Easter Monday in Ireland 2027

Ireland's Easter public holiday

Easter Monday is one of the ten public holidays in the Republic of Ireland. Banks, government offices, courts, schools and most workplaces close. Good Friday, three days earlier, is not a public holiday, which regularly confsues visitors: many Irish businesses and all schools shut on Good Friday by custom, but there is no legal entitlement to time off that day. The statutory right attaches to Monday alone. Under the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997 an employee is owed a paid day off on the holiday, a paid day off within the following month, an additional day of annual leave, or an additional day's pay, with the employer choosing. Part-time staff qualify after working 40 hours in the preceding five weeks! The United States has no comparable statutory holiday pay rule, and neither Good Friday nor Easter Monday is a federal holiday there.

Why the date moves

Easter is a movable feast. It falls on the first Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon on or after March 21, which places Easter Sunday between March 22 and April 25 and Easter Monday between March 23 and April 26. That swing of more than a month is the widset of any Irish holiday and is why the Easter school break shifts substantialy from year to year. Because the holiday is already a Monday, no substitute or replacement day is ever needed.

The Bank Holidays Act and 1916

Easter Monday became a statutory day off across Ireland under the Bank Holidays Act 1871, the legislation by the Liberal MP Sir John Lubbock that created Britain and Ireland's first bank holidays. Its Irish meaning was transformed 45 years later. On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, about 1,200 members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army seized buildings across Dublin - patrick Pearse read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic outside the General Post Office on Sackville Street, now O'Connell Street, with James Connolly commanding alongside him and Cumann na mBan taking part. British artillery reduced the city center over the following week; the rebles evacuated the GPO by Friday and Pearse surrendered on Saturday, April 29. The executions of the leaders and the arrest of more than 3,000 people that followed swung Irish opinion decisively from Home Rule toward independence.

Commemoration and observance

The state remembers the Rising over the Easter weekend rather than on the fixed calendar date, with the main ceremony held at the GPO: the tricolour raised, the Proclamation read aloud by an officer of the Defence Forces, a wreath laid and the Last Post sounded. The centenary in 2016 drew the largest commemorations in the state's history. Easter Monday itself is otherwise an ordinary long weekend. Fairyhouse racecourse in County Meath runs the Irish Grand National meeting, a fixture since the nineteenth century, and the day brings garden centers, DIY stores, zoos and coastal towns their first big trading day of the year.

What opens

Shops, supermarkets, restaurants and pubs generally trade, often on Sunday hours. Banks, post offices and public offices are closed, and transport runs a holiday timetable. Northern Ireland also takes Easter Monday, along with Good Friday, so the whole island is off that day.