An Focal
9
2nd November 2011
Lifestyle
Blame your late running train on a derailed management: Why Irish Rail is going nowhere fast Colm Fitzgerald, Comment Editor
IT’S a Friday evening, and you’re heading home to wherever up the country. You arrive at a windswept Limerick Junction after a brief though somewhat unsettling trip on a boneshaker railcar, only to find your next train is cancelled, hugely late, or is formed of just 3 carriages and you have to stand for the journey. The problems and corruption in Irish Rail are multifaceted. If, like me, you took Economics for the Leaving Cert (or indeed are such a scholar at UL) you’ll know that a semi-state body generally does not exist to provide a profit and as such will not operate in the most effective manner. Instead it exists generally only to provide essential services. Sadly, Irish Rail, a company with a reasonable amount of untapped potential, fits the above description well. In recent years, the company has taken decisions which have been majorly influenced by politics. Take for example the Western Rail Corridor, providing trains between Limerick and Galway. From the outset, the cheap option that was opted for would only be a white elephant. It offers slow and expensive
trains which meander through the Co. Galway countryside, with a total journey time of 2 hours. Compare this to the Bus Eireann 51X service, which surely many of you are patrons, which takes about 80 minutes. There are plenty more difficulties on the ground on a daily basis which are a greater problem. Trains to Sligo and Rosslare are often run with Commuter Railcars, entirely unsuited to long journeys. This is thanks in part to the rushed retirement of the old “orange” MKIII carraiges (which continue in service in the UK), most of which are now dumped in North Wall in Dublin. From a local perspective, it is difficult to understand why there are no direct trains to Dublin after 9am from Limerick. Having used the rail network in the UK extensively over the summer, organisation seems far more widespread there. Multiple companies provide services there, with all of them providing information about services in a far clearer and effective manner. Similarly, trains actually run at times which make sense and not all trains run to Dublin! Finally, reserving a seat when booking online should not be mandatory. Recent trains I’ve been on have had Darth Vadar and Adolf Hitler boked to travel. I’m unsure is that the endorsement we need!
Surviving the FYP Andrea Gallagher IT’S a frosty Thursday morning in January in the non-term time University village ghost town of Castletroy, Limerick. At least I think it’s a Thursday, but the day doesn’t matter. When you’re “Doing the FYP”, there are no days, only hours of daylight in between the half an hour it takes to drag yourself out of bed and the merciful moment in the evening when the creak of a door signals the first housemate to crack and make the journey downstairs for tea and Coronation Street. For most 4th years at UL, (ahem, hard luck Law and Euro!) January is a far off, comforting beacon of hope, the promised land of hard work to suppress the guilt of first semester negligence, and just the right side of Christmas. You reassure your older, wiser supervisor confidently, “Yes, but you see I’ve actually decided to dedicate my entire January to my FYP, so..!” January is the month of the return to the grim (if a little flooded) arms of student accommodation. The very act of returning to a freezing house strewn with tragic remnants of the après exam frenzy of December, far from the indulgence of home cooking seems an adequate forfeit in itself. When you make the FYP Pilgrimage to Castletroy, the first thing to do is The Shopping. The genuine FYP experience necessitates the hermit look, which simply cannot be achieved by frequent trips to the
Mecca of Superquinn. Stocking up on practical goods is important. It’s all about perish-ability! Meticulous effort to prepare dinners (for those of us to have discovered Tupperware and the miracle of freezing) takes up a day or 3. You see, once you get enough dinners cooked for a month, THEN you can settle down and focus on your FYP. And so it begins. Day one: I’m a one-woman poetry SAS crack unit. Everything is shiny and new and the zest for learning is overwhelming. But what’s that I spy from my (perfectly arranged) desk? If it isn’t my laptop from 1st year! It took its last breath many moons ago, since replaced by a kindly sibling handme-down. I absentmindedly turn it on, half expecting a miracle rebirth, but get the familiar error message I never bothered to decipher (recession wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time). I’m soon searching the dark realms of computer geek forums for step by step instructions on how to resurrect this poor neglected piece of scrap metal. Six hours later I have burned two discs of reboot software with little triumph. Two hours later I’m looking a little dishevelled, but more determined than ever. I hear footsteps on the wooden stairs. This usually initiates a nice cup of tea and a two hour conversation, the threatening type where someone could leave any minute and upset the entire dynamic, and everyone will have to return to their respective FYP
Irish Rail: Making decisions based on politics as opposed to consumer feedback
caves. An FYP survivor friend walks in and eyes me suspiciously, enquiring as to what exactly I’m doing. After I manically explain my achievement with wide-eyed grit (I’m about to reboot it), he congratulates me... but his eyes say “and WHO has been looking after The FYP?!” At the ripe old post FYP age of 25, he gently prods “I hope you didn’t spend all day doing this... because that’s what I might have done when I was doing my FYP...” So where can one find relief from this burden? It can be refreshing to place yourself in a situation or group of friends where The FYP doesn’t exist. Like an alternate universe. One January morning I called my mother to hear a chirpy voice asking whether I was working that day because I was up so early. I glumly stated (although with that smug self sacrificial pride of an FYP student) that no, I was up.... “Doing The FYP”. Instead of the pat-on-the-back sympathy I was used to from my fellow UL graduate siblings she enquired, very confusedly and casually “What’s the FYP?!” Now, this isn’t a case of all encompassing FYP self pity/ importance. Or even just the standard “my parents haven’t a notion what I’m doing at college” situation. My mother has had FIVE children go through the gates of UL (I’m from a good Catholic home you see). That must be some kind of record. Five UL graduates = FIVE FYP’s lovingly dedicated to her. You do not have that many children do The FYP without at least recognising the term, particularly as something of a negative or at least meeting its mention with the required reception of support/ pity. I’d love to tackle that question but you better stop procrastinating, that book shelf isn’t going to alphabetically arrange itself you know!