Leamy in Focus! Life and times of little-known Limerick benefactor
Reporter:
nick@limerickleader.ie
Pictured at the panels outside the former Leamy school in Hartstonge Street are designer Fionán Coughlan and Julie Long of printers GBM. Academic Dr Paul O’Brien put together the wording );
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UTTER the words the Leamy School to many people in Limerick city and they will inevitably reference Frank McCourt, the landmark Tudor building in Hartstonge Street synonymous with the author.
They’re less likely to be able to tell you about William Leamy, the generous benefactor whose financial legacy built the school in the early 19th century.
But some have paused to wonder whether the vibrant memoir credited with inventing the lucrative genre of “misery literature” is in fact a true and authentic account of his childhood. Or is it largely a creation of McCourt’s undoubtedly fertile imagination?
The book is the subject of a scathing attack in the latest edition of the
Dublin Review of Books. Alan Titley, emeritus professor of Irish at University College Cork, denounces McCourt as a “chancer”.
He accuses him of peddling a book that was “trashy” and “cringe-inducing”; a “sham” with a “concocted narrative”.
To say that the professor is unimpressed by the man once hailed as the “Irish Dickens” would be a dramatic understatement.