Ireland’s Central Bank has learned a valuable PR lesson: When trying to garner public favor and interest by honoring one of your country’s greatest literary figures with a limited edition coin, please, for the love of all things bookish, try not to misquote him.

On Wednesday, the bank announced the launch of a limited-edition ten euro coin to honor James Joyce, which features a portrait of the author and a quotation from his world-famous epic Ulysses. The words printed on the coin read: “Signatures of all things that I am here to read.”

Unfortunately, the actual quote is: “Signatures of all things I am here to read.” The bank added the word “that.”

The backlash was swift, prompting the bank to release the following statement in explanation:

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The motion was proposed, according to councillor Danny Healy-Rae, because “people are living in isolated rural areas where there’s no public transport of any kind, and they end up at home looking at the four walls, night in and night out, because they don’t want to take the risk of losing their licence.”

Let us just say that being of Irish descent, having lived in Galway for several months, and having spent a fair amount of time in Kerry, it really is true that the Irish pub culture is as much about socializing as it is about drinking (if not more so). It’s also true that many rural parts of the country have few, if any, social outlets aside from said drinkeries. Therefore, as ridiculous as it may sound, these concerns about people becoming socially isolated if they can’t go to their neighborhood watering holes are legitimate.

That said, we do feel the need to point out that the whole problem could also be resolved if these isolated folks just practiced heading to the pub, taking part in conversations, listening to music, playing cards with their neighbors and not drinking excessively (ludicrous, we know).

All jokes aside, though, we would be very surprised if this motion were accepted by the Minister for Justice (the next step in becoming law).

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