16th June: Bloomsday (Dublin)

Bloomsday. The events of James Joyce's novel Ulysses take place on 16 June 1904. Joyce fans will be celebrating today by retracing the steps of the main character through shops, hotels and pubs. 10 things you might not know about Dublin:

1. The English name for the city comes from the Old Irish Dublind, meaning dark pool, referring to a dark tidal pool where the River Poddle entered the Liffey behind Dublin Castle. The name in Irish is Baile Átha Cliath, meaning ‘Ford of the Reed Hurdles’.
2. Dublin has more green spaces per square kilometre than any other European capital city, with 97% of city residents living within 300 metres of a park.
3. Dublin has a lot of rivers. Forty six of them to be exact. The most famous is the Liffey, which divides the city in two between the Northside and the Southside. Others include the Tolka, the Dodder, the Swan, the Poddle.
4. Which brings us to bridges. There are two especially famous ones. The O’Connell Bridge, which was originally made of rope and only one man and his donkey could pass over it at a time. Now it is made of concrete and has the distinction of being the the only traffic bridge in Europe which is wider than it is long.
5. The Ha'penny Bridge is a pedestrian bridge built in 1816. The name comes from the toll originally charged to cross it.
6. One of Dublin's newest monuments is the Spire of Dublin, officially "Monument of Light". It is a 121.2-metre (398 ft) conical spire made of stainless steel on O'Connell Street. It is intended to mark Dublin's place in the 21st century. At dusk the monument appears to merge into the sky. The base of the monument is lit and the top is illuminated to provide a beacon in the night sky across the city.
7. We can't leave out Molly Malone. She is the character in the popular song, also known as Cockles and Mussels or In Dublin's Fair City, which has become the unofficial anthem of Dublin. The song tells of a fishmonger who plied her trade on the streets of Dublin, but who died young of a fever. While there is no evidence that Molly Malone really existed, in 1988 the Dublin Millennium Commission endorsed claims about a Mary Malone (Molly being a derivative of Mary) who died on 13 June 1699, and proclaimed 13 June to be "Molly Malone day". She is commemorated with a statue designed by Jeanne Rynhart, erected to celebrate the city's first millennium in 1988. This statue is known colloquially as "The Tart With The Cart" or "The Trollop With The Scallops."
8. Dubliners have a habit of giving statues and landmarks amusing nicknames of this type. Other examples are the “Hags with the bags”, (statues of women near the Ha'penny Bridge), the “Dick with the stick” (the statue of James Joyce), the “Flue with the View” (the Chimney Stack with the new lift in Smithfield Village) and the aforementioned Spire of Dublin is being called the “Stilleto by the Ghetto” and the “Stiffy by the Liffey”.
9. Dublin is twinned with San Jose, Liverpool, Barcelona, Beijing and Emmetsburg, Iowa.
10. Dublin has produced a lot of famous people. James Joyce, naturally, but others include writers William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, J. M. Synge, Maeve Binchy, Roddy Doyle. and Bram Stoker; actors Sir Michael Gambon, Colin Farrell, Colm Meaney and Gabriel Byrne, and music acts U2, Westlife, the Dubliners, the Boomtown Rats, Boyzone, Thin Lizzy, Sinéad O'Connor, the Script and dare I say it, Jedward.