Profile: Cork 2005 has come in for criticism, but Ireland's 'second city' is still holding on to its air of superiority, writes Frank McNally.
The people of Cork are a closely-knit community. Or if they're not, they soon will be. Even as you read this, work continues on one of the defining projects of the European Capital of Culture programme: a giant, knitted map of Cork.
By the end of this year, operating mostly in their homes and using patterns drawn from satellite tracking of weather, traffic and pedestrian movements in the city, a "database" of up to 5,000 knitters will have created the biggest installation of its kind in the world. The finished map - a fabric of society if ever there was one - is expected to tour internationally.
The solidarity engendered by the project is badly needed at a time when there is much criticism of Cork 2005. There have been big holes in the culture programme. Stitches have been dropped. And, amid complaints about under-funding and recriminations about a lack of support from local businesses, the whole thing has threatened to unravel at times.
But there's a common thread that holds this city together. When the big picture of the year of culture emerges, the truth that Leesiders have known for centuries will surely once again be knit large: that, whatever is wrong with Cork, the crowd in Dublin are to blame for it.
Even so, the Dublin Government was given a polite welcome when it visited the culture capital this week. The budget shortage was temporarily forgotten as Bertie Ahern and his ministers held their weekly Cabinet meeting in City Hall, before embarking on a tour of cultural venues, dispensing largesse. They conferred national status (and the exchequer funding that goes with it) on the Crawford Art Gallery. They handed the State-bought Séan Ó Riada archive over to UCC. And the Taoiseach cut the ribbon on a new artists' residence in the former home of Jack Lynch: a happy reminder for locals of a time when a Corkman took supreme power in Ireland, with a hurling stick in one hand and a ballot box in the other.
Cork was looking its best for the occasion. After five years of misery for locals, the city centre had re-emerged from an overhaul of its crumbling drainage system, and a new, pedestrian-friendly Patrick Street gleamed in the sun. The effects of urban regeneration - happening much later here than in Limerick or Dublin - were pleasantly obvious. And, after all the early criticism, the Cork Mid-Summer Festival promised a shot in the arm for the cultural celebrations. The festival starts on Tuesday with an on-street version of The Merchant of Venice, an apt choice for a place that used to see itself as a city state, ruled by merchant princes and married to the sea.
THE PRINCES ARE not as plentiful or as powerful as they once were. They were particularly scarce, apparently, when Cork 2005 sought financial pledges from 1,000 local businesses and received only 140 replies. But, like everywhere else in the globalised world, the multinationals are where the money is now. Not for nothing is modern Cork twinned with Shanghai. And the internationalised economy is also reflected in the city's new bars and restaurants, like Boqueria, with its tapas and a décor that could be in Bilbao or Barcelona.
Some things haven't changed. The princes have bequeathed a seafaring tradition that still endures in Cork. For upper middle-class families, easy access to the main amenities - schools, hospitals, and the yacht club - still dictate where you live.
Membership of the Royal Cork, founded in 1720 and the world's oldest yacht club, remains crucial for anybody wishing to be somebody. The importance of water in the city's social life even features in the old joke about the Cork mother pleading for assistance: "Help! Help! My son the doctor is drowning!"
Alongside the yachting, the yearning for freedom from Dublin rule also remains as strong as ever. Often derided by citizens of the other capital, Cork's reputation for independence is well founded. Although the city was quiet during 1916, it more than made up for it in the years that followed, and the concept of rebel Cork was immortalised during the period 1919-23. The murder of the city's Lord Mayor Tomás MacCurtain, the death on hunger strike of his successor Terence MacSwiney, and the burning of Cork by British forces (which itself followed the bloodiest month of the Anglo-Irish war, November 1920) were the holy trinity of events through which the city's reputation as a centre of opposition to Dublin Castle was forged.
THE BRITISH FIRST denied responsibility for the conflagration that engulfed Patrick Street and City Hall. But the burnt corks worn in the hats of auxiliaries on the streets of Dublin undermined the denials, and the building in which the Cabinet met this week was eventually rebuilt with British reparations. The city was also a centre for republican resistance during the Civil War, when rebels took over the offices of the Cork Examiner and held out until the Free State forces attacked from the sea and caught them by surprise.
Tempered by fire, Cork's independence has endured into happier times when it can be expressed largely through sport. Roy Keane, who will be conferred with the freedom of the city along with athlete Sonia O'Sullivan next Tuesday, is the modern embodiment of rebel Cork. When he was sent home from the 2002 World Cup by Mick McCarthy, the Irish team's manager at the time, his treatment provoked a bloodless civil war, dividing brother against brother and starting a conflagration that consumed radio talk shows for weeks on end. A T-shirt popular with Cork's pro-Keane propagandists juxtaposed the footballer with Mic-hael Collins. Two Cork heroes, read the message, "both shot in the back". The message conveniently ignored the fact that, by the time of his demise, Collins was the Irish team manager, and it was in Cork he was shot. Indeed, Leesiders are capable of lively arguments with each other, as the influential website The People's Republic of Cork and its chatroom, The Langer's Forum, illustrates (one of the smaller achievements of the year of culture, by the way, is that the word "langer" is now included in the Oxford English Dictionary).
But Cork people never fall out with each other for long, not when the real enemy is still to be dealt with. Bitterness between the locals will not last. When 2005 is over and all the knitting is done, the various fragments of Cork society will reunite in the certainty that, whatever their differences, the crowd in Dublin can be relied upon to stitch them up again sooner or later.
The Cork File
What is it?
The European Capital of Culture 2005. Also the "real capital" of Ireland.
Why is it in the news?
See above. Aslo because it will this week confer the freedom of the city on local heroes Roy Keane and Sonia O'Sullivan.
(Its residents are) most likely to say
"Way ahead of ye, boy!", "ye langer ye!", and "what has Dublin ever done for us?".
Least likely to say
"Cork, the Republic of Ireland's second city"