Ireland
Ireland observes ten statutory public holidays. Nine of them are also bank holidays, and the two categories do not overlap perfectly - Christmas and St Patrick's Day are public holidays on which banks stay open, while Good Friday is a bank holiday that never became a public holiday.
The ten public holidays
- New Year's Day - 1 January
- St Brigid's Day - first Monday in February, or Friday 1 February when 1 February is itself a Friday
- St Patrick's Day - 17 March
- Easter Monday - the Monday after Easter Sunday
- May bank holiday - first Monday in May
- June bank holiday - first Monday in June
- August bank holiday - first Monday in August
- October bank holiday - last Monday in October
- Christmas Day - 25 December
- St Stephen's Day - 26 December
Public holiday and bank holiday are not the same thing
Irish law draws the distinction from the 1924 Public Holidays Act onwards, and it still matters for pay entitlement. Christmas Day and St Patrick's Day are public holidays but not bank holidays, so banks remain open on them. The inverse also holds: Good Friday is a bank holiday that was never added to the public holidays statute. Irish employees therefore have no general statutory right to Good Friday as a paid day off, though the 1998 Labour Court ruling in Byrne v Storehouse and subsequent practice mean most are given it anyway. Any analysis of the Irish calendar that reads "public holiday" as shorthand for "day off" will get this wrong.
No substitute days
Ireland, unusually among the British Isles, has no statutory handover day. When a public holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday, it falls on that weekend. The June bank holiday of 2022 also shows the statute can flex: a one-off holiday on 2 June marked the Platinum Jubilee, an event with no recurring precedent in the calendar.
The eight-day Celtic year
Alongside the statutory calendar runs an older solar cycle, eight observances spaced roughly six weeks apart. All eight have briefs: Imbolc (1 February), Ostara (around the spring equinox), Beltane (1 May), Litha (around the summer solstice), Lughnasadh (1 August), Mabon (around the autumn equinox), Samhain (31 October) and Yule (around the winter solstice). St Brigid's Day is the interesting one: it is the only Celtic observance that has been promoted into Irish statute, and it was placed on 1 February - the old date of Imbolc - rather than on the Monday-aligned Imbolc itself.
Where the calendar differs from the UK
The two calendars share a Christian skeleton but diverge structurally in four ways that matter. Ireland has no substitute day where the UK does. Ireland has one fixed-date public holiday, St Patrick's Day, where the UK has none. Ireland aligns five of its holidays to a Monday, while the UK aligns only the summer and Christmas breaks that way and leaves New Year and Good Friday fixed. And Ireland counts Good Friday as a bank holiday but not a public holiday, the reverse of England and Wales.