Limerick Country

I was reminiscing with a good friend of mine recently about Dublin in the 1970s; he was considering what Dublin must have been like for someone from the country, ie myself. I had to remind him that I was, in fact, from Limerick city.
Back in my home town this weekend, I again feel assertive about Limerick's urban credentials. A few years ago I saw the film Troy in three different cinemas, in Limerick, Westport and Castlebar. In Mayo and Limerick an audience of teenage girls showed up for Brad Pitt, probably unaware of much of this 'historical stuff' in the movie. In Limerick, however, the girls settled down after a while and were locked into the story: it didn't work for the Mayo audiences, however; the fate of a city under siege had no appeal.
(On Clancy's Strand, an Edwardian red brick house is riddled with bullet holes, from Civil War days; it is now a listed structure. A few days ago, more marks of the same kind were produced when a row of houses in St Mary's Park was raked by machine gun fire. )
Preliminary criteria for city status: to have been besieged, to have been worth taking; primal terror of citizens within the walls sending waves forward through generations. Urban bus routes. A food market where citizens, who had no land, traded with country folk. Round-the-houses races, requiring a circular rather than linear route, proving that the settlement was more than a ribbon development on either side of a road. Oh, and a distinct local military tradition... take a bow Corporal O' Dea.