A small country with an epic history for book lovers

Ireland is a country in love with words, both written and spoken, its denizens rightly famous for the craic, that indefinable melange of music and laughter and the joy taken in a simple chat or a tale well-told.

It’s also there on the walls as we make our way through the crowds to the rambunctious streets of Temple Bar on our first night in Dublin – in a mural with the headline “Feed Your Head – READ”. There’s Brendan Behan cheek-by-jowl with Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett. A panel nearby reveals that Ireland has produced four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In Ireland, the writing is on the wall – seemingly every wall.

And that’s without mention of W.B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift, and the great James Joyce, whose masterful Ulysses spawned Bloomsday (June 16 every year), one of the biggest literary festivals in the world. This is the land, for goodness’ sake, of John Banville, Colm Toibin, Edna O’Brien, Roddy Doyle, Sally Rooney and Bram Stoker.

Which makes our first day in Dublin, before we head south-west for Kilkenny and beyond, such a pleasure; because our first stop is Trinity College’s Old Library, which houses the famous Long Room and the Book of Kells.

Unarguably one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, the Long Room is 65 metres of burnished wooden bookshelves, normally filled from floor to barrel-vaulted ceiling with 200,000 of the library’s oldest tomes.

These, however, have been temporarily removed as part of the Old Library Development Project, which aims to improve fire and environmental protections in the library and clean, document and electronically tag the books.

The Trinity College Long Room, with “Gaia” in the distance.

Even without them, it’s still an alarmingly impressive space. And taking things up a notch since November 2023 is the presence of Gaia, a remarkable illuminated globe that, using detailed NASA imagery of the Earth’s surface, shows our planet as it is viewed from space.

Sitting about two-thirds of the way along the Long Room, this large but miniature Earth by artist Luke Jerram is suspended in the air, a bright blue ball contrasting beautifully with the polished old oak beams of the library. It is mesmerising, eminently Instagramable, and it will be a crying shame when it is taken down in September 2026 (so get your skates on).

The Book of Kells, the 9th-century illuminated gospel manuscript, has been held by the library since 1661. Only two pages of the actual book are displayed at any one time (under glass), but the exhibition around it does an outstanding job of explaining why it’s regarded as a masterpiece of Western calligraphy.

After a visit to Dublin Castle, we (20 of us in a 65-seater coach) head to Kilkenny on the banks of the River Nore. Kilkenny Castle and its grounds are the main attraction here, and after the fascinating guided tour, I take advantage of the welcome free time built into the itinerary and stroll through the narrow streets of this beautiful, medieval town.

Maybe it’s because books and writers have been close to mind, but it seems Kilkenny boasts an inordinate number of bookshops. The Kilkenny Book Centre, for instance, is huge and has a large selection of Irish-themed tomes. This is the place for you if you’re after The Pocket Book of Irish Prayers and Blessings, A Hundred Words for Grand: The little book of Irish chat, or (my favourite) A Massive Book Full of Feckin’ Irish Slang by Murphy O’Dea. The Book & Coffee Shop in William Street is well worth a browse (and coffee and cake), too.

But it’s in Galway, after we’ve visited colourful Cobh, ferried to and from the pretty island of Garnish at Glengarriff, experienced the windswept grandeur of the Cliffs of Moher, and mooched around the English Market and Gothic Revival majesty of Saint Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork, that I stumble across this bibliophile’s Shangri-La: Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in Middle Street.

Charlie Byrne’s in Galway.

Party-town Galway might be famous for other things – heritage, history, Guinness and plenty of craic – but this might be its best-kept secret. It might not have the Book of Kells, but Charlie Byrne’s has pretty much everything else. Spread out over six labyrinthine rooms are more than 100,000 new, secondhand, antiquarian, and bargain-basement books on every conceivable subject and literary bent, including copies of An Prionsa Beag and An Hobad (that’s The Little Prince and The Hobbit to the non-Gaelic speakers among us).

I feel Mr Wilde, whose statue adorns the start of the city’s main pedestrian thoroughfare a short walk away, would approve. My bank manager might not.

THE DETAILS

TOUR
Bunnik Tours is a family-owned business that runs small group tours for a maximum of 20 people. The Icons of Ireland tour for 2025 has been renamed A Tale of Two Irelands and begins in Dublin and ends in Belfast. Prices for the 12-day tour (maximum 16 people) start at $7795 a person, twin share, and include accommodation, tips, sightseeing, breakfast, one lunch and three evening meals (including group welcome and farewell dinners). See bunniktours.com.au

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The writer was a guest of Bunnik Tours.