Newsflash! Ireland has its own timezone

G

Geegee

Guest
I am sick to death of hearing radio and television reporters refer to "Irish time". Do they really think that their listenership are so uninformed that they would not know what GMT refers to? This is an incessant problem on RTE, in fact I have never heard GMT being referred to.
 
Forgive my ignorance, but what is BST? Is this Belfast time? If so, then why not use this? I still think the actual timezone is GMT though.
 
Right now we are on IST (Irish Summer Time) which is an offical timezone!

BST is British Summer Time and while BST=IST timewise I am proud that we have our own little Timezone!

And IST is UTC+1, UTC is also known as GMT.
 
DublinTexas said:
Right now we are on IST (Irish Summer Time) which is an offical timezone!

BST is British Summer Time and while BST=IST timewise I am proud that we have our own little Timezone!

And IST is UTC+1, UTC is also known as GMT.
Click to expand...

The timeanddate.com website is a useful resource for information on this sort of stuff. Are time zones ISO standardised? I found it difficult to ascertain this.
 
Re: GMT - but they're still ahead of us!

That's a very interesting site. Here's a bit of useless information which maybe some 'Met' man or woman could confirm - if it's true.

Remember being told many moons ago that because of the way the earth rotates, the sun sets earlier in Greenwich than Dublin. Twenty-nine minutes or thereabouts. It follows therefore that the sun sets earlier on the east coast of Ireland than on the west. Does anyone know how Greenwich became the starting point for time zones?

I really wish they'd stick to the sun since I never can work out what time to phone a relative in New Zealand. AFAIK, it's thirteen hours ahead of us in Winter and only eleven in Summer. GMT/BST/ISM or whatever you're having yourself! That's + 1 now I think.

The smiley won't work.
 
Re: GMT - but they're still ahead of us!


Don't know the answer but I do know that up to not too long ago (early 20th century if I'm not mistaken) Ireland had no single standardised time zone and different areas (towns/townlands etc.) had their own (synchronised to the local church bells if I'm not mistaken) with those to the east slightly ahead of those to the west I'm not sure when the country standardised on a single timezone. Dava Sobel's http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140258795/qid=1112835896/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-6881588-0530313 (Longitude) is a great read dealing with matters such as this.
 
Greenwich happened to be at the site of the Royal Observatory. The Astronomers working there were tasked with determining Latitude and Longtitude, and simply used their own base as a reference point for their calculations.

The idea of a common time within a country only became necessary with the development of the railway system in the UK (and Ireland). Before this any town that had a clock kept its own approximate time. This is a useful site.
 
I second Clubman's recommendation of Longitude. I'm much more of a fiction reader but that one was really well written and if memory serves it explains all the to-ing and fro-ing about the Royal Observatory. And it really brings it home how much navigation etc. has developed in a few hundred years. Samuel Pepys's recent biography had a lot about scientific developments of the time in it too (he was "high up" in the Royal Navy) but Longitude is a much shorter and more pacy read.

Rebecca

(PS where are the formatting menus/icons on the "reply" screen. I can't figure out where italics etc. are)
 
MissRibena said:
(PS where are the formatting menus/icons on the "reply" screen. I can't figure out where italics etc. are)
Click to expand...

Go to your control panel, under 'edit' options scroll down to the bottom under misc. and select Message Editor interface/Enhanced interface

You have all sorts of text options
 
The BBC made a TV version of Longitude that was quite interesting (if slow moving). It's available on DVD.
 
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