zoneinfo europe

[Paul Eggert]

   From: Tony Sanders <sanders at 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.HTML>

So referring to Ireland as `Eire', as the tz database does, is a bit
like referring to Russia as `Rossiya'.