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A BIZARRE INCIDENT occurred during the week, when morning commuters were thrown off their train and delayed by an hour because of a single serial fare dodger who refused to cooperate with Irish Rail staff.
Irish Rail said in a statement that the man was being pursued for a number of previous fixed penalty fines and two instances of violent behaviour towards staff. If this is the case, then clearly the individual needed to be dealt with. The Gardai were unavailable to attend at Ashtown station when the individual became uncooperative with staff, but arrangements were made for another Garda unit to attend the train at the Docklands station. The paying punters were put off and the train went on its way.
A lack of power for dealing with trouble on public transport
It was an overreaction to put everyone off the train, though I can understand too that if Irish Rail staff felt they had a particularly odious individual in their clutches they would want to soften his cough a bit with a trip to a Garda station. What this really highlights is the lack of effective powers or resources for dealing with trouble on public transport.
When he was the minister responsible for public transport, Labour’s Alan Kelly identified the key problem holding back use of the services on offer: middle-class snobbishness, he told The Irish Times, kept people off buses and trains. Two days prior, a man had dropped his trousers on a Luas and injected heroin into his groin. The presumably snobbish commuters on-board reported being horrified at the sight.
The catch-all term “antisocial behaviour” has come to be used in the official lingo to cover everything from gaggles of excited teenagers singing Crazy World on their way back from a concert at The Point, to out-and-out brawls between inebriated junkies in the middle of the working day.
A young boy sat down the DART one day and pricked his finger on a needle that had been left behind by some junkie. The boy and his family endured an agonising wait to get back test results to make sure he had not caught something life-altering or life-limiting from the needle. There isn’t a day that goes by that commuters aren’t subjected to people using drugs on public transport.
We have all been subjected to annoying or intimidating behaviour on a bus or train
Arguments, brawls, people carrying weapons, people defecating and generally soiling the place are regular occurrences. Public transport is also subject of attacks from people on the routes, and Dublin Bus in particular regularly has to curtail services in particular areas because of an uptick in missiles being thrown at vehicles.
We have all witnessed or been touched by sometimes annoying, sometimes offensive, and sometimes downright dangerous behaviour by certain passengers on public transport. The 39 bus in Dublin was my route in and out of town growing up, and it was unusual not to witness some form of trouble or selfish individuals inflicting hassle on their fellow passengers. One time I got off when someone started smoking heroin on the packed evening commute. Another time I got off after a group of lads got on at the dual carriageway before Ashtown, tried to break windows and eventually deciding to relieve themselves on the bus.
Maybe I’m a snob, but passively smoking heroin and urine flowing past me on a bus is my limit.
Protecting commuters
Luas operator Veolia and Irish Rail have both contracted private security firms to help patrol their respective routes. On the Luas, there are nine teams of two people patrolling from 10am until the service stops. Their presence helps alleviate trouble, but still the latest safety report for the Luas highlights over 2,200 cases of disorder and vandalism on the service. This is just the reported and accounted for stuff.
Commuters on other services, the bus in particular, have practically no security. An isolated driver can’t do much except radio for help and perhaps, in the odd case, drive to a Garda station and hope for the best if things get particularly bad.
Public transport can be a law-free zone in a way. At times the troublemakers are given free reign, and all the decent, fare paying folks are just stuffed in with them and advised to keep their eyes averted.
This isn’t good enough. It isn’t good enough because decent folks deserve the protection of the law. But it also isn’t good enough because public transport is one of the things we rely on to keep our economy and our society going.
If commuters are held up for an hour because revenue officers for Irish Rail either don’t have the power to deal with a rule breaker or the backup from someone with that power, then there is a knock-on effect. People are late to work or miss appointments. If people stick to using their cars because they’re too snobby to put up with piss, shit and drugs on their commute it increases congestion.
Public transport deserves its own fully empowered police force
Then there are the older and vulnerable people who are left to fend off odious characters outside of commuter hours. How many people feel trapped in their homes because of a bad experience trying to take a bus to a community centre or out to the cinema or similar? I’d say more than a few.
Public transport is an artery through which the lifeblood of society flows. As in other countries, it deserves its own fully empowered police force.
Anyone who has travelled around London knows the highly visible transport police there. You’ll meet them in stations, travelling around, and responding to incidents. They provide a real sense of security in one of the busiest transport systems in the world. Yet, there are only 2,931 officers in the transport force overall. Small numbers, as with the grand total of 18 security guards travelling on the Luas each day, can make a big difference.
A force dedicated to transport would have the flexibility to travel to trouble spots. We already see some of that, for example in an operation carried out on the Luas with Gardai and Department of Social Protection officers to hunt out people with fake or expired travel passes who are also, according to official reports, key troublemakers.
It would be nice to know that travelling around our busy cities there are patrol cars dedicated to policing the transport networks, who can respond to calls from bus drivers in difficulty. These same officers could patrol stations and help tamp down the thugs who have seen bicycle lock ups and even ticket machines removed because of constant vandalism.
Decent people deserve the chance to commute in peace, and those who have no respect for others need to know there’s a fair chance of meeting big cops with big batons the next time they decide to kick off.
Aaron McKenna is a businessman on columnist for TheJournal.ie. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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The one and only time that Kenny showed leadership, courage and backbone. Has been a complete disappointment ever since.
“One year on: What’s happened since Enda Kenny’s landmark Cloyne speech?”
Answer F**K ALL
I had great hopes for the Government when I heard that speech. I thought finally , we are getting somewhere.
More hot air from a flat deflated Taoiseach!
How can people take mr pr man seriously. He spoke those words only because people wanted to hear them at the time. But he knew like all politicians know the Irish quickly forget!
‘Dysfunctional,disconnected and elitist’ ? Does that not describe our government/insiders? Enda and Eamonn, your time is rapidly running out…
So let them be, who have had sex with children!
And turn Your rage on those who turned their eyes,
Intending to defend Your church with lies!
Nor were they ever fit for Your dominion!
These hypocrites are far worse than the poor
Polluted souls they moved from place to place,
Avid to avoid undue disgrace,
Trafficking in silence to be sure.
Remember them when You return! For they,
Instead of proper penance, yet remain
Cardinals, bishops, princes in Your name,
Knowing well what price they ought to pay!
English translation: Clerical paedophiles are bad, but so are their facilitators who protected them.
Conclusion: Poetry is a handy way to say something obvious in a way that make you sound intellectual.
In some ways, nothing happened – nothing much anyway. I’d love to see the catholic church kicked out of the country or at the very least hauled through the courts with the pope ultimately responsible being locked up. The church has had too much power in this country for way too long. Even if it was made an illegal organisation would be good. Pope JPII’s young people of Ireland, I love you statement can be seen in a different light now. Maybe when he kissed the ground at the airport he was really hoping to get it up the ass – should have Father Ted style.
That speech should be remembered for what it was, extremely populist and opportunistic. It was the perfect time for such a speech, but it was not as brave as people seem to think.
The church was once viewed as the pinnacle of the Irish system, a very powerful entity and the moral beacon to light the path. Roll on the years and its disgusting antics are displayed to the citizens and they rightly lose faith in it. The power of the church topples, its influence diminishes and its beacon fades.
At the same time the population are becoming aware that they have been mugged by their past political leaders, and indeed that the world at large may not be as we once conceived it to be.Election time comes round, the people are weary but angry and have had enough lies…In to power waltzes Enda and associates on the promise of change,truth, transparency etc.
There is a vacuum of moral leadership perceived to exist…without a beacon, how will we see the path?
Enda’s speech that day was effectively, an attempted coup by him to replace the church as the moral leader of the country with himself. Like a young up and coming fighter, giving the disgraced punch drunk old champion of yesteryear a beat down. He saw the crocked church, hit it his best shot and secured some popularity as the guy who stood up to the church. Lets not kid ourselves, he would not have attempted it back when the church was the champ!
P.S. I AM A FAN OF NEITHER.
I believe the time has come for contributors to be asked their affiliations to political parties. Looking at the posts on this story with two exceptions I see names and nom de plumes associated with Sinn Fein . This makes it unlikely that the Journal will ever be highly read and that’s a pity because it gives us so much with day and evening long support from the journalists.
Please clarify.. Are you trying to insinuate that if someone is associated with SF that makes them undesirable somehow?
Not only this, but that their presence in the comments section (which is fully open to any member of the public subject to the rules of the comments policy) will somehow affect the journals readership?
Where do we start? Guilt by association, circumstantial ad hominem,
Poisoning the well, it’s very poor logic, and it makes you look quite elitist / snobbish.
Would you be suggesting that an FF readership would damage the journal too, because you failed to mention that.. How about FG supporters? Labour?
I don’t find any of our political parties truly credible and as such have no party preference. I will vote based upon how well the individual councillor represents my views, and how good they are at their job. Which, according to “Common Sense” is what democracy is supposed to be all about.
I was having a gawk through the 2011 Party Leaders Allowance data from SIPO the last day. No surprise to see FG were the biggest spender on “Media Training” (€70,000) and “Consultancy fees including H.R., Media, I.T. & P.R. Management”. On top of that, remember Kenny intervening last yearto get Ciaran Conlon (his “media manager”) a €35,000 raise to €127,000 per year. All paid for by the public.
Remember, what you see and hear through the media is cleverly micromanaged by PR firms. Be swayed by actions, not words.
Meant to say: the figure for “Consultancy fees including H.R., Media, I.T. & P.R. Management” was €258,693.
The SIPO report can be found here: http://www.sipo.gov.ie/en/Reports/StateFinancing/FundingreceivedunderPartyLeadersLegislation/290512-ReportonExpenditureofthePartyLeadersAllowance2011/File,15730,en.pdf
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