Sir, - The annual gentrification of June 16th by Dublin's provincial immigrants - Dub mockery would rapidly puncture their pretensions and so the circle is tightened - provides light relief on the streets of Dublin for the attempted secular canonisation of the author who hated Dublin and despised its working class people.
The mores of the day did not suit his wide tastes and so he left the country, as was his right. But his resentful barbs towards the Ireland which exported him are evident in his draft writings. I understand there are no finished originals as Joyce was near-sighted and could not correct the drafts, containing copious grammatical errors and indecipherable gaffes, which proof readers passed and printers merrily ran off. Hence the myth of literary genius, the constant interpretations of his works and an unwillingness, amounting to a fear, to acknowledge the quicksands of mediocrity. It is their reputations which are in the equation, not that of Joyce. They are the ones not wearing the clothes, hence the industry, the cover up.
It is said that Joyce lived in straitened circumstances both in Ireland and abroad, and was indebted to some who believed in him and funded his desire to vilify Dublin and its people. I now hear that the Joyce industry is a wealthy trust fund and I am sure that the fund has channelled some of these monies to the still deprived areas of central Dublin from which the trust originally gained its millions. - Yours, etc., Michael Mac Coisdealbh,
Goatstown,
Dublin 14.