Irish Examiner view: Should we end daylight savings? Maybe we should all just sleep on it...
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So, how was it for you? That extra hour in bed this weekend? Time well spent? Or perhaps you didn’t even notice the clocks had rewound to fulfill the “spring forward/fall back” rubric?
Almost as predictable as the biannual daylight savings ritual of putting our timepieces forward one hour in the spring, and reversing the process in the autumn, is the unresolved debate that accompanies it.
MEPs, led by Sean Kelly of Fine Gael, have written, not for the first time, to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, demanding an end to the practice, which was introduced during the First World War to save fuel for the military effort.
Among the many advantages held out for the daylight-saving regime include road safety, reduced energy usage, and improved public health. And then there’s the simple fact that most people would rather have an extra hour of light in the evening than the morning.
There are few more depressing phrases in our language than “the nights are drawing in”.
The last time public sentiment was tested, it amply justified the calls for change. An EU consultation from July to August 2018 gathered a record 4.6m responses, with an 84% majority demanding an end to the changing of the clock. In March 2019, the European Parliament adopted its legislative resolution in favour of the commission’s 2018 proposal, with 410 votes in favour, 192 against, and 51 abstentions.
Since then, nothing. To add to the confusion is increasing medical evidence that most people do not, or cannot, take advantage of the extra hour of sleep that becomes available following the last Sunday in October.
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Because sleep is closely linked with mental and physical health and judgment, some scientists are calling for the changes to be abolished. But reformers divide in to two camps: Those who believe that staying on winter time is best, because it prioritises morning light, which helps you wake up, while the evening darkness helps you fall asleep, and those, mainly politicians, who maintain that permanent summertime delivers economic benefits.
Whether this is a relevant justification for yoking our circadian rhythms to a productivity graph is questionable. Perhaps we should follow the examples of the Magratheans in , by Douglas Adams, when confronted with an intractable problem: Just sleep on it for very much longer.
The online abuse of children by Alexander McCartney, a 26-year-old former University of Ulster computer science student from Newry, South Armagh, has justifiably been described as “industrial”.
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McCartney is an evil man who deserves every second of the minimum 20-year sentence imposed upon him. But what the case reinforces is the extent to which Big Tech is out of control.
Most of McCartney’s victims were aged between 10 and 16. He is thought to have targeted 3,500 children in 30 countries. He traumatised one girl, Cimarron Thomas, 12, from West Virginia in the US, so much that she took her own life in May 2018, after McCartney demanded that she involve her younger sister in sex acts and send him pictures. Cimarron’s father, Ben, killed himself 18 months later. He died never knowing what had caused his daughter to end her life.
The technique used by McCartney is catfishing, a phrase that has existed for less than 20 years. It is the creation of a false online identity to befriend and exploit victims. In the case of McCartney, it was sexual grooming of a disgusting kind. Frequently, it involves theft and fraud. Every country, Ireland included, has its practitioners.
McCartney pretended to be a teenage girl and carried out his offences from the bedroom of his childhood home. He had been known to police in the North since 2016, when he was arrested for possession of indecent images of children on his electronic devices. He was bailed and arrested again on similar offences in 2018.
Despite the attention of the police and the conditions of his bail, McCartney continued to offend. He replaced phones and laptops that had been seized. His conduct, said a prosecuting solicitor, escalated in seriousness, “in the form of the depravity of the demands he made of the subject children”. While there might be further questions about how he was able to pursue his paedophile activities despite being on the radar of the authorities, we cannot gain much encouragement from the response of one of his digital platforms of choice.
A spokesperson for Snapchat said the sexual exploitation of any person is horrific and illegal and “our hearts go out to the victims in this case. If we discover this activity, or it is reported to us, we remove it, lock the violating account, and report it to the authorities.”
The company said it had extra protections to make it difficult for teenagers to be contacted by strangers.
“Through our in-app Family Centre, parents can also see who their teens are talking to, and who their friends are,” they added.
The company’s precautions aren’t enough to prevent what the presiding judge in Belfast described as “terrible and catastrophic damage on young girls”.
There is an old saying that ‘money has no conscience’.
But perhaps Snapchat’s financial supporters might reconsider backing a company that provides a tool for online sadists and predators.
It was 40 years ago this weekend that science-fiction classic The Terminator hit the cinemas, with its warnings about super-intelligent systems that would come to dominate, and subjugate, humankind through triggering a nuclear war.
Movie buffs will remember that, in the first part of the franchise, the T800 model Terminator, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, was one of the bad guys, but in later episodes he moved away from the dark side.
“I’ll be back,” he said. But what form will his descendants take?