Limerick is no stranger to bad publicity: it is 100 years this month since the start of the boycott of Jews in the city. About 80 people left Limerick as a result and their experience has remained in Jewish memory as the "Limerick pogrom".
Limerick's anti-Jewish prejudice was rooted in poverty and ignorance and, like all forms of fundamentalism, was profoundly unchristian. The Jews were resented as intrepid immigrants at a time when, as one Limerick councillor put it, "we have our own people walking the streets in thousands and going to America to seek a livelihood".
Father John Creagh, director of the Redemptorist Men's Confraternity, was a demagogic preacher, who spared no one. Dealing with the abuse of alcohol, he had assailed certain publicans as living for "blood money".
In January 1904 Creagh turned his eloquence against Jewish traders in the city. It appears he had been approached by shopkeepers complaining of the competition from Jewish pedlars. On January 11th he claimed the labouring classes "were allowing themselves to become the slaves of Jew usurers". They knew who the "rapacious Jews" were: they had crucified Christ. There were "no greater enemies of the Catholic Church than the Jews".
Creagh advised his congregation to have no further commercial dealings with the Jews. Most of them lived in Colooney (now Wolfe Tone) Street, near the Redemptorist church. As large crowds passed by after the sermon that night, the residents were subjected to jeers and threats of violence.
Next day the local rabbi wrote to Michael Davitt, whose Fall of Feudalism in Ireland was published in 1904. Rabbi Levin said the priest's allegations were untrue, that previously the Jews had lived in harmony with their Catholic neighbours; and he left the great land reformer to conclude whether the outbursts were rooted in anti-Semitism or had been prompted by local traders.
Davitt responded quickly, protesting in the Freeman's Journal as an Irishman and a Catholic "against the spirit of barbarous malignity being introduced into Ireland, under the pretended form of a material regard for the welfare of our workers". He was attacked in the letters columns of the local press and by a trades union group, which endorsed Creagh's policy.
The confraternity director's next weekly sermon attracted international notice. Although deprecating physical violence against the Jews, he urged his listeners to "keep away from them and let them go to whatever country they came from. . ." Anti-Semitic outbreaks that evening resulted in a number of summonses being issued.
The boycott lasted several months. As the controversy developed, Arthur Griffith's United Irishman supported the boycott, while the British press censured Limerick racism. The position of the Jewish traders was not improved by the intervention of the Church of Ireland. A general assembly motion drew "the attention of his majesty's government to the persecution of Protestants and Jews in Ireland".
Limerick Corporation was outraged. Members held a special meeting in April to forward a plea to the lord lieutenant to release a youth who had been given a one-month prison sentence for throwing a stone that struck a Jew. Although the meeting proclaimed its opposition to violence, it expressed concern at Jewish trading practices, and some members wanted the traders out of the city.
In the autumn Creagh opened a bank, a shop and the Workmen's Industrial Association. Two years later he was assigned to the Redemptorists' new mission in the Philippines - "in no way a demotion", Dr Thomas Morrissey remarks judiciously in his fine biography Bishop Edward Thomas O'Dwyer of Limerick, 1842-1917 (Four Courts Press, €45).
He also points out there were sharp divisions in the Limerick Jewish community. A second synagogue was opened in 1901, well before the boycott, by those who did not wish to associate themselves "with money-lenders".
Father Morrissey concludes: "The departure of the Jews was not universally welcomed in the city. People who lived in Colooney Street valued many of them as good neighbours, and resented the violence used against them, but they had no effective voice."
Father Brendan McConvery, writing in last month's issue of the Redemptorist magazine Reality, said what made Creagh's "denunciation infamous is the way it demonised a whole community, drawing on the worst Christian anti-Semitic legends and twisting passages from the Gospels into a vicious tirade".
Incidentally, the Limerick Jewish burial ground was established at Castletroy in the 1890s on land provided by Willie Nunan, this diarist's great-grand-uncle.
Bishop O'Dwyer of Limerick took steps behind the scenes to alleviate the situation; but otherwise, like the city corporation, he insisted the issue was a commercial and not a religious one. He did not regard the Jews as a priority. He probably heeded the charges of usury and shared to some degree the common European prejudice against Jews.
By contrast, during the land struggle he had condemned boycotting and the Plan of Campaign on moral grounds. His independent stand, which led to sustained public abuse, was influenced by the friendship of a circle of untypical landlords to the west of the city. Lord Emly of Tervoe was instrumental in bringing the Redemptorists to Limerick; Aubrey and Stephen de Vere were men of culture and humanity; and, together with the Earl of Dunraven, nearly all had followed John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church.
In his final years he changed the course of Irish history. As 1916 dawned he found the Irish Parliamentary Party seemingly dominated by the policies and values of the British Liberals, while bodies such as the Gaelic League were preserving a sense of national identity. His Lenten letter was devoted to peace - to ending "the calamitous war that was turning Europe into a human slaughter house".
When the people were disheartened after the execution of the leaders of the Rising, his denunciation of Gen Sir John Maxwell as a military dictator stirred the nation.
His subsequent speech on receiving the freedom of Limerick was perceived as an episcopal endorsement of Sinn Féin.