The Dead; Sex, love and longing at The Gresham Hotel.

At the end of the night we leave 15 Usher's Island and follow Gabriel and Gretta Conroy's journey up river and down O'Connell St (then Sackville Street) to the Gresham Hotel. With Professor Anne Fogarty we re-visit the Gresham Hotel and Gabriel's own moment of self-revelation. Gerardine Meaney and Declan Kiberd explore the story's love stories and how they relate to Joyce and his own life's love, Nora Barnacle. Love and loss are intertwined in the personal epiphanies in 'The Dead' and through the archives we look at what was happening in Joyce's own life with the death of his mother May and his family's decline into poverty. Declan Kiberd, Gerardine Meaney, Kevin Whelan and Anne Fogarty explore the story's ending and that final scene of a snow covered Ireland. Is it one of despair or hope?