believably to their conditions. (Plunkett would have been helped, here, by knowing many such as they.) If their city cannot be reconstructed from the book, as Joyce claimed it could be from Ulysses, it is because so much of it is set in a mythical neighbourhood, Chandler’s Court in St Brigid’s parish, somewhere along the old Dublin & South-Eastern main line.General Tom Barry’s Cork No. 3 (West Cork) Brigade wiped out an eighteen-man Auxiliary patrol at Kilmichael, on the Macroom–Dunmanway road, Co. Cork. James Plunkett published two further novels, Farewell Companions (1977), which partly drew on his childhood and early adult experience, and The Circus Animals (1990), which included incidents drawn from the controversy surrounding the Russia visit of 1955. is, above all, a great defiance of this contempt for the poor. Its realism is not just a reflection of the way things were: it is also a statement of the way things should be, that attention must be paid to those whom history treats as the anonymous masses. We might give what he is doing the name of defiant realism. The title? "Strumpet City"? "Strumpet" is a centuries-old word for prostitute, of course. So is Plunkett calling Dublin the "City of whores"? I don't know, but actually he found the title in a play, quoted at the front of the book, called The Old Lady Says 'No', written in 1929 by an Irish playwright named Denis Johnston: Shall we sit down together for a while? Here on the hillside, where we can look down on the city ...

First edition of the Fenian newspaper the Irish People. Circulating chiefly in Dublin, it was suppressed by the authorities in September 1865. The novel's roots date from 1954, when Plunkett's radio play Big Jim was produced by Radio Éireann, with Jim Larkin the titular hero. [1] In 1958, it was expanded into a gloomier and more stylized stage play, The Risen People, staged at the Abbey Theatre. [1] Kathleen Heininge characterises it as a dry work which read as "pure propaganda for a socialist agenda". [2] When Hutchinson requested a novel about James Connolly from Plunkett, he reworked the play again; Connolly does not feature in Strumpet City, published in 1969. The Risen People was revived and revised in 1977 for the Project Arts Centre and Jim Sheridan. [3] A 2013–14 revival at the Abbey included "the Noble Call", a speech in response to the play's themes from a different public figure at each performance. [4] Panti Bliss' speech on LGBT rights in Ireland at the closing performance attracted media attention. [5] [6] Reception [ edit ] Following his death in May 2003 James Plunkett’s obituaries emphasised his humble beginnings, his consistent trade unionism and, of course, his talent, but did not remark that his Strumpet City is Ireland’s greatest historical novel. This failure may result from reluctance to ask two questions: how historical novels differ from others and where Plunkett’s book fits amongst them. Strumpet City is Dublin City Libraries' One City, One Book Choice for 2013". Gill Books . Retrieved 15 October 2022. Rashers Tierney, in lesser hands, could have been merely the embodiment of the horror of near absolute poverty. He is utterly destitute, despised and bullied by officialdom. He occupies the margins of life and of history, too poor even for the collective self-assertion of the workers. He is reduced almost to the level of his friend and equal Rusty, his beloved dog. He is King Lear’s “unaccommodated man . . . a poor, bare, forked animal”.

Like many others, I watched Hugh Leonard’s adaptation of James Plunkett’s Strumpet City on RTE television in 1980, we all sat glued to the television screen each week, eagerly awaiting each episode as it unfolded. So I was delighted this was chosen in our Book Club as the read for May as I finally got a chance to read it and also revisit the television series (hired on DVD whilst reading the book). Winner of the 2020 Orwell prize for political writing for Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me ( Picador ) It is based on the period before world war I. The characters, most of them are poor and destitute. It is a struggle to get a meal a day.

Here is a book possessed of a rare integrity and genuine pathos by a writer born in 1920 into the testing Dublin working class world that had, a generation earlier, produced James Stephens. Considering that much of Plunkett's inspiration came from his reverence for James Larkin, as well as a life-long belief in labour politics –For the unstable, young Father O’Connor, torn between fond memories of his beloved mother, his interest in musical evenings and his egotistical pursuit of sanctity, being posted to a slum parish will consolidate his vocation. Father Giffley, the older, wiser, alcoholic, possibly insane parish priest and one of the most powerfully evoked characters in Irish literature, knows otherwise: “It’s almost 30 years since I first came to the Dublin slums. I didn’t come like you, looking for dirty work, I came because I was sent. They knew my weakness for good society and good conversation. I suppose they thought they’d cure me by giving me the faces of the destitute to console me and the minds of the ignorant to entertain me.” But the Soviet visit had one good outcome – it helped Plunkett resolve to leave the union job and to seek full-time work with Radio Eireann. During the early 1950s he had begun contributing talks, short stories and plays to the station (having earlier played for a time with its Orchestra) and in 1955 he applied for and got a full time staff post there as Assistant Head of Drama and Variety. He found himself an intellectual atmosphere led by people he said had “culture and integrity”. The Head of the Drama and Variety department was Michael O'hAodha and others there included novelists Francis Mac Manus and Philip Rooney and poet Roibeaird O'Farachain. Plunkett possessed an honourable social consciousness, and endures as an artist through his great Dublin novel, writes There is a terrible accident at a coal yard and you feel empathy for big Mulhall and the further poverty his family will suffer in its wake. But this is not a work of heroic propaganda. Plunkett infuses characters with whom he would not agree with vivid, detailed life. One of the finest portraits in the book, indeed, is that of the priggish Father O'Connor and his slow journey towards a fuller humanity – O'Connor is rich enough to be worth a novel to himself. This is why

Special mention should also be made of Mrs Bradshaw, an upper class lady, who while trying to help in small ways cannot see the bigger picture and would be quite content for things to sty as they are, with the poor getting occasional handouts but otherwise knowing their place. Tom Wall is a former Assistant General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. His Masters Degree thesis in UCD is titled “Understanding Irish Social Partnership ‑ An Assessment of Corporatist and Post-Corporatist Perspectives” (2004). will be in no doubt that the author's sympathies lie with the poor and with the workers' struggle for a better life. is the impossible Irish novel. The great master of the short story, Frank O'Connor, writing in 1942, claimed that it was simply not possible to write a social novel in Ireland. In Russia, he said, an author such as Chehkov could "write as easily of a princess as of a peasant girl or a merchant's daughter" but in Ireland "the moment a writer raises his eyes from the slums and cabins, he finds nothing but a vicious and ignorant middle-class, and for aristocracy the remnants of an English garrison, alien in religion and education. From such material he finds it almost impossible to create a picture of life . . . a realistic literature is clearly impossible." Winner of the Booker prize and and the British Book awards book of the year and fiction debut of the year for Shuggie Bain (Pan Macmillan)This is not a work to compare to the quotidian, creative deliciousness’ of Joyce’s Ulysses. On this, I have read a good few books, and have many, many more to grapple with, but having read some of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov, and other Russian masters’ creations, this work here, Strumpet City, is, in my view, the Irish equivalent, and a masterpiece. The success of the radio play led to it being expanded for the stage in the Abbey Theatre as T he Risen People in 1958. The suggestion to expand it came from Sean 0'Casey, who wrote later to David Krause: "I am glad you met Jim Plunkett. He wrote a radio drama about Jim Larkin and sent me the book of what he had written. I thought it good, and recommended him to lengthen it, and make it fit for stage. I'm glad he did this and wish the work every possible success. He is as you say an Honest writer, and brave too; he has written some fine short stories and has a fine literary talent. But he too must walk warily." Strumpet Cityis the work that consolidated James Plunkett Kelly's literary status. By instinct a short story writer with a flair for characterisation, he wrote several outstanding stories such as