Plassey
Posted on Thursday, May 4, 2006Everybody in Limerick knows Plassey. If you don’t go to the nearby University, you certainly went swimming there as a teenager. You walked along the river bank there, got stoned there or laid, if you were lucky or drunk enough. I once gashed my foot there on a sharp stone, while swimming with my friends, and had to walk the whole way to Barrington’s Hospital for stitches, stopping every hundred yards or so to empty blood from my boot, but even that memory, strangely, has transmuted into something I like to keep, because it’s part of growing up and bonding with people who still matter to me. Plassey is fishing, swimming, walking and sharing. I was very, very young indeed when my father carried me on the bar of his bike, but to me Plassey is also Micheal O hEither commentating on some match neither I nor my father gave a shit about, yet which we both recognised had some meaning beyond our narrow lives. It’s a beautiful place - peaceful, serene and part of what we are.
When I was a kid, Plassey House - now the administrative heart of the University of Limerick - was simply the Haunted House. A brooding, Aubrey de Vere edifice, filled with terrors, with monsters, certainly with ghosts, but in reality populated by people who had no other place to go.
Did you know that the original Plassey is a place in India? Or that Plassey House was built for the great Clive of India), and that he named the area after his victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, when he defeated the Nawab of Bengal through the astute use of bribery? I don’t think he lived in the house. I’m not even sure he ever saw it, but perhaps he did. I hope he did, because it’s a beautiful place.
It could easily be that Clive of India never saw Plassey House for one very good reason. It isn’t widely known that, not more than five miles upriver, there’s another great house, built at around the same time by Dave of India. He called it Plassey House. And to make matters worse, another Italianate villa, Plassey House, only two miles away, was built by Steve of India. Both Dave and Steve also claimed to have defeated the Nawab of Bengal, in a game of forty-five.
Some scholars, while acknowledging the fine work evident in the great Italianate villa, Plassey House, at Annacotty, built by Maeve of India, dispute her claim to victory over the Nawab, ascribing it instead to Viv of India, who never built a house at all.
One thing is certain though. Whoever won the battle, the Nawab of Bengal was nothing short of a bollocks who sold out for a handy few bob and a quiet life.
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