Leaving the island and returning to the city

From the island to the city … walking along the Shannon in Limerick shortly after returning from Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017; click on image for full-screen view)

Patrick Comerford

I am back from the island and have been to the city.

I have returned from the island of Crete, and already I have spent some time working at Church meetings in Limerick.

But I was transported back to Greece immediately on Thursday afternoon when I visited the Hunt Museum for the first time and came face-to-face with a number of classical Greek objects in the collection, including an earthenware water jar from 4th century BC.

Earlier this week, I mused that spending time on a Greek island, enjoying the sun, the sea, the scenery and evening meals might be compared to the crew in the Odyssey who are enticed to linger on the island with the lotus eaters and to forget the purpose of their journey.

But sometimes, I find, times spent lingering on the island is also time for reflection and thinking about future problems ahead.

But sometimes there is a danger of becoming isolated on holidays like this, and beginning to think that problems and solutions can be arrived at without reference to their context in the city back home. How often in discussions and conversations in abstract and distant locations like this, do we often think we can solve all the problems of the world?

So often I allow myself the luxuries of standing on the high moral ground without considering the dilemmas of those who have to make immediate decisions on their feet, on the ground below.

Sometimes in discussions on island holidays or on retreats, or on away days, the temptation is not so much to end up lingering on like the Lotus Eaters, but to hold onto what I see as my own high principles in exile, like I am less like Philoctetes in the Greek classical play of the same name by Sophocles.

Philoctetes (Φιλοκτήτης), the son of King Poeas of Meliboea in Thessaly, is a skilled archer and a participant in the Trojan War. He is the subject of four Greek classical plays, although Philoctetes by Sophocles is the only one to have survived. The other lost plays are Philoctetes at Troy, also by Sophocles, Philoctetes by Aeschylus, and Philoctetes by Euripides.

Philoctetes is also named in Homer’s Iliad (Book 2), which describes his exile on the island of Lemnos, his debilitating snake-bite, and his eventual recall by the Greeks.

The play Philoctetes by Sophocles is one of his seven surviving tragedies and was written by Sophocles during the Peloponnesian War. It won first prize when it was first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 409 BC.

Philoctetes is one of the many Greek suitors who competes for the hand of the beautiful Helen of Sparta and he is required to take part in the Trojan War to reclaim her for Menelaus. Philoctetes gains the favour of Heracles and is rewarded with his bow and poisoned arrows.

But Philoctetes is stranded on the island of Lemnos by the Greeks on their way to Troy because a wound on his foot festers and give a terrible smell. Sophocles says Philoctetes has been bitten on the foot by a snake on the island of Chryse (Χρύση) when he unwittingly trespasses into the shrine of the nymph who gives her name to the island.

The bite causes Philoctetes constant agony and emits a horrible smell. For 10 years he lives alone in forced exile on Lemnos, and becomes increasingly angry at the treatment he has received from Odysseus.

But when the Greeks find they need the bow and arrows of Heracles in the siege of Troy, Odysseus and a group of men rush back to Lemnos to recover them. The Greeks are surprised to find that Philoctetes is still alive, and they wonder what to do next. Odysseus tricks the weaponry from Philoctetes, but Diomedes refuses to take the weapons without the master archer, who is still angry with Odysseus.

The fate of the entire Greek expedition hangs in the balance. Heracles finally persuades Philoctetes to go to Troy, promising he will be cured and that the Greeks will win. Philoctetes obeys and back at the siege of Troy a son of the physician Asclepius heals his wound permanently.

Because Philoctetes is not suffering the war-weariness of the previous 10 years, he is among the Greeks chosen to hide inside the Trojan Horse, and during the sack of the city he wins glory, killing many Trojans, including Paris.

Sophocles does not offer a simple morality play, nor does he provide any easy answers to the perennial problems of why we suffer or why we feel abandoned by those closest to us.

Instead, he offers a way to discuss the conflicting values of the good of the nation and justice or the common good, between political expediency and integrity in the demand for justice. Should a dishonourable action be carried out for the sake of the common good? Both Philoctetes and Odysseus represent extremes of each set of competing values, and both become the subject of criticism by Sophocles.

This is not a play of action and doing, but a play about emotions and feelings, a study in suffering. Sophocles appears to suggest that deception is unjustifiable in a democratic society, no matter how high the stakes may be, and that common ground outside politics must be found if conflicts are to be resolved.

The earthenware water jar in the Hunt Museum may be contemporaneous with the play Philoctetes by Sophocles. When we return from our islands to our cities, how do we retain our values without neglecting the need to pursue the common good and without losing personal integrity?

The Greek earthenware water jar in the Hunt Museum in Limerick (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Following the surviving mediaeval walls of Limerick

Following the surviving parts of the city walls on Island Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Patrick Comerford

As I strolled through King’s Island after my arrival back in Limerick late on Thursday [13 July 2017], I set out to follow the path of some of the remaining portions of the old city walls.

The mediaeval city had two sets of walls, surrounding Englishtown on King’s Island, and Irishtown to the south. In the late 17th century, as civic pride was renewed and blossomed, city gates were rebuilt, with new Latin mottoes or inscriptions, and many maps show the paired walled cities linked by the gated Baal’s Bridge.

Limerick was a walled city with 17 gates until the 1760s and the development of Georgian Limerick, driven by Edmund Sexton Pery, speaker of the Irish House of Commons, who gave his name to Netown Pery, the heart of the new Georgian city centre.

In 1760, the walls of Limerick were declared redundant, and Pery’s initiative from 1765 on extended the city south of the Abbey River and the ancient medieval city. As part of this expansion of Limerick, most of the walls of the mediaeval city were torn down.

The surviving wall of Saint Saviour’s Priory and the nuns’ graveyard (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Until these developments, the east side of Englishtown was lined with religious foundations, and some of these were incorporated into the walled area. However, all that remains of these friaries and convents today is the East Wall of the Dominican Friary, which was founded in 1227 by Donnchadh Cairbbreach O Brien on land donated by King Henry III. Donnchadh Cairbbreach was buried in the friary in 1242.

A further royal grant of land was made in 1285 by Edward I, who claimed the friary had been founded by his ancestor.

The Limerick historian Seán Spellissy says James FitzGerald, Earl of Desmond was buried in the rebuilt priory in 1462. However, it seems that James FitzGerald, 6th Earl of Desmond, was buried in Youghal, Co Cork, when he died in 1462 or 1463; Thomas FitzGerald, 7th Earl of Desmond, who was beheaded in Drogheda in 1468, was buried at Saint Peter’s Church, Drogheda, and then reburied at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin; and James FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Desmond, was buried in Youghal, Co Cork, when he was murdered in Rathkeale in 1487.

Two blocked arched openings may once have given the Dominican friars of Saint Saviour’s access to the walls and orchards outside the city walls.

At the Dissolution of the monastic houses in 1541, Saint Saviour’s Friary was suppressed and their friary and the friars’ lands and estates, including fishing rights on the River Shannon, were granted to James FitzGerald, 14th Earl of Desmond, in 1543.

Desmond may have only intended to hold the property in trust for the Dominicans, for he returned it to the friars during the reign of Queen Mary Tudor (1553-1558). In 1589, the friary was granted to Robert Annesley, a captain in the force that suppressed the Desmond rebellion in Ireland who securing a grant of 2,600 acres of former Desmond estates in Limerick.

Annesley’s descendants held the titles of Baron Altham, Viscount Valentia, Earl of Anglesey and Earl of Mountnorris, and the family was involved in a famous scandal in the 18th century that involved kidnapping the family heir when he was a boy.

The surviving Sallyport by the walls of Saint Mary’s Convent of Mercy (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Annesley seems to have profited by selling the priory and its lands to James Gould, who was in possession of them in 1600. During the Catholic Confederacy, the site was once again in the possession of the Dominicans, and in 1644 Pope Vincent X gave a charter for a university at Saint Saviour’s.

Terence Albert O’Brien (1600-1651), the Dominican Bishop of Emly who was executed by General Ireton in Limerick on 30 October 1651, is said to be buried in the priory. He is one of the Seventeen Irish Martyrs beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1992.

With changes in Limerick’s political fortunes in the century that followed, from the 1650s to the 1750s, the buildings of the Dominican Friary fell into ruins, and only the east wall of the friary church survives.

In 1812, three Franciscan or Poor Clare nuns moved into a house near the ruins of the Dominican Friary, built a chapel, choir and cells, and built a school for the children of this part of Limerick. Two of the nuns returned to Dublin in 1816, but another three nuns arrived from Galway soon after. However, the Poor Clare convent was dissolved in 1831.

Seven years later, the Sisters of Mercy moved to Limerick in 1838, and they moved into the convent building, fronting onto Island Road. When Mother Catherine McAuley, who founded the Sisters of Mercy, and Mother Elizabeth Moore entered the doorway on 24 September 1838 to found Saint Mary’s Convent, they were welcomed by the two remaining Poor Clare sisters.

Island Road roughly follows the line of the city walls that had stood from 1237, and part of the walls can still be seen close along the boundary walls of the former Dominican Priory and Mercy Convent.

A wall display recalls the Mercy Sisters being welcomed to Limerick by the Poor Clares (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)