Crisis and Comeback E-Book

Michael Moynihan

• Herausgeber: The Collins Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

How does a city survive its worst recession in living memory? Cork entered the 1980s with swagger. The 1970s had been dominated nationally by the city's favourite son, Jack Lynch, who was Taoiseach for much of the decade. And the sense of superiority wasn't confined to the political arena. The city had given Ireland a world-class rock star in Rory Gallagher, and boasted one of the first internationally recognised film festivals. Cork bustled: Patrick Street on a Saturday afternoon heaved with shoppers in Roches Stores and Cash's. There was a stability to the city, anchored by the institutions from which it drew its identity: the university, the Murphy's and Beamish breweries, the English Market. Underpinning those were key employers such as Ford, Dunlop and Verolme – internationally recognised names, deeply rooted in the fabric of the community after providing decades of employment. Confident and busy, Cork seemed to buck the trend of the late 1970s, as the ripples of the oil crisis spread economic uncertainty across the globe. But by the middle of the 1980s, the city had been plunged into chaos. Ford, Dunlop and Verolme all closed within eighteen months. Every institution in the city seemed under threat. The two breweries came close to shutting down. The English Market survived not one but two devastating fires. Cork Corporation strongly considered turning it into a car park. The uncertainty spread beyond the unemployment statistics, horrific though they were, manifesting itself in religious hysteria, protest voting and crime. Cork had become a rust-belt region. But a spiky self-belief, determined natives and vital new industries made all the difference as the city began the often painful transition from traditional manufacturing to what we now term 'the knowledge economy'. Drawing on extensive interviews with politicians, workers, writers and industrialists, Michael Moynihan weaves a sweeping tapestry of the city at a critical juncture. In a rich narrative, he tells the compelling story of how Cork's eventual status as a high-tech hub was won.

Leseprobe

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN is a journalist with the Irish Examiner. He has also written for RTÉ, Today FM, The Observer and the Washington Post. He was born and raised in Cork, where he lives with his wife and two children. He is the author of several successful books and has twice been shortlisted for Sports Book of the Year.

facebook.com/michael.moynihan.54

@MikeMoynihanEx

For Donal and Mary, Marjorie, Clara and Bridget.

Contents

About the author

Dedication

Title page

Introduction

1 Market or Car Park?

2 ‘Dickensian. Totally Hierarchical’

3 Dunlop: John McEnroe Says No

4 Verolme: Selling the Job Twice

5 The Fall Guy: Paddy Hayes

6 Lacking Context: Coverage of the Closures

7 The Fallout: ‘I Used to be Someone’

8 Collateral Damage: Shops, Cinemas and Breweries

9 Patrick Street Looking like a War Zone

10 1985: Chaos

11 Beyond the Pale: a Second City

12 Haughey and Cork

13 ‘Ardnósach’: UCC in the Eighties

14 Blood on the Carpet: Haughey Helps Cork

15 ‘A Place for Women’

16 Going Without

17 The North Side

18 The Local Authority: Soft Tar

19 The Tide Turns: Apple

20 The CIA and the Film Festival

21 Ford Save the Projector

22 Down With This Sort of Thing

23 The Field on the Boreenmanna Road

24 How Cork RTC Landed That Multinational

25 The Education Ecosystem

26 Learning from the Past

27 A Different Place Then. A Different Place Now

28 ‘Fierce Notions’: Cork’s Future

Acknowledgements

Imprint page

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Introduction

It was a different city then. Coming out of the 1970s, Cork’s swagger was intact, its position in the world secure. The previous ten years had been dominated nationally by its favourite son, who was Taoiseach for much of the decade, and the sense of superiority was not confined to the political arena.

The city had given Ireland a genuine, world-class music star and boasted one of the first officially licensed, internationally recognised film festivals, which had been on the road since the 1950s and had attendance in the thousands at its peak. Cork had produced the country’s first modern GAA superstar earlier in the decade and at times in the 1970s there were not one but two League of Ireland football clubs in the city.

Cork bustled: people came to the centre of the city to shop and socialise, to visit the same places their parents had visited for years. St Patrick’s Street on a Saturday afternoon heaved with people shopping in Roches Stores and Cash’s; they took the kids into Mandy’s or Burgerland as a treat afterwards.

They read the Cork Examiner and Evening Echo over Barry’s tea and cakes made in Thompson’s bakery, in Mary Rose’s coffee shop in the Queen’s Old Castle or the Green Door on Academy Street.

On a Saturday night Patrick Street heaved as well: people streamed into the centre of the city from the northern and southern suburbs. The bars and clubs rocked every autumn with the newly created Jazz Festival, which quickly established its primacy as the go-to destination every October bank holiday. They went to the movies in the Pavilion, the Capitol, the Cameo, the Lee and other cinemas.

There was a stability to the city, and key to that stability were the institutions which anchored the city and reinforced its identity: the English Market, still trading after almost two centuries; the university, slightly stand-offish on the Western Road, and the regional technical college further out; the two breweries, on opposite sides of the river, Murphy’s and Beamish.

Underpinning those were key employers, significant industries such as Ford, Dunlop and Verolme, which were internationally recognised names, deeply rooted in the fabric of the city and county after decades of employing the natives. Of the three factories, there was no doubt which was the pre-eminent employer. Dunlop employed 1,800 people there at its peak, and there was a prestigious international element to shipbuilding, but Ford was first among equals, a tangible marker of quality. Tyres were necessary but unglamorous, and nobody had a naval frigate in their driveway. A Ford car, however, was a product any worker would be proud of, and there had been a time when 7,000 people earned a living in its Cork base.

The work somewhere like the mould room in Dunlop could be hot and dirty. Verolme had a significant Dutch element – a management cohort who kept their distance from staff for the most part. Ford, however, was deeply rooted across the culture in Cork. The Ford boxes became part of local folklore, the sturdy packing crates in which parts for the factory arrived. These provided the raw material for garden sheds all over the city and makeshift beachside chalets, while a factory soccer team, Fordsons, became FAI Cup champions in 1926.

The Dunlop social club on the Blackrock Road provided an outlet for thousands over the years, but the grip Ford exerted was visible in a Sunday Times interview with Jack Lynch in the early 1970s. The then-leader of the opposition drove a Ford, the journalist noted, out of loyalty to the firm that employed so many of his constituents. (These loyalties counted. When another Cork politician, Michael O’Leary, visited Dunlop, the workers noted his tyres were Semperit rather than the local brand.)

Ford was famously described as a Cork firm with an American branch, a joke that not only underlined the strength of the links between the city and the home office in Dearborn, but offered a telling insight into the city’s trust in the company.

This, then, was the city: confident and busy, and apparently bucking the trends of the late 1970s, as the ripples of the oil crisis spread economic uncertainty across the globe. Cork was seen as an exception to the malaise. The city featured, famously, on the cover of Business & Finance in October 1980. The headline said everything you needed to know. ‘Cork: What Recession?’

Halfway through the 1980s, however, Cork was in chaos. Ford, Dunlop and Verolme all closed within eighteen months of each other, and every institution in the city seemed under threat. The North Infirmary hospital closed. Murphy’s Brewery almost shut down early in the decade and Beamish & Crawford faced its own survival crisis later in the 1980s. There were rumours that Cork Airport itself was in the firing line. The English Market survived not one but two devastating fires, only for Cork Corporation to strongly consider turning the Market into a multistorey car park.

The uncertainty spread beyond the unemployment statistics, horrific though those were. There was an outbreak of joyriding in the city, disaffected youths stealing cars and leading gardaí on high-speed chases to nowhere, a vivid illustration of the despair in the city. An illiterate sandwich-board carrier was elected to the corporation. People in Cork claimed to see religious statues moving.

The film festival was broke and trying to hang on to its one asset, the projector. There was no League of Ireland team at all in the city for a couple of seasons, and in the same years the county hurlers lost two consecutive All-Ireland finals.

In an effort to bolster spirit in the city a festival was launched to commemorate the granting of a Royal Charter eight centuries before, the Cork 800. It was supposed to begin with an air show at Cork Airport but that had to be cancelled. It was too foggy for the airplanes.

How did Cork turn things around? Some crucial decisions were made, such as backing an obscure American company’s plans to locate a factory on the city’s north side, long before it became one of the richest companies in the history of the world.

A new microelectronics centre opened near the university, bolstering the city’s reputation as modern, technologically savvy, and open for business. An academic’s parting words with an entrepreneur getting into his car led to another key industry coming to the city. After years of neglect the cityscape improved. The English Market survived. League of Ireland football returned. The hurlers started to win All-Irelands again. The film festival was rescued.

The lessons were taught in a hard school, as the poet Theo Dorgan put it, but they were learned. There was no other choice.

1

Market or Car Park?

The English Market’s experience of the 1980s is emblematic of the city, fittingly enough, as few other institutions are as closely identified with the city as the Market. The fact that it managed to survive, unlike other long-standing institutions, would be worth underlining in and of itself, but the manner of its survival makes it all the more relevant.

In latter years the Market has become synonymous with the city, or more synonymous than ever before – visiting film crews inevitably capture footage of the crowded walkways between stalls bursting with fresh produce, while tourists seeking an authentic Cork experience share those winding passages with locals shopping for groceries where their parents and grandparents strolled in their own time. The high-water mark of its status as an integral part of Cork’s identity came in 2011, when Queen Elizabeth II of England visited the Market and laughed along with stallholders. The pomp and ceremony of a royal visit seemed apposite, given the problems the Market had faced down in its time.

Founded in 1788, it had survived challenges as ferocious as the Great Famine and revolution, and as mundane as out-of-town shopping centres, coming through to surf the more recent wave of interest in traceable food and environmentally friendly producers. Why then did the corporation want to replace it with a car park in the 1980s?

Go back to the start of that decade, and the phone call which woke up the O’Connell family early one morning. At a time when mobile messaging and social media were far in the future, hearing the jangle of a landline telephone at six o’clock in the morning usually meant bad news. That was Pat O’Connell’s thinking when the phone rang, and he wasn’t wrong.

‘I remember the phone going off in the hall that early in the morning, and my mother letting a screech out of her when she answered it. Obviously bad news, a call at that time of the morning, though we were early risers anyway.’

It was 30 June 1980. O’Connell’s mother had been told about a fire in the Market, where the family fish stall was under threat.

‘We all hopped into the van and headed in, and we were absolutely devastated when we saw the fire. It was probably more devastating than a death in the family because we were so entwined with the Market, to be honest. It was part of our lives and suddenly all we could see was smoke billowing out of the Prince’s Street entrance. We managed to get into our own stall but we could see the devastation. The fountain was in the middle of it and all you could hope, really, was that that was going to be the phoenix coming out of the ashes, but there were no guarantees. It was strange to be looking at the sky where there had been a roof.’

Six units of the Cork City Fire Brigade had to cut their way through the metal gates barring the entrance in order to fight the fire. Their priority was to cut off the gas supply. The firemen needed to access the balcony overlooking the fountain area, which they did, and they were thus able to contain the fire and prevent it from spreading to the Grand Parade end. Within half an hour they had brought the fire under control, but eleven stalls had been destroyed.

Later on, firefighters picking their way through the charred, smoking rubble were fearful that the ornate wrought-iron fountain at the Prince’s Street entrance had been destroyed, and they found a mass of debris there. Underneath the rubbish, though, the fountain was intact. The metal was till hot to the touch, one of the firemen would later recall, but it had survived.

The Market would be rebuilt – the cost of £300,000 was a significant amount at the time – but O’Connell remembers the early 1980s as a grim period in its history.

‘The Market wasn’t doing brilliantly that time anyway. It’s always easy to be wise in hindsight, but the signs were there that things were beginning to slip a bit, if you had your eyes open. For instance, there were too many butchers in the Market at that time and the competition between them was ferocious – it was a race to the bottom when you look back on it, because if Tommy was giving three chops for a pound, then Jimmy next door to him would try to give four for a pound. Every stallholder became obsessed with the internal competition rather than what was happening in food retail in general. Price became more important than quality.

‘The result of that was always going to be the quality going down and down. The Market has always prided itself on keeping in the middle of the top end, if you like; we rely on local produce and we have a job, promoting food in Cork. We all realise that and take it very seriously even if we don’t shout and roar about it. We take a pride in our local food sources, and with the connections to restaurants in terms of supplying them you get a feel for what’s going on. At the time you’re probably too close to it, really, you can’t see the wood for the trees, but looking back now … no. The signs weren’t good.’

In that sense the Market was collateral damage in the growth of the city, which had been expanding outwards. Shopping centres were located on the periphery of the city, drawing people out of the city or, more likely, encouraging those living in the suburbs to abandon the traditional excursion to town for their weekly shopping. In time, those shopping centres in Ballyvolane, Wilton and Douglas, combined with a pre-existing slight drop in footfall ‘probably started to kick a little bit, all right’ says O’Connell: ‘But we didn’t have a culture of it until then. Ballyvolane was the first to hit the city centre because Dunnes Stores was up there, and it was probably a little bit out of town compared to other places.

‘You were beginning to notice that Mrs Murphy wasn’t coming in once a week any more. Now she was coming in every second week or third week. We felt first that it was a novelty, that people would come back to the Market, and that happened, all right – even if people were doing a weekly shop in one of the shopping centres they still tended to come in for their meat, their fish and so on.

‘But when Douglas Court opened we opened a small unit there to hedge our bets at the same time. The trouble was we were paying as much for a tiny unit out there as we were for two or three units in the Market. There isn’t a large margin in food anyway so you’ll suffer if you’re selling one product – fish or meat – in a centre like that, given the costs.’

Then there was the plan to get rid of the Market as we know it. This proposal would gain momentum later in the decade, around 1988, after the loss of thousands of jobs, when the short-term boost in revenue for the Corporation would have been appealing. In O’Connell’s words, the plans were ‘scarily serious’. The specifics involved a multistorey car park above the market space.

‘This was a time when multistorey car parks were supposed to solve all problems in cities. I think Sean Beausang of the Corporation had been over to Wales – Swansea – where there was a market with a car park over it and the bus station next to it. I don’t know if there was an original market there, I suspect there was, but this was a “modern” market, and he felt that was the way to go – to knock what we had, put the traders over in the Coal Quay for the couple of years there’d be building. Then they’d all come back to nice new modern stalls, with a multistorey car park overhead.

‘It would never have worked. It would have been absolutely insane. And it was the women in here who said, “that isn’t happening, lads”.’

Nowadays the preponderance of women among the stallholders is striking in the English Market, and in the 1980s it was the central group of female stallholders who held the line in the face of the corporation’s plans.

‘Among them were my own mother, Eileen Ahern below and Siobhan, Mrs McDonnell, Mrs O’Sullivan,’ says O’Connell. ‘They were tough ladies, really tough, and they said, “that’s not what the Market is. It’s in trouble but it’s been here since 1790 and survived famines and fires, it’ll survive this if we pull together, if we have that passion about us.”

‘I think everybody had been so shocked by what had happened in the city that they’d recoiled into themselves a little, but then they realised, “our predecessors came through tough times, we can do it.” That hard core of people saved the Market, I think. The traders’ committee went knocking on every councillor’s door and said it wasn’t a good idea.’

To convince the councillors the traders’ committee had to make some points about the modern retail experience, but they also had to convey the essence of the market experience: what differentiates a place like the English Market from other shops, other places.

‘They pointed out that if you closed the Market for two years, it’d be a disaster. People change their shopping habits and other businesses step in and take over, obviously. We got over it but I think it also showed how careful you have to be with something like the Market. If it’s gone, it’s gone.

‘Not everyone understands a market, how it works, the balance that’s involved. A market has to be rooted in tradition, and ours is very much family-oriented and generational. If you break that link then it’s hard to restore, you’re going back to start from scratch. But it can’t be a museum either, some place where you come in and watch old trades performed for you. It has to trade and it has to make money, to employ people, all of that.

‘And we’re lucky with the Market that we’ve always had the core of seven or eight people who understand it, who understand that we’re only passing through and that it’s important to keep it for the next generation, that we leave it to them in a strong situation. We’re lucky in the Market that people have come through and stood up on occasions when they’re needed – such as when the idea of a multistorey market was mentioned.’

It seems difficult to conceive of now – brutalist concrete hiding parking spaces instead of the ornate iron gates at the Grand Parade and Prince’s Street entrances – but part of that may be the Market’s current status as one of Cork’s biggest tourist draws. In the 1980s, when the city was struggling, all options were on the table. Thousands of jobs had vanished and the Market was suffering as much as any other sector. O’Connell remembers the closures of Ford, Dunlop and Verolme and the impact they had.

‘Oh Jesus, yes. Those job losses devastated the city, it was as bad a period in Cork’s history as I’ve seen. Great employers, and then the peripheral industries that fed off them … they also seemed to go suddenly. I know there was talk about it but people didn’t really believe it could happen. They’d been in Cork for so long, they were engrained in the culture of the city, and people believed it just wouldn’t happen.

‘It was shock, pure and simple. Everybody knew somebody working there, and the sense was “this couldn’t happen”. But it did. The Market was absolutely hammered by the closures. Hammered. It depends on local people, and not only were those local people out of pocket, there was a sense of depression over the city, there was a sense of horror there. The sense was “if we can’t hold these industries, our biggest, what chance do we have of attracting in new ones?”’

When that initial shock dissipated, O’Connell reckons it took time – ‘two or three years’ – to readjust to the new reality.

‘That people wouldn’t just arrive in Cork and love the place and set up businesses here. People realised there were economics involved, that the city had to box smarter to attract those industries and employers. We’re very parochial. We thought Ford was Irish – that it was a Cork business, not an Irish business – and we had so many families like the Dwyers and the Barrys who were smart business people, who created a lot of employment, that we felt insulated from things like that.

‘It was the first time we saw multinationals in operation, that sentiment didn’t come into it when it came to these kinds of decisions. They liked Cork, but … and that “but” came in capital letters. I think it took those few years for people to adjust, and it was Apple which helped people to do that, which taught people that we had to be smarter in terms of jobs.

‘The whole Market reflected that gloom, that depression. At the time, in the 1980s, there were thirteen or fourteen stalls empty – that was one of the reasons we expanded, though everybody laughed when we did that. My mother invested about £40,000 at the time into opening a second stall when most of the stalls around us were closed or closing. We were thinking, “is this clever?”, but we rode it out, and when things turned we were ready for it, then.’

Riding it out meant defeating that plan to put a multistorey car park over the stalls.

‘It’s very hard to credit now, to envisage what would have been put in its place. Because the Market was in trouble at that time, they were looking at alternative businesses, as had happened in Swansea.’

Eventually O’Connell went to see the Welsh model for the new Market himself. Up close, he realised that it was a different proposition entirely.

‘It was nothing like what we have here. To me, it’s more of a flea market, and that’s not an insult, because there’s a place for a flea market, but it’s not a food market. There’s no sense of culture such as you get here. Why do tourists come in here, after all? Because there’s a sense of place here, a sense of Cork. We’re lucky in that we’ve managed to keep that sense of place. Obviously, people’s shopping habits have changed, and they’re shopping online and so on, but we’ve managed to keep our core customers.

‘And a lot of the foreign nationals who work in the likes of Facebook and Apple come in here – and they automatically feel at home. They’re used to markets along these lines at home. Funnily enough, you’d often speak to English people when they come in, and they say, “we used to have a market in our town like this but developers bought the site” – because markets tend to be in the centre of towns, obviously. It’s valuable property.

‘If the local authority doesn’t understand that there’s a value to a market that goes beyond the commercial value to the area, if they don’t see the bigger picture of what it brings to a city in terms of promotion and culture … the council has to understand that, and it can be difficult because often it’s not their area of expertise. In a downturn they’re under pressure for rates, for instance, to pay for all the services that make a city work.’

O’Connell gives the local authority due credit nowadays, however.

‘In fairness, Cork City Council has bought into the sense of what the Market brings. In terms of rent increases they’re very realistic – when they compare our rents to Patrick Street, we say that’s fine if they want telephone shops in the Market, but they won’t have a food market. They have to understand what they have in the Market, and those were discussions which were before the Queen came, by the way, when it wasn’t nearly as easy to sell as an idea.

‘To me the Coal Quay was another magical place – it was unusual with trees and turkeys at Christmas, but it just slipped through the cracks.’

The demise of the Coal Quay illustrates clearly that the survival of unique locations like the Market is not assured. It takes work, co-operation, understanding: a combination requiring a delicate balance.

‘We’re lucky at the moment that the Council gets it and understands it. Who’s to say that won’t change in twenty years’ time? Because it took a lot of persuading to stop them from putting up the car park that time. It would have been easy money for the Council, or Corporation, at the time, particularly with the mentality that “we’ll always have the Market”. But it would have been gone after two years away – people get different habits, they get jobs elsewhere, and the whole thing is different.

‘Dublin City Council came down a couple of years ago, they wanted to do a market in Dublin, and they asked if we’d be interested in being involved. We said no, one was enough – but I asked who they were going to get in for the market. They were naming out wholesalers and I was thinking no, they didn’t get it. I looked around the Market and saw people involved who were second generation, third generation … this is what they do.

‘Of course, they supply restaurants but they’re not wholesalers, they’re traditional retailers. Mrs Murphy comes in every Friday morning for thirty years and now her daughter is coming in … it’s not just bricks and mortar. Instant tradition doesn’t work, there isn’t the same background in stories built up over the years. One chap from Asia who went to UCC twelve or fourteen years ago came back recently, he came to the stall and asked if I remembered him. “I do actually,” I said, “you were a student, weren’t you?”

‘And he said he was, he’d be down every week to get his fish, and though he was back home in Asia, he still loved Cork – and the fact that he came in and reintroduced himself, I thought that was great, that it showed a real sense of the place.’

O’Connell’s view of the Market as a melting pot for newcomers to the city is persuasive: ‘Cork people are nosy anyway. They’re not afraid to ask where you’re from. Cork’s shape and size does lend itself to a successful market. When strangers come to the city, the Market is a place where they build up a relationship quickly with the people in the stalls because that’s what we do.

‘They may not know the fish, or the cuts, and they feel a bit more relaxed because they’re dealing with someone who gets what it is they want to do – they don’t want to dip the fish in flour and fry it on the pan, they want to steam it in ginger and garlic or whatever. And we chat away and ask them if they’re working in Apple or studying in UCC, and straight away they have a connection which they mightn’t have made in a bigger city, or in a supermarket.

‘The Market has all that, and Cork’s a friendly city anyway. People have time to listen in the Market, and if your English isn’t good, that’s not a problem. When the Spanish come in and ask to have their bass cleaned out they’ll say, “can you open it like a book,” which isn’t the way Irish people say it, but you know immediately what they want. And that relationship starts off because that’s what we do.’

The Market is now known all over the world thanks to Queen Elizabeth’s visit. O’Connell acknowledges the peak but is always worried about a possible trough following.

‘Julian King was the ambassador when the Queen arrived, and a few weeks after the visit he called in to us and said, “the Market really made an impression on her, she’s still talking about it.”

‘And we said that that’s what we always do, chat away to people, and he said, “yeah, but people don’t usually do that when they meet the Queen of England.” It doesn’t matter to us if you’re royalty or penniless, if you come in to us for fish then you’re a customer.

‘The visit lifted the profile of the place in terms of tourism. It’s given recognition that it’s a very special place, the Market, but we’ve known that for a while without being big-headed. We’ve stood back and examined why it gets that kind of media attention, and our feeling is that it’s unique, it has the friendliness that’s been maintained through the generation.

‘You go abroad and see how other markets have changed, and while this place has changed too, and modernised – when you look back at the 1960s and see no refrigeration, wallpaper, tarmacadam floors, you’d say, “sweet Jesus, how did we get away with that,” but that was the standard of the time.’

And worries?

‘Always. Always. The worry is that you won’t keep the backbone of family businesses. Food is so streamlined in its delivery … there’s only a fraction of the number of butchers that would have been here in the 1950s, and now we have an olive stall and a chocolate stall – things that wouldn’t have been thought sustainable years ago, but do you stick rigidly to what you have and fight the tide, or twist a bit? So far we’ve been lucky, and there is an element of luck involved. Who knows what retail will be like in ten years’ time, the way things are changing?

‘Wary is probably the word I’d use. We’d be conscious of how things change and we wouldn’t want to be the last dinosaurs standing, but we’d like to think it’ll survive the next 200 years.’

Still, it wouldn’t be the first time an English visitor helped the English Market. Keith Floyd is a key person in the recent history of the Market and central to its success, says O’Connell.

Given the way photogenic cooks now dominate the TV listings, it is difficult to convey the impact someone like Floyd had. His rambling travelogues, interspersed with energetic cooking outbursts and emphatic on-air directions to the camera operator, were compulsive viewing. There was one legendary episode of his show shot in a Welsh rugby club which ended with Floyd, and the contents of a large silver tray of food, on the floor.

He was genuinely passionate about the Market and filmed there often; there is footage in one clip of Floyd talking fish while O’Connell chops and slices in the background.

‘He was the original of the species, really, in terms of being a TV chef, but I also think he was one of the first people to spot the potential in the Market, long before anyone else. He was well ahead of people in that regard. He picked up on people’s passion for food and also that people were starting to travel, and that food could become part of that travel experience.

‘Food tourism was non-existent at the time, but he recognised that there was an incredible food culture in Cork, with the Market the symbol of that, in many ways. But it’s the symbol of an awful lot more in the city as well – it reflects the times.’

O’Connell’s view of the Market as a canary in the mine for all of Cork is persuasive: ‘If Cork is doing well then the Market is doing well, and similarly, if Cork is struggling then the Market is struggling too. You’ll see it here, because it depends on local businesses and local people. And that’s the magic of the Market, that if you want a feel for Cork there isn’t a better place to get that. You walk through and you hear the banter among the stalls, you see the interaction between the customer and the stallholder.

‘It gives you a sense of the rivalries, north- and south-side, the sporting clubs people follow, the people from other counties slag you about their teams … the Market’s a small space in the centre of Cork but it’s also a barometer for the city.’

That kind of perspective helps with evaluation, of course. Having seen the 1980s up close and personal qualifies O’Connell to point out what made that decade different to the crash following the financial crisis of 2008.

‘If we’re honest, we all knew we were living beyond our means in the Celtic Tiger, the three cars outside the door, all of that. You know how you’d notice? At Christmas someone might come in and say, “I’m having six people over for dinner, how many prawns do I want for prawn cocktails?” And I’d say thirty. They’d say, “no, give me a hundred”. You’d know in your own heart and soul that seventy of those were going into the bin the following day, but it didn’t matter, and “didn’t matter” was the mentality that applied. There was an assumption that things would continue, but you had to be suspicious that a little island in the North Atlantic was showing the world the way in terms of growth.

‘It was different in the 1970s and 1980s. Nobody was going to New York to buy their clothes for Christmas because it was cheaper to buy them there. In the 1980s, a taxi driver wasn’t telling you that he had six properties that he owned around town, all of them rented out. There were extremes there that were surreal.

‘When the crash came it was as though someone had thrown a switch, it was so sudden. People didn’t realise the banks were in so much trouble in the crash, in particular. Every generation improved steadily in terms of its living standards but expectations seem to have risen to a level … one thing that I notice from the counter is that a lot of the middle classes were hit in the last crash.

‘In the 1980s it was a different shock, and more of the working classes were hit. And there was a shock compared to the crash, which you had to realise was inevitable. There was a hurt there because they were Cork businesses and they’d left so suddenly.’

The Market was hit with a second fire in January 1986: several stalls were destroyed and the roof was damaged, but the blaze did not cause the same level of damage as the earlier fire, thanks to the swift action of the Fire Brigade.

What is interesting about the Market’s survival is the way it compresses many of the key elements of the wider story of Cork in the 1980s into one specific narrative. The comfortable routine shaken, and shocked, by decisions taken thousands of miles away; the defiance allied to innovation which helps an institution to survive; the intervention by key individuals – the female traders in this case – to make a difference; the interconnectedness of the Cork ecosystem; and the reliance on an inherent passion to get past initial obstacles.

Those specific elements would be seen again and again in the 1980s.

2

‘Dickensian. Totally Hierarchical’

From the outside, Ford was one of the best jobs in Cork. Reliable, well-paid, prestigious: no wonder Red Crowley, who spent twenty years there, says it was like being in the bank. A permanent post in Ford – or Dunlop or Verolme – was a passport to the middle class for many. You could get a mortgage and move to wherever took your fancy in the city or beyond, for instance, an example of actual physical mobility as opposed to social climbing.

Behind the facade, however, there could be a different side to working in Ford. Much was always made of the long association between the American parent company and its Cork branch, the deep roots that Ford had in the community on Leeside.

The positive side to that was a deep loyalty that many workers – and customers – felt to the Ford brand, even in the aftermath of the closure.

But organisations which have habits and modes of practice dating back decades also run the risk of becoming sclerotic – to use the term applied in the 1980s to the Cork Film Festival, aptly enough. They can drift into hierarchical stasis and complacency, with disastrous results. It takes exceptionally clear vision to sift through the attractions of stability and comfort in order to identify the potential danger lurking just beneath the surface.

Dan Byrne studied electrical engineering in University College Cork (UCC) in the late 1960s and during his final year various firms and organisations came to the college on the ‘milk round’, signing up promising graduates.

‘Many of the class went for interviews in the UK,’ says Byrne. ‘There was a big demand for graduates to work there, while others had interviews with the ESB, which at that time was an organisation run principally by engineers so they hired many Irish engineering graduates. I was offered a job in the ESB, which looked like a safe haven.’

Byrne and some members of his class had also been interviewed for a job in Ford, and though several of them were shortlisted, no jobs were offered. He decided to take the offer from the ESB and joined their offices in Dublin in September 1970.

‘I wasn’t there a month when I realised that it wasn’t for me,’ he says now. ‘The toughest job I had was doing the crossword in the newspaper every day and I wasn’t learning anything. At about that time I got a call from Fords to offer me a postgraduate position at their manufacturing plant in Cork.

‘There was a culture of nepotism in Fords. If your father or uncle had a job there, you had every chance of being hired. At the interview I’d been asked if I had any relatives in Fords and I said no, but when I came home and told my parents how it went, including that question, my father said “What are you talking about – my brother’s working there.” My uncle Liam was working there all his life but at the interview I’d totally forgotten it. I was thinking it hadn’t gone that well anyway but I felt that put the tin hat on it altogether.’

Bored in the ESB, a long way from his native place, Byrne found the Ford offer an attractive proposition.

‘It meant I could get back to Cork, so I was delighted when I was offered the position and joined in January 1971.’

Though he had excelled in UCC, Ford provided another level of education altogether for Byrne.

‘I’d been in university for four years but I’d say I learned more in my first four months in Fords than I had in those four years in UCC. It was a huge learning experience for me. Interestingly, even though I had graduated as an electrical engineer, the work I was involved in at Fords was more mechanical, manufacturing and even civil engineering, rather than electrical engineering.