If Angela's Ashes depicted Limerick as awash with rain, a new publication on the city's university will go some way to reversing that impression, showing the natural beauty of its campus on the banks of the Shannon under sunshine and in between showers.
University of Limerick - A Celebration was launched this week by the college's president, Prof Roger Downer, who described it as depicting "what we are and what we were and from where we have come".
The collection of 100 photographs of the first university to be founded in the history of the State is mainly the work of a Cork photographer, Mr Andrew Bradley, who specialises in landscape and marine work. He took the pictures over 12 months including one intensive period when he lived on campus for a week "getting up at 4 a.m. to get sunrise shots".
"What we are trying to get over in photographs is a flavour of the place. It was not a technical project, it was a creative project," he said.
Dr Walsh describes in his foreword the struggle the city had to get a university. A delegation travelled to London in 1845 to make the case for Limerick to be chosen as one of the proposed Queen's Colleges.
An institute of higher education was established following the sudden death of the Limerick TD and minister for education, Donogh O'Malley, in 1968. It was not until the introduction of legislation in 1989 that the campus was granted university status.