Connect: In eleven days Dublin will celebrate the centenary of Bloomsday. There will be a breakfast for 10,000 people in O'Connell Street and chat will naturally include opinions on how the city has changed over the last 100 years. No doubt some punters will wear dodgy Edwardian rig-outs but if these put scores of literary codgers in celebratory mood, so be it.
Fifty years ago celebrations for Bloomsday were more muted. There were codgers then too, of course, but for the most part public Joyce-admirers were serious about literature and equally serious about drink. Myles na gCopaleen, Anthony Cronin and Patrick Kavanagh were among a small party that used two horse-drawn cabs to ferry them around the Bloomsday route in 1954.
There is a famous photograph of Cronin and Kavanagh on one of these cabs outside Davy Byrne's pub in Duke Street. Cronin is holding the reins and Kavanagh is staring at the camera. He's also cross-legged. (Well, they had visited quite a few bars including some not known for their Joycean associations.) Anyway, this year also marks the centenary of Kavanagh's birth on October 21.
So, while Joyce's Dublin will dominate this year's literary celebrations, Kavanagh's rural Ireland will feature too. Has it changed as much as Dublin over the same period? Perhaps it's impossible to compare such things. Yet it's hard to imagine that the notorious 'paralysis' Joyce associated with the city was not even more intense in rural Ireland during this state's early decades.
The fault-line between Dublin and the rest of the Republic - that 'jackeens v culchies' banter - has been quiet in recent years. Its last great grating was perhaps in the 1970s when Dublin and Kerry dominated Gaelic football. Although there remain residual eruptions whenever these two counties meet in the All-Ireland championship, its heyday appears to be finished.
Cars, television and improved communications have diluted if not quite killed it. It's not surprising it has lapsed into childish farce. In earlier centuries rural people had looked on Dublin with trepidation.
They saw it, after all, as a Protestant city and the centre of English rule in Ireland. Until recent decades it remained alien to many rural Irish people who seldom visited it. Some never did.
Joycean 'paralysis' was more intense in rural Ireland because of De Valera's ideology, which preferred the rural to the urban. Furthermore, the grip of Roman rule after British rule ended was more enforceable and pronounced in the countryside than in the city. There was, at least for newcomers, a possibility of freedom and anonymity in the city impossible in a tight rural community.
Patrick Kavanagh knew as much and forsook Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan to live in Dublin. Although he's rightly remembered for his poetry, he wrote more prose, most of which was journalism for the Irish Press, The Bell, The Standard and this newspaper.
Despite that, he disparaged, as artists often do, newspapers' notions of what really matters as "the day's loud lying".
Kavanagh wrote 'City Commentary' for the Irish Press for two years from 1942. Echoing his own rural background and his first poetic success (The Ploughman) as well as copying the title of William Langland's mediaeval poem, he used the pseudonym 'Piers Plowman'. The idea behind his column was to give a countryman's impression of city life to rural readers.
Clearly, Dublin in those years - though almost four decades later than the city of Ulysses - still held a mystique in provincial Ireland that is diluted now. Kavanagh knew the rural world, its meanness and frustrations. He also came to know the meanness and frustrations of the city and though he "had no money and no profession except that of small farmer" he stayed in Dublin.
There are, it would appear, grades of 'paralysis'. If Edwardian Dublin represented a paralysed world, rural Ireland for much of the last century was on the verge of rigor mortis. Both Joyce, a university-educated Dub, and Kavanagh, an under-educated country man, were Catholics and both, as contemporary bankers might put it, had "issues" with the Protestant-led Literary Revival.
Kavanagh disparaged the Revivalists' writing about Ireland as the literature of the "lookers-on" who were not "part of the national conscience". The sectarian fault-line was always at least as intense as the urban-rural one. Now it too - even in the notoriously bigoted North - is calmer than ever.
Catholics and Protestants, Dubs and 'culchies' - these are not the contentious pairings now.
The widening fault-lines now are between immigrants and nativists and, as ever, rich and poor. Next Friday's referendum on Irish citizenship will probably show that Irish attitudes to immigrants and emigrants are in sharp contrast. It may show us as parasitic. While poor people may indeed feel threatened by immigrants what excuse can wealthy people who vote 'Yes' possibly have? Opinions on Joyce and Kavanagh have certainly changed over an era in which Dublin has cast off the British and Roman empires to settle under the EU and American ones. But maybe affluence has intensified rather than undone Irish meanness and made more stony grey people than ever. National paralysis was bad enough but international parasitism is worse.