Our Cork 2040: In a city of churches, the sound of their bells has vanished

Máirín Prendergast ponders how and why Cork city lost the sound of its church bells, and how vacant business premises post-Covid could provide an opportunity to foster local arts and crafts.

Cork City and county are in a phase of rapid expansion. The draft Cork City Development Plan 2022-2028 expects to build 20,000 homes in the city by 2028, while national plans under Ireland 2040 expect to see the city’s population double.

The Cork City Development Plan is inviting submissions from the public until the 4th of October if you’d like to have a say in how the future of Cork is shaped.

The Our Cork 2040 series is based on the idea that it’s the people who live, work, raise families and face all of life’s challenges in Cork who really hold a stake in the future of the city and county, not developers and anonymous corporate entities.

Our Cork 2040 presents a variety of writers with different areas of expertise, experience and interest. 

If you would like to become a contributing writer in this series, there are just four weeks left until we conclude the series, so please drop us a line! At the moment we are particularly interested in hearing from people with mobility issues, or people who have struggled with housing and homelessness, but we are open to all sorts of life experience.

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Our Cork 2040: Máirín Prendergast

Máirín Prendergast is an actor, director and writer. She studied in the Crawford College of Art and Design in the 1950s, going on to study at Leeds Arts University. She’s a former speech and drama teacher for Cork School of Music. Prior to the Covid crisis, Máirín’s most recent live stage performance was in Gaitkrash Theatre’s Cosy at Cork Midsummer Festival 2019. She also appeared as Sister Assumpta in 2019 comedy The Holy Fail. Máirín and her husband David raised their family of five children in Cobh. They now live in Tivoli.

I’ve loved Cork all my life

Cork is a beautiful city. It’s my city.

I’ve loved it all my life, and I’ve never wanted to live anywhere else; I’ve never really gone anywhere else, and I came back very quickly, if I ever did.

We have the university, the School of Music offering degrees in music and drama, and the art college offering degrees in design and fine art, so it’s a cultural city, a hive of creativity.

A city of church bells

Standing in Emmet Place, looking to the Northside, I see a circle of beautiful churches: St Vincent’s, St Mary’s, The Dominican Church, a glimpse of the North Cathedral and Shandon, and moving on down the banks of the Lee, at the end of Summer Hill there’s the Presbyterian Church that’s so famous for its crooked spire, and on to St Patrick’s, opposite the railway station.

In the city centre, we’re blessed with St Augustine’s, St Peter and Paul’s and further up the river, the magnificent St Finbarre’s Cathedral.

Up the Western Road, we are privileged to have the Honan Chapel, built by the Honan family and where we are so blessed to have windows by Harry Clarke, absolute jewels.

I want to hear all these churches ring out their bells over the city again.

I miss the sound of the call to prayer, and the reminder of God’s presence in our city. These churches are sanctuaries, where anyone can pop in for peace and quiet and comfort.

Because the doors were locked all during Covid, maybe that made me realise that the sound of the bells was gone, so I don’t know how long they’ve been gone for.

I have so missed them in these times. I would like to see their doors open all the time.

The enriching power of immigration

We’re privileged in our city to have had the arrival of many immigrants who have brought such a wealth of expertise to Cork.

I particularly remember the Fleischmann family and Aloys Fleischmann, a man who was the living embodiment of music, who was choirmaster at St Mary’s Cathedral. Tears still fill my eyes and I get a shiver up my spine recalling the opening hymn at twelve o’clock mass on Sunday and the boy sopranos soaring up to the heavens.

My brothers sang in this choir, one a boy alto and one a boy soprano.

Katherine Boucher Beug, who lives in Kinsale, is an internationally renowned artist who has taught during her time in Cork and has brought so much to the arts and enriched the fabric of life in Cork. At the Cork School of Music, there were people like Jan Čáp, the fabulous pianist, and of course the Petcus.

Aloys Fleischmann’s son eventually succeeded him, so we have some idea of how welcoming immigrants can enhance, enlarge and educate us all.

A golden era for Cork: drama, dancing and socialising

For me, the golden era of Cork was when I was young, and the city was alive.

I was very lucky with my education, because my parents made sure I was immersed in all the arts: drawing and painting, music, drama. I started going to The Loft, where Father O’Flynn was teaching Shakespeare up over the sweetshop in Shandon, when I was about twelve, 70 years ago.

I was only a little girl and I just sat there with my mouth open. The stars were Mon Murphy, Michael McAuliffe and Michael Twomey. Father O’Flynn would put on plays. I developed a deep love and appreciation for Shakespeare there.

There was an awful lot of amateur drama in the city, and a great interest in it. There were directors like Dan Donovan, Michael McCarthy and John O’Shea. All the schools had past-pupils’ drama societies, and we all went in for the drama competitions and we travelled around to the drama festivals.

The Opera House was burned down at that stage, so it all happened in Father Mathew Hall.

The theatre wasn’t just about visiting companies coming in; it was all Cork companies, educating Cork people. We did it all ourselves, and we travelled with it. With the Southern Theatre Group I remember we’d come out of work at half five, jump on a bus and go down to Limerick, put on a show and jump back on the bus to go home. We did that every night for a week, to Limerick and back. We regularly went all over the south with the Southern Theatre, did all the John B Keane shows during the summer, and it was a great life.

Cork was a smaller place then, and we all knew each other. It was a great city for dancing: there were dances at Highfield Rugby Club, Lee Rowing, Dolphin. And we all went dancing, so I think the young population all socialised together in a way that I don’t know if it’s happening today.

I’d love for the young people to be as interested and to have so many outlets, but maybe they are, and I just don’t know about it.

Cork in the Covid crisis

I made a short film called Me and Mine during Covid, with Jim Horgan from the CAT Club, and because it was about the same woman at different stages of her life, the director was able to shoot the three phases of the young girl, the middle-aged woman and the old woman, all on our own.

Someone else asked me to do an interview about what I did in lockdown as an old person, and really, what I was doing was writing poetry.

Covid has had a terrible effect on people, I think. We had to open back up again at some stage, to start living again.

I think it made us realise the importance of a friendly city, where you can talk to anyone on the street, and it really is a friendly city, that’s what I like about it. People in Cork aren’t surprised if you address a remark to them. I go to Cork Coffee Roasters with my daughter and whatever table has free seats, you just take them and sit down, and you might strike up conversation with other people at the tables.

Now there are so many empty shops and the English chain stores like Debenhams seem to be retreating from the city centre.

But this is a great opportunity to welcome local, family-owned businesses back.

We could have pop-up galleries for artists and local craftspeople. I don’t know why, but it seems to me that people aren’t buying art in Cork. Long ago, Christine McDonald had a beautiful craft shop near the GPO and she sold all Irish crafts. It was a great place for artists to sell their stuff. There’s a small place in Tesco now, but it’s kind of in the corner of the Tesco complex.

I’d like people to have the opportunity, now that places are empty in the city centre, to build up arts and crafts again.

I’d also like to see the business community get more involved in creating opportunities for our young, developing artists and investing in their talent by commissioning works of art.

And I’d like the city to be commissioning public works of art - sculptures, murals and more - to honour the great number of Cork artists who have left their mark here.

Housing

One of my children is spending a fortune in rent on a tiny house in the city, but if you’re spending all your money on rent, how can you ever hope to buy?

Then another of my children did manage to buy, but if she hadn’t managed to buy when she did, she certainly wouldn’t be able to now, because now you need two salaries. Single people can’t possibly: how could they? People with two salaries have more money, and they can up the bid.

I don’t want people living in huge glass boxes and huge concrete towers.

I can’t even imagine how it would be to live in a huge box with people above you and on either side of you. I know people need housing, but they needed habitable houses that will enhance their lives, and not stultify them.

Would you even want to go home, at the end of your day, and go up in a lift twelve stories high? Years ago we thought the little lanes with tiny houses were awful, but they’d be heaven compared to being up in a skyscraper, where you actually mightn’t even know the people living next to you. All you’d have time to try to establish would be your own privacy, because you’d be surrounded.

It also shocks me that we can’t seem to design attractive corporation houses, or social housing, to rent. Why not make them attractive? It should be the first priority to provide housing that helps people to grow inside their souls.

Technology

I don’t have one of those mobile phones where everything comes up on the screen; I’m not mentally efficient with those things. I find it hard to describe, but they upset me. So I rely on David to tell me about the things that are happening around the place, but of course he’s not as interested in knowing about what’s on as I am, so I’m not always aware of all the things that are going on.

I went up to do an MA in UCC when I was still teaching, about 20 years ago. I didn’t think they’d take me, but I went for an audition and I was so grateful to be taken in my sixties, when I didn’t think they would.

But one of the conditions of doing the MA was that you had to be computer literate, so a friend of mine said they’d help me when I needed to put my work up online.

They got in a computer tutor to give us all lessons, but I couldn’t do it. She had to give up on me. But I got the MA, and I got first class honours. I did a practical MA and put on a show; it was Ibsen’s The Doll’s House, but as Brecht would have done it. I wrote about the process and put the show on in the Granary theatre.

I was thrilled, jumping out of my skin, when I got first class honours. I think it shows that you don’t have to be scared of ageing in Cork, and that there are still all sorts of avenues open to you.