Plan envisages Bloomsday public holiday

Efforts are under way to introduce a one-off special public holiday next year to mark one of Ireland’s most celebrated literary figures.

Followers of author James Joyce want the day off to commemorate Bloomsday, June 16, when the Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses – Joyce’s best-known work – spent the day walking through Dublin.

Next year will signal the centenary of that event, which Joyce aficionados already signalled on an annual basis from breakfast time to closing time in Dublin.

This year’s celebrations demonstrated how widely the partying has caught on in recent times, with events spread throughout last weekend.

As ever, there were special breakfasts, closely following the diet set out in Ulysses.

There were also readings from the work, one lasting as long as four hours, by well known actors at various locations in the capital, most of them dressed in Edwardian clothing – the period in which the novel is set.

The ritual involved intense and serious-minded Joycean scholars as well as people just out for a good time who had never got round to reading the novel that started it all.

Meals sampled during the big day included what Ulysses described as “the inner organs of breats and fowls, thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, stuffed roast heart, liver slices, fried with breadcrumbs and fried hencod cod roes,” and might be followed by grilled mutton kidneys, complete with “a fine tang of faintly scented urine“.

On top of all that, a “gorgonzola cheese sandwich, washed down by a glass of burgundy,” was also available.

Now the plan is to make sure even more people in Dublin and beyond are aware of the occasion next year.

Two separate committees have been appointed by the Joyce scholars to work out how best to denote 100 years of Bloom.

Among the ideas being considered are lobbying the Government to declare a special public holiday, and a huge breakfast – see menu above – for as many as 10,000 people in O’Connell Street, Dublin’s most famous thoroughfare, on June 16 next.