Obituary: Jim Kemmy

Jim Kemmy, stone-mason, trade unionist, politician and historian: born Limerick 9 September 1936; Editor, Old Limerick Journal 1979-97; TD (MP) for Limerick East 1981-82, 1987-97; Mayor of Limerick 1991-92, 1995-96; Chairman, Irish Labour Party 1993-97; died Dublin 25 September 1997.

As an atheist in Ireland's most conspicuously Catholic city, and an opponent of ardent Republicanism at the height of the Troubles, Jim Kemmy never ran away from a battle. But, though vilified by opponents on issues from Northern Ireland to abortion to contraception, he survived to become the conscience of the Irish Left.

Personal qualities of warmth and integrity, and pronouncements, on national radio or in the warmth of a small bar, couched in a deep rumbling Limerick dialect so thick it could sound like provincial French, attracted fierce loyalty. His power-base in working-class Limerick was built on his close affinity with constituents on low incomes and on welfare. Though he was a self-educated intellectual and respected historian, his own experience lay in the school of hard knocks.

His father's early death from tuberculosis meant that he had to leave school at 15 for an apprenticeship to support his four siblings. Poverty had earlier forced all 14 of his mother's brothers and sisters to emigrate. Completing his apprenticeship as a stone-mason (following several generations of the family into the trade) in 1957, Kemmy earlier had been sacked for asking for a 3d-an-hour rise and, after spells without work, he left for three years on London building sites, a period which saw him devour left- wing literature from Marx to James Connolly and Jim Larkin.

His political involvement began in trade unions. He was secretary of Limerick's branch of the Brick and Stonelayer's Union from 1960, and headed the Limerick Building Trades Group from 1968. Joining Labour in 1963, he served on its national council while also being President of the Limerick Trades Council. He quit the party in 1972 with 38 colleagues after it failed to censure its local TD (MP) for condoning the 1904 anti-Semitic pogrom in the city.

Other battles were with the draconian Catholicism practised by the local archbishop, and with republicans (often through his Limerick Socialist magazine), whose H-Block hunger strikers he openly challenged, a brave move amid the heated atmosphere of 1981.

That year Kemmy achieved national prominence when elected to the Dail as an independent socialist. He first backed Garret Fitzgerald's promise of constitutional reform, then brought the coalition down in 1982 over John Bruton's "budget of the little feet" levying VAT on children's shoes and clothes and cutting food subsidies.

Pilloried by the Catholic establishment locally for backing contraception and divorce (the city has a long history of right-wing Catholicism based on lay confraternities), Kemmy lost his seat in 1982. During the vitriolic anti-abortion campaign of 1983 when he opposed attempts to insert what was aimed to be a permanent bar on abortion in the Irish Constitution, he came under fierce attack from clergy and the main local newspaper, which damned him as "an abortionist".

Forming the "post- nationalist" left-wing Democratic Socialist Party, he regained the seat in 1987, holding it in three subsequent general elections. He rejoined Labour in 1990, encouraging a wider collaboration within the Left. His principled judgements on the less virtuous national figures such as the former Taoiseach Charles Haughey carried a Moses-like gravity. Fellow Limerick TDs such as Fianna Fail's diminutive Willie O'Dea would wince when Kemmy spotted that their local rebellions against party whips softened by the time they reached the seat of power. "It's no use being Mighty Mouse in the constituency and then just a church mouse in the Dail," he quipped.

Kemmy's grandfatherly attention to constituents' smallest problems won deep affection. This figure was obvious during an election canvass with him in 1992, ambling through bleak concrete local authority estates. Repeatedly party workers would call him down the road because another elderly woman "wants a wave from Jim".

He had few personal enemies, but still revelled in the repartee, the rough and tumble of politics. One evening as we drove beside the city quays beside the River Shannon he stopped the car beside a poster for his Fianna Fail (FF) rivals so, with obvious glee, he could show us the "666" inscribed by unnamed opponents across the face of the then Taoiseach Albert Reynolds.

Weeks later Kemmy was, ironically, to play a key role in shifting the previously strongly anti-FF Labour rank and file into a new alliance in government with that very party. It was argued that social reforming elements in FF such as Bertie Ahern, now Taoiseach, held more in common with Labour than their Fine Gael former partners by now led by Bruton.

Kemmy, in a persuasive but typically blunt speech favouring realpolitik, told a special Labour conference deciding the issue. "We would all like to be on the side of the angels. But there are very few of them out there."

The same logic, that the important thing was to help "your own people", drove him in 1993 to accept Reynolds's plan for a widely criticised tax amnesty for those who had salted undeclared income outside the state.

Kemmy the historian and editor of the heavyweight annual Old Limerick Journal was deeply concerned with the complexity of events that forged Ireland's northern sectarian divide from the Williamite period on. He was enthusiastic supporter of the ground-breaking "Kings in Conflict" exhibition, shedding a fresh light on the wider international influences that helped shape the modern Irish political landscape.

One of his last cultural acts was to edit a much-praised volume, The Limerick Anthology, highlighting the quality of Limerick writers. One of them, the best-selling Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, said that amid the controversy over the accuracy of his unflinching memoir of Limerick disease, alcoholism and child mortality Kemmy was one of only two people whose opinion he really valued. Some locals had vociferously claimed McCourt had exaggerated the deprivation.

Kemmy, speaking in August, argued the book was all too true of that lowest stratum of charity-dependent unemployed families verging on destitute in the Thirties and Forties. Indeed, he made clear, there had, among those with 12 or 13 children, been many even worse off.