limerick

Date traveled: October 31, 2017

For us, Limerick was nothing more than a dinner stop on our way from Dublin to the Cliffs of Moher. Admittedly I purposely picked it out on the map to stop for an hour or two because of the name.

We couldn’t find any monument depicting a famous limerick, which I half-hoped to be a thing. The origins of the limerick poem are vague, but Wikipedia tells me its first known mention was in Newfoundland. Because the town didn’t seem to play up its association with the poem, my best guess is that the association might annoy them and that they’ve been the brunt of enough jokes to want to celebrate it. This is the opposite approach taken by the town of Dildo in Newfoundland.

Limerick seemed like a working-class suburb town with a giant stadium in the middle. The thing to do there is probably cheer for the local soccer team or make trouble. This judgment is of course based on almost nothing: a single hour in time where I hadn’t slept and was racing to beat a sunset. But it sure didn’t seem like a ‘destination’, that much was clear.

I didn’t expect a city of under 100,000 to be the third largest in the country (after Dublin and Cork). I don’t think of Ireland as particularly small, so expected a notably-sized city to have more going on, to be more like a version of Ireland or city that I conjured up before our road trip. I expected a place called Limerick on the River Shannon to be almost comical in its stereotypicalness.

The stereotype it ended up fitting was ‘small city’. The more places you go, the more places are the same.

The drive through rural Ireland was great, albeit frightening. Rolling down the tiny roads against the stone ‘fences’, seeing the sheep, felt like I was somewhere different and distinct. I wouldn’t recommend Limerick as a stop more than any other small city or large town you might come across off the highway – Galway had a lot more charm. The countryside around Limerick was the experience, not the town itself.