Bloomsday 2024
On 13 June, the Embassy held an event at the Residence to mark Bloomsday 2024.
The event was hosted with the Centre for Irish Studies at Charles University. Ambassador Gibbons provided welcoming remarks, which were followed by readings from Bloomsday and Finnegans Wake by faculty members and students of the Centre, with excerpts read in English, Irish, Czech and Ukrainian.
In addition to works by Joyce, there was a reading of Seamus Heaney's poem, Beacons at Bealtaine. The poem had been commissioned by the Irish Government in 2004 for the accession of the Czech Republic, alongside 9 other countries, to the European Union, which took place during Ireland's Presidency of the Council of the EU. To mark the 20th anniversary on 1 May 2024, the poem was also translated into Czech by Mariana Machová, Markéta Novotná, Maxmilián Filip and Stanislav Cincibuch.
Conamara Chaos, a local Czech band, played traditional Irish music during the event.