Ulysses in 80 2026-In Conversation with Robert Nicholson

After nearly-

Sure

... 50 years on Dublin's streets, are there people or stories the city remembers differently today than when you first began?

I suppose people know a lot more about James Joyce now than they did 50 years ago.

He'd be the classic example.

Than any of the characters of Ulysses.

There's a great book by Vivian Igoe about the, the, um, James Joyce's Dublin characters, which gives you all the facts, or, or all the known facts about anybody mentioned in Ulysses, and there's a whole host of them, the faithful departed as they are.

Well, a lot of them are in Glasnevin too.

So those would be examples I would think of.

I couldn't bring you up anybody specific.

Possibly our views of some of our great national figures have, um, changed through time.

What are some of the national figures, or not national figures, just well-known figures that are buried in Glasnevin?

I could go to the bottom of the alphabet and pick out Zozimus, for example.

[laughs]

Um, somebody finally put up a gravestone to him.

But Zozimus was the, the last of the great Dublin balladeers.

And his real name was Michael Moran, but, um, he's responsible for all sorts of lovely stuff, um, like, "In Egypt's land, contiguous to the Nile," which goes on to tell how Pharaoh's daughter went running on the sand and found a basket floating up with a smiling babby packed with wads of straw.

Um, so he was, he was one of the characters.

Yeah.

Trying to think of specific oddities.

I mean, there are people like, you know, all these people like Bang Bang and Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell and Professor MacGinni, people who actually feature in Ulysses.

I'm not sure if they are actually buried in Glasnevin.

You'll find Brendan Behan there.

He's got a carefully designed tombstone with a hole in it, and, um, well-wishers will often leave a pint of Guinness there for him.

And Daniel O'Connell.