Essay 17 Governments might fancy deploying bank holidays to foster cohesion and goodwill, but that doesnt mean everybody has to play along crashing out of the Fifa World Cup was that Friday, July 24th, became the bank holiday that never was. Would Keir Starmers 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 doesnt mean everybody has to play along. On the Irish calendar, the newbie since 2023 is the Imbolc/St Brigids 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 doesnt 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 Brigids 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 Anyone whose job regularly involves weekend working shrugs their shoulders when public holidays roll around. PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO holidays roll around, but theyre 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 wouldnt 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 wasnt 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. 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 Lubbocks 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 todays 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 youre 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. THE IRISH TIMES Weekend Saturday, August 1, 2026 DavidSedarisontheseriousbusinessofcomedy.Page8 WalledtownsofIreland:RositaBolandvisitsWexford.Page10 PatrickFreyne:GlenHansardwasIrelandsbandleader.Page5 WEEKEND THE IRISH TIMES Saturday, August 1st, 2026 A WOUND IS HEALED Afterdecadesofheartbreakandnearmisses, Mayofinallyhasitsmomentinthesun By 2 Cover story A HOUSE OF PAIN NO MORE MayosAll-Irelandtriumphreleased75yearsof pent-upemotioninoneunforgettableafternoon ByKeithDuggan M acHale Park in Castlebar has always been best suited to those Saturday-night matches in winter, when the season is young and the promise uncontained. An ideal Cover story meme, the jokes came thick and fast. Through all that, Mayo footballers and supporters never shied away from speaking about it, nor returning to All-Ireland finals. Maybe we make too much of the football, Fr Leo Morahan, the former county board executive, said back in 2007. Mayo has the 4 Cover story 2004, when he was beginning his sec- ond term as Mayo manager. By September, he had the county back in an All-Ireland final, when Kerry defeated his young team. Like most GAA counties, the network of names and connections within Mayo football are impossibly dense: you could fill the People GLEN HANSARD WAS OUR NATIONAL BARD TheFramesfrontmanwasIrelandsbandleader, anditfeltlikehewouldbedoingthejobfor alongtime ByPatrickFreyne I n the 1990s, I wasnt convinced by The Frames. They felt a bit mainstream. A bit major label. I was a young idiot. Later, a friend convinced me that I 6 Music THE PIANIST WHO PLAYS WITH ONE HAND ONLY Freya Terris is the first pianist to pass their Grade 8 piano exam playing solely with their left hand ByJohnOConnor L ike countless other young musicians, Freya Terris discovered her love of music at the piano stool. Yet her journey has been anyt People 7 Fearkeptmefrom doingwhatIreally wantedtodoorsay Q&ARevJanetBroderick The Donegal-based priest on childhood games with her brother actor Matthew Broderick, how people react when she preaches sermons, and who could play her in a biopic Howagreeableareyou? I think life has made me agreeable 8 Interview I DONT LIKE EXTREMISTS. BUT I FIND THEM THRILLING AS CHARACTERS TheUSwriterandhumouristtalksabouttheseriousbusinessofbeingfunny onthepageandathislivereadings ByPatrickFreyne WEEKEND INTERVIEW DAVID SEDARIS A few days after I interview David Sedaris, I receive a thank-you postcard fe Interview 9 I just tried to get through my days [at school] without being found out as gay. Im 69, so no one even really imagined then that anyone could be anything that awful back then DavidSedaris: Idontknowhow tobuyaplane ticket.Idontopen anymailthat doesntlooklike fanmail. Photograph: Leonardo 10 Feature HISTORY EMBRACES US EVERY DAY IN WEXFORD In the first of a four-part series on Irelands walled towns, we visit Wexford, where history is quite literally in peoples back gardens ByRositaBoland I f Billy Colfer talked to you about history, youd sit up and listen, Paul Walsh tells me. W Feature field. We discovered that Sparrow was a surname of ship owners back in the 1830s, Hussey says. Hussey brings me out into their back garden to show me where, more than a century ago, a house was built against the other side of their wall. The medieval wall thus became a party wall. It towers 12 Photo essay Formedtotacklethe siltingissueintheriver Liffey,thereservenow extendstotheentirety ofthebay WILD AT HEART Photographs: DaraMacDónaill andEndaODowd Words: EndaODowd O f the 797 Unesco biosphere reserves across 147 countries, Dublin Bay is the only one to include a national capital Photo essay DublinsNorth BullIsland,partof theDublinBay Unescobiosphere reserve,isnow hometo180 differentspeciesof bird.However, conservationists warnthat,asworks tostopcoastal erosionareerected alongthecoastline, theirlong-term impactonthe ecologyand landscapemaybe difficulttopredict. Photographs: 14 Feature TWINS PEAK WERE PROBABLY MIRROR IMAGES OF EACH OTHER Whetheritsthehighsofalwayshavingcompanyor thelowsofsensingtheotherspain,thebestpartof beingatwinisneverbeingstuckforafriend ByJenHogan I relands birth rate may be falling, but the incidence of twin births continues to rise, with al Feature 15 Its sometimes fun and its sometimes not, because they could steal your stuff had a friend beside you. In fact, the twins only really went their separate ways when they went to college and that was a major shock, Emma says. Rebecca says there are lots of upsides to being a twin, but the T 16 Essay he 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 citys thoroughfares were WEEKEND E Essay 17 Governments might fancy deploying bank holidays to foster cohesion and goodwill, but that doesnt mean everybody has to play along crashing out of the Fifa World Cup was that Friday, July 24th, became the bank holiday that never was. Would Keir Starmers mooted last act have applied across 18 Feature BE LIKE JOHN LENNON AND BUY AN IRISH ISLAND Four islands for sale off Mayo, Donegal, Tipperary and Galway, with bidding starting at 299,000 ByJessicaDoyle W hen you attract screaming fans everywhere you go, what do you do to get some peace and quiet? You buy an island, of course. Tha People 19 SARAH MOSS Teenage dieting made me an expert in mental arithmetic I bofin. It is suitable for grazing and features two natural freshwater lakes. The island measures 1.2km by 0.4km and rises to a maximum height of 63.3m above sea level. It is a Special Protection Area under the EU Bird 20 Environment TOMAÍ Ó CONGHAILE Our beautiful, troubled planet needs a skilled reconciler T he World Cup may be over but the fallout continues: Trumps unwanted interventions; Germanys early exit; football not coming home; Argentinas post-final petulance. Not to mention, of course, that banner. Environment 21 British navy, spent several days imprisoned in the Tower of London on corruption charges, and died of smallpox before reaching 40. Initially, a strait running between the two main islands was named after him and, by 1765, the Falkland Islands had become the English name for the entire 22 Obituaries FIRST WOMAN DIRECTOR OF A NATIONAL INSTITUTION, LIBRARIAN AND ACADEMIC Patricia (Pat, Patsy) Donlon Born: January 28th, 1943 Died: July 23rd, 2026 Patricia (Pat, Patsy) Donlon, who has died peacefully aged 83 at Blackrock Hospice, Dublin, was a leading light in that remarkable generat Obituaries 23 RENOWNED ORNITHOLOGIST AND COMIC ACTOR WHO STARRED IN THE GOODIES Bill Oddie BillOddiewasamemberofcomedy trioTheGoodies,whoseanarchicTV sketchshowairedinthe1970sand 1980s.Photograph:IanGavan/Getty Born: July 7th, 1941 Died: July 25th, 2026 Bill Oddie, who has died aged 85, was a mul 24 Last word DAVID McWILLIAMS ThefirstvictimofAI? Theeconomy W e are in an era of great technological advances, or so say all the tech bros who are championing not just AI, but a whole host of technological innovations from finance and healthcare to supply chain management and communications. In