Hour Change

Same here! It's great in spring when you have a shorter night, but a right swizz this way round.

I hope you get paid for the extra hour?!

In fairness, I'd take the extra hour in work any day over a toddler at 4.30am!!!

Do you seriously mean you're up at 5.30am every single day??? 😱

(can you tell I don't have kids?!)

Catastrophe sounds hyperbolic but for the cross border workers it would certainly make life more complicated.

But policy should be made to benefit the masses not the few. So I do hope the EU push ahead with the plan. We'll have a UI sooner or later and then all will be well.

That’s correct but there’s no issue (that I’m aware of) with the Spain/Portugal border being disputed. Unionists wouldn’t care a jot but nationalists very likely would.

As much as my sleeping sucks, it was even worse this morning, instead of the usual 4.30 waking up, it was 3 am today. Doggies didn't complain tho, nothing better than to fook out for a walk that early 😁

With kids the trick is to start the clock change a week early putting them to bed or waking them up an extra 10 minutes early or late each day to build up to the hour change.

Oh crap. Part of my job is to design reports used for payroll and I've just realised that I forgot about daylight savings

You need Gro clocks to train them not to get up before the sun is up on the clock. Wonderful bits of technology and worked a treat every year for us. Kids off to bed at the same time as normal and stayed in bed the extra hour without even realising the clocks changed.

It has been for most of human kinds existence on earth!

The main issues for us are of course twofold: the west of Ireland is some 10 degrees west of Greenwich, in mid winter even now sunrise isn't till about 9am. If we kept so called 'summertime', sunrise in late Dec/ Jan would not till about 10am. Just think of that for a minute - 10 in the morning and the day only getting going.

Secondly would potentially be a significant rise in road accidents. Commuters & others leaving at say 7.30am on roads that are thawing, would instead but effectively put on the roads at 6.30am. Darker and with higher levels of frost to deal with.

But it isn't now

Wine o clock?

Winter time is the normal time. Clocks go forward for the summer and they return to normal for winter. If abolished it would have to remain at winter time.

No. Winter time is the normal time.

Based off 12 noon I'd imagine. You could redefine it on that basis maybe. But as per current definition, winter time is the unadjusted one

Well I and many others equally hate that it's been practically dark getting up at 7.30 recently. Not everyone stays in bed till midday :)

As for road safety, of course there is no evidence as the model has not been tried in many decades for very good reason. We do have evidence though that road safety is compromised in existing periods of fog, ice and wintry conditions - so it is entirely logical & predictable that putting people on the road an hour earlier (in terms of poor road conditions) will cause issues.

No it isn't. Sweden and Finland have amongst the lowest road fatalities and accidents in the EU and deal with significantly longer dark hours and icy/wintery conditions than us. The whole nonsense that road accidents would go up is just that. Getting dark at 4pm in December is just silly when the extra hour of daylight would be much more useful in the evening. Not everyone goes to bed at 5 in the afternoon 😉👍

It would be nice to see this absolute anachronism done away with

For a country that worked so hard for independence, we sure do love copying everything they do, don't we /sarcasm

Irish Standard Time is defined as 1 hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, per the Standard Time Act of 1968.

Logically Ireland should be split down the middle with the portion west of 7.5E on UTC -1, with the eastern portion on UTC.

The French and the Spanish should both be on UTC, but if I recall one was dragged forwards by WW2 and one opted to align with Germany for political reasons.

From a practical standpoint, shifting permanently one hour forwards puts us out of sync for five months of the year with the UK but gives us more 'daylight hours' in the winter at the cost of commuting in the dark.

It's 4 minutes for every degree of longitude, so Ireland definitely doesn't warrant a split time zone, that'd be quite mad.

Rather the point is that the west of Ireland is typically 10 degrees west of Greenwich, so sun rises/ sets 40 minutes after it does at Greenwich in London. The sun in the west of Ireland in 'winter time' is typically not due south till c 1240 and in 'summer time' till c. 1340.

You could argue that Ireland as an island could have it's own time zone based on 8 degrees west, that's roughly Athlone. But that would only be c ½ hour difference from GMT. So we're kind half a dozen of one and six of the other.

Overall it makes sense to make the best of it and for convenience to stick with GMT/ Brit time. And if we have to plump for no change in the hour, to stick with so called 'winter time' as this arrangement distributes daylight best about both sides of noon in our overall situation.

The problem is terminology - the unwashed public associate 'summer time' with lovely long evenings spent at BBQs in the garden etc and think wouldn't it be great to keep 'summer time' all year round. It's a silly idea seized upon by populist politicians every year who want to grab a few headlines, mostly FG I notice. Calling things 'summer time' or 'winter time' has no difference to weather and actual amounts of daylight.