Michael Moynihan: Should Cork get Rory’s guitar? We haven’t exactly honoured him up to now

I note the statement from the National Museum of Ireland on the guitar being donated to it: 

It is planned that Rory’s guitar’s will be exhibited as part of Changing Ireland, a new permanent exhibition in Collins Barracks next year, as well as being exhibited in Cork. 

I’m not sure if an exhibition of that name based in Dublin is indicative of anything other than Unchanging Ireland, or Unchanging Attitudes To The Rest Of The Country at least, but there are more important questions.

Should the guitar be exhibited in Cork?

Let me explain. 

Come to Paul Street in the heart of Cork city and Rory Gallagher Place, specifically. One of the first things you’ll notice is the bronze sculpture honouring the musician.

Created by Geraldine Creedon at the request of what was then Cork Corporation and Rory’s family, it has the shape of a guitar on one side, while the other features lyrics from the musician’s 1982 album Jinx. A natural focus for fans visiting Cork from near and far, then, devoted followers who wish to pay homage.

Mind you, I said it was one of the first things you’ll notice. 

One of the other things you’ll notice immediately is the rubbish bin right in front of it.

This bin is usually overflowing with litter of all kinds, which is better than having to wade through said litter if it were scattered all over the plaza.

It doesn’t do much for the Rory Gallagher fans who’d like a picture of the sculpture, however. It’s located at exactly the point you’d stand if you were taking a photo of someone next to the sculpture, so either a) you stand in front of it and you’re too close or b) you stand beyond it and all those fast-food wrappers and takeaway coffee cups spilling out of the bin form an interesting foreground to your snap.

Obviously you can take a picture at an angle, with the sculpture side on, but equally obviously it was installed to face out across the plaza. It’s pretty disappointing, then, that you can’t really photograph it without including a full rubbish bin in the foreground.

That’s why I wonder if the song and dance — ahem — being made about the Gallagher guitar is a little performative. There’s a public sculpture honouring the man in one of the busiest streets in the city, a spacious public plaza, and yet someone thought the very best place for a rubbish bin in the entire open space available was right in front of that sculpture.

That doesn’t sound to me like it honours the memory of an internationally-renowned musician.

Donal Gallagher's experience

Then again, it chimes with a few points Donal Gallagher, Rory’s brother, made in a recent interview with Donal O’Keeffe of The  Echo.

Though stressing his respect for the city, Gallagher cited several plans to showcase his brother’s legacy which came to nothing, like the scheme to redevelop Cork City Library in the late nineties.

“The plan then was that the new library would open and the music section, named after Rory, would then house elements of the memorabilia and instruments,” said Donal Gallagher.

The plans for that are still on the drawing board ... I haven’t heard anything since. 

In 2005, while Cork was European Capital of Culture, Donal Gallagher tried to put on a public exhibition in the Cork Public Museum: “I asked: ‘What would you like from Rory?’ and I assumed they would say ‘a guitar’ and they said ‘no, something small’, and I said ‘can you give me an indication, are you talking about a harmonica, then?’, because that was the size of the space they were affording it.”

Saying he had made “umpteen visits into City Hall over the years”, Gallagher added: “Sometimes when you’re dealing with bureaucracy, they just don’t respond, or your email is stuck in their junk mail or some excuse, because they don’t necessarily maybe want to deal with the problem.”

Lessons learned... or maybe not

Well, I’m sure lessons have been learned and we’ll do better going forward. 

Then you see that the Cork event centre has a live contender for longest-running development saga on Leeside.

I refer to the bandstand out in the park in Ballyphehane. Many thanks to Eoin Lettice for getting in touch to point out that work commenced there in March 2023. Yet here we are, almost November 2024, and the bandstand was still surrounded by metal fencing yesterday.

(A side note about this metal fencing that’s thrown up around sites all over the city. Is it the building equivalent of abandoning your car in traffic with the hazard lights on? It looks as though surrounding an open site with these fences means no-one need ever make progress with any work on the site. More on this at a later date.)

On these particular fences there are signs: ‘Cork City Council: Caution. Construction in Progress’.

Park the very flexible understanding of the present continuous tense as used here and take a step back.

This is a bandstand: A roof supported by four pillars. I don’t think building or maintaining a bandstand is complicated by considerations of coastal erosion or seismic activity but I am open to correction. Even if there were coastal erosion and seismic activity to deal with, work commenced nineteen months ago and still has not been completed.

Perhaps a rare animal is nesting in the eaves or the foundation and conservation issues are holding up the work?

Or maybe a private company — cough — is carrying out the work and needs more funds due to building inflation?

Glacial speed 

In any event the glacial speed at which this work is progressing goes a long way towards explaining the Event Centre. Perhaps it’s just something in the air.

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of official appreciation of the power of names like Rory Gallagher’s — to make locals feel proud of the place, to celebrate talent and accomplishment, to draw visitors.

At least the bandstand wasn’t dumped in a yard like the Fireman’s Rest and left to rot, only to be restored years later at a cost of hundreds of thousands of euro. Back to that soon, though.