Seamus Kelly was remembered as a “great figure” in Irish Times journalism at the unveiling of a bust in the Irish Times building on Tara Street last night. Kelly was an Irish Times drama critic and columnist, writing the Irishman’s Diary using the pseudonym Quidnunc. He died in 1979.
“He had a great love of Ireland,” his son Brian Kelly said. “ I think he did more than any journalist of his era . . . to promote and to share his love of the complete country.”
Irish Times deputy editor Denis Staunton said he hoped that by remembering Kelly, the paper could encourage “his vigour, his imagination, the breadth of his enthusiasm” and “above all, his excellence of writing” to inform what it did on a daily basis.
Kelly “embodied so much that’s best in the tradition of journalism in The Irish Times,” he added. “He was energetic, enthusiastic, witty, cultivated and engaged and he wrote magnificently.”
The bust by Kieron Kelly was given to ballet dancer Joan Denise Moriarty some years after his death, said Irish Times journalist John Moran, of the organising committee. After her death in 1992, it was bought from a Cork auction house by the newspaper. It was recently mounted on a new plinth.
Irish Times managing director Liam Kavanagh said the newspaper had a “fantastic history” and people like Kelly had brought it to where it was today.