THERE was never any need to ban Ulysses in Ireland. Its author James Joyce was loathed during his life by the Irish establishment and the Catholic church. But according to Joyce’s nephew, Ken Monaghan, Customs wouldn’t even let a copy of the book into the country. So why ban something that doesn’t exist?

Copies “were confiscated at points of entry” said Monaghan, “and, of course, were never on sale openly in shops in Dublin until the middle to late 1960s”. In fact, for much of the 20th century, Irish readers could only get their hands on a copy if it had been smuggled in from abroad, or sold in a brown paper bag by some liberal bookseller as if it were weapon-grade smut.

The Herald: A first edition of UlyssesA first edition of Ulysses

It’s astonishing now to think of this book – which has become central to the Irish psyche, to Irish academia and Irish cultural life – being treated no better than pornography. As the book reaches its centenary next week (on February 2), the story of its author’s journey from pariah to icon is recounted in Professor John McCourt’s studious work, Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland.

When I first read Joyce, he was already approaching deification. I was 16 and studying literature in an Irish grammar school in the 1980s. By the 1990s, when I continued my studies at university in Ireland, the notion of teaching Anglo-Irish literature without Joyce was absurd. Today, the story of Ulysses – that quintessentially modernist text – mirrors Ireland’s journey from a backward nation on the fringes of Europe, dominated by tradition and the church, to one of the most progressive countries on Earth at the heart of the European project. Quite fitting, then, that its author spent most of his life in self-imposed exile in Europe as his country rejected him.

How do you explain Ulysses to someone who hasn’t read it? It’s often been said that anyone who’s not Irish would have trouble understanding what Joyce’s work truly “means” – not an idea I subscribe to, literature is literature after all – but his masterpiece is an ephemeral and slippery beast of a text.

Put exceptionally broadly, it tells the story of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he wanders around Dublin. It’s a portrait of a city and a people, and crucially a time – a time when Ireland was ripping apart, quite literally, with revolutionary change. When it came to Ulysses, however, all the establishment cared about was the sex – and for its time there’s a fair bit of it, though how anyone could find titillation in the stream of consciousness narrative, which plays so heavily in the book, is beyond me. But then, dirty minds find dirty things in places where they never were.

Joyce was hated for “washing dirty Irish linen before the eyes of the English reading public”. Though Ulysses was initially banned in the UK and US, his work was later championed in those countries, while reviled and ignored at home. On the continent, he was lauded as another Zola. Sadly, we Irish never know a good homegrown talent when we see it; we need someone else to confirm success for us – or at least that used to be our way. Things have clearly changed – specifically through the death of the church’s power and the blooming of Irish liberalism.

It’s a far cry from when Irish senators couldn’t even bring themselves to say Joyce’s name in Parliament. Joyce wanted Ireland free – not just from England, but from regressive nationalism and clericalism. Clearly, it was always going to be a tough road to walk, as Ireland struggled to carve a role for itself in the world after the 1919-21 revolution.

In some ways, the reaction to Joyce is reflected in the hate directed at the National Theatre of Scotland’s 2010 play Caledonia, which told the story of Scotland’s colonial folly, the Darien Scheme. Nationalists do not like their beloved country mocked or harshly critiqued.

Ulysses was considered evil – there were headlines such as, “Satan, Smut & Co”. At one time, McCourt tells us: “The very name of Joyce set the righteous aflame with anger.” Joyce was the antithesis to the narrow church-drunk nationalism of political leader Eamon De Valera. His was more the revolutionary spirit of Scotland’s James Connolly – who also fought during the Easter Rising of 1916.

Joyce never made life easy for himself. He deliberately wound up everyone – even potential allies. Even after his death in 1941, Ireland heaped opprobrium on him. The periodical The Irish Rosary all but spat on his grave. Ireland still wasn’t ready to “know itself” – to see itself in the mirror Joyce held up.

Here’s a flavour of just how beholden the Irish government was to the Catholic Church’s strictures: in 1948, the new government wrote to the Vatican asking “to repose at the feet” of the Pope, in “filial loyalty”. What chance did a “muckraker”, as the press called Joyce, have in Ireland’s suffocating society?

In the 1950s, the Irish Times was still calling the church “the effective government”. However, there was a growing cadre of American scholarly Joyceans starting to turn up as tourists looking for the Dublin of Ulysses. It was seen as absurd – but we Irish are good at making a buck so cashed in, and thus Bloomsday was quietly born: the annual celebrations in Dublin on June 16 marking the date of Leopold Bloom’s peripatetic adventures.

In the 1960s, John F Kennedy – seen as “Ireland’s President” – altered the mood when he talked of his reverence for Joyce. Then, as Ireland opened up in the 1970s with entry into Europe, Joyce was released from the underworld. He wasn’t yet a national icon – but nor was he still a devil from hell spewing pornography over parishioners. By the 1980s, statues were going up, and with the birth of the Irish Celtic Tiger in the late 1990s, society was long past caring about the moral majority. Few may have read Joyce, but he made money and he was a symbol of modernity and a new age.

Today, Joyce is a commercial carnival, and Bloomsday nothing but the Irish equivalent to a stag do or hen party in Blackpool. Roddy Doyle, another great chronicler of Dublin, perhaps accurately predicted the future of Ulysses in the 21st century when he half-joked: “They’ll be serving Joyce happy meals next.”

The Herald:

Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland by James McCourt is published on February 10 by Bloomsbury Academic Press, £19.99