I think this was targeting the McCarthys on Hyde Road
Not sure if this fits in here or the woeful journalism threadâŚ
âYou fit into Limerick â it wonât change for you. Nor should itâ
Laura Kennedy: Sydney may be cool, but Canberra has âLimerick weatherâ. I prefer a bit of rain. I donât recognise myself without it
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Canberra reminds me a smidge of Limerick. Not in any literal sense â not because itâs Irelandâs real capital, though that would be interesting.
Wed Oct 25 2023 - 06:01
After a recent column, an Irish Times reader messaged me on Twitter. Donât worry â this isnât the opening sentence of a legal statement. I simply refuse, by the way, to call Twitter âXâ. Weâll call it that after itâs dead.
The reader got in touch to make a very good point, saying that I shouldnât call Canberra Australiaâs âpolitical capitalâ. Canberra, the reader said, is just the capital of Australia. Quite right, too â it is. That loadbearing term, âpolitical capitalâ suggests that Australiaâs real primary city lies elsewhere. That âelsewhereâ being approximately three and a half hoursâ drive northeast of Canberra and sitting decadently, bikini-clad on the coast â a contrast from Canberraâs mountainous inland location and its decidedly less cool, young image.
I feared sharing my instinct, which would be that in all likelihood most Irish people may not realise that Australiaâs capital is not in fact Sydney. There are, of course, some people who will know this. Geography teachers, one would hope. Irish people who have lived in Australia. People who enjoy a pub quiz, taking it just seriously enough to want to win but slightly too seriously for anyone else to want to be on their team.
For all Irelandâs obsession with Australia, we donât know a huge amount about the place.
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It exists in the minds of many Irish people as a sort of utopian escape from places like Limerick, where I grew up. When Irish people think of Australia, they think of sun (Canberra has seasons, including a cold winter â every Irish person I have told this to looked sceptical and one asked openly in a tone of mild disgust if Iâd realised this before deciding to move). They think of sea (Canberra is inland â itâs grand, I canât swim anyway and Iâm afraid of sharks). They think of spiders (I havenât seen a single one yet â snakes are apparently much more of a worry but not so much in the city).
Canberra reminds me a smidge of Limerick. Not in any literal sense â not because itâs Irelandâs real capital, though that would be interesting. Weâd need a lot more hotels and a Krispy Kreme before that could happen â not to mention that decades-promised Marks and Spencer. Donât mention Marks and Spencer to a Limerick person. It remains an open wound. The sprawling suburbs and wide American-style streets of my new home, 110-year-old Canberra, could not look more different from the Irish little city I grew up in, and not just because countless Limerick buildings have stood far longer than this Australian city and absolutely feel every bit of it when you try to heat them in winter.
After six weeks here I can see that Canberrans, like people from Limerick (Iâll call them Limerickians and you canât stop me), are often both down on their city and yet quick to fiercely defend its merits if they perceive a slight from outside. I know that dissonance of old.
It brings to mind the seismic ripple of resentment that went through Limerick when the movie version of Angelaâs Ashes was released in 1999. My searing sociological analysis will naturally be warped by the fact that I was about 10, but I vividly remember my grandmother conversing sniffily with other Limerick grand dames, lamenting how very miserable and impoverished the film made our city look. Everything was grey. Buildings. People (nutrition was bad back then in fairness). The city itself seemed under a waxy tarp of grey rain that drenched and obscured everything.
[ I didnât expect to move to Australia. I have no idea what Iâm doing ]
Despite the fact that my grandmother insisted her marigolds would never have grown if Limerick actually rained like that all year round, I still maintain that the latter was relatively accurate. Even here in Canberra, when it occasionally rains â and it has rained four times or so in the six weeks Iâve been here â the basin in which the city is nestled will fill with greyish-white mist so that the distant mountains disappear and you will be soaked through to your very skeleton in under a minute.
I call this âLimerick weatherâ.
Walking to school through rain most mornings is my resounding memory of Limerick, though when I go home these days it occasionally doesnât rain, which naturally helps to keep the bias in check. In Canberra, itâs spring and hot, so the rain brings a sort of astonishing tepidity with it, as though someone has splashed you flirtatiously from a toasty bath. Itâs a far cry from the acid cold of January rain travelling up your knee socks by capillary action in the dark of a Limerick morning in 2006.
Limerick city has a cadence you must fit into if youâre going to get anywhere there. You fit into Limerick â it wonât change for you. Nor should it. In Canberra, that grey rain makes me homesick, somehow, and comforts me too. Like Limerick weather, it doesnât plash. It batters. It horses down.
Iâm not living in an Emily Dickinson poem.
No gentle and poetic rain will connect me to home, but the sort that destroys your hair and has you almost crying at the state of yourself will. Sydney might be cool, and perhaps Canberra isnât (though thereâs a bakery called Three Mills here that makes a cherry Danish Iâd disown my family for and you can buy the best avocado of your life here for under a euro). âCoolâ is transient. It cares who is looking.
I prefer a bit of rain. I donât recognise myself without it.
Limerick is like Australia.
Howâs that Hun?
Full of Snakes girl
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That looks a savage feed tbf
It was unreal, My house was left in a heep earlier and I headed up.
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I fucking wish the guards were cable-tying fellas to anything.
Is there any reason or event that caused it all to kick off again in Limerick ?
you donât have to be a genius to figure this one out
He wonât be missed
The split season innit?
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Didnt know something like that was on. Looks great. More of that i say
Loads of people around the city last night, great buzz about the place. Mostly families too it seemed. Is this the first year of the festival?
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Itâs been going on for years but looks like it was a bigger spectacle than usual ?
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It mustnât have been that well advertised
Supposedly one of the tow trucks involved in seizing the scramblers last week: