Awkward Crime Statistics

1st Oct 2018

Sophisticated, friendly and much better than where you came from – yes, that’s what we were thinking too. We welcome all you students from near and far with open arms to our great city and may we say, formally, what an absolute privilege it is for you to be here.

You may not realise it now (although given the hole of a county you have come from it has probably dawned on you at this stage) but this is as good as it gets. Your life has peaked: you are in Cork.

If you’re looking for a friendlier city than ours you officially have two other choices according to, Condé Nast,  the world’s official friendly city guide. You can go to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico or Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, the number one and two friendliest cities in the world. Apparently.
 

Ballsa on the bike. Welcome to Cork.

Neither are hurling strongholds but both have murder rates that make Dublin’s drug gang wars look like the side line of a first round Sciath na Scol match. They might throw their arms around you when you arrive in those cities and call you ‘amigo’ but they’re probably just sussing out how big a black bag they’ll need to transport your body after you “accidentally drown” in your hotel bath.

We’re not saying that Cork is some kind of utopian dream here – not this time anyway as we’ve proved that in plenty other pieces we’ve written – but we admit it does have its fair share of “crime”.

You only have to look at the weird eyebrows of many of the city’s young women or the plastic signage epidemic on city centre shop fronts to see the reality of crime on our streets.

Other on-going criminality includes the empty site at the end of South Main Street where the-thing-that-shall-not-be-mentioned may or may not be built sometime in the next decade and the decline of Cork football since the glory days of 2010 but there’s little any of us can do about that. The Gardaí clearly have no interest in either which is a shame – both would make great show trials.  

Also, a few years back, a nightclub on Oliver Plunkett Street played a kiddie-trance remix of, our national anthem, The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee, which had such a devastating effect on clubbers/victims that a team from the United Nations War Crime Unit was sent to investigate. 

The Lord Mayor supressed the report as it was too harrowing for Corkonians to hear but safe to say that the DJ who was responsible was sent on an all-expenses-paid trip to one of the world’s top two “friendliest cities” and he hasn’t been seen since. 

Most college students will look at the possibility of cycling to get around the city. A few weeks ago this newspaper revealed the level of bike crime in Cork. “683 bikes stolen in Cork” said the headline after the Gardaí did a pre-college publicity run.

But it was over two years. Actually, two years and eight months to be exact. And it wasn’t clear whether the stats were for the city or the county or both.

Assuming the later that means, each year, about 0.05% of the population of Cork have a bike stolen from them.  For context, in Dublin over 2 million bicycles are stolen every month and in Limerick bikes evaporate if you leave them outside for more ten minutes. 

It’s also worth noting that the “683 bikes stolen” figure doesn’t include the tools who lost their bikes but told their mams they were stolen or the ones who actually got them back having reported them stolen but subsequently remembered they actually left their two wheeled transportation system round the back of their old doll’s house after a big night out a few weeks back. Oops!

Students in Cork also need to be very careful at night.  Walking down a quiet street or road on your own can get you in all sorts of trouble. If all you were looking for was a peaceful stroll home or a little bit of late evening exercise the night before a big exam, you could suddenly find yourself being grabbed by your Accounting and Finance Society hoodie, hauled into a manky sitting room, handed a can of cheap beer and told to party like there’s no tomorrow.

Waking up in between a pair of bearded twins from Sneem who both stink like the inside of Michael Healy-Rae’s cap and the jackhammer raging inside your skull are the least of your worries. The fact that you’ll have to repeat your “Design of Budgetary Control Systems” paper because you couldn’t say no to yet another party on College Road is the true crime here. 

Welcome to Cork, students, but be careful out there.