Ireland: Cork Rooftop Farm: urban agriculture taking root on Coal Quay
They made it up as they went along. They scavenged wood, hauled pallets up three flights of stairs, and built mobile, raised beds.
By Joe Mcnamee
Irish Examiner
Sept 12, 2020
Excerpt:
One minute, you’re a businessman with a computer-science degree, running a successful family business, next thing, lockdown comes and you find yourself the owner-operator of a 6,400sq ft urban ‘farm’, three stories above Cork city’s iconic Coal Quay?
Quite the transition, but for Brian McCarthy, 34, it was most probably down to his bloodline.
When Brian was four, his father, Kevin McCarthy, moved the family back into his suburban childhood home, in Bishopstown, which was just another housing-estate semi-D in a suburb flush with them and little else. The McCarthy homestead, in Westgate, however, was different.
From a farm just outside Bandon that was blessed with a large, secluded back garden, Kevin’s father and Brian’s grandfather, Denis McCarthy, had filled it in the 1960s with greenhouses, growing all manner of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, the latter of such quality and quantity that Kevin, on finishing his Leaving Cert, in 1972, added a cold room and began a flower retail business, Cork Flower Supplies.
It soon outgrew its domestic base and supply, and as Kevin began importing from the Netherlands, he relocated to the city centre, eventually settling on the Coal Quay, on Cork’s Cornmarket St — only moving in 2006, to a larger premises on the outskirts of the city.
