Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told the Dail that he wouldn’t accept the North being in a different time zone to the rest of Ireland.
MEPs voted earlier this week to scrap the twice yearly clock change from April 2021 and Labour leader Brendan Howlin pointed out that Ireland would be in a difficult position because the UK would be leaving the EU.
He said: “There is the possibility of having two different time zones on the island of Ireland, as the UK has already declared it does not intend to switch from its current system.”
Mr Varadkar told Mr Howlin in the Dáil that he was aware of it and that he had been thinking about it himself when he read the European Parliament report.
He said the Government “has not taken a position on it yet, nor have we discussed it”.
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He also said he would like to know the views of the House and suggested a debate, saying that “maybe a few indicative votes might be worth experimenting with”. There was “plenty of time” to consider the issue because of the 2021 deadline.
But the Taoiseach stressed: “I could not and certainly would not wish to countenance a situation whereby Northern Ireland was in a different time zone from the rest of Ireland”.
Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc said on Tuesday that there needed to be coordination to prevent this because “no one wants to see a patchwork of time zones within the EU.”
Under the new legislation, governments opting to make summer time permanent would adjust their clocks for the last time on the last Sunday in March 2021.
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For those choosing permanent standard time - also called winter time - the final clock change would be on the last Sunday of October 2021.
Currently, the EU has three standard time zones, GMT, GMT +1 and GMT +2.
The clocks go forward this Sunday, March 31.
