Paying the price for a `good life'

What is it about this rail dispute? Now well into its sixth week, it's so low-key as to be little more than a background drone. The contrast with a Dublin bus strike screams for analysis. Where are the pathetic vox pops, the howls of public indignation, the pressure for settlement that usually accompany such a calamity?

"Management won't settle," said an industry insider this week. What made him so sure? "Because it's not biting in Dublin," he shrugged.

True or not, what made this a particularly biting insight was that we happened to be sitting on a stalled, Dublin-bound train. A journey scheduled to take about two hours and 40 minutes had been shuffling and dying for three hours and not a sign of Heuston Station.

We limped into Heuston nearly an hour late. Upon which the city/suburban folk hopped on buses or hailed taxis. The culchies stoically paid the parking fee, before driving another 30 or 40 minutes home on dusty, bone-rattling roads. In normal times, an Arrow train might have taken us some of the way, but the strike has taught us not to rely on it.

But that's rural life, isn't it? Pleasure and pain. And it's nothing to how the people of Waterford and Westport must be feeling, carrying the brunt of the rail dispute at the height of the tourist season. Or the other unfortunates losing out to a general sense that the entire service is out. Several tourists reported that Dublin taxi drivers were simply dismissing rail travel as an option. While Iarnrod Eireann threatens to pursue the ILDA for £5 million in costs, a man for whom rail is an integral part of his business remarked that his revenue was about a fifth of normal that day. Who can he pursue?

Still, Dublin is relatively unaffected. Politically, a double-decker busload of Dubliners wailing about a forced walk the few miles to Rathmines will out-shout a thousand fragmented culchie voices any day. Culchies, you see, are accustomed to inconvenience; accustomed, God help them, to the several-hundred-mile trek to Dublin for chemotherapy; to the 20-mile drive to the "local" hospital; to a five-mile trudge to the nearest GP; to the notion that their "choice" of school is where the school bus goes, regardless of the needs of the child; to the necessity of at least two cars if both partners work; to paying a king's ransom for carparking in the city.

Generally, they don't complain. It's the price they've paid for the "good life". More recently, it's the price some city folk have been paying for an affordable home. But as more and more of them are decanted, resentfully, into the "country" for reasons of affordability or decentralisation, the question is bound to be raised more persistently and with more emphasis.

Does the pleasure balance the pain anymore? Why do decentralising civil servants insist that the city rim is as far as they want to go? Is it because they are seeing through more calculating eyes what country people must live with?

Remoteness from menacing, big city streets and the attraction of leisurely, flower-scented country strolls feature heavily in fantasies of rural life. But the shop in our tiny hamlet was held up twice last year. And you take yourself or a child on one of those charming strolls at your peril. Why? No footpaths or cycle paths; all those D-reg cars speeding towards the golf clubs; the haulage trucks hurtling through, laden with debris from another massive construction project; the townies tired of motorway traffic jams, who use these roads as rat runs (while the Garda concentrate their cameras on comparatively safe dual carriageways and motorways, presumably because there's a safe verge to stand on).

But we're lucky; lucky to be "only" three miles from a bus stop; that we can afford two cars to get us to work; that childcare is not an issue; that we're not disabled or elderly or trying to survive on a State pension. We're not trapped - not yet anyway - by this State's sinful neglect of a decent rural infrastructure.

A rural transport report published this week by Area Development Management spelt out the staggering facts. More than a third of the rural population has no access to transport or has a serious difficulty with it. For many it's not the long-haul part of a journey, but the first five or 10 miles that presents the challenge. Getting to the public transport pick-up point is the biggest stumbling block of all. So there's the elderly woman with a free travel pass forced to pay £12 to a hackney driver to get her to, and from, the public transport pick-up point to use that pass; the pensioner who has to pay £20 to be driven to collect his pension.

In the absence of adequate public transport, low-income rural households have a "choice". They can buy and maintain a new car (upwards of £6,000 a year); or make do with an old banger (around £3,000 a year) and watch it fail the National Car Test, as 85 per cent do on the first day of testing. Or they can contend with a "qualitatively different experience of poverty in terms of factors such as physical and mental health, degree of economic strain and alienation from social and political life, ranging from social contacts to church attendance and participation and confidence in the political process".

How much thought was given to any of this in the preparation of the NCT? "It is questionable whether or not . . . any complementary policies were considered . . .", the ADM report concludes delicately.

With an ageing population and threats of rural bank and post office closures now routine, these are urgent questions. This week, launching the report, the Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, said people in rural Ireland had the right to the same kind of social access as people living in towns.

She could start by scrapping the CIE monopoly. And Iarnrod Eireann and the ILDA might start by remembering that rural folk are real people too.