No-one knows for certain how the name of an Irish Mid-Western city came to be associated with the short, irreverent, often bawdy verses of the limerick.

Some people believe that it came from the school of poets who lived in Croom, Co. Limerick in the nineteenth century; their specialisation was short satiric verses. The genre became a fixture in Victorian times, due in no small part to the author of nonsense verse, Edward Lear.

In the history of Irish literature the town of Croom, in Co. Limerick, is celebrated as the meeting place of the 18th century Fili na Maighe, the Gaelic poets of the Maigue. This was the original birth place of