Irish Time Symposium at Long Room Hub
Posted on: 11 October 2017
At 2:00 a.m., Sunday, 1 October, 1916, Irish time changed. Up until that point, time in Ireland had been regulated by the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act of 1880, the Act of the Westminster Parliament, that set out to standardise what had been a plethora of local time zones to a standard time regulated by the observatory in Greenwich – “and in the case of Ireland, Dublin mean time”, which was marked by the observatory in Dunsink. In practice, this meant that between 1880 and October of 1916, Irish time was twenty-five minutes and twenty-one seconds behind Greenwich mean time, a situation that only changed with the Time (Ireland) Act of 1916. Indeed, one of the principal clocks in the city of Dublin that had been synchronised with Dunsink was the clock over Front Square in Trinity College Dublin; another was in the GPO.
“Irish Time: A Symposium”, which runs in the Long Room Hub in Trinity College Dublin from October 12-14, takes this moment of shifting time as a starting point for a reflection on the experience of time in Ireland. It brings together thirty speakers from Germany, the UK, the US, Iran, Taiwan, as well as from around Ireland to speak on topics ranging from “Time-Space Compression in Irish Drama”, “Time and Untime in Ulysses” and “Ireland and Modernity.” There will be keynote addresses by Professor Claire Connolly and Professor Luke Gibbons. The symposium will also feature a poetry reading and live interview with Gerald Dawe, on the subject of time, memory, and poetry, on the evening of Thursday, October 12, at 5:30 pm. On the evening of Friday, October 13, at 5:30 pm, the composer and musician Roger Doyle will discuss the relationship of music to time, in relation to his recent work Time Machine. The public are welcome to the evening events. “Irish Time: A Symposium” has been convened by Professor Chris Morash, Vice-Provost of Trinity College Dublin, and holder of the Seamus Heaney Chair in Irish Writing, and Professor Martin Middeke of the University of Augsburg.
For more information, please see here
