Limerick Audio Tour: Stories & Streets of Prior’s-Land Revealed

On your right, look for the broad red-brick frontage with its rectangular face, a glass entrance at street level, and the Belltable name set across the front.

Belltable tells you something central about Limerick: this city has long loved a crowd gathering in one room to watch something unfold. Cinema, theatre, concerts, public talks, odd little experiments that might delight you or leave you baffled - all of that belongs to Limerick’s character. A city does not only perform in its streets; sometimes it performs in the dark, with everyone facing the same stage.

This building has changed costume more than once. Before Belltable, it lived as the Coliseum Cinema and, in another chapter, as the Redemptorist Confraternity Hall. Locals still enjoy the small irony that “Belltable” was itself a compromise: when the arts centre opened in nineteen eighty-one, one side wanted to keep the grand old Coliseum name, while the Confraternity Credit Union wanted to honour its own heritage, so they settled on Henry Hubert Belltable, the Belgian army officer who founded the Holy Confraternity here. Even the name above the door is a negotiated peace between nostalgia and ownership.

The show began in nineteen seventeen, when local merchant Michael Gough opened the Coliseum. His daughter Lena, a trained opera singer, used to perform arias between film screenings, which is wonderfully Limerick: not content with cinema alone, the place added live voice as well. In nineteen twenty-eight, the building screened Limerick’s first talking picture, The Jazz Singer. If you glance at the image in the app, you’ll see how restrained the exterior seems; all the drama happened once you crossed the threshold.

Then the glamour frayed. By the nineteen fifties, locals called it a flea-pit, and after a bitter strike in nineteen fifty-one to nineteen fifty-two, it closed. In one of those turns cities specialise in, the silent auditorium became a shirt factory in nineteen fifty-three, with sewing machines rattling where audiences had once waited for the lights to drop.

Its modern life has been just as dramatic. Inside are a two hundred and twenty-seat theatre-cinema, gallery, rehearsal rooms and workspaces for artists. Mike Finn premiered Pigtown here in nineteen ninety-nine, then returned years later and called the place a hothouse for Limerick talent. Even in rougher periods, Belltable Unfringed kept the spirit alive with gloriously unruly work, including a vegetable circus called Cirque de Légume. Then came the collapse in twenty thirteen: a one million euro refurbishment ran over by three hundred thousand euro, creditors met in an angry room, and Joanne Beirne dryly dubbed the new seating arrangement “Vatican Two theatre” because actors had to look up at the audience. The theatre reopened in twenty sixteen, proving that some buildings never stop auditioning for their next role.

From here, the city’s performance shifts outward - away from stage lights and toward the river, where newer glass and steel make their own statement at Riverpoint. If you want to come back, Belltable generally opens from noon to five thirty on Monday, from nine to five thirty Tuesday to Friday, and closes on Saturday and Sunday.

Riverpoint is a blue-green glass tower with a broad curved facade, a squared roofline, and a slimmer companion block rising just behind it on the quay.

What you are looking at is Limerick trying, very deliberately, to look ahead. People here spoke about turning the city back toward the Shannon, and Riverpoint became one of the clearest statements of that intention: not a shy building, but a glittering marker at the bridge approach, facing the river as if the city had decided to meet its own front door properly at last.

Jim Barrett, the architect so often credited with pushing that riverside ambition, spent years arguing that Limerick should stop presenting its back to the water. Later profiles called him the city architect, even a mover-and-shaker, and this complex is one of the places where his argument took physical form. If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see Riverpoint near the start of that transformation, when the old site was still fresh in memory.

And memory matters here, because Riverpoint did not rise on neutral ground. Before this stood St Munchin’s House, a late nineteen-sixties office block so disliked that people called it one of the ugliest buildings in Limerick. It faced the Shannon with a blank concrete gable, a dead wall where a riverfront ought to have had some grace. The Department of Agriculture worked there, then moved into Riverpoint, a quiet but telling change: the state itself stepped out of an old embarrassment and into a glass tower.

At fifty-eight point five two metres, Riverpoint still makes its point rather well. It is one of the taller storeyed buildings in the country and a striking marker on the skyline. The scheme promised a complete urban package: thirteen floors of offices, one hundred and thirty-seven apartments across the two towers, a restaurant, a fitness centre, and an underground car park.

But Limerick’s grand resets rarely stay pure for long. Developer Michael Daly tied Riverpoint to boom-time confidence, then to the crash, when Anglo Irish Bank won an eighty-six point five million euro judgment against him in twenty ten. And the contrast sharpened again in December twenty fourteen, when residents told reporters that homeless people were sleeping in penthouse-floor corridors. That is the uncomfortable truth standing inside the polished glass: aspiration above, hardship close by.

If you want a cleaner modern view, the app has one as well. Yet even this sleek frontage cannot quite erase what stood here before, or the uneasy questions that followed after. Riverfront renewal is only one chapter in a city that keeps trying to improve, impress, and recover. When you are ready, continue to Henry Street, about a two minute walk from here.

Look for a long, straight street framed by brick and stone facades, with the broad glazed frontage of Dunnes Stores as its most modern marker and the heavier ecclesiastical mass of the Franciscan church further along.

Henry Street may seem like a commercial corridor, but it has a habit of turning into a stage, then a ruin, then a stage again. In eighteen forty-eight, Joseph Fogerty fitted up a new theatre here for a Masonic ball. Later accounts claimed men tried to set it alight. That uneasy rhythm returned on the twenty-third of January, nineteen twenty-two, when the Theatre Royal on this street burned down.

And yet Henry Street kept performing. The Savoy opened here on the nineteenth of December, nineteen thirty-five. Fire tore through it in October nineteen forty-one. Then, improbably, it entered what many locals remember as a golden age under Tom English, who took charge in nineteen fifty-four at just twenty-two years old and ran the house for eight years. A street can teach you a city’s character that way: applause in one decade, ash in the next, then a queue forming all over again.

If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see one of Henry Street’s later acts of self-reinvention: the glazed Dunnes frontage that replaced the old Spaights site in two thousand and one. People had mocked Spaights as shabby and tacky; its replacement became a small declaration that the city intended to smarten its cuffs and carry on.

But Henry Street does not keep only commercial memory. It also keeps political memory at pavement level. A plaque marks the birthplace of Seán South, born here and later active in Clann na Poblachta, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Legion of Mary. So here, on one ordinary street, cinema glamour, fire, retail ambition and ideology all occupy the same address book.

Walk on toward O’Connell Street. There, these local dramas broaden into the city’s main public performance.

Look for the broad, straight avenue framed by red-brick and stucco Georgian terraces, their tall sash windows stacked in tidy rows, with Daniel O’Connell’s monument marking the far end at the Crescent.

This is the street where Limerick presents itself to the world. O’Connell Street is the city’s main thoroughfare, running almost a mile in a long, confident line, parallel to the Shannon, and cutting through the centre as the showpiece of Newtown Pery. In seventeen sixty-five, Edmund Sexton Pery asked the engineer Davis Ducart to design a new district on his southern lands, and this street became its centrepiece. That was a bold move: the city’s wealthier residents began leaving the older medieval quarters of Englishtown and Irishtown for these broader, grander addresses.

Its name tells its own little drama. For years it was George’s Street, honouring King George the Third. Later, Limerick gave the same central artery to Daniel O’Connell instead. The city did not simply raise O’Connell on a monument at the Crescent; it let his name run the full length of its civic spine. That is what a main street often does. It reveals who a city wishes to honour, and how confidently it wishes to be seen.

Commerce arrived early and held on stubbornly. Around eighteen fourteen, a drapery business traded on the Cannock’s site. Then, in eighteen fifty, George Cannock and John Arnott bought the shop at number one hundred and thirty-four George Street and built it into one of Limerick’s best-known retail names. For many locals, Cannock’s became part of family ritual, especially the famous Christmas windows. Then came the wound. In the early nineteen sixties, builders replaced the old façade and landmark clock tower in a rebuild that former staff and historians later called a “philistine exercise” - in plain terms, a crude act of redevelopment that stripped away much of the building’s character. When Cannock’s closed in nineteen eighty, people mourned more than a shop. They mourned a familiar face of the street.

If you fancy it, have a look at the before-and-after image in the app; the bones of George Street remain recognisable even after the façades and traffic systems changed.

That tension between pride and vulnerability still hangs here. O’Connell Street remains the city’s retail and financial centre, lined with banks, department stores, bookshops and hotels. Yet a study in twenty twelve found that sixteen percent of its retail units stood vacant, the weakest figure for a main city street in Ireland at the time. A grand address, then, but not an invincible one.

And that is why Belltable matters so much here. Earlier, you met it at number sixty-nine: a two hundred and fifty-seat theatre-cinema, a smaller studio, a gallery, and a place for poetry and performance. On a street so often judged by tills, rents and footfall, Belltable quietly insists that a city’s main street must also make room for thought, experiment and risk.

From here, the story narrows and becomes more social. Bedford Row, about four minutes away, developed with a different sort of energy - less official, less ceremonial, and more rooted in everyday gathering. Head there when you’re ready.

Stand here for a moment and Bedford Row begins to behave like several streets at once. It is a shopping street now, polished by redevelopment and pedestrianised between O'Connell Street and Henry Street, but commerce did not arrive on empty ground.

Bedford Row’s Methodist chapter tells a different story. In seventeen fifty-two, the first conference of the Methodist Church in Ireland met in Limerick under John Wesley, and that movement later settled here. On the twenty-third of December, eighteen twenty-one, worshippers opened a Gothic Wesleyan chapel on this street, with a carved stone front and iron balustrades. It was not only for sermons. People came here for Sunday school, concerts, prayer meetings, and funeral services. In other words, this was a place where a city gathered to learn, mourn, sing, and be seen.

Then comes the twist. In eighteen fifty, a Scottish entrepreneur named Peter Tait rented rooms here, worked as a shop assistant, and, when money ran short, sold goods from a basket. Within three years he had founded a factory on Bedford Row employing around five hundred women. Later he arranged sewing training for girls from the Union Workhouse. By the middle of the eighteen fifties, he had secured government uniform contracts worth about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, something like thirty million pounds today, and employed roughly one thousand people. And in eighteen sixty-three, Tait accepted a huge Confederate order and bought the ship Evelyn to help run the blockade, tying this Limerick street to the American Civil War. That is Bedford Row in miniature: chapel, classroom, factory floor, and global trade route, all stacked together.

After the Methodists left in nineteen twenty, the chapel became the Grand Central Cinema, later Savoy Two. Shopfronts and screens hid the old church fabric so well that many passers-by scarcely knew it survived. Even now, parts of that frontage remain folded into newer buildings.

From a street that kept reinventing how people gather, we move to the place that tries to keep such stories straight: Limerick Museum.

Look for the pale stone former friary, with its plain rectangular frontage, rows of sash windows, and the larger church building folded into the same historic complex.

This is Limerick Museum, and there is a quiet irony here. A museum is the city’s official memory machine: Limerick City and County Council gathers fragments, labels them, protects them, and decides which pieces of the past become part of the shared story. Yet this keeper of memory has led a wandering life of its own. It began in nineteen oh seven in Andrew Carnegie’s library and museum on Pery Square, opened to the public in nineteen sixteen, shifted to restored houses in John Square in nineteen seventy-nine, moved again to Castle Lane in nineteen ninety-eight, then to temporary rooms on Merchant’s Quay in twenty twelve, and only in May of twenty seventeen settled here in the old Franciscan friary. If you glance at the picture on your screen, you can see that latest chapter for yourself: not a purpose-built museum, but an older religious building given a fresh civic duty.

That rather changes the question, does it not? A city does not simply inherit memory. It edits it, rehousing it when necessary, and decides what deserves careful keeping. Which stories usually make it into museums: civic triumphs, ordinary work, political struggle, or buildings that vanished before anyone thought to love them? And which ones quietly miss the shelf?

Inside are more than sixty-two thousand objects, collected through donation, purchase, and long-term loan. Some are grand: the city charter signed by King Charles the Second, a civic sword associated with Queen Elizabeth the First, and a scabbard said to have been used by Lord Edward Fitzgerald at his arrest in seventeen ninety-eight. Some are intimate: Limerick lace, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century silver, even a gentleman’s suit from around seventeen oh six. And some are gloriously strange: Ireton’s Cat, mummified on Nicholas Street, a fragment of the largest meteorite ever to fall in Ireland, and two Second World War gas masks that, thankfully, never had to do their work.

The museum’s modern name honours Jim Kemmy, a Labour politician and twice Mayor of Limerick. That matters. Naming a museum after him ties medieval relics and revolutionary papers to a man who argued about the city in living memory. The institution has done the same in its exhibitions: Soviets and strikes, the War of Independence with one hundred and thirty county fatalities, and the First Dáil, the first revolutionary Irish parliament. Since two thousand and four, it has even catalogued its collection online, becoming the first local authority museum in the state to do so.

In a moment, continue to Sarsfield Street, about a minute away, where history steps out of the display case and back into trade, closure, and redevelopment. If you fancy coming inside later, the museum generally opens from ten to five on weekdays, with shorter Saturday hours, and it closes on Sunday.

Look for a broad, straight street framed by multi-storey stone and concrete commercial blocks, running from the solid span of Sarsfield Bridge toward the junction at O’Connell Street.

Sarsfield Street is one of those places whose identity has been revised in public, and more than once. It began as Brunswick Street, then in the early twentieth century the city gave it a different patron: Patrick Sarsfield, first Earl of Lucan, the Jacobite commander who fought for King James the Second during the Siege of Limerick in sixteen ninety, and then helped arrange the Treaty of Limerick. Even the name tells you this street does not stand still. It gets relabelled to suit the story a city wants to tell about itself.

But the harder story here is commercial. Before the ring road and newer bridges diverted the flow, this was the start of the main road toward Galway, a proper working artery through the city. In eighteen twenty-nine, John Spillane opened a tobacco factory here, later remembered as the House of Garryowen. By nineteen twenty-nine, it was among the last large tobacco factories left in Limerick. And William Spillane, who owned it later, also served as mayor. That is how tightly business and civic power could fit together on one street.

Locals know something most visitors miss: the tobacco handled here did not simply come from nearby fields. Limerick traders brought leaf from the United States, Egypt, and Turkey as well as from Irish growers. So this apparently ordinary city street sat inside a supply chain that stretched across oceans. If you glance at the image on your phone, the steam shovel passing Hurley’s Tobacconists in nineteen twenty-eight catches that mood exactly: commerce first, sentiment later. Then came the familiar urban turn. Roches Stores bought premises here in nineteen thirty-seven, suffered a fire in nineteen forty-seven, and reopened on O’Connell Street in nineteen fifty-one. Decades later, Dunnes Stores shut its large complex here in two thousand and eight and moved to Henry Street. Debenhams, formerly Roches Stores, closed in two thousand and twenty when the company collapsed in Ireland. What looked like a single retail loss was really the latest round in a long habit of opening, burning, moving, closing, and starting again.

The street’s fragility showed itself brutally in Storm Darwin in February two thousand and fourteen. Part of a building collapsed outside Sullivan’s pharmacy. The boathouse next door lost its roof. Fire crews evacuated a University of Limerick student after the door blew off her fourth-floor apartment. Part of the old Dunnes frontage also came down onto a car at the lights.

And yet, even that shell found a second use. In two thousand and nineteen, the University of Limerick bought the former Dunnes building for eight million euros, then turned it into a city-centre campus and Fab Lab, a workshop for design and digital making. In two thousand and twenty-three, the rezoning made it official: this street would not simply wait for the next shop tenant.

From here, walk about four minutes to Ormston House, where another kind of reinvention waits.

Look for the pale, rendered street-front with its tall rectangular windows and crisp nineteenth-century proportions, a modest old commercial facade carrying a much newer life inside.

Ormston House is one of the clearest examples in Limerick of a building refusing to settle into just one identity. In two thousand and eleven, art students occupied the ground floor here at numbers nine and ten Patrick Street and, with support from the Creative Limerick scheme, turned it into a gallery and cultural resource centre. That matters, because this was not a grand top-down rescue. It began with people claiming space, testing what a tired city building could still do, and persuading the city to believe in it.

The building had already lived several lives by then. In the seventeen nineties, this site held three separate Georgian houses. Number nine hosted the San Souci Hotel. Number ten belonged to Edward Poe, a saddler, a maker of horse tack and harness. Number eleven traded in woollens under Samuel Harding. The old records keep the human marks as well as the business names: Poe’s wife died here in seventeen ninety-seven, and in eighteen thirty-two, during the cholera year that tore through Limerick, John Fogarty of the English Woollen Warehouse died at this address. Even the domestic stories have their odd corners. In eighteen forty-six, the cloth merchant Kerry Tidmarsh married Jane Stenson twice within a matter of days, once on Denmark Street and again in Killaloe, then quietly retired from Limerick not long after. One building, and already enough commerce, grief, and strangeness for several.

The name Ormston House reaches to a later chapter. In nineteen sixty-one, John F. “Jack” Ormston opened Limerick’s first self-service supermarket here, and it must have felt startlingly modern. Shoppers picked up baskets, chose goods themselves, read prices on shelves, and paid at a moving-belt checkout instead of waiting at a counter. More than seven hundred products lined shelves that Ormston designed himself. Yet underneath that neat modern surface, the old city kept asserting itself. Former staff remembered goods sliding down to the basement from street level, bottles stored under Ellen Street, and river water creeping into the cellar at high tide, forcing stock up onto shelves.

That supermarket closed in nineteen eighty-two when larger chains undercut it. Other businesses came and went. Artists used upper rooms for a time. Then, at last, the building’s latest turn held. Since opening, Ormston House has worked with hundreds of artists from more than two dozen countries and staged hundreds of events. When its future came under threat after the National Asset Management Agency, or NAMA, sold the loan book and the site went on the market, more than three thousand people signed a petition. In two thousand and twenty-one, Limerick City and County Council bought the ground floor and basement and granted Ormston House a thirty-year lease.

That is the achievement here: change without amnesia. The artists did not wipe the slate clean; they added a layer and kept the older ones legible. They even produced the Women of Limerick phone app, mapping twenty-five overlooked women across the city and winning a National Heritage Week award.

From here, we head back into the commercial core, toward Cruises Street, where one ambitious remake of the city still leaves people arguing about what had to vanish to make room for it. If you wish to return inside, Ormston House usually opens from noon to six, Wednesday through Saturday.

If you judged Cruises Street only by what you can see, you might call it a straightforward shopping street: a pedestrian run opening off O’Connell Street, with storefronts, passing footsteps, and Quimper Square sitting quietly at its centre. But this is one of those Limerick places where absence does much of the talking.

For nearly two centuries, this ground belonged to Cruises Royal Hotel. George Russell opened the hotel here in seventeen ninety-one. The name people remember came later, through Edward Cruise, and in time the hotel lent its identity to the street itself. That alone tells you how deeply it entered city life. This was not simply somewhere to sleep. It offered around eighty rooms, a ballroom, a cocktail bar, grill room, lounge, main bar, even a passenger lift and a gentlemen’s hairdressing department. In other words, a whole little social world under one roof.

You can almost hear it if you stand still long enough: glasses set down on polished counters, dance music floating from the ballroom, the rustle of formal clothes on the stairs. Local memory holds especially tightly to the dances of the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, when people came here looking for brightness in lean years. Nancy Blake, later famous for founding Nancy Blakes nearby, is said to have sharpened her craft in the old hotel first. That is often how a city works. One place trains the spirit of the next.

Cruises also kept an unofficial guestbook of the celebrated and powerful. Daniel O’Connell stayed here. So, local histories say, did Charles Dickens, Charles Stewart Parnell, John Dillon, John Redmond, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and even Richard Nixon. Presidents and visiting dignitaries used the presidential suite. For generations, if Limerick wished to receive someone important, this was one of the places where it did so. There is still a plaque on the O’Connell Street corner, near the Costa coffee shop on the old site, recalling Dickens. A modest marker for a rather grand vanished stage.

Then came the great break. In nineteen ninety-one, developers demolished the hotel. In late nineteen ninety-two, this pedestrian street opened in its place. Some called it renewal, modern retail, a cleaner and more open city centre. Others saw the loss of the city’s oldest hotel, not as tidy progress, but as a wound. In Limerick, that argument never quite settled. It still hangs here between the paving stones and the shopfront glass.

Even Quimper Square carries that sense of replacement and repair. Rowan Gillespie’s bronze, The Singer from Quimper, arrived in two thousand and six to mark Limerick’s twinning with Quimper in Brittany. For a while in twenty twenty, the statue disappeared after damage to one leg, and people feared theft or vandalism. In fact, it had gone away for repair and then returned. That small drama says something about this street: people notice when a landmark vanishes.

And they notice when energy fades as well. Shop closures and vacant units have made Cruises Street a symbol of city-centre anxiety. Yet perhaps that is why its story matters. This place shows how a city can gain openness and lose intimacy in the same gesture.

When you are ready, continue to William Street, about a three-minute walk from here. There, the story turns from demolition to something else: fire, endurance, and a street that survived by holding on.

William Street is a broad Georgian street of stucco and brick frontages, with tall sash-windowed upper floors and a long run of shopfronts stretching in a steady line.

This street tells a quieter kind of city story: not grand monuments, but people opening a door each morning and trying again. It carries the name of William Pery, first Baron Glentworth, brother of Edmund Sexton Pery, the man who pushed this whole Newtown Pery district into being. And you can still feel that Georgian order in the rhythm of the buildings around you, even after so many interruptions.

By the eighteen fifties, William Street had already become a place where ambition tested itself in public. James W. Peattie, once a principal cutter at Todd’s, stepped out on his own and opened a tailoring and clothing shop at number fifty-six in January of eighteen fifty-six. Not long after, Mrs Dickson announced her own business at number forty-two. Those small acts matter. A street becomes itself when people risk their savings and reputation on an address.

If you glance at the image in the app, you can see that long commercial face of the street still holding together, even after everything it has endured. And endure it did. Fire returned here again and again. One major blaze came in May of eighteen sixty. Then, in eighteen seventy-seven, Boyd’s premises caught fire and the flames spread into the adjoining Hibernian City Hall. Reports said the heat blistered paint on buildings across the street. Workers scrambled to save the rear stores and dragged away several hundred gallons of paraffin before it could ignite. Henry Street had its own collisions of trade and disaster; here, too, commerce lived with that constant risk.

Yet the remarkable thing is not simply that William Street burned. It is that it carried on. Boyd’s suffered another fire in eighteen ninety, and a representative even wrote to the Limerick Chronicle to deny rumours about dangerous oils on the premises, describing the panic when the hose water suddenly failed. Still the business rebuilt. Carew’s, at number fifty-five, says it has traded here since eighteen eighty-five. That sort of continuity is easy to miss, but it is the backbone of a city.

Even particular buildings wear that pattern. At numbers seven to nine, the red-brick and terracotta shop replaced warehouses that burned in November of eighteen eighty-six, very likely to a design by Robert Fogerty in eighteen eighty-seven. And then Todd’s, on the corner with O’Connell Street, went up in the great fire of the twenty-fifth of August, nineteen fifty-nine, after an electrical fault. Smoke first showed on the William Street side.

So William Street leaves you with a practical lesson: a city survives not only through planning, but through stubborn return. When you are ready, continue to Thomas Street, Limerick, about a two-minute walk away, where old buildings have found yet another use in the city’s changing cultural life.

Thomas Street makes a fitting last word, because nothing here sits still for long. The street itself carries a question. People say it takes its name from Thomas Unthank, an eighteenth-century Limerick merchant, though no one has ever proved it beyond doubt. Even the name keeps a little mystery in reserve.

Stand here a moment and notice the shape of the street: it runs out from O’Connell Street toward Wickham Street, with Catherine Street cutting in around the middle. What matters most, though, is how the ground has been rethought. The stretch between O’Connell Street and Catherine Street gave more room to people than to traffic, and farther along the footpaths widened. That is not cosmetic. It changes how a city meets itself.

Thomas Street has kept finding new uses for old rooms. In late twenty sixteen, the Old Fire Station reopened as a vegan and vegetarian café, turning a former emergency-services building into a place of conversation and plates on tables. It closed in twenty nineteen when family obligations pulled the owners away, but the idea mattered: a working city can remake its buildings without erasing them. In twenty eighteen, the artist Maser, working with Team Limerick Clean Up, gave part of the disused fire station another life again.

Then there was Mark Carey, who opened Steamboat Records at number fifty-one in November twenty sixteen. In the age of streaming, that was a splendidly stubborn act. He backed records, C-D-s, D-V-D-s, comics, and Limerick-made music, as if to say that culture still deserves shelves, hands, and chance encounters.

And the remaking continues now: new shops proposed, charity retail supporting Limerick Marine Search and Rescue, apartments and community space planned at numbers thirty-three and thirty-four, even during road works that keep pedestrian access open.

Before you finish, look around for the older fabric still carrying newer habits. That, I think, is the real picture of this city: not a place preserved under glass, but one still arguing, building, repainting, reopening. Our walk ends here. Limerick does not.