Dunsink Unsynced – An Irishman’s Diary about the end of Irish Time

While 1916 has gone down in history for the declaration of an Irish Republic, it was also the year Ireland lost a small but important measure of independence, the right to set its own clocks.

The Time (Ireland) Bill, passed in Westminster a few months after the Rising, was a chronographical act of union, ending a 36-year arrangement during which this country had fixed its clocks according to the longitude of Dunsink Observatory.

Experiencing sunrise 25 minutes and 21 seconds later that Greenwich, Dunsink had dictated Irish time accordingly since 1880. When it was 1pm in London, officially, it was still only 12.35pm here.

But that situation ended at 1am on October 1st, 1916. British clocks were going back that night anyway, by an hour for winter. So to harmonise the two islands, while minimising disruption, it was decreed that Irish clocks would reverse by 35 minutes.

Their short-lived independence was immortalised in – of course – James Joyce's Ulysses. In one of the book's several mentions of the phenomenon, Leopold Bloom is walking near Dublin's O'Connell Bridge when he notices that the "Timeball" on the Ballast House has fallen.

The time-ball was a copper device, designed to be seen from Dublin port, that dropped every day at 1pm GMT, allowing mariners to synchronise their watches. So Bloom deduces that it must be: “After one [...] Dunsink time.”

But he’s forgetting that the copper ball is not on Dunsink time – unlike the famously accurate clock on the same building, which he can’t see, because it’s around the corner.

And Joyce lets him forget, so that he can correct the record later: “Now that I come to think of it, the ball falls at Greenwich time,” Bloom recalls a while afterwards. “It’s the clock is worked by an electric wire from Dunsink.”

Speaking of balls, there’s a certain aptness in the fact that this weekend’s centenary will fall a few hours after the referee has blown the final whistle on the All-Ireland football final replay.

Dublin measurement

Because even though official Irish time, pre-1916, was by definition a Dublin measurement, one of its more impassioned defences came from Mayo, and the veteran Irish nationalist MP John Dillon.

Introducing the Bill that summer, British chief secretary Herbert Samuel claimed that the alignment of the clocks was “a unification long desired in Ireland”. Resolutions in favour had been passed by the chambers of commerce of Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Derry.

And after all, as Samuel pointed out, Ireland’s divergence was unique in western Europe then, setting it apart not only from Great Britain, but also “France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal”.

Even so, Dillon took pride in his country’s splendid isolation: “We have managed to get along for 600 or 700 years,” he said, “without assimilating our time to that of Great Britain.”

He did, however, promise to consult his voters in East Mayo before voting. They were “very good authorities”, be pointed out, because most of them crossed the Irish Sea every year “to cut your hay and gather your harvest” and he had never heard a single complaint about the time difference.

The Irish Times (which, perhaps ironically, favoured an end to Irish Time, in the singular) called his speech "foolish" and suggested that, if he was sufficiently committed, he could always invent his own time zone for "Ballaghaderreen".

In any case, Dillon was one of 74 MPs to vote against the Bill, while 178 voted for. So it was comfortably carried and the clocks changed. Even when Ireland won political independence a few years later, there was no attempt to change them back.

Ballaghaderreen, by the way, still doesn’t have its own time zone, although it does occupy a unique social and geographical position in Ireland. After a rates dispute in the 1890s, it seceded from Mayo and remains administratively part of Roscommon to this day.

Its GAA players, by contrast, still pledge loyalty to the green and red. And at least one of them, the veteran Andy Moran, will be playing on Saturday and assisting Mayo’s efforts to turn the clocks back to 1951, the year it last won the All-Ireland.

A day later, in an echo of 1916, Dunsink turns the dial back 35 years farther. In a talk to mark the centenary, David Malone of NUI Maynooth will discuss “Calendars, Clocks, and the End of Irish Time”. Admission is free, but you need to book via the website of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dias.ie.