Limerick Dignitaries Visit Sunnyside
by thomas cogan

Photos Thomas Cogan At right, back row, Democratic Leader Thomas Manton, Lily Gavin, Assemblymember Cathy Nolan, Congressmember Joseph Crowley, Senator George Onorato, Buster Sabba, Assemblymember Brian McLaughlin, Michael Kearney, Gerald Sweeney, Brendan Keating. Seated, Counsel Sandra Marsch, Mayor John Ryan and Borough president Claire Shulman.

With a golden chain around his neck to signify his office, John Ryan, 804th Lord Mayor of Limerick, was the guest of honor at January’s luncheon meeting of the Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce. The luncheon took place at the chamber’s usual meeting site, Dazie’s restaurant on Queens Boulevard, following a reception given the mayor at La Guardia Community College. Both events occurred Friday, January 19, the climactic day of the mayor’s four-day visit to New York. The visit commemorated the linking of Queens and the Limerick–Shannon area of Ireland in a bond celebrating cultural and commercial progress. The mayor was accompanied by John Keeney, city manager of Limerick, and Sandra Marsch of the Limerick County Council.

Limerick has long been associated, whether fairly or not, with certain five-line doggrel verse, and more recently with the book Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt’s account of his poverty-stricken childhood there in the late 1930s. The guests of honor had nothing to say about verse but did acknowledge the effect of McCourt’s book and the movie version that followed. In those days 60 years ago and for some time thereafter, they said, Limerick was a provincial town in a poor country. In contrast, it has currently become emblematic of Ireland’s burgeoning prosperity, which is based largely on information technology.

Right now, the visitors stressed, instead of squalor amidst the city’s fine old Georgian architecture, there is a level of prosperity even higher than the national average and a determination among many to make the same mark in communication—cell telephones—that Finland and Sweden have made. Ryan observed that County Limerick currently has an unemployment rate of 4.2 percent, while Queens also has an unemployment rate of 4.2 percent. What better time to become sister counties than now?

The mayor warned luncheon attendees that he would have to improvise a speech because the one he had prepared was left in a travel bag with an aide who seemed to have disappeared. "It’s a good thing I didn’t leave the golden chain in the bag," he added, "or I wouldn’t be going home." He noted that on Wednesday, the day he arrived in New York, the city experienced a slight earthquake, and wondered if there was cause and effect. He praised Michael Kearney, vice chairman of the Sunnyside Chamber, for his tireless effort establishing the Queens—Limerick link, and begged Queens to keep him lest Kearney return to his native Ireland and become a political rival. He also praised Dazie’s, saying that in Ireland, when anybody sits down in a restaurant and opens the menu there is either one reaction or another: "O Bountiful Lord" or "O Sweet Jesus!" He assured Lily Gavin, owner of Dazie’s, that his reaction was the first one.

At right, back row, Kearney, Manton, Rule Vanderkoi, Clare Kraft, Marlene Sabba, Sabba, Diane Ballak, Keating, Dr. Audry Harrigan, Gerald Lederman, Maureen Lynch, Vince Reily. Front Senator Toby Stavisky, Shulman, Ryan, Marsch, Gavin, and Luke Adams.

He said that Queens and Limerick–Shannon are both bursting with cultural growth and are linked by a common language and good airports. He said that when Ireland thinks of New York it thinks of Manhattan and when New York (and the rest of the United States) thinks of Ireland it thinks of Dublin, immediately heading there on landing in the country. He added, "We need to do something to tilt the axis." He suggested that when Queens thinks of Ireland it should think of Limerick–Shannon and head there first, and maybe the Irish would return the compliment.

Keeney presented a slide show entitled "Limerick City, A City Leading Through Learning." It highlighted the prominence of two places of learning, Limerick Institute of Technology, where Mayor Ryan is a lecturer, and Limerick University, a state school established in 1972. Besides deferring to information technology, Keeney also emphasized Limerick City’s status as a seaport and the ongoing development of the River Shannon. He said that Limerick and the rest of Ireland are trying to draw emigrant Irish back to the land where they were raised and educated, since if industry is busy and prosperity obtains, the traditional brain drain can be reversed.

Luke Adams, president of the Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce, presented identical (and quite heavy, he asserted) gifts to Mayor Ryan and Marsch of Limerick County Council: glass replicas of the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, each on a glass base. Mayor Ryan presented locally made scarves to Queens Borough President Claire Shulman and Gavin, while Marsch, who has visited Queens and La Guardia Community College several times to help establish the link to Limerick, presented Irish lace to both of them and praised Gavin as "my surrogate mother" in the United States.

Several politicians attended the luncheon in addition to Shulman, including Assemblymembers Cathy Nolan and Brian McLaughlin and state Senator Toby Stavisky. Congressmember Joseph Crowley made an appearance, as did his predecessor, Thomas Manton, who remembered a time 20 years ago when Irish youth were well educated but the unemployment rate was 20 percent. The picture is much better these days, in Limerick and in Queens, he noted.