Cork's Mighty Mice

4th Oct 2007

Cork's Mighty Mice
Danny Elbow

It has been a big week for Cork on the internet. First of all, Cork girls Joy Allen, Emily Hughes and Louse Cremin managed to get chocolate giant Cadbury's to bring their much lauded Wispa bar back to shelves in Ireland and the UK. The Corkonians organised an online campaign through a bebo site and marketing heads at the company took note when it clocked up more than 14,000 hits.

It wasn't long before Cadburys announced that 23 million mouth watering milk chocolate treats would reappear in sweet stores, making this campaign the first to influence a major UK brand to resurrect a discontinued product.

CORKOPOLY
Online success for citizens of the Peoples Republic continued when the makers of Monopoly announced that Cork would feature at the top of the stakes in the new Irish version of the game which will hit the shops in time for Christmas.

Earlier this year, the game's makers Hasbro put an online voting system on their website to allow Irish citizens to vote for their home county. After several months of voting the most popular counties were to be awarded the most valuable squares on the board.

Initially, Corkonians were dismayed to see their county failing to make the top ten with truly awful counties like Waterford, Limerick and Meath grabbing the initial limelight and revelling in the whispering campaign to keep Corkonians in the dark.

RED TIDE
However it wasn't long before the rumours reached Leeside and, using our Langers' Forum as a base, Cork's internet community sprung into action and saved the county's reputation by swamping the Monopoly site to pump Cork back into the reckoning.

There's nothing like tapping into Cork pride to get Rebel heart rates up and mouse buttons clicking - before long Cork was working its way up the rankings, zipping past terrible places like Dublin and Longford as votes poured in by the thousand, making sure the county would not be incorrectly presented as being interior to other counties.

BACKLASH

Cork assumes its righful place on the famous board

Suddenly all hell broke loose as Cork soared up the rankings. Local radio stations all over the Irish Republic called on their citizens to vote for their county and a counter-campaign playing on a fear that "cocky Corkonians" might win precious bragging rights sent the rest of the Free State into proverbial panic. Parish gazettes, church pamphlets and talk at the crossroads turned to hysteria with desperate appeals to anyone who would listen to help stop the red tide.

ONLINE MUSCLE
They shouldn't have bothered. This wasn't the first time Cork's online muscle has been called to task. Among other online poll devilment, in 2005 when UCC's Glucksmann building was short listed for the UK's top architecture award, the Stirling Prize, we wanted to make sure Cork's international showpiece came out on top and a similar campaign was mounted.

When the BBC published an online poll for people to vote for their favourite of the six buildings that made the short list, PROC users voted in their thousands to ensure Leeside's showpiece came out tops.

The Glucksy

GLUCKSMAN
The Glucksman eventually won a staggering 42% of the 20,000 votes, taking UK critics by surprise (even beating the Scottish Parliament Building and a fancy BMW factory in Germany to the finish line!), raising much valued publicity in the UK for the fruits of the city.

This time round PROC members responded with typical Rebel passion and sufficiently swamped the Monopoly poll to make sure the valuable purple square would have the name of the best county on it. Cork's online community and internet geeks everywhere can take a bow - doing something for your county has never been easier!

NEO-DEMOCRACY
While political leaders squirm around in the quagmire of tribunals and blab on about boring budget estimates, citizens of the People's Republic can be assured that we at PROC headquarters will be looking after the more..er.."important" issues like where the county is positioned on popular board games and on obscure online polls.

Of course this is all part of a sustained period of test runs. The government might have succeeded in pretending the failure to roll out electronic-voting was down to security issues with the machines but we know that they are afraid of Cork's mighty mouse campaigns and an apparently jovial quest for sovereignty that might not turn out to be so funny when the borders are sealed up.

Lucky for Bertie and the boys, online voting isn't part of the Irish democratic electoral system just yet but the campaign has already started...