Illuminati and UCC

mikep

Does the use of the skull and crossbones motif by UCC have a link to "The Illuminati"........

Gillo

At a guess no

Master-Decoy

hahaha nice.it would need to include the oul 322 methinks.still, is it in the main logo or just like the rugby team or something?

humanji

Does it mean pirates?

Mr. Presentable

It's Pirates

Mahatma coat

Pastafarians FTW

CeoilSoul

All jokes aside, UCC's skull and crossbones crest has a grim history and one that has been suppressed. It comes from when UCC (then Queen's University) was built in the 19th century by inmates of the Union Workhouse (now St. Finbarr's Hospital). The forced labour policies during the worst years of the "Famine" (when there were bumper crops of barley & wheat and lifestock production actually went up) meant that native Irish Corkonians from the city and county, who were starving, were forced to build the university: a university which they, as native Catholics, were not allowed to attend. Many of them died during the construction of University College Cork and the urban legend goes, they were buried beneath it. The colonial/ protestant ascendancy who built the university at their expense then chose the skull & crossbones as their crest. There's also an urban myth that there's a mass-grave under one of the urban grottoes dedicated to St. Mary on one of the back streets near UCC.

If you're a native of Cork, you'd know that what is now St. Finbarr's Hospital and UCC are not that far apart, just a couple of kilometres max. At that time in the mid-19th century (the university was built in 1845 while the country was being allowed to starve to death), there were just open fields. The inmates of the workhouse would trudge across the fields, haul quarried limestone bricks all day, some of them would die and be buried beneath the place, then the rest would slog back to the Union Workhouse. THOUSANDS upon thousands of Cork people died in the Union Workhouse, many of them on forced works at UCC. Today there's just a crappy plaque on the wall of St. Finbarr's Hospital that you'd hardly notice and UCC's skull & crossbones crest that people associate with pirates. And supposedly Irish people value their history.

Recommended reading:

John A. Murphy, The College: a history of Queen’s / University College, Cork (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995)

Famine in Cork City by Michelle O'Mahony.