We sometimes feel uncomfortable about the way in which many of us - albeit not those in the retail business and certain other sectors - now enjoy an extended Christmas season, consisting not just of the traditional two days but of the greater part of 10 days, running from some time on December 24th to January 1st or 2nd.
This has become an Irish and British custom - but the practice must have quite a few precedents on the Continent of Europe. For it certainly applies to the European Commission in Brussels, where it is the custom to faire le pont - make the bridge - between Christmas and the New Year.
If our discomfort about taking such a long break was confined to the fact that only some of us seem to have this privilege, it would be justified. But I fear that it also derives from a more general sense of unease about taking time off work. I think that as a country we have been much too mean about holidays. Until the mid-1970s, excluding Christmas we had only six public holidays in the year - like the British, from whose period of rule we seem to have inherited our parsimony in this respect. Now, perhaps under EU influence, we have eight such days - while the English, less open to continental example, still have only six. Seven of the 13 continental EU states enjoy between 10 and 12 days off each year, in addition to Christmas.
For my part, I have never had any qualms about taking good breaks at Christmas, Easter and the summer - which I have found necessary to keep going, at a healthy pace, during the rest of the year. That was especially the case when I was under pressure, while in political office. I regularly found that when in that period of my life I got a break at these times of the year, it took up to five days for me to unwind, getting more, rather than less, tired each day, before I began to recover. So a mere week off would have been of little use to me.
I have always been puzzled by the relatively low priority apparently given by trade unions to this matter of adequate annual holidays. For the cost of longer annual holidays is relatively low: an extra week reduces working time by 2 per cent. Now, in the past seven years unions have negotiated a cumulative cut of 5.5 per cent in weekly hours worked. But perhaps workers would have preferred to take some of this weekly hours reduction in the form of longer annual holidays.
Given a choice, they might have opted instead for, say, a 3.5 per cent cut in weekly hours plus an extra week's annual holiday. I wonder if the unions ever sounded out their members on such a choice?
Of course, in the United States annual holidays are very short indeed - just two weeks in most cases and this is not offset by the fact that they have one more public holiday than we do in Ireland - nine days plus Christmas Day. But this holiday deficit is of course only one of many areas in which US culture differs from that in Europe. Whatever some US-oriented members of our Government may think, the US is a different world. That reality is, however, often obscured by the common language, and by the pervasive global character of American mass culture which blinds us to the deep cultural differences between the two sides of the Atlantic.
I think Christmas has a special quality in Ireland, because of the greater closeness of family relationships in a small country.
However, we should not idealise our family relationships: there is all too much evidence on our streets of the extent to which a proportion of children and young people have suffered from the breakdown of relationships in their families. What is notable is the extent to which Irish young people remain attached to their families. The huge number of young people in Dublin who return to their families in distant parts of the country each weekend, in fleets of buses, is, I think, a peculiarly Irish phenomenon. The scale of reciprocal visits by members of families who are geographically divided by external migration is also remarkable. Each year over a million Irish people visit relatives in other lands - and each year there are 1.5 million visits by emigrants to their families here - almost as many visits as we have adults in our population. And, of course, several hundred thousand of these visits take place at Christmas.
In recent times tens of thousands of Irish people have also taken up employment on the Continent. Since we joined the European Community the number of Irish people living in continental EU countries has increased more than twelve-fold, and during the past decade alone this figure has doubled. There are now almost 50,000 Irish people living in those countries. Many of them, and many in the US and Australia also, now keep in constant touch with home by way of the web edition of The Irish Times, which has an extraordinarily large number of "unique users" - 1.1 million per month. That's more, for example, than the London Times, which serves a domestic population 16 times greater than ours. Clearly this facility has had a major cultural impact on the Irish diaspora - as I have found wherever I travel in the world.
Indeed, about five years ago, in the early period of our economic boom, I received letters from people in places such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia saying that on the basis of Saturday articles of mine on the economy they had read on the web, they were proposing to return to Ireland.
To all the web readers of The Irish Times on Saturday, and to the 250,000 or so who read the paper in hard copy form, a very happy Christmas and New Year.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie