DUBLINERS with an aversion to literature are advised to flee the city today as the annual Bloomsday festival brings the usual rash of Joycean breakfasts, bicycle rallies and street readings.
An estimated 7,000 overseas enthusiasts are in the capital for the occasion; while for those who prefer their culture in the privacy of their homes and offices, The Irish Times on the Internet is celebrating the day with a special website at http://www.irish=times.com/bloomsday
The festival started at the weekend, with the award of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world's largest prize for a single work of fiction.
A hoarse President Robinson defied a cold picked up in Scotland to speak at the presentation ceremony on Saturday night, when the £100,000 prize was claimed by the Spanish author Javier Marias. (In fact, £25,000 of the total went to the translator of his book A Heart So White, but as a translator himself Senor Marias was not complaining.)
Among the guests at the gala presentation was that latter day Leopold Bloom, Mr Gay Mitchell TD, whose Joycean imagination has transformed Dublin into a city fit to host events as big as the Olympics.
While the Olympics have not been secured yet, Mr Mitchell did succeed while lord mayor in persuading the engineering firm IMPAC to part with the investment for a Dublin literary prize, and he looked suitably proud as he surveyed his success at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.
Asked to explain the criteria for the competition - the nominations come from libraries around the world - Mr Mitchell said: "You have to be Fine Gael." (However, a discreet check of the biographical information on the winning author notes his father supported the Republicans in the Civil War.)
In a refreshing contrast to the modern fad of giving writers prizes, the theatre group Macnas staged a show on the theme of another great Irish literary tradition, censorship.
Mad monks wandered around the courtyard of the Royal Hospital, warning of seditious literature and holding a gala bookburning. With starring roles for Mephistopheles and Faust, the show was high on pyrotechnics. So it looked like an attempt by the organisers tub pacify the insurance company when the other half of the night's entertainment proved to be the Dublin Fire Brigade Band.
