Springing forward in time

Main image courtesy of Pixabay.

Just in case you forgot, if there are clocks in your house not connected to the internet, you should have put them forward an hour at 1am, writes Brian Byrne. Computers, phones, tablets will all have done that automatically. But mechanical timers on lights and heating systems, and the odd clock elsewhere, will still be on so-called winter time.

(For me, my bedside clock is now back in sync. I don't bother changing it in the autumn, so during winter time I wake up, look at it, and mentally subtract an hour. Go figure.)

But ... before you go around winding your clocks forward, check with others in your house to make sure they haven't already done so. Family chaos has been known to happen.

Meantime, did you know that from 1969-1971, Ireland observed standard (summer) time all year round? It was an experiment in the run-up to our accession to the EEC but abandoned before we actually did join. During those years, time in Ireland was the same as in the then six EEC countries, except in the summer in Italy, which switched to Central European Summer Time (CEST).

Earlier, until 1916 Irish time was defined as the local mean time at Dunsink Observatory outside Dublin, which had Irish time at 25 minutes and 21 seconds behind the Greenwich Mean Time. That was found to be inconvenient for telegraphic communication between the two countries and in October 1916 the Time (Ireland) Act 1916 came into effect synchronising both islands to GMT.

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