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We now have a dedicated page to keep up to date with our Circular Tales project.
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‘Circular Tales’: slocking apples, chocolate crumb and collecting waste in 1940s to 1960s Cork City

At this community listening event, the Cork Folklore Project shared stories and memories from our archive to celebrate the launch of our project ‘Circular Tales’, with a most engaged audience. Dr Cliona O’Carroll and Jamie Furey (Project Lead), presented stories of how Cork City communities in the 1940s to 1960 stretched resources, earned extra money, and creatively appropriated all sorts of goods from chocolate crumb to apples to fish. The broader project will engage with our colleagues in the Environmental Research Institute who will identify how these memories are relevant to current concerns about ecological sustainability. 

Cork Folklore Project Listening Event (April 2023) – Circular Tales

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