Jimmy Kelly is the Irish Regional Secretary of the UNITE trade union.

He spent most of his working life at Waterford Crystal as a craftsman and then a workplace representative. He became an active lay member of what was the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union and took on his first full time role in the union movement following the merger of the ATGWU and Amicus in 2008. Jimmy is a passionate advocate of workers’ rights, not afraid to speak his mind, and represents the interests of nearly 100,000 union members across the island of Ireland. He sits on the Executive Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and has instigated court action seeking to force the Irish Government into enacting pension protection legislation which is shamefully lacking here.