Some of the best house parties of my college years were on Good Friday.
You’d head to an off-licence the day before, get more booze than you were likely to need and get together with friends for the 24 hours it was illegal to buy alcohol. Drinking on Good Friday – and the strategising involved – brought a vague sense of defiance and illicit collusion, a thrill like getting a naggin of vodka while underage. And pals often stuck working in bars on Friday nights could come along for the festivities too.
This changed in January 2018 when government decided, alcohol-wise, Good Friday should be like any other day. Good Friday sessions lost their allure once the Intoxicating Liquor (Amendment) Act 2018 was passed. The scarcity that held the tradition together was gone.
Fine Gael congratulated itself on enacting another reform: ensuring bars could open their doors on the date Catholics believe Jesus Christ was crucified before he was later resurrected. The ban, it was said, had been something of an embarrassment – to tourists hoping to spend money, to our fellow members of the European Union and to ourselves.
“The government believes the time is right to end the restrictions,” said TD David Stanton speaking in the Dáil. “We live in a very different society than that which existed when they were put in place.”
It’s understandable that Ireland wouldn’t want religious legislation on its books. When the eighth amendment, another church intercession on our private lives, was repealed by 66.4 percent of voters, public opinion recognised the suffering it had caused – and the dangers of clerical influence on the law. But people didn’t seem to have a strong opinion about Good Friday. One poll of 1000 adults found that half the respondents supported continued limits on alcohol sales. Fifty percent said it made no difference because they, like my friends and I, bought cans in advance. Surveys conducted by local outlets like the Longford Leader concluded a majority of their readers wanted the ban to remain too.
There was a group that did however feel strongly the ban should go: those profiting from the hospitality industry. Vested interests – not private citizens concerned about their right to have a pint being temporarily infringed – were loudest calling for its removal. Separation of church and state was long overdue, they said, because Americans in Temple Bar might be deprived of an opportunity to pay €9 for a Guinness.
“Ireland must be the only country in the world that has a bank holiday weekend and actually chooses to close the tourist attractions it is best known for – the centres of craic and ceol – the restaurants and gastropubs of the country," Restaurants Association of Ireland CEO Adrian Cummins said in 2013. “Even the Vatican City doesn’t obey this ridiculous law.”
Before their eventual triumph, publicans and restaurateurs spent years lobbying government to revoke the restrictions. In February 2017 the Vintners Federation of Ireland and the Licensed Vintners Association launched one of their many initiatives – the #AboutTime campaign, with its progressive-sounding sloganeering, wording that wouldn’t have sounded out of place if spoken by same-sex marriage advocates two years before.
Except they were rallying against one of the last remaining vestiges of something now all but extinct in Irish public life: the idea of restricting profiteering in service of a public good.
Sorry bishop – capital has spoken
Capital is adept at co-opting the symbols, iconography and language of progressive movements. We've all endured corporate pride celebrations, calls for more women CEOs without demands for higher wages for all, the mental health initiatives that individualise depression and discount the material conditions that contribute to it.
Absent from the lobbying around the ban was any concern for bar and off-licence staff, the underpaid and overworked who had previously enjoyed a guaranteed rest. Underpinning repeated calls for modernity was an assumption that the most desirable freedom of all, to which all other freedoms must be subordinate, is the freedom to consume – and that someone should always be there to facilitate it, whenever they’re required.
“Pubs opening on Good Friday is good news, both for publicans and their customers but also for the many tourists who visit Ireland over the Easter weekend, who in the past would find the pubs closed during a major holiday,” VFI chief executive Padraig Cribben told The Sun in March 2018. “The Good Friday ban was introduced a lifetime ago in 1927 and we took the view that such a piece of archaic and discriminatory legislation needed to be removed.”
Conditions for workers in the hospitality industry were abysmal in 2018 – and remain so today. In 2022 SIPTU said low pay and long hours are the why the industry struggles to find staff. Last year Mandate found nearly one-third of retail and bar staff faced verbal abuse while doing their jobs. Tomorrow, if you go for a drink, ask yourself – how free do the staff seem?
Many of Ireland’s problems come from our civic priorities being organised around the extractive ambitions of a small proprietorial class, sometimes even when nobody is buying. And the imported gastropubs, overpriced hotels named after writers forced to emigrate and curated premium experiences, are hostile to authenticity, to real meaning beyond buying things.
Though consumer spending increased the year the Good Friday ban was lifted – AIB data showed a 43 per cent jump in card transactions – the Irish Times reported that many Dublin bars were quieter than normal Fridays. That pint tomorrow won’t be as good as the drink you had at home when the ban was in place.
One man interviewed by the paper seemed to miss the old way. "It means we don't have to get the boat to Holyhead anymore," he said. "That's what we used to do. The craic was great and we didn't just do it for the drink." He also called the ban "a church law that had deprived people who weren't Catholics a drink." But was it so terrible? If the choice is between sitting in a pub on yet another Friday evening, or boarding a ship with my friends, heading towards the horizon, in search of something forbidden, I know which I’d prefer.
In the absence of a new secular public holiday compensating bar staff, as suggested by the Workers Party, our Good Friday ban was worth keeping. Removing it has little value if we do so on the terms of a capitalist class that seeks to subject every facet of our lives to the demands of commerce.
