Council Affairs: Crescent Crusade

BUT in all seriousness, what is the Mayor’s "obsession" with closing The Crescent? John Moran wasn’t in the door of Merchants Quay...

BUT in all seriousness, what is the Mayor’s “obsession” with closing The Crescent?

John Moran wasn’t in the door of Merchants Quay and he was lording it up with his very own version of The Last Supper, all while closing off this main artery into the city.

Councillors still can’t make head nor tail what his “fascination” with these twice yearly Sieges of O’Connell Avenue is all about? And at this month’s Metropolitan District meeting, the question remained.

Weary council members pleaded with our unreasonable overlord to move the sandcastles and ageing pub rockers to some other, more out of the way spot, where they could rub each other’s egos with gusto, without disrupting traffic during the busiest shopping weeks of the year.

You see, it’s become a tradition in City Hall in recent years for Christmas in Limerick to kick off with the annual pummelling of our festive season’s offering. This yearly shit-show has replaced the turning on of the twinkling fairy lights, and is akin to bloodcurdling scenes witnessed by the Romans at the Colosseum as the Christians were fed to rabid lions back in olden times.

It’s usually one of the seething blue-shirts or Éamon de Valera’s lot that get proceedings underway with a two-fingered ‘bah humbug’ to the council executive. But in fairness to them, they kept their blood pressure well under control, and even offered some very sensible alternatives to the Mayor’s worrying fetish for barricading himself into The Crescent, where he has the pick of two primely-located properties.

“Somebody or some arm of this organisation has an absolute obsession in closing the Crescent,” Cllr Dan Maximus McSweeney bellowed.

Cllr Peter Decimus Doyle begged his lordship not to ride roughshod over the ratepayers and the business people in Limerick.

This overpowering preoccupation will see us all come to a bad end, I tell you. I mean, poor auld Cllr Catherine Meridius Slattery has had to deal with head-the-balls on FaceTube, upset that they might miss out on a seat at the long table this Christmas.

“There is plenty of places in Limerick that a market can be put – Bedford Row, Thomas Street, Cruises Street.

“Limerick means a lot to me, and if it means standing up for people that don’t have a voice because of one person’s ego to close off a road for for six weeks, I will be doing that,” Cllr Slattery warned.

Long-serving Labour Party councillor Joe Leddin had never seen the like of it, and he called on Mayor Moran to cop himself on and show a bit of leadership.

“I absolutely agree with the frustration of the traders in relation to this planned closure of the Crescent. It’s semi-detached from the core area of the city in terms of retail and hospitality — it’s a business district. I don’t know what the fixation with the Crescent is,” he cried.