When the 'Cork Examiner' engaged in a spot of muckraking, so to speak

100 years ago, this newspaper, under its original title, published a series of opinion pieces, by a contributor known as Periscope, on social and political issues that are still relevant today

The Blackrock bus driving through flooding on the Victoria Road, Cork City, in January 1938. The city was 'awash' with mud.

It is quite astonishing the number of things that get into a periscope at all times or at any time, when you keep the instrument well over the top, but at Chimetime it becomes more astonishing than ever.

From this wide field of view, you may easily infer what sort of Christmas it really is, and what most people think of it. Even that unhappy citizen you discovered late at night, reeling in circles from one side of the road to the other, and charitably assisted to find his right hall door, has his views as to the festive season, for as you stop his wild... circling and help him along, you hear him mutter: 'Beastly time, Christmas; state …yo inebriation'. You know then that it is not a case of some new form of locomotor ataxy, nor that old thing St Vitus’s dance, but simply Chimetime booze, and very bad stuff, too.

You know, also, that if you hadn’t happened along, it is probable that one of the circles would have landed this particular son of Bacchus in the channel, where he would have remained wallowing till the grey dawn of Christmas morning, by which time his views of Christmas would have undergone a change for the worse. This possibility brings home to your mind the imminent perils of mud.

On Christmas morning, you have the active evil of it brought home to you sharply and unpleasantly. You live, perhaps, where the mud is thickest, at the Douglas Road, for instance.

You are arrayed in an expensive get-up, carefully thought out for Christmas; you are going to church with your wife or daughter, also in the gladdest of her glad rags; you are just outside your gate and you start to look up and down the road; suddenly a large motor car comes along at the usual, madly illegal pace and... !

Yes, from your toes to your chin, you are a mass of spots and spatters of pure limestone muck and you both have to return to the house and try to get rid of the stains, which have sunk into your garments; a liberal, permanent stain.

Thereafter, your desire for devotional exercises is far less keen, and the things you think about, what we customarily call 'the state of the roads', would be best represented by dashes and asterisks.

Wherever the periscope, if turned on the city, reflects much in other... some parts are sometimes muddy; in our city, all parts are always muddy. Yet it is easy to sum it up: The plus of mud is caused by the minus of 'supervision'; lately, the periscope gave me a curious insight as to how this state of unlimited, unrelieved muck comes about. There is a muckman in one of our suburbs who is the … as a leisurist.

He appears early in the morning with his unsullied broom, which he places carefully against the wall. He then looks about carefully until he spies an Examiner sticking out of someone’s postbox. He takes out the paper, puts his back to the wall, and has a good, solid fill of the morning's news for about an hour or an hour and a half.

When he has gone through that paper, from the 'births, deaths and marriages' to the in-print, he folds it up again and not too carefully, and shoves it into the postbox from which he took it, never knowing anything about that little periscope inside the wall, hard by!

And the indignant subscriber, when he opens his paper and notes its condition, exclaims angrily: 'Fancy the Examiner people sending me a pawed paper like this! How disgraceful.' The periscope, I may here remark, has revealed the fact that this plan of a free read in the early morning is highly popular with the corporate muckman.

You see, my friends, it enables them to have quite a lot to talk about while they are putting in time... the day, now and then having a long spell of chat leaning on their shovels or brooms and discussing the affairs of the nation. The proper disposal of the 'thick and …' kind of mud seems to be still a problem, the only solution of which appears to be the accumulation of it beside the kerb. When you do not step into it up to your ankles, you get a full spray of it over you from some passing motor car.

One day last week a young Corkman, home for a holiday from a well-ordered English city, amused his friends here by the shock of his experience. '“What do you think?' he said in the voice of one who had made a thrilling discovery, 'I actually saw mud thrown up on the footpath by a passing motor!'. 'You are lucky, old chap,' he was calmly informed, 'that you didn't get a slash of it across the face'.

And he was lucky so far, if he only knew it. Various rumours have been abroad for some time past as to some organised attempt to deal with this plague of muck, but so far they have not materialised.

When we see a little of the muck gone from one accustomed place, we meet more of it than ever in other places. The cleaning, one may infer from that, merely takes the form of sweeping the muck from one place to another, and letting it lie there, and so many of the streets and roads are holed that this kind of lodgement makes matters worse than ever.

I do not know how much of the 66,000 spent by the corporation has been devoted to street-cleaning, but I fear it must be a very small proportion, or else the absence of proper 'supervision' is more masked than ever and is leading to worse results.

There is an old Irish saying, the merest apology for dirt: 'Where there's muck, there's luck.' In that case, our city should be the luckiest place on Earth. At all events, the citizens need never be really apprehensive that the municipal authorities, as at present constituted, will take any very active steps to deprive them of their 'luck' by removing the muck. Whatever happens, the 'luck' and the muck will remain as far as they are concerned.

If all the able-bodied men who are drawing unemployment money were obliged to do even a little bit of street cleaning for their money, the ladies of Cork might safely promenade the streets in white-satin shoes without fear of a single stain. That 'money for nothing' department is a painful thought for the harassed taxpayer who has to wade through shoals of muck. A half-dozen up-to-date muck gatherers, purchased out of the 66,000, would have largely reconciled the ratepayers to the profitless squandering of the rest.

I fear that not until there is a 'clean sweep' of our present municipal managers and messers, or the greater number of them, will there be any 'clean sweep' of the streets. Optimists advise us confidently to put our trials under our feet. Alas, the citizens of Cork already have their greatest trial under their feet.

First published in the 'Cork Examiner', December, 1923