The vintage front page shows a street full of “Dublin holidaymakers” smiling at the camera, sitting on the kerb, waiting for the bus in the sun. But these early queues soon dissipated. “Bank holiday spoiled by weather,” announces the reusable headline. The city’s thoroughfares were “lashed by sweeping rain, as if from minor cloudbursts”, according to The Irish Times, which hints at the familiar spectre of public transport collapse by positing that CIÉ officials “budgeting for endless tram and bus queues, were disappointed, or perhaps one should say relieved”. By the time it stopped raining, “most people had lost their incentive to go anywhere near the sea”.
This page, which I pass on my way to my desk, is framed and hung on the wall, not because the dashed expectations were worth preserving, but because the date is Tuesday, August 7th, 1945, and the lead story concerns a more sinister cloud – the “impenetrable” one that formed over Hiroshima after the dropping of the first atomic bomb. When juxtaposed with this moment in history, the sorrowful report on the weather hopes of Dubliners, who would have been unaware of the dawn of the nuclear age as their Monday unfolded, seems quite ridiculous. Into each life some rain must fall – but must it fall so heavily on a bank holiday?
In fiction, too, the line between exuberance and agitation on such days can be thin. In the opening chapter of Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock, we meet Charles “Fred” Hale, a journalist who does not belong “to the early summer sun, the Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd”. It is Whit Monday, once a public holiday in both Britain and Ireland, and he is watching the seafront arrivals uncoil endlessly, “like a twisted piece of wire, two by two, each with an air of sober and determined gaiety”. With a downbeat outlook not untypical of his trade, Hale envisages their queues for lunch, return journeys on crowded trains and weary walks home, with just “a grain of pleasure” extricated from a long day of “immense labour and immense patience”.
What is it about the public holiday that provokes shuddering clashes between the pursuit of collective bliss and the thwarting of it, the pressure to celebrate the day and the failure to do so, the desire for freedom and the frazzled impossibility of attaining it? They taunt us with an ideal born in the Victorian age. They dangle nice things in front of us, but turn fraught fast. They say we’re not time-poor and here’s the long weekend to prove it, then corral us into the chaotic overflow car parks of life, sucking that time away from us. They are hot messes of days on which we get dressed up for an inevitable letdown, then slump “back to work A-G-A-I-N”, as the frenetic Blur song Bank Holiday puts it. Drained by “determined gaiety” and the unrecoverable disruption to our week, we’re left confused. Aren’t we meant to want more of these bloody things?
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The numbers are often presented without nuance. Ireland has 10 public holidays and the average in the European Union is 12. But the comparison is muddied by the fact that workers in several EU countries with apparently generous quotas do not receive a compensatory paid weekday off if public holidays fall on the weekend.
No referendum proposing a new public holiday would be rejected. Not everyone is as curmudgeonly about them as Hale, or me. Enough people run the gauntlet of their infrastructural pinch-points to suggest a critical mass still tries to make the most of the ones we have. And yet a widespread clamour for an extra one is conspicuous by its absence.
One group of people is keen to talk about them: politicians. The Green Party argues that Good Friday should be converted from a bank holiday into the fully fledged public holiday many people think it already is. Its alternative idea is for a new public holiday on the first weekend in July “to allow people to have some time off over the summer”, while People Before Profit has called for two more, circling the last Mondays in September and November.
Those in power, too, seem enamoured with the glorious potential of public holidays to both boost morale among the electorate and shore up support for approved markers of national identity. In Britain, for instance, Westminster loves announcing once-off, non-recurring public holidays tied to the royal family. It’s a lot trickier, after all, to maintain buy-in for the monarchy if people are too busy working to pay attention to weddings, funerals and jubilees.
Call it populism or sheer opportunism, but British politicians are also fond of using public holidays to maximise the unifying power of sport. One consequence of England crashing out of the Fifa World Cup was that Friday, July 24th, became the bank holiday that never was. Would Keir Starmer’s mooted last act have applied across the UK or only in England? That neither option would have been frictionless reflects an awkward facet of the public holiday in the 21st century. Governments might fancy deploying them to foster cohesion and goodwill, but that doesn’t mean everybody has to play along.
Offering new public holidays to overburdened workers is a bit like declaring to insomniacs that you have arranged for them to go to bed early
On the Irish calendar, the newbie since 2023 is the Imbolc/St Brigid’s Day public holiday in February. When Leo Varadkar, then the tánaiste and minister for enterprise, trade and employment, announced it a year earlier, he referenced the European public holiday average and framed the measure as one of several planned new labour rights.
The symbolism of the chosen day was clever. By coinciding with the traditional Irish celebration of the start of spring and becoming the first Irish public holiday to be named after a woman, it simultaneously alludes to Old Ireland and our modern image of ourselves as progressive. It also bears none of the contentiousness of another day sometimes floated as a possible bridge-building feature of any future, 32-county Ireland: the Northern Ireland public holiday of July 12th. This proposal doesn’t merely contend that a calendar adjustment can improve social harmony, it says this can be done even when the date serves as a notorious lightning rod for deep division.
Reading the Government press release about St Brigid’s Day, I was surprised to see that in 2022 we were granted a once-off public holiday – a pandemic-related Day of Remembrance and Recognition held on March 18th, a Friday. My (ironically) lost memory can be attributed to the great mind-swirl of Covid times, but it also points to something else. Our lives are not equally attuned to the rhythm of public holidays, and the assumption that they are is strange.
The self-employed shrug their shoulders when public holidays roll around, but they’re not alone. They may be joined in this activity by anyone whose job regularly involves weekend working, anyone faced with a childcare quandary and anyone otherwise obliged to treat a long weekend as a nice concept but nothing more. When you have no wiggle room in your workload, a bank holiday does nothing to alleviate the demands upon you. Instead, it requires both an intense run-in the preceding week and a frantic catching-up exercise the week after. The luxury of a Monday off becomes a hellish festival of stress.
Employees rostered to work on public holidays will value any financial benefit this brings and might volunteer to obtain it. Days off in lieu, however, can prove slim compensation. People who work unorthodox hours or antisocial shift patterns often understand better than most the value of social synchronisation. Even those of us who adore the midweek joys of sparse cinemas, queue-free shops and open public swimming pools are aware that time off that can be shared with others has a special currency that time off when everybody else is working does not. Few salves, meanwhile, are available for the pain of knowing everybody else is off having a brilliant time while you are trapped by some interminable task.
When bank holidays were first introduced to Britain and Ireland, they were hugely, instantly popular among urban workers. Why wouldn’t they be? It was 1871, and productivity-focused employers had spent the preceding decades rowing back on their informal recognition of religious holy days. Work was monotonous, idleness frowned upon. Then along came the right man to draft the right bill for the hour: Sir John Lubbock, banker-turned-politician and polymath. His vision wasn’t confined to banking. He thought people employed in different occupations should be able to spend these holidays together. For England (which legally covered Wales) and Ireland, where workplaces customarily closed on Christmas Day and Good Friday, the original four were Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August and December 26th.
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A contemporary account in The News of the World, quoted in a 1914 biography of Lubbock, vividly depicts how his invention “carried rays of hope and joy into humble households” on Monday, August 7th, 1871, the first day to be celebrated after the passing of the Bank Holidays Act. London stationmasters and river captains were taken aback as tens of thousands of people descended upon them – “From 8am the cry at every railway station was, ‘Still they come!’” – and passengers who found their way on to steamboats were soon packed “like herrings in a barrel”. Jetties became impassable. Even in the normally quiet Shepperton, a punt on the river was not to be had “for love nor money” and tobacco and alcohol supplies ran out.
This inaugural “St Lubbock’s Day” set the tone. A century later, so little had changed that traffic congestion – exacerbated by the start of English and Welsh school holidays – was cited as the reason for moving the August bank holiday to the end of the month everywhere in the UK except Scotland.
By the time Lubbock died in 1913, The Irish Times was in no doubt. His “humanising” creation had “brought us out of the age when the necessity for holidays was looked upon as a degeneracy” and “restored the ideal of pleasure to its proper place in the art of life”.
Parallels between today’s dehumanising labour culture and the travails of 19th century workers are easy to find. But the world is not the same, and the solution to the scourge of overwork surely cannot be either.
This is not an economic argument against more public holidays. It is a plea for acknowledgment that they are not universal happiness-spreaders, that they highlight rather than mitigate a breakdown in social synchronicity and that the pernicious encroachment of work on our leisure time is far too knotty a phenomenon to be solved with such a blunt policy tool. Offering new public holidays to overburdened workers is a bit like declaring to insomniacs that you have arranged for them to go to bed early. They might not welcome it, or think you’re a genius.
Maybe what we should strive for is a more ambitious societal shift, one that stands a chance of restoring the ideal of pleasure to its proper place in the art of life. Luckily, I have yet to fully work out what – if anything – is wrong about a four-day week.
Source: The Irish Times
