Matt W. is the founder of the Working Day Calculator network and researches and maintains statutory holiday and business deadline tools across Canada, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, Singapore, and Australia. Articles are verified against official government sources before publication.
Guides and reference articles written for the Ireland Working Day Calculator.
The shutdowns are not legally mandated, but they are commonly observed on CIF and unionised sites — and your contract probably assumes they will happen.
There is no formal Law Society-mandated shutdown, but the standard contract conditions quietly remove the Christmas week from the calendar — and the rest of the chain tends to follow.
The WRC clock usually starts on the date of the contravention, not the day you found out. That small detail catches people every day.
The general procedural deadlines are short and familiar. The trap is assuming they apply to every type of case.
The statutory minimums are only the starting point. Here are the thresholds and counting quirks that most often cause diary disasters.
The headline quirk: key steps can be due in 5 working days, and 'working day' itself quietly removes the week after Christmas.
Two common surprises: a public holiday doesn't automatically 'move' if it lands on a weekend, and Good Friday still isn't a statutory public holiday.
The deadline you think you have and the deadline Order 122 gives you are sometimes different -- especially for short periods and late-day service.
The same Friday in April can be a normal working day for conveyancing, a 'non-reckonable' day for short court deadlines, and a day off in many offices anyway.