What is all this crap about Limerick being a "City of Culture"?

Now Limerick is an all right place as places go.  I know of worse places and I know of better.  I have a friend who hails from Limerick and in our younger wilder days I used to drop down to his gaff of a weekend and we would then head off to the various and numerous watering holes in the vicinity to play music and get hammered.  Happy days.  So I do know where Limerick is, though these days it tends to feature in my mind as a place to pass through on the way to somewhere else.

So why should it suddenly become a "City of Culture"?

Even more important, why the blind fuck should it get a gubmint grant?

I read a piece where Pat Cox [failed RTE reporter, and failed bigwig from Brussels] "thanked" the gobmint for the grant.  Why the blind fuck is he thanking them?  It's not their money, it's mine.  I am sick and tired of organisations giving obsequious gratitude to the gubmint for some handout or other.  IT IS NOT THEIR MONEY.  Without any by-your-leave those cunts in Merrion Square are handing MY money over to some other crowd of cunts who have come up with some hair-brained scheme that does sweet fuck all except provide jobs for the boys.

What exactly are they hoping to achieve with this "City of Culture" thing anyway?  I know Limerick used to have a fairly rough reputation.  It used to be known as Stab City.  Heh!  But they stopped calling it that when people realised that the lads over in South Hill had forsaken knives for guns and Shoot City doesn't quite have the same ring to it?  So are they just trying to buy themselves a new reputation?  Too little, too late, I say.

I would dearly love to know what I'm getting for my money though.