Tim O’Brien: Cork Fire Brigade, Murphy’s Brewery, Murphy’s Rock,

Tim O’Brien: Cork Fire Brigade, Murphy’s Brewery, Murphy’s Rock,

Life History; Fire Brigade; Youth;

Tim talks about working for Cork’s Fire Brigade, and about changes to the job over the years. He has been a fire-fighter since 1975 and loves the job.
Tim was born in Watercourse Road. His father worked in Murphy’s Brewery. His mother came from West Cork, and he had some contact with the countryside and country people. He is a speaker of the Irish language and tries to use it where possible.
His father worked in Murphy’s for 42 years, and the job was one handed down by previous generations of his family. You were expected to drink the product if you worked there. He recalls shire horses pulling the beer barrels around Cork to tied pubs, and women collecting horse manure when they passed.
He talks about Murphy’s Rock and how that area has changed. Children used to go to Eglington Street baths and get an ice-cream from the Cold Storage. He muses about how children’s lives have become more constrained.
He has mixed feelings about modern life and about changes to Cork’s streetscape.

Note; This interview was conducted as part of the Cork 2005 Project

22 March 2005

CFP_SR00365_obrien_2005

Cork; Ireland; 1960s-2000s;

Cork 2005 Collection Catalogue Numbers:

CFP_SR00329_mccarthy_2004;
CFP_SR00330_odriscoll_2004;
CFP_SR00331_claffey_2004;
CFP_SR00332_hanover_2004;
CFP_SR00333_desplanques_2004;
CFP_SR00334_bale_2004;
CFP_SR00335_sheridan_1996;
CFP_SR00336_steiner-scott_2004;
CFP_SR00337_rot_2004;
CFP_SR00338_stafford_2004;
CFP_SR00339_odonoghue_2004;
CFP_SR00340_hawkins_2004;
CFP_SR00341_ocarroll_2004;
CFP_SR00342_ikebuasi_2004;
CFP_SR00343_ogeallabhain_2004;
CFP_SR00344_geaney_2004;
CFP_SR00345_wulff_2004;
CFP_SR00346_abdoulbaneeva_2004;
CFP_SR00347_gunes_2004;
CFP_SR00348_fourie_2004;
CFP_SR00349_henderson_2004;
CFP_SR00350_valdman_2004;
CFP_SR00351_carmody_2004;
CFP_SR00352_osullivan_2004;
CFP_SR00353_mahknanov_2004;
CFP_SR00354_oflynn_2004;
CFP_SR00355_akhter_2004;
CFP_SR00356_walker_2004;
CFP_SR00357_kelleher_2004;
CFP_SR00358_manresa_2004;
CFP_SR00359_wimpenny_2005;
CFP_SR00360_skotarczak_2005;
CFP_SR00361_vermeulen_2005;
CFP_SR00362_owen_2005;
CFP_SR00363_dsouza_2005;
CFP_SR00364_setter_2005;
CFP_SR00366_botan_2005:

Published Material;
‘How’s it Goin’, Boy? radio series (six thirty-minute episodes, broadcast 2005 and available on the Cork Folklore Project website)

O'Carroll, Clíona for the Cork Northside Folklore Project (2006) How's it goin', boy? Dublin: Nonsuch Publishing.

Cork Folklore Project Audio Archive

English

Sound

1.wav File

51m 59s

Cork City Fire Station, Anglesea St, Cork City, Ireland

MiniDisc

16bit / 44.1kHz

The following is a short extract from the interview transcript, copyright of the Cork Folklore Project. If you wish to access further archival material please contact CFP, folklorearchive@gmail.com

F.Q: Picking the blackberries. Em is there anywhere else you can think of now that you used to play around as a kid?

T.O'B Eh well obviously Eglington Street swimming pool right – we used to go to the baths. And that was a bit of an event because we were going into town, and there was concern if you were going into town, but then on the other side it was a lot safer because any adult would give you a kick in the arse if you did anything out of the way right, it didn’t have to be your parent or know you or anything. You were afraid of them anyway to start off so that wasn’t a bad idea. We used to come down as I say to Eglington Street baths eh from Blackpool to the baths it was probably about for young fellas maybe twenty minutes, twenty five minutes walk eh and however long it took us to come down it would take us twice as long to go back because we would go to the Cork Cold Storage for the ice creams and eh like I mean to say the ice cream would take you flippin half an hour to eat it – it was so big! And you would go home and you’d think that you were the flippin Prince of the world, and the whole thing for I don’t know maybe three pence to get into the Eglington Street baths, and another three pence going home, that’s six pence and transfer that to modern money and you probably have something like two p. right, you wouldn’t get a lot for two p. these days.

F.Q: Two cent, yeah you wouldn’t get a lot em Tim would you have went to the cinema?

T.O'B Yeah eh obviously that was a kind of a thing. You had the Palace, you had the Lee, eh you had the Pavilion, you had the Capitol, and you had the one out in Washington Street (the Ritz) and you had the one above in Collins Barracks.

F.Q: The Cameo.

T.O'B Cameo, so you had all of them and eh you get to go to the pictures once a fortnight, and I remember actually there was a very funny ritual at home; eh it was the father who would give us the money to go to the pictures, but you would have to kind of grovel for a long time first, and one of his tricks was that he would put his hand in his pocket, and you’d think you were getting the money and the hankie would come out, right, so then we developed this knack: we’d get our friends to come to the door to try to put him under pressure, so he wouldn’t relent for that either. He used to go through his ritual – he’d always give us the money in the end, but like I mean to say you would have an awful lot of getting there before you actually got it you know. Eh but then as I say we used to go out and go to the cinema, gangs of us. Em there used to be kind of I remember about five or six of us seemed to go everywhere, eh together the whole time you know, em into the cinema in the afternoon, and come out and be dazzled by the light outside because it was so dark inside, one of the things I always remember; em the films I saw then were probably as good as any film I saw since like.