From: Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com> Date: Sun, 02 Jun 1996 01:56:08 -0500 Hi, someone complained to me that:

At 22h37 WEZ here in Dublin you are showing time for Dublin, Ireland at

Fri May 31 22:35:45 BST 1996

Dublin time is (currently) Irish Summer Time (IST) or WEZ (West Europaische Zeit).

As far as I know, `BST' is correct for Dublin. `BST' stands for `British Summer Time'; this corresponds to +0100, the correct UTC offset for Dublin in summer, and as far as I know it's the usual (English) abbreviation used in Ireland for the time in question. Ireland is one of the British Isles, so `BST' is also geographically correct. I doubt whether the Irish typically use `WEZ'. I've never heard of the Irish using the abbreviation `IST' -- I just checked, and I can't find any evidence of it on Usenet or the Web, whereas I found much evidence of the Irish using `BST'. For example, see the following URLs: http://www.itw.ie/Itw/guestbook.html http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/eenghome/strat/node2.html http://www.koala.ie/services.html telnet://lib1.tcd.ie:13 As a bit of trivia for tz watchers, I discovered that the Irish Constitution states that the official name of the Irish state is `Ireland' in English. Normal practice is to restrict the use of the name `Eire' (with an acute accent over the `E') to texts in the Irish language and to use `Ireland' in all English-language texts, with corresponding translations for texts in other languages. Source: <URL:http://www.irlgov.ie/iveagh/foreignaffairs/facts/fai/CHAPTER2/NAMES/NAMES.HT...> So referring to Ireland as `Eire', as the tz database does, is a bit like referring to Russia as `Rossiya'.