Jack Lynch Tunnel

Sir, - Dick Hogan's warm endorsement (Southern Report, July 27th) of the new Jack Lynch Tunnel in Cork is well deserved

Sir, - Dick Hogan's warm endorsement (Southern Report, July 27th) of the new Jack Lynch Tunnel in Cork is well deserved. It seems to have transformed the traffic situation in the city and has certainly made it easier to get from the north to the south side of the river.

What he didn't mention, however, is the quite remarkable change it has made to the geography of the place. Coming out of the tunnel at the southern end, you meet a whole new vista of fields and water; one is no longer in a city at all but in a spacious seascape with inlets all around. This is not the Cork I knew all those years ago, when the southbound horizons of our little world were the scaley shallows beyond Blackrock Castle. Now, for the first time, we see these lovely watered inlets.

I was reminded of a line from a great poem by Aogan O Rathaile: "O Ghaillimh na liog ligheal go Corcaigh na gcuan" ("from the white flags of Galway to the inlets of Cork"). To think that it has taken a Celtic Tiger event to show us what an 18th-century line meant!

With a new pride we say: Corcaigh abu! - Yours, etc.,

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Liam O Murchu, Glenageary Park, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.