‘O commemorate me with no hero-courageous Tomb – just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by’

Patrick Kavanagh’s bench by John Coll at Wilton Terrace on the Grand Canal, between Baggot Street Bridge and Leeson Street Bridge, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water, preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges –
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb – just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.

While I was being interviewed in Dublin last week by Montenegrin television, Charlotte and I were staying in the Clayton Burlington Hotel on Leeson Street, close to Leeson Street, Raglan Road, Pembroke Road, Baggot Street and the Grand Canal, and all their memories of and associations with the poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967).

It was Bloomsday, and after coffee in the Canal Bank Café on the corner of Leeson Street and Suffolk, we went on our own Dublin perambulation of the area that Patrick Kavanagh made his own corner of Dublin after moving to the city from Co Monaghan in 1939.

He wrote 70 years ago in 1953:

If ever you go to Dublin town
In a hundred years or so
Inquire for me in Baggot Street
And what I was like to know.

Patrick Kavanagh’s love of the area is feted in his ballad, ‘On Raglan Road’, and these streets became his ‘enchanted way’, the quiet streets where old ghosts meet.

There are plaques to him on the houses he lived in – one of them is now the Mexican Embassy on Raglan Road – and he pops up constantly in the street art around the area along with other writers, including Samuel Becket and Brian O’Nolan or Flann O’Brien or Myles na Gopaleen.

Parson’s Bookshop was beloved by many writers in Dublin, particularly Brendan Behan, Benedict Kiely, Mervyn Wall and Mary Lavin, but none more so than Patrick Kavanagh. It used to be the Bridge House, on Baggot Street Bridge, but has long since closed.

‘And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy / And other far-flung towns mythologies’ … barges on the Grand Canal between Baggot Street Bridge and Leeson Street Bridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Kavanagh’s lasting memorial along these ‘enchanted ways’ is his bench close to Baggot Street Bridge on Wilton Terrace and Wilton Park, on the north bank of the Grand Canal.

Sitting on a bench erected to the memory of ‘Mrs Dermot O’Brien’, Kavanagh wrote a sonnet requesting the same for himself. That bench inspired his sonnet, ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin.’ That particular seat was on the Mespil Road or south side of the Canal, and was dedicated to ‘Mrs Dermot O’Brien.’ She was Mabel Emmeline Smyly, the wife of Dermod William O’Brien (1865-1945) from Mount Trenchard, near Foynes, Co Limerick, a landscape and portrait painter who won an Olympic medal in the painting competition at the 1928 Olympic Games.

Shortly after Kavanagh died in 1967, his friends John Ryan and Denis Dwyer formed a committee to raise money to buy the materials and pay for the labour for another, less-well-known seat. That statue, unveiled a few months after his death, is a simple wood and granite seat designed by the artist Michael Farrell (1940-2000).

But the sculpture that is best-known as a commemoration of Patrick Kavanagh is on Wilton Terrace. This is a more recent sculpture, with a much-photographed life-size bronze figure by John Coll. It was commissioned as part of the Dublin 1991 European City of Culture celebrations and was unveiled 32 years ago on 11 June 1991 by President Mary Robinson.

John Coll is originally from Taylor’s Hill Galway and now living in Dublin. After an initial career as a marine biologist, he became a figurative sculptor with many public works to his name, including the monument to Patrick Kavanagh on the Grand Canal and his celebration in bronze of Brendan Behan on the Royal Canal in Drumcondra.

John Coll’s sculpture on Wilton Terrace, between Baggot Street Bridge and Leeson Street Bridge, shows a reflective Patrick Kavanagh sitting thoughtfully, his hat beside him on the bench. He seems to offer a sympathetic, non-judgmental ear to passers-by, inviting them to sit down and have a chat.

Coll imagines the poet Kavanagh composing not ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’ but another sonnet, ‘Canal Bank Walk,’ for a plaque beside the sculpture bears the quotation:

Leafy with love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me
Patrick Kavanagh 1904 to 1967
Sculptor John Coll.

The poem ‘Canal Bank Walk’ was also inspired by the Grand Canal, but was written in 1958 after the poet’s recovery from lung cancer and from legal difficulties:

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

The house where Patrick Kavanagh once lived on Raglan Road is now the Mexican Embassy in Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Did Joyce confuse Athos and Argos when naming the dog in ‘Ulysses’?

Docheiariou Monastery on Mount Athos … but why is Bloom’s dog named Athos? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Over the past few days in Dublin I have been musing about the churches named by James Joyce in Ulysses and wondering which synagogue in Dublin, if any, Leopold Bloom’s father Rudolf Bloom might have felt welcome in wither before he converted to Christianity or in his last days as he thought about returning to the Judaism of his birth.

In Ulysses, Joyce constantly draws comparisons between Jewish and Greek history, language and culture with Irish experiences. It is impossible to read Ulysses without an understanding of both Jewish life and practice and Homer’s Odyssey.

But in these past few days, I have also been wondering why on earth Rudolf Bloom called his dog Athos and not Argos.

It is difficult to imagine that Joyce did not know Mount Argus, the Passionist monastery in Harold’s Cross a ten-minute walk from Brighton Square where he was born and a church where his mother had once sung in the choir – with a Miss Bloom. There is a passing reference in Ulysses to Father Charles of Mount Argus (1821-1893), a Dutch-born Passionist monk with a reputation for healing miracles.

In Greek mythology, Argus or Argos (Ἄργος) is the name of characters, including Argus, King of Argos and son of Zeus and Niobe; Argos, son of Arestor, builder of the ship Argo in the story of the Argonauts; Argos, son of Jason and Medea; Argos Panoptes (Argus ‘All-Eyes), a giant with 100 eyes; and, most relative to my musings this week, Argos, the faithful dog of Odysseus.

In Book 17 of the Odyssey, Odysseus arrives home on Ithaka finally, after 10 years of fighting in Troy, followed by 10 more years struggling to get home to his island. In his absence, reckless suitors have taken over his house in hopes of marrying his wife Penelope.

In order to secretly re-enter his house to spring a surprise attack on the suitors, Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar, and only his son Telemachus is told of his true identity. As Odysseus approaches his home, he finds his dog Argos lying neglected on a pile of cow dung, infested with fleas, old and very tired.

This is a sharp contrast to the dog Odysseus left behind. Argos used to be known for his speed and strength and his superior tracking skills.

Unlike everyone else, including Eumaios, a lifelong friend, Argos recognises Odysseus at once and he has just enough strength to raise his head, prick up his ears and wag his tail. But the dog then loses the strength to hold his ears up, much less to greet his old master. The disguised Odysseus wipes away a tear and asks Eumaeus about the handsome animal. But he is unable to greet his faithful dog for fear that this would betray who he really is.

After telling the beggar about the dog’s glory days, the noble man who raised him from a puppy, and the duties that are forgotten when a lord goes away, Eumaeus goes into the palace to tend to the needs of the insolent suitors. Having finally seen the man he longed for, Argos dies. This is a substantial event in marking the return of Odysseus.

‘Be kind to Athos, Leopold …’ an old man and an old dog in Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

There is an echo of the story of Odysseus and his dog Argos in Ulysses, but Leopold Bloom’s father Rudolf Bloom named his dog Athos and not Argos.

In his suicide note, Rudolf Bloom asks Leopold Bloom to care for the animal. Throughout Ulysses, Bloom is kind to stray dogs. In the episode Circe, he gives one dog the meat he has bought, and in Eumaeus he remembers Molly’s vexation when he tried to bring home a stray dog.

Athos corresponds to Odysseus’s Argos, the faithful dog who waits for his master’s return. Bloom remembers his father’s instructions in his suicide note: ‘Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish.’ He recalls the note again in Ithaca: ‘be kind to Athos, Leopold…,’ remembering Athos as ‘an infirm dog.’ Bloom thinks in Hades that Athos too ‘took it to heart, pined away’ when his master died.

There are suggestions that Rudolph Bloom named his dog Athos after Athos, Count de la Fère, a character in the novels The Three Musketeers (1844), Twenty Years After (1845) and The Vicomte de Bragelonne (1847-1850) by Alexandre Dumas. The other two musketeers, Porthos and Aramis, are friends of the novel’s protagonist, d'Artagnan.

Despite Joyce’s deep love of Greek and classical literature there are no suggestions that Leopold or Rudolf Bloom ever knew of Mount Athos, let alone visited it, and Joyce himself never visited the holy mountain.

Perhaps we just have some simply play on words here by Joyce, conflating the names of two holy mountains with monasteries, both known as all-male bastions and with different levels of formidable severity when it comes to the exclusion of women.

Mount Argos Monastery in Dublin … not to be confused with the monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

A Bloomsday odyssey in Dublin in search of a synagogue for the Bloom family

The Adelaide Road Synagogue of the Dublin Hebrew Congregation opened in 1892 and closed in 1999 … one of two Dublin synagogues named by James Joyce in ‘Ulysses’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

It has been a pleasure to be back in Dublin today (16 June 2023), which is Bloomsday, celebrated throughout Dublin as a major cultural festival, even by people who have never read Ulysses.

Although I have been working most of the day on an historical documentary with a television production company from Montenegro, I could not help revelling in the coincidence that I am back here on Bloomsday.

Leopold Bloom is the most celebrated fictional person in modern Irish literature. Despite many of the claims that he is the most prominent Jewish figure in Irish literature, every critic known that Leopold Bloom is not actually a Jew. Although James Joyce makes Leopold Bloom’s father, Rudolf Bloom, a Hungarian who was born a Jew, the former Rudolf Virah converted to Christianity before he married.

Leopold Bloom’s mother was not Jewish, he was never circumcised not did he ever have a bar mitzvah, he was baptised in the Church of Ireland and was later baptised again and married in the Roman Catholic Church, and his diet is anything but kosher. By any shared standards in Judaism, Leopold Bloom is not Jewish.

On this blog yesterday, I was looking at some of the churches James Joyce refers to in Ulysses. But, on this Friday evening, as this is Bloomsday, I am allowed to amuse myself in wondering this: had Leopold Bloom been brought up a Jew, which would have been his family synagogue?

Joyce refers to at least two synagogues in Ulysses, Mary’s Abbey Synagogue and Adelaide Road Synagogue.

In Episode 10, ‘Wandering Rocks,’ Ned Lambert says heartily: ‘We are standing in the historic council chamber of saint Mary's abbey where silken Thomas proclaimed himself a rebel in 1534. This is the most historic spot in all Dublin. O’Madden Burke is going to write something about it one of these days. The old bank of Ireland was over the way till the time of the union and the original jews’ temple was here too before they built their synagogue over in Adelaide road. You were never here before, Jack, were you?’

Later, in Episode 17, ‘Ithaca,’ during a discussion that involves comparisons of Hebrew and the Irish language and a comparison of the sufferings of Jews and the impact of the Penal Laws on Irish Catholics, we are told: ‘their dispersal, persecution, survival and revival: the isolation of their synagogical and ecclesiastical rites in ghetto (S. Mary’s Abbey) and masshouse (Adam and Eve’s tavern): the proscription of their national costumes in penal laws and Jewish dress acts: the restoration in Chanan David of Zion and the possibility of Irish political autonomy or devolution.’

Despite his conversion and name change, the widowed Rudolf Bloom returned to some of his Jewish practices before his suicide, including celebrating the seder meal at Pesach. However, had Rudolf Bloom remained a Jew, and had his son Leopold been brought up a Jew, it is unlikely that either father or son would found a home in either of the synagogues named in Ulysses.

The synagogue at Mary’s Abbey survived from 1836 until 1892 … one of two Dublin synagogues named by James Joyce in ‘Ulysses’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

When the Stafford Street Synagogue in Dublin was forced to close in 1836, Dublin’s Jewish congregation moved to 12 Mary’s Abbey, off Capel Street, and remained there for almost two generations until 1892.

The new synagogue was Dublin’s fourth, following short-lived synagogues at Crane Lane, off Dame Street; Marlborough Green, off Marlborough Street; and the converted rooms on an upper floor of a private house at 40 Stafford Street, now Wolfe Tone Street.

Like its predecessors, this was not a purpose-built synagogue, but the former chapel of a small Presbyterian group known as the Non-Burghers or Seceders, who later joined similar groups in forming the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

Saint Mary’s Abbey, which gives its name to nearby Abbey Street, was founded by the French Cistercians in 1147 on the site of an older Benedictine foundation. The chapter house was used as the meeting place for the king’s council, and it was there ‘Silken’ Thomas Fitzgerald renounced his allegiance to Henry VIII and started his ill-fated rebellion. The abbey was dissolved at the Reformation in 1539 and its lands were divided.

The former Presbyterian chapel at Mary’s Abbey, which gives its name to Meeting House Lane, was bought on 15 January 1836 to provide a permanent synagogue for Dublin’s Jews, who then numbered about 300 people. A further £500 was spent on providing the new synagogue with a new Aron haKodesh or ark for the Torah Scrolls, a bimah or reading desk seating and flooring.

The Revd Isaac Davidson, who had been the minister in the Stafford Street synagogue, moved with the congregation to Mary’s Abbey. One of the first trustees, Alexander Lazarus Benmohel (1788-1839), travelled to London to ask the elders of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue or Bevis Marks to become trustees for the property, and some time later the congregation asked to be considered a branch of Bevis Marks.

The capacity of the synagogue is disputed by historians. Louis Hyman, in The Jews of Ireland (1972) says at first the synagogue had a seating capacity of about 90 and that the numbers were never greater than 350 at its peak. However, others say even these modest figures may be overstated.

The attendance and membership were drawn mainly from the Anglo-Jewish middle classes in Dublin, and its strict Victorian standards of decorum fostered a formal and stuffy atmosphere that later earned it the nickname of the Englishe shul (‘English synagogue’) among a newer immigrant community.

The congregation was seen as a prosperous community in its early years, and by 1854 it agreed to ‘conform to the form and service of the Great Synagogue, Duke’s Place, London,’ for centuries, the main Ashkenazi synagogue and centre of Ashkenazi life in London.

The congregation began to call itself the Dublin Hebrew Congregation from around 1859. It aligned itself with the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Anyone married to a non-Jew was not allowed to engage a seat or to receive any form of honour. The synagogue committee decided whether Jews who had intermarried or who did not openly profess the religion as a Jew would be allowed a Jewish burial.

By the mid-1870s, the Jewish Chronicle reported that the congregation was ‘respectable but unfortunately dwindling.’ The last Sabbath service was conducted at Mary’s Abbey on 5 December 1892. On the following Saturday, Jews and Christians attended the dedication of an ornate purpose-built synagogue at Adelaide Road, that remained open until 1999.

The site of the former synagogue at Mary’s Abbey in Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The synagogue at Adelaide Road, which is also named in Ulysses, was the first purpose-built synagogue in Ireland. It was designed in a vaguely Byzantine style, with seating for a congregation of 300 in the main body, and for another 150 in the galleries, by the Dublin-based architect John Joseph O’Callaghan (1838-1905).

The synagogue on Adelaide Road opened on 4 December 1892, when the Chief Rabbi, Dr Hermann Adler, said in his sermon: ‘Ireland is the only country in the world which cannot be charged with persecuting the Jews.’

The new synagogue was soon dubbed ‘the English shul’ by the Eastern European Jewish families in ‘Little Jerusalem’ because of its tendency to follow the style and custom of synagogues in Britain.

But Adelaide Road synagogue opened six years after Rudolf Bloom died by suicide in 1886 in the Queen’s Hotel in Ennis, Co Clare. So the Bloom family would never have known the inside of this synagogue.

The synagogue celebrated its centenary in 1992, but by the 1990s, the numbers attending on a Saturday morning usually stood at 40 to 50. The Dublin Hebrew Congregation voted to close the synagogue on Adelaide Road and amalgamate with the synagogue on Rathfarnham Road, Terenure. The building was sold, most of it was demolished, apart from the façade, and the site was redeveloped as offices. The Dublin Hebrew Congregation formally merged with the Terenure Hebrew Congregation in 2004.

The synagogue at 7 Oakfield Place, off Clanbrassil Street, was founded in 1885, a year before Rudolf Bloom died (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

In the 1880s and 1890s, a number of smaller synagogues opened in the area between the South Circular Road and Portobello that became known as ‘Little Jerusalem,’ and by 1890 communal relations were strained in Dublin.

Peter L Fishback on his website ‘Major Tweedy’s Neighborhood’ suggests that one of these small synagogues, the Hebroth at Oakfield Place, is ‘likely the synagogue Leopold Bloom’s father attended when as a widower, he returned to his old faith.’

The new Jewish immigrants fleeing Poland, Russia and the Baltics in the face of rising persecution in the Tsarist empire, found the congregation at Saint Mary’s Abbey too formal, stern, assimilated, middle class and unwelcoming. But these new small synagogues were also established out of necessity: the more orthodox new arrivals needed to be able to walk to their synagogue on Friday nights and Saturday mornings without breaching any of the limitations on distances during the sabbath.

According to Louis Hyman in The Jews of Ireland, the shul founded in Oakfield Place in 1885 was one these many hebroth established in this area by the recent immigrants from Lithuania and Poland.

The Oakfield Place synagogue had 45 seat-holders or subscribing members in 1885, according to the Jewish Year Book, although this number had fallen to 35 by 1897.

Although many of these small synagogues survived after the opening of the new synagogue at Adelaide Road in 1892, some of them survived for only a few short years, and others closed within a few decades.

When the United Hebrew Congregation was proposed in 1909, it had the support of many of these smaller hebroth. A synagogue opened at Greenville Hall on the South Circular Road in 1916, it attracted the members of many of these small synagogues, and a new synagogue built on the site of Greenville Hall opened in 1925. The hebra at Oakfield Place finally closed in the 1930s.

The synagogue at 11 Lombard Street West in the Portobello area of Dublin was founded in 1890 or 1893 and continued until the 1960s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Peter L Fishback points out that Rudolph Bloom would have been out of place in Mary’s Abbey Synagogue as the congregation consisted of fairly prosperous, native-born Dubliners with ancestors from England and Germany. But, as a Hungarian Jew might he not have also felt out of place among the recent immigrants from Lithuania and Poland?

Rudolf Bloom died on 27 June 1886, which means he could never have known the Chevrah Tehillim Synagogue at 46 Lombard Street West. Louis Hyman says this small shul was founded in 1893, although the Jewish Year Books say it dates from 1890.

Joyce in Ulysses has Leopold and Molly Bloom living nearby at 38 Lombard Street West in 1893. In her soliloquy, Molly recalls 1893, the year ‘the canal was frozen’ and how she had too many oranges and too much lemonade at a party in the Comerfords’ home in Clanbrassil Street. She was caught short on the way home to Lombard Street that night, and recalls how she had to use the men’s toilets in a pub, with great personal discomfort.

The small synagogue at 46 Lombard Street West closed in the early 1960s, due to the decline in the Jewish population in the area.

So, while the Blooms lived for a time on Lombard Street West, the widowed Rudolf Bloom could never have known this synagogue as he considered returning to the Judaism of his childhood before he died.

Shabbat Shalom

Adelaide Road Synagogue … one of two Dublin synagogues named in ‘Ulysses’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

A virtual Odyssey around Dublin churches with Leopold Bloom on the eve of Bloomsday

The bells of Saint George’s, heard throughout ‘Ulysses’, are now in Taney Church in Dundrum (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Tomorrow (Friday 16 June 2023) is the 119th anniversary of the day in 1904 on which Leopold Bloom wandered the streets of Dublin as a modern-day Odysseus and, after many adventures in his mind and in the city, found his way home on Bloomsday.

I am back in Dublin briefly, and on the eve of Bloomsday I thought it would be worth taking a ‘virtual tour’ of some of the churches named by James Joyce in Ulysses.

The best known church referred to in Ulysses is, perhaps, Saint George’s Church on Hardwicke Place. The bells that Bloom hears in his home at 7 Eccles Street are those of Saint George’s. The church was built at the beginning of 19th century. Its features include a 60-metre high spire and a four-column portico.

Francis Johnston, the architect who designed Saint George’s, was a keen campanologist and he presented the set of eight bells to the parish where they rang in the New Year for the first time on 1 January 1829.

The ‘Calypso’ episode restarts the story of Ulysses in Bloom’s home at 7 Eccles Street at 8 am on the morning of 16 June 1904.

When Bloom crosses ‘to the bright side’ of Eccles Street in ‘’Calypso, he can see the sun ‘nearing the steeple of George’s church.’ At the end of the chapter, he hears the bells in the steeple winding up to sound the time: ‘A creak and a dark whirr in the air high up. The bells of George’s church. They tolled the hour: loud dark iron.’ It is 8:45.

The bells are heard ringing in ‘Circe,’ ‘Ithaca’, and ‘Penelope’.

As various Dubliners prepare to execute Bloom in ‘Circe’, ‘The bells of George’s church toll slowly, loud dark iron,’ repeating not only the lovely description of their sound in ‘Calypso’ but also the nursery-rhyme sense that Bloom heard in them: ‘Heigho! Heigho!’

Later, when Bloom is apotheosised as Lord Mayor, monarch, and Saviour, ‘Joybells ring in Christ church, Saint Patrick’s, George's and gay Malahide’ – references to Christ Church Cathedral and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and to either Saint Andrew’s or Saint Sylvester’s in Malahdie.

The pediment of Saint George’s Church, Hardwicke Place, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

‘Ithaca’ marks the approach of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom to Bloom’s house by noting that ‘they crossed both the circus before George's church’ – the semicircular plaza before the church’s façade.

As the two men bid each other adieu midway through the episode, and as Molly lies in bed in ‘Penelope’, the church’s bells sound again, announcing the times as, respectively, 1:30 and 2 am.

Saint George’s Church closed in 1990, was deconsecrated in 1991 and has had many uses since, including a night club and theatre. The bells that Bloom hears ringing are now in Taney Church in Dundrum, where they were rung to mark Bloomsday for the first time last year (2022).

The interior of Saint Andrew’s Church, Westland Row, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

In ‘Lotus Eaters,’ Bloom stands outside Saint Andrew's Church reading a notice about a mission to convert people in China to the Catholic faith, and it makes him think about recruiting campaigns closer to home: ‘Prayers for the conversion of Gladstone they had too when he was almost unconscious. The protestants are the same. Convert Dr William J. Walsh D.D. to the true religion.’

When Bloom visits the church on Westland Row, he muses in and extended interior monologue about religion and the Catholic Church. Joyce names the church All Hallows in Ulysses, but Joyce is referring to Saint Andrew’s Church where my great-grandparents were married in 1851, and where my grandfather was baptised in 1867 and married his first wife in 1899.

Bloom has been baptised Catholic, but is intrigued as he watches the congregation receiving Communion: ‘Good idea the Latin. Stupefies them first. Hospice for the dying. They don’t seem to chew it; only swallow it down. Rum idea: eating bits of a corpse …’

The Church of the Three Patrons in Rathgar, where Leopold Bloom is rebaptised before he marries Molly (Photograph Patrick Comerford)

In ‘Ithaca’ readers learn that during his high school years Bloom expressed ‘disbelief in the tenets of the Irish church,’ a reference to the Church of Ireland in which he was raised. He was baptised in Saint Nicholas Without in the Coombe, by the Revd Gilmer Johnston. But this baptism is a literary device, for Johnston is a fictitious character and the church was demolished in 1862.

Leopold Bloom later became a Roman Catholic, and was baptised again by Father Charles Malone in the Church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar, prior to his marriage to Molly Tweedy.

In ‘Hades’, Tom Kernan, who followed a similar course and like Bloom and was never fully convinced of his Catholicism, tries to engage Bloom in covert criticism of a funeral Mass they attend:

— The reverend gentleman read the service too quickly, don’t you think? Mr Kernan said with reproof.

Mr Bloom nodded gravely looking in the quick bloodshot eyes. Secret eyes, secret searching eyes. Mason, I think: not sure. Beside him again. We are the last. In the same boat. Hope he’ll say something else.

Mr Kernan added:

— The service of the Irish church used in Mount Jerome is simpler, more impressive I must say.

Mr Bloom gave prudent assent.

The reference is to the Church of Ireland parish church of Harold’s Cross beside Mount Jerome cemetery.

Harold’s Cross Church … ‘The service … in Mount Jerome is simpler, more impressive I must say’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

From the top of Nelson’s Pillar, the two women in Stephen’s story ‘see the roofs and argue about where the different churches are: Rathmines’ blue dome, Adam and Eve’s, saint Laurence O’Toole’s.’

Looking for such landmarks suggests that Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe are pious women, but church spires and domes made up most of the landmarks on Dublin’s skyline in 1904.

Why has Stephen chosen these particular churches?

Perhaps their divergent angles from the pillar enable him to evoke the panoramic view the two women gaint by walking about the viewing platform at the top of the pillar. It is possible, though, that the history of Irish politics and nationalism may play a part in this choice too.

The Church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, Rathmines … the green copper dome dominates the skyline of Rathmines (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

‘Rathmines’ blue dome’ is the Church of Our Lady of Refuge or, more fully, the Church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners. Although they describe the dome as having a blue appearance, many would say the large oxidized copper dome is green.

A fire destroyed the church in January 1920 and the entire heavy dome smashed down onto the floor of the church. A beautiful new dome was completed in 1923, taller and more elaborate than its predecessor. It too was designed to weather to a blue-green hue, and, as I described it on this blog last Saturday, it continues to provide a striking visual landmark.

‘Adam and Eve’s’ is the popular name among Dubliners for the Church of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, the Franciscan church on Merchant’s Quay that also figures prominently in Finnegans Wake.

The third church, Saint Laurence O’Toole’s, is a Gothic Revival limestone structure built in the 1840s and 1850s in Seville Place, close to the Dublin Docks. Its majestic four-stage tower and spire were said to be the last landmark seen by emigrants leaving Ireland from the North Wall.

Two of the churches had nationalist associations. Saint Laurence O’Toole was the first Irishman elected Archbishop of Dublin, a town ruled by the Danes and the Norse. He was canonised by Pope Honorius III in 1225 and later became Dublin’s patron saint.

‘Adam and Eve’s’ takes its popular name from mass-goers during the Penal Laws entered through the Franciscan church through the Adam and Eve Tavern next door.

Joyce mentions the church’s services in Cyclops, when the narrator despises Bob Doran for ‘talking against the Catholic religion, and he serving mass in Adam and Eve’s when he was young with his eyes shut, who wrote the new testament, and the old testament.’

The name of Adam and Eve survives from an 18th century tavern (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

In ‘Ithaca’, Stephen and Bloom find a spiritual bond in belonging to despised faith communities: ‘their dispersal, persecution, survival and revival: the isolation of their synagogical and ecclesiastical rites in ghetto (S. Mary’s Abbey) and masshouse (Adam and Eve’s tavern): the proscription of their national costumes in penal laws and jewish dress acts: the restoration in Chanah David of Zion and the possibility of Irish political autonomy or devolution.’

When the Stafford Street Synagogue closed in 1836, Dublin’s Jewish congregation moved to premises at 12 Mary’s Abbey, off Capel Street, and remained there for almost two generations until 1892.

The new synagogue was Dublin’s fourth, and, like its predecessors, this was not a purpose-built synagogue, but the former chapel of a small Presbyterian group known as the Non-Burghers or Seceders, who later went on to join similar groups in forming the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

Saint Mary’s Abbey, which gives its name to nearby Abbey Street, was founded by the French Cistercians in 1147 on the site of an older Benedictine foundation. The chapter house was used as the meeting place for the king’s council, and it was there ‘Silken’ Thomas Fitzgerald renounced his allegiance to Henry VIII and started his ill-fated rebellion. The abbey was dissolved at the Reformation in 1539 and its lands were divided.

The last Sabbath service was conducted at Mary’s Abbey on 5 December 1892. On the following Saturday, Jews and Christians attended the dedication of an ornate purpose-built synagogue at Adelaide Road, that remained open until 1999.

The site of the former synagogue at Mary’s Abbey in Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

As for the Rathmines church, it is said the members of the Dublin IRA, assisted by a church official who belonged to ‘A’ Company, had slept in the church when police came looking for them in their houses. When the fire broke out in 1920, it turned out that the IRA had also been hiding large quantities of weapons and ammunition in the church.

There are references too in Ulysses to the ‘quiet church’ from which the sound of prayer ‘streamed forth at times.’ The church is obliquely named at the end of the sentence, when we learn that the prayers are addressed to ‘Mary, star of the sea,’ a reference to the Church of Mary Star of the Sea in Sandymount.

Prayers are being addressed to the Virgin Mary late on a Thursday evening during a temperance retreat in the church. Joyce had represented such a retreat once before, in ‘Grace,’ the penultimate story in Dubliners. There, the retreat takes place in ‘the Jesuit Church in Gardiner Street,’ in the north inner city, close to Saint George’s Church.

Saint Francis Xavier Church in Gardiner Street, Dublin