Joyce did go 'back there' to found the Volta cinema, for instance. But if I had Joyce's family I'd keep well away from where they were too!

Travel was different then. Very expensive. Joyce mostly sat in Paris and wrote, and dined expensively. He'd escaped a nightmare of poverty and misery, and found a milieu in which he could be happy.

Weelittledrummer, are you conflating the narrative and the dialogue? Your grandparents may not have sounded like the free-flowing narrative, but probably used some of the various varieties of Dublin language Joyce quotes in the dialogue of Ulysses.

That article by James T Farrell is here: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/farrell-on-joyce.html

Something funny happened to the clicky.