Hotelier John Brennan is wrong: The St Brigid’s public holiday is not the break ‘no one wanted’

Hotelier John Brennan said what I consider a very silly thing lately. It wasn’t just what he said: he also took it upon himself to speak for me. And for you, the person reading this article. And for everyone else in the country.

What he said in an interview with The Irish Times was that February 5th, the upcoming new public holiday, was one that “no one wanted”. This public holiday, which falls either on a Friday if that is February 1st, or the first Monday in February, is named St Brigid’s Day.

It also happens to be the first time Ireland has had a public holiday named after a woman.

I wanted that holiday, thank you very much, Mr Brennan. January, not April, is the cruellest month in the Irish calendar: T.S. Eliot must never have visited Ireland at this time of year. It’s dark in the morning and dark in the afternoon. There are often storms – we have just experienced two, Storms Isha and Jocelyn – that disrupt travel and knock out electricity and present a danger to lives and property. People are more broke than usual after Christmas, and the lights and glitter of December are absent, making those opaque gloomy mornings and afternoons even dimmer.

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To have a long weekend to look forward to in early February is a joy. I booked a flight to Italy for that weekend months ago. Every now and then, I look at the attic apartment I booked in the centre of an old town in northern Italy, and feel delight at the knowledge I’ll be there during St Brigid’s Weekend, as I think of it. Even if I wasn’t going anywhere further than my own house, I’d be glad and happy to be having a paid day off.

[ Hotelier John Brennan says costs of doing business are ‘off the wall’ ]

[ Selling the Park Hotel Kenmare: ‘It was always for sale, if somebody wrote a cheque’ ]

Of course I am privileged in being an employee who does not work for herself, and who fully benefits from a Government-decreed public holiday. The context of John Brennan’s complaints was that he said the St Brigid public holiday took €25,000 off the bottom line of the businesses he was running last year.

Mr Brennan has a legitimate point of view. He is an employer and successful businessperson who is of course entitled to express his views about his industry in the media.

He and his brother Francis have sold two of their well-known Kenmare businesses: the Park Hotel and the Lansdowne Hotel. They were collectively for sale for €20.5 million. John Brennan retains Dromquinna Manor, also in Co Kerry, which hosts some 55 events a year. Dromquinna Manor recorded post-tax profits of €164,792 in 2022.

Anyway, John Brennan was critical of the Government because of “inflated costs” in doing business, due as he saw it, variously to the minimum wage, VAT rates, and that annoying new public holiday in February which “no one wanted”.

It is hard not to feel sorry for people working in business here in the current climate. We all know that Ireland is an expensive country to do most kind of businesses in, starting with the basic fact that we are an island, and getting people and goods here costs more money than it does in mainland Europe. Complaining about the cost of doing business here is about as productive as complaining about how much it rains.

Call me as dim as a January morning, but I would have thought that an additional public holiday in February would have been a potential boom to hospitality; would have encouraged at least some people to perhaps go away for a long weekend in Ireland. Surely that is an additional income to the local economy? Some of them may even have chosen to go to Kenmare.

Let us not forget that when the new public holiday in February to honour St Brigid was first announced in 2022, it came in tandem with a one-off public holiday in March of that year, a “Day of Remembrance and Recognition” to honour the memories of those people in Ireland who died of Covid. The Irish public had been through one of the longest lockdowns in the world, and endured many, many months in which it was not possible to go anywhere farther than a few kilometres from your home.

I am unlikely to forget that time, as is anyone else who lived through it. It seemed almost impossible any of us would be able to travel anywhere again without fear, much less with any kind of pleasure. I was grateful for that long weekend in March of 2022, and I am grateful for this new permanent public holiday in February, coming as it does at “the halfway point between the winter solstice and the equinox, the beginning of spring and the Celtic new year,” as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said at the time.

So speak for yourself, Mr Brennan.

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