A small country with an epic history for book lovers

The Age

09-05-2025

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.
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.
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).