I returned from a trip to Ireland recently and made a few observations about
metric use there.
I was not impressed with the Irish support of metric.
It is true that most of the highway signs were in metric and gasoline was sold
by the litre. However, highway signs, even official ones, sometimes used
incorrect symbols (e.g., "KM" for kilometres). Non-official signs showed that
common people could and would use metric in their postings, but privately, most
people still used a lot of YOE* and saw no particular reason to try to replace
them with metric. There was considerably more interest in making sure that
signs were in the Irish language. (It is required that all official signs be
dual, English and Irish, in most of the country, and IRISH ONLY in certain
parts of the country that are recognized to be predominantly Irish speaking.)
Packaged things in grocery stores seemed to be almost all in metric but I did
not have much opportunity to study them.
These are off the cuff observations and I don't pretend to know whether they
represent the typical situation.
Regards,
Bill Hooper
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* YOE = "Ye Olde English" units
Humor me! I still like "Ye Olde English units" as a description.
Someone recently suggested to me that abbreviating it as "YOE" seemed good.
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