Time For Change?

Time For Change?

Patrick Ryan takes a look at the history of our timekeeping over the last 150 years.

To Countess Markievicz it was an outrage, further evidence of the yoke of imperialism. To insurance assessors it remains an annual headache spawning mountains of further paperwork, while for doctors in A&E deparments it means more work every November, and less sleep as they struggle to keep pace.
Our clocks go forward one hour on Sunday morning so it’s a good time to take a look at the history of daylight saving, and ask whether Ireland should move in line with the EU and abandon British Summer Time (BST) or stick with the system we’ve used for over 100 years.

For millennia the measurement of time was a local matter, dependent on the rising and setting of the sun through the seasons. Long after their invention accurate clocks were rare: ornate, mysterious machines owned by rich, while pocket watches which followed from the 1700s remained a technology beyond the understanding of even the educated elites who carried them.

Driven by the demands of commerce, during the Industrial Revolution accurate timekeeping in every home and factory became essential. Up until the 1920s in cities “knocker uppers” were hired to wake sleeping workers near a mill or distillery by banging on their windows, and the new set times for lunch breaks announced by a klaxon.

In World War I coordinated attacks saw the pocket watches move from officers’ waistcoat to wrists, allowing them to signal men with the left while holding a revolver or pistol with the right, but with hostilities over outside the cities time was about measuring days and months rather than hours and minutes. The pealing of bells on the hour called parishioners within earshot to prayer and church, but while farming remained the major employer sunrise and sunset still dictated the start and finish of your day.

Technology, and consumerism brought about change once more. By the 1960s imported watches and transistor radios picking up hourly updates and scheduled programming were now affordable. Suddenly everyone was far more aware of every minute, a far cry from the slower pace of preceding generations who at most points in the day would have only had an approximate idea of the hour, based on the sun. It’s interesting that our relaxed attitude to timekeeping is found in many countries with a strong agricultural base such as the south of Spain and southern Italy.

Officially of course the trains had always needed to be run on time, and regulation was required.
In 1880 Dublin Mean Time, the legal time for Ireland had been defined as the local mean time at Dunsink Observatory outside Dublin, about 25 minutes 21 seconds behind Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the legal time for GB.

By the outbreak of the Great War technology dictated change as the telegraph had become an important tool for business and the military, and for practicality Summer time or “Daylight Saving Time” was introduced in May 1916 across the UK.

Parliament soon passed the Time (Ireland) Act 1916 to ensure that from 2am Dublin Mean Time on Sunday, October 1st, 1916, all clocks on both sides of the Irish Sea would observe the same settings.
Countess Markievicz was upset. As late as 1918 she still predicted that the abolition of Dublin Mean Time would “put the whole country into the SF (Sinn Féin) camp…public feeling (was) outraged by forcing of English time on us.”

Home Rule MP Tim Healy had also been skeptical, commenting in debates that “while the Daylight Saving Bill added to the length of your daylight, this Bill adds to the length of your darkness”.
Long before perfidious Albion wasted Irish time the idea had been explored in various parts of the world for centuries, and discussed by thinkers including Benjamin Franklin. In 1895 scientist George Hudson, a noted entomologist who maximized the daylight to catch insect specimens published a paper suggesting that shifting clocks back two hours each summer in his native New Zealand would prove a health boost for shift workers benefitting from more time in the sun and fresh air.

In 1907, William Willett, a successful builder whose great-great-grandson is Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, published a leaflet arguing sunlight was being wasted in sleep, his proposals to change the clocks in 20 minute increments over four weeks finding favour with prominent figures like Winston Churchill and writer Arthur Conan Doyle. The proposals were not adopted until the year after his death during the Great War, a move copied by the USA in 1918 shortly after it entered the global conflict.

After independence in 1922 and the subsequent establishment of Northern Ireland, the Irish Free State tended to follow Britain’s lead in setting time. Belfast, like cities across the water in the UK, was highly industrialised with shift work in factories and the likes of shipbuilders Harland & Wolff dependent on accurate timeclocks in order meet targets and drive the economy, something less common in the rest of this island.

The change from Dublin time to Greenwich time occurred simultaneously with the official move from summer time to winter time. Various acts during the early-to-mid 1920s provided a default summer time period, and though a move to “double summer time” which Winston Churchill introduced in Britain to further increase output in World War II was considered here, Ireland continued with the existing system, so Belfast remained one hour ahead of Dublin year round until the return to the current GMT system late in 1947!

Two decades later we faced yet another adjustment. In 1968 in preparation for Ireland’s entry to the EEC the winter time change was dropped and our clocks reset along with those of most other member states, to Central European Summer Time – in other words GMT+ 1 all year round – an initiative which ran until 1971.

Scientists report both pros and cons in the biannual changeover. It’s now recognized that there’s a distinct drop in our sleep quality following the adjustments. In the USA a study in Michigan found the Monday after daylight savings time saw a 24% rise in hospital admissions from heart attacks, while in Finland researchers reported that ischemic strokes rose by 8% in the two days after the switch. In contrast cardiac arrests drop by a fifth when Americans turned back their clocks.
“We don’t really know exactly why there is an increase in heart attacks and strokes…It’s likely connected with the disruption to the body’s internal clock, or its circadian rhythm,” says Dr Maria Delgado-Lelievre, MD a Hypertension Specialist at the University of Miami.

Experts say changing over also costs the economy. One US study estimated that drops in worker productivity alone means a loss of $275 million, while Britain’s AA reports that insurance companies and emergency services must cope with an overall rise of 11% in car accidents (rising to 16% at rush hour) after the changeover.

With more people working from home today, and household ESB prices rising significantly over recent years the loss of daylight means domestic lights and heating will be switched on as early as 4pm. This hits many of us directly in our pockets, not to mention causing surges in power demand nationally and the subsequent knock-on effect on the environment as we struggle to lower emissions in line with EU directives,

Ireland, the UK and the USA are among the one third of the world’s nations which use daylight saving, while powerhouses like China, India and Japan, along with most of Africa leave their clocks unchanged.
In March 2019 the European Parliament voted in favour of ending the initiative in 2021, following the European Commission’s draft directive from September 2018 aiming to abolish biannual clock changes in all EU countries.

However no final decision has been made. A qualified majority of member states would have to support the final text, so don’t hold your breath on it happening anytime soon.
Would Ireland support such a move? It’s unlikely, and impractical while Northern Ireland still adheres to the status quo on time throughout the post Brexit UK. Any deviation would prove politically sensitive in the north too, so it’s hard to envisage.

For the foreseeable future it looks like there will be no change to changing the clocks here, but don’t worry. As TS Elliot assured himself and the readers of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock published in 1915, just as Britain prepared to turn the hours hands and change the rhythm of our lives for the century which followed, there will be time.

“Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,