Cork's proud year

This weekend Cork embarks on its adventure as European Capital of Culture

This weekend Cork embarks on its adventure as European Capital of Culture. The southern capital is brandishing the title with pride and promise; the promise being a year-long programme that offers a wide range of experiences - in the enjoyment of art and entertainment - to music-lovers, theatregoers, those with an eye for art and craft and concern for the architectural environment.

What, up to now, has simply been imagined becomes a reality in the shape of exhibitions, publications and performances to provide every kind of cultural nourishment. There will be, too, the excuse to party and let the bells of Shandon express the exultation that Cork must feel at the arrival of what the poet Thomas McCarthy today describes in this newspaper as "another red-letter year, a moment in history when it stands up and speaks to the nation and to Europe".

Cork's contribution to the cultural life of the State has, of course, already been a significant and well-established one - particularly as a place where literature flourished in the form of those truly authentic voices that shaped the Irish short story - O'Connor, Ó Faoláin and William Trevor, as well as in the wonderful and incantatory Gaelic poetry of Seán Ó Ríordáin.

Cork gave to the traditional music revival movement its major figurehead: musician and folklorist Seán Ó Riada, whose own work as a composer entered the popular imagination at a time when the State needed the kind of powerful, musical statements that his work embodied. The contribution of Aloys Fleischmann - Munich-born, but a Cork resident most of his life - to the musical life of Cork and the State, particularly as a campaigner in the cause of music education, was phenomenal in his lifetime. It is appropriate, too, that as homage to one of Cork's most loved and dearly-missed musical sons, Rory Gallagher, the guitar hero will be celebrated as part of the "50 Years of Rock and Roll" exhibition.

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Fleischmann, were he still alive, would surely be an outspoken voice demanding an end to the ongoing saga of tardiness and setback that has resulted in not even a foundation stone for the new School of Music being on view in the city's year of culture. Nor can other local disenchantment be ignored - a sense, in some quarters, of marginalisation from the official programme, as well as disappointment with levels of local business support for Cork 2005 and disquiet over emerging aspects of the city's €196 million redevelopment. For today's opening event, the promise is a pyrotechnical transformation of the River Lee - it is unlikely to be the only transformation Cork experiences during its year as Capital of Culture.