Holidays in Ireland

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Ireland

Twenty-Five Minutes and Twenty-One Seconds Behind

For thirty-six years the country kept a legal time of its own, distinct from its nearest neighbour. The Statutes (Definition of Time) Act 1880 fixed Greenwich Mean Time for Great Britain and, in the same clause, fixed Dublin Mean Time for Ireland, defined as the local mean solar time at Dunsink Observatory outside the city, about 25 minutes and 21 seconds behind Greenwich. Dunsink, under the direction of the Royal Astronomer of Ireland and affiliated with Trinity College, had already been supplying time to the capital for decades by then, distributing signals by telegraph to city clocks and, from the 1860s, to a time ball mounted at the Ballast Office on O'Connell Bridge for the benefit of shipping. The offset was small but real enough to matter for railway timetables and telegraph traffic between the two islands, and it survives today as a minor literary footnote: James Joyce has a character in Ulysses note that the Ballast Office timeball is down, signalling Dunsink time, a detail that only makes sense to a reader who knows Dublin once ran on its own clock.

The arrangement ended abruptly and for practical rather than symbolic reasons. Just five months after the Easter Rising of 1916, the Time (Ireland) Act aligned Irish time with British time from 1 October that year, prompted largely by the wartime inconvenience of telegraphic and military communications running on two different clocks across one kingdom. Because the change coincided with the end of that year's wartime summer time, clocks were put back only 35 minutes rather than a full hour, a single adjustment that quietly folded two separate reforms, the abolition of Dublin Mean Time and the return to winter time, into one night.

A Parliament That Refused to Change the Clocks

Abolishing Dublin Mean Time by British statute did not settle, for everyone, whose time Ireland actually kept. In the general election of December 1918 Sinn Féin candidates won a large majority of Irish seats, refused to take them at Westminster, and instead convened their own assembly in Dublin's Mansion House in January 1919 as the First Dáil Éireann. According to research into the period's competing claims over Irish time, the new government's early minutes were recorded in the old, legally abolished Dublin time rather than the standard time Westminster had imposed three years earlier, a small bureaucratic act that asserted political legitimacy through the clock as much as through any declaration. The practice did not survive into the independent state that followed the War of Independence and Civil War, and a new Summer Time Act in 1923 settled Irish clocks firmly back onto the same footing as Britain's, this time by the choice of an Irish parliament rather than an external one.

One Hour Across the Border, All Through the War

Neutrality during the Second World War produced its own quiet division of the island's clocks. In 1940 the United Kingdom adopted British Double Summer Time, keeping clocks an hour ahead of GMT even through the winter months to extend usable daylight for wartime industry, and Northern Ireland followed the rest of the UK. The independent state to the south, formally outside the conflict, kept its ordinary summer and winter time changes on the Greenwich standard, so for most of the war years a traveller crossing the land border moved not just between jurisdictions but between clocks, with Belfast running a full hour ahead of Dublin until Britain reverted to single summer time in the autumn of 1947.

A further, shorter-lived experiment came in the run-up to European Economic Community membership. From 1968 the state kept its clocks on GMT plus one hour all year round, abandoning the autumn changeover entirely as a trial thought likely to bring commercial practice closer in line with the continent it hoped to join. The experiment lasted only until 1971, when the twice-yearly changes were restored, though the underlying question of whether the country's clocks should follow Britain's or the European mainland's has resurfaced periodically ever since, most recently in discussions over what an EU-wide end to seasonal clock changes would mean for a land border that, unlike most in Europe, separates a euro-area member state from one still setting its own time policy.

A Beam of Light Aimed Five Thousand Years Ago

Long before any act of parliament, Neolithic farmers on the banks of the River Boyne built a passage tomb whose builders appear to have understood the sun's yearly cycle with striking precision. Newgrange, raised around 3200 BC and therefore older than Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza, contains a narrow opening above its entrance, rediscovered as a functioning feature only during excavations in the 1960s, through which the rising sun at the winter solstice sends a beam of light down the 19-metre passage to illuminate the inner chamber for a matter of minutes. A statistical analysis published in the journal Nature by an astrophysicist at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies concluded that, correcting for the slow change in the Earth's axial tilt since the monument was built, the alignment falls within roughly half a degree of the solstice sunrise, a precision its author judged too tight to be readily explained by chance.

Archaeologists remain more cautious than tourist literature about what the alignment meant to the people who built it. Later research has suggested the outer passage and the roof-box feature itself may represent a later Neolithic addition to an earlier structure rather than part of the original design, and no written record survives to say whether the builders saw the midwinter light as marking a calendar date, a religious rite, or something else entirely. What is not disputed is the physical fact: for a few minutes each December, in a chamber sealed in darkness the rest of the year, the sun still finds the gap its builders left for it five millennia ago.

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