The news that a body of a dead passenger lay unnoticed in a Dublin bus for three days will probably surprise nobody who has had the great good fortune to travel in what we are pleased, in our first national language, to call Bus Atha Cliath. The only surprising feature of the episode in which a bus became both a doubledecker hearse and a funeral parlour is that such occurrences do not seem to happen all that often. That is probably because passenger deaths normally occur of old age, exposure or famine at bus-stops.
We all have our own horror stories about Dublin Bus, or plain old CI bloody E. They are not of recent vintage, nor of recent years, but stretch back decades to that abysmal epoch when the State thought its duty was to meddle in the affairs of transport; and it did so with the customary incompetence and corruption which we might expect.
Traffic jam
You detect a certain bitterness here? You are shrewd. You may sit upstairs in the front of the bus beside a few uncollected bodies and pretend to be the driver as you gaze through the fogged up-windows and wait for the real driver to take command of his vehicle - he is actually having a stroke in a traffic jam eight congested miles away. As for the animus - which is no greater than that felt by anyone who has stood in the rain for a week or so, shunting the odd corpse of those who have perished of
queuing into the gutter and shuffling into their place, until finally a bus emerges through the downpour, hurtles by and vanishes again without pausing - let me tell you a story.
There was once a certain GP on the northside of Dublin who worked for Dublin's bus service. One day a Fianna Fail TD friend of his contacted him to warn him that with, certain changes being planned for CIE, his job was being secretly advertised, in Irish, in the Irish Press - the intention being, of course, that he should not know this was happening.
The GP, a middle-aged man with a family, accordingly applied for his own job; but, needless to say, he didn't get it. It went, as intended all along, to a newly qualified graduate of the College of Surgeons whose father was a Cabinet Minister. The GP wrote angry letters to various politicians about this scandal. This being a time of great economic depression, his actions were not prudent. All dispensaries were henceforward, by political fiat emanating from the Department of Health, closed to this GP; and in a country over-supplied with doctors, all private practices were already full. Thus the GP had to emigrate, where he further enlarged his family; which explains why the author of this column was born in England.
So. Let us do some accounting here. CIE is not merely responsible for causing its clients to die of TB in their bus queues; it is not just the bearer of the odd dead body or two about the capital city; it has not merely lost the Irish taxpayer uncountable billions in straightforward subvention and financially unquantifiable incompetence; but it is also - some would say most criminally of all - responsible for my funny accent.
Political interference
And, indeed, the kernel of CIE's problem lies in that linguistic oddity: not so much in the calibre of its managers - God help them, the poor bastards - but in its deplorable history of political interference. For 70 years various CIE chief executives have been like chess-players hunched at the board, with assorted Ministers gazing over their shoulders, reaching over and moving chessmen, bawling advice and criticism and even making helpful suggestions to the opposition. Mary O'Rourke is the latest - and alas, probably not the last - Minister to have the power to meddle in CIE, and she has arrived with an axe.
But of course there is no date set for the dismemberment of Corpse Iompair Eireann; and, considering the history of State endeavour in this area, we may confidently expect today's infants in their political swaddling clothes to grow up in towns gridlocked into paralysis - until finally, in half-a-century or so, their turn will arrive and they too can have a go at being Minister and messing around with trains and buses and timetables and having a whale of a time generally by making sure that completely empty buses leave railway stations a minute before a train groaning with commuters arrives.
What japes.
Record "profit"
Depressing? Not a bit of it! Because while CIE remains in existence, there is always the possibility that its annual report might win the Booker Prize. The latest to hand, for 1998, carols that the company returned a record profit of £11.6 million. Interesting use of language here. To whom did the company "return" this money? To the taxpayer, perhaps, who - we learn from an almost invisible paragraph, written in ant-writing - subsidised the entire operation to the tune of £107 million? Far from making a profit, CIE lost nearly £100 million. Which is fine; transport systems should not make profits, but instead make life generally more bearable by attracting customers from the roads. But we also learn that, despite squillions of my loot and yours, CIE carried fewer passengers in 1998 than it did in the mid-1970s. How many of them were dead at the time, the report, alas, fails to make clear.