'We decided to go together': Cork friends on travelling to Belfast for joint replacements

Cork women Nora Burke and Martina O’Riordan have known each other for 60 years, so it was apt that they were in hospital together — one for a knee replacement, the other for a hip replacement

Nora Burke (left) and Martina O’Riordan (right) following Nora’s two hip replacement surgery and Martina’s knee replacement surgery at Kingsbridge Private Hospital. Photo: Gerard McCarthy

LIFELONG friends Martina O’Riordan, 75, and Nora Burke, 73, first met when O’Riordan’s parents bought a shop five doors up from Burke’s home on Macroom’s Main St in the 1960s.

“We hit it off straightaway,” says Burke, a former post-office worker. “Martina’s family had just come from England; it was a big change for her to come to a small town like Macroom.”