Where does our grand stretch go if the clocks don’t change?

AFTER months of vague threats and dark mutterings about EU directives, it has come to pass: next year will be the last time that the clocks change all over Europe.

From 2021, we will no longer gain or lose an hour twice a year. Instead, each EU country will choose whether they want to remain on summer or winter time all year round. So primary school children won’t have to learn the ‘fall back, spring forward’ mnemonic – and we won’t have any more ridiculous stories like the one about my mother-inlaw showing up at the restaurant two hours early to meet my parents for the first time.

According to MEP Deirdre Clune, who announced that the proposed change is now EU law, this is good news. More than 80% of people surveyed in the EU backed the abolition of the clock change. What is more surprising is that a majority of people in Ireland also voted in favour of the change. What on earth were you thinking of? And, more importantly, how did I miss that vote?

Whichever way you spin the change – permanent summer time or permanent winter time, the result will be a disaster for us. From 2021, for six months of the year, we will have two different time zones on our island. You will be able to get a train from Drogheda to Belfast – or visa versa – and arrive before you leave. Driving from Dublin to Clones for a match (if such a journey will even be possible post-Brexit), your phone will change times and zones six times, which could be alarming, in its most literal sense.

And for once, we can’t blame the Brits: we will be the ones shifting the goal posts, and then, only for six months of the year. In other words, the rest of the EU might forget all about the end of March and October, but if we want to catch that train, we need to never forget what time it is where we aren’t.

And I’m worried sick about my settop box. Right now, I have TV shows programmed to record at a certain time. If half of them begin an hour earlier or later than the other half, how will my digibox be able to distinguish between them? Meanwhile, a number of phone apps work on the time on your phone – how will friends ever get weekend tee times if everyone with a bag of golf clubs in Northern Ireland has access to the booking system an hour earlier? My God, how will I ever get tickets on Ticketmaster again?

All of this will probably be sorted out in due course. We have almost two years to fix the technology to assure that however weird it will be having two time zones on our little rock, it won’t bring our social, sporting and TV viewing lives to a juddering halt. But no technology on Earth can change the physics of remaining on the same time all year around: and that’s where the real disasters might occur.

If we go with summertime all year around – and married to our beloved ‘grand stretch’, I’d be very surprised if we don’t – it will mean that most of us will be getting up and going to work, frequently in artificially lit environments, in pitch darkness for about six months of the year.

AS well as having horrible consequences for our mental health – study after study shows that exposure to daylight heightens levels of serotonin and all manner of other lovely hormones in our bodies – this would also mean more traffic will be moving in the dark. And with children having to get to school, it will follow that there will be more cars on the road – would you let your children walk or cycle to school in the dark? – which will inevitably lead to more road deaths. I honestly can’t see any way around that.

Alternatively, if we stick to wintertime, we will lose our long evenings in spring, which will lead to a marked reduction in people taking exercise and engaging in outdoor pursuits after a long winter spent indoors.

The vast majority of the citizens of the EU live on the continental mainland, further south than we do. That means that they have shorter dawns and twilights and there is less of a difference between their summer days and winter days. That’s just simple science. But we occupy a different space and there is a huge difference for us, here on our northerly, westerly Atlantic rock, in the length of our summer and winter days. That’s why our bigger next door neighbours introduced daylight saving in the first place.

If the EU is serious about protecting our interests in the Brexit omnishambles, then it also needs to re-examine this ruinous development, recognise our special place and exempt us from this new law.

As to how the other members fare with the logistics of a brave new Europe in which every second country might be in permanent summer and every other one stuck in winter, well, I presume they’ve already figured that out. Haven’t they?