Cork Intelligensia Dominate

11th May 2010

It seems the Dublin political and media elite are finally coming around to what we have been saying for years. The rest of Ireland is on the brink of financial bankruptcy but more so, it is being acknowledged that the country has actually been morally and socially bankrupt for decades.

On Dublin based state television channel RTE (available in many areas in Cork if you feel like tuning it in) on Monday night citizens of the 26 counties were presented with a range of perspectives on the state of the nation from some of the Cork's foremost thinkers as part of a programme called Aftershock.

A few years ago they would have been laughed at. Not just by uninformed Celtic Tiger bandwagoneers but, most cringingly, by government leaders - Bertie Ahern's 2006 instruction that Celtic Tiger doubters should commit suicide being the peak of national foolishness. The doubters he pilloried weren't uninformed nobodies. Tragically, they were highly respected professors of economics with realms of ominous data.

Martin, Jordan, Cooper, McCarthy & Murphy

You can understand where RTE are coming from with the panel selection for their programme though. If brain cells attached to faces like Ahern, Cowen and McCreevy, all from the dark murky mists of the Greater Dublin Area, are ultimately responsible for the current mess then there's no point listening to voices with similar accents.

You can't bate a bit of level headed down-to-earth analysis when you're down and out so it was no surprise that the state broadcaster had to rely on a disproportionate volume of Corkonian brain power to accurately sum up the catastrophe that Dublin has lead the nation into.

Corkonians made up 50% of the four intellectuals invited to analyse the nation. Cork journalists Matt Cooper and Justine McCarthy delivered rational and reasoned presentations as to how the republic can, at the very least, get its foot in the door that leads to economic, and more important social and moral recovery.

The post-match analysis on the Frontline after the show was also heavily dominated with Corkonians, among them great minds like Professor Gary Murphy and UCC's Dr. Declan Jordan made a welcome change to the tiresome shouty-populism of Dublin trade union leaders often more interested in a cheap round of applause than the best interests of their country. It took the Leeside based Jordan to rubbish EU Commissioner Máire Geoghan-Quinn's latest PR-puffery "i-conomy".

Time to go.

The government fearful of sending out pre-programmed one liner toy soldiers decided to fight fire with fire by sending the articulate Foreign Affairs Minister Michéal Martin to the show who, when quizzed about part of his department being decentralised to Limerick, amusingly distanced himself from travelling to the Treaty city repeating "I never go to Limerick" several times.

His denials were so emphatic that could have been seen as a pitch to his Cork constituents - long weary of seeing their rugby stars lining out in Thomond Park rather than on Leeside.

Justine McCarthy's assertion that Bunreacht na hÉireann, the Irish constitution, should be abandoned will be welcomed by her fellow Corkonians. In any replacement document the identity and superiority of Corkonians should be recognised in any new constitution and moving the house of parliament to City Hall or the Elysian (in fairness they could do with the business) would be the least Corkonians should expect.

Preaching about equality is all well and good but a certain amount of this talk is burying our heads in the sand. The rest of Ireland may want equality but it will be difficult to convince Corkonians that they should be equal to everyone else.

How would that equality work? As other counties have shown over the course of the current Republic they are perpetually inferior to Cork so we would have to be affectively handicapped to allow others to feel they are equal to us. How would that work?

Cork Constitution. Who became All Ireland Champions on Saturday.

Will Cork kids be forced to drop out of school in 6th class so that their level of education and sophistication are the same as a child in Longford who has completed their leaving cert?

Will GAA clubs be forced to close for several months of the year to make sure Cork produced teams that are "equal" to counties like Offaly and Kildare?

Will we have to throw all our domestic rubbish into the streets so that our city looks like the other dens of inequity around the island that masquerade as habitable cities?

If Ireland wants the type of equality some commentators wish for then Corkonians would to have scale back their greatness and downsize their superiority.

Instead this inequality should be allowed to continue. The remaining 25 counties of the island have the option of being lead by the greatest county here in the south. In many ways we're already leading (just ask the Central Statistics Office or the Lonely Planet crew) but that pioneering role needs to be set in stone in a new constitution.

The circus of counties devoted to their Dublin ring masters better move quickly if they want in. Corkonians cannot continue to be the de facto intellectual leaders of this fragile unification of counties while the Dublin government continues to clown around like monkeys trying to fly a plane or Kerrymen playing hurling.

We in Cork can't keep an entire joke-nation propped up for much longer.