(IRISH INDEPENDENT, November 27th, 2015)

The distinctive triangular railed Sandymount Green park is at the heart of the prosperous Dublin city village of Sandymount
James Joyce, as we know, was a man of many parts. Of Dublin that is. Both in terms of the many places the peripatetic Joyce family lived in during the author’s formative years and those places associated with his great works of fiction. Like the southside suburban village of Sandymount.
At the opening of the third chapter of Ulysses we encounter Joyce’s literary alter ego Stephen Dedalus mid-thought and mid-stride on Sandymount Strand. And later in the book Leopold Bloom finds himself sitting on rocks overlooking the strand observing a young woman, Gertie McDowell, and, let us say, fantasises about her.