Limerick has been damned for snobbery. And undoubtedly class distinction is here for all the world to see. Housing, for example, is more or less segregated on socio-economic lines.

So, to a significant extent, is education. Schools tend to be largely working-class or largely middle-class. Glenstal, of course, is a class apart.

And the discrimination continues after school. Remember the four young Limerickwomen - all residents of the same local authority estate who gave false addresses when applying for jobs because "they didn't want the companies to know where they were from."

And there was the case of another young Limerickwoman. A shopkeeper refused her a job when he thought she lived in Southill, then offered her one when he discovered she lived in Corbally. And the injustice persists in sickness as well as health.

How, where and when you are treated in hospital depends largely on which caste you were born into. Admittedly none of all this is peculiar to Limerick. Institutional class discrimination in such areas as education, employment, housing and health - and in both the private and public sectors - is rife nationally and indeed internationally. And it is, if anything, less pronounced in Limerick than elsewhere.

But there is another measure of snobbery - other than the institutional: the personal. How do the social attitudes of members of Limerick's upper classes and upwardly-mobile classes compare with those of there counterparts elsewhere?

The toffs fall into two categories: the old money and the new. The old dynasties of Limerick are surely remarkably less showy than the merchant princes of, say, Cork. Most of the owners of inherited fortunes on Shannonside are conspicuous only by their inconspicuousness.

Wealth, of course doesn't always cascade down the generations. Sometimes it dries up. Assets hard-won by one generation can so easily be lost by another.

But the Limerick people who have just lost it all are inevitably and rapidly succeeded by the people who have just won it all. But these, too, usually adopt comparatively modest lifestyles. They don't generally drive top of the range cars or send their children to terribly exclusive schools or inhabit spectacular residences.

There are far fewer South Forks in Limerick than in many other smaller and poorer places.

Indeed, the reputedly wealthiest man in Limerick - a self-made millionaire many times over - lives contentedly in a humble semi-detached house in one of the Northside's less fashionable neighbourhoods. The vulgarity of conspicuous consumption in the Treaty City and County is the exception rather than the rule. Limerick people, unusually if not uniquely, don't flaunt their wealth, whether old-established or new-found.

In all fairness, Limerick should be noted less for snobbery than for the fact that is the only place on earth where even the nouveau riche have a touch of class.