May Day! May Day! It's the summer!... kind of... Always the perpetual optimists here in WorldIrish Towers, we've put together a list of eleven things we're looking forward to over the next few months. 

What are you looking forward to?

1. Long weekends

So we've got the May bank holiday this weekend, then the June Bank holiday – AKA Whit weekend – and way down the line we've got the August bank holiday. So much time for activities!

Or just relaxing...

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2. The GAA Championship

Christmas comes but once a year but to many Irish people it's not 25 December, it's the day their county lines out in the first round the All-Ireland GAA Championshop, whether it be football or hurling.

Doesn't matter what your odds are, or how the league campaign has gone, at 1:55pm on Sunday 19 May, I will be full sure Cavan are destined to win Sam Maguire!

3. Silage Season

The most exciting time of the year for many people in the country. It brings with it early mornings, late nights, sandwiches, greasing machinery, accidentally getting stabbed by your uncle with a pitchfork, your mother having 15 people for the dinner, and getting the trailer stuck on the side of a hill, among other things.

I love the smell of silage in the morning!

4. Exams

Dear Leaving and Junior Cert students, they say doing these exams are the toughest thing you'll face in life but they're wrong. In fact the most difficult thing to put up with is when your mother rings you on the first day of the exams every year for the rest of your life to tell you how such and such down the road's daughter's husband's niece thought of Maths Paper I!

And you with your own college exams to worry about, after not heading to a lecture in five months!

5. Star Wars Day

May the 4th be with you!

No seriously, look here.

Image: Flickr

6. Being allowed to take off your jumper

You'd spend all day in primary school running around in just a shirt, and then you'd get off the bus and your mother would give out stink because you'll catch your death.

'Don't cast a clout till May is out!' 

'Shed in May, rue the day.'

7. Summer festivals

The good less wet weather means that you are absolutely guaranteed there'll be some sort of community festival happening on any given weekend in Ireland.

Ripe with bonny babies, ducking chairs, vintage cars and machinery, bumping cars and of course, the Craggy Island funfair!

Image: Killinkere Jamboree

8. The material that spawned many a great literary work

Every year so far you started this epic completely unprepared but this year it will be different...

You're a year older; a year wiser – this year you and your other 8-year-old friends are going to make day-by-day notes; documenting what shenanigans, frolics and haphazard adventures you and your comrades in arms embark on, so that come September your 'What I did on my summer holidays' essay will be the best one yet!

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9. Ice-cream

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream!

10. Going to the beach

'If we should be so lucky as to get more than two hours of nearly dry weather on any given day, then the entire population of Éire must to down tools (apart from their bucket and spade) and get thy buttocks to the beach.'

-  Article 4.6 in the Irish Constitution.

Image: Berenice Beukes

11. A day at the bog

Nuns!? 

Image: Sligo Heritage

Categories: Summer May Festivals