Madam, - Cork has 18 in the centre plus a tunnel. Dublin has eight. Galway has three. Limerick has three. Sligo has three.
Waterford has one. Bridge, that is. There is talk of a new one, which, if it is ever built, is to be tolled. It is hard to understand how the people of Waterford and south Kilkenny are tolerating the very idea. The Minister, a Waterford man, has fulminated that "if there are any further objections, there won't be a bridge at all".
To quote Michael McCarthy's Priests and People of Ireland (1903): "They (the people of Waterford) are so busily engaged in maintaining all the bridges by which they hope to pass from Mount Misery to heaven, that they have no energy left to build a free bridge across the Suir". Old Timbertoes (the original timber bridge) was a toll bridge controlled by commercial interests until it was no longer useful.
Don't worry about the name - that will be chosen by the people of Waterford. But, to think that we have to pay to get in and out of the new "Gateway" city of the south-east, is reprehensible, to say the least. - Yours, etc.,
AFRA CRONIN, Ferrybank, Co Waterford.