'A fella's lecturer pulled him out of the bar the night before exams': New book recounts UCC bar tales

When the college started selling pieces of the floor of the bar online, people got in touch from all over the world recalling their memories of their time in the bar, which closed in 2016.

UCC's iconic Old Bar.

From meeting future husbands and wives, to drowning post-exam sorrows, UCC's iconic Old Bar was the setting for a thousand stories.

Now, five years after the taps ran dry, some of those stories are being compiled into a book, which is being put together by the head of UCC's Visitor Centre, JP Quinn.

The news of the book comes just days after the college went viral for a unique take on people's nostalgia for the Old Bar, which saw it selling off pieces of the floor of the venue, which closed in 2016 and is being repurposed into a space for student respite.

Mr Quinn hung a piece of the floor on his office wall and was prompted into selling them. Such was the demand that people started sending emails of their own experiences of the bar in an effort to justify why they should jump the queue.

Trip down memory lane

For the head of the visitor centre, it was a nice trip down memory lane and he is now set to compile some of these stories into a book, which he hopes will come out later this year.

“I think they almost felt like they were chancing their arm trying to get a piece of the board because they knew that it was limited and that we were only going to be doing this the one time," he said.

“So they were almost trying to justify why they should get a piece over other people.

“Lots of people sent little stories, almost like their own history with the bar as part of their emails.” 

Mr Quinn said he has heard many stories from all over the world since he announced the framed boards were being sold.

Professor John O Halloran receiving piece 001 of College Bar floor from JP Quinn, Head of Visitors' Centre in University College Cork. Picture: Tomas Tyner, UCC.

“I have people telling me that they met their husband there in 1973, people telling me the fights they had there, people telling me they worked in the bar, their mother worked in the bar.

“One fella’s lecturer pulled him out of the bar the night before his exams.

“There’s a lot of stories there from people whose history to UCC is connected with the good times they had there.” 

Mr Quinn said for many people, the good times they had in college centred around the Old Bar.

The Old Bar project has “rekindled a lot of people’s romance with the university”, he added.

We've had calls and emails from Singapore, Thailand, Australia, America, South Korea from all over the world, looking to get a piece of this little bit of history

“So there's that nice kind of iconography of parts of the Old Bar being on people's walls, all over the world.” 

Social history

More than 1,000 people have expressed an interest in getting a piece of UCC’s social history.

Mr Quinn said the book will cover the history of the bar and “some of the stories and the great things that happened there”.

While no longer a bar, the building still plays an important role in student life.

It has been refitted to become The Calm Zone, a calm space to support the university’s autism-friendly initiative.

It is a space designed to be a place of respite and calm for students, and in particular students on the autism spectrum.

“There’s a huge juxtaposition there about how that place went from being like almost a festival – it was Oxygen before Oxygen ever existed – to being a calm, quiet space, still provided for students but in a different way."