The times they are a-changing — daylight saving call could cause havoc

LAST week, we stumbled on a puzzle.

Some people want to change ‘it’ to leave things the same; others want to leave things the same by changing ‘it’. What is ‘it’?

Answer: the bi-annual turning of the clocks by an hour.

It’s quite possible that when we turn our clocks back in October next year, it will be for the last time.

A study conducted over the summer by the EU found that 84pc of respondents favoured the abolition of daylight saving.

The number of responses was the highest ever received in any Commission public consultation, 4.6million.

If the proposal is passed, member states would then be required to choose whether to permanently remain in summertime or wintertime.

Britain says it has no plans to abolish daylight saving, while the indications in Ireland are that we would go along, as we usually do, with the EU line.

So we could end up with a time-border in Ireland, for part of the year. This could be one of the myriad of ways, big and small, that life will be affected on this island by Brexit.

The existing political situation, though not perfect, is working in the North, and the changes that are coming will make things worse.

I am still praying that something will happen to make Britain see sense.

Until the late 19th century, time in Ireland and Britain was defined locally according to the natural circadian rhythm of sunrise and sunset, or ‘God’s Time’.

The first recorded suggestion about daylight saving was made by the American founding father Benjamin Franklin in 1784 as a way of saving money on candles.

On this side of the world, the concept was popularised in the early 20th century by an English building contractor named William Willett. His primary motivation was to provide workers with extra light for leisure time in the evenings.

In a pamphlet called the Waste of Daylight, he said: “While daylight surrounds us, cheerfulness reigns, anxieties press less heavily, and courage is bred for the struggle of life.

“Against our ever-besieging enemy, disease, light and fresh air act as guards in our defence.”

Several bills failed before daylight saving was first enacted, in both Britain and America, during World War I, in an effort to conserve energy.

Since 1996, all Europeans have been required to change their clocks forward and back on the same dates. This is to prevent practical problems in sectors like transport.

About 70pc of countries across the world operate daylight savings. The majority of those who don’t are around the equator, where the daylight hours don’t change much throughout the year.

The conundrum we will shortly face on daylight saving is effectively a re-run of 1923, when partition occurred.

Politicians furiously debated whether we should stay in a common time zone with Britain or align ourselves with Europe by abandoning British Summer Time.

There were also some lighthearted contributions which offered relief to the very serious side of the matter.

One senator said that if the time zone in the pubs and shops in Louth were different those 500 yards up the road in Armagh, “all manner of chaos would result”. He added that it would harden “a partition which most of us do not approve or recognise”.

In contrast, Senator Ernest Blythe argued that the mental exercise of juggling Standard Time, Summer Time and God’s Time would boost the IQ of the nation.

He pointed out that we had adjusted to the 25-minute switch from Dublin Time to Greenwich Mean Time, even if during the transition, he was “continually meeting people who, if it was 9.0, were scratching their heads and wondering whether it was 8.0 or 10.0.”

WE COULD END UP WITH A TIME-BORDER BETWEEN THE REPUBLIC AND THE NORTH, FOR PART OF THE YEAR