National Library of Ireland Announces Bloomsday 2026 Programme of Events
In collaboration with the James Joyce Centre the National Library of Ireland will celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysess with a programme of readings and performances as part of the official Bloomsday Festival on June 16.
Headlining the programme is a special theatrical reading by actors in Joycean costume from scenes set in the NLI’s Reading Room. During the performance Ulysses characters Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan will meet the ‘quaker librarian’, NLI’s former Director Thomas William Lyster, while Leopold Bloom consults the NLI’s newspaper collections on a quest to find a back issue of the Kilkenny People. Performances start at 2pm and 2.30pm in the Main Reading Room of the National Library, on Kildare Street, coinciding with the exact hour Bloom enters the National Library.
Visitors to the NLI can also enjoy a special performance by the Fingal Mummers inspired by Ulysses character Buck Mulligan’s mummers play. This performance takes place from 3pm until 4pm on the front steps of National Library of Ireland. Welcoming visiwill be the James Joyce Massive Head by the Galway-based performing arts group Arcana.
At the Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again exhibition at the Bank of Ireland Cultural & Heritage Centre visitors will be able to listen to readings from Seamus Heaney’s Finders Keepers, with examples from the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses. The performance will be held at 12 noon.
The NLI’s Reading Room which featured in Episode 9: Scylla and Charybdis of Ulysses will also be open to the public to visit between 6pm and 8pm on June 16.
“The National Library of Ireland is central to the Bloomsday story," said Director, Dr Audrey Whitty, "and we are delighted to be part of the Bloomsday Festival this year. Not only is our beautiful Reading Room the setting for one of the chapters of Ulysses – ‘Scylla and Charybdis’- it also features National Library director at the time, Thomas William Lyster, who would have been well known to James Joyce."
Director of the James Joyce Centre, Darina Gallagher, added: "We are proud to be working with the National Library of Ireland this Bloomsday with an expanded programme of events, bringing to life the characters and places of Ulysses. The Bloomsday Festival is a colourful celebration of James Joyce himself and especially his acclaimed novel Ulysses with its rich cast of characters. In partnership with the NLI and through our Bloomsday Passport, we encourage everyone to embark on their own literary journey around Dublin, following in the footsteps of Bloom and Dedalus on that summer afternoon in 1904.”
