Friday, 20 April 2012

There Was An Aul Fella From Oxford...


The road from Waterford is peppered with towns which are famous for one reason or another. Wexford and Cashel are where the cheeses come from; Tipperary is where the sweetest girl I know comes from; and Limerick is where the five-line poem comes from. Well, it may be.
 It’s definitely where Frank McCourt, author of “Angela’s Ashes” came from. I haven’t read the book or seen the film, but Lameys House, where rooms in the McCourt family home have been recreated by Onah Heaton, gives a strong sense of the incredible poverty and hardship of 1930’s Limerick. The building used to be the school where young McCourt studied until he was 13 - the walls are covered in maps where Yugoslavia is still a country; a dunce’s table faces the corner of the room; and a thin, springy can lies ominously on the teacher’s desk . As I leave Onah gives me a fragment of the building as a souvenir and I muse that, apart from the work, seeing gems like this is what touring is all about.
And that respectable middle-aged ladies say “feck” and awful lot in Limerick.

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