About the Author

This series of 100 books published between September 2015 and January 2020 is compiled and edited by Limerick Historian, Archivist & Entrepreneur Gerard J. Hannan BA MBS. Limerick Gazette began life in September 2015 when Hannan began to gather 20,000 previously unpublished images of Limerick in the 20th Century. Using social media, he crowdsourced the images and built an online archive at www.limerickgazette.com where they will remain permanently archived for present and future generations of Limerick people worldwide. All of the images in the archive belong to the people of 20th Century Limerick and come from their own private home collections. These are images captured throughout the century by the people who lived their lives on the streets and lanes of Limerick and, as such, witnessed first-hand the history of their native city unfold and opted to capture it forever in photographic form. This fact makes the archive unique because what they captured was Limerick life from their perspective and their images show us their reality and what was important to them. In fact, unintentionally or otherwise, this is a pure, unbiased representation of historical fact as evidenced by the images themselves. However, it is not sufficient to just produce a book of images without trying to capture the social and economic environment in which these people lived. To achieve this Hannan has searched through local, national and international newspaper archives to ascertain what was important to the people of 20th Century Limerick. Using the basic measuring tool of the most controversial because it brought international attention to the city he searched global archives to find the hundreds of stories featured as they happened in every issue. The combination of images and text in each edition of Limerick Gazette will permit us to see and experience 20th Century Limerick in a way which, up until the current digital era, has never allowed before. All the profits from the sale of these books are used to support the project and help pay for day to day expenses involved in maintenance, technical costs, research, and development.