Michael Moynihan: Gimme shelter — Cork's reduced bus service driving us round the bend

They’ve pointed out in different ways that there are various challenges to the quality of life in Cork which could do with some coverage, or perhaps some more coverage.

I made one point in return — when these matters combine and infect each other then there’s an exponential deterioration. Allow me to illustrate.

Say you’re a student from Cork who’s going to college in the city; forking over for accommodation in Waterford or Galway would break you, never mind Dublin, but you’re lucky. You can live at home and go to UCC or MTU.

Home is just far enough away from the campus to consider moving out and sharing a house, but that’s not a runner, really. The accommodation crisis is a reality, as noted.

So how do you get to college?

The bus should be an obvious solution, but Cork’s bus service is ... the technical term is terrible: there was a demonstration at the bus station a couple of weekends ago which illustrated people’s unhappiness with the service which was well attended (it would have been better attended if the bus service was better, which sounds like a joke but isn’t).

A few days ago this newspaper revealed that a chronic shortage of bus drivers has led to cuts to services on five Cork City routes this month.

 Bus Éireann has insisted the cuts will be temporary, and that the revised timetables will improve both punctuality on those routes and reliability across the city’s wider bus network.

Yes, you read that correctly: to improve the bus service, services had to be cut

There’s a general acknowledgement that Bus Éireann is struggling to hire drivers, which in turn causes service problems, but telling people that punctuality will improve because there are fewer buses ... well, surely that misses the real point.

That there are fewer buses.

Our college student thinks about an alternative — driving to college?

This comes with its own challenges. Driving around Cork is a fraught experience with the amount of roadworks necessary all over the city because of the lack of maintenance of the physical infrastructure. (The Patrick Street traffic ban should have improved the traffic situation, but writing the words ‘Patrick Street car ban’ without breaking into maniacal laughter is beyond the capacity of this scribe.) Then there’s the driving.

If your experience of Cork drivers is reminiscent of the desert chase scene in Mad Max: Fury Road, you are not alone.

You are not imagining the levels of danger either.

Recent data showed there are 317 people on a learner permit since 1994 (with 117 of those drivers taking no test since 2009); there are 327 drivers on a provisional licence dating from 1995 (again, a number of them — 24 — have taken no driving test since 2009). On top of that 414 people have been driving as learners since 1996, 463 since 1997, and 594 since 1998.

In other words there are thousands of people driving on Irish roads who are not qualified to do so

Our college student is to be commended for deciding to be responsible and to become a qualified driver.

The only problem is that at the time of writing, applicants for a driving test at the Wilton centre in Cork can expect to be invited to book their driving test at the end of January 2025. (On top of that, of course, any effort to address the number of unqualified drivers mentioned above would of course lengthen the waiting lists for driving tests.) 

The organisation running the Irish driving test system is the Road Safety Authority, of course. We recently learned, of course, that the RSA had “significant expenditure” that did not comply with public procurement rules in 2023 — €3.7 million was spent on five contracts outside of public procurement guidelines.

It is not the only public body with a questionable record on finance, of course.

Our college student is motivated to get to campus early to study but also to avail of the fitness facilities.

To stay in shape, of course, but also because the showers work.

This is more important than you might think. Sometimes the water supply at the student’s home in Cork is unreliable: swathes of Cork city have had to endure years of brown, filthy water flowing from their taps at home.

Recently residents from one part of the city which is badly affected by this problem, Mount Farran, held a protest to draw attention to their plight. 

And to express their unhappiness with the shambolic organisation responsible for water in the country.

That’s Uisce Éireann, of course, which used to be Irish Water before deciding to embody ineptitude in both official languages of the State. Last week, it was in the news for paying out bonuses of up to €30,000 in 2023, a year when profit at the utility increased by more than 50% to €329 million.

A couple of weeks before that it was in the news for killing thousands of fish in north Cork because of a discharge from one of its water treatment plants.

The organisation has spent months flushing the network in the worst-affected areas, and last week it began the latest round of flushing — targeting Dublin Hill, Meelick Park, Mervue Crescent, Glenthorn, Old Whitechurch Rd, and areas off the Ballyvolane Road, work expected to continue over the next two months.

It can be easy to glance at headlines about the shenanigans of Bus Éireann, the RSA, and Uisce Éireann without linking those stories to the deterioration of one’s quality of life on a day-to-day basis. This little experiment, however, shows the way the interaction of state organisations can trap you neatly

There are other public bodies which often don’t cover themselves in glory, of course. I note calls last week for Iarnroid Éireann to add capacity from Cobh when cruise liners are in town, as visiting tourists often occupy much of the space on trains to the city; if our imaginary student has a pal coming to college from Cobh then that’s another headache.

Then there was Cork City Council’s advertisement last week for a children’s drawing and colouring competition. Winning entries featuring favourite characters will appear across Cork city this December.

On bus shelters.

This is not to denigrate any kids who enter this competition, but these shelters are where you find the final indignity of the Cork bus situation — the digital displays which appear to exist to troll passengers, describing buses which are late, which are delayed, or which simply don’t exist.

Perhaps the proposed artworks will distract passengers. Either from the live updates which show an organisation’s contempt for its users, or from the bad weather on the way.

Favourite characters, though. A qualified car driver in Cork? A competent Uisce Éireann exec? The driver of a reliable bus?

Maybe mythical characters would be more accurate.