Sacred Cows: Bloomsday 
Celebrations

To celebrate the work of Joyce in particular was to go against the then forces of Official Ireland who had a special loathing of Joyce, due to the fact that of all the good books that they had banned, his were arguably the best. And the whole world knew about him, which somehow made it more embarrassing.

So in that atmosphere of fearful philistinism, it was a fine and a noble thing for John Ryan to hire a couple of old-style, horse-drawn cabs, of the type used in Ulysses to take mourners to the funeral of Paddy Dignam, to take that first Bloomsday party on its Joycean pilgrimage.

Ryan, Kavanagh, O'Brien and Cronin were joined by Tom Joyce, a cousin of the author, and by AJ 'Con' Leventhal, and if you look at the pictures of them that were taken on that day as they set off for various parts of the city which featured in Ulysses, you could get the impression that you are looking not just at five deeply civilised men, but at perhaps the only civilised men who were living and working in Ireland in the summer of 1954.

But being civilised, they were also highly sensitive men who would sometimes seek escape from the badness of Ireland in ways that were self-destructive and that invariably involved alcohol. So their odyssey, as it turned out, was truncated somewhat, and it ended up in The Bailey pub which happened to be owned by John Ryan - he had rescued the front door of Leopold Bloom's fictional home at 7 Eccles Street and installed it in the pub, which would be enough of a Joycean connection for most of us. 
So while they may not have done the full itinerary, they had still done something admirable and even heroic.

Certainly the Bloomsday revellers of today would not be found departing from their prepared script to sit down for a day's drinking, or to urinate against a wall as the poet Kavanagh and Tom Joyce are doing in one of the commemorative pictures.
No they wouldn't be doing any of that. Instead they'd be poncing around in Edwardian costumes, eating kidneys "faintly scented with urine" for breakfast, and in a fake Dublin accent showing off 
the few words from Ulysses that they 
know, while some RTE reporter records it all for the bit of eejitry at the end of the news.

Indeed, the fact that by their acts and omissions they have managed to associate the awe-inspiring genius of Joyce as an artist and as a man with eejitry in any way is some measure of the desecration that we are looking at here.
"Shite and onions!" they will cry, because not only do they seem to think that it is hilarious in itself, it supposedly shows how plain and earthy Joyce was, how he knew the ways of the common people, just like them.

"Yes I said yes I will yes!", they will exclaim, in the manner of Molly Bloom, carefully omitting all the rest of the famous soliloquy, which is convenient for them. Indeed some of them can't even rise to that much, and they will render it simply as, "Yes, yes, yes!". Which is even more convenient.

For those of us who have to look at them dressed up like 19th- Century tosspots, there is another way of looking at it: "No, No, No".
"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan," they will blather, because those are the first four words in the book, and despite how very funny and earthy it is supposed to be, most of them haven't really got past those first four words.
And they never will either, because they have discovered that there's far more enjoyment to be had wearing a straw hat and a false moustache, eating gorgonzola cheese and quaffing a glass of Burgundy, than there is in reading Ulysses. Or any other book, for that matter.

The extravagance of the Edwardian garb, the elaborate fatuity of it all, is actually a measure of the lengths that people will go to avoid reading Ulysses. Any true celebration of the book would shut down all this abysmal street theatre and would consist of nothing more than people sitting down reading the thing, or at least as much of it as they could read on June 16. Which would probably amount to "stately, plump Buck Mulligan", then a sneaky jump to the gorgonzola cheese and burgundy in Davy Byrnes, and finally a graceless leap to the sanctuary of "Yes I said yes I will yes".

Nor is it any disgrace to be unable to read Ulysses. Many intelligent people have found it impossible, but they at least have had the decency not to pretend otherwise by prancing around the streets trying to look cultured. 
That jolly cry of "shite and onions!" does have a certain authenticity, but to get 
the true flavour of Bloomsday you'd need to tweak it a bit. You'd need to take out 
the onions, and what you'd have then is 
shite. Just shite.