The band slowly becomes more and more musically competent and draws bigger and more enthusiastic audiences. Tensions run high between the band members, not helped by the jealousy and animosity Joey receives from other male members due to the attention he receives from the female backing singers. Bringing soul music to Ireland is then reduced merely to the city. In the beginning, Jimmy includes all of the country Ireland, but later realises that the culchies have everything whereas the Dubliners are the working-class and have nothing. With music fanatic Jimmy Rabbite as their manager, the Commitments seek to fulfil their goal of bringing soul to Dublin. They quickly start learning how to play their instruments and perform a number of local gigs.

Eventually, he gets together a mismatched group with seemingly no musical talent, led by mysterious stranger Joey 'The Lips' Fagan, who claims to have played trumpet with Joe Tex and the Four Tops. Jimmy places an ad in the local paper reading 'Have you got soul? Then Dublin's hardest working band is looking for you'. He witnesses a young man singing drunkenly into a microphone at a friend's wedding and is struck by the fact he is singing 'something approximating music'. After this, Rabbitte gets rid of their name, making them 'The Commitments' (stating 'All the good 60s bands started with a 'the'') and, most importantly, forming them from another synthpop group into the face of what he thinks will be the Dublin- Soul revolution ('Yes, Lads.

He accepts graciously, but only if he can make fundamental changes to the group, the first being the sacking of the third, and mutually disliked, member - their synth player. To solve this problem, they recruit a friend they'd had from school, Jimmy Rabbitte, to be their manager. Two friends - Derek Scully and 'Outspan' Foster - get together to form a band, but soon realise that they don't know enough about the music business to get much further than their small neighbourhood in the Northside of Dublin. The first episode in The Barrytown Trilogy, it is about a group of unemployed young people in the north side of Dublin, Ireland, who start a soul band. The Commitments (1987) (originally to be called The Partitions ) is a novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle.

The commitments by roddy doyle