In describing his approach to the work Plunkett said that he wanted the book to portray Dublin in all its respects. He said that, while he was moved by O'Casey, his city was only a section 'the submerged city', while Joyce portrayed 'a seedy middle class'. He explained: "I wanted a panorama, so to the world of O'Casey and the world of Joyce I added the better off people, the people of property and a very important thing then, the Church, because it had very definite views on the social structures at that time." In the same interview he outlined his approach: " You see society at that time was set in a mode in which even the skilled man felt a cut above the unskilled man and there were these strict divisions between the classes and there was no wide concept of concern for one's neighbor, or responsibility for one's neighbor and no concept of brotherhood - as such... Then Larkin came along and these very lowly people began to make their weight felt. He began to insist that the labourer should have decent living conditions and the right to negotiate his conditions with employers and so on, and this swept through society. The employers naturally resisted. The Church was outraged at the idea of lowly workers refusing to obey their masters and so society got into ferment". And here was the place for literature: "when people begin to think they come alive. Literature is about people in their awareness and life. That is why Larkinism was important from the novelist's point of view. Although it was a distressing period it was full of pomp and colour... I don't know why Joyce said Dublin was the centre of paralysis because, in fact, everything seemed to be happening all at once.'' 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’s greatest creation, moreover, is a character who is at once the ultimate in harsh realism yet also poetic, even mystical. James Plunkett Kelly, or James Plunkett (21 May 1920 – 28 May 2003), was an Irish writer. He was educated at Synge Street CBS.

During the 1960s, Plunkett worked as a producer at Telefís Éireann. He won two Jacob's Awards, in 1965 and 1969, for his TV productions. In 1971 he wrote and presented "Inis Fail - Isle of Destiny", his very personal appreciation of Ireland. It was the final episode of the BBC series "Bird's-Eye View", shot entirely from a helicopter, and the first co-production between the BBC and RTE.Plunkett possessed an honourable social consciousness, and endures as an artist through his great Dublin novel, writes The Sinn Féin movement—the name famously coined by Máire Butler, a cousin of Irish unionist leader Sir Edward Carson—was launched by Arthur Griffith with the aim of re-establishing the independence of Ireland by withdrawing from the Westminster parliament and setting up a government in Dublin. Heavily publicized and amid the usual whinging from nonentities about the diversion of scarce resources, the first episode was promised for a wintry Sunday evening in late 1980. A huge audience tuned in, many of whom half-expected yet another national disaster. is full of ordinary nobility – the stubborn pride of Rashers, the deep love between Mary and Fitz – and ordinary decency. Moments of unexpected kindness punctuate it. But the novel is, among others things, an anti-romantic portrait of a city mired in vicious poverty. In the period in which it unfolds, 1907 to 1914, a third of Dubliners were essentially destitute, living in single rooms in some of Europe's worst slums. These were often, in a grotesque irony, the grand former homes of the gentry. On one of the finest Georgian terraces, Henrietta Street, the 1911 census records an astonishing 835 people living in just 15 houses. One house alone, number 7, was shared by 104 people belonging to 19 families. Not surprisingly, diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery were rife: Dublin's death rate was 22 per 1,000 people; London's was 16. (From the beginning of The Bellhe became a highly respected writer. He had worked briefly with Larkin while serving as secretary to the Worker's Union of Ireland.

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). The Risen People". Abbey Theatre. 2013. Archived from the original on 26 October 2014 . Retrieved 24 May 2015.

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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. 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. 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. 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. This thought is taken up early in the novel itself, where, in a rare and discreet intervention of the authorial voice, Plunkett notes children searching bins for “half-burnt cinders”: “They came each morning from the crowded rooms in the cast-off houses of the Rich . . . The clothes they wore had been cast off by their parents, who had bought them as cast-offs in the second-hand shops.” In this imagery, there is the suggestion that the people themselves are cast-off humanity, discarded and of little value.

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”. It seems significant that the area Plunkett was born in, Irishtown, is bounded by both the poorer district of Ringsend and the well-to-do suburb of Sandymount – hence, perhaps, the accuracy with which Plunkett captures both ends of the social spectrum in Winner of the BBC National Short Story award for The Grotesques from her short story collectio n Sudden Traveller ( Faber ) 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 ] will be in no doubt that the author's sympathies lie with the poor and with the workers' struggle for a better life.Margaret Thatcher, Conservative prime minister of the UK since May 1979, resigned. She was succeeded by John Major. In explaining the novel's success Plunkett himself said that it was that he didn't "lift my eye away from people at any stage, didn't lift my eye away from the parish. This is all one can know, for the whole of life is in that parish, where else can it be" (Writer in Profile interview with Niall Sheridan RTE, 1/1/1970). 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). Strumpet City’ is a best-selling novel by James Plunkett set in Dublin between 1907 and 1914, a period of major labour unrest. Adapted for RTÉ Television by Hugh Leonard, ‘Strumpet City’ was broadcast as seven episodes in 1980.

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 ...Panti's rousing gay rights speech goes viral". BreakingNews.ie. 5 February 2014 . Retrieved 24 May 2015. Overall, Plunkett’s novel can only be accurately characterised as a triumph! I thoroughly enjoyed the read and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the social history of Dublin - despite the fact it is a novel it certainly introduce the reader to the themes which one imagines would have informed the historical events upon which its narrative is based. Plunkett worked closely with The Bell editors Sean O'Faolain and Peadar O'Donnell. They assisted his writing and encouraged his activism. Another early story followed a trade union organiser on the last day of a long labour dispute. It traced him wandering through a gathering of exhausted strikers, to a bitter encounter with his wife, exasperated with poverty and the pain of coping, and then finally to a meeting with the general secretary and his disillusioned colleagues as they agree to accept terms which allow them to return to work but without the pay increase they fought for. It was called with intended irony: The Victorious.