Speech on Receiving the Freedom of Limerick City and County
Milk Market, Limerick, 29th September 2014
Lord Mayor
Ministers
Members of the City and County Council
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen
I wish to thank the councillors of Limerick City and County Council for affording me this great honour as the first freeman of Limerick City and County. I am reminded here today of the many great Limerick civic leaders over the years – not least my friend and colleague Jim Kemmy who represented the people of Limerick, and especially the working people of this city with such passion and commitment for so many years. He was deeply committed to Limerick in all its aspects. He sought appropriate attention for Kate O’Brien and it was he who first introduced me to the McCourt brothers and The Cranberries, on whose behalf I recall Jim accepting a Hot Press award. Jim was once kind enough to include some of my own work in an anthology of Limerick poets which he edited and he is in my thoughts today.
At his funeral, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, one of our most distinguished historians, and a lifelong colleague and friend from our earliest days as students and temporary migrants, gave an ovation that recalled all of this so well.
Is lá fíor-speisialta an lá seo domsa mar Uachtarán ar Éirinn agus mar Luimníoch. Mar is eol go mór do dhaoine, chaith mé cuid mhór de m’óige cúpla míle siar ón tSionainn i gCo an Chláir, agus cuid mhaith de mo shaol aosach i nGaillimh, ach b’é san áit álainn seo, i gCathair an Chonartha, a tháinig mé ar an saol agus b’é in Eaglais Naomh Mainchín a baisteadh mé.
[This is a very special day for me as President of Ireland and for me as a Limerick man. As is well-known, I spent much of my childhood a few miles west of the Shannon in County Clare, and much of my adult life in Galway, but I was born here in this beautiful place, the Treaty City, and I was baptised in St. Munchin’s Church.]
My father had strong connections with the region of Limerick. My mother married my father in 1937 and moved from Liscarroll to Limerick. All of us children were born between 1932 and 1942, the opening years of the war.
During my childhood, our family moved through many parts of the city. At first, my father rented a premises as a pub in Little Catherine Street and later bought a pub at old number 3 Upper William Street. In the succeeding years, due to illness and the economic circumstances of the time, he, my mother and my sisters faced difficult times as he faced unemployment and my parents and my two sisters moved constantly between a number of rented flats in the city: the journey that began where we were all born in 27 Belfield Park, and went on through Upper Gerald Griffin Street, back to old number 7 Upper William Street, a retail miscalculation as people were on ration books, then on to 3 Landsdowne Gardens (otherwise known as the Burma Road), Laurel Villas, upstairs in 10 Coleraine Terrace, and finally, 24 Elm Place, Rathbane. My mother bought Annie Simpson’s books in O’Mahon’s bookshop.
Owing to my father’s illness, my brother and I had been brought from Limerick to our uncle and aunt’s home in Ballycar, Newmarket-on-Fergus in Co. Clare in August 1946. We were 5 and 4, and we visited Limerick from time to time, including visiting at times of excitement, such as the great Todd’s fire which changed the city.
I saw ‘The Knights of Castille’ in the Savoy, when Bedford Row had a choice of cinemas; and in my sensory memory are the smell of Shaw’s and the hardware exoticisms of Boyd’s and Spaight’s. I also recall the red-bricked elegance of Perry Square, shrine of the professions.
My brother John and one of my sisters, Kathleen, are here today with their families and it means a great deal to me that we can share this happy occasion in our city of origin, a city my parents loved. In my poetry collection there is much of Limerick.
I accept this honour today with great pleasure and humility, given as it is on behalf of all those who live in Limerick, and those who love and shout for Limerick whatever their circumstances, wherever they may be, and whatever the challenges they face in the city and county of their minds and hearts.
These are times of celebration in Limerick City of Culture but the times my parents lived here were hard times in Limerick for many families, as they are today for many families; but the character and the solidarity and care for each other among the people of this city is well reflected, for example, in the recent response to the flooding. I saw this first hand earlier this year, when I visited the King’s Island, but I saw too in St. Munchin’s and other communities the work being done for those affected by the flooding, and I congratulate them again today, as I do all those involved in tasks of regeneration, revival and inclusion.
I am also mindful today that this is a historic occasion in marking the recent coming together of Limerick City and County Councils. The division of the country into counties was of course an English initiative – indeed it was King John, whose name is still invoked in this city who established the Shire of Limerick in the 12th century.
Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that our counties have developed their own personality and character over the centuries. The County of Limerick has its natural centre of gravity here at the City, with the bounds of the plain of Limerick being drawn by the Mullaghareirks to the West, the Galtees and Ballyhouras to the South and the Silvermines and Slieve Felims to the East – Slieve Felims with which I was made familiar from my earliest visits to Murroe and Glenstal with Brother Anthony.
The county boundaries are fluid of course and I am happy to observe that Limerick has always enjoyed happy relations with its neighbours – a state of harmony usually only interrupted by the Munster Championship. We have happily become accustomed once again to seeing the green and white of Limerick frequent Croke Park during the summer with the revival of Mick Mackey’s game in the county. Limerick football has been making steady progress, and of course there is, quite appropriately, a Limerick man in charge of the Munster Rugby team.
Limerick FC are well established in the top level of Irish football and will soon return to the Markets’ Field – the place where I went to see my first soccer match. In this sporting capital of Ireland, sport is a beating pulse of the community and the omens for success have never been better.
Níl cathair ar bith in Éirinn atá suite chomh hámharach sin nó in áit chomh hálainn sin is atá Cathair Luimnígh, le tailte méithe timpeall uirthi i mbéal na haibhne moiré náisiúnta seo ‘gainne. Leis na blianta cairbreacha tharraing an suíomh idéalach seo Lochlannaigh, Normannaigh agus aíonna agus ionróirí eile gan áireamh. Tá sé go beo i m’aigne i mbliana gurb é seo comóradh míle bliain d’éag Bhriain Boróimhe, Rí Mór na nDal gCais, a rinne, cé gur Clairíneach é, Luimneach a thógáil ar ais ó na Lochlannaigh.
[No city in Ireland is as fortuitously or scenically located as Limerick, surrounded by rich fertile lands and at the mouth of our great national river. Over the centuries this ideal location has attracted Vikings, Normans and countless other guests and invaders. I am conscious that this year is the 1000th anniversary of the death of Brian Boru, the great leader of the Dál gCais, who, though a Clare man, took Limerick back from the Norse.]
This is a lush region of the country, with the river dominating the landscape. During my time in office as Minister in the 1990s, I was privileged to have the opportunity of promoting the improvement of our canal system and the completion of the works which restored access from the sea to the canal system. I am happy to say that the role of the Shannon and the linked canals in attracting visitors to our country has grown steadily since that time, making Limerick an ever more important focus for Ireland’s tourism sector.
Today is a double celebration for me, as I also have the opportunity to visit Limerick City of Culture, of which I am patron. Earlier this morning, I met with the Board and officials of the City of Culture and later this afternoon I will be meeting many of the projects which have been supported under the Made in Limerick strand of the City of Culture Programme. I have been impressed and delighted by the wonderful success of this year of culture, including of course the recently triumphant arrival of Royal Deluxe and their Giant Saga. As Ireland’s first national City of Culture you have led the way and set a very high standard for other cities to follow.
Back in the 1990s, as the first Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, I had many positive encounters with Limerick and was happy to be involved in helping to acknowledge and grow the cultural traditions of the city, including the transfer of the Irish Chamber Orchestra to the University of Limerick. Over the intervening years, I have visited the University of Limerick on many occasions, including its Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies, and it has been an immense pleasure to witness the growth and development of the University of Limerick, which has given so much to the city and the region.
As Minister with responsibility for broadcasting, I was also involved in establishing Lyric FM, which later moved to Limerick, and it is wonderful today to see the wonderful facilities for music and performing arts which have been developed in the University and in the city. The phenomenal success of the Cranberries shows the full breadth of Limerick’s musical life, which is being enriched further by the programme of the City of Culture.
And of course, I am looking forward, as I know you all are, to the performance of my good friend Micheál O’Súilleabháin and his ensemble which will follow this ceremony. Not just the city and county have benefitted from the leaven that the musical community contributes, beyond the boundaries that community has enriched rural and urban life.
The long tradition of Limerick in the visual arts is equally impressive, going back at least as far as one of our greatest national painters Sean Keating, whose portrait of Dr. Noel Browne, painted in 1951, hangs in my study. That tradition has been centred over recent decades in your world renowned Art and Design School. The people of Limerick are rightly proud of the many artists, including the great John Shinnors, all those artists who learned their skills at the School under the mentorship of my good friend Jack O’Donovan, a great artist in his own right who sadly passed away this year.
As to the writer’s words in literature, Limerick has produced the unique and radical talent of Kate O’Brien – and the Glucksman Library at the University of Limerick holds an important collection of her writing. Through Frank and Malachy McCourt you have presented us with important, and at times controversial, versions of our history. More recently, your own Kevin Barry has given us a powerful dystopian vision of a future Limerick, a vision which subverts any taken for granted smugness or indifference and which poses challenging questions about the values of our present. Among the poets are the Liddys, James and John, and the indefatigable poets and their supporters of the White House.
In all of this cultural expression, a distinctive Limerick energy and vibrancy can be found; a fearlessness which generates a challenge to accepted forms and ideas. This energy can be seen also in the work of your great actor Richard Harris, your great broadcaster Terry Wogan (both I know freemen of the City of Limerick), and more recently in your comedians, actors, filmmakers, and musicians.
To conclude, I must give a special mention to another Limerick man who recently left us – the incomparable and truly international poet Desmond O’Grady. And may I finish with one of his poems about his home place:
A Song Of Limerick Town
for Annette Reeves
We, in the fishblue hours
Of clockstrike early morning;
Sleep in the househuddled doors
Of our eyes, love in our yawning;
Stole through the sailorless streets
Of the still, caught-cuddling town,
Where seabedded fishing fleet sleeps
Fast in the arms of ‘Down
Anchors, all hands ashore.’
And now, here with the bulk
Of our talk from the hours before,
Here with the sulking hulks
Of ships, when no bells fore
Or aft will bang in the ears
Of morning and the town clock
Hoarsely churns its gears.
We are made one. I
With the man of the Limerick town
And you with the Shannon stream;
Made one till all doing is done.
Míle buíchas as ucht an ghradaim seo agus guím gach beannacht ar bhur n-iarrachtaí, ní hamháin don bhliain seo ach don todhchaí.
Beir beannacht,
Go raibh maith agaibh.