On a rainy Dublin election day, Mr. O’Connor sits by the fire in the Committee Room after canvassing on behalf of a candidate for city council named Richard Tierney. O’Connor is visited by fellow canvassers and others, including the caretaker Old Jack, Joe Hynes, John Henchy, a suspended priest named Father Keon, a delivery boy, Crofton, and Lyons (possibly the Bantam Lyons mentioned in “The Boarding House” and in Joyce’s Ulysses). Because it is also Ivy Day, the anniversary of the Irish patriot Charles Stuart Parnell, talk turns inevitably to Parnell; eventually, Joe Hynes delivers a poem he has written in the patriot’s honor.
