Why Corkonians are staying for keeps
This week, the census results definitively proved the Rebels do not like to stray from the smell of their mother’s cooking.
But why do 88% of Ireland’s Corkonians still live in the southern most county?
And why does Cork have almost double the number of bona fide natives as Meath, where only 39% of its residents grew up there?
“Why would you want to leave?” asks Mallow-born academic Professor John A Murphy, “The Greeks said a city was a place of a human scale and that is what Cork has. It is still possible to walk to everything, yet when you think about all the elements of art and sport that are available...”
Cork City football club chairman Brian Lennox, in Sweden with his team, said it is the passion of its people. “I think all of us are proud of Cork and we all have a bit of that Rebel spirit in us,” he said.
But it cannot simply be its scale or art and sport. Galway has only 65% of indigenous Tribesmen on its books and one third of people living in Waterford are “blow-ins”. In both cases, the majority of outsiders were born in Dublin.
Cork’s figures are boosted by the returning migrants technological advances have facilitated.
Frank and Walters drummer Ashley Keating said the band is among this cohort.
“We lived abroad a lot because when we were starting in the early 1990s you had to go somewhere else to make a living, but that has all changed,” he said.
The census revealed the population of every county has been textured by international arrivals and in Cork this section accounts for 10% of its population.
Proud Cork man and concert promoter Kenny Lee said this adds to the appeal.
“As a proud Cork man I remember a thing called Pana, which was literally to go onto Patrick’s Street on a Saturday and the buzz would be fantastic. Now if you walk up and down you hear the Russian, Polish and Nigerian accents and I think it is great because it adds something extra to the place,” he said.
However, what the Census figures do not reveal is whether the high proportion of Cork natives is because of people staying loyal to home or the rest of the country wanting to steer well clear of an insular “real capital” culture.
Mr Murphy said the county is not the self-obsessed fiefdom people criticised in the first half of the last century. “I think Dublin are just not aware of what is down here and theirs is not the only city in the country,” he said.
