INTO THE WEST County involvement in the Capital of Culture year has been relatively minor (apart from the Kinsale Arts Festival and the West Cork International Chamber Music Festival), but the county arts organisations have been working as enthusiastically as ever.
"Artbeat" is the end-of-year guide to events in west Cork, largely concentrating on the West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen and unrolling a programme from now to February which includes exhibitions, classes, readings, a children's arts festival, dance and theatre sessions, courses, recitals and open galleries - among them the Nature Art Centre for Drumming, Art and Healing at Ballydehob.
A SENSE OF PLACE Admitting to having once had to find his way around Dublin with the help of a map dating from 1820, Dr Garrett FitzGerald welcomed the publication of The Atlas of Cork at the Aula Maxima in UCC last week as launching more of a treasure than a coffee-table book. Dr FitzGerald's fellow speaker was sportsman Jimmy Barry Murphy who found the broad inclusivity of the book exemplified by its essay on road-bowling and his own hero Mick Barry.
A product of the Geography Department at UCC (represented by editor John Crowley) for Cork 2005 and assisted by Allianz Ireland, the atlas, Dr FitzGerald said, explained at last how, and why, a settlement in the middle of a swamp had grown into a city. As a railway enthusiast as well as a map-and-atlas collector, he was also gratified by the fact that in 1917 as many as 70 trains left the city daily.
THE END OF THE SHOW More than trains have left Cork in the meantime. The closure last week of the Capitol Cinema on the Grand Parade means that apart from the Kino arthouse on Washington Street there is only one cinema left in the city. The Gate, at the far end of the North Main Street, is not exactly central.
The Capitol is to be replaced by retail and apartment developments, but the entertainment it offered over so many years is now to be found only in the suburban multi-plexes, which means that a vital sign of city-centre night-life has been quenched, and also that everyone who wants to go to the movies has to get into a car. This is a dismaying example of cultural planning with which to end Cork 2005.
