Tadhg Barry 'Rebel and Revolutionary' Exhibition

Tadhg

Barry’s Cork

(1880-1921) Tadhg Barry

By the turn of the twentieth century, Cork was Munster’s premier commercial centre and Ireland’s third largest city. The 1911 census recorded a population of 76,673 in the city, with another twenty thousand or so living in the suburbs. The overwhelming majority, 88 per cent, were Catholic, with a small Protestant (mainly Church of Ireland) bloc and a tiny number of Jews and Unitarians. Corkonians had a varied experience depending on where in the city they were born. A 1915 study found that 35 per cent of the population lived ‘in a chronic state of want’, inhabiting tenements and owning only a single set of clothes. Twenty per cent resided in a home considered unfit or barely fit for human habitation while another 14 per cent lived a ‘hand-to-mouth’ existence. Poverty led to public health catastrophes. Infant mortality numbered 132 per one thousand births, while tuberculosis killed 283 people a year. The situation in Cork contrasted starkly with that of industrialised Belfast, where only 0.03 per cent of the population resided in a one-room tenement.

Coopers at work at the Beamish & Crawford brewery c. 1900 (Donal Ó Drisceoil & Diarmuid Ó Drisceoil, Beamish & Crawford: The History of an Irish Brewery, Cork, pp. 160-161)

Linen manufacture, brewing and distilling were Cork’s chief industries. It had little heavy industry, although some shipbuilding did take place at Haulbowline. The city had deindustrialised significantly during the nineteenth century; even its world-famous butter trade was facing extinction by 1900. Deindustrialisation had left a large pool of unskilled labour in its wake. Work was highly segregated along gender lines, with construction, railway and dock work providing much male employment, while women were typically employed in domestic service, tailoring and the manufacture of textiles and upholstery. Built on the second largest natural harbour in the world, the port of Cork was the city’s economic lifeblood. A 1908 British government report described Cork as a ‘town which depends chiefly upon its natural situation for its means of sustenance.’

Fr. Matthew Statue, Patrick’s Street, Cork c. 1900 (oldphotosofcork.wordpress.com)

Although Cork had a history of political radicalism, having been a Fenian stronghold in the 1860s, the demand for Home Rule dominated local politics in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. But constitutional nationalism was not a united front, and Cork was at the heart of a split that rocked the Home Rule Party in early 1909. When Cork city MP William O’Brien and his supporters left the Irish Parliamentary Party and formed the All-for-Ireland League (AFIL), Cork became a battleground for the soul of nationalist Ireland. The county became an AFIL stronghold, with nine of the county’s ten parliamentary constituencies electing O’Brienite MPs in the December 1910 Westminster election. But strong republican sympathies lay dormant in the city throughout this period. Unrepentant ex-Fenians were often elected to Cork Corporation, and they marched alongside committed Home Rulers during the annual Manchester Martyrs commemoration, the biggest annual republican event before the Easter Rising.

Patrick’s Street, Cork, 1906 (courtesy of Tom Power)

Sunday’s Well, Cork, early twentieth century (National Library of Ireland)