Theo Dorgan, poet and director of Poetry Ireland: I came to Dublin seven years ago. I'd been working for Triskel Arts Centre and the Cork Film Festival, doing 60 to 70 hour weeks, trying to make £1 do the work of £10. I knew the map of Cork so intimately. I could be set down one any street blindfold and known where I was by the smells and the angle of the sun on my face. Leaving Cork was like giving up smoking dope: I had got to know the territory so well that the memory was enough.
I love Cork with an unthinking - but not uncritical - passion. One of the things I was glad to leave behind was the cultural schizophrenia of the Cork middle classes, the people who are proud of having culture but not prepared to support it (with some glorious exceptions, I admit).
When it comes to humour, Dublin is witty, but Cork is infinitely sardonic. Nothing will ever surprise a Corkman, while there is a spluttering indignation about the Dubliner.
Dubliners are not prejudiced against Cork people. Most Dubliners are originally culchies anyway, whereas my family in Cork city goes back generations. In Dublin if people start talking about Cork to me it is usually to say what a great time they had the last time they were in Cork.
Cork has been industrially destroyed. Dunlop, Ford, Verolme - all these factories were shut down within a matter of months leaving 2,500 people out of work. The economy has been decimated since the late 1970s. Successive governments have underinvested in Cork. This is the real second city syndrome: every capital hates and fears its potential rival. Cork is just too far for a handy weekend jaunt for Dublin's managerial class. It is a case of out of sight, out of mind. Once Cork gets its senior hurling team right, everything will come right. But seriously, there is something unresolved about a city, devoted to drink and good times, whose main statue is of Father Matthew, founder of the Temperance Movement.
Maureen Gaffney, psychologist and broadcaster: I'm from Midleton in east Cork. I draw a big distinction between Cork city and Midleton. As a child I went on excursions to Cork city about once a year and it was a major event. It was like going to another country.
I've been living in Dublin for about 25 years, more or less ever since I graduated from UCC. My father was from Dublin and saw himself as an exile in Cork. I always associated Dublin with my father's intellectual curiosity and expansiveness. Because of him I felt when I came to Dublin that this was the place I was destined to be.
Even so, I always thought of Cork as home, and when I go back to Midleton, it is as though I never left. I go back to the house I grew up in and sleep in my old bedroom. I feel attached by a metaphysical umbilical cord. My mother plays a pivotal role in that. Midleton is a small town and my mother knows everyone. I keep up with everyone through her and she tells them what I'm doing. People keep up with me through my work in the media as well.
My husband is from Cork city, and when we first came to Dublin we saw a lot of other "Cork exiles" - mostly people we had known in college. This orientation towards Cork has waned over the years, especially since we stopped going to Cork for Christmas. Since my father died eight years ago, my mother spends Christmas with us in Dublin. Up to then, Christmas in Dublin would have been inconceivable.
Another decisive factor has been our kids growing up and wanting to do their own thing at weekends. For a long time we used to go down to Cork every few weeks. That has changed with the kids getting older, and so my orientation has changed too.
Going back to Cork I am always struck by how my family are so centred on their own lives. That complacency zone is quintessential Cork.
Frank O'Connor called it the Cork grandeur".
Richard Kearney, author and Professor of Philosophy at UCD: I am from the dreaded Montenotte - you learn not to say the word after a while! I went to boarding school in Limerick where I had my Cork accent beaten out of me. Later I went to UCD.
In Dublin I was the outsider. Any chance I got all the holidays - I went back to Cork. I still do, although not to Cork city. My family now lives in Union Hall, in west Cork, and that is where I spend all my holidays and is the place where I do most of my writing and thinking.
In Dublin I found a solitary anonymity, where I didn't have to live up to anything. In Cork it had always been as though I was living in the midst of a large family, where everything was familiar and interconnected. This feeling was mirrored in the very streets of the city, which are narrow and intimate in their medieval network, particularly up around St Fin Barre's Cathedral.
I was happy growing up in Cork. We had our local heroes. I remember hearing Rory Gallagher practising in a house on Patrick's Hill. In sport too there were intimate, local allegiances. In the 1970s, Cork had almost a stronger cultural movement than Dublin. There was the film festival, and a lot of poetry and music.
There is an ex patriot community of Cork exiles in Dublin. When we meet, there is a smile of recognition and the language of the tribe. After five minutes you're into Cork reminiscences. It is playful and funny, informed by an ironic sense of estrangement.
The fact that I don't belong in either Dublin or Cork gives me a freedom I wouldn't have otherwise. But I couldn't imagine being buried in Dublin. This is not because of nostalgia or sentimentality, but a deep feeling I don't talk about.
Pat Kinevane, actor; he is currently playing Inspector Larkin in the Dairygold Murder Mystery on the Late Late Show.
I'm from Newtown, a village just outside Cobh. I came to Dublin to work as an actor in 1988, when I was 22. I still miss the countryside around Newtown. We lived at the highest point in Cobh and you could see the Galtee Mountains. It was beautiful. Cobh is an island so I felt very safe growing up there. I don't feel that way in Dublin. I'm six foot tall, but my body is tense when I am out walking in Dublin.
I don't relax until I get inside my front door.
At home, when I was growing up, people were very open. They wore their heart on their sleeve. In Dublin, I have to be careful who I trust. Sometimes I have to be coy in order to be careful. It is a weird feeling.
I have some friends from Cork who are also involved in theatre. Although I abhor mafias, I feel I can trust them and we are very close. I can't explain the bond - we didn't grow up together in Cork, and it has taken me a while to really get to know them - but their friendship means a lot to me.
Ultimately I'd love to live in the countryside again, especially if I had children. I miss seeing animals, the way I used to see foxes and birds when I was growing up, in Cobh. I don't think I could have grown up in a better place. It is only now that I realise the richness of it.
Living in Dublin is very handy for my work. I can walk to the Gate or the Abbey from my house. I am easy to contact for agents or theatre companies. As an actor, you have to have your finger on the pulse.
When I first came to Dublin I found the accent hilarious. People sounded like caricatures. Now when I go home to Cobh, people there notice that I have picked up Dublinisms. They don't like it. They tell me I'm becoming a Dub. It is frowned upon to lose your Corkonian status.
John Creedon, presenter of Risin' Time and Review of the Week on RTE Radio 1: I came to Dublin in 1987, having got a job with RTE Radio 1 as a presenter. Up to then my only knowledge of Dublin had been coming to see football or hurling matches. All I knew was the run from Heuston Station to Sean McDermott Street. Living here was tough at first. I didn't know a sinner in the business. My wife Mona (who is also from Cork) and I used to go into the city centre at weekends, hoping we would bump into people we knew, just like we used to in Cork. We didn't, of course! I grew up in the centre of Cork city, where we had a late night grocery and newsagent's shop at the foot of Patrick's Hill. I wasn't used to living in the Dublin suburbs, which are pretty bland.
People tend to think of Cork in one dimensional ways, such as the jazz festival. But Cork is like Texas, it is the largest county in Ireland and it is full of contrasts. My mother is from Adrigole, which is 100 miles west of Cork city. Youghal, at the other end of the county, is 35 miles to the east.
It is not surprising that such a large and well populated part of the country has produced famous sports people, writers and politicians.
Cork people really consider themselves contenders. They are disappointed when their hurling team doesn't win the All Ireland. They are big guys. Not a master race, but there are so many of them, they are used to winning. It isn't like coming from Carlow.
Cork city is very contained. It is a principality with a little bit of everything. You forget how tiny it is. After all, it has a university, two local dailies, a local TV station, three radio stations. You don't expect to leave Cork. Everything is on site. I still go back for weekends, and it is like going back to the well. I get bombarded with support. After I have been to Cork I come home energised and full of inspiration. It reminds me of who I am and where I am coming from. I have four daughters, all of whom were born in Cork and consider themselves from Cork. Like me, they are fanatical supporters in a exile of the Cork Football Club. When Cork City FC comes to Dublin to play a match, it is like a little bit of home coming to town.
Alan Titley, fiction writer and playwright, he is head of the Irish Department in St Patrick's College, Drumcondra: To me, as a boy, Cork was the centre of the universe. There was no sense of it being narrow or provincial. I grew up in Turner's Cross, which is on the southside of Cork city, the real old Cork. I was cursed with an idyllic childhood, abut out of my natural perversity I decided not to go to UCC after school. I went to St Pat's in Dublin instead. Years later, in 1974, I ended up getting a teaching job, there and I haven't left the place since.
I have lovely memories of Cork entwined about my heart but I'm not sentimental about it. I hate those nauseating ballads about the glories of one's home place. If you get sentimental about the past it means the best is over. I prefer to look forward.
I've now been in Dublin longer than I was in Cork. My wife is from Dublin and so are my five children. It was liberating to come to St Pat's. Dublin is a cosmopolitan capital city. It is full of immigrants as well as real Dubs, so you can retain your Corkness here. When I came to Dublin I never felt that just because Dublin was bigger, it was therefore better. Nor did I feel that I, as someone from Cork, was a second class citizen. Coming from Cork, you don't have an inferiority complex.
I remember when I first arrived in Dublin, asking a man for directions. He said: "I don't tell culchies where places are." I was shocked that he assumed that just because I was not from Dublin, I was a culchie when, in fact, I was from a city as well.
I don't think the tourist potential of Cork has been realised at all. Up until the 18th century it was like Venice: most of the main streets were channels for the Lee. It should have stayed like that, with people travelling up and dawn the streets in currachs. Cork could have been the Venice of Ireland.
