Clodagh Finn: St Brigid’s Day — and seven other choices for a new bank holiday

A portrait of Brigid illuminates the GPO, Dublin. Why don’t we make St Brigid’s Day, February 1, a bank holiday? 

Who doesn’t welcome the idea of having an extra bank holiday? Bring it on — although it doesn’t quite seem fair that frontline workers, the very people supposed to be honoured by the proposal, often work bank holidays.

All the same, the discussion has focused attention on who should be recognised by the Government — and in what way.

Most agree that medical staff should be first in line for any financial reward, but there is an equally strong case to be made for shop workers, gardaí, and transport workers. In fact, the list goes on as so many people in so many sectors worked in near-impossible conditions to get us through the last 18 months.

Over the coming weeks, there will be lots of debate about acknowledging that work, and rightly so. However, we should not ignore the importance of choosing the date of a new bank holiday.

There has been some suggestion that we should mark Thanksgiving, which falls on the fourth Thursday of November, but why should we turn to the US for inspiration when we have so many under-celebrated dates in our own calendar?

An extra bank holiday should not be about reaching out to the US tourism market, as one TD has said. It should be about highlighting what we have at home.

What about St Brigid’s Day, for example? Why don’t we make February 1 a bank holiday? There are several good reasons to do so. 

It marks the beginning of spring, albeit a tentative, icy one; it provides some blessed relief in the interminable days between Christmas and St Patrick’s Day; and it celebrates a woman who deserves much more time in the sun.

Those points were made on Twitter by Jillian van Turnhout yesterday, but it’s a point that is raised every spring when her feast day comes around. While she is a Catholic saint, she has universal appeal and her talents echo those of frontline workers — she was a gifted administrator, a prolific miracle worker, and a woman of deep compassion.

She was also very powerful. She founded her own monastery in the fifth century, and her “outstanding and innumerable miracles” were greeted with the “tumultuous applause of the multitudes”, to quote Cogitosus’ seventh-century account of her life.

That same account outlines some 32 miracles, the most famous of which is the story of how Brigid convinced the king of Leinster to give her as much land as her cloak would cover. When he agreed, four of her nuns each took a corner of the cloak and ran like the wind, in all directions, until they had coveted the whole of the Curragh — or so the story goes.

There’s another beautiful story about how she once hung that same cloak on a sunbeam to dry. Many other miracles have passed under the radar too. She turned water into ale to satisfy the thirst of lepers, cured the deaf, and restored sight to the blind.

Another account tells of how she once miraculously ended a pregnancy of “a certain woman who, after taking a vow of virginity, had lapsed through weakness into youthful desire of pleasure, and her womb swelled with child”.

Brigid, exercising the “most potent strength of her ineffable faith”, blessed her and “caused what had been conceived to disappear”. The woman was returned “to health and to penance”.

While some have interpreted that as evidence of proto-feminism, it is more convincing to see it as the early Church’s insistence on self-restraint and chaste devotion.

However, on the whole, her miracles illustrate that Brigid was a woman of compassion, empathy, and healing, fifth-century-style — all fitting attributes for any holiday acknowledging frontline workers and commemorating those who have died from Covid-19.

It would be a lost opportunity if we looked to the US to provide us with inspiration for a bank holiday designed to commemorate the work of so many people in this country.

If St Brigid is too religious, how about a date relevant in the lives of some of the many Irish pioneers in the realm of public health?

I think it’s important to choose a woman for two reasons. Firstly, their contributions have been overshadowed for many decades. Let’s do something to change that now. Secondly, the majority of healthcare workers are women, formally and informally. 

The lion’s share of caring in the home falls on the shoulders of women. That is not, in any way, to diminish the incredible work done by everyone, just to say that we have an opportunity to acknowledge some under-recognised people.

Dorothy Stopford Price (1890-1954), for example, was one of the Irish pioneers of the BCG vaccine that helped to eliminate TB. Her work certainly resonates now, at a time when vaccines were developed in record time and taken up here in such great numbers.

She was born on September 9 and died on January 30, two possible dates for a new bank holiday.

Margaret ‘Pearl’ Dunlevy (1909-2002), a physician and epidemiologist from Donegal, was another champion of immunisation in the fight against TB. She graduated with a diploma from UCD and did vital research into TB as a member of the BCG vaccine committee at Crooksling Sanatorium and St Ultan’s Hospital for Infants.

The success of her pilot programme in Dublin meant it was rolled out all over the country with great results.

On February 26, 1982, chief medical advisor James Deeny wrote in the Irish Medical Times: “Dunlevy built up from nothing the highly
efficient, beautifully organised Dublin scheme, which ran like clockwork, was availed of widely, produced no unfavourable incidents, reduced childhood tuberculosis to vanishing point, and lowered dramatically the awful incidence of tuberculosis meningitis in babies in Dublin.”

We might, then, consider February 26 as a day to commemorate our recent experience of how public health campaigns helped us through a global pandemic.

Or we could seek out a date relevant to Dr Kathleen Lynn (1874-1955), who also played an important role in helping to eliminate TB. She is perhaps better known than most, but a bank holiday on her birthday, January 28, would get the year off to a gentler start.

Many others too

There are many others too. Here are a few of them, along with possible dates for a bank holiday: Ella Webb, paediatrician and founder of the Children’s Sunshine Home, was born on October 16. Ada English, a politician and psychiatrist who did so much to change Irish attitudes to mental health, was born on January 10. Lucinda Sullivan, who dedicated her life to children’s welfare after a narrow escape from drowning on Lake Zurich, set up the Sunbeam Hospital to treat children with rickets. She died on August 29.

It would be such a shame not to pick a date that has real meaning.

If there was a poll, though, I’d be voting for Brigid. We need a foil to March 17 and she is such a beacon of hope at a dark time of the year.