That's the impression I got in Ireland, when I was driving around the country in early May of this year. Unfortunately I rented the car in Belfast, then went to the Republic, so the speedometer was still in ancient units.
Carleton ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bill Hooper" <[email protected]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, November 13, 2009 11:07:24 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: [USMA:46160] metric in Ireland 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 ----------------------------------------------------- * 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. ============================== If you have not already done so, please note my new email address: [email protected] (Old address will still work OK temporarily.)
