Ireland's own little time zone!

I was fascinated to discover yesterday that, whereas the UK will be switching to Daylight Savings Time at 1.00 am tonight - going one hour ahead of GMT, Ireland won't be! Instead, we'll simply revert to Irish Standard time (which - perhaps not entirely coincidentally - is also designed to run one hour ahead of GMT).

Kudos to the Grand Auld Stretch on Blue Sky for educating me on this: Post by @theauldsthretch.bsky.social — Bluesky

Apparently, it was the Germany who first introduced daylight savings time, at the height of WW1. Within weeks, several countries (on both sides of the war) followed suit. The US joined in, in 1918.

It's far from universal practise. Most countries in Asia and Africa either never changed their clocks or have abandoned the idea.. Only in Europe, North America and Australia is the practise widely used. The difference is presumably linked to latitude: where the length of the day varies very little across the year, there is little point in messing with the clocks.

Even in Europe, it has come in and out of fashion. Though the idea persisted in the UK and Ireland, most countries abandoned the practise in the 1920s. In France, The government decided to abandon clock changes in 1923, and instead to move working hours forward by 30 minutes.

Paris however, in a move that must have caused some confusion, continued to change its clocks.

During the Second World War, the practice of changing clocks again spread from Germany to many European countries. For a time, the UK even introduced Double Summer Time, going two hours ahead of GMT. But the fact that this was being done in wartime, and often by force, meant that most countries reverted to their previous system once peace returned.

It was the 1973 Oil crisis (where the price of oil quadrupled in a few months) that led most European countries back to daylight savings and its been the norm here more or less since.

The EU has had legislation in place since 2018 to abandon the practise, but this seems to be stuck in a bureaucratic quagmire.

And there have been some changes. Notably in Ireland, where the Standard Time Act of 1968 struck a conveniently low cost blow for anti-imperialism and took us out of the UK time zone, creating our very own time-zone: Irish Standard Time - which is aligned to Central European Time (CET)

This had no direct effect on our clocks, but it was interesting how it was set up. Rather than mimicking the British by using GMT in winter and GMT+1 in summer (British Summer Time, or BST), we did the opposite. Irish Standard Time is what we use in summer, which is the same as CET (though most of Europe is then at CET+1). And in winter, we take an hour off to move back in alignment with GMT.

So, we use standard time in summer, but the British use standard time in winter. Or - as i saw it explained online - British time is the dark worse weather and Irish time is the better brighter weather. (https://bsky.app/profile/wyvernfriend.bsky.social/post/3mi3abbkkjk2v)

Interestingly, both Ireland and the UK abandoned the practise in 1970, sticking with summer time throughout the year. But this does mean that it is dark until well after 9am in the mornings - even later in Northern Scotland - and in 1971 we went back to changing the clocks,

More here:

Daylight Saving Time Statistics