I’m committing sacrilege. A Corkman openly praising something in Dublin.
A stern deputation will approach and ask me to hand back my Cork passport (it’s like the Irish one but has Tanora on the cover and the ‘Holly Bough’ quiz at the back). It’s just wrong.
As a foreign correspondent, my job is to report to Cork that “things are in an awful state in Dublin”.
I should be WhatsApping receipts from the Temple Bar. Examples of “gurriers”. Telling anecdotes of a house made of Aslan CDs and coddle that sold for nearly a million, or how I once saw Harry Molloy out of Fair City in a post office.
But brace yourselves: There is a thing up here we don’t have in Cork, and we should have.
The Phoenix Park. It’s massive. 1,750 acres. There’s something about that kind of size that means you’ll never have two identical days in it. There are so many routes to walk in it that by the time you repeat yourself, you’ll have forgotten the first time.
And you’ll be a different person anyway. There are places where you can’t see a house or a road or Krispy Kreme or a bicycle shelter.
And it keeps surprising. They cut hay there this last week. YES! HAY! I had to go to Michael D’s back yard to see hay being saved.
I’d like to think Michael D and Sabine were arguing over whether to go for hay or silage, and it’s a good job it didn’t rain because at one stage they weren’t spaking.
My children jumped in the rows and frolicked.
We put any disturbed hay back, of course. We didn’t want to make life hard for the man on the baler.
Speaking of which, he must have been salivating at the prospect of his invoice, given it’s the OPW run the park.
The Phoenix Park is a classic example of being grateful to people in the past for a decision that affects us all now.
Obviously not too grateful. It was the Viceroy Duke of Ormond who enclosed it to keep the plebs out of his hunting park.
But Lord Chesterfield opened it to the public in 1745 and at a time when the bar was low, apparently “he wasn’t the worst of them”.
If it wasn’t for him, we’d be talking about Phoenix Park Mews off of Chesterfield Avenue now. Paying 600K for a hovel in “an exciting development in a much-sought-after area” if someone hadn’t said: “Let’s have a nice big park” all those years ago.
We need a Big Cork Park. Ballincollig Regional Park is 139 acres, Tramore Valley is 160 acres.
The motivation to do something about it should purely be that we can’t let Dublin have a park 10 times as big as ours.
OK, I’m not sure where it’s going to go. Land is precious and expensive, of course. But maybe it could have cows on it. The Phoenix Park used to have cows in the big fields.
If Cambridge, the Englishest city ever, can have Friesans wandering around along the river on commonage. (Apparently low-density herds of cows are good for biodiversity
because of the way they graze.) And with the Nitrates Thing, a bit of grazing land would make the money back in a century or two.
We never regret making a park. At no point has anyone wandered into a park and thought: “I wish we had more concrete in here.”
So when it comes to buying bits of the Glen of the Downs, or making a giant Cork Cow Park, let’s do it.
Future generations will thank us. As they save the hay.
