The name ‘Limerick’ includes both a city and county. Speaking mainly of things as they were in the nineteenth century, the city was a port on the estuary of the River Shannon, with a population of some 60,000. Both passenger and freight boats regularly plied the Atlantic to the ports of Quebec and the American East coast. In origin, however, Limerick City was a Danish settlement, giving us surnames which are as old as the oldest Irish surnames, for we had the Danes before we had surnames.

The county is a small one, a vaguely rectangular shape measuring about 40 miles wide from County Tipperary in the east to Kerry in the west, and about thirty miles deep from north to south. It is bounded by County Cork along all of its southern border, and by the Shannon Estuary and County Clare to the North. County Clare comes so close to the city, in fact, that much of the south-eastern part of that county was closely connected in many ways with the city of Limerick. Together, city and county had a population of about 300,000 before the Great Famine of the 1840s, but declined steadily to less than half of that during the second half of the century, contributing, in the process, more than its fair share to the peopling of England, America and Australia.