Early Life
Luke Kelly was born into a labouring class family in Lattimore Cottages, 1 Sheriff Street, a quarter of a mile from Dublin's main thoroughfare, O'Connell Street. His grandmother, who was a McDonald from Scotland, lived with the family until her death in 1953. His father worked all his life in Jacob's biscuit factory and enjoyed playing football. Both Luke and his brother Paddy played club Gaelic football and Association football as children.
He attended the Laurence O'Toole School as a child, and achieved very good grades in most subjects. In 1953 the Dublin Corporation moved the family to Larkhill near Whitehall when their flat was destroyed in a fire, but he continued to attend O'Toole's by taking a bus there every day. Luke left school at thirteen and after four years of odd-jobbing, he went to England in 1958. Working at steel fixing with his brother Paddy on a building site in Wolverhampton, he was sacked after asking for more money. He worked odd jobs from oil barrel cleaning to vacuum salesman.
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“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
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