In pictures: Bloomsday 2025
Bloomsday
, the celebration of
James Joyce's
literary masterpiece Ulysses, was celebrated in
Dublin
today.
Named after its anti-hero, Leopold Bloom, and based on his all-day meanderings around Dublin on June 16th, 1904, it has been celebrated annually since 1994 with breakfasts, public readings from the book and the donning of the finest of Edwardian clothing.
John O'Reilly and his wife Marianne O'Reilly on their way to a Bloomsday breakfast in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times
Singer Simon Morgan (right) and other performers prepare behind the scenes at the Bloomsday breakfast in Belvedere College, Dublin. Photograph: Dan Dennison
People gather at the table for Bloomsday Breakfast in Belvedere College, Dublin. Photograph: Dan Dennison
Simon Morgan sings for the audience at the Bloomsday breakfast in Belvedere College, Dublin. Photograph: Dan Dennison
Baby Nova Forbes enjoying the Bloomsday breakfast in Belvedere College, Dublin. Photograph: Dan Dennison
(L-R) Carol Reynolds, Sheena Bourke, Marian Finn, Carol O'Neill, Louise Whelan, Margaret Gray, Rosemary Phipps and Yvonne Rossiter in Ringsend Park, the location of James Joyce's first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
Philip Murphy and Mary O'Neill Byrne at the Joyce Bench in Ringsend Park, Dublin. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
Brendan Byrne plays the ukulele in Kennedy's, Westland Row, Dublin, during Bloomsday breakfast. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times
Carole Ward and Liz Kinch enjoying the Bloomsday festivities on Duke Street, Dublin.
Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times
Lisa Tonello from Italy and Issa Ali from Dublin celebrate Bloomsday in Kennedy's, Westland Row, Dublin. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times
A group of friends dressed up for Bloomsday on Duke Street, Dublin. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times
Raychel O'Connell and her son Tadhg in Bloomsday attire on Duke Street, Dublin.
Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times
Paddy Keogh at Kennedy's, Westland Row, Dublin, for Bloomsday breakfast. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times
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Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Stay with a Chelsea Flower Show gold-medal gardener at his seaside retreat in Kerry
Who lives in a house like this? A large set of hand-forged gates, ornately decorated with galvanised fern leaves that creep up their posts, featuring intricately detailed croziers, unfurl to reveal a magically landscaped spot in the space beyond. The ferns are the clue to the owner – Billy Alexander, the multi gold medal-winning gardener, who has just won his third gold medal at this year's Chelsea Flower Show – and who lives in Kells Bay House and Gardens, at the end of this secluded drive. The set of hand-forged gates, ornately decorated with galvanised fern leaves that creep up their posts, at the entrance to Kell's Bay House and Gardens. Located about 15km west of Glenbeigh on Co Kerry 's Iveragh peninsula, the property includes a Victorian house and a subtropical botanical garden and grounds that overlook Dingle Bay. A river runs through it and, along with the waterfall, the rushing water provides a soundtrack to the lush greenscape. On the shores of the Wild Atlantic Way , the 60-acre property has access to a secluded beach and is surrounded by mountains on every other side. READ MORE Kells Bay House and Gardens: A river runs through the 60-acre property Chelsea winner These and other Chelsea Flower Show awards are displayed proudly on the walls in the diningroom. Set into cards, the medals themselves have to be paid for – he thinks they cost about £150 each. On this same gallery wall are photos of him receiving one of the golds from the late Queen Elizabeth II back in 2018. She's wearing a sunset pink opera coat. He's sporting a smile as wide as the Atlantic that crashes below the house. There are photos too, on the walls, of her son King Charles, who presented Alexander with this year's gold medal. Billy Alexander with his gardening awards. A watercolour by the late Pauline Bewick hangs on another of the walls, commissioned by Alexander, and botanical prints from specimens in the garden, illustrated beautifully by Susan Sex, cover the entrance hall walls and stairwell and are also in every bedroom. This is a plantsperson's retreat, with 60 acres of grounds and gardens to explore. Kells Bay House and Gardens: The property sits on the coast, 15km west of Glenbeigh on Co Kerry's Iveragh peninsula The conservatory area where guests and daytrippers can enjoy a coffee or tea. The driveway is lined with mature trees soaring 100 feet up into the air. Scots pines, Douglas firs and rhododendron, fashionable in Victorian times, were set as a wind belt by an earlier owner of the property – previously called Hollymount Cottage – possibly Rowland Ponsonby Blennerhassett, Home Rule MP for Co Kerry between 1872 and 1885. It was he who established what is now called the ladies' walled garden, adjacent to the front of the house, reportedly for his wife Lady Mary. Blennerhassett also extended the property and renamed it Kells Bay House. Kells Bay House and Gardens The property includes a main house and other own-door annexes. Virginia creeper climbs the front of the property. A terrace of pink sandstone runs from the front steps down to a cafe area. Entrance hall with its two doors, one on either side. The porch has an entrance on either side, one to the east and the other to the west, to try and keep out of the prevailing winds. The porch and entrance hall have been turned into one long space that extends to about six metres (20 feet), and leads through a door to the main staircase. The public spaces of the house feature dado-level panelling throughout, all painted a warm sandy white called Boathouse by Colourtrend. The walls above are coated in soft serene colours, all by the Irish paint company. Billy Alexander with his award winning ferns. Life on our planet Alexander believes the first tree fern on the property was planted in the 1890s, the so-called mother of all the tree ferns that now inhabit what is termed the primeval forest, a space that looks like a set for Jurassic Park. Indeed, the location featured in the 2021 filming of the Netflix series, Life on Our Planet, which brought extinct creatures back to virtual life in video footage. The clip shows a giant millipede, Arthropleura, which measured over 2.5 metres long – the size of a small car. [ Remarkable 45-hectare estate worthy of Gatsby in Co Westmeath for €8 million Opens in new window ] The tree fern is a plant with which Alexander has had an affinity since his early 20s when his aunt Cora, a family friend of his mother's, bought him his first Dicksonia antarctica. It prompted him to start a hobby business selling plants, while not yet ready to give up his then day job at AIB. It was this side hustle that first brought him to Kells Bay, delivering stock to its then owners. The setting blew him away. He made his first offer on the house, of €2 million, around 2006. It was rejected. About a year later the agent came back saying the owners would accept it. At this point he didn't have the €2 million, and offered a lower price, of €1.5 million, which was accepted. The property needed serious upgrading. 'I started with the roof, taking it down and replacing it,' Alexander says. He thinks this cost about €150,000. To eliminate damp, he dug down into the ground floor to insulate it and lay an underfloor heating system, geo-thermal-operated. Underfloor heating works really well in old houses, especially coastal ones. The dual aspect drawing room with an open fire. Kells Bay House and Gardens: The property has 11 bedrooms in nine different spaces Kells Bay House and Gardens: Penn Alexander serves up Thai cuisine for guests in the Sala Thai restaurant The property was a building site for seven or eight years, with Alexander travelling down from Dublin on a Thursday, meeting with builders on the Friday morning, and then doing the long five-hour drive back to Dublin on a Sunday. On the terrace outside the house, where day-tripper visitors to the 60 acres of gardens can enjoy coffee and tea with a view, there are potted palms four to five metres in height. These form part of the theatre of the place and are transported from the polytunnels by forklift for the season, to help fill out the backdrop. 'They give a more tropical feel,' he explains. Cordylines fill the middle distance, with fuchsia below, and you can see the sea beyond. Thousands of people visit the gardens every year. Groups of children come on school tours before term time. And yet you cannot see any of this traffic from the house, because he had the location excavated to ensure it would be at a level below at a cost of about €40,000. His happy place, though, is with his beloved Dicksonia antarctica in the nursery, where he estimates he has 600 or 700 specimens at varying levels of maturity. A view of the nursery through the poly tunnel. He surveys the grounds daily, either in the early morning or early evening, when guests are still readying themselves for the day or having dinner or pre-dinner drinks. He likes to inspect the polytunnel and nursery and take the sky bridge, a rope bridge that crosses one of the moss-clad gorges. Throughout the property, timber sculptures of dinosaurs and lizards stand life-size, designed by Pieter Koning and Nathan Solomon. Inside, he reconfigured the layout slightly, installing a commercial kitchen to the back and a large office – the control room of the operation, where he spends most of his days. The food and beverage and accommodation at the house accounts for 60 per cent of its revenue. The other 40 per cent comes from the garden cafe, the sale of plants and entrance fees to the gardens. Entrance is €9.50 per adult, while a family of five, two adults and three children, costs €30. [ Wisteria-clad home with American-style luxury interiors on 14-acre estate outside Naas for €4.95m Opens in new window ] Residents are served Thai cuisine, featuring local fish cooked by his wife, head chef Penn Alexander. They met in Phuket, Thailand, where Barry was holidaying to escape the madness of Italia '90. They kept in touch by old-fashioned letter, as Penn's English was only rudimentary, and the following year he took a three-month leave of absence from his bank job, and they travelled around Thailand. They've been together 35 years and moved down to live at Kells Bay about 11 years ago. Previously, Penn had been working in a restaurant in Dalkey but wanted to set up her own place. 'The cost of leasing alone would have been €150,000 just to get going. Now we have a premises,' he explains. They opened their doors in 2014; it took a full year before they were operating seriously. The wall in the dining room where Alexander's awards have been hung with pride. Actor Colin Farrell paid the spot a visit while filming The Lobster in nearby Sneem. 'I didn't know who he was. He requested, 'Your best Thai green chicken curry, as spicy as you can make it!' and gave his approval a short while later, saying this was 'the best f***ing spicy Thai green curry' he'd ever had.' Domhnall Gleeson dined there while filming Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Taoiseach Micheál Martin is a repeat guest – making use of the direct access to the beach to take a morning dip when in residence. Accommodation wise, the property has 11 bedrooms in nine different spaces. Four are upstairs in the main house. Three of these are ensuite. The fourth has exclusive use of the adjoining bathroom, a concept he says he has to explain to some visitors as they cannot get their heads around it. In addition to the rooms in the house there are five own-door units in the annex. Two of these have two double bedrooms. While children are welcome to visit the estate, overnight stays are adults-only. The rooms are booked out through July and August. A weekend night in September costs €150 per room, with breakfast from €12.50-€16. Dinner at Sala Thai restaurant is a la carte, and almost all the main courses are less than €25.
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Louise Bruton: Penneys' adaptive lingerie is half the price of Kim Kardashian's Skims. That's a game-changer
My wardrobe malfunctions may not be as dramatic as some onstage performers, but they can still cause a scene. Having a boogie at a gig in Dublin recently, my movements were cut short. The belt of my linen overcoat, which I had tied behind my back, had unravelled and wound around the spokes of my wheelchair, grounding me to a halt. It took two security guards to set me free. Pairing billowing material with a wheelchair is a rookie mistake. Lots of bad things can happen, from getting lassoed like a calf to mucking up the material as it drapes over the tyres. And if it rains there will be soggy arms for days. I wore the coat knowing those risks, but I also wore it because it looked good. When I get dressed, I usually have a particular persona in mind – kooky art teacher at parties, Paul Mescal in GAA shorts on balmy days, B-list pop star for weddings – but the execution won't always complement my wheelchair. No matter what their personal taste or style is, disabled people usually have to pick an outfit based around function and comfort. This was something I found myself thinking about at the launch earlier this month of Penneys ' latest adaptable clothing line. Included in the range are wardrobe staples such as blue denim jeans (€22), a beige trench coat (€35), white shirts (€20), drawstring tracksuit bottoms (€18), pyjama tops and bottoms (€18 each). There are accessible features like snap fastenings on T-shirts and bras, waist loops to pull up trousers, and hidden openings for stoma or catheter lines on shirts – all potentially helpful adjustments for various disabilities. Penneys' adaptive lingerie (€10/€12) is also half the price of Kim Kardashian 's Skims offerings. It will be a game-changer for some. READ MORE And yet, unfortunately for me, I would never choose to wear the range. The conservative styles don't fit in with my somewhat eclectic taste palette, and I don't see how these adaptable features will make it any easier for me to get dressed or to move around compared with what I wear already.I left the launch trying to understand what adaptive fashion really means, generally and personally. The best way I've seen it in action is when brides take their wedding dresses from civil ceremony to unruly dance floor by bustling the excess material of their skirts up and away from stomping feet. Like dancing brides, adaptive clothing should mean changing your clothes based on your surroundings or your needs. A dress in Primark's new adaptive fashion range Disability is a wide-ranging term used to cover thousands of conditions and illnesses, and within those, each person's experience differs wildly. If only a portion of a clothing line is adaptive, it will serve only a small percentage of disabled people. Browsing the hundreds of items on online retailer Zalando 's adaptive edit, personal style has room to thrive for adults and children. Broken down into categories like fit for prostheses, sensory friendly, easy closure, easy to dress and seated style, these are more than just staple items. While Nike and Skechers have clothes that coincidentally have adaptive qualities in this edit, lesser known names like Anna Field, Pier One and Even&Odd have items designed with disabled people in mind and use disabled models to display them. Alas, these clothes don't sing to me either. Primark's adaptive fashion range will be a game-changer for some When many shops in real life still don't have larger changing rooms, it's easy to throw everything into an online basket, but clothes I've bought from other adaptive lines have been unsuccessful. A raincoat in the seated style used so much material that it pooled over my wheels, catching water and mud and all of the things it was meant to resist at an Irish festival during a yellow weather warning. Loops to pull on shoes have pulled all the way off, and snap fasteners on jackets have not stayed fastened. I am still learning what I need from my clothes, but I also want to shop in a sustainable way instead of this trial and error approach. Adjustable sleeves and elasticated or drawstring trousers are essential for me as I'm in the seated position all day, but I also need breathable materials like cotton, linen or wool to protect my skin and to regulate my body heat. A brand that nails those criteria is Yoke, a London-based studio that uses deadstock fabrics to make relaxed clothing out of natural fibres. Their loose fitting gingham trousers with an elasticated waist means I don't get that sharp pinch from zips or buttons. A cut-off zip-sleeve jacket from Primark's adaptive fashion range Closer to home is Miss She's Got Knits by Dubliner Karen Birney who handknits colourful cardigans, jumpers and vests using Merino or alpaca wool in chunky or cutesy stitches. When her cropped Supersoft MSGK vest came online in her summer drop, I clicked 'buy' immediately. With a vest, sleeves getting frayed by my wheels is a non-issue and the cropped fit prevents material from bulking in my lap. But the best thing about this vest is that people always compliment me when I wear it. Primark launched its new adaptive fashion range earlier this month The above pieces are investments, but because I've become better at searching for what I need online, Vinted fills in the gap for affordable preloved clothing. Most weeks my postman brings a bundle of vintage and designer clothes that tend to my needs with no compromise on the environment, my style, or my bank account. Well, maybe some financial compromise. Adaptive clothing shouldn't be niche, but with Penneys on board everyday fashion is becoming more accessible for disabled people. I would argue, however, that if brands really wanted to implement an adaptive approach, then a free alteration service for customers would cater to all bodies and backgrounds while also looking out for the planet. A gal can dream.
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
From dark and witty to feather-light perfection: New poetry by Kimberly Campanello, Patrick Cotter, Karen Solie and Bernard O'Donoghue
The dark, witty prose poems that form the body of Kimberly Campanello's An Interesting Detail (Bloomsbury, £10.99) are preceded by the more formal I'd Love to Say I'd Been There. It hypnotically builds its musical repeating lines on ' ... the bells / of the churches ... heard / below the waters / of the bay' so convincingly that even the meta-statement 'this opening sequence sounds incredibly akin / to the ringing of cathedral bells' does not jar the imaginative sonic waves carrying us to the ending. There, Campanello reveals that, like the reader, she's just been reading about this too – this is a hymn to the imagination as much as history. Campanello's neat, surprising endings are a central feature of her highly original prose poems, often upending a seemingly heavyweight beginning. In Major Insights, Campanello begins with a chart showing 'an ancient king found buried with his dog, four horses, cattle and sheep'. The speaker gifted this chart from which 'Major insights will be garnered' but the recipient doesn't want Campanello looking under her sink. 'I said it's not clean down there in anyone's house. I had brought lunch. I said I was hunting paper towel.' Campanello's exact deflation is particularly potent in poems describing her growing disability. One could almost miss the pain if the endings didn't bite so hard, 'If you wish I can pour you a glass of wine, but it is better if I make larger movements, like opening the corked bottle in one go. That is if I am to appear less vulnerable and more impressive, which I assume you prefer me to be.' Campanello's preoccupation with the layers of history mirror a powerful awareness of the seachanges in her still-young body, remembering her activist days, 'All those years walking great distances across capital cities during strikes. My body sliding off me like melted butter' (Ghost Walk). READ MORE Patrick Cotter's fourth collection, Quality Control at the Miracle Factory (Dedalus, €12.50), features many of his signature anthropomorphic poems – ranging from Reverse Mermaid through the identity-bending For What This Row of Rabbit Heads in My Wardrobe to the wild commentary of A Horse Called Franzine Marc, who enters the National Gallery knowing 'enough about Duchamp and Beuys to be unembarrassed when / she dropped ... an ephemeral treasure, // fluffy and fragrant. An arts journalist' speculates 'if this was meant as guerrilla art/or critical commentary'. Sometimes the surreal reveals that it is the real world that is more fantastic. The touching prose poem Crow, My Friend lists the crow's 'airdropped' presents of 'crazed creativity' that act as metaphors for Cotter's collage style, 'the feathered fish-hook ... the platinum screw from an aristo's sit-in trainset, the brass clasp from a child's Chinese casket'. And it's funny, 'The cat could not compete with the gist of these gifts', yet the crow disappears, his last message melted away in the snow. Elegy is Cotter's heart ground. In The Mare I Meet the Week of Your Death, Cotter's description of the horse expresses all the beautiful horror of fresh grief, 'Her prehensile lips form a glove ... Now she turns an eye the size of an anemone's bright / corona to blaze on me, her low gruff whinnies // like flat stones skipping across the pond of my hearing'. In Self-portrait at Sixteen, Cotter manages to hold two ghosts in one, Cotter's 16-year-old self in 1979 connecting with the 16-year-old Sarah Paddington at her 1821 grave in St Fin Barre's Cathedral. 'Later, I lit a candle for her Purgatory-dwelling / Protestant heart, at Catholic St Augustine's'. Karen Solie's deeply philosophical Wellwater (Picador, £12.99) begins in the basement where 'one is closer to God ... closer to consequence, to creatures no one loves / but the specialists' (Basement Suite). This is one of many acute Solie snippets, jostling beside quotations from writers including Rilke, Denise Riley or simply Proverbs, 'to which I guiltily return, / sliding another out of its pack, / he who troubles his household with groundless anger / will inherit the chaos that some of us / truly seem to prefer.' Restless, angry elegies for our stricken planet skewer the global economic crisis. 'To be no longer working bodes differently / for those of us who will not walk, as in the promotional literature, / upon the equatorial beaches ... Money buys the knowledge it isn't everything' (Autumn Day). Our global collective helplessness is given form and shape, held tight in lines that fall on the ear almost like a guilty pleasure. Red Spring charts the rape of the land by agrochemicals in Solie's native Saskatchewan alongside Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, 'The chemical // in the field respects the gene ... the farmer the authority / of Bayer ... who will not hesitate to make of you an example / if you insult its canola patent by growing your own seed. // Such wide confusion fills the countryside...' Towards the end Wellwater begins to climb – to the stars in Orion – but most beautifully in the final Canopy, its owlets 'peering / through their nursery window' at young Solie and her family, sitting 'on the graded dirt' below two cottonwoods who 'built their circular staircases / 80 feet high, around columns / of absolute nerve'. Miraculously the cottonwoods still survive 'in excess / of their average lifespan ... In spring / they champagne the air with cotton'. The owlets could be a stand-in for a young Solie as the set-up reminds us of Autumn Day's chilling Rilke quote, 'Whoever has no house now, will never have one'. Yet the peripatetic Solie is mostly like the cottonwoods, building her own erudite and magnificent treehouse with 'absolute nerve' from words alone. Solie writes of songs so simple you don't recognise at first how good they are – a description that fits the brief brimming poems of Bernard O'Donoghue's The Anchorage (Faber, £12.99). O'Donoghue's poems are feather-light, yet they mimic perfectly the indelible sting of our sharpest memories. [ Bernard O'Donoghue: from byres to spires Opens in new window ] The title poem's 'anchorage' is an 'iron staple / In the wall which the dog had been chained to'. The farmers of O'Donoghue's homeplace of Cullen form a 'cortège of horse floats' making their way to 'repair the loss. / But what good was that?'. When the poet closes his eyes, all he sees is 'the invisible / Last leaping of the dog'. Memory and imagination are a lethal mix here, the reader reimagining the death that haunts the poet. And O'Donoghue drives that point deeper in the pitch-perfect Lif is laene, urging us 'read the small print' and 'for God's sake to love' our lives that may have to be sent back 'if we are not ready for the high investment ... And you must not put / their pictures into albums till you're sure / you can bear the cost of items of such inestimable value.' Death, always present in O'Donoghue's poetry, stalks now like never before. People are as likely to be making hay in the afterlife (While the Sun Shines) as in his memories of Cullen, which are, of course, another afterlife – his own 'picture album'. His version of Chaucer's The Privee Theef, simple, direct and terrifying, recalls another terrific Middle English translation The Move from O'Donoghue's previous collection and this gift extends to Old Irish too. The Hide, an unbeatably fresh version of Túaim Inbir, leaps off the page. 'My dear heart, God in Heaven, / He is the thatcher who made the roof. / A house into which the rain can't pour, / a refuge where no spear-point's feared, / open and bright to a garden...' The Anchorage confirms Ireland's quietest living poet as one of its finest.
