Surely "An Bord Snip" was asleep; it would not cost anything to force politicians on to the nation's buses and trains, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
SURELY THE biggest “if” of Irish history is not what would have happened if Michael Collins had not been shot, or if we had handed the ports back to the Brits in 1938, but this fascinating hypothesis: what would this country be like if our politicians used public transport? You would get rid of the accusation of limousine abuse right there, and that’s not all.
Some years ago Diarmaid Ferriter chaired an RTÉ radio series called What If? I was on it once, but otherwise it maintained a surprisingly high standard of debate. The questions addressed included “What if John Charles McQuaid had not been appointed archbishop of Dublin in 1940?” and – a personal favourite – “What if there had been no Late Late Show?”
I hope the makers of the programme will forgive me when I say that none of the scenarios proposed are as radical as the simple prospect of seeing a couple of Ministers crushed into other people’s armpits on a commuter train. Or watching a TD cope with the burgeoning crowd at the bus stop outside Clerys – we like to think of ourselves as a humble, yet fun-loving group – as it spills across the footpath and starts muttering rebellion.
Or having some public representative on the platform at Mallow station one chilly evening, standing beside a terminally ill man who is travelling to Dublin for chemotherapy, and wondering when the connecting train is going to show.
Or even coming to terms with the new and rather alarming automatic doors on the toilets of some of the inter-city trains – no easy task, as a matter of fact. (Those female Iarnród Éireann employees with their new clipboards may say that it is impossible for a passenger to lock herself into one of them, but that is not reassuring enough for some of us. When your trust in the civil authorities of your country is gone, it’s really gone.)
If our politicians used public transport, instead of just turning up at railway stations at election time, it is a fair bet that we would have fewer empty and echoing kilometres of under-used motorway, and much better provincial and suburban bus services. Who knows, we might actually have been able to restore some of the local rail routes used in our great grandparents’ time.
The most basic of our inter-city services seem all right – the Dublin-Cork line is good, I think, and the week before last, in Heuston Station, someone was heard actually praising the Dublin-Waterford service. No, it is the shorter journeys that are a misery.
Even before the main Dublin-Belfast line collapsed into the sea at Malahide on Friday, commuters in Ireland were a pulverised minority. Pulverised and strangely silent.
But The Irish Times has a source in Skerries. And our Skerries source has a lot to say. Our source is a commuter. She didn’t like the way things were going even before the bridge over the estuary at Malahide collapsed, closing the rail line that goes north out of Dublin for what looks like at least three months.
“It’s standing room only from Balbriggan,” she says. “It’s packed for the 40 minutes into the city centre. It is quite awful.”
She wasn’t too happy either with the passengers’ website set up in the wake of the bridge’s collapse. At lunchtime yesterday she was trying to decide how she was going to get to work this morning and the website was still referring to “an enhanced bus service” as the replacement for the crowded train route.
No one was being any more specific than that, but the locals have detailed complaints. Apparently it takes ages to get into town from Skerries because the bus can’t get under – wait for it – a low railway bridge.
There will be a bus from Drogheda to Skerries ” But who wants to go from Drogheda to Skerries?” asked our source, rather disloyally. She’s going to travel into town by car, which means getting home very late because the M1 is so busy in the evenings.
And all of these are the relatively privileged problems of a rail-user in north county Dublin (or Meath, or Louth) who also owns their own car.
Most of the people who commute to Dublin were forced out into the hinterland by rocketing house prices. They were lured there partly by the remnants of the railway service the British left behind, and which the new republic refused to even maintain.
During the boom there was some intermittent publicity about how the old, rural services in these satellite areas could not cope with the young families who were arriving at the new housing estates expecting luxuries like schools, street lighting and, in the more expensive developments, pavements on the roads to the nearest shops.
Does anyone seriously believe that commuters would have to put up with so much if our public representatives were forced to use public transport, both at home and abroad? Surely “An Bord Snip” was asleep at the wheel on this one; it would not cost anything to force our politicians on to the buses and trains of the nation, that is, while we still have buses and trains.