A MEMORIAL MADE from the ashes of a well-known late Limerick legend has been painted blue by a mystery man wearing a hi-viz jacket.
‘Jock’s Block’ sits outside The Whitehouse bar on O’Connell Street and has for the last nine years been a tribute to local character and avid rugby fan Jock Hunter.
The concrete block is made, in part, from Jock’s ashes and contains his urn, as well as a number of other personal items. It is decorated by copper piping surrounding it.
Some of Jock’s ashes were also scattered in Thomond Park and in the Millennium Stadium.
Early last Tuesday morning a man was seen painting the entire memorial blue and locals are as yet clueless as to who the person was or why they did it.
“That’s about as much as anyone knows,” Whitehouse bar manager Richie Byrne told TheJournal.ie.
“We have footage of the guy but we don’t know who it was. He was there for a good while, about and an hour an 10 minutes from 7.30am so he came in before anyone was there.”
Byrne says that it was the anniversary of Jock’s death recently and his friends who’d made the memorial had talked about doing it up:
It’s the 10-year anniversary and his friends had talked about doing something. I noticed it when I was coming in but I presumed it was them that had painted it. It was only when they asked me about it themselves that I realised it wasn’t.
He added that Jock’s friends are making an official complaint to the gardaí but that nobody is sure if whoever painted it thought they were doing anything wrong.
He says that some people are speculating that the person may just have wanted to freshen up the memorial but didn’t do the best job.
“We are not suggesting that the individual in the footage is necessarily acting with ill intent. We haven’t eliminated the possibility that somebody hired him to do it,” Jock’s friend Greg O’Shaughnessy told the Limerick Leader.
Jock Hunter was born in Scotland and only spent a number of years in Limerick but left a lasting impression on people the area said Byrne.
“We just want to find out happened and maybe if we get the story out there somebody will know,” he says.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say