Limerick and Angela's Ashes.

 

Frank McCourt -Angela's Ashes

Limerick is also known as "Stab City." The Irish/American writer, Frank McCourt, who was from Limerick but had been born in the U.S., has often been criticised for portraying the city in a bad light in his novel called 'Angela's Ashes'. The book is cracking read but some people say that McCourt invented things and was inclined to exaggerate the poverty and misery of his childhood growing up in Limerick's lanes.

One of his relatives was a 'Blue Shirt' called Laman Griffin. In his book, McCourt says that all Irish children are taught about how Ireland suffered under 800 years of English oppression. Yet, the miserable Irish childhood that McCourt describes, took place in a country that was an Irish Republic and which was dominated by the Roman Catholic church and the conservative nationalist politics of Fianna Fail and Eamon de Valera. It was a country that banned abortion and contraception and which subjugated women. It was country of Magdalene Laundries where unmarried mothers were incarcerated and their babies sold and then exported to the U.S. and Australia. Many of the "fallen women" who escaped from the laundries, were often returned by the local Gardai.

Sinead O'Conner was sent by her father to the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity laundry in Dublin, when she was just 14 years of age, when she was labelled a "problem child" and started to shoplift and play truant. Sinead claimed that she suffered horrendous physical and emotional abuse from her mother when she was a child, but this seems to have been covered up as was a lot of child sex abuse in Ireland.