To us he was just Uncle Luke
Music, culture and sport meet at a festival in honour of folk legend Luke Kelly in Dublin’s Smithf ield Square
LUKE KELLY would be ‘mortified’ about a festival celebrating his legacy in Dublin this weekend, according to his beloved niece who is helping organise the event.
The Luke Kelly Festival in Smithfield Square, now marking its second year, sees music, culture and sport meet in the legendary folk singer’s name.
Kelly’s niece, Paula McCann, who will MC today’s proceedings, told the Irish Mail on Sunday how the ‘very modest’ founder of The Dubliners would be bemused by ‘two statues and a bridge, a commemorative coin, and now a two-day festival’, all in his honour.
‘He’d be absolutely mortified,’ she laughed. ‘He’d be saying “What’s all the fuss about?”’
The festival caters to all generations and interests, with visitors enjoying activities from a five-string banjo workshop for beginners (Kelly’s chosen instrument) to a football area – ‘because Luke was football mad and I think fancied himself as a footballer,’ Ms McCann explained.
‘So all his passions and interests are being represented.’
The iconic singer’s love of sport is one of Ms McCann’s abiding memories of her uncle, who would watch whatever match was on and who instilled a love of cricket in her brother, also called Luke.
‘We weren’t aware of how famous he was,’ she recalled. ‘And he spent a lot of time with my grandmother when [The Dubliners] weren’t travelling, so we would have spent a lot of time with him.’
Ms McCann said that, to them, their ‘very loving uncle’ was ‘Uncle Luke first and foremost, like Uncle John and Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Paddy.
‘He was part of a devoted family and wasn’t treated as anybody special. He would come up for the dinner and chit-chat. We didn’t see him as being famous – he was just our uncle Luke.’
While she couldn’t pinpoint where Kelly’s ‘unique voice’ came from, Ms McCann said there ‘wasn’t a day went by without some singing’ in his family home at Sheriff Street, near where Vera Klute’s marble sculpture of the singer stands today.
‘My grandfather sang from the time he got up in the morning till the time he went to bed at night and older people that would have known him would say “Your grandfather was an absolute gentleman and was always singing.”
‘The singing was part and parcel of family life,’ she said.
The family were moved to Whitehall after a fire at their flat and the north Dublin suburb seemed ‘like the countryside’ to the ‘real inner-city heads’.
Ms McCann said: ‘When The Dubliners achieved fame and were off travelling, Luke would come home and always went down to Sheriff Street to see his old friends and neighbours. He had an absolute and utter connection with that place.’
The eldest of 10 grandchildren stemming from the singer’s parents, Luke and Julia, Ms McCann welled up as she recalled a ‘very poignant memory’ from a hometown Dubliners show attended by many of Kelly’s family members towards the end of his life.
‘My oldest auntie, Mona, had hearing issues and was sitting in one of the boxes, while the rest of us were down in the audience,’ she recalled. ‘And – I’ll never ever forget this – he was coming off the stage and he turned around to Mona. He turned around and lifted his banjo up to her in the box.’
It was Mona who had first brought Luke to céilithe and she was a member of the Marian Arts Society, a drama group on Sheriff Street that Luke later acted in.
‘That’s where he learned his love of performing and that’s where he would have started as a kid,’ Ms McCann said. ‘It was Auntie Mona who introduced him to that and it was kind of an homage to her. I can still see him holding up his banjo to her, because at that point he probably knew that he was sicker than people had realised.’
Her mother Bessie, one of the last two of Kelly’s five brothers and sisters who are still alive, says a ‘piece of the heart of the family was broken when Luke passed’, Ms McCann said.
She said an encounter at last year’s Luke Kelly festival – when a parent said their four-year-old sings along to Kelly’s songs – helped reinforce to her how universal his appeal remains.
‘It’s just mind-boggling and I suppose
‘We are truly in awe of how much he is loved’
from a family perspective, we are truly in awe of how much he is loved and how much that love bridges across the generations.’
Ms McCann described an ‘eternal quality’ to Kelly’s voice.
‘He could have sung back with the druids. He had one of those haunting, beautiful, pure voices. It is the voice that kind of jolts you, when you hear the first few bars of Raglan Road and think “Oh my God, that is unique.”’
Performers on today’s programme include George Murphy, Ger O’Donnell and Trevor Sexton, while craft sessions include maracas making and record sleeve design.
Also today Donal Fallon, author, historian and host of the Three Castles Burning podcast, will sit down with writer Jimmy Murphy to discuss ‘Baggotonia’ – Dublin’s bohemian quarter in the mid-20th century.