Setting bank holiday and special hours on Google for Irish businesses

Short answer: use special hours for one-off dates — St Patrick's Day, St Brigid's Day, the June and August bank holidays, St Stephen's Day, or a private closure — and leave your regular hours alone for a normal week. Set them a few weeks ahead so anyone checking your profile before St Patrick's weekend sees the truth, not last year's hours.

Ireland's public holiday calendar has a few dates that don't exist in the UK or elsewhere, so a profile copied from a UK template will quietly get it wrong. Citizens Information publishes the confirmed dates each year, which is worth checking directly rather than assuming they match a neighbouring market.

Regular hours vs special hours vs temporarily closed

• Regular hours are your normal week — change these only when the pattern itself changes.
• Special hours override regular hours for a specific date: a bank holiday, a stocktake day, or longer opening for a local event.
• Temporarily closed is a distinct status for a genuine extended closure — use it only when the business really is shut, not as a shortcut for one bank holiday.

How to set them

1. Open your Business Profile and go to hours.
2. Find Special hours and add the date.
3. Enter that day's hours, or mark it closed.
4. Save, then check the profile from a phone the way a customer would.

An Irish year at a glance

Put reminders in the diary about a month before each of these:

• New Year's Day
• St Brigid's Day (the first Monday in February, or 1 February itself)
• St Patrick's Day, 17 March — a genuinely busy trading day for some businesses and a full closure for others
• Easter — Good Friday is no longer a statutory closure for many trades but is still worth checking against your own patterns
• The May, June and August bank holidays
• Christmas Eve through to New Year, plus St Stephen's Day on 26 December

Because dates for the moveable bank holidays shift each year, it's worth confirming the exact date on Citizens Information or gov.ie rather than working from memory.

A closure example, illustrative

A café in Cork closing for St Stephen's Day, illustrative only: setting special hours for 26 December to "closed", then reverting automatically to regular hours the next day, avoids the awkward situation of a customer arriving to a locked door based on out-of-date information.

Checklist

• Special hours set for every closure in the next three months
• Regular hours still match reality
• Website and phone message match the profile
• A short post published if the change is worth telling customers about

Where Local SEO AI helps

The business profile workspace keeps hours alongside your other details, and reports & actions lists upcoming checks so bank holiday hours become a routine task rather than something remembered too late. Updates sent to Google require the live connection, which is awaiting Google's approval; until then, changes are prepared as drafts for you to review. See pricing, billed in GBP (£). Pair this with the posting routine, and see our Dublin local SEO guide for a city-specific starting point.