The photographs on top are of the 20 Café on Anglesea Street.
The photographs below are of O’Flynn’s Butchers on Marlboro Street.
We found out that, excluding the English Market, O’Flynn’s Butchers are the last remaining butchers shop in Cork city.
We liked their curved glass and their mosaic entrance.
Do you know what connects these buildings?
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Spiced Beef and Corned Beef from O’Flynn’s Butchers have been my favourite for a long long time.
I have been in O’Flynn’s Butchers many times – even when I was a baby.
Since I started in Our Lady of Lourdes, we meet Mr O’Flynn sometimes as he walks to work.
We regularly meet him on Ballinlough Road by Belair but one morning I was walking to school with my dad. We stopped at Café 20 to read the plaque in the ground which says that James Joyce’s granddad lived in the building when he worked for Cork Corporation.
We all liked the moustache in the plaque.
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Mr. O’Flynn was early that morning because we weren’t late. He saw us looking at the plaque and he said there was a story connecting the plaque to his shop. He invited us into the shop to hear the story. One Saturday morning, Emma and I called into Mr.O’Flynn. He said that before the shop became a butchers, one of the previous businesses was Cunningham Pawnbrokers.
He said that if you were short of money, you could bring a watch or something valuable to the Pawnbroker who would mind the watch and give you money. You had to pay back the money and some interest and the pawnbroker would give you the watch back.
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If you did not come in with the money after some time, the pawnbroker would keep the watch and could sell it to anyone else.
Mr. O’Flynn told us that people were researching James Joyce because he was a famous author and one day they came into the butchers shop to see if there were any records from the time of the pawnbroker. The researchers told Mr. O’Flynn that, about 1921, the father of the writer James Joyce came to Cork and stayed at the Victoria Hotel which is around the corner from the butchers. It was on Patrick’s Street.
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James Joyce’s father must have run out of money because he went to the pawnbrokers. He gave his false teeth to the pawnbroker and received money.
Mr. O’Flynn told us that upstairs over the butchers shop is the frame of an old sign for the pawnbroker – but they have never found the false teeth.
They think that James Joyce’s father must have brought in the money to get them back.
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