Madam, – It appears that pre-booking a seat is not a guarantee that you will actually get that seat/space on our national train service.
Being a wheelchair-user, I always travel in a reserved seat/space to ensure a minimum degree of aggravation both for myself and for Iarnród Éireann staff, when I arrive at the train.Unfortunately, things did not go according to plan in July. Returning from Heuston Station after a week of rest and relaxation with three other wheelchair-users, we found our reserved seats/spaces were occupied by other wheelchair-users. Thanks to the Iarnród Éireann staff we were squeezed onto the train and at least we finally reached our respective homes.
The journey was, to put it mildly, personally physically uncomfortable, embarrassing and to my mind degrading.
Because Iarnród Éireann has a policy of trying to accommodate all presenting passengers regardless of booking status, I spent a four-hour journey in my wheelchair in the aperture of an automatically opening and closing doorway, having to move back along the corridor each time anybody wanted to use the toilet, go to the snack bar, or enter or leave the carriage. Meantime, my reserved seat/space was occupied by someone else, who presumably had a much more comfortable and less aggravating journey.
Iarnród Éireann needs to update its computer programme to take into account all pre-bookings so that reserved places are allocated to the customers who reserved them and not to people who show up on spec. This would apply to the able-bodied as well as to those who are not. It is amazing in the 21st century that our national train service cannot arrange a matter that was successfully managed by previous companies that held this responsibility. – Yours. etc,