We’ve always had a peasant hatred of being part of any crowd that we can’t get away from – in our own car
YOU KNOW there are always going to be people who refuse to use public transport. Despite the new bus corridor on College Green in Dublin, which opens today. Despite the new 50c bus fare, introduced today, which allows you to travel round the centre of the capital. Despite the 25th anniversary celebrations of the Dart rail service, which runs along Dublin Bay, and marked its birthday with live entertainment in every carriage – something many of us would have paid good money not to have experienced. Despite the Luas dropping passengers to their front door, carrying them up the stairs and making sure they brush their teeth before tucking them into bed.
It would be very convenient if these public transport refuseniks could be characterised as wily old executives who are a little stuck in their ways. But it’s not like that. Most of the people who refuse to use public transport are healthy, fairly youthful types who are distinguishable from the rest of us only in so far as their cars are pretty clean. This is a bitter pill for the anti-car lobby to swallow, but it is true, nevertheless. There are people who will never be beaten, or even induced, out of their cars. This might be a question of national identity; it is certainly a national characteristic. The Republic has never been a great place for public transport – train and tram tracks ripped up with gay abandon, whole transport networks destroyed in the newly independent Ireland, which was then and still is in thrall to the car.
When you browbeat a refusenik into using public transport – “just this once” – the results are startling. After just five minutes they complain about waiting times. They worry that someone they know might see them (sad, but true). They chuckle with relief on arrival. They bore all their friends to death about it for months afterwards, but they rarely repeat the experience.
This is hard for foreigners to understand, but we’ve always had a peasant hatred of being part of any crowd that we can’t get away from – in our own car. We feel that public transport cramps our style – even though that style seems to consist of driving along featureless motorways in order to do nothing particularly urgent. Some people would say that this hatred of public transport is confined to the Irish male. Irish men do seem to regard the use of buses, in particular, as somehow shaming. No one knows why this is, and under interrogation they hardly seem to know themselves.
But the hatred of public transport is not confined to males in Ireland. There are plenty of women who drive everywhere, when they live in areas with plenty of public transport, on the rather shaky grounds that their clothes or hair would get destroyed by any exposure to the elements. I have really heard this argued, and not just by John Prescott, former deputy prime minister of the UK, allegedly on behalf of Mrs Prescott.
In other democracies, or in societies which aspire to become democracies, your ordinary person wishes to be treated equally to his fellow citizens. In Ireland, your ordinary person wishes to be treated differently to his fellow citizens – and will pay for the privilege. This rather peculiar attitude has left us with a health service which runs on apartheid, a transport system which runs on nothing at all and whole swathes of the population who do not even walk as far as the bus stop and are consequently extraordinarily fat.
Of course, for roughly half the people resident in the Republic, public transport is not an option. Again, if you are a foreign visitor, you may find this strange, but the rural bus routes have effectively vanished and you need to have a car, or the money for a taxi, in order to get to the train station. The few rural transport schemes that survive are currently under threat (this is newspaper-speak for “in the bin”). And now, quite a few of the train routes outside Dublin are similarly under threat, or in the bin. It is no coincidence either that obesity rates in rural areas have rocketed in the past decade.
In provincial towns there seems to be an attitude that if you are using public transport you are one of “the halt and the lame” and probably on benefit, and that therefore you will never cause any sort of trouble. On my past two bus trips in provincial towns – whoops, cities – Galway and Waterford, the bus drivers on both occasions were busy on their mobile phones throughout the journeys. There is no reason why these drivers should not treat their buses as their private offices as, presumably, no one ever inspects them or complains.
So, you see, all types of public transport have been devalued and neglected here for years.
It’s going to take more than a bus lane in College Green and a discount bus fare to change that. As bus routes are cut, the services become more and more unreliable and less likely to attract new customers. The irrational attitude of the Irish to public transport is reinforced, and foreign tourists are mystified as they try to get around the country without hiring a car. If you are a foreign tourist, by the way, we’re sorry about that. Don’t forget to sign the visitors’ book on your way out.