The work of James Joyce is full of music. It is not used only as decoration, but also as a way to express hidden feelings and inner emotions. This is especially clear in the short story The Dead, where Joyce uses the song The Lass of Aughrim to give deeper meaning to the narrative.
James Joyce Tower, Sandycove, Dublin
Every year, at the beginning of January, I return to both the story and its film adaptation with a feeling of nostalgia. It is a deeply personal story about love, loss and identity, which T. S. Eliot called one of the greatest short stories ever written. When I listen to the old Irish ballad, I often reread the final, most beautiful paragraph of the story. It always fills me with wonder and deep emotion, and it moves me every time. This passage also has a musical quality, as its gentle rhythm and softly flowing melody create an atmosphere of silence, sadness and reflection, bringing the story to a close.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
James Joyce, The Dead
Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, Ireland
Music is present throughout the entire story, from Italian opera to popular folk songs. Singing, dancing and playing music create the background of the Christmas party, while conversations at the table refer to famous singers and the musical life of Dublin. All of this slowly leads the reader towards the emotional centre of the story.
James Joyce Centre, Dublin
The Lass of Aughrim in the Story
The song The Lass of Aughrim, heard almost by chance after the party, is not just background music. It becomes a voice from the past that suddenly enters the present. For Gretta Conroy, the song brings back the memory of her first love, Michael Furey, a young man who once sang this song for her and who died tragically young. This memory reveals how strong and sincere that love was, and it clearly contrasts with the emotional distance in her marriage. The past feels more alive and more real than her quiet everyday life.
James Joyce Centre, Dublin
The song is also essential for her husband, Gabriel, as it leads him to a moment of deep understanding. He realises how empty his emotional life is and understands that the dead can have more power over the living than those who live without strong feelings. In this way, The Lass of Aughrim brings together the main themes of the story – memory, love and death – and leads to a sad, quiet ending that invites deep reflection on human life.
* * *
Let the music invite quiet reflection as we listen, accompanied by the restored guitar that once belonged to Joyce himself.
Small Things Like These – a quiet Christmas story with a sharp edge
Christmas is coming. And maybe this time, instead of Dickens, we could read Claire Keegan. Instead of A Christmas Carol, Small Things Like These, a Booker Prize finalist from three years ago. A moving story full of Christmas spirit, about the power of everyday choices. How small acts of kindness can save lives and stand against hypocrisy and evil – the institutionalised violence done in the name of a religion whose first and greatest commandment is to love your neighbour…
The Good Shepherd nuns, in charge of the convent, ran a training school there for girls, a providing them with basic education. They also ran a laundry business. Little was known about the training school, but the laundry had a good reputation. (…) Reports were that everything that was sent in, whether it be a raft of bedlinen or just a dozen handkerchiefs, came back same as new.
There was other talk, too, about the place. Some said that the training school girls, as they were known, weren’t students of anything, but girls of low character who spent their days being reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen, that they worked from dawn til night. The local nurse had told that she’d been called out to treat a fifteen-year-old with varicose veins from standing so long at the wash-tubs. Others claimed that it was the nuns themselves who worked their fingers to the bone, knitting Aran jumpers and threading rosary beads for export, that they had hearts of gold and problems with their eyes, and weren’t allowed to speak, only to pray, that some were fed no more than bread and butter for half the day but were allowed a hot dinner in the evenings, once their work was done. Others swore the place was no better than a mother-and-baby home where common, unmarried girls went in to be hidden away after they had given birth, saying it was their own people who had put them in there after their illegitimates had been adopted out to rich Americans, or sent off to Australia, that the nuns got good money by placing these babies out foreign, that it was an industry they had going.
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These
Breaking the silence – voices that challenged Ireland’s moral order
When the main character of this short novel, coal delivery man Bill Furlong, goes through the convent gate, it is 1985. Seven years later, on 3 October 1992, Sinéad O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. People saw this as blasphemy, and it ruined her career. She was criticised for saying out loud what half the world now talks about.
Interestingly, in James Joyce’s story The Sisters, published in 1904 in The Irish Homestead Journal (and included ten years later in the collection Dubliners), the nine-year-old narrator wonders why the death of his intellectual and spiritual mentor, Father James Flynn, brought him relief. From the half-spoken conversations among the adults, we learn that the priest had some secret that everyone supposedly knew about, but no one spoke of directly. The hints, however, are quite clear (at least from today’s perspective). They paint a picture of a depraved clergyman who harmed a child who trusted him. One of the characters sums it up by saying:
It’s bad for children. My idea is: let a young lad run about and play with young lads of his own age and not be…
James Joyce, Sisters
James Joyce Centre, Dublin
Joyce did not finish that sentence at the time. The Irish had to wait several more decades. The silence was finally broken by actor and performer Gerard Mannix Flynn, who, as a teenager, spent two years in an industrial school in Letterfrack, run from the late 19th century by the Catholic organisation Christian Brothers. His book, Nothing to say (published in 1983), became one of the first voices speaking out about the sexual abuse of minors by clergy.
Writing the story was frightening: I knew that certain sections of Irish society would reject the notion that the Christian Brothers could do anything wrong. As for the sexual abuse, well, that word was just not heard anywhere in Ireland. Strange, because they all knew that children were being sexually abused by those in authority; the government knew, the police knew, the clergy and religious knew, yet nobody could name it. They were afraid of their own shame, and conspired to deny and hide it.
Gerard Mannix Flynn, Nothing to say
St Francis Xavier Church, Dublin
Behind the convent gates – Magdalene laundries and hidden abuse
The use of violence was supported by institutions run across Ireland by the Catholic Church and religious organisations. Care and education centres, which were supposed to provide rehabilitation for young people, in reality often functioned as high-security prisons, where children and adolescents were exploited as cheap labour and repeatedly subjected to physical abuse and sexual assault. There are known cases of fatal beatings, prolonged isolation of children from their families, rape, and psychological mistreatment of residents. Among such institutions were the so-called Magdalene laundries, which were meant to help prostitutes or single, often underage mothers with “unwanted” children (whom the nuns frequently took away, claiming they would not be good mothers and did not deserve a child). In a final note to her text, Claire Keegan explains:
Ireland’s or last Magdalen laundry was not closed down until 1996. It is not known how many girls and women were concealed, incarcerated and forced to labour in these institutions. Ten thousand is the modest figure; thirty thousand is probably more accurate. Most of the records from the Magdalen laundries were destroyed, lost, or made inaccessible. Rarely was any of these girls’ or women’s work recognised or acknowledged in any way. Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they could have had. It is not known how many thousands of infants died in these institutions or were adopted out from the mother-and-baby homes. Earlier this year, the Mother and Baby Home Commission Report found that nine thousand children died in just eighteen of the institutions investigated. In 2014, the historian Catherine Corless made public her shocking discovery that 796 babies died between 1925 and 1961 in the Tuam home, in County Galway. These institutions were run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish State. No apology was issued by the Irish government over the Magdalen laundries until Taoiseach Enda Kenny did so in 2013.
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These
Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin
What remains after the silence is broken
The Magdalene laundries have become one of the most powerful cultural symbols of institutional violence against women in Ireland. Peter Mullan’s 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters – written and directed by Mullan – shocked public opinion by showing the brutal reality inside those institutions. Joni Mitchell’s protest song The Magdalene Laundries gives a similarly moving and critical voice. The work of Edna O’Brien, though often more indirect, also addresses the fate of Irish women trapped by social and religious systems of control. Together, these works form a layered picture of collective memory and critical reflection on the lives of women in 20th-century Ireland.
To get the best out of people, you must always treat them well, Mrs Wilson used to say.
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These
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Glasnevin Cemetery is Dublin’s national necropolis and one of the city’s most important literary landscapes. It is a place where memory, history, and everyday life meet – right beside The Gravediggers pub.
Established in 1832, Glasnevin is the final resting place of over a million people, including many important cultural and political figures from Ireland. It is therefore not only a burial ground, but also a place of national memory.
Glasnevin Cemetery also has personal meaning in the life of James Joyce. His parents, John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane ‘May’ Joyce, are buried there, which adds a more intimate, family dimension to the writer’s connection with the place and the city.
The Gravediggers pub – history at the gates of Glasnevin Cemetery
Right next to one of the cemetery gates is a pub with the charming name ‘The Gravediggers’, founded by John Kavanagh in 1833. Kavanagh had a knack for business, because not only did he open a bar that attracted mourners and served the gravediggers who worked at the cemetery, but he also bought the land around it to prevent any potential competition in the immediate vicinity.
The pub is named after the cemetery workers who were so keen to use its services. So keen that the main gate was eventually moved to another location, and a special window was made in the pub’s wall through which gravediggers could order beer by knocking on it with a shovel. Today, the pub’s guests are mostly tourists visiting the cemetery.
The Gravediggers pub
Between literature and everyday life
However, James Joyce does not mention The Gravediggers in his famous novel Ulysses although one of the characteristic scenes – the funeral of Paddy Dignam (Episode 6, Hades) – takes place in Glasnevin Cemetery.
The O’Connell circle, Mr Dedalus said about him. (…)
Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland’s hearts and hands. (…)
How many! All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we. (…)
The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place. (…)
Thank you. How grand we are this morning!
James Joyce, Ulysses
In the pub itself, part of the action of the novel Dublinesque by the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas takes place.
The story follows Samuel Riba, a retired Spanish publisher who loves books and worries about the decline of the literary world. He travels to Dublin with a few friends to hold a mock funeral for the ‘Gutenberg era’ – the age of printed books – inspired by Ulysses and the work of James Joyce.
While in Dublin, they visit real places linked to Ulysses, including ‘The Gravediggers’. Vila-Matas uses the pub as both a real setting and a symbol – a place between life and death, past and present – which suits a story about endings: of people, books, and times gone by.
15 Usher’s Island in Dublin, Ireland, is a classic Georgian townhouse overlooking the River Liffey. It’s an important part of literary history. In the late 1800s, the house was home to the grand-aunts of writer James Joyce, who also ran a music school there. Their home later became the setting for one of Joyce’s most famous stories, The Dead, the last one in his collection, Dubliners.
Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat when the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia Morkan’s choir, any of Kate Morkan’s pupils that were grown up enough, and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too.
The Dead takes place during a Christmas party at 15 Usher’s Island. The main characters, Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta, attend the yearly dinner held by Gabriel’s aunts. The evening features music and a discussion on politics. As they prepare to leave, Gabriel sees Gretta standing quietly on the stairs, deep in thought. A song from the party has brought back memories of her youth…
This story made the house a well-known literary location, though in later years it was often empty or used by squatters.
In 1987, director John Huston used the house’s exterior in his film version of The Dead.
A scene from John Huston’s film The Dead
A brief revival of Joyce’s world…
Around 2000, Brendan Kilty, a barrister and passionate Joycean, purchased 15 Usher’s Island and lovingly restored the house as a tribute to James Joyce’s The Dead. His vision was to revive the spirit of the story’s famous dinner scene, hosting gatherings and events that celebrated Dublin’s literary heritage. For a time, the house stood as a living museum of Joyce’s world – filled with music, conversation, and echoes of the past. However, financial difficulties eventually forced Kilty into bankruptcy in 2012, and the house was sold by receivers in 2017.
The drawing-room was filled with so many guests that the young men, unable to find chairs, had to stand about in groups near the piano. The middle of the room was occupied by a large square piano and a tall mirror above the mantelpiece reflected the gas flames, making the room bright and warm.
…then left waiting for its future
For many people in Dublin, the house still feels like a part of Joyce’s world. When there were plans to turn it into a tourist hostel, writer Colm Tóibín and others objected, saying it was too important culturally. Unfortunately, their appeal didn’t succeed.
Whatever the future holds for 15 Usher’s Island, The Dead has left its mark here. The house now faces a bridge named after Joyce, linking Usher’s Island with Blackhall Place on the north side of the river. The bridge opened on Bloomsday in 2003.
While reading So it goes. Travels in the Aran Isles, Xian and places between by Nicolas Bouvier, I recall my visit to Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands on the West coast of Ireland.
And while life on the island may seem blissful and idyllic in the innocent July weather, the truth that spoke to me most eloquently was the one I saw hauntingly enshrined in this tree.
Bouvier expresses this in the following words:
A wind which had picked up from Newfoundland would not let itself be fooled by a cliff, however imposing. For the wind it was less an obstacle than a riddle to which it had long known the answer. This is how it works: at the foot of the cliff it forms a cushion of air; from this springboard it rises up and starts again. When, having made the climb, it reaches the top and hurtles down the other slope in almighty gusts which flatten broom and thistles, it better not to stand in its way. A few meters from the fort, one of these gusts hit me, throwing me to the ground and tossing me into the stones and brambles like yesterday’s newspaper. I saw my heavy camera bag bounding ahead to the green meadows, scattering the rabbits, and found shelter in a corner of the fort, hands and nose bleeding from scratches.
I asked Hernon what people did here at this time of year.
“After the January storms, if the west wind sets in, they do nothing. The waves are too strong for coastal fishing. (…) The walls around the kitchen gardens get repaired but the wind’s too strong to spread seaweed on the meadows, it blows over the stone walls and then you have to start all over again. The men do odd jobs around the house, and drink; the women knit for the summer tourist trade. And not just any old knitting: each of the island villages, even if there are only four or five houses, has its pattern, like a brand. In the old days it was a way to identify the drowned who washed up on shore: crabs and fish don’t eat wool. Today it’s only the drunk who drown; they have their separate corner in the cemetery”.
/Nicolas Bouvier, So it goes. Travels in the Aran Isles, Xian and places between/
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