'It's the most important city in the world'; Watch Frank O'Connor talk to the BBC about Cork in 1961

#OnThisDay 1961: "You don't have to sell Cork to me, Huw. To me it's the most important city in the world" Frank O'Connor returned to his native Cork, on Monitor. pic.twitter.com/9Os88vlfHQ

— BBC Archive (@BBCArchive) November 19, 2018

O'Connor was born Michael Francis O'Donovan in Cork city in 1903. He penned over 150 works and is best remembered known for his short stories and memoirs.

In the BBC clip, he described Cork city as a provincial city, where creative people are moulded before they leave for bigger things.

"[I left Cork] 10 years too late, I'm still trying to make up for lost time," O'Connor told Wheldon.

Standing atop a building which appears to be the Metropole Hotel today, O'Connor highlighted the struggles and successes he faced in his hometown.

"You don't have to sell Cork to me, Huw. After all, to me it's the most important city in the world," he said, looking out over the city.

"It doesn't have the spectacular Georgian beauty of Dublin, but it has a quiet regence, charm of its own. You always feel that Dublin is going to get up and address you as if you were at a public meeting, but in Cork, you get the impression that at any moment you may meet one of Jane Austen's old ladies among the bow-fronted houses.

"And I suppose it is good to see pretty things before you're old enough to appreciate them, to have the feeling of beauty before you get the idea of it. But for me, the beautiful houses are just places where mother worked as a charwoman and where I went to pick her up at 6 o'clock. The Mardyke, it's a bit of a mess nowadays I'm afraid, is where I used to dream of taking a girl one night after dark, and never did because I was afraid she'd notice the patch in my trousers.

Beauty you've lived with after the age of 16 isn't in your head. Actually, I'm the last to notice it. But it's there inside you alright, like your blood and bones.

O'Connor describes the age at which someone leaves the city as that city's 'mental age'. He described Cork's 'mental age' as 18-and-a-half.

"All the same, though the outside looks fine, it's a different matter when you have to live here. There's that business of mental age, for instance," O'Connor said.

"I don't know exactly how you judge the mental age of a town but one way is certainly by its bookshops and libraries, art galleries and theatres and concerts. And if you judge Cork by these, you'll see that 18-and-a-half isn't an unfair estimate. Of course, that's largely the influence of a Church, which is provincial to the core."

O'Connor criticised Ireland's then-restrictive censorship laws, which saw a number of his works banned across the country.

"I know that Bonne University in Germany was recently searching for the complete work of Liam O'Flaherty, a fine writer by any standard, and all the libraries in Ireland put together couldn't produce a set. I'm quite certain they couldn't produce a set of mine. Four, or is it five, of my books are banned by law. You may say that my books are bad but surely you'd expect a city like this to have a complete set of the works of even its worst writer.

That's what I call provincialism. To be provincial is to be deprived.

He said people deprived of cultural outlets become bitter and jealous.

"I suppose the mark of provincialism is the fact that there's no intellectual atmosphere in which a man can grow up, in which he can develop himself fully after the age of 18 or 20 or even 25. There's something that happens after that. I think he tends to become bitter, to be disappointed, to resent other people's achievement and to belittle it.

"In a town like Cork, you'd be astonished at the dirtiness of people's tongues, merely because they haven't themselves achieved all that was in them to achieve. I think that's the secret of provincial humour, which is nearly always malicious and always belittling."

Despite the struggles he faced in Cork, he acknowledged that the poverty he experienced in his childhood shaped the writer he would become.

"It's in the provinces, it's in a city like this, that character is shaped and, up to a certain point, character is all that matters. After that, individuality has to take over and somehow or other the man's full individuality has to be expressed," he said.

"[If I hadn't left Cork] I'm quite certain that I wouldn't have been the writer I am, whatever that may be, but I think there's a strong possibility that if I hadn't been brought up in Cork I wouldn't have been a writer at all.

"As a boy here I learned certain things about life that a lot of people don't know. The real values, the values of poverty, servile poverty. There was poverty here in those days and there still is. Behind all the gracious houses there are the lanes of little country cabins, each of them with its two rooms and the loft overhead. And not a few dozen of them either but scores, hundreds perhaps of them.

"They may not look so squalid now but believe me, they were hell to live in. I spent the first six years of my life in 251 Blarney Lane, my mother and father and myself sleeping in the one tiny room. And mind you, we were aristocrats compared with the families of eight and ten who lived and died in them. Oh yes, they died in them too rather than go to the infernal workhouse.

"I was only a baby when my mother one day put me down on a chair in one of these cabins and I saw her through the bedroom door saying the last prayers over a young fellow who was dying of a tubercular haemorrhage: 'Out of the depths have I cried to thee, oh Lord, Lord hear my prayer'. Out of the depths alright. It was no wonder if the men cleared out to the pub and the women became slovenly and hopeless."

Many men from Cork left to fight in World War One, but O'Connor describes this difficult time as "the happiest period of my life".

"The place is poor enough now, you know, but up to 1914 the average domestic income there was about 12 shillings. Even up to 1939 it was scarcely more than a pound. Of course, in wartime it mounted to something like 30 shillings so there was nothing else for the men to do but enlist in the British Army and, naturally from the women's point of view, it was a real blessing to have one exacting adult out of the house.

"1914 to 1918 was in some ways the happiest period of my life. But there was more than that to it. Those old sweats who went off to die saw that their wives could have the separation money. The women who used it to bring up large families in two rooms had heroic stuff in them.

Old soldiers become an almost secret society. They know what war is really like. And we who came out of the slums are a secret society too. We know what that poverty was like and we allow no outsider to criticise one of us.

"That sense of community is something that belongs to the provincial town. It has a set of moral standards all its own and the standards are so forthright that they give the individuals the chance of breaking them as a responsible moral agent."

Since being shared, the archive footage has been viewed on social media by over 60,000 people.

Many people shared their reaction to the video, highlighting people they knew and the places they recognised.