Colm O'Regan: I mourn the loss of two great Cork pubs - the Western Star and The Crows Nest

I have come to the end of Part 2. That inflection point in life, when you realise you are exactly twice the age you were when you first thought you were a grown-up. I recently walked past two places that were part of Part 1. They have now vanished. Two pubs: The Western Star and The Crows Nest. Two very different types of memories.

The Crows Nest came first. Like other earlier pub memories, I associated it with the Holy Hour. Gather around young’uns and I’ll tell you about when pubs used to close for a while on Sundays and then open at 4pm. It gave rural youth enough time after their Sunday ice-cream with wafers to thumb ten miles to somewhere to play pool and gather around one John Player Blue. 

But the Crows Nest wasn’t rural. It was at the gate of the city at Victoria Cross. My brother Conor would bring me there to watch English league games on BBC or we might call in after a smoggy gloamy winter Cork City match. 

A city pub on a Sunday afternoon with Coke and Taytos and BBC football on the telly with their different typefaces. Who could ask for more? Maybe Notts Forest were playing. Would this be their year in the FA Cup? Spoiler alert: It never was.

The Western Star was the unholy hour. An ordinary pub in front, with a sort of a shed at the back. And a beer garden which was rare enough in Ireland before the smoking ban. A beer garden back then was just a yard that smelled of beer. 

The Star was the kind of place you would come out of the shed after a night out there and there would be footprints on your back and you couldn’t figure out how they got there. They might even be your footprints or a hoof. A place not to wear chinos to. Post-college exam celebrations were chaotic. 

Imagine the film The Ten Commandments when Moses goes up to get the tablets and comes back to find the Israelites have decided to worship a calf but imagine if Moses has forgotten to go up to get the tablets because he’s worshipping the calf too (because he’s doing Ag Science).

Both pubs were derelict for more than a decade. In keeping with Cork Way Of Building Management. But walking past their locations and seeing them vanished hit hard in a different way. When something is derelict it’s a pity. When it is replaced it is more brutal. There is no more sentiment. it’s not that a chapter has closed. The chapter has been ripped out.

The Star’s site is now owned by Bons Secours. The Crow’s Nest is student accommodation which is fine. But it is at the junction of mid-west and west Cork. The Straight Road or Bishopstown. Two different states of mind.

I dunno, call me sentimental but I think important junctions should have more thought gone into what building sits at their crux. They are in the map of our brains. When the Capital was closed at the ‘Cork’s T Junction’ (where Washington Street meets the Grand Parade), something was off-kilter about the city.

Likewise Victoria Cross isn’t any old junction. It’s a gateway.

I’m not suggesting the Gateway to Dripsey should be two enormous statues of our 2009 Junior All Ireland hurling and the Cork Junior B 2005 trophies but I’m just saying the people should have been consulted more. Okay, I’m saying I should have been consulted more. Maybe a mural of a glass of Coke, a bag of Taytos. And Forest winning the FA Cup. Although that’ll have to wait for Part 3.