Strumpet City strikes a blow for RTÉ drama

The late David Kelly  was one of our great character actors and played many memorable roles since the 1950s. He played many roles on British television. He appeared regularly in Me Mammy, Never Mind the Quality Feel the Width and Robins Nest but to some he will forever be associated with Fawlty Towers where he played the hopeless builder, Mr O’Reilly.
To a younger generation, he will be remembered as Grandpa Joe in the remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, while to an older group, he will forever be Rashers Tierney in Strumpet City.
Written by James Plunkett, Strumpet City has to be one of the great Irish historical novels of the last century. It can only be described as an epic as it follows the lives of a motley group of characters caught up in the events which affected Dublin 100 years ago, the great strike and lockout of 1913 in particular.
Its main issue is with the striking workers and their starving families. He deals with the attempts by the fledgling trade union movement to win better pay and conditions for the workers. While the bosses and business owners feature with the workers, he does not ignore the other strata of Dublin society at the time.
He shows us a family totally divorced from the strike who live in a cocoon of their own, the two priests and the most colourful character and also the most unfortunate character of them all, the poor homeless Rashers Tierney. Plunkett’s belief seems to be that everybody has a basic decency if they could only overcome their circumstances.
Plunkett was born in inner city Dublin in 1920 when they people were recovering from 1916, in the throes of the War of Independence and could vividly remember the times written about in Strumpet City. His father was a trade unionist and a veteran of the Great War. Plunkett himself worked with Larkin in the 1940s and his trace union work greatly influenced his writings.
Plunkett had his first stories published in The Bell in 1942 and he continued to have stories published in various publications. Early in the 1950s he began to contribute talks, stories and radio plays to Radio Éireann as it was then called.
He joined the staff at the station in 1955 as part of the drama department by which time he had had many plays broadcast and a collection of short stories The Trusting and the Maimed published. With the advent of television, he was sent to the BBC for training and when Telefís Éireann was launched in 1961, he became one of the first producers and eventually become head of drama.
His great novel was first published in 1969 and was a huge success not just in Ireland but being translated into more than a dozen languages. RTÉ then decided to make it into a television series and the novel was adapted for television by Hugh Leonard.
The work on the series was superb, and RTÉ assembled an all star cast including Peter O’Toole as Larkin. It was their most successful drama production, the biggest earning show they ever produced and was sold to over 30 countries. All based on James Plunkett’s original novel Strumpet City.
That novel was first published on April 28, 1969 – 43 years ago this week.