Instead of censuring the vandals, Luke would have tried to understand their plight
LUKE KELLY might have broken into a wry smile after both statues commemorating him in Dublin were splashed with white paint. The original bust of the red-headed troubadour adjacent to where he was born in Sheriff Street has been defaced for the sixth time.
These acts of vandalism are usually greeted with disgust, but Kelly, a ballad singer and rebel with a list of causes as long as your arm, was never one to put himself on a pedestal during his lifetime.
Whether these latest attacks are pure vandalism or some randomer looking for attention is unclear. But you can’t help thinking that Luke would find a way of analysing the motive behind it and concluding that the perpetrators were underprivileged and knew no better, needing help rather than condemnation.
He would likely rationalise the motives of those who have defaced his statues. He may conclude that they were motivated by lack of education, or that such acts as defacing a monument to Dublin’s most famous ballad singer could only have been carried out by someone who had in some way been failed by society.
Through songs and ballads like ‘Joe Hill’, ‘Alabama 58’, ‘Free The People’ and many others, Luke Kelly was on the side of the oppressed, not only speaking up for a working-class audience but trying to educate them in class politics as well.
When not travelling the world with The Dubliners, he would even abandon his pint in O’Donoghue’s of Merrion Row to join protest marches through Dublin in support of Travellers, the downtrodden from Ireland to Nicaragua, nuclear disarmament and other ‘right-on’ causes.
It is likely that, if he was to meet those who attacked his statue, rather than censure them, he would want to sit down and discuss their motives, to understand where their angst came from or the philosophy or lack of it behind their actions.
If he was going to be outraged, it would not be about a statue splashed with white paint, and certainly not one of his own image. In his lifetime, he reserved his ire for unscrupulous politicians and employers and big business.
Because of the continuing attacks on the unique Vera Klute statue/bust of Kelly on a low plinth adjacent to the long-demolished Lattimore Cottages where he was born, some councillors, fed up with the expensive cost of cleaning it up, want the statue moved to another location.
They’re missing the point completely. Luke Kelly would still rather be with ‘his people’ paint-splashed or defaced, than in some antiseptic middle-class location, among people who didn’t sympathise with his causes or understand his motivation, no matter how much they admired his rendition of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Raglan Road’.
His real goal would be to foster an interest in art, literature and political activism among people so uneducated and alienated that they continually deface the memorial to a man who left school at 13, educated himself and could hold his own in any company, no matter what their class or so-called ‘standing’ in society.
While not attaching any blame for these frequent attacks on the people of the north inner city, you have only to look around this city enclave to see that compared with similar areas on the south-side of the river Liffey, in my view it is a cultural wasteland. Those who attack ‘art’ are drawing attention to their own ignorance, because, as Luke Kelly understood, no one gave them an appreciation of it.
It is also possible that with the current debate around the cultural and political significance of statues and public monuments, those who threw paint over Luke Kelly were motivated to get in on the act. Through ignorance of his political and social activism, they are just picking on the wrong target.
Let us also remember his own lusty rendition of ‘Nelson’s Farewell’ glorifying the destruction of Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin on March 8, 1966, which included the following verse, written by ‘Galway’ Joe Dolan: In Trafalgar Square it might be fair
To leave old Nelson standing there
But no one tells the Irish what they’ll view.
Now the Dublin Corporation
Can stop deliberation
For the boys of Ireland showed them what to do!