It was the usual high-cholesterol Bloomsday in Dublin, with at least half a dozen venues offering the Full Joyce for breakfast, complete with inner organs of beasts and fowls.
For a man who spent most of his life on mainland Europe, James Joyce, the author of Ulysses, did little to popularise the continental petit-déjeuner. As licensed by his greatest creation, the breakfast fry-up remains the supreme choice of Joyceans everywhere.
Mind you, on Monday you would have been hard pressed to find a mutton kidney in modern-day Dorset Street, where Leopold Bloom bought his on June 16, 1904, in the epic novel.
Moses Dlugacz’s butcher’s shop – fictional to start with – is now a dentist’s. But in other victuallers along the Dublin street, a pork kidney was the nearest I could find.
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At Brady’s, on the corner with Belvedere Road, a man with an east European accent said the mutton variety was an old-fashioned taste now, although if I was desperate for one, he thought there was a place over on Thomas Street that might still do them.
In general, despite its prominent role in Ulysses, Dorset Street is still a Bloomsday-free zone. The nearby Belvedere College, where a Grecian blue carpet was rolled out on the front steps for the occasion, is one of the big breakfast venues, hosting for the Joyce Centre just down the way from it.
But, as in 1904, Dorset Street is still too busy being Dorset Street to celebrate its immortalisation in literature.
Bloomsday 2025 was an occasion for straw hats, in every sense. Unfortunately, those are the only items of Edwardian apparel that suited a sweltering June day in Dublin, with unbroken sunshine and temperatures in the 20s.
Dundalk-born Philip Mullen, one of those attending breakfast at the Silk Road cafe in Dublin Castle, recalled that the colourful striped jacket he wore was originally a gamble on the fashion of the New Romantics, circa 1980, catching on in his native town.
Instead, he was worn it for “every Bloomsday since 1982”. But combined with the obligatory waistcoat and the rest of the ensemble, wearing it was sweaty work even before the sun climbed over the castle parapets.
John O’Connell, meanwhile, among those Joyceans who had chosen a black suit and bowler hat for the day, was suffering a bit too. And that was even before he decided which of his pack-of-six false moustaches to put on.
But mourning gear is part of the price of having to attend the annual funeral of Paddy Dignam, a man who since 1954, when Ulysses re-enactments began, has been ritually buried almost as often as Mayo football.
As usual, the biggest Bloomsday attendances per square centimetre were in the diminutive Sweny’s Pharmacy, where capacity attendances (about 17 at a time) squeezed in to buy lemon soap or to participate in readings and song.
From outside, it looked and sounded like mass in very small chapel in 20th-century Ireland as the readings and hymns leaked out to crowds standing around the door and beyond, some of them smoking.
The smokers included Katia Farias Rodriguez from Amsterdam, dressed in Molly Bloom-style blouse, skirt, and hat (also hard work in the balmy temperatures). As a precocious teenager reader once, she used to be challenged by her father: “Why do you bother with those books? There’s only one that matters.”
He meant Ulysses, so when that turned up on the reading list for her last year in school, she finally plunged in. Her teacher wasn’t pleased, “because that meant she had to read it too”. Then it turned out that her father hadn’t read it at all. Katia ended up having to tell him what it was about.
Across the road in Kennedy’s pub, Polish ambassador Artur Michalski told me he has attempted it twice without success, although he had earlier read the opening section at the Joyce Tower at Sandycove, so this may be third time lucky.
Vastly improving the pub’s average readership of the book, meanwhile, was Ana Dahlberg, from Portugal via Sweden.
An ex-teacher turned food-and-beverage manager, she has devoured Ulysses five times now, with ever-increasing levels of engagement. Her copy is densely transcribed and complete with an explosion of colour-coded page tags, like confetti at a wedding.
Over on Duke Street, at lunchtime, Davy Byrnes was as busy as ever, still benefiting from Bloom’s historic change of mind in having a cheese sandwich and glass of wine there in 1904.
But there’s no such thing as bad publicity in Ulysses, as the revival of the adjacent Burton Tavern testifies. Having first thought of having lunch at the Burton, Bloom instead gave it the sort of the review that might have closed it down had it not been shut already by the time Ulysses was published.
Sumptuously recreated last year, the venue now celebrates the link with Joyce. After a long delay, it was at last thrown temporarily open for this year’s Bloomsday. The full unveiling is expected next month.
