Transcription
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
M.O'D: When I say Cork are there, can you think of three words that come to mind, the first three things that jump to mind?
S.W: Lee, chaos, change.
M.O'D: Can you say a bit about those?
S.W: As I mentioned before the Lee always kind of stuck out, em well maybe not the Lee as being the Lee, and everything that’s linked to it for a Cork person, but just as a river flowing through a city and eh adding so much more flair to it; I suppose that might be debatable as regards to everything that goes into it, as well which one mightn’t want to think about too closely, but just as such I always really well that’s something, coming into Cork city, Patrick’s Bridge, and so on. It’s really doing something for me. Now chaos, I suppose the traffic I’m referring to. (I would have come to Ireland with a bicycle, again you know when I came over to Ireland I flew into Ireland, I had my bicycle with me, flying through Shannon, putting the bicycle onto the bus, and off we went to Cork, so I would have cycled for the first couple of years all over the place, and eh which was a great way of transport and I was grateful for having the bike, because I’ve heard that the traffic is lunacy here; obviously the whole infrastructure in Cork is was geared towards garages, small cars or whatever and em but then obviously the whole thing evolved traffic grew more and more cars on the streets, and just congestion all over the place, and on top of that, I suppose a typical, is it Irish or particularly Corkonian behaviour, to park everywhere you want, it doesn’t matter if you block the road, you already have a car parked on one side of the road, it doesn’t matter if you park on the other side of the road, and nobody else can get through. So that to some extent amused me, to another extent annoyed me, and em I suppose I would have been used to cycling a long, long time, and cycling probably in a haphazard way, myself, but it would have suited me down to the ground you know: I didn’t care whether I broke a red light, or just go against the stream, which I still do, which I think is very well to do, but obviously it’s getting a bit more dangerous now because things have improved ever so small I suppose. The surfaces in Cork city have improved luckily ten years down the road, that brings me on to change, the change that took place particularly over the past five years I think is just phenomenal, em I’m saying that in a very neutral way, so I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing, I suppose it’s both. Remembering coming to Cork and yeah getting around in Cork ten years ago, there were certain areas where I thought this is unbelievable, this reminded me of em really probably the early times after the second World War in Germany em well that would be an exaggeration now obviously there would have been devastating destruction there, but em lets say the years after rebuilding Germany and so on, and you would have had really very poor architecture, very neglected areas and so on, and certainly one area that sticks in my mind would be the North Mall: that would have been extremely grey, a lot of dilapidated houses, em at the same time there was a nice flair in that area but really I felt grey, grey on a bad day it really could have an impact on somebody’s mood like, and certainly the Coal Quay similarly. So they were the things there was an attraction one side kind of a feeling of being appalled, how things could be that way, could be that bad in the 90’s, so that certainly had an impression on me.