DREAMS

50 Years of Creativity, Culture and Community at the University of Limerick

Lead Editor and Project Manager: Joseph

O’Connor

Edited by: Joseph O’Connor, Eoin Devereux and Sarah Moore

Editorial Note

In ‘Dúiche’, Anna Ryan Moloney’s radiant and meditative essay for this book, a connection is mapped between architectural and personal space, between the built and the emotional or spiritual environments, the territories of memory and meaning. It is a particularly resonant approach to writing about a university, a place where lives are altered, memories are formed and meanings are investigated and contested. ‘Dúiche’ means ‘hereditary land’ or ‘demesne’. The present offers a good moment to put together a chart of the demesne, to assess the sustainability of what we have and to plan for what we’ll be passing on.

This volume marks the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Limerick (UL). It presents fifty contributions from or about people associated with our university. As with many maps, the individual elements are often beautiful or striking, but the effect is best experienced by stepping back to take in the totality.

‘Dreams’ is the title of a widely loved song by The Cranberries, a band whose connections with UL are strong, as founding member Noel Hogan and local music promoter Ber Angley make clear in this book. The contributors we selected were asked to take the word ‘Dreams’ as a starting point and offered a maximum space of 1,300 words per piece. Beyond that, we made some suggestions as to theme, but no editorial proscriptions.

The writings range from scholarly essays to students’ tweets, through poems and presentations, to personal memoirs and transcripts of talks. Loretta Brennan Glucksman’s foreword recalls major funding and development initiatives on the part of her late husband, Lewis, and their friend Chuck Feeney. The president of Ireland writes about the passionate socialist for whom our business school is named. A student journalist portrays with affectionate gentleness the Library Café’s ‘Pink Ladies’. Donal Ryan, the most consistently excellent Irish novelist of his generation, contributes a brilliant short story that might also be read as an eco-parable – a fitting read for those of us whose days are becalmed by our riverside workplace.

Voices in the assembled chorus of this book include those of current undergraduates and alumni, retired professors, members of the catering and grounds staff, sportspeople, musicians, artists, nurses, diarists, researchers, chroniclers, visitors, teachers, seekers and campaigners. A different trio of editors would have made a different selection (as would any one or any two of the current three), but our hope is that the book offers contributions that would be included by every editor wishing to reflect the vividness and diversity of UL life in the early 2020s.

The University of Limerick, the first university to be established since the foundation of the state, came about through determined local campaigns – as remembered in this book by Paddy Meskell of the inaugural 1972 class and by Bill Whelan, internationally acclaimed composer of Riverdance – and, later, through the merging of the National Institute of Higher Education and Thomond College of Education. The story is told in David Fleming’s assiduously researched study The University of Limerick: A History (2012), and in founding president Ed Walsh’s lively account Upstart: Friends, Foes and Founding a University (2011). Our own book is not a chronology but a conversation that builds into a characterisation. The fifty pieces may be read in any sequence, from cover to cover, or dipped into.

The reader will notice the emergence of resonances, rhymes, repeated themes, preoccupations. Research. The Glucksman Library. Sport. Music. A respect for creativity. An affection for colleagues. Our students as our teachers. The beauty of the campus. The image of the Living Bridge shimmers through a good many of the pieces – an actualised metaphor for teaching, learning and outreach –and the Shannon flows in reflective counterpoint. But a current of iconoclasm is at work in these writings, too, a restlessness, a desire to push onward. There is often a commitment to engage with communities in wider and more welcoming ways, to make an impact on more lives, to do more around the major issues of class, gender, identity, disability (or ‘“dis”ability’, to borrow a trenchant term of orthographic subversion used by our contributor Charlie Mullowney), environment, marginalisation, exclusion and participation. While there is great pride in these pages, there is ambition and activism too. The powerful words of Sindy Joyce, Denise Chaila and Donnah Sibanda Vuma are reminders that much remains to be done; that everyone has a right to safety, freedom and education; that protest matters; that real inclusion and diversity will make us all stronger. A closer relationship with Limerick city is seen as a matter of pressing importance and the opening of the UL City Centre Campus as an exciting opportunity. These priorities are what make UL the place it must continue to become: a university where there are beautiful buildings but no ivory towers. We extend sincere thanks to our wonderful contributors for their willingness to participate and for their skill, also to Wendy Logue and Conor Graham at Irish Academic Press, and copyeditor Dermott Barrett. We thank Gobnait O’Riordan, Kate Harris and Ken Bergin at the Glucksman Library, Carla Capone, Rina Carr, Yvonne Cleary, David Fleming, Oonagh Grace, UL President Kerstin Mey, and Caroline Keane and Cliona Donnellan for assistance with contractual matters. We add our thanks to UL Confessions administration, and to Eoin Brady and Michelle McMahon, Dr Eimear O’Connor, Sorcha Pollock, and UL Fifty Programme Manager Caroline Rafter. The late David Lilburn, artist, cartographer and designer, was a much-loved UL creative presence for many years; we thank his wife, Romanie van Son, and Yvonne Davis (whose fine essay on UL’s art collections appears in this book) for helping us to include an example of his beautiful work.