The Friday View including Culture Night tips!
It's a Culture Night special
Dazzled by the ridiculous array of offerings in Cork City and County for Culture Night? Ellie picks her top five recommendations for the things you should go and see. You won’t see online offerings on this list: these are IRL only.
A touch of Frost in the Crypt
Listen and look in St Luke’s Crypt, 4pm-8pm
Immerse yourself in painter Deirdre Frost’s new work and in music that has been especially composed in response to it by her brother, Paul Frost.
Deirdre is showing fresh work that is a result of her Sample-Studios Graduate Studio Residency in St. Luke’s Crypt and her Backwater Artists Group Residency in Studio 12: the two form a two-venue exhibition trail of painting and sculpture called In Habitat, In Transition.
The Freemasons’ Hall holds….no secrets?!
Guided tours of the Freemasons’ Hall on Tuckey Street, 5pm-8.30pm
Queues have formed around the block in previous years for a chance to gawp at the esoteric symbols and strange paraphernalia housed in the Freemasons’ Hall on Tuckey Street. This year, instead of being able to traipse through the bizarre assemblage yourself, the tours are guided. What makes this one of Cork Culture Night’s most enduringly popular offerings? Why, the opportunity to see something secret, of course.
“We prefer to think of ourselves not as a secret society, but as a society with secrets,” a member told me earnestly if unconvincingly the first time I wandered in on Culture Night a few years ago.
Send in the Clowns
On the Coal Quay, North Main St and Grand Parade, 6pm-10pm
Street performers are back with a bang this week with Pitch’d Circus and Street Arts Festival and as part of Culture Night, there will be several outdoor performances and walkabouts underway, not least of which is artist Tom Campbell’s Rubbish Performance, in which performers don litter for their capers: it sounds silly, but there’s something profound about it too.
The craic will be Dobry in Cobh’s Eastern European Market
A food and crafts market celebrating Polish, Lithuanian and Estonian cultures in Ireland, at John F Kennedy Park in Cobh, 5.30pm-9.30pm
The Polska-Éire festival, celebrating the rich cultural connections Polish and other Eastern European nationalities have brought to Ireland, is set to liven up Cobh town centre with a market featuring foods and crafts, as well as music, live historical re-enactments and a fire show. If you’re city-based, this would make a lovely train outing.
Celebrate with musical a-Bandon
Live music trail all over Bandon town centre, 7:00pm - 9:30pm
Let your ears lead you from one musical offering to another around the streets of the West Cork town. With so much to see on Culture Night, some people plan with military precision to fit things in, but Bandon’s Live Music Trail is more in the spirit of what I think Culture Night should be about: the unexpected stumble-upons.
At the very least you’ll be able to check out enterprising Cork singer-songwriter Áine Duffy’s Duffbox, the converted horsebox she turned into a mobile performance space during lockdown to get her back out on the road gigging and touring.
The America’s Cup drama
So, Cork is still in the running for the America’s Cup. Up until midweek it was firm favourite to host the 2024 event - “ours to lose” even. Then it was sunk at cabinet level, but lo and behold the organisers are extending the proposal deadline for six more months.
We had an explainer during the week about what the race is and how it would unfold in Cork Harbour, as that was something we thought was lacking in all the shouting about the necessity of Cork hosting the America’s Cup, and the significant cost to taxpayers - somewhere between €150m and €200m.
Now that Cork is once again back in the running along with Jeddah, Barcelona and possibly Auckland, we are reliably informed that the selection process for the host city is always a drama. Regardless of the outcome, the ideas for making the harbour more accessible with more infrastructure for all (pontoons, marinas) should go ahead. And in the meantime a full timeline and list of how public money would be spent and on what would go a long way to making the process more transparent.
Cycling stats
Another news story we had on T+D which coincided with National Bike Week, which wraps up this weekend, reported on how the figures used to set a target of 4% for cycling as a share of metropolitan area transport by 2028 in the draft Cork City Development Plan are taken from 10-year-old census data.
Cycling advocates think we’ve already reached that target, and that the baseline is too low.
Tweet of the week:
Well done to the students, teachers, mums, dads and guardians for organising the cycle bus to Beaumont Boys National School this week.
That’s it for this week’s round-up. Our long read is slightly later this week - actually it will be in your inbox this evening, so you can get to it after “de culture”. It’s a timely piece with input from a Midleton man.
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.
From the T+D archive: