Voters, as a general rule, should be aware of the three or four cheapest votewinning promises or demands that opposition parties can make, almost regardless of the circumstances in which the demands are issued:
You could have the most successful Government the country had ever seen, and every citizen could be living in the lap of luxury, and these are still demands that an opposition party in Ireland can make to grab a bit of attention. In all cases, bar possibly the last, the opposition party can be sure that its position will be relatively popular because it places the Government in the role of Scrooge, or in the role of layabout, depending on the demand. The Government is in favour of taking very long holidays while you get two weeks. The Government wants to fly like billionaires on your expense.
And the Government wants you to work every day God sends:
All workers deserve a break.
Labour is calling on Government to make Good Friday a bank holiday for all workers to provide equality across the board.
Public holidays are just one way of improving life for workers in Ireland.
Full Statement here 🌹: https://t.co/UtP8gDGzP9 pic.twitter.com/JFFj6BD7zB
— The Labour Party (@labour) April 3, 2023
This particular proposal, of course, has a few anomalies to it. First, there is probably no political party in Ireland more aggressively committed to what we might call the de-catholicisation of the country than Labour is. As such, Good Friday is an odd choice for them to pick for an extra day off work. I can’t imagine that the kind of people who attend 3pm church services on that day, for example, are dramatically over-represented in the 2-4% of the public who still profess that they’d vote for team Ivana.
If anything, this strikes me as the kind of proposal that risks alienating more core Labour voters than it does in winning the party new voters. If Aontú, for example, had made this same proposal, then it is not hard to imagine some Labour Party Senators, not to mention what remains of the party’s once proud army of supporters in the commentariat, denouncing it as a step backwards and proposing that we make International Women’s Day a bank holiday instead.
Second, there is no strong evidence of real demand to make the day a holiday from those for whom it is, in fact, one of the most solemn occasions on the religious calendar. Even at the height of the power of the church in Ireland, Good Friday was never a public holiday. One reason for that was that its not being a public holiday was an opportunity for individuals and businesses to show their piety independently of a command from the state: Good businesses voluntarily gave their workers the day off, and closed their doors as a matter of religious observance, rather than state command. That’s all gone now, of course, and with it the memory that not all good things in life necessarily come at the command of our elected demigods.
Even so, quietly, around the country, those to whom the day remains special and solemn will make their own arrangements to observe it. Personally, I think that’s good: And further, it strikes me that religious observance, especially a religious observance that commemorates somebody’s excruciating suffering, shouldn’t necessarily be totally easy anyway: if Christ suffered on the cross, then there’s nothing necessarily wrong with you having to use an afternoon’s worth of annual leave to remember the event.
Third, we don’t really have national holidays that are universal any more, anyway. The only one that really remains is Christmas Day, which is still recognised as a day when everything closes. More and more, on bank holidays, most shops and commercial enterprises that are public facing are open anyway.
The irony here is that Good Friday was, once, a de facto public holiday because of what I mentioned above – people would do it voluntarily. And the further irony is that nobody waged a longer or more sustained war against that than the Labour Party itself. Once, for example, many eons ago, pubs were closed on Good Friday. That, apparently, was a crime against secularism. Now, they want to make it a public holiday.
All of which says something about Labour: Its voters, of course, tend to get the day off on public holidays. NGOs are closed. Schools and Universities. The civil service shuts down. But the pubs are open.
And that, my friends, is politics: Labour doesn’t represent people who work in pubs, it represents people who work in universities. So all that principled stuff about secularizing the country, when it comes down to it, amounts to guff: They still want the day off.
Just for the right kind of people.