Times are a-changin’

CLOCKS will go back an hour in the TRNC at 4am on October 28 in line with the UK and the rest of Europe, Prime Minister Tufan Erhürman has announced, despite Turkey’s decision — for the third year running — to remain on summer daylight saving time.

It means the TRNC and Turkey will again have a one-hour time difference this winter, after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signed a decree, published in Ankara’s Official Gazette this week, to keep his country on a “permanent” time zone of “GMT +3”.

The decision comes two years after predictions of “chaos” when the TRNC’s then government decided to follow Turkey’s lead and stay on summer hours in October 2016 — and claims that the resulting dark winter mornings were partly to blame for a crash between a minibus and a lorry in which two schoolgirls and their bus driver died.

Last year saw demonstrations and petitions after then deputy prime minister Serdar Denktaş announced that the TRNC would again opt out of the annual clock change — a decision later scrapped in a surprise U-turn.

While the TRNC is to remain in step with Europe this winter, there are also signs that the times could be changing on the continent, following a European Commission public consultation which saw 84 per cent of some 4.6 million respondents “in favour of putting an end to the bi-annual clock change”.

The Commission said it would now propose a change to arrangements in force since the 1980s coordinating times across the continent.

The Bloomberg news service reported: “Under the proposal, which president of the EU Commission JeanClaude Juncker wants EU governments and the bloc’s Parliament to approve within just seven months, each member country would notify by April 2019 whether it intends to apply permanent summertime or wintertime.

“The last mandatory change to summertime would occur on March 31, 2019. After that, EU countries wishing permanently to switch back to wintertime could still make one final seasional clock change on October 27, 2019.”