Bloomsday celebrated with new bridge

Dublin was today celebrating Bloomsday – the 24 hours when Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses masterpiece, roamed through the streets of the Irish capital.

And Bloomsday was also commemorated in Dublin today by the introduction of a new bridge across the River Liffey.

The €9m new road crossing, radically different in design from earlier bridges across the Liffey, was being formally declared open to traffic by Dublin Lord Mayor Dermot Lacey.

Named the James Joyce Bridge, it was designed by Spanish engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava, a world leader in his field.

It links two areas of the centre, one Usher’s Island, the location of a derelict Georgian house in which Joyce set his short story The Dead.

The bridge took six months longer than anticipated to construct because of its unusual design, which incorporates splayed steel arches, with a concrete deck suspended from high-tensile hangers.

Meanwhile aficionados of the writer dressed up in the Edwardian attire of the early years of the last century – primarily boaters and colourfully striped blazers - and perambulated through the city in the manner of Bloom quoting aloud excerpts from Ulysses.

The ritual – currently marking the 99th anniversary of the peculiarly Dublin literary event – involved intense and serious-minded Joycean scholars as well as people just out for a good time who have never got round to reading the novel that started it all.

The celebrations began early this morning at an 18th century Martello Tower that was briefly home to James Joyce at Sandycove, on the southern rim of Dublin Bay, and continued with a series of breakfasts at restaurants and cafes nearby.

Later, the Bloom enthusiasts were confronted by a series of trips to other parts of the city encumbered by traffic conditions totally unknown in the days of Joyce.

And later still, there were plans for the partying to continue into the night at a host of Joyce-linked bars in and around Dublin.