As the northern axis of our planet again tilts away from sun, and our bright, long summer finally segues into the cold darkness of the Irish winter, an odd thing is about to happen.
This Sunday we will put our clocks back by an hour, effectively hastening the onset of the dreaded dark evenings and eliminating exposure to sunlight for a vast tranche of the population.
Campaigners, here and in the UK, want that to change.
“It would make this blooming long, dark winter shorter,” says Tommy Broughan, the Dublin North East TD who is behind the Brighter Evenings Bill, which calls for winter and summer time here to be each moved forward by an hour.
“We get a lot of rain, a lot of darkness . . . The light is there, but because of the way we organise the country, we don’t use it. People would be more cheerful, healthier, and you’d have more useful time.
“It might help seasonal affective disorder (Sad), which a lot of people suffer from. And I think it’d have a knock-on effect on suicide rates and our general national wellbeing.”
Campaigners have been lobbying about this issue for more than 40 years. They say it would reduce road deaths, improve mental and physical health and result in more economic after-work activity.
Last year the then-minister for justice, and Time Lord, Alan Shatter referred the Private Members' Bill to the Oireachtas Justice Committee, which is inviting submissions.
“Having an extra hour of light in the evenings would reduce crime and the fear of crime,” says Broughan. “Usually in the run-in to Halloween there’s a lot of anti-social behaviour. At the very time we need more light, the light is reduced.
“You’d need the British administration . . . to agree to a similar change,” he says. “You’d want everyone in these islands thinking together to do it properly: whether to do the full GMT+1 and +2, or take the American example and have a much shorter window.”
It wasn’t always thus. Ireland used to have its own time zone, which was about 25 minutes and 21 seconds behind GMT. It ran from August 1880 to October 1916.
Changing the time without the UK doing likewise, though, would result in Derry and Letterkenny, for example, being in different time zones. Ireland would need EU approval for any move. There are, perhaps, other ways to brighter evenings.
After referring the bill to the Oireachtas committee, Shatter recommended an alternative solution: getting up earlier. While it sounded like the exhortations of a workaholic, he was actually proposing the fabled Nordic model, whereby school begins at different times in different months. This would obviate the need for moving in tandem with the UK, where the latest of many similar bills was defeated in 2012.
Drawbacks
There would be drawbacks to a time change. Bringing Ireland in line with Central European Time (CET) would mean that those in more northerly counties would have late sunrises in the depths of winter and late summer sunsets. It would also affect those farmers and postal staff who follow Benjamin Franklin’s dictum of early to bed, early to rise. And an ESRI paper in July found that such a move wouldn’t significantly save energy.
Yet the benefits are compelling. The Road Safety Authority reports that the most dangerous time to be on the road is from 4pm to 7pm. They also found that road deaths increased on evenings where darkness fell earlier.
A UK study by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents found that a move to CET would prevent about 80 road deaths a year, saving the NHS £138 million (€230 million).
While most see it as something Ireland couldn’t do without its biggest trading partner, there are precedents: Portugal is an hour behind Spain, while Russia and Belarus decided in 2011 to keep their daylight savings time year-round.
At present, the amount by which office hours in Dublin and Brussels are out of line, in winter, can be up to four hours. With Britain threatening to leave the EU and further European economic integration mooted, supporters here may soon find a welcoming ear for becoming more in sync with the Continent.
