“Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is set in the Irish Nationalist party headquarters (or “Committee Room”) in Dublin on October 6, 1902. (There is some debate about the exact year, but most scholars agree that it is on or around 1902.) October 6th was known by nationalists in Ireland as “Ivy Day” and was an annual event marking the death of popular Nationalist Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell. Observants would wear ivy leaf pins on their lapel to show their support for Parnell and affiliation with the Nationalist Party.
Irish Nationalism emerged in response to England’s colonial rule. Like many colonized nations, Ireland struggled with the consequences of colonialism, such as a flagging economy, widespread poverty, and political corruption. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is set in a particular political moment between Parnell’s death (and the resulting waning of nationalist fervor) and the eventual success of the nationalist movement (leading to the establishment of the Republic of Ireland as its own nation-state in 1922). The nationalist characters that Joyce centers in the story are all cynical, lazy, and/or morally corrupt—his ways of pointing to the challenges that faced the Nationalist Party in these intervening years.
That the story takes place on a rainy day in a room where the fire can barely keep the political canvassers warm also underlines Joyce’s pessimism about the nationalist movement—the lackluster fire represents the sad state of the Nationalist Party in the early 1900s.
