Cheers to secularism, that was a good Friday!
UNLESS I had absolutely no choice in the matter, I can’t imagine getting out of Dublin for a bank holiday weekend. I mean, what would be the point?
Despite its relatively modest size, our capital is still a pretty busy and hectic place for most of the year. So it is no harm to switch the pace down a gear from time to time and, for 72 hours or so, see the city transformed into almost a sleepy backwater.
Quite by accident, however, I ended up spending a bank holiday weekend in London last year. I’d booked the trip a couple of months in advance and just picked the dates that seemed handiest. It was only as the time approached that I realised we’d be away for Easter.
Still, that was no great hardship. There was the consolation of being able to kickstart the weekend with lunch in a fully licensed restaurant on Good Friday. Afterwards I dropped into a West End pub where I’ve been an occasional customer over the past 25 years. ‘For f***’s sake,’ laughed the Cork-born manager as he saw me walking through the door. ‘The lengths an Irishman will go to for a drink!’
Suffice to say he won’t be able to make that joke if I ever find myself on his premises again over Easter. This is due to the fact that there were two notable events here over the weekend. Well, that’s not strictly true.
It would be more accurate to say that one thing happened, while the other failed to materialise. First, the pubs opened on Good Friday. Second, the world didn’t collapse around our ears as a result. Perhaps the most significant thing of all, though, is that there were no lurid tales of excessive drinking, obnoxious behaviour and anything else that might have made this seem like a bad idea.
Granted, nobody disputes that this country has a complicated relationship with alcohol. But it was completely ridiculous to use that as justification for keeping the pubs closed on Good Friday for the past 90-odd years.
Come to that, it was also counterproductive. We all know what it used to be like on Holy Thursday. There would be Moscow-style queues outside the off-licences, while the scenes in the booze aisles of your local Tesco resembled something out of Supermarket Sweep.
BUT there was none of that this time around. Nor were there Hogarthian scenes on the streets on the Friday itself. It is a lesson for our political leaders that if people are treated like adults, they will usually respond by behaving like adults.
Of course, the other strong argument in favour of lifting the ban was the tourism factor. Imagine spending out hard-earned money for a long weekend in Barcelona or Paris, say, and discovering on arrival that you couldn’t order a glass of wine or a bottle of beer. You’d hardly be inclined to recommend such a place to your friends as a must-visit destination, would you?
The legislation that originally outlawed pubs from opening on Good Friday was included in the Intoxicating Liquor Act of 1927. It still applies to Christmas Day, although the St Patrick’s Day ban was lifted in the early Sixties.
So far, there is no major groundswell of support for Christmas opening. But it works perfectly well in England where many pubs serve drinks for a couple of hours in the early afternoon.
Having experienced it myself once, I can recommend it as a pleasant way of breaking up what can be a long, stressful day. Mind you, there is no question that it could be an even more stressful day for certain parties if the normal licensing hours applied.
Still, as we move towards becoming a more secular society, it is only a matter of time before the pubs here are allowed open their doors on December 25 as well.
If the length of time it took to get rid of the Good Friday ban is anything to go by, we are looking at sometime around 2109. I’ll look forward to raising a Christmas pint in my local then. Mind you, given that I will just have celebrated my 141st birthday, I’ll probably just have one or two.