Catherine Kirwan: A love letter to a city in desperate need of affection

In November 2014, I started the book that became my first novel. Walking in and out to the city centre, I glanced a thousand times at a stone wall down the far end of one of the narrow lanes off Barrack Street and eventually began writing about what might be behind it.

I invented a round tower house, inhabited by crime-fighting solicitor Finn Fitzpatrick so, arguably, I owe Barrack Street big time for my first three books: Darkest Truth, Cruel Deeds, and A Lesson in Malice.

There’s no argument about my fourth, though. It’s called The Seventh Body and I definitely owe the street for this one. 

Like the others, it started with me walking in and out to town. It’s what I do. I walk around Cork. To get from A to B, mainly, but also to think; to stop my back from seizing up; to take the air; to see and hear what’s happening.

That last bit is the most important. I don’t wear headphones. I watch and I listen and I let my mind ramble and often I do that on Barrack Street because (unless I set off early and go the long way for the step count) the old street is an essential part of my morning commute.

Strolling into town, at the back of my mind, I’m always aware that I’m treading a path where, since Corcaigh was a rough settlement of mud and wattle hovels, others have gone before. 

Warriors. Soldiers. Traders of all kinds. Holy men and women. Ordinary people too. 

On Barracka — and it might be because so many of the buildings have been permitted to languish long term in a state of disrepair — it doesn’t take much to conjure the dead. 

This was especially true during March and April 2020, at the start of the covid lockdown, when cars and vans were mostly absent and the veil between past and present felt thinner. 

I’ll never forget the ghostly tap tap of my feet on the footpath. Scary, even though that year the spring was clear and bright, and the slyly stunning view of the northside you’re gifted by the curve just past Tom Barry’s was unmarred by mist.

Barrack Street leads on from Bandon Road, which used to be the main route into the city from the west in the time before roundabouts and bypasses.

In recent decades, the street has become known as a dereliction blackspot — quite something when you consider the state of the rest of the city widely dubbed ‘the dereliction capital of Ireland’.

But in 2021, construction started on a Cork City Council housing project along one of the dereliction rows. Unknown to everyone, the works would give up some sensational and ghoulish secrets.

Gruesome discovery of skeletal remains

In October of that year, the skeletal remains of six men were found beneath one of the demolished buildings, the former Nancy Spain’s pub. 

The men’s hands and feet showed signs of having been bound but, within days, they were deemed to be of archaeological interest only, perhaps related to one of many battles fought in the area in ages past.

The news cycle moved on quickly, but I didn’t. I desperately wanted to know what was happening behind the hoardings. 

I was also thinking about another body. A woman, maybe, killed more recently than the first six.

Nancy Spain’s was a well-known venue, but the only time I remember being there was sometime in the ’90s, with a gang of buddies for an amazing gig by Pierce Turner. 

That memory led me to surmise that the seventh body might have something to do with a group of music fans.

Geography led me down the hill to Sir Henry’s nightclub, home to the fabled house music club night, Sweat. 

Henry’s closed in 2003 and where it used to stand is one of Cork’s many vacant sites, across from the (non) Event Centre and only a five-minute walk from where the six historic bodies were found. 

And so, as I thought about a seventh body, I formed an imaginary link with Henry’s. 

I thought about people who used to be friends, now living very different lives, united by their shared history and a dark secret.

I love Cork and I’ve spent the last decade writing the city a series of book-length billets-doux. That said, it seems to me that Cork city centre is a depleted place now. 

Sometimes, on my way down Oliver Plunkett Street for a sandwich at the Long Valley, I play a depressing game of ‘how many vape and phone shops are there today?’. 

And, even though, three-and-a-half years on from the discoveries at Nancy Spain’s, it’s heartening to see that work is almost complete on the wonderful development that replaces it, it’s not even close to being enough. 

In the middle of a housing crisis, how is it possible that we have so many empty houses and that, still, almost no one lives ‘above the shop’?

I write fictional murder mysteries but there are days when it feels like the beautiful city that inspired them is being strangled. 

We have a Cork taoiseach and a recently appointed city manager, but there are no easy fixes, and new paving schemes don’t fool anyone anymore.

We need actual people living in the ample vacant residential space in the city centre. We need lights in windows. We needed them years ago. We really need them now. Before it’s too late.

• The launch of The Seventh Body takes place at Waterstones, 69 St Patrick’s Street, Cork, on Wednesday, March 12, at 6.30pm — all are welcome to attend