TIME CHANGES TONIGHT CLOCKS GO FORWARD - ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW AND FACTS
The nights and mornings have been dark for far too long but in March we can look forward to the clocks going forward for spring and summer 2019.
With the number of daylight hours getting longer we will see the return of British Summer Time and abandon Greenwich Mean Time for another seven months.
This change happens in the last weekend of March every year in the Ireland in 2019 it will be in the early hours of Sunday, March 31 .
The clocks will go FORWARD one hour at 1am.
So, we lose an hour extra in bed on the Sunday, but gain an extra hour of sunlight in the evenings which is always welcome.
If you’re still unsure as to which way the clocks go, the easiest way to remember it is probably ‘spring forward, fall back’, although we obviously call it autumn in the UK, not fall.
Continues below
Why do the clocks go back?
Benjamin Franklin first had the idea to chance the clocks while he was in Paris in 1784. He suggested that if people got out of bed an hour earlier they'd get extra daylight.
However it wasn't something that was properly introduced in the UK until 1916. It had been discussed a number of years before by the government but many people opposed it the first time around.
Continues below
A man called William Willett wrote a whole pamphlet about it in 1907 called 'The Waste of Daylight' about how people wasted valuable hours of light during the summer.
He was also a keen golfer and would become rather annoyed when it got too dark for him to continue playing in the evening.
Sadly he died in 1915, a year before it was introduced in the Ireland and the UK.
Will my phone update automatically?
As for technology, as long as your phones are connected to the internet via 4G or WiFi then the time will change on them automatically. They should change at 1am on Sunday, March 31 by going forward an hour.
When do the clocks go back again?
The clocks will not change again until October 27 2019, then the clocks move back to GMT for winter.
By March the nights will have drawn out a fair bit already but during December the UK gets as little as seven hours and 40 minutes of sunlight each day.
2019 CALENDAR NOW ON SALE