Sir, – I read with pleasure Deaglán de Bréadún’s piece concerning his brief visit to the grave of James Joyce in Zurich (An Irishman’s Diary, September 3rd).
It is worth wondering, however, whether he is right to refer to Fluntern Cemetery as “the great man’s final resting place”.
Following the death of Joyce in 1941, the Irish government declined his widow’s offer to allow his remains to be repatriated (an insult so severe that it cost the State the Finnegans Wake papers, which Nora subsequently ensured were left not to the National Library of Ireland, but to the British Museum).
Efforts to repatriate Joyce were renewed in the early 1970s, when Ulick O’Connor won the enthusiastic approval of Joyce’s son Giorgio, as well as that of the then taoiseach Jack Lynch. The remains of James Joyce were to arrive back into Dublin Bay on a naval corvette, ahead of a State burial. Sadly, as plans were being finalised, Giorgio died in 1976. The grand homecoming never came to pass.
The 75th anniversary of Joyce’s death will be in 2016 – a year that will also mark the centenary of the first full publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Fluntern Cemetery is, as Mr de Bréadún writes, a beautiful place, but perhaps our greatest novelist has slept for long enough beside the lions of the Zurich Zoo. – Yours, etc,