old illustrations of limerick

• Limerick 1651 Map and Booklet ~ John Elliott

Junior, how did the launch of this publication go? Where can one get a copy of it, as neither the Civic Trust nor O’Mahony’s have it listed on their web sites yet?

I bought my copy of the map & booklet over Christmas for 40 euro by calling into the Bishops palace ( home of Limerick Civic trust) – worth every cent… I think there were only a 100 printed – phone call or an email them to see if they have some left..061 313 399 info@limerickcivictrust.ie

Great to see Limerick City getting that level of historical attention
. . . . . . gunter will have a lot of reading to do to catch up I suspect.

@CologneMike wrote:

Hmmm . . . . Gunter, though I have yet to see them, I have a feeling that they could be still ignoring the tall Dutch-gabled houses built in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries around Limerick.

surely not. As soon as I get my hands on a copy, we’ll run it under the microscope and hold a bitching session, if needs be.

Well done CologneMike for identifying that 5 bay, early-Georgian, as 11 + 12 Broad Street:)

So this is essentially the same view

The Chinese shop at no. 12 looks like a total rebuild, but the red shop at no. 11 could well be the two storey remnant of the original structure.

Very interesting

It’s almost impossible to look back at old photos of Limerick without a sense of acute disappointment and a feeling of what might have been!

In this case it’s hard to believe that those images above are actually of Broad Street. Especially when you consider the dump that it is today! Back then the street looked strong and vibrant whereas now it’s pretty much dead! 🙁

Mike is spot on when he says that this general area fell into terminal decline with the exodus of residents in the 50s and 60s. Aerial photographs from the time show it looking a bit like a bomb site. Consequently very little of the original fabric remains. Which is unfortunate as we could have had a spine of streets stretching from William Street through to the Abbey River with a unique character and charm.

Instead the area was “redeveloped” dismally over the last 10-20 years in a thoroughly lazy, disjointed and haphazard manner! :rolleyes:

Just going off on a bit of a tangent here but, there is now a vast swathe of underdeveloped city centre land here. With a bit of ambition and vision it could be transformed into a brand new urban quarter. If we are serious about injecting life back into the city centre and making it a more attractive place for people to live, shop, socialise and just generally spend time in. We should be looking at underutilised areas like this and examining how they could be developed and how they could become better integrated into the city centre!

@CologneMike wrote:

Griff, that is a very limited edition and by the sound of it, a collectors item already!

I mailed the good people at the Trust earlier on today, hopefully I’ll get a favourable reply.

Don’t hold your breath; I email them a few days ago about getting a copy but haven’t gotten a reply.

@jimg wrote:

Don’t hold your breath; I email them a few days ago about getting a copy but haven’t gotten a reply.

Give them a call … I originally sent them an email which was not answered – I thought it was a one off but maybe they dont have the resources to reply to emails – you’d think it would be easier to click out a standard reply than answer a phone call !!

@Tuborg wrote:

It’s almost impossible to look back at old photos of Limerick without a sense of acute disappointment and a feeling of what might have been!

@Griff wrote:

Have to agree – some of the cheapest nastiest rubbish built in the last 20 years has been on Mungret st/Broad st/John st… hard to believe these streets were the heart of the old Irish town.

More disappointment on Mungret Street. 🙁

First image 28 Mungret Street. (Diagonally opposite Milk Market / Watergate Flats)

Second image 69-72 Mungret Street (To the right of Molyneux‘s Pub)

At least the Milk Market survived, as it went from a state of use to a state of decay and back to a state of restoration.

Some excellent images of Limerick to be found in this online resource….Thought I’d make sure everyone knew of its existence…………

Last year, the National Library introduced an online service whereby 22,000 photographs from the Lawrence, Poole and Independent Newspapers collections were added to its website database.

Since then, library staff have digitised an additional 12,000 images from five other important National Photographic Archive collections: Eason, Stereo Pair, Clarke, Tempest and Keogh.

The 34,000 photographs of Ireland, all relating to the period 1860 to 1954, can be viewed online at http://www.nli.ie/digital-photographs.aspx .

A couple more…

Rutland Street & Patrick Street

The Crescent

Munster & Leinster bank, The Medical Hall & Royal George Hotel

O’Connell Street, from above Cecil Street

• Bygone Limerick ~ Hugh Oram (The City and County in Days Gone by ) 9781856356794
• The Battle for Limerick City ~ Padraig Og O Ruairc (Military History of the Irish Civil War series) 9781856356756

Two more new historical books out soon, which should provide interesting photo material of Limerick circa 90-100 years ago. 🙂

An Irishman’s Diary Irish Times

Hugh Oram

IT ALL BEGAN with an almost throwaway remark by George Stacpoole, the antiques specialist from Adare, Co Limerick. He’s the head of the Irish Antique Dealers Association and I’ve known him for years. One day, he said to me that he had lots of old photographs of Adare, suggesting they might make a book.

Simple as that, the beginnings of a long quest that is finally completed, with the publication due in April of my next book, Bygone Limerick , with many photographs taken 100 years ago. I’ve known and written about Limerick, city and county, for years, but researching this book introduced me to wonderful people I’d never met previously and I heard many intriguing stories.

I soon discovered a veritable network of people, each a passionate expert on the history of their own locality: John Cussen from Newcastle West; John Harrold from Bruree; Noel Collins from Kilmallock; Tony Browne from Limerick city; Tom Keogh of the city museum, with his personal collections of thousands of old picture postcards; Frank O’Connor, an expert on Limerick’s postal history; Michael F O’Sullivan, the creamery historian from Hospital; Fr Mark Tierney, that prodigious historian from Glenstal, and Vincent Browne, a thoroughly unlikely altar boy :p in his native Broadford, Co Limerick.

Introductions to other people were equally rewarding. From Lady Vivienne Lillingston of Kilmallock, I found that her husband, Allan, rode a one-eyed horse called Winning Fair, to victory in the Cheltenham Champion Hurdle in 1963.

Other curious historical facts came to light from the time of the War of Independence and Civil War. I was told about Tomás Malone, whose nom de guerre was Seán Ford, head of the old IRA in east Limerick. He was able to travel around the county with impunity, never discovered, because he was good friends with a judge, O’Callaghan Westropp, who had an Armstrong-Siddeley car with a capacious boot. He was never asked to open it for inspection.

Peter Tait, commemorated by the Tait Memorial Clock in Limerick city centre, had extraordinary business achievements in Limerick. He arrived in the city in the early 19th century from his native Shetland Islands as a penniless orphan and he began his career in the city as a pedlar. He went on to invent the notion of mass production clothes, with the same principles that Henry Ford applied to car production. This notion made Tait a fortune.

The last business venture in his life was a cigarette factory in northern Greece, which failed. His life ended, almost penniless, in a desolate hotel room in what was then southern Russia, now part of Georgia.

On the contemporary side, Denis Leonard, the driving force behind the Limerick Civic Trust, was enormously encouraging as soon as I approached him. The trust has done much restoration in Limerick in recent years. Sadly, he died at a comparatively young age, at the end of last year.

I also discovered all about Seán Ó Riada’s father, who was the garda sergeant in Adare for 28 years. At weekends, when he went to sit on a wall at the top of the town at 2.30am, all the local publicans knew it was time to shut up shop. During the week, he used a special knock on the doors of local pubs late at night; 20 minutes later, he would go in and find the place miraculously empty. Adare never had any “found-ons” in his time!

Another great personality I unearthed was John Enright, who made fishing rods in Castleconnell, just outside Limerick city. In the late 19th century, the runs of salmon on the Shannon at Castleconnell were vast and the Enright rods were so well regarded around the world that Tsar Nicholas II of Russia once declared that he would use none other. The opening of the Ardnacrusha hydro-electric dam and power station on the Shannon in 1929 finished the glory days of fishing at Castleconnell.

Just over a decade later, the ferry across the Shannon here ended when a bridge was built; I found that one of the ferrymen became blind in later life, but was able to navigate the Shannon with unerring accuracy.

Someone else I heard much about was the late Tommy Bowen, who by day worked in a hardware shop in Kilmallock. He was a walking encyclopedia of genealogical and historical information about the medieval town and did much to keep the town museum going.

The places, too, that came up in my research were amazing: the old bacon factories in Limerick, the Cleeves dairy factories and the short-lived soviets in Limerick, Bruree and elsewhere. One day, a friend of mine in Dublin, Denis Bergin, asked me whether I’d heard of Limerick’s hanging gardens. I hadn’t, but soon found out that a Limerick banker, William Roche, in the early 19th century, had constructed vast roof-top hanging gardens in the centre of the city that were the talk of the populace. I also discovered that Roche had managed to survive the great banking crash of 1820, an event which surely proves that much history merely runs in an endless loop.

Of all the century-old photographs used in the book, those that most captured my imagination were those of Adare and all its thatched cottages.

The streets are absolutely deserted, not a car in sight, just the odd pony and trap. For anyone who has done what I’ve done recently, driven through Adare to try to find a parking space, it was a salutary lesson.

Bygone Limerick is published by Mercier Press, Cork, next month.

Looking at those pictures is heartbreaking, to say the least. Everybody still alive who ever sat on Limerick City Council should be shot.