Michael Moynihan: We must not allow antisocial behaviour in Cork to become normalised

I ask because it sometimes appears the middle of town is rougher than it used to be. Far rougher.

Some of that may be down to an eagerness to share war stories, whether those are accurate or not. Many Leeside readers will have friends eager to describe recent trips down Oliver Plunkett Street in terms reminiscent of New York’s Five Points in the mid-19th century. Or they may be sharing some of those yarns themselves.

‘Sometimes appears’ is also an important qualifier here. Older readers may recall Cork city centre 30 or 40 years ago not exactly resembling a lost pastoral. In the early 90s, I had a challenging encounter coming out of town one night in late March: around Lower John Street a chap inquired about the contents of my bag from The Body Shop and didn’t seem satisfied with my answers.

To quote Cormac McCarthy: whoa, differences.

I know it was late March because the bag had a Mother’s Day gift basket in it, which came in handy.

(“There’s a bit of a dent,” said my mother the following morning. “Don’t ask,” I said.) 

Granted, even then certain precincts were associated with blackguarding late at night as punters spilled out of discos and sought deep-fried solace.

Daytime danger

What’s different now is the daytime blackguarding.

Many readers will be aware that a local radio station carried a report some days ago of a small child witnessing a stabbing in Cork city centre last weekend in broad daylight — near the city’s bus station around half two in the afternoon.

That’s hardly the only report of its type: the daughters of a friend of this column walked past an entirely different stabbing incident in Patrick Street some time ago after school; a random trawl through the headlines in this paper certainly suggests a growing lawlessness in the city.

Shops in Patrick Street were set on fire, apparently at random, by an arsonist in February, a woman was seriously assaulted on Oliver Plunkett Street early in March, and later that same month a case came to court involving a man threatening staff at another shop, this time on the Grand Parade (this newspaper’s headline on that last case? Man with over 100 convictions told garda he hoped his wife and children would 'die a horrible death’).

Earlier this month a teenager was brought before Cork District Court charged with injuring another teenager in “a knife fight” on Oliver Plunkett Street in Cork.

Another case was heard in the courts last week about an alleged assault which began on Washington Street and continued at the intersection of Grand Parade and Oliver Plunkett Street (this newspaper’s headline on  that case: ‘I still don’t fully recognise myself': Man was hit 250 times during assault in Cork city’.) That last incident occurred around 1am. The other four cases occurred between 9.40am and 6.30pm.

These incidents don’t occur in a vacuum. The lack of basic maintenance of the city, the swathes of dereliction, the vacant shopfronts don’t help, and other random factors contribute as well, such as images of violence on the streets being shared online.

Garda presence

Then you have the street harassment, open-air drug-taking, aggressive begging, and what might charitably be termed a low-key garda presence.

That last is no exaggeration. Eoin English reported here this week on a Sinn Féin policing document launched by Deputies Tommy Gould and Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire: “In Cork City, there were 734 gardaí in January 2022, which fell to 699 by December 31, 2023, and to 694 by January 31, 2024.

“This figure has now fallen to 673 on February 29. This is a loss of three gardaí a week in the first two months of the year,” Mr Gould said ... Mr Ó Laoghaire said of the 126 gardaí who graduated from Templemore in 2022, just one was assigned to Cork, with just four from the 237 cohort who graduated last year. ‘Cork has 10% of the state’s population but it is getting just over 1% of the garda cohort,’ he said.” 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that every columnist will eventually bemoan in print antisocial behaviour, petty crime, and the general decline of society. It is as inevitable as using the phrase ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged’ in a column.

In doing so it’s important to point something out, though.

There are people on the streets of Cork who are in the terrible grip of addiction — people who have been failed at every turn by the apparatus of the State and who are now largely fending for themselves in a hostile environment. 

Those agencies and individuals who are trying to care for those people deserve huge credit for their efforts. They’re working on behalf of a cohort of people who have been effectively abandoned by Irish society.

That reality coexists with another reality: many people visiting the city find aggressive begging and violent behaviour generally frightening to encounter at any time, but particularly disconcerting on a morning’s trip to town. Such behaviour is a strong disincentive to return to the city, obviously enough, but there is another consequence to such behaviour being so widespread: there is every danger that it becomes normalised. And this in turn raises a slightly different spectre.

If that is your expectation then you simply come to expect it when you visit the city centre. You become immune to the aggravation and learn to adapt your behaviour accordingly.

You learn to side-step the two people fighting with each other on the footpath so you don’t get embroiled in the row. You jam in your AirPods so you don’t have to listen to someone intimidating those around you in a queue for coffee. You hold the door open in a city car park for the five people who were taking drugs in the parking space next to your car. (All personal highlights from a couple of weeks’ worth of visits to the city centre, by the way.) 

But this behaviour has a limited shelf life. For many people, a day eventually dawns when you decide not to visit the city centre at all simply because it’s not worth it.

 Parking at a suburban shopping centre car park is an easier experience, and free. There isn’t as much brawling outside the supermarket entrance.

Where does that leave the city centre, though?

Some readers may feel this is an overly negative depiction of Cork city centre. If your visits are more sunshine and lollipops then good for you, but that is manifestly not the case for many others.

Creating a better city experience for all is surely a basic expectation, but to do so we need to identify the problems that need to be solved. That can’t be accomplished until the people who love Cork, and who want to see the city fulfil its potential, acknowledge the challenges it faces.