LIMERICK’S energy, according to Limerick Mayor John Moran, is contagious, and this month he wants to spread that infectious energy throughout key city thoroughfares.
Of course, the Black Death was highly infectious as well, and the streets of our city centre can often give the appearance of being gripped by bubonic plague, for all their grease stains and despondent countenance.
Our new mayor however, is this month offering locals residents, businesses, and community groups the chance to bring out their dead (metaphorically speaking) for fun and frolics aplenty on the city streets in order to breathe some fresh new life into them.
He announced that The Crescent, from the junction of Hartstonge Street/Lower Hartstonge Street to the junction of Barrington Street/Newenham Street — in an area of the city in which our first citizen owns two properties — will close for portions of the month as a location for entertainment of all sorts.
And the fun is free for all, with the space open to suggestions from the public on how to use it – hell, he’s even offered to foot some of the bill.
While it all sounds about as exciting and welcome as a fart in a spacesuit (to quote the Big Yin), I hope the weather keeps fine for Moran and his bush drinking (non-alcoholic, we’re assured) buddies.
It’s great to see aspirations to bring life back into our humdrum city streets, but it would be nice to aim higher than a teddy bear’s picnic.
At least our dear mayor is excited.
“Let’s make this fun and interesting. It does not have to be complicated. Why not just grab some folding chairs and read a favourite book or have pizza or a takeaway al fresco with Daniel O’Connell watching over you among Limerick’s Georgian buildings,” he enthused.
“I will make one promise that if we make this work, our ambitions for next year will be even greater. We say that Limerick has a ‘different kind of energy’. Let’s all now do our part to show what that means in practice.”
It all seems kind of half-arsed to me.
With the People’s Park only blocks away, it is hard to fathom why this event, which gives off the whiff of being a purely egotistical exercise from Moran, is not taking place there.
The handful of forlorn looking tables and potted trees scattered around the Crescent scream ‘the cat ate my homework’ levels of thought.
Is this the best He Who Will Have Solved The Housing Crisis in His First Term can come up with?
I mean, if closing off city streets and putting out park benches for people to eat their greasy takeaways and drink their tubes of cider is the best we can come up with in the way of summer entertainment, then I really may have to take my chances with the plague.
