Frank McCourt - Honour him by learning his lessons

WHEN Frank McCourt’s great memoir Angela’s Ashes was published 13 years ago it was immediately recognised as a wonderful, benchmark memoir.

That, however, did not prevent a degree of criticism from an offended minority who felt that his descriptions of Limerick as a dismal, impoverished, rain-sodden and priest-ridden backwater were unjustified.

If we are to be honest, and in these instances that can be no more than an assumption, we have to acknowledge that McCourt’s work describes exactly the lot of the poor, the near-destitute and the alcohol-plagued in the Ireland of more than half a century ago. It, like more or less anywhere else, could be a horrible place if you drew one of life’s short straws.