Yes, and this is an angle that doesn't always get mentioned. It's common in Ireland to deliberately oversize your panel array relative to the inverter — say 7 kWp of panels on a 5 kW inverter — so you still get a useful output through our poor winter light. The downside is that on bright summer days the panels can generate more DC power than the inverter can pass through, and that excess is simply lost ("clipped").
A battery soaks up some of that otherwise-wasted summer surplus. Instead of the power being thrown away at the inverter limit, the excess DC charges the battery during the peak of a sunny day. Owners with this setup empty the battery in the morning ahead of a good day so there's headroom to capture the midday peak, then run off it in the evening — squeezing value out of generation that would otherwise vanish.
So if you're planning to oversize for better winter performance (a sensible move in the Irish climate), a battery is a stronger proposition than a simple summer-payback calculation suggests. It's one of the reasons the "panels only" versus "panels plus battery" debate doesn't have a single right answer — it depends on how oversized your array is and how much surplus you'd otherwise lose.