A living, breathing story of a city

“WHERE did you get that child?”“I got it in Mallow Lane.”“How much did you pay?”“I got the child at a bargain rate of three pence a day.”“You were badly caught.

Sure, I could have given you two beautiful cripples for only four pence.”Thus ends an exchange between two professional beggars on the streets of Cork in the 1850s and recorded shortly after in a pamphlet written by the exotically named Valentine Everybody.

To most Corkonians, this represents a faded fable, hardly worthy of note, but to historian Michael Lenihan it is part of the lore of Cork, a living, breathing account of what the city was really like long ago, rather than what the leaden history books tell us.