Editor's note: This article first ran Monday, but is worth checking again today, when the county is closed for the second time this week.

City workers in the Irish bastion of Boston are off today, but not because of St. Patrick.

No, while declaring March 17 a holiday may be an idea whose time will come, El Paso County may well be the only governmental entity in the country that has given its workers the day off on St. Pat’s account.

As it happens, city and county workers in Boston and the surrounding area do have March 17 off.

“It is a city holiday, but it has nothing to do with St. Patrick’s Day,” said Rocco Corigliano, who works in the office of the Boston mayor. “It’s Evacuation Day. It’s goes back to the revolution and commemorates the evacuation of the city by British forces during the American Revolutionary War on March 17, 1776.”

Asked if he knew of any city that had ever declared St. Patrick’s Day a holiday in America, Corigliano said, “No, I don’t think there’s any city that has a St. Patrick’s holiday.

“It’s not a real holiday.”

Until now -- in El Paso County where the number of people with Irish ancestry is surely as small as could be found anywhere.

It took just one man to make it happen.

County Commissioner Dan Haggerty said he was enjoying his day off performing “a corporal work of mercy by taking two old dames to the casino.”

Yes, one of them was his mother, he said, and she still has that quart of milk in her refrigerator even though it was little help to another of her son’s, Republican state Rep. Pat Haggerty, in his recent loss at the polls.

A veteran county commissioner who has never lost an election, Haggerty confessed that after years of joking about making March 17 a legal county holiday instead of a good day to call in sick, he managed to slip it in for the first time on the list of official holidays at budget time last summer.

“We didn’t research to see if it was a holiday anywhere else,” he said, “but St. Patrick was a good ol’ boy, a good Catholic and the patron saint of the El Paso Diocese, and I can’t think of a better excuse to give them the day off.

“After all, there’s only two kinds of people in the world: the Irish and the people who wish they were.”

He disputed the suggestion that there are few people of Irish descent in El Paso County where Hispanics make up about three-quarters of the population.

“You have O’Tooles, O’Briens, Ochoas and Ocampos. They’re Irish,” he said.

As a compromise for getting to add St. Patrick’s Day to the county’s list of holidays, Haggerty said, he had to give into County Judge Anthony Cobos’ insistence on letting employees have Good Friday off as well.

“It was a unanimous vote,” he said. “That gives them sort of a spring break to spend with their kids -- a three-day week with Monday and Friday off.”

Taking a more sheepish view of a holiday that may add to the county’s reputation for finding any reason to close the courthouse, Commissioner Veronica Escobar said it’s appalling.

“And I’m appalled,” she said. “I don’t remember our discussing this in the budget cycle or approving it.

“I do remember our having a broader discussion about compensating employees because we’re not able to give them significant pay increases. Holidays are one of the few perks we can give them instead.”

Asked if she’s had any complaints about the locked doors at the courthouse, Escobar said, “Not yet, but it’s early.”

David Crowder can be reached at dcrowder@epmediagroup.com or (915) 351-0605.