It’s that time of year again, clocks go back and we get an extra hour in the bar.

Despite the European Parliament voting in favour of removing daylight saving time permanently after spring 2021, we will still be changing the clocks on October 31.

The clocks will go back an hour at 2am on Sunday, October 31.

In 2019, the European Parliament voted to remove daylight energy saving time permanently. The initial plan was to stop seasonal time changes after spring 2021. However, this was put on ice due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Following summer solstice on June 21, the days gradually become shorter.

By turning the clocks back an hour during autumn, this provides people with more sunlight in the morning. Turning the clocks forward in the spring brings lighter evenings, or as we say in Ireland, “the grand ould stretch”.

The idea of British Summer Time (BST) was first proposed in the UK in 1907 by William Willett, who happens to be the great-great-grandfather of Coldplay singer Chris Martin. He felt that valuable daylight was being wasted in the mornings during the summer months because people were still in bed.

He published a pamphlet called The Waste of Daylight, in which he outlined his plans to change the time of the nation’s clocks. But when he died in 1915 the government still hadn’t backed BST.

It wasn’t until a year later, in May 1916, that Britain passed the Summer Time Act and started changing its clocks twice a year.