About the Film

“Mixed Blessings” looks at Ireland’s dramatic transformation from a poor nation of rolling green fields, farmers’ pubs, and devout Catholics to an urbanized, secularized and giddily flush society. In this program, WIDE ANGLE visits the city of Limerick. Once a slum known as “stab city” and the impoverished setting of the best-selling memoir ANGELA’S ASHES, the Limerick of today has all the main ingredients of change: foreign investment, a miniature property boom, a burgeoning services industry, childcare shortages, high levels of immigration from neighboring EU states, and shopping developments popping up like daffodils in spring.