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For anyone that might be interested the Catching Stories project is having two events for this year’s science week (13-20 November).

The first is part of the ‘Celebrate Science’ family day this Sunday, November 13th Western Gateway Building.

Here we will be replicating our ‘Time travel vaccination centre’, Where you will hear Joe Scanlon telling of his getting the ‘Branding Iron’ injection as a child. More info is in the link below.

https://www.corksciencefestival.ie/event-details/time-travel-vaccination-station-stories-from-the-bench

Our Second instalment for Science week is a listening event on Tuesday the 15^th at 5:30 pm in the Student Hub, room 1.72 Schtepps.

Project coordinator James Furey will walk through the Catching Stories online resource showcasing the rich content within. Immunologist Dr Beth Brint will be on hand to illuminate the oral testimony with a more science-based perspective. The presentation will be of great interest to those in the medical profession, both practitioners and educators, social and cultural historians, and anyone with a general interest in Irish society.

Both events are free and open to all.

Catching Stories is an SFI Discover-funded project undertaken by UCC’s Department of Folklore & Ethnology and the Cork Folklore Project. The project consists of a collection of oral testimonies, text-based responses, objects of memory and ephemera relating to infectious diseases in Ireland. These strands will be presented in an online resource with additional commentary from an immunologist to give a holistic view of how infectious disease and the subsequent public health measures affected Irish society. For more on the project see www.catchingstories.org​

Under the Community Heritage Grant Scheme 2022, the Cork Folklore Project were successful in obtaining a grant of €6,300 towards our project – ‘OPENING MEMORIES’ – CORK FOLKLORE PROJECT ONLINE CATALOGUE.   This enabled almost 200 interviews with attendant metadata files to be compiled and uploaded by the appointed professional, Kieran Murphy.  This included data entry of all administrative and content metadata relating to almost audio interviews.  The Cork Folklore Project want to thank the Heritage Council for their generous funding and Kieran Murphy for his professionalism.   

We are a community-based non-profit, founded in 1996 in partnership with the Department of Folklore and Ethnology, UCC and Northside Community Enterprises.

What do we do?

We digitally record stories and memories from the people of Cork. Our collection holds over 1,000 hours of recordings on a range of subjects: working life, leisure, social change, health, childhood, and everyday life. We are recognised nationally and internationally for our high standard of folklore collection and dissemination.

How can you access the material?

Our full audio collection is open to the public and researchers by appointment.

You can also browse much of our material on the Online Catalogue, Memory Map, Journal and Media section on this website.

It’s hard to believe that it has been two years since the launch of the Grattan Street Stories exhibition in St. Peter’s North Main Street in February 2020.
We’re happy to share above some of the photos of the evening and hope they bring back happy memories for those involved.

In essence, the event was a community celebration via the work of the Cork Folklore Project’s Oral History Community Outreach Project in collaboration with the HSE. It highlighted the links between the community and medical staff over many decades as well as revealing the strong health-in-the-community themes explored in a unique way in the oral history method.

The exhibition features the work of artist Edith O’Regan Cosgrave, in a unique and innovative collaboration with the oral history work of Cork Folklore Project’s Kieran Murphy. More of the artwork can be seen here on Edith’s website.

Not only did the launch and the broader Grattan Street Stories initiative showcase the positive impact of the CFP Community Outreach Pilot Project thus far, but it also underlined the huge public appetite for the scheme and the great potential for expanding the project into the future.

We’re delighted to launch our project: ‘Catching Stories’, which brings oral history and health together in a new way. It’s an online social history resource focussed on infectious disease in Ireland in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Here we bring oral testimony and family memory together with an immunologist’s perspective, in a multi-media exploration of diseases such as measles, polio and tuberculosis. Listen to what it was like to be a recipient of ‘The Branding Iron’ in 1960s childhood tuberculosis vaccination, view the memorial cards of Cork brothers dead from Spanish Flu within a fortnight of each other, browse the accounts of how families and communities were affected by infectious disease and listen to the stories. Learn about the history of these diseases, what causes them, how they spread and the efforts to combat them.  

Browse our pilot resource at http://www.catchingstories.org. We would love to hear from anyone who would like to contribute to the ongoing project: just contact us at https://corkfolklore.org/health/contribute-to-catching-stories 

For this year’s Culture Night, we are keeping it local.  

There has been a lot of talk about bars and pubs in recent times, a lot of it somewhat negative. It is timely then that our latest project for culture night 2020 remembers one of Cork city’s most unique establishments.

For the past year or so Maureen of Maureen’s bar on John Redmond Street (our local) had been toying with the idea of compiling a little oral history on the previous proprietor of the bar, Miss Pat Buckley. So, when Maureen inquired whether the Cork Folklore Project be interested in helping out with the project for culture night we, of course, said yes.

Miss Pat had the premises from the early 1950s to 2006. By all accounts (and I mean all accounts) Miss Pat ran a clean, homely bar that was frequented by a cross-section of Cork city’s inhabitants, from the locals of Shandon to the actors and crew of the Cork Shakespearean Company, politicians and comedians.  Please enjoy these memories of Miss Pat and her room.

We would like to thank all who contributed to the project. And if you have stories pertaining to Miss Pat and her bar we would love to hear them.

Interviewees: Patrick O’Connor, Kieran O’Leary, Kieran Curtin, Tony O’Sullivan, Humphrey Twomey and Mary O’Neill.

All Interviews conducted by David McCarthy, Maureen McLaughlin and Jamie Furey.