TV review: Oíche i gCorcaigh gets under the skin of Cork at night

Garda Shane Mac Carthaigh & Barra Ó Sé in Oíche i gCorcaigh

Oíche i gCorcaigh (TG4) is a surprise. 

It starts like an ad for the Guards, with two young cops having friendly chats with homeless people in Cork city centre. We’ve seen these ‘night in the city’ docs before. 

But next up is a group of cloistered nuns in Cobh, singing in Latin and talking about getting up at 3 am as a “joyous sacrifice”. Then we meet a young couple in Ballyphehane talking about the difference a small child in the house has made to their night-life.

Three women in Blackpool drink prosecco and niggle about the costs of a night out in Cork, straight after a man in a homeless centre talks about delivering sandwiches to people living on the streets.

An ambulance arrives for a Ballyphehane man in agony with suspected gall-stones, describing his pain as 8 out of 10. They give him a pain-killer to inhale, he takes a puff and says “long live the HSE.”

This moody story of Cork at night meanders through the nooks and crannies of the city (and Mallow), the sadness of the work done by the Cork Missing Persons charity alongside new families and young people out on the pull. 

A young guy serving cocktails in the Imperial Hotel talks about Michael Collins’ connection with the place. A band plays in Crane Lane, Tadhg Hickey tells jokes in Irish in The Roundy. A woman dies peacefully in hospital.

Any time it veers towards an Instagram-friendly ad for nightlife in Cork, the camera returns to the Missing Persons volunteers patrolling the river by boat, looking for bodies with a spare eye out for anyone who looks like they are about the enter the water.

There is no real point or agenda to Oíche i gCorcaigh. That’s what makes it so good. It’s just a snapshot of people in an Irish city in the early 21st century. 

This isn’t the whole picture – it’s mainly Irish speakers which rules out most of the population, local or otherwise.

But it definitely gets under the skin of the place, warts and all. I was too immersed in the stories and the atmospheric views of Cork to spot the subtitles.

And in the end, a subtle point emerged out of this night in Cork. Sirens blazing, lights flashing, our ambulance crew rushes to the aid of someone who was taken out of the river. We don’t know if he is going to make it.

Decent people stay up every night to keep an eye out for the rest of us. We should thank them.