Cork was a city of markets from its beginning, but it was not until 1788 that its
first indoor market, a covered food emporium off the Grand Parade, opened for
business. This Grand Parade Market for meat and fish was soon linked to the
semi-covered Root Market for vegetables and fruit off Princes Street. When
the latter was re¬ fashioned and roofed in 1862, the familiar, conjoined English
Market of today was complete. The Grand Parade-Princes Street Market was
a flagship of the corrupt and undemocratic 'English' corporation that had
politically controlled the city since the early eighteenth century. Following
local government reform in the 1840 and a limited extension of the franchise,
a Catholic, 'Irish' majority was returned and a new, 'Reformed Corporation'
established. This heralded a new era in the political history of Cork, and also
in the history of its markets. A Market Committee (later Tolls and Markets)
was established to oversee administration. In 1842 almost £5000 was
earmarked for the building of new markets and renovation of many of the
existing ones, most of which, with the exception of the English Market,
had long been neglected.

The centrepiece of Cork's market revolution was a second indoor food market
in the city centre. It was named St Peter's and was completed on this site in late
1843 at a cost of approximately £3000. The main entrance was on North Main
Street and the rear entrance on Cornmarket Street, the main entrance to the
Bodega @ St Peter's Market. The huge building, described at the time of its
opening as 'a sort of covered street', covered half an acre (incorporating the
current Bodega site, as well as Maher's sports shop at its rear). It was designed
by the renowned architect Alexander Deane and modelled on St John's Market
in Liverpool, the largest in the United Kingdom, which had opened in 1822. Its hundreds of stalls sold meat, fish and vegetables to the Cork working class.
St Peter's, together with its neighbouring newly-established clothes market,
the Bazaar (the building currently occupied by the Loft furniture store and the
next¬door bar /restaurant premises), was intended to provide accommodation
for the numerous street dealers who had previously occupied Cornmarket
Street. The creation of the new markets was part of ongoing measures by the
authorities to regulate dealing and minimise street selling. It was also an
attempt by the new corporation to distinguish itself from its predecessors by
providing facilities for Cork city's majority working class, Catholic population. 



Rents, prices and food quality in St Peter's were lower than in the English
Market, and it soon became known as the 'Irish Market', to distinguish it from
its older, grander counterpart. Special shield ¬shaped plaques were attached
to the new markets, which were named after saints (St Peter's, St Finbarr's,
St John's, St Mary's), branding them as the creation of 'the Reformed Municipal
Corporation of Cork.'

The market opened at 8.00am each weekday and closed at 6.00pm (11.00pm
on Saturdays, later brought back to 7.00pm). A team of functionaries, including
sweepers and scalesmen, or 'weighmasters', maintained the market under the
direction of a superintendent who had responsibility for it together with the
nearby Bazaar. St Peter's survived the Great Famine of the 1840s, but suffered
from the constant competition of street trading, which carried on in the nearby
Cornmarket and North Main Streets, despite the best efforts of the authorities
to encourage dealers indoors. Although rents in St Peter's were relatively low
(two to three shillings per week maximum), the temptation to revert to free
trading on the streets was not always resisted by all. A report for the Tolls and
Markets Committee in 1881 noted that a large number of the market's stallholders
had decamped to Cornmarket Street: the order was given for them to be cleared
and offered two months' free rent in St Peter's if they gave a commitment
to stay indoors.  



The virtual porosity between the 'covered street' that was St Peter's and the
bustling real street outside proved ultimately fatal to its prospects: it was never
able to establish its own distinct, insulated identity as the English Market had
done. While the latter continued to turn a healthy profit for the corporation,
justifying continued expenditure on it and copperfastening its identity in the
process, the Irish Market rapidly became a loss-maker. By early 1905, fifty-eight
stalls in St Peter's were vacant, and its annual income of less than £500 was
over £200 less than it had been the mid-1880s. Estimated expenditure on
the market for 1906 was £600.



Various proposals were mooted as to the best way to remedy what was
effectively a crisis. In November 1905 the corporation's Tolls and Markets
Committee considered a proposal to convert St Peter's, which by then had
sixty-three vacant stalls, into a wholesale market for the sale of fruit, vegetables,
flowers, fish and poultry. The proposal, which was opposed by thirty councillors
and a petition of 140 local residents and shopkeepers, was rejected. The
committee then suggested that the proposed market could be held on
Cornmarket Street itself, 'under a glass or corrugated iron roof, supported on
iron pillars, up to a certain hour, after which all commodities remaining unsold
should be removed into St Peter's Market', a fascinating proposal that came to
nought. In a context of increasing losses, the corporation decided in 1910 to
close a portion of the market at the North Main Street end. In the meantime, in
a further admission of defeat, moves were made to regularise street trading on
Cornmarket Street by listing approved stallholders and arranging stalls along
a prescribed line on the street.

The First World War began in August 1914, and the Irish Market became one
of its casualties. In April 1916, the month of the Easter Rising, Cork corporation,
which was then controlled by a Redmondite majority who supported the British
war effort, handed St Peter's over to the Ministry of Munitions which established
a National Shell Factory there. The remaining stallholders were accommodated in
a specially adapted section of the Bazaar.

After the war's end in late 1918 the St Peter's site returned to the corporation.
Following independence in 1922 most of it was leased out, first as a garage and
subsequently to the shoemaking firm Dwyer & Co, but a small portion at the
North Main Street end was retained as a meat market by the corporation. This
mini-version of the Irish Market, with space for sixty stalls, the majority of which
remained vacant, stuttered on into the mid-twentieth century. At the end of 1955
the remaining handful of stallholders in St Peter's were given notice to quit and
offered alternative accommodation in the English Market.
The Irish Market was no more.