The Busiest Day Award goes to anybody who did the whole Bloomsday thing from start to finish. June 16th is not a day for the fainthearted - quite apart from all those nutty gizzards and urine-tainted kidneys, it's just plain old exhasting getting from event to event. For many, the day kicked off at the Bloomsday breakfast in the James Joyce Centre on North Great George's Street as many of the great and good of the city joined to read from Ulysses and share breakfast and maybe a pint. The proceedings started with the British ambassador, Dame Veronica Sutherland, reading with her husband Alex Sutherland, who is a keen amateur dramatist. Through the morning, breakfast-munchers were treated to performances by Ruairi Quinn, leader of the Labour Party; Barry Murphy, chairman of the OPW; RTE's Carrie Crowley; musician and composer Maureen Charlton, the Hon Desmond Guinness and the American ambassador, Jean Kennedy Smith. The messenger bike rally during the morning saw the Lord Mayor of Dublin, John Stafford, pedalling furiously alongside Bill Cullen, head of Renault in Ireland. The pair then repaired to the Shelbourne, where the Irish Youth Foundation were holding the annual Bloomsday lunch. Gerald Davis, renowned Bloom look-alike and the man behind the Davis Gallery, was the main speaker and Alex Findlater, wine merchant and founder of the messenger bike rally, also spoke. Norma Smurfit and Vi Lawlor were at the IYF table while dotted around the room were film censor Sheamus Smith; Olive Braiden of the Rape Crisis Centre; Robert Doggett of the Trocadero restaurant; Noel Carroll, chief executive of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce who read a piece at the Joyce centre earlier in the day with harpist Deirdre O'Callaghan, and Frances Fitzgerald.
The Bloomsday lark continued on into the evening with a couple of events that tied in neatly with the literary theme of the day. In the Irish American Partnership on St Stephen's Green, artist Brian Breathnach opened an exhibition of paintings. Brian, who revealed that he had met Samuel Beckett if not his other hero Joyce in Paris, has just finished a series for the Ulysses Suite in the soon to be re-opened Ormond Hotel. There to check out Brian's work were actor Stephen Brennan, who is working on the multi-million pound American TV series Mystic Knights in Ardmore; Brian's brother, musician David Breathnach; Barry Dunne, who has recently opened a new gallery called Dalkey Arts in Dalkey village, and Irish-Americans John Shanahan and his children Julie and Sean Shanahan, who are opening a restaurant called Shanahans in the spot where Baton Rouge used to be on St Stephen's Green.
Later in the evening the Bloomsday choice was between Davy Byrnes pub, the Shelbourne Hotel or St Ann's church in Dawson Street where an evening of readings rounded off the highly successful Dublin Writers' Festival. Most of the events were booked out, and Tuesday night was no exception - a queue stretched round the corner to hear writers including Roddy Doyle (who said darkly that he was only there because the organisers got to him before he realised that Brazil were playing Morocco that evening); novelist Dermot Healy and poet Rita Ann Higgins.