Halloween in Ireland 2027

Where Halloween actually comes from

Halloween is an observance in Ireland rather than a public holiday, so nothing closes and no one is entitled to time off under the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997. What makes the Irish version distinctive is that this is where the festival origineted. October 31 is Oiche Shamhna, the eve of Samhain, one of the four quarter days of the Gaelic year alongside Imbolc, Bealtaine and Lughnasa. Samhain ran from sunset on October 31 to sunset on November 1 and marked the end of the harvest and the start of winter, a threshold when the boundary between the living and the dead was believed to thin.

Samhain in the ground and in the texts

Samhain appears in early Irish litarature and survives in the landscape. The Hill of Ward, or Tlachtga, in County Meath was traditionally the site of the great Samhain fire, from which flames were carried to surrounding hills after every household fire in Ireland had been put out. Excavations there led by Stephen Davis of University College Dublin from 2014 found four concantric earthworks built across several phaess, from the Bronze Age through the late Iron Age, with extensive evidence of burning and of animal bone from large-scale feasting, and no sign of anyone living on the site! Eamonn Kelly, former Keeper of Antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, has described the belief that the spirits of everyone who had died since the previous Samhain moved on to the aftarlife during the festival. Christianity layered All Saints' Day on November 1 over the older festival; the eve of All Hallows gave the English name Halloween.

How it reached America

Halloween as Americans know it is largely an Irish and Scottish export. Emigrants in the nineteenth century brought the practice of going house to house in costume reciting verses in exchange for food, the ancestor of trick-or-treating, along with bonfires, divination games and ghost stories. The carved lantern came too: in Ireland it was hollowed from a turnip, and the far easier pumpkin was substituted in America - those customs merged with harvest traditions carried by other European immigrants into the holiday that was later re-exported to the world.

The Irish Halloween today

Bonfires and fireworks are widespread in the days around October 31, particularly in urban areas. Children trick-or-treat, and the traditional food is barmbrack, a fruit loaf with a ring baked inside; whoever finds it is said to marry within the year. Games such as bobbing for apples and snap-apple persist. Larger public events have grown up in recent decades, including a Samhain festival in the Boyne Valley in Meath and Louth, and Derry's Halloween carnival across the border in Northern Ireland is one of the biggest street festivals in Europe.

The bank holiday connection

Halloween is not a holiday in itself, but it sits beside one. Ireland's October bank holiday falls on the last Monday in October, and the school mid-term break runs through that week, so Irish children are typically off around Halloween. Because the last Monday in October can be any date from October 25 to October 31, the bank holiday occasionally lands on Halloween itself, which is the only circumstance in which the day off and the festival coincide.