Today, Bloomsday, 16 June 2018, let’s take a look at Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and his use of Tullamore tobacco in the opening chapter.
The Tullamore based businessman Daniel E. Williams took the side of Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-91) in the great divide in Irish politics in 1890-91. Parnell had been the greatest leader in Irish politics in the nineteenth century bringing Home Rule centre stage in 1886. Although a quiet and reserved man he could always put in a commanding performance in the House of Commons. Gladstone said of him that he had the rarest of qualities in a speaker – measure. He brought about a ‘Union of Hearts’ between the Liberals and Ireland, a union that was shattered in 1890 when Parnell was cited as co-respondent in the Katharine O’Shea divorce case. Parnell died a year later, a broken man. Nonetheless he had brought to Ireland a sense of Irish statehood, Ireland was a nation.
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