A Different View
Time to re-evaluate the benefit of bank holidays
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
There’s something hugely ironic about associating Mondays off work with the banks, given that the reason that thousands have no work any day of the week is because of the profligacy of those same lending institutions during the boom times.
But be that as it may, the existence of Bank Holidays means that those who live for the long weekend can at least find something to be grateful to our financial houses for.
We’ve just come through another one and there’s a third in quick succession coming up in less than four weeks – three wasted Mondays in the space of seven weeks.
They’re not wasted for everyone of course because there are some employees who are fortunate enough to be in jobs where the work starts and finishes on a given day, but for most people, what isn’t done today has to be done instead tomorrow.
So you might have Monday off, but you’ll still have to do a week’s work before Friday comes around. And for those people, a Monday off isn’t really a holiday at all.
Before I cause collective apoplexy and people think this is like Scrooge cancelling Christmas, this isn’t about being a killjoy on the holiday front – so here’s my suggestion.
We have nine Bank Holidays a year in Ireland and four of them aren’t open to argument – that’s New Year’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, Christmas Day and St Stephen’s Day.
But the other five should be abolished, and workers instead should get an extra week’s holidays a year.
That way, employees get the benefit of the time off because it’s a week that not everyone else is off for, and they don’t have to shoehorn five days work into four.
Employers also benefit because production isn’t affected five weeks of the year, or they don’t end up paying double time for people to come in just so the assembly line isn’t brought to a shuddering halt.
The tourism sector might object to the end of five Bank Holiday weekends and the publicans in particular might miss the busier Sunday nights, but the Gardaí wouldn’t miss the hassle and neither would the street cleaners.
And we cannot underestimate the economic impact of a Bank Holiday weekend; we can see anecdotally how it works here, but Cornwall for example calculated that moving from the May bank holiday to St Piran’s Day (the region’s patron saint) on March 5 would benefit the Cornish economy by between £20 and 35 million.
And given that the pubs and hotels have taken quite a hit in recent years, it might seem churlish to try and starve them of five nice little earners.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.