[2] 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.

Although it is his publishing debut it was not the first novel he wrote,[3] and he had written for the stage, his play Brownbread being produced by Passion Machine, a theatre company with a special interest in working-class Dublin stories, in 1987.

[7] 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.

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.

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.

The line "the Irish are the blacks of Europe" is one of the most famous in the book,[7] and has been described as "the equivalent for the Celtic Tiger of de Valera's homage to comely maidens speech in the 1940s".

Kirkus Reviews wrote: "Brash, human, smoothly executed, and seemingly authentic, full of youth, energy, and good humor, this is a quintessential garage-band romance—and a fine and promising debut".

There are some differences between the book and film, the most obvious being that the novel was composed mostly of dialogue, with hardly any physical description; the movie concentrated much more on the collapse of Dublin's inner city.

The Commitments is a 1991 comedy-drama film directed by Alan Parker with a screenplay adapted by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, and Doyle himself.