Demolished Cruise's Hotel was the focal point that Limerick city no longer has
Our columnist PATRICIA FEEHILY argues that nothing has replaced the once majestic and now demolished Cruise's Hotel as a focal point in Limerick city.
EUREKA! I know what's missing from Limerick city. Despite the much lauded vision of the city Fathers, it doesn't need a boundary extension just yet. It needs a focal point first.
Now, this may sound a bit self centred, but when I look at the expanding universe I know that I'm the centre of it. However, when I look at the prospect of an expanding Limerick, the centre doesn't even hold - as W B Yeats might have said, in a different context of course.
Actually, it was only this week when I went looking for the city's focal point that I realised it didn't have one. When I was working in the city, this never bothered me. Now it's a cause of great disorientation and confusion. I'm lost without a focal point.
It all began when I got a call from an old friend I hadn't seen for over 20 years. She was home from Canada, she told me, and would I meet up for a coffee and a chat at some focal point in Limerick. I was thrilled. It felt as if I had just batted an eyelid over two decades ago and here she was still calling me again to meet for a chat. Time holds no measure – sometimes.
But focal point! What focal point? The last time we met it was over apple pie and cream in Cruises Hotel when she told me excitedly that she was going to Toronto for two years.
The two years stretched and then multiplied, and while we exchanged Christmas cards every year, I don't believe she ever put mine on the mantelpiece because I have a terrible habit of posting my cards the day before Christmas Eve hoping by some miracle that they might catch the last plane out of here before Midnight Mass.
Anyhow, both our lives had changed dramatically in those two decades plus. So had the streetscape of Limerick, and despite what they say, it wasn't all for the better either.
That late 1980s meeting in Cruises, for instance, took place before the developers moved in and demolished, not just a Limerick monument, but a national monument - the oldest hotel in the country.
Even the liberator, Daniel O'Connell had stayed there once. Why did we stand idly by and let them do that, for heaven's sake?
But whatever about the priceless heritage, they also took our focal point. Several years ago, the late Jim Kemmy told me adamantly that the Shannon was Limerick's natural focal point, and unfortunately, we had turned our backs on it.
I disagreed with him, of course, and insisted that the focal point of Limerick was Cruise's Royal Hotel. That was our anchorage once. All human life passed through its marble foyer and history resonated from its plush depths.
Sometimes I even thought I saw the ghost of Michael Collins striding impatiently through the imposing doorway on his way to his rendezvous with death at Beal na mBlath. For us rural folk, it was the focus of all our shopping trips to Limerick. "We'll meet up in Cruises at …" was the catch cry of a generation, as we took our cues from Cannock's clock across the road.
But the thing is this. Nothing has replaced it since, not even our valiant attempts to turn our faces to the Shannon again. As my friend and I strolled down Cruises' Street the other day, past the boarded up shopping units and the few remaining multinational outlets, we remembered Cruises Hotel and we both agreed that character and uniqueness had been compromised here, and that the city now desperately needed a focal point that captured those lost essentials if its soul was to be saved.
Now, it's not that I'm always looking for a focal point in my life. Thirty years ago I told the person who drew the plans of our bungalow that I didn't need a focal point in the living room. The telly would be enough.
But in my senior years I've become more focused, and I find myself drawn like a magnet to whatever it is that adds a bit of interest to the milieu and captures the essence of wherever I may find myself at a particular time.
I know what you're thinking. This wan has reverted to her hillbilly roots with more rapidity than anyone would ever have thought possible. She can't find her way around Limerick anymore without a familiar monument to guide her.
Maybe you're right, but then, is there a city worth its salt anywhere that doesn't have a definite and interesting focal point?
READ THE AWARD-WINNING PATRICIA FEEHILY'S 'DON'T MIND ME' COLUMN EVERY WEEK IN THE WEEKEND LEADER
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Monday 21 May 2012
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