In early 2010, Cork Opera House was in crisis. The 160-year-old cultural institute was days away from closure and urgently needed a €1 million cash injection to survive. The then chairman Damien Wallace would later tell The Irish Examiner that very few people knew the scale of the problem. It was a “financial basket case”, he said. The solution was an emergency restructuring package involving sweeping redundancies, debt write-downs, a €1.5 million bank loan, a new CEO and a more commercial approach to bookings (this autumn’s lineup is a bastion of eclecticism with acts including Alan Carr, 10cc and Tchaikovsky’s…

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