HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008!

HAPPY New Year to all the readers of the Irish Examiner!

While the nation will be waking up this morning full of joy or dread for 2008 spare a thought for the 1,500 inhabitants of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean on the other side of the world.

Thanks to the international dateline they were the first on the planet to celebrate the arrival of 2008 — at 10am our time yesterday, giving them ample opportunity to celebrate New Year over and over again.

While the clocks chimed midnight on Christmas Island, Irish revellers were still in daylight working out what frock to wear or whose invitation to take up or decline.

The 1,500 inhabitants of the tiny island beat Australians to their New Year celebrations by three hours but Aussies being Aussies did not seem to notice or care.

In Sydney an estimated one million revellers gathered on the harbourside to usher in the New Year at midnight (1pm Irish time yesterday).

Two hours earlier or 11am Irish time New Zealand welcomed the New Year, which is a Leap Year with an extra day falling February 29.

In Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford the New Year was celebrated a full 14 hours after the party on Christmas Island officially finished.

In Britain, thousands took to the streets of London to welcome in 2008 and crowded prime spots in Trafalgar Square and the Embankment to watch fireworks over the River Thames and to hear Big Ben chime midnight.

In Edinburgh, tens of thousands of revellers from all over the world joined in the city’s world-famous Hogmanay celebrations.

In New York, Times Square’s New Year’s Eve light-ball marked its 100th year by going green with 9,576 energy-efficient bulbs lighting 672 Waterford Crystal glass triangles.

Using about the same amount of electricity as 10 toasters, the lights are smaller but more than twice as bright as last year’s lights, which were a mix of more than 600 incandescent and halogen bulbs.

The ball was first dropped for the New Year’s Eve celebration in 1907. Made of iron and wood, it weighed 700lbs and was lit with 100 25-watt incandescent bulbs.

Over the century, five other versions of the ball were designed to ring in the New Year.

In 1999, the ball was made from crystal but in keeping with 2007 as the year green issues came to the fore, the ball is now low-energy.