A GHOST continues to haunt Limerick. In death as in life--as in Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes--it overshadows everything. Just when the Mid-West must have thought that the sleepless spirit had finally been laid to rest, along comes the Mayor of Limerick to rattle the skeleton.

Cllr Jack Bourke pleads with the Pulitzer Prizewinner to use his influence to switch the premiere of the film of the book from Dublin to Limerick. This, he believes, would benefit both the city and the movie. But would it?

In fact Angela's Ashes has already been screened in Ireland and, despite the appearance of star performers such as those pictured on this page, it is by all accounts a dire film. Barnum and Bailey might have believed that there was no such thing as bad publicity but it is difficult to understand how a gloomy, depressing and backward look at a make-believe Limerick would necessarily show today's real-life Limerick in a kindly light.

As one artistic local wit observed in wicked parody this week: "Worse than the film of an ordinary miserable childrhood is the film of a miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the film of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." If the movie magnates don't want to stage their premiere here, why try to pressurise them? Good riddance to it.

I promise not to unnecessarily prolong the by now nauseating McCourt saga, save to quote from an obviously wise and venerable Limerickman, John Conran, of 26 Eastbourne Avenue, Hodge Hill, Birmingham, England :-

"Having read and enjoyed Angela's Ashes, I would like to point out that the Limerick the McCourts returned to was itself suffering the aftermath of World War One, the excesses of the Black and Tans and the Civil War, with World War Two on the horizon. I lived in Limerick at the time. I had nine sisters and one brother.

"I did not feel all that misery. I enjoyed my schooldays at St Munchin's CBS. We had the Shannon and the hills on our doorstep.

"The problem with the McCourts was not Limerick, the Church or the priests. The father was an alcoholic. He failed in New York, the promised land.

"He would fail in any city--and did."

Out of the mouths of babes and senior citizens . . .

The spectre that haunts Limerick is not that of Angela or of any other Limerick person but of her alcoholic Ulster husband. Forget the movie. Limerick must finally recognise that its real role in the story is neither here nor there.

Only then will Malachy's ghost be laid to rest.