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Ireland Lost Twenty-Five Minutes and Never Got Them Back

The St James's Gate brewery has been operating on the same site in Dublin since 1759. It produces about 2.5 million pints of stout a day.

Divide that out and it comes to roughly 1,700 pints a minute — around twenty-nine every second, continuously, from one address. At its peak in the 1930s the brewery employed over 5,000 people and was the largest employer in the city; automation has brought that down to about 600. The site once had its own railway, and a gate stretched across St James's Street, which is where the name comes from.

Two hundred and sixty-seven years in one place, doing one thing.

The clock: Ireland's own time zone lasted thirty-six.

The Statutes (Definition of Time) Act 1880 established Greenwich Mean Time as the legal time for Great Britain and Dublin Mean Time for Ireland. Dublin Mean Time was the local mean time at Dunsink Observatory, just outside the city — 25 minutes and 21 seconds behind Greenwich. It was the legal time across all thirty-two counties.

Then, months after the Easter Rising, the House of Commons passed the Time (Ireland) Act 1916, abolishing it.

The mechanism was elegant and is worth stating precisely. The change took effect on the night of 30 September / 1 October 1916, the same night British clocks went back an hour at the end of summer time.

Irish clocks went back thirty-five minutes instead of sixty.

The twenty-five minutes were absorbed into the change and never returned. Farmers, local councils, politicians and business groups objected. Countess Markievicz, one of the leaders of the Rising, complained bitterly in writing. The Home Secretary told the Commons that assimilation had been pressed upon him from all quarters in Ireland.

Ireland became independent a few years later and never went back to Dublin Mean Time. It has followed Greenwich and the British daylight saving schedule for more than a century since.

One brewery on one site for 267 years. One national time zone for 36, ended in a single night, by 35 minutes instead of an hour.

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