FROM THE ARCHIVES:The colonisation of Dublin by Cork people has long been a standing joke.
One old joke asks how to get five people into the back of a Mini and suggests that the easiest answer is to park the car in Cork’s Patrick Street with a sign on it saying “going to Dublin”.
An even older account of the phenomenon is reported in this anecdotal piece by an anonymous “special correspondent” who tried to get to the bottom of the matter as it was in 1931 under the headline “A Legend and the Truth”.
JOE JOYCE
THIRTY MEN were seated at a private dinner party in a Dublin hotel the other night. The guest of honour was a Cork man to whom they were bidding good-bye.
There was a certain amount of unconscious irony in the fact; for the Cork man was leaving Ireland for the United States to “push” his fortune, as it was termed in one of the many speeches at that
dinner.
The thorny, and oft-discussed, question of Cork men in Dublin arose, and a census was taken of the counties of origin of the men at the party. The real purpose of the census, of course, was to find out how many Cork men were present.
It came as something of a surprise when it was discovered that only seven out of that 30 came from Cork, and there was some amusement when it was further discovered that 14 of them came from Belfast.
Of the remainder, three came from the west of Ireland, one from Dublin and five from other counties in Ireland.
We all remember the time, not long since gone, when the question “Aroo from Cork?” pronounced in a broad Cork accent, was a never-failing source of laughter, and many the tale was told of how the Cork invasion of Dublin began and developed.
Following the institution of the Irish Free State, for one reason or another, this question again arose, and was given all sorts of fanciful turns and twists.
In order to find out just how many Cork men there were in Dublin, I spent some time yesterday pouring over a rather dusty volume of the Census of Population, 1926.
According to that the population of Dublin Borough is approximately 316,693, and of this number only 4,224 were born in Cork. It would appear from this that Cork people really prefer to live in their own city and county.
As against that, I found that there were some 1,000 Dublin men residing in Cork, so that it would seem that the difference of 3,000 odd represents those Cork men who, of necessity, must take up their residence in the capital in order to look after the affairs of the State efficiently.
I looked further into the census, and discovered that there were more Wicklow men, Meath men and Tipperary men in Dublin than Cork men, the respective figures being 6,479, 4552 and 4,346.
It may come as a surprise to learn that there are 6,441 men from Northern Ireland who have taken up their residence in Dublin, and of that number 2,002 are from Belfast.
The number of people born in Scotland who are now living in Dublin is 2,384 and they apparently have found conditions here more congenial than in their own country, or it may be that they have staged this miniature invasion as a counterblast to the Irish invasion of Scotland, of which so much is heard.
It may interest the pure-bred Dublin man to know that in his city there reside 532 Americans, 605 Russians, 127 Germans, 103 Frenchmen, and altogether 779 persons from “elsewhere”, and that word may mean anything.
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