Cork’s Cultural Heritage

The spreading Lee, that like an island fayre
Encloseth Croke with his divided flood
Edmund Spenser

Statio Bene Fide Carinis – A Safe Harbour for Ships is Cork’s city motto. Cork, as the natural capital of the southwestern region, has always looked outward relying on trade to keep the city and its citizens prosperous and developing. This was and remains a trade in culture as well as commerce.

For five hundred years, from the seventh to the twelfth century, Cork was a centre of learning and piety. A Charter granted to the City by King Edward VI in 1543 established Cork as a merchant centre. By the Elizabethan era the city was regarded a prosperous port.

Finnbarre’s Cathedral is on the site chosen by St Finnbarre, the patron saint of Cork, to found his monastic school in 650 AD. The Cathedral, French Gothic in style, was designed by William Burgess of London in the mid 1800s. The monks of St. Finnbarre’s monastery went from Cork into Europe carrying their Christian learning to the Carolingians and the Italian territories.

By 1800 there were fifty silver and goldsmiths at work in the city. Much of the skill and elegance of Cork silver is due to the presence of Huguenots: names such as Goble, Billon and Lebatte appear on the merchant lists and lists of Mayors and Freemen of our city during the eighteenth century.

During the Napoleonic Era Cork prospered too, both as a provision centre and an arena of assembly and military embarkation. The prosperity of those times found cultural and intellectual expression with the organisation of such institutions as the Royal Cork Institution 1803, (Royal Charter, 1807) and the Cork Society of Arts, 1815. This was the era of great monumental works of the sculptors Hogan and Foley, as well as the arrival from Rome of the Classical casts from the studio of Antonia Canova. The Canova casts can still be seen at the Crawford Gallery. These same casts formed the nucleus of the School of Art and Design, which was established by the Board of Trade in 1849. In 1877 a member of Parliament for Cork was successful in getting the Public Libraries Amendment Act (Ireland) passed which permitted grant to be given for Music as well as those for Art and Science. This led to the founding of the Cork School of Music in 1878.

In 1916 Daniel Corkery described Cork:

Leaving us the summer visitor says in good-humoured way that Cork is quite a busy place, considering how small it is. And he really thinks so, because whatever little we have of pastors, postmen, urchins, beggars; of squares, streets, lanes, markets; of wagons, motors, tramcars, ships; of spires, turrets, domes, towers; of bells, horns, meetings, cries; concert halls, theatres, shops – whatever little we have all these – as humdrum a collection of odds-and-ends as ever went by the name of city – are flung higgledy-piggedly together into a narrow, double-streamed, many-bridged river valley, jostled and jostling, so compacted that the mass throws up a froth and flurry that confuses the stray visitor, unless indeed he is set on getting at the true size and worth of things. For him this is Cork. But for us it is only ‘the flat of the city’.

Cork is a city of hills, of early and mid-Victorian residencies in Sunday’s Well, Tivoli and Montenotte. Churches such as the famous St. Anne’s in Shandon, with it gold fish, the North Cathedral, priories and schools, all look down on the centre of the city, the island at its core.

The city’s buildings are elegant, intimate, and frequently not immediately obvious to the casual visitor. Pugin, who also designed Westminster, was the architect of St. Peter and Paul’s church, which is tucked away off Paul Street. Harry Clarke’s wonderful stained glass windows of the Honan Chapel should also be sought out. Aside from these there are the wonderful riverside walks of the Markdyke, and Marina and the continuing beauty of the University. Animating these spaces with films, music, plays, choirs and people are the cities festivals. Of course, during 2005, Cork payed host as European Capital of Culture.

The city has also traded with Europe in art and artists. By the late 1770s Cork artists like James Barry (a member of the Royal Academy of Art) were living in Rome, painting in the Vatican Galleries, in Parma and Bologna, learning the methods and values of neo-classical Europe. Out of the same circle came the artist Daniel Maclise, (born 1806) who became another influential member of the British Royal Academy. Francis Sylvester Mahony or ‘Father Prout’, also lived in Rome in the late nineteenth century. This Cork writer, educated by the Jesuits in France, ordained at Lucca, was a hugely influential writer on Fraser’s Magazine in the 1840’s. His Reliques of Father Prout, a satirical, multi-lingual collection of essays has endured as a powerfully influential presence in Irish writing. Mahony’s Cork erudition and linguistic trickery has influenced both James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

Cork writers have made their greatest impact on Irish literature in the twentieth century. Daniel Corkery (born 1878) published his Cork novel Threshold of Quiet in 1916 as well as his influential Hidden Ireland in 1927. Sean O’Faolain (born 1900) and Frank O’Connor (born 1903) are two novelists and short-story writers who changed the direction of Irish fiction after Joyce. Cork has produced arguably the most important Irish language poet of the last two hundred years in Sean O Riordain. Born in 1916, O Riordain spent his entire life in the environs of the city, working in the City Hall and lecturing part-time in the University’s Irish language Department. Among his students at the University were a whole group of energetic Gaelic language poets, Michael Davitt, Liam de Paor, Gabriel Rosenstock. Cork English language literature is also rich with writers: the poet and playwright Patrick Galvin, the novelist Mary Leland, young poets such as Gerry Murphy, Greg Delanty and Patrick Cotter.

Despite the general depression in the United Kingdom after the Napoleonic Era, Cork continued to trade through the bleak nineteenth century, becoming the commercial and banking capital of the southern part of Ireland. Wines from the Mediterranean and French Algeria, salt from Liverpool and animal hides from Russia were the chief imports of the city by the mid-nineteenth century.

Food and whiskey, fertilisers and tweed were the staple exports for a hundred years or more. During the First World War the Ford Motor Company set up a huge Tractor manufacturing facility on the City quays: thus began a new era of heavy industry in Cork, including fertiliser manufacture, ship-building, tyre-moulding and coach-building. The entry of Ireland into the EEC in 1973 meant that competition and free trade ruined many of these tariff-protected industries. Many workers lost their jobs and as many were too old to migrate, so Cork harbour area became a landscape of depression and hopeless decline. The Arts in Cork continued, Festivals were organised on a shoestring; volunteers and civic-minded citizens never gave up hope but offered their skills to the community until the economy turned around.

Today both culture and commerce are in rude health in our port city. Works by local composers such as Sean O Riada, Aloys Fleischmann, Seamus de Barra and John Gibson continue to feed the classical appetites of the city. Singer-songwriters like Jimmy McCarthy and Sinead Lohan, John Spillane and Noel Shine have huge local following as well as developing international reputations. Drama directors such as Emilie Fitzgibbion, Pat Kiernan, and Johnny Hanrahan continue to pack the theatres. There is a crop of young directors and playwrights emerging from the wings to follow them.

The University’s Quartet in Residence the Vanbrugh String Quartet gives regular recitals of Smetana, Mozart, Borodin and Shostakovich in the Aula Maxima. The composers, O Riada and Fleischmann, were teachers at the University. Stained glass artists such as James Scanlon and Maud Cotter, leading exponents of this fine craft, are based in the city today. Organisations such as the National Sculpture Factory, the Cork Film Centre, the Cork Artists Collective, the Institute for Choreography and Dance, to name but a few, lead the way in innovation.

You have been introduced to Cork, a city of people and poets, actors and writers, as well as visitors from all over the world. Now, as always, Cork extends its hand to the visitor as it celebrates in a year-long programme of events having secured the title European Capital of Culture 2005. Our City of Culture welcomes your curiosity and enjoyment.

© Tom McCarthy, Novelist and Poet