Warm tributes were paid yesterday to Ms Deirdre Kelly, the conservationist and environmental campaigner who has died, aged 61. One of the staunchest defenders of Dublin's heritage, the mother of four championed conservation projects since the 1970s and was once described as "the conscience of the city".
Ms Kelly was prominent during the 1970s in the Wood Quay marches and the sit-in and street protests over the demolition of Georgian buildings off St Stephen's Green, which became known as the Battle for Hume Street.
The author of two books on conservation and traffic issues in Dublin, she is survived by her husband, architect Mr Aidan Kelly, children Maeve, Diarmuid, Mahon and Hughie, her mother Molly, two sisters and a brother.
Ms Kelly was born and grew up on Leeson street and her happy city upbringing informed her campaign to prevent city communities being broken up to make way for commercial developments. She took part in the six-month sit-in in Georgian buildings in Dublin's Hume Street which marked a crossroads in the campaign to save Dublin's heritage. The protest was over plans by Green Property Company to demolish the buildings to make way for offices.
The protest ended in June 1970 when demolition men broke into the houses and beat those inside, demolished the roof and wrecked the interiors. Dubliners and politicians were galvanised and the developers agreed to develop the site, but to retain the facades of the original houses.
Ms Kelly founded the Living City Group in the early 1970s to promote the conservation and development of central Dublin "as the living heart of a capital city". In 1973, she unsuccessfully took the Minister for Local Government and the governor of the Bank of Ireland to court in an attempt to prevent the bank demolishing houses to extend its Lower Baggot Street premises.
In 1986 she helped organise the Dublin Crisis Conference, a gathering of 100 groups who shared a common concern for the city.
Ten years earlier, she had highlighted the threatened destruction of the city to make way for commuter traffic in her book Hands Off Dublin. Four Roads to Dublin, a history of Ranelagh, Rathmines and Leeson Street, was published in 1995.
Friends and colleagues of Ms Kelly paid touching tributes yesterday to her generosity, fighting spirit and pioneering conservation work at a time when the planning blight was at its height.
PProf Kevin B. Nowlan, who worked with her in the Dublin Civic Group, said her death was a great loss. "She had a great awareness all the time that a city is about the people who live in it and not just buildings. It was that ability to see the whole thing in the round that was great about her." Senator David Norris, who was involved in the Dublin Crisis Conference, described Ms Kelly as a very brave spirit. He said she would have "put the fear of God into Taoisigh and city managers and God know's who else because they knew she was someone who was motivated by principle and wouldn't give up".
Ms Carmencita Hederman, a former Lord Mayor of Dublin and a friend, said she had played a "vital role in raising peoples' awareness of conservation and architectural issues in the city". "She was a real little terrier once she got hold of something. She used to bombard me with letters when I was a councillor."
The publisher of her two books, Mr Michael O'Brien from O'Brien Press, said Ms Kelly was pleased that people were now inhabiting inner city areas. "She was quite pleased that people had moved back into the city and that areas had been pedestrianised. She would have felt that some of her battles paid off."