Deirdre Kelly who died on February 16th, aged 61, was one of Dublin's greatest champions. She was born on May 15th, 1938, the eldest daughter of Molly and the late Thomas McMahon, and grew up on Upper Leeson Street, attending Scoil Bride and the Holy Faith Convent in Haddington Road.
She moved to the College of Commerce in Rathmines and the National College of Art before taking up a job at the National Museum doing pen-and-ink drawings of archaeological objects; later, she studied archaeology at UCD. Even those who knew her well were surprised to discover that she would have been 62 this year; nearly all of her friends and associates had mentally subtracted 10 years from her age, because she seemed so much a child of the 1960s. Yet she was already 31 at the time of the Hume Street occupation in 1969/1970. She first met her future husband, Aidan Kelly, from Ballaghadereen, Co Roscommon, in McDaid's pub on Harry Street in the late 1960s while he was studying at the School of Architecture in Bolton Street. They were married in 1970 and spent three months on honeymoon hitchhiking through Europe to Yugoslavia and Greece.
Their first home was a basement flat in Fitzwilliam Street, which became impossibly small and cluttered as their family expanded with the arrival of daughter Maeve and sons Diarmuid, Mahon and Hughie. It was from here she ran the Living City Group and its spirited campaigns against the depopulation of the inner city.
In 1979, when they moved to Old Mountpleasant, in Ranelagh, a next-door neighbour said to her: "Mrs Kelly, do you realise you're taking the last children out of this area?". True to form, she did a survey and found that in the entire southside Georgian core, from Holles Street Hospital to Leeson Street Bridge, there wasn't a single child left.
She will be remembered by everyone close to her as a bundle of energy, passion and commitment who threw herself into epic struggles from Hume Street to Wood Quay, as well as fighting battles against office development and road-widening schemes that damaged the fabric and communities of the city she loved.
Between 1979 and 1982, she published City Views, a lively newsletter highlighting dastardly plans for the city. In the same period, she was the author of Hands Off Dublin, which documented and denounced the corporation's road plans, and They're All Outta Step but Our Corpo, which showed what other cities were doing.
She was a radical, in the truest sense, in that her ideas and the stances she took were way ahead of their time. Twenty years ago, she was talking about cycle lanes, traffic calming, better public transport and living over the shop. There was little response at the time, but all of these things have since become part of public policy. Deirdre Kelly held out a candle for the city during one of its darkest periods; in a way, every new apartment block built in the inner city since the early 1990s is a tribute to her. She was also the guiding light of the Dublin Crisis Conference in 1986; the agenda it set in a time of bleak depression ultimately led to the repopulation of the inner city. In 1995, O'Brien Press published Four Roads to Dublin, her meticulously researched and illuminating history of her beloved Ranelagh, Rathmines and Leeson Street. She was close to finishing another book, dealing with the escapades of her uncle, when she was stricken by cancer. Her family hopes to complete it.
Deirdre Kelly is survived by her husband Aidan, daughter Maeve, sons Diarmuid, Mahon and Hugh, her mother Mollie, sisters and brother - and also by the inspiration she so effortlessly conveyed to many others to continue fighting the good fight for Dublin.
Deirdre Kelly: born 1938; died February, 2000