Luke Kelly was born on November 17, 1940 to a working class family near the Five Lamps area of Dublin, where in the words of his sister Betty, the family lived in ‘poverty of the utmost’, sharing communal toilets and taps with eight other families. By all accounts, Luke was a good student, an avid reader, and gave and received his fair share of knocks and bruises on the playing field for Home Farm FC and his local GAA club. Like many Irish people in the 1950s, Luke left school at a young age, and survived for the next few years of his life doing various menial jobs.

The bleak economic realities of 1950s Ireland saw Luke emigrate to England in 1957 to work alongside his brother Paddy as a steel fixer on a building site where, not long into the job, Luke was apparently fired for demanding better pay and conditions for the workers. He eked out a living by odd-jobing, where the work varied from cleaning lavatories to selling hoovers door-to-door. His initial years in England were that of an itinerant worker spending most of his time in Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Birmingham or wherever available work would take him.

Luke’s entrance on the musical stage after 1960 stemmed from his interest and involvement in the folk scene that was witnessing a resurgence in this period in folk clubs throughout England. With banjo in hand, he displayed a tremendous interest in discovering and mesmerizing folk songs from throughout Britain and Ireland and injecting life into them with his own unique and unforgettable voice.

Some of these songs which he popularized would go on to be seen as Irish ballads when in fact their origin and story lay elsewhere, a notable example included Ewan McCall’s Dirty Old Town which was an English folk song about Salford. Seeing an opportunity to return home and find work during the ballad boom in Ireland in the early 1960s, Luke returned home in 1962 after over four years in England.

O’Donoghue’s Pub on Merrion Row would be the setting that would bring together the people whose musical skills, energy and distinction would take a lead in putting Irish folk music onto the world stage. The pub already had a reputation as a session house, but it was its role in bringing together the likes of Ronnie Drew, ‘Banjo’ Barney McKenna and Luke Kelly followed later by Ciaran Bourke and John Sheahan that guaranteed its place in Irish folk history. But in 1964, Luke left the group for a period of two years in which he honed his talents under the watchful eye of Ewan McCall in London – an experience he would later view as a sort of apprenticeship for better things to come.

He also got married to Deirdre O’Connell, an American singer and actress during this period. The late 1960s would see the group really hit the international stage with hits such as the controversial Seven Drunken Nights, The Black Velvet Band, and a performance of Muirsheen Durkin on the hugely popular Ed Sullivan Show in the US in 1968.

By now the Dubliners were a household name in Ireland and enjoyed tremendous support in numerous countries throughout the world. The hectic scheduling and party lifestyle, however, took its toll. Luke’s marriage to Deirdre ended as a result, and close friends had by now expressed concern about his drinking.

The Dubliners, however, were later injected with even more energy when composer, Phil Coulter joined their management team. It was under Coulter’s influence that Luke would sing two of his most memorable songs Scorn Not His Simplicity and The Town I Loved So Well - songs that illustrated both his compassion for the less fortunate and his concern for the turbulent events that were wreaking havoc in the North.

By the turn of new decade, Luke and the Dubliners had done more to revitalise and re-invigorate Irish folk music and place on the world stage than any other group. It was not to last however and the beginning of Luke’s gradual exit from this life began when, after complaining of headaches for some time, he collapsed during a concert at the Cork Opera House on June 30, 1980. Diagnosed with a brain tumour and operated upon, he continued to tour with the Dubliners. He also gave up drinking for a few years in the hope of speeding a full recovery.

The failure of the medical treatment to prevent his decline however became apparent by the fact that he was more frequently forgetting lyrics from songs he had sung all his life, felt increasingly weaker and was forced to leave the stage during concerts on the continent in the autumn of 1983.

By this stage, Luke could no longer tour and flew back to his beloved Dublin for another operation and he spent Christmas with his family but was taken into hospital again in the New Year, where he died on 30 January 1984. Kelly's funeral in Whitehall attracted thousands of mourners from across Ireland.

A balladeer, musician and political activist, Kelly’s ability to sing ‘his heart out’ with ‘perfect diction’ in the words of Bono and the late Ronnie Drew bear testimony to the gift of his irreplaceable voice to stir and move the most hardened of souls with song and sentiment.

It is an illustration of his pride for his humble origins that Luke Kelly, a man of so many songs and words, now lies in peace in Glasnevin Cemetery where his headstone bears the simple words:

Luke Kelly -‘Dubliner’.