The Banks of my Own Lovely ... Venice ?

Perhaps chastened by last week's rebuke, Finbarr Cullen has stayed away from politicians this week. Instead, he protests at a proposal "by the Cork Chamber of Horrors - sorry, Commerce" to drain the south channel of the River Lee in order to construct a light railway:

...the Lee to become a railway track ! The Venice of the South ! Where we sported and played in the green leafy shades, stroke-hauling salmon and catching bile-filled mullet - to disappear in the name of progress ! Not on, boy.

I thought the Venice of the South was in Italy, but the rant is otherwise splendidly unanswerable, as I am sure you will agree.

Well, maybe one dissenter could be my old friend - if he will allow me to call him that - Theo Dorgan, to whom Finbarr applies the insulting sobriquet of Great Brain of Cork. That it is intended as an insult is put beyond doubt not only by the context ("recently spotted junketing ..." - another give-away word - " ...to Jerusalem, despite an international boycott") but by the separate reference to "Fintan O'Toole, Ireland's leading intellectual (excluding our own Theo Dorgan, of course)".

Update on Tuesday, February 25, 2014 at 08:11AM by Fergus O'Rourke

Theo Dorgan and I have been FaceBook friends for some years now, so I suppose that he has allowed me to call him my friend.