Pictures of people reading at a Bloomsday event in Portland OR on June 18, 2026
Bloomsday at Kells Restaurant 2026
Since the final years of the former century Portland Hibernians have been gathering each June to celebrate in their own ways the written words of James Joyce and other fine Irish writers of which there are way more than you’d expect to find from an island in the Atlantic Ocean that’s one third the size of Oregon.
Erin Walsh recruited the readers, brought some beautiful flowers and read from the works of Seamus Heaney.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme. The Cure of Troy
Colleen Schultz chose a key scene from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, which she read with Jim Keegan.
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Mike Phillips matched Joyce’s use of the sea as an image with the lyrics of a song by Tom Petty, Wildflowers.
You belong in a boat out at sea. Sail away, kill off the hours. You belong somewhere you feel free
Daniel Curran wrote a piece for the evening about two things of beauty in the front yard of Curran Castle in NE Portland that people come to view: a pair of red maple trees.
Gemma Whelan read how Joyce intricately described water in Ithaca, Chapter 17 of Ulysses. Leopold Bloom, a self-described “waterlover,” returns as always to the sea.
David O’Longaigh memorized a poem back in Dublin in the 1970s so he could impress the young ladies. It was written by Oliver St. John Grogarty, a real person who inspired the character Buck Mulligan (Stately, plump) in Ulysses. David ended the evening with, naturally, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. YES.
Rob Larson read from his own works about how human nature can be so confounding when relationships are involved.
Claudia Dissel recalled how JFK used Joyce’s imagery of the sea to recall how our ancestors got here. When he addressed the Dail in 1963, JFK told Irish lawmakers how the character Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses describes Ireland as someone seen "afar... like a shy young peasant... at the door, lifting his head to the door, watching the loose drift of his herd,...”
Manus O’Donnell talked about and read from the greatest short story ever written: The Dead in Joyce’s collection of stories called Dubliners. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
The Portland Hibernian Society meets on the Third Thursday of the month September through June. Click here to sign up.
Bloomsday - June 18, 2026