There is an enormous potential for creating Metric Martyrs on the daily street market in Henry Street, Dublin. Many things are sold by the piece there, but when something is sold by the measuring unit, there are only these age-old scales and age-old weights to be seen. I must assume that these Imperial devices grow more and more unreliable by the year, as they are not being verified anymore. Or are they still? I saw a Garda car driving through that street and wondered what would happen if they started to write out summonses for breaking the W&M regulations. That would cause an uproar, the IAML and the BWMA in the front to stand up for all these new Metric Martyrs. From last March everything in Ireland is supposed to be sold by the hard metric unit. It has to be assumed that the authorities move very cautiously.
Han Historian of Dutch Metrication, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
