Today is St Brigid's Day as we have always known it, but next Monday, depending on your line of work, you may be enjoying an extra day off thanks to our new public holiday of the same name. It will be an annual holiday — the first one ever to be called after a woman, writes Joyce Fegan

In rekindling the old tradition, Irish women have toppled a mean-spirited custom but the fact we need it at all is a sign that we have a long way to go before gender inequality is consigned to history, writes Clodagh Finn