County Limerick
Luimneach
- IrishLuimneach
- ProvinceMunster
- County townLimerick city
- Local governmentLimerick City and County Council, one council since 2014
- Area2,755 km²
- Population209,536 (2022)
- Highest pointGaltymore, 917.9 m, shared with Tipperary
The 1904 Limerick Boycott
Limerick's Jewish community was small and poor, Lithuanian pedlars mostly. In January 1904 a Redemptorist priest, Father John Creagh, preached them into ruin, telling his confraternity that they had fastened on the people like leeches. The rabbi, Elias Levin, answered with figures: of 1,387 summonses at the Limerick courthouse in 1903, only 31 could be connected with Jewish traders. Arthur Griffith lent the campaign his name.
Local Catholics stopped trading with Jewish merchants and stopped paying what they owed them. Stones and mud followed, though nobody was killed.
The police counted thirty two Jewish families in January 1904. Fourteen months later eight had gone. By 1911 thirteen of the rest were still there.
Father John Creagh: Complicated
Cormac Óg
Dromcollogher creamery
Ireland's first cooperative creamery opened at Dromcollogher on the sixth of June 1889. The farmers registered it that year as a cooperative dairy society.
It began without Horace Plunkett. The organiser was W. L. Stokes.
A creamery meant a cheque every month for the milk. Cash that came in every month widened the ways a family could live off the land.
Cormac Óg
Father John Creagh
He was born in Thomondgate in 1870. In 1902 he took charge of the Redemptorist confraternity of the Holy Family in Limerick, some six thousand working men who heard him every week.
On the eleventh of January 1904 he told them to have no more dealings with the city's Jews. The boycott that followed broke part of a small, poor community.
His order sent him away in 1906. He ended up in the Kimberleys of north west Australia, where he kept the German missions open in wartime. He died in Wellington in 1947.
Father John Creagh: Complicated
Cormac Óg
Read further
Better land and bigger farms than the West. A boycott in 1904 that broke a small Jewish community. And one of the few bishops who backed the pledge.