No 17 Erindipity Does Cork

Biggest county for being better than Dublin (whether it is or isn't)

LAST week this column received a nice email from a reader in Cork. Dave McArdle is his name and he hosts a radio show on RED FM.
Dave asked if we'd put together a special Erindipity Does Cork Miscellany for his listeners, which we are more than happy to do. To the rest of you non-Corkers, we say, please read on as we hope you'll find a ramble around the Rebel County invigorating. Let's get started with the . . .

Eight reasons why Cork is better than Dublin

>> Cork has more vineyards than Dublin.
>> Cork gave the world the name of one of its greatest revolutionaries. Ernesto Guevara took the nickname 'Che' after watching Cork characters 'Cha' and Miah on Hall's Pictorial Weekly. True story.
>> Cork is a bigger county than Dublin.
>> Michael Collins was a Corkman, not a Dub.
>> Michael Collins was shot in Cork, not Dublin.
>> Cork has the widest trees.
>> A Corkwoman once rogered the king of France.
>> Cork has more muck millionaires than Dublin.

Best place for making muck out of brass

Before we get to that, let's explain a couple of things. Ireland's widest tree is a Monterey Cypress (12.05m wide by 27.5m) and can be found in Innishannon, Co Cork.
The tallest tree in the country is a 56m high Douglas Fir in Co Wicklow. Douglas is also a place in Cork. Is this a coincidence? (Yes. ) Cork has three vineyards (Blackwater Valley, Longueville House and Thomas Walk) while Dublin has one, Fruit of the Vine.
Corkwoman Marie-Louise O'Murphy (1737 . . . 1814) was King Louis XV's mistress for two years.
Now back to the muck and brass.
One Cork company loves its home province so much that it's exporting it to America.
Crookstown firm, The Auld Sod Export Co. , is getting filthy rich shipping Irish muck to the yanks for $15 a bag. The 340grm packs are sealed for "freshness". Well you wouldn't want your muck to be 'off ', would you?
When the business started in 2006, one 87-year-old ex-pat snapped up $100,000 worth to fill his American grave. Another spent $148,000 on . seven tons to spread under the house he was building in Massachusetts.
The company's website is currently offering four bags of Official Irish Dirt, four bags of Shamrock Seeds and free shipping . . . for only $20. What are you waiting for?
There's a typically Cork twist to this enterprise. Where do they get the muck from? Tipperary.
Exporting their county is one way of avoiding the Tipp boys in hurling, we suppose.

Better for being older than Dublin

According to legend, Cork was established in the 7th century when St Finbarr kicked a huge serpent out of the Lee and set up a monastery. This makes it older, and therefore, better than Dublin which was founded in 988. The serpent yarn is rubbish of course.
Everybody knows St Patrick got rid of them in the 400s.

Best name for a rebel county

The name 'Cork' derives from 'Corcach mor Mumhan' which means the 'big marsh of Munster'. This explains why 'Mallow' is in Cork.
Cork is also known as the 'Rebel County'. This is because the inhabitants have been giving stick to outsiders for centuries, long before Mick Collins did.
One theory is that the county got its name in 1603 when Cork's leading Catholics refused to accept James I as king. The lovely Lord Mountjoy stamped out the revolt. Mountjoy, by the way, was named after a jail in Dublin.

Interesting fact: Cork harbour is the second largest natural one in the world after Sydney. This means that it's better than anything the dockers of Dublin have ever worked on. Also, as Sydney is very, very far away, Cork harbour is better than that too.

Tallest building

The tallest building in the Republic is the Cork County Hall (67m). Liberty Hall is only 59.4m. Dublin does have the tallest sculpture though (the Spire at 120m). Mind you it's a hell of a lot uglier than the Ballycrovane stone in Co Cork, which is the tallest Ogham standing stone in Europe (5.2m). If that doesn't impress you then Cork has the longest building in the country . . . the former Eglinton Lunatic Asylum.
It was built with long, long corridors so the loonies would never have to go around the bend.

Best place to go to the loo

In 2002 the VHI hosted a beauty contest . . . to find Ireland's loveliest public loo. This was part of a bladder control awareness campaign, although you'd want to be pretty dopey not to be aware that your bladder's out of control.
To win the 2,000 prize all you had to do was submit a photo of your town toilet's interior and exterior.
Let's reflect here for a moment on the bravery of the photographers who stood inside their public loos taking photographs ("no really, officer, it's for the Top Toilet competition").
Naturally, Cork won and the best place for a wee is Gougane Barra.

Interesting fact: Traditional Cork food consists of tripe, drisheen and crubeens. That's a combination of stomachs, guts, blood and pig's trotters. Anyone who can stomach a foot which has spent all of its life caked in pig poo is some man. Or a foot fetishist.

Best Place to survive a nuclear attack?

During the '70s west Cork was invaded by continental hippies who believed it would be the safest place on earth to survive a nuclear holocaust. Word had gone out on the hippy wire that Ballydehob's latitudinal/longitudinal coordinates,
51 33 45 N and 9 28 38 W, rendered it immune to fallout-carrying winds.
What the hippies didn't know was that down the road, UCC was storing 2.5 tonnes of uranium and a so-called "student training reactor". In 1980 energy minister George Colley told the Dail that "the sub-critical device" was acquired under a "grant provided by the government of the United States of America".
Students? Uranium? Rag week?
God help us.

Interesting Cork slang fact: Bernhard Langer is not an affliction of the trouser department caused by chaffing.

10 of the best Corkonians

>> Sir John Arnott . . . famous businessman who owned Arnotts Department Store in Dublin.
>> Thomas Croke . . . Archbishop of Cashel who has a stadium named after him in Dublin.
>> Sir Hugh Lane . . . patron of arts whose gallery is in . . . Dublin
>> Gerald Goldberg . . . made first Jewish lord mayor in 1977 . . . 21 years after Robert Briscoe was made first Jewish mayor of Dublin.
>> William Annyas . . . first ever Jewish mayor in Ireland, when he became top dog of Youghal in 1555. The last Jew to become mayor in Ireland was Ben Briscoe . . . in Dublin.
>> Jack Lynch . . . taoiseach whose day job was in Dublin.
>> Sam Maguire . . . GAA man whose trophy is awarded in Dublin every year.
>> Sean Og O hAilpin . . . Cork hurler (from Fiji).
>> Rory Gallagher . . . Cork musician (from Donegal).
>> Eddie Hobbs . . . Cork TV personality.
Definitely not from Dublin: we don't want him.

A final clatter of Cork facts

There's a Cork Street in Dublin, but no Dublin Street in Cork.

The first Turkish Delight chocolate was made in Cobh, County Cork, by the Hadji Bey company in the 1890s.

The tallest Irishman ever, Patrick Cotter O'Brien (1760-1806), was born in Kinsale. He measured 8ft 1in (2.46m).

Elizabeth St Leger of Doneraile Court, Cork became Ireland's only ever female Freemason in 1712. She was forced to join after eavesdropping on a ceremony through a hole in the wall of her family home. Some masons, leaving a hole in the masonry like that.

In the 17th century Baltimore was famous for having the biggest Curry House in Ireland, which is where it gets its name from (Baile an Balti Mor).

And finally . . .

If that lot doesn't satisfy the Leesiders, they can stick a Cork in it.

No 8: Ireland’s Fittest Corpse

Sunday Tribune January 13

"You are a bloated, disgusting, fat pig."
Erindipity never had a problem with being called the above as a tweenager. None whatsoever.
We did, however, have a problem with being called a "skinny, wimpy, little git" as this was an accurate description of a boy with pipe-cleaner legs, who was regularly bullied by butterflies and wore a crash helmet when it snowed.
Our pathetic physique was due to our habit of hiding food, particularly at breakfast time. School mornings began with Weetabix and hot milk. We really liked Weetabix with hot milk, but for some still mysterious reason, we felt compelled to stir it and stir it until it became a disgusting, dung-coloured emulsion. Even though we knew we were turning our favourite breakfast the consistency of cat puke, we couldn’t help it. We had to see if we could get all the lumps out (which we never did). Then we couldn’t eat it
Stuffing the bowl inside our pyjamas, we would sneak upstairs to the bathroom to hide the evidence of food-wasting.
Over time we discovered that flushing Weetabix down the loo was a non-runner as – due to its high-fibre content – it floated. Also, if any stuck to the side, it hardened like cement.
So we threw it out the window.
This practice continued for a number of years, until a man who had been painting the outside of the house asked our mum if she had been keeping cows on the garage roof.
"No. Why?"
"It’s covered in cow s***te, missus."
Another breakfast time ‘yeuch’ was eggs fried in the dripping she collected in an enamel bowl in the fridge. This would be added to over the course of many Sunday lunches and the only way of gauging its age was by slicing it in half and counting the rings. Depending on who was frying them, the eggs would variously arrive hard and shrivelled or runny and covered in burnt black fat. Either way, they tasted of beef.
These were secreted in various places downstairs: behind curtains, in the coal scuttle, in the cistern . . . One day our dad – who was an occasional golfer – pulled out his six iron and sent a petrified fried egg frisbee-ing across the fairway. He later discovered three more fossilised eggs clinging to his clubs.
Curiously, he didn’t give out, perhaps because he was too afraid to ask why his weirdo son was hiding fried eggs in his golf bag.
School lunches went uneaten too, due to a love/hate relationship with garlic salami sandwiches (our mum loved making them/we hated eating them).
As a result of this lack of eating we grew up looking like the pull-through they clean rifles with, and the butt of the usual ‘skinny’ jokes.
We mention all this here in the context of last Monday’s ‘Future Shock: Fat Nation’ programme on RTE, where we were told that 25pc of Irish boys and 30pc of girls are overweight.
The reason for this, we believe, is prosperity. Parents have more cash now, so they give their children more pocket money, which they spend on chips/burgers etc. We’re not saying this is a bad thing, it’s just that the pre-Boom generation would never have dreamed of spending their meagre money on food. That was something your mum gave you for free at meal-times. If you didn’t eat it, you went hungry.
If there’s one flaw in the current status quo, it’s that many parents spoil their offspring because they feel guilty about both having to work to pay for the mortgage. As a result Ireland’s latch-key kids are now a crowd of lard-arses.
With this body-consciousness in mind, this week we went in search of Ireland’s Skinniest Schoolboy (see above) and Fattest Man and, to our delight, discovered Ireland’s Fittest Corpse into the bargain.

Ireland’s Fattest Man

Roger Byrne, from Co Laois may or may not have been fond of his butter, but he weighed the equivalent of 728 pounds of Kerrygold (52 stone) when he wobbled off this mortal coil aged 54 in 1808.
If you have problems visualising 52 stone, then consider that Roger was over four times as heavy as Asha, the baby elephant born in Dublin Zoo four months ago (168 pounds).
As if being chronically fat wasn’t bad enough, the Laoisman was also named after the mark you get if you have sex up against a radiator.
Now let’s meet . . .

Ireland’s Strongest Man

There is an old 1950s reel in the Pathe News archive, filmed in a London gym, which begins with a shot of a man cleaning his teeth. He then bites the rung of a chair on which a girl is sitting, and lifts it off the floor, twirling it around. In another scene he lifts a weight with the girl seated on it and two young men perched on either end.
The doughty chap is Kerryman Michael ‘Butty’ Sugrue (1924/1977), a Kilburn Landlord who was the strongest man in Europe in his day.
Despite being a short-arse, Butty once pulled a fully loaded bus through the streets with his teeth.
On one occasion he got a former world champion boxer to use his stomach as a punch bag after lifting two men, tied together, over his head and spinning them around.
Another favourite trick was to tie a rope around himself and get six men to try and pull him over. They never did.
Butty was also a boxing promoter and responsible for bringing Muhammad Ali over to fight in Croke Park in 1972. To do this, he took Ali’s promoter around to meet his bank manager, who said Butty was "good for the $300,000" needed to stage the bout. The deal was settled on a handshake.
Those exploits aside, Butty is included here because of the singular diet he invented in 1968, when he decided to bury one of his barmen alive.
Mike Meaney was 33 when Butty planted him in a coffin nine feet under in the garden of the Admiral Nelson as a publicity stunt. For 61 days, Meaney – who was buried with some books and a torch – breathed through a hosepipe. For his daily sustenance, Butty fed him 1,000 calories of liquid food, plus Guinness, pumped through another pipe.
On the day he was due to be dug up, a huge crowd gathered to watch eight Paddies working away their shovels, to the strains of the London Irish Girl Pipers.
As the coffin began to emerge, Butty (never one to miss an opportunity) was the first to tell the BBC – and all of England – “we have him lads!”
After 15 minutes Mike rose from the grave wearing green pyjamas, sunglasses and clutching a crucifix. For a former grave-dweller, he looked remarkably fit and trim due to Butty’s Underground Diet.
Perhaps Butty’s diet may be the solution to dealing with today’s chip-gorging piglets – ground them and feed them through a hose.
Or perhaps not.
At any rate, it’s worth pointing out that – despite years of honing his superb physique – it was food that killed poor Butty in the end.
He collapsed carrying a fridge up the stairs.
So maybe this fitness thing is over-rated.
Chip Butty, anyone?