PROC's Graffiti Removal Challenge

19th Aug 2015

C’mere with all the rainin’ and complain’ about the state of the city over the last few months we have decided to set business owners and business organisations a challenge to rid Cork of graffiti tags.

Firstly, in general we don’t think the place is looking better than ever and there’s a rake of new businesses starting up and filling spaces that have been vacant since a few days after Bertie told everyone everything was grand.
 

A selection of some of the graffiti we have removed from Patrick Street (more below)

Take a walk around Patrick Street, Oliver Plunkett Street or Grand Parade on a Saturday this summer and you’ll be amazed at the amount of tourists walking around smiling.

Even the diesel fume puffing open top buses are jointed every weekday and you can hardly draw a leg in the English Market with the Asian, European and Americans and their selfie sticks. Whoever thought fluffy white tripe and drisheen could gather such scrums of snap happy anorak clad tourists? You’d wonder what would the last generation of market stall owners make of it all.

Fancy websites promoting the city, sending delegations abroad for twinning ceremonies or big dealing our ‘food culture’ are important but we must always check if we are doing the simple things right: are locals and tourists as safe in the city as they could be? Are we being sound to visitors and asking confused-looking ones if they need helping hand? And does the gaf actually look well?

Even if a city has its fair share of run-down graffit-ridden buildings the power of a coat of paint should never be underestimated. Neither should graffiti removal of which there is little action in Cork.

We’re not talking about the class looking graffiti in White Street car park or on Pine Street next to Camden Palace – we’re on about all those prominent city centre buildings that have the same big ugly spray-painted tags on them for years – the human equivalent of dogs peeing against a building to leave their mark. When you start looking they are everywhere and the only way we’re going to purge them is by coming together to get rid of them.

TEAM BUILDING
To hell with these costly staff bonding sessions in bland hotel meeting rooms where Doreen from human resources is desperately trying to get Maura from ‘engineering systems’ to give a toss about guiding a blind folded hungover Donal from ‘product development’ through a Cushion Maze while another disinterested colleague bangs a bongo drum.

Many Cork companies force their employees into this kind of contrived nonsense so that boxes on forms sent down from Dublin can be ticked with sentences next to them that say things like “Maura is now capable of actioning value-added synergies through holistically branded platforms” and “John Paul is adept at restructuring cross-functional client end deliverables“.

You don’t need a Cork taxi driver to set off your codswallop alarm bells there.

We spend so much time in office chairs now that our brains have become oblivious to the deep satisfaction of a bit of physical work – the kind of stuff that’s now reserved for Saturday man sheds and sneaky hardware purchases from the special offer section of German supermarkets while the old doll isn’t looking.

Nowadays it’s more likely you’ll get that adrenaline rush from like lifting heavy things up and down in a gym or cycling a bike that doesn’t go anywhere to the sound of horrible kiddy trance in your local fitness centre. Great for your heart but it does nothing for your soul.  

Standing back to look at a thing you’ve built together or passing by a previously manky looking building that’s now sparkling because of your work is beneficial to everybody in Cork whether they realise it or not. And the personal satisfaction is off the scale.  

We say to Cork businesses who are thinking about a team building exercise for their staff: why not get them out on to the streets of the city to contribute something tangible to Cork instead of arsing around in conference rooms uptalking in silly hats and banging drums? 

The People’s Republic of Cork is issuing a challenge to businesses and business organisations in the city centre to come out on to the streets and get their hands dirty.

We’re picking one challenge to start with: let’s remove all graffiti from the city centre. We’ve made a good start already around Patrick Street and our CODAC comrades have been at it up around North Main Street too - but with more volunteers we can really get Cork gleaming.

So we want to hear from any group, business or organisation interested in getting involved. We’ll show you how to do it (it’s perfectly safe) - you just bring the bodies and the elbow grease. Contact us at editor@peoplesrepublicofcork.com or @cork on twitter if you’re interested in getting involved.

And of course, your HR department is welcome to call this whatever they like to keep headquarters happy: “a community leveraged team building investment synergy portal” or “practical microscale strategic supply-chain mirroring”.

To us it will always be just cleaning up the gaf. But call it whatever you want – let’s just get Cork gleaming.