Prof. Murray’s “Zoomsday” Celebration Featured in Article in Irish Times

For over a decade, Professor JaneAnne Murray, together with New York lawyer Janet Walsh, has organized an annual Bloomsday celebration for the Irish American Bar Association of New York—an event that pays tribute to James Joyce’s masterwork, Ulysses, and Joyce’s contribution to First Amendment jurisprudence. This year, the event went online for a “Zoomsday” celebration. The featured speaker was famed Irish journalist Frank McNally, who gave a talk on the Phoenix Park Murders of 1882, which are referred to several times in Ulysses.

McNally’s focus was the discreet memorial—a cross cut into the grass—that has marked the spot, more or less continuously, for 138 years. As McNally explains in his article in the Irish Times about the event, “[t]his tied in with the IABANY’s general theme of justice. ... But it also touched on a current hot topic, the war on statues, and questions of who should and should not be commemorated.” McNally adds that based on a draft script, Murray had created “a slick PowerPoint presentation, possibly from her kitchen [ed. note: correct assumption], which [he] watched like everyone else. Anyway, it seemed to work. At one stage of the talk, I found myself thinking: this is actually interesting.”

Ex-Mayor Pete Buttigieg sent a letter, regretting his inability to attend, and praising Joyce as “the great epicist of the everyday.” The letter concludes:

It strikes me that you, who work in the law, are like novelists, at least a little bit Joycean in the sense that you spend so much time with the written word, exploring and then effectuating its concrete consequences for human affairs and individual lives. With so much change upon us—and so many changes needed from us—it is as good a time as ever to seek out new ways for words to become actions.

In addition to McNally’s talk and Mayor Buttigieg’s letter, the event featured music, song, and readings from Irish Senator David Norris and movie director, John Crowley.