Drinagh Co-op, 1923
The co-op that built the village
Drinagh Co-operative Creamery was registered on 13 November 1923 and took in its first milk in May 1924. The man behind it was Fr John Crowley, the local priest, who pushed the West Cork farmers into pooling their milk and selling their butter together rather than one at a time. It worked. By the late 1930s there were a further nine branches; by the 1950s Drinagh was only the fourth co-op in the country to pass a million pounds in turnover. In 1965 it helped found Carbery, the joint venture between the four West Cork creamery co-ops, and by 1992 it was Carbery's largest shareholder. A village of a few hundred people running a business of that size is the most West Cork story there is. The centenary was marked in 2023 with a published history.
1887 - 1916
Sean Hurley, the only Cork man of 1916
Sean Hurley was born in Drinagh in 1887 and was the only Cork-born Volunteer killed in action during the 1916 Easter Rising. He had gone to primary school in Clonakilty alongside Michael Collins, and the two were close - they emigrated to London, played GAA for the Geraldines club, joined the Gaelic League and the Irish Republican Brotherhood and later the Volunteers together. In Easter Week, Hurley was with the Four Courts garrison under Commandant Ned Daly, in the heavy fighting around Church Street. On 29 April, just before the surrender, he took a gunshot wound to the head and was carried to Fr Matthew Hall, where he was anointed before he died, aged 29. His pocket watch and 1916 medal are now in the Michael Collins House exhibit in Clonakilty. Drinagh has commemorated him since 1966.
Medieval church, 1818 tower
Drinagh West and the steeple
Above Curraghalickey lake, a couple of kilometres outside the village, is Drinagh West graveyard - the site of a late-medieval church that was in use up to the early 1800s. Nothing of the medieval building survives, but a Church of Ireland tower put up in 1818 still stands, and the locals call it the steeple. The graveyard is mostly unmarked Roman Catholic graves; the earliest legible inscription dates to 1843. There was once a watch-house in the corner, the kind built to guard fresh graves from body-snatchers in the days when anatomy schools paid for cadavers. Skibbereen Heritage Centre surveyed and recorded the burials. It is a quiet spot over the water, and worth the short detour if old graveyards hold you.