New Year's Resolutions for Corkonians

30th Dec 2018

Our recommendations to improve the purity of your pure Corkness…

Learn Microsoft Excel
Are you a member of the Cork County Board? Then this year you should pledge to learn how to add things up on a computer programme like Excel. It might seem daunting, just like when you had to give in to feeding the Cork team chicken and pasta instead of manky sandwiches after training (the bloody prima donnas), but it could save you the mortification of being up to €30 million off when calculating how much you’ve overspent. And having the Dubs take control of your stadium.  
 

Chrischt, Mary, get Tracey Kennedy on the phone quickly

Take the Hollybough on Holidays
It’s no harm asking the nice receptionist at your hotel in Santa Ponza if they have a copy of the Hollybough handy so you can take a photograph of yourself with it at the poolside for publication in next December’s edition. Obviously, that’s only if they are a three star joint.

Any four star hotel worth its salt in Spain will have placed a copy of Cork’s Christmas bible on the bed of their Cork guests for this very purpose. Nobody wants that horrible sinking feeling sitting on the plane on your way back to the People’s Republic when you realise you had a great holiday but it’s a complete waste if you didn’t get a Hollybough pic.

Go To the Football
To be a fully rounded, equal opportunities, pure Cork Corkonian you have to show as much support for the footballers as you do for the hurlers. Legendary Cork supporters like Cyril Kavanagh and The Bomber are seen at every senior game no matter how grim the prospect of watching the footballers lose at home to midland minnows in Division Two may seem. Hardcore Cork fans still chant encouragement and clap their team off even at those dull, freezing, winter trudge-fests. That’s the benchmark for all those wishing to be as pure Cork as possible.
 

Half time at a Cork football league match.

Learn the Second Verse of the Banks
And then in the spring time of something and something….. For serious pure Cork bonus points at post-match singsongs knowing more than just the first verse of the banks marks you out as an elite Corkonian.

Get John Spillane to write a song for your parish
Passage West plamásed  him into it, Ballyphehane’s cherrytree’s got one and Ballincollig sort of forced him to write “Beautiful Ballincollig” after he released the controversial “Johnny Don’t Go to Ballincollig” (which went down like a lead balloon in the town but had everyone else around the county in stitches). Being able to sing a folk song about your town or parish gives you bonus Pure Cork points.
 

He'll write a song for your town or village but he can't guarantee everyone will like it.

Mind Your French
And we’re not talking about the kind of rougher stuff you’d hear out of the mouth of someone from Limerick. With the Brits about to cut themselves off from the rest of the world like a convent full of reclusive Poor Clare’s, we’ll have no other English speaking country to have inter-EU bantz with. The land of yellow vests and air traffic control strikes is our nearest neighbour and it’s time we got to know each other better, especially if our proposal to build a zip line from Roches Point to Roscoff gets the funding it deserves.

Vote in the Plebiscite
What’s that you say? Well, in next May’s local elections, city citizens will be asked if they would like a directly elected mayor for Cork. The answer is yes and you’d better vote for it, sham. We need a figure we can send to Dublin with outrageous demands who, upon their unsuccessful return we can then berate as a ‘pleb’.

Become Pure City
As the city boundary is extended later in 2019, tens of thousands of county citizens will officially have their culchie status revoked as they are consumed by the big smoke. If that’s you then you’d better start working on blending in with your new city friends:

Get a tattoo of your loved one on your forearm, buy six barky Alsatians in your back yard and place a nice, half-burned mattress in your front garden.

Plus, being a city slicker is all about turning adversity into opportunity. Before, where you saw large cracks in the pavement, you should now see a court case and dollar signs.