FROM THE METROLINK to the National Children’s Hospital to a football culture built almost entirely around last-minute equalisers, Ireland loves to make its people wait for anything good.
This week produced several new additions to that rather exhaustive canon, including the introduction of rudimentary technological improvements to our transport and communications infrastructure – while the British reminded us we’re also in the waiting room for a general election.
In this strange year in which approximately one quarter of the world’s population and at least 97 countries have held or will hold general elections, the Irish public may wonder when it will be our turn.
It’s likely that the results of Thursday’s general election in the United Kingdom will only cause those feelings to intensify. After all, it’s hard to look at the likes of Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Johnny Mercer (who led the fight to prevent prosecutions for offences committed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles) lose their seats and not feel at least a little in the mood for the drama of an election here.
Ireland’s new Minister for Finance Jack Chambers announced on Thursday that this year’s Budget would be moved forward by a week, prompting political correspondents and punters across the country to speculate that an October or November general election is more likely than ever.
Coalition party leaders Simon Harris, Micheál Martin and the outgoing Eamon Ryan have all publicly remained steadfast that this government will serve its full term – which would mean no election until the new year. Whether or not anyone actually believes them is quite a different story, and so firm have they been on the matter, that a late-autumn/early-winter election might actually feel like a bit of a rugpull.
In the wake of Sinn Féin’s relatively minor gains in last month’s local elections, many commentators suggested that it would be wise for Simon Harris to call a general election as soon as possible in order to capitalise on the Opposition’s apparently stalled momentum. Simon Harris, however, seems to be conscious that Sinn Féin’s disappointment doesn’t necessarily mean substantive gains for the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil coalition.
All three of Ireland’s largest political parties remain unpopular in ways that would have been unthinkable for most of the past century, to the point that a Red C poll published this week showing a 20% first preference vote for Fine Gael is actually perceived as good news for the party that currently holds the office of the Taoiseach. Oh, Charlie Haughey would be spinning in his grave, were he not secretly still alive and plotting his return from his private bunker on Inishvickillane.
Ireland therefore remains engaged in a form of electoral edging, brought to the brink by the chaos of campaigns in France, the United States, and of course the UK, only to be denied our own opportunity for ballot box catharsis. Note: if you don’t know what ‘edging’ is, please do not Google it while at work.
Thankfully, the waiting game is sort of our default position for all matters, great or small.
It was reaffirmed this week, for example, that it will be 2027 or 2028 before Ireland’s public transport system is ready to enter the sci-fi era of contactless debit card payment, the likes of which exists and has existed in many other European cities for quite some time.
If you’ve made a trip to London over the last decade, you might be aware that the buses, and the Tube, and the Overground, have had compatibility with debit card contactless payments since 2012. We are operating at a deficit of 16 years. It took less time to go from the Nokia 3210 to an iPhone that can measure your heart rate. We are 16 years behind our nearest neighbouring capital city, playing catch-up to a country so unsophisticated that they’re still using a philistine electoral system in which a 34% vote share can yield 63% of the seats in parliament.
It took the Apollo Project eight years to land a man on the moon in the 1960s — roughly half the time it will take us to introduce an existing technology into our vehicles. We’re not talking about rocket science here. Rocket science is, apparently, considerably easier.
Since Covid, virtually every coffee truck, hole-in-the-wall kiosk and temporary market stall has some facility for contactless payment. To say that Dublin Bus et al. will be the last horses to cross the finish line with this technology is an understatement, though it will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever waited for a Dublin Bus.
By the time contactless payments are implemented on Irish public transport, it’s pretty plausible that we’ll have an entirely new and unforeseen way of paying for things. Scanning our retinas perhaps, 5G mindwaves, or some kind of Minority Report system where a bunch of clairvoyants are kept on-call so they can inform Dublin Bus drivers of our intended fares ahead of time. We could probably use another team of clairvoyants to predict bus arrival times. Obviously it’s not easy to find full-blown psychics these days but even someone with a fraction of The Shining would probably do a better job than the current software masquerading as a real-time app. It’s just occurred to me that maybe that’s the issue. Maybe we’ve got the technology ready to go, we just have to wait for the buses to arrive. If that’s the case then an estimate of three-to-four years starts to make an awful lot more sense.
At this point, you may be thinking to yourself that it seems like the author of this piece has some kind of personal vendetta against Irish public transport. If you are thinking that, well, let’s just say that I’m glad it came across.
A final notable story from this week was the recommendation of the Oireachtas media committee that the TV licence fee be scrapped and replaced by state funding for RTÉ – a major boost for the significant demographic of people who like to say “This is what we’re paying our TV licence for?” every time RTÉ does anything.
Given the slow-moving nature of change in Ireland, it doesn’t seem especially likely that such a move will be taken with any great haste, so in the meantime I’ve taken the liberty of putting together a few suggestions for how the national broadcaster could plug some of its financial holes.
For now, though, director general Kevin Bakhurst remains focused on more immediately attainable goals, such as redesigning the RTÉ Player by bringing in features such as Live Restart. Should be handy enough, right? Most streaming services have that, right? We should be able to get that done within the next few— oh, 2026, is it? That’s fine, I suppose. We were already playing the waiting game for everything else.
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