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." Winner of the Women’s prize for fiction and the British Book awards fiction book of the year for Hamnet ( Tinder Press ) James Plunkett Kelly, or James Plunkett (21 May 1920 – 28 May 2003), was an Irish writer. He was educated at Synge Street CBS. Many studies have been written about the quest for the Great American Novel. Anyone seeking its Great Irish equivalent need search no further. The production was described as '"rigorously honest and challengingly relevant'' by Helena Sheehan in her study of Irish Television Drama. "The epic scale and penetrating truthfulness of Plunkett's novel were skillfully reproduced and even enhanced by the quality of virtually every aspect of the RTE production : the script by Hugh Leonard, the direction by Tony Barry, the performances of Irish actors, the use of film and authentic locations." Tony Barry defended its contemporary relevance by telling Sheehan that Strumpet City was honest and pulled no punches on difficult issues: "Historical drama, should only be done , in his opinion, if it is honest. If not it should not be done.”

Posterity has been less kind to the clergy than Plunkett’s collective presentation of them might suggest. One can only speculate as to why he felt the need to balance Father O’Connor’s belligerence with two benign priests and to end O’Connor’s participation in the story on a sympathetic note. Plunkett had his own difficulties with the clergy and some of the more pious members of his union. In 1955 he accepted an invitation to visit Moscow as part of a writers’ delegation. The visit was roundly condemned by the clergy and he was pilloried in the Standard, the influential Catholic newspaper of the time. This led to a campaign to have him dismissed from his job in the Workers Union of Ireland. He defended himself in a letter to The Irish Times, pointing out that he had sought guidance from his confessor, Father James (later Bishop) Kavanagh, before he travelled and that he did not attempt to dissuade him from going. This tells us that Plunkett was still a practising Catholic when he began writing Strumpet City ‑ so much so indeed that, as he told a Spanish research student in an interview in 1992, he could not bring himself to use contraceptives during his early married life, something that exasperated his late wife. This degree of orthodoxy did not persist, but it is reasonable to assume that during the ten years that he struggled to complete the book he also struggled with conflicting thoughts about the role of the clergy in the events he was writing about. Father Kavanagh was a friend and not just a confessor. Kavanagh was of working class origins, had family links with the union and was partial to a drink. There was probably some of him in the character of Father Giffley, although Plunkett would also have known a number of progressive priests in the1960s. The Risen People, a stage play, which premiered at the Abbey in 1958. By then he had joined RTÉ, initially working in radio and transferred to television in 1961, eventually becoming head of drama. Hugh Leonard's seven-part adaptation of The series also showcases the appearance of many stars of Irish soaps who were latterly to make prolonged appearance in future episodes of Glenroe and Fair City, people like Brendan Caldwell, Eileen Colgan, Donal Farmer and Alan Stanford. 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. the culmination of five years of increasingly bitter disputes between Dublin's unskilled workers, organised by Larkin's Irish Transport & General Workers' Union, on the one side and the city's employers, led by William Martin Murphy, on the other.

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. 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 ]

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. Plunkett’s greatest creation, moreover, is a character who is at once the ultimate in harsh realism yet also poetic, even mystical. 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. I am surprised a book like this got past the censor in the 60's as not only is one of the characters a prostitute but there are also some not so charitable remarks made regarding the church. The characters in the novel represent both sides of the divide. Even so, as in all good novels, opinions are not quite so clear cut. Some of the upper classes do try to help the poor and of course some of the poor are only half-hearted in their support of the strikers, desperate as they are for work.

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The Bellhe became a highly respected writer. He had worked briefly with Larkin while serving as secretary to the Worker's Union of Ireland.

Murray, Christopher (2000). Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation. Syracuse University Press. p.181. ISBN 978-0-8156-0643-7 . Retrieved 24 May 2015.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 Connolly, Shaun (8 February 2014). "Buttimer and Panti drown out empty rhetoric in homophobia debate". Irish Examiner . Retrieved 24 May 2015. 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. 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 ...

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 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.”

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When Plunkett started contributing to The Bell in 1942 he was advised by Sean O’Faolain to write from his own experience. This advice he followed in Strumpet City. Plunkett grew up on the Ringsend side of Sandymount and the drama is mostly located around that area: south from the Liffey along the eastern shoreline. It was here that so many of the port workers lived. The area had not changed much since 1913 when Plunkett grew up and later worked there. Most of the tenements remained and the level of poverty was only somewhat ameliorated. He started work in the Gas Company along the quays where nearby in Windmill Lane Tonge and Taggart, most likely “Morgan’s Foundry” in the book, was still operating. When he became a union official he got to know James Larkin and many members of the union who were “out” in 1913. He modelled some of his characters on these and absorbed their stories. There were other influences. Like all Dubliners of his time he would have observed one or more “Johnny Fortycoats” wandering the streets and from this image he created the comic and tragic figure of Rashers Tierney. He also had insights into the middle class, who lived at the posher end of Sandymount. Plunkett’s father worked as a chauffeur and he would have heard stories from him about the rich people he drove. He was an altar boy and used his knowledge of Catholic ceremony and regalia in the episodes involving the priests.