Cork 2005: There are times when events, locations and personalities crowding into the Cork 2005 programme seem to throng together in a welter of competing dates and locations. Surveying a month which began with Marina Warner and goes on to gather in Emma Kirkby, Darina Allen, Franko B, Cathal Coughlan and - according to the autumn brochure - the National Ploughing Championships, the desire, eventually, is to find a fixed point.
That is found at last in the news that the €60 million contract for the city's School of Music is to be signed today. By any measurement of contemporary cultural provisions, this is an achievement. It also represents an extraordinary span of time. When Cork won the designation as European Capital of Culture the plans for the new school were advanced, but the old school was still in situ, a thriving creative propagator of music education, enormously popular and widely respected. Even though a constituent college of the Institute of Technology (along with the Crawford College of Art and Design), in a distant suburb, the school retained an aura of independence and personality.
Standing in the heart of the city, the school had become too small for its constantly expanding services. But what began as a visionary approach to its renewal in 2001 descended with amazing rapidity into confusion as, anticipating a rapid building schedule, staff and pupils were moved out of the existing building and into a variety (more than 17 eventually) of alternative sites from hotels to offices and sports clubs.
The government's public-private partnership negotiated with Jarvis International collapsed, and even that process, heralded by difficulties in the UK company and Department of Finance funding wrangles with the EU, was so slow that efforts to find a substitute partner were also delayed.
This long meantime brought staff, students, graduates and parents onto the streets, with marches, speeches and protest meetings adding to a sustained campaign for the provision of the school. Until the German building company Hochtief Developments arrived to take up the partnership, it looked as if Cork 2005 would have come and gone before the music school was physically resurrected. Even that was doubtful: there was a suspicion that without the impetus of the Capital of Culture year the project could be delayed even longer.
Now the contract has been sealed - and it seems on better terms that originally proposed. The new arrangements is that the German company will build, furnish and manage the school (on the original site on Union Quay) for 25 years at a cost of €7.6 million to the government. Although this is an achievement, there is a sense too that the school has been cheated of the primacy it should have enjoyed during this particular year. The amazing thing is that although disembodied, its authority and dynamism survived to provide not just its usual teaching facilities for 400 full-time and more than 3,000 part-time students, but a crucial role in the music schedules of the Capital of Culture programme through several diverse strands.
Had everything gone as planned, the new building, designed by Murray O'Laoire Architects and greeted now as a legacy, would have been central to this year's events. As it happened, its physical dominance was replaced by that of the Glucksman Gallery at UCC, with which it should instead have shared the limelight of Cork 2005.
