Ireland introduced a new national public holiday around Saint Brigid's Day in 2023, observed on the first Monday in February unless 1 February itself falls on a Friday, making it, according to the Irish government's own framing at the time, the first Irish public holiday named for a woman and a deliberate modern civic recognition of a figure standing at the exact overlap between the Gaelic Imbolc and the Christian Brigid this entry's first article describes.
The new holiday is explicitly secular and civic in its legal basis, available to the whole population regardless of religious observance or lack of it, and its introduction has been read by commentators both as an act of gender-representation policy and as a modern state formally re-engaging with a pre-Christian seasonal marker it had not previously given equivalent official standing to, alongside the long-established Christian and bank holidays that make up the rest of the Irish calendar, giving Imbolc and its Christian overlap a level of state recognition that Beltane, Lughnasadh and the other cross-quarter festivals covered elsewhere in this atlas do not share in Ireland today.
The Brigidine Sisters, a religious order founded in County Kildare in Brigid's name, relit what they present as her ancient perpetual flame at Kildare in 1993 after centuries during which it had not been kept, and the flame has burned continuously there since inside a purpose-built fire temple at Solas Bhride, a modern revival that predates and helped build the public interest the 2023 national holiday later formalised.