🎃The Friday View 28/10
It's the end of an era for Aramark, Cork City Council and the English Market. Plus, Halloween and the Jazz weekend collide on Leeside - we have a few recommendations.
Aramark out of the English Market
In August 2021, Ellie wrote a detailed piece about the English Market, but it had a different flavour than most pieces typically written about the Cork institution. Her long read focused on Aramark, a US corporation, which for the past 10 years has had a general services contract with the Market handed out by Cork City Council.
As Ellie wrote at the time “the day-to-day management of the gourmand’s paradise is in the hands of a company notorious for its US prison food and management of Irish direct provision centres may leave a bad taste in the mouth of some visitors.”
People Before Profit Cllr Fiona Ryan has been a consistent and vocal critic of the Council’s involvement with Aramark, and, as she said in that T+D piece (below), “Aramark running the English Market is in conflict with our social obligations.”
In 2019, students in Trinity College Dublin campaigned for the college to cut ties with Aramark. The publicity and their boycott led to Aramark terminating its contract with the Dublin college’s catering services. It subsequently pulled out of catering services in UCD.
The news coming this week is that Cork City Council has decided not to renew Aramark’s contract, opting to go instead with Lisney, an Irish property company with a base on the South Mall in Cork city. The three-year contract is worth €350,000 and the Irish Examiner reported that Lisney has already met with traders from the Market this week. Tim Mulcahy of The Chicken Inn told the paper that a lot of Lisney’s “key executives shop in the market”.
One of those Lisney execs, Margaret Kelleher, based in the Cork office, has listed Cork City Council as one of her key clients according to her profile on Lisney’s homepage. Likewise, Nicholas O’Connell, a divisional director based in Lisney’s Cork office undertakes valuation work for numerous clients including Cork City Council.
The tendering process for the English Market contract began earlier this year and Tripe+Drisheen contacted Cork City Council for more details about how many companies were bidding and if the Council decided to drop Aramark based on criticisms of the US corporation.
In reply, a spokeswoman for the City Council said the Council does not release details in relation to any of the other tenders “for reasons of confidentiality and commercial sensitivities”, adding that the latest request for tender procurement process was undertaken when the management services contract with Aramark expired.
Cllr Ryan told T+D that she welcomed the City Council’s decision to cut ties with Aramark while acknowledging the work done by campaigners and activists to highlight what she said was the “inappropriateness of a company which has presided over unjust conditions in Ireland and internationally to be managing the English Market.”
“It would be preferable for the money to be used to hire people to do this work directly under the remit of the council, in the interim it is a good news story that Lisney has been awarded the contract going forward,” she added.
Indeed, missing in all the contract talks is the fact that the City Council could have stepped up and hired directly. The budget is there after all.
-JJ
News in brief
An interesting group
They don’t write the headlines like they used to. The interesting group in question shows Michael Collins centre with Diarmuid Fawsitt far left. The photo above is one of 2,000 documents that make up the Fawsitt collection now housed at Cork City & County Archives. Fawsitt was born in Cork, near Blarney Street, and led a varied and busy life. Along the way he co-founded the Cork Corps of the Irish Volunteers, befriended Lord Mayor of Cork, Tomás MacCurtain and Michael Collins. He was also a civil servant and a judge on the circuit court and spent time Stateside. The Fawsitt collection comprises diary entries, photographs, news clippings, articles, speeches, and lectures and provides a detailed glimpse into a“little-known but key figure in the struggle for independence”.
Not yet emerging: a light rail route
The wait goes on to see what route the provisional light rail route in Cork city will take. The National Transport Authority (NTA) had intended to publish details of the tram route this side of 2023, but The Echo reports that it’s going to be early next year before we get eyes on the “emerging preferred route” as it’s being referred to.
Given the stick the NTA was getting for BusConnects in Cork, perhaps the delay is strategic: a light rail route that runs on roads and streets is going to upset some/many people (whenever details of the route are published).
The NTA proposal would see a tram run 17km from east to west (roughly from Ballincollig to Mahon Point taking in UCC, CUH and MTU). According to the infographic from the NTA, journey times by light rail from Ballincollig to the city centre would be 27 minutes, and 20 minutes from Mahon Point to the city centre. The NTA estimated a budget of €1 billion, but it’s light on detail. While Jacobs Engineering were commissioned to draw up an analysis of the route back in August 2020, bear in mind it’s all very much at the proposal stage. There is much to emerge, including an emerging preferred route.
TikTok, Micheál Martin and an upset artist
TikTok secured another world leader this month when an Taoiseach Micheál Martin joined the Chinese-owned social media video sharing platform. As CorkBeo astutely noted, it’s unlikely that the Taoiseach is creating the content by himself (safe to assume there that he is absolutely not). In his latest video, now deleted, the Taoiseach did however upset Dublin-based street artist Asbestos whose mural of a figure obscured by a cardboard box on South Main Street featured very briefly in a video uploaded last week.
The long and the short of it is that Asbestos claimed copyright infringement, stating that he wasn’t first asked if his public mural could be featured in the video, and blamed Martin for his role in the housing crisis. Martin’s team took the video down and issued the standard apology. Bear in mind that the mural, paid for with public funds, was just a very short part of a montage of images from Cork, but it was enough to upset Asbestos. Anyway, a win all round for TikTok.
Bandon library open access
Bandon library joins Douglas library in offering extended opening hours. Officially called ‘My Open Library’, the libraries operating the service are open on a self-service basis outside of normal opening hours, seven days a week, from 8:00 am to 10:00pm, 365 days per year. It’s a condition that all new or refurbished libraries across the country offer My Open Library. While there are no staff working during the extended hours, members can still borrow and return books, but you’ll need to sign up first with Bandon library for a short induction course before you can start using the service. Bandon Library can be contacted at 023 8844830 orby email MOLBandon@corkcoco.ie
Photo of the week
Out + About
🥔Dig in, eat up and celebrate Samhain: Before Meat and Potatoes finishes up at The Crawford Gallery next week there’s still a chance to get some…potatoes. On the bank holiday Monday if you’ve had your fill of jazz, head over to Emmet Place where they’ll be harvesting potatoes which were planted earlier in the year. Culinary historian Regina Sexton and UCC folklorist Dr Jenny Butler will be at the gallery as they turn the spuds into colcannon. You’ll also get to hear about other traditional Samhain dishes. In fact, it promises to be an afternoon full of tidbits about pre-Christian and folk dimensions of an Irish Halloween and the role food played in the harvest festival. Free to attend and suitable for all ages.
Time, date, place: 3–5:30pm, Monday October 31, The Crawford Gallery, Emmet Place
🎷All that jazz: Where to begin? The Opera House, the Metropole, the Old Oak, The Crane Lane or your local? As usual, The Guinness Cork Jazz Festival brings lots of jazz and not jazz to Cork for what nearly always promises to be three days of rain. Shurlookit, you can’t do much about the weather. However, if it’s jazz you’re after, here's a few recommendations: Seun Kuti is playing over two nights at the Everyman and at St. Luke’s for what promises to be two massive gigs for those lucky enough to have bagged tickets. Likewise tickets for the GoGo Penguin gig are sold out too, but there’s still availability for Portico Quartet who will be playing The Everyman on Sunday at 10pm. That should be an electric gig, as should the gig featuring Alabaster de Plume and Jeff Parker who will be holding court for a Sunday afternoon gig at St Luke’s. The spoken word artist will be teaming up with American guitarist and composer Jeff Parker for this one. And if you’re looking for Karen Underwood, go no further than the Opera House as the singer is doing shows across the three days of the weekend. She’ll be singing from the songbooks of Nina Simone, Ester Phillips, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington. Full details of all the gigs and venues for this year’s festival can be found here.
Time, date, place: various venues across the city until October 31.
🐲The dragon of Shandon is back. Cork Community Art Link and its amazing team of volunteers have been working hard to get dragon ready for Samhain. Now in its 17th year the Dragon Of Shandon Parade will start out in Shandon on Church Street before winding its way south to finish up on Cornmarket Street for what promises to be a great night of fun and spookiness. This year the Dragon will be joined by two French delegations, an artists collective which will be bringing along a float of their making, as well as a group of musicians.
Time, date, place: 7pm, Monday October 3, Church St to Cornmarket St
🖼For one weekend only. Painter Cora Murphy is opening up her new home on Douglas Street with an exhibition of her landscape paintings. Threshold takes its name from the title of a book by John O Donohue, and the exhibition features some of Murphy’s largest paintings to date, and uniquely, in her own home. Her new neighbours over at Cork Flower Studios put up a floral decoration on the front of her house, so you’re sure to not miss it. More information here.
Time, date, place: 11am – 5pm, October 28 - 31, 42 Douglas Street.
This week on T +D
On Monday Ellie wrote about GUBU Man, a Dublin artist who suffers from LED sensitivity. You can read that piece here.
On Tueasday we had a short piece about the sad news that curtains have come down on Corcadorca, the Cork theatre company which had a huge creative presence on Leeside streching nack over 30 years.
On Wednesday Ellie reported from Feed Cork, a food bank in the city centre, which has so far in 2022 reported an increase of 84% in new sign ups compared with 2021. You can read that story here as well as Ellie’s long read about Feed Cork and the team of volunteers behind the vital service.
To get high-quality journalism about Cork in your inbox every week, join our free email list now.
That’s it for this week’s Friday View. Be sure to stop by tomorrow for our weekly Arts+Culture newsletter/podcast - it’s a Jazz weekend special! Any tips, news or events you’d like to share with Tripe+Drisheen, you can contact either of us at jj.odonoghue@gmail.com or emailellieobyrne@gmail.com. We are always happy to speak to people off the record in the first instance, and we will treat your information with confidence and sensitivity. Get in touch.
This post has been updated to include comment from Cllr Fiona Ryan in the Aramark, English Market news story.