Just off a much-delayed bus from Perpignan to Barcelona last weekend and still hoping to reach Valencia by nightfall, I needed a place to recharge my phone and take stock.
But the bus station seemed devoid of power points and the cafés around it were small and crowded. So I sought asylum in the nearest Irish pub, which was called the James Joyce. And realising while there that Valencia was no longer a same-day option, I ended up watching the All-Ireland hurling semi-final between Dublin and Cork.
The clientele was mostly Irish but I was intrigued to note a couple of Catalans at the next table studying the game with great apparent interest. Had they come in for the tennis and stayed for this? Or were they aficionados, initiated by Irish holidays or girlfriends? I couldn’t tell.
Then half-time arrived and they got up to leave. So doing, one of them pointed to the television and asked me with wrinkled brow: “What is this game?” So I explained it was called “hurling”, having to repeat and then spell the name for him.
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Then I embarked proudly on the usual spiel about how it was an amateur sport, and all the players had day jobs, even though the biggest games attracted sell-out crowds of 82,000, etc, etc.
With the slightest encouragement, I’d have offered a deep-dive introduction into the history and culture of the GAA, channeling Joyce’s The Citizen and his friends in the Barney Kiernan’s pub scene of Ulysses:
“So off they started about Irish sport and shoneen games the like of the lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil and building up a nation once again and all that..”
Instead, I restricted myself to irony: “It’s supposed to be our national game but half the country can’t play it.” Then the man who’d inquired what it was called, still pointing at the TV, followed up with a question that floored me.
“But what country is this?” he asked.
I was momentarily lost for words. We were in an Irish pub and had just watched 30 men with pale skin and freckles, many of them called O’Leary, O’Sullivan, O’Donoghue, and the likes, knocking Gaelic-style lumps out of each other for half an hour. What other country could it be?
“Ireland,” I said, amid a sense of wonder that this wasn’t blindingly obvious. And maybe the man was embarrassed, because after he asked what the two teams were and I told him, he added: “Ah yes, the famous places.”
Then he thanked me and left with the parting message: “I have learned something new today.” I watched him go thinking I had learned something too.
No doubt we Irish do have an exaggerated sense of our place in the world. That said, after checking into a hotel for my Barcelona stop-over, I strolled towards the nearby Barri Gotic (Latin Quarter) and was struck by how Placa de Catalunya felt like just a larger version of Eyre Square. The illusion persisted all the way down Shop Street and Quay Street, or the “Ramblas” as they’re known here.
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Mid-way through my Mediterranean odyssey in France and Spain, I got an email from another Irish Ulysses whose literary adventures involve a more distant corner of the Med: an island off Croatia.
Born in Roscommon but based in Belgium for many years, James Candon describes himself as a “recovering lawyer, now a wannabe writer”, who in pursuit of the latter vocation, recently completed a masters in western literature at Leuven.
I first met him at the International Flann O’Brien Conference in Transylvania in 2023 and he was also among the Flannoraks who attended the latest gathering of that cult, last month, in the even more exotic location of Strabane.
But since 2024, James runs a literary festival of his own, on the island of Lopud, near Dubrovnik. A multilingual event, it brings together writers from Ireland, Croatia, and elsewhere. This year’s instalment will be from September 20th to 22nd.
The good news is that, thanks to an associated writing contest, at least one Irish person can attend the event free. The competition is for a short story, essay, or poetry on a theme inspired by a once luxurious but now abandoned hotel on Lopud.
The general subject matter should involve ideas of house and home, James writes: “The concept of one’s home has been a cherished literary motif throughout time, from Greek tragedies to the present day. Hotels, in turn, offer a temporary refuge – a place of warmth without judgment. But what do their walls feel, and what stories do they long to tell?”
The one in Lopud should be the subject or setting of the piece, full rules for which are at https://pontalopud.hr/book-bridge-2025/. But no specialist local knowledge is expected. In this vein, entrants may be reassured by the accidental involvement in the project of the all-purpose Irish national adjective. What kind of hotel was the one in question? It was a Grand Hotel, of course.
