In Calypso Bloom imagines young publicans-to-be
"Coming up redheaded curates from
the county Leitrim, rinsing
empties and old man in the
cellar." The picture is of rustics scraping by in the big
city, doing menial labor. Joyce appears to have based this
picture on an actual employee of O'Rourke's pub named Patrick
Mulhern. Later in the novel Bloom mentions the Leitrim town
where Mulhern was born, "Carrick-on-Shannon," as a kind of
quintessentially Irish backwater far removed from exotic
foreignness.
County Leitrim (LEE-trəm) is in the northern part of
Connacht, just south of Donegal. It has the smallest
population of any of Ireland's 32 counties, and little in the
way of scenic or historic sites to attract visitors. Gifford
observes that in 1904 it "seemed remote and agrarian to
Dublin, and its inhabitants were regarded as country
bumpkins." Carrick-on-Shannon, the largest town, is no more
than a village by the standards of most counties. Fewer than
5,000 people live there today. Sited at a strategic ford on
the River Shannon, it grew up as a market town hosting several
annual fairs. In Eumaeus,
Bloom indicts the provincial thinking of the barhounds of Cyclops
who were enraged when he called Jesus a Jew: "because
mostly they appeared to imagine he came from
Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhere about in the county
Sligo." In this hyperbolic account, a fair-skinned and
blue-eyed Savior stumbled out of the most unforeign, chastely
Irish place imaginable.
[2021: Checking the 1901 census records for Larry O'Rourke's
building on a whim, Senan Molony has discovered that in that
year an unmarried 22-year-old man named "Patrick Mullherne,"
who was born in "Carrick on Shannon, Leittrim," was living on
the premises and working as a "shop assistant." No doubt he
had red hair. Mulhern or Mulherne ("Leittrim" leads one to
suspect that either Larry O'Rourke or John Phillips, the
census "enumerator," had a habit of doubling consonants) does
not appear in the 1911 census records, but presumably he may
have still been living in the building in 1909, when Joyce
visited Dublin and stayed with his friend J. F. Byrne at 7
Eccles Street. One can easily imagine Joyce having drinks in
the corner pub while staying with Byrne, learning that the
red-headed barman was from Country Leitrim, and including him,
relatively anonymously, in the legion of Dubliners who
populate the pages of Ulysses.]
