Limerick Stories

I write this, perhaps the last entry in the Irelandiary, from the aft cabin on the topsail ketch Hawaiian Chieftain. This is extremely exciting and somewhat dulls the pain of no longer living in Cork. Granted, I don’t have a permanent address to replace Cork yet, as this topsail ketch tends to move around a little bit and I don’t yet have a place to live when I go back to school in the fall. Thus, number twelve Grattan street continues to be my spiritual address.

But to Limerick we do go!

Ever since setting foot on Eirann's shore back in January, I had desperately wanted to attend a GAA sporting event. The GAA is the Gaelic Athletic Association, the body that governs the national Irish sports of hurling, Gaelic football, and a few others for both men and women. Its history is delightfully significant but this thing here will do a better job of explaining it than I will. Anyway, my one attempt to find a hurling game in Cork back in March went quite awry, and Allison and I found ourselves on a night train to the thriving Cork suburb of Knocknaheeney (colloquially "knocka"), home of software manufacturing plants and roving bands of adolescent hooligans, as night fell. The hurling match was not, in fact, in Knocka, and we had taken the wrong bus.

Now it was May and I was getting worried that I'd be after leaving Ireland without having sat in some damp bleachers, shouting "Corcaigh abu!" until I was hoarse whilst wearing a commemorative scarf. So, with the last of my brilliant trip-planning prowess, I hatched a strategic journey to Limerick to kill five or six or seven birds with one cheap stone.

Not only was the city of Limerick, a few hours North of Cork, hosting the quarter finals for Gaelic football on this particular weekend, it was (and still is, I'd wager) home to a number of things I had wanted to see for many months. Foremost is the fact that Angela's Ashes, the heart-rending, blackly humorous memoir of the eminent Frank McCourt is primarily set there. In my independent study of Irish literature, Angela's Ashes was compulsory reading and it moved me quite to tears; five stars, highly recommend it, although it's not for the faint of heart. I wanted to see all the McCourtian things in Limerick, namely the museum dedicated to his memory, and Match Weekend presented the perfect opportunity. Lesser Limerick attractions include the oft-sung walls of Limerick, King John's castle, and the stone upon which the Treaty of Limerick was signed. Limerick is also dominated by the broad majestic Shannon river, and gazing upon Ireland's powerhouse is never a bad thing. These are the sorts of things that interest me.

Thus, I gathered a ragtag band of companions and we met up at Parnell Place station in      Cork, ready to ship ourselves up to Limerick.

Once again the weather smiled down upon us and we had nary a stormcloud to bother us- the day was brisk with mixed cloud cover, but perfect for rambling. We set about patrolling the far reaches of Limerick town as we waited for the McCourt museum to open and got to see the castle and walls on King's Island and walk the graveyard at Saint Mary's cathedral. Both of these remain from the Norman conquest of Ireland and lend their solid, impenetrable bulk to Limerick's skyline.

The treaty stone, so named because the aptly named Treaty of Limerick was said to be signed on it, was once a mounting block. It's a great big chunk of limestone set up along the Shannon river and it was on this stone that the Williamite, Protestant faction in the Williamite wars signed into law an agreement with the defeated Jacobite Catholics stating that Catholic emancipation would be grated if said Catholics would swear loyalty to William and Mary of Orange. The treaty ended up being nullified by a fractious Irish Parliament (and by this we mean English-in-Ireland, not native Irish) which instead added bulk to the restrictive Penal Laws. That stone also saw the short-lived Soviet of Limerick's two-week attempt to assert independence in 1919, during the Irish rebellion against crown rule. Now it gets to rest by the river, watching rowing teams and swans glide past.  The stone has seen Limerick earn its motto of “Urbs antiqua fuit studisque asperrima belli (An ancient city well studied in the arts of war)”

Which is quite the motto to have.

After lunch we made tracks for the museum, which promised further amusement while we waited to go to the match.

In Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt likens Limerick to a dank, freezing hell, one that (spoilers ahead!) claims the lives of his family members and friends and generally makes everyone within its bounds utterly miserable and trapped in a cycle of poverty. While it has surely changed greatly in the eighty years since McCourt's miserable boyhood, particularly thanks to the multiple millions pumped into its improvement at the beginning of this millennium upon its designation as a city of culture, it was still hard to reconcile the somewhat sleepy Saturday city with the damned setting for this quote:

“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”  

Studying with Frank

The McCourt museum is housed in the old Leamy school for boys, where Frank himself attended school. The bottom story is fitted to look like a classroom of the nineteen thirties and the upper floors have been made to represent the McCourt home on little Barrington lane. This upper section is understandably squalid.

I won’t bore you with the gory details of the Frank McCourt museum and must simply rail at you to go read the book. I will, however, mention the exceedingly clever diversion that the museum owners installed for bored children whose parents were busy cooing over Pulitzer prizes and old photographs: it’s a portraiture easel, made so that the artist can draw with an expo marker the likeness of whoever sits on the couch before the board.

We had inordinate amounts of fun with this easel. The Frank McCourt museum is heavy stuff; lots of death. Lots of alcoholism. Lots of squalor. Lots of unfortunate business with which one must glance with a stern and melancholy face. However, Frank himself seems to have taken all of this with as much good humor as one can considering the circumstances, and I don’t think he would have disapproved of the lovely likenesses we crafted on the easel.

After the museum we made our way to the bus stop from which we would ride the Limerick city flier out to the Gaelic Games pitch. We were early; there were many cute pubs, one of which we chose to sit in and people watch, enjoying Irish coffees as wholesome lads took the grandparents out for drinks. It was extremely idyllic.

The bus dropped us off quite a ways from the stadium and we got to see some of Limerick’s outlying new developments, including the massive Thromond rugby stadium and the largest mall I had seen in over five months. I don’t think I was expecting Limerick to be quite so American-looking; Cork retains much of its maritime character, Dublin is unquestionably Dublin, and the other cities throughout the island I’d visited were distinctly European. Limerick’s outskirts may have been found around any rural American city and featured convenience stores, fruit stands, and grassy vacant lots. They were pleasant through which to walk on our way to the stadium. The way was peopled with Limerick fans attired in exclusively green and white, shouting “Luimneach abu!” and waving their large team flags about. There was even an overenthusiastic youth waving his Limerick flag for three hours straight and shouting himself hoarse. It was probably good that nobody in my group wore our red-and-white togs (red for the blood, white for the bandages; Cork has a flare for the dramatic) for we would have been the vast minority surging towards the stadium.

Inside the seating was covered and the turnout massive. Still, only half of the seats were filled. The Irish take sports seriously and the crowd was overwhelmingly green and white. There were, however, a couple of massive elderly gents wearing head-to-toe red-and-white, wrapped up to the jowls in commemorative scarves and jerseys. Themselves and our small contingent of Rebels were the only cheerers for the leaping, sprinting, prancing players of the Cork Senior Gaelic Football team.

This fact did nothing to change the fact that Cork’s players were gods of the football pitch, handing Limerick their rear ends on a silver platter. It was, to make an understatement, a rout. A debacle. Poor Limerick’s players and fans were a spirited opponent but they stood not a chance. There were two games that evening and though we could not stay for the entirety of the second we got to hear its live broadcast on the bus back to Cork.

It stays light preposterously late during an Irish spring, and it was sunset when we rolled back into Cork. The sun was dancing on the Lee, sparking off steeples, and making dramatic rays of light through the scattered clouds. It was an extremely poetical end to a lovely day in a city I was expecting to be much more depressing than it was. We have Limerick’s qualification as City of Culture and the millions of euro given it in for infrastructural repairs to thank for this. I’m sure Frank McCourt would be pleased about this.

Now I’ve had a long and exciting day of sailing; it included fires on shore, rapid wind shifts, full deckloads of passengers, and lightning. It was very fun but I am drowsy and know that you don’t want to hear me ramble on about Limerick incoherently any more than I do. With that, I leave you expecting some sort of truly sad goodbye blog post.

Also on this sail, as I was up at the top of the dock, checking the good folks of the Tricities in for their boarding cards, I was delivering my usual speech about the differences between the Lady Washington and Hawaiian Chieftain, giving instructions regarding proper boarding procedure, and warning members of the public about our lack of bathrooms when one couple asked me where I was from.

I responded with “Boise, Idaho,” and they exchanged confused looks.

“We thought you were from Europe somewhere,” they said. “England maybe, or Ireland.”

I was quite pleased indeed.