I’m not sure if I made it clear enough in the article, but I think that all the recent events (car free proposals, the luas bridge without a luas, the 41x situation and even the Patton Flyer fiasco that you bring up) are all connected - and it all points towards the minister trying to engineer a situation where nobody is responsible for anything much like the situation in the UK.

This would leave the way clear to privatise the whole lot and leave us with an almighty mess. The only thing holding it back right now are the drivers and their unions. Unfortunately the public, through a lack of understanding of what is actually going on (nudged along by Dempsey etc..) are not as behind them as much as they should be - they see the aircoaches and swords expresses of this world and think that a glorious future of private operations lie before them - the government’s unwillingness to insist on private operators taking on public service (i.e. crap) routes in addition to the plum, profitable, ones is making this worse. If we must have private operators, so be it, but let’s level the playing field.

As far as integrated tickets go - we’ve said it before and we’ll keep saying it, what’s wrong with the bits of cardboard we have now? Sheer madness, you can tell none of these idiots ever use public transport, they have no idea about what the real issues which need addressing are. The only smart card these iijits should be looking at is the one marked p45.

So Alek, all of that said, what can we do about it? You’re a driver (right?), I’m a passenger, what can we do to sort this out?

The same Minister presides over an Integrated Ticketing process already some €40 million in the red with NO actual return for it.
Indeed so bad is the situation now,that our Minister needs yet more outside consultants to tell him what he needs to hear.

Now,this Minister feels a shiver of uncertainty over whether or not the glaringly insufficient numbers of Buses in service are actually more than enough for the plebs,cue the white gloved Tokyo Underground People Pushers coming soon to a Dublin Bus stop near you !!

Oh Jesu ! who will rid me of this turbulent Politician…in fact ALL of the breed could be dispensed with along with a container load of “Independent” Consultants and then we might have the makings of progress.

It is becoming blindingly apparent that the State is rapidly running out of funds and that these political creeps are going to slash and burn in an attempt to preserve their own slime filled careers.

Instead of presiding over Multi Billion € grand schemes such as the NDP and T21 all we really needed was enough people with interest in public transport to be given control over the systems.

There are so many locations where the targeted spending of relatively small amounts of money would result in major improvements to service levels but because the suggestions come from the lowest levels they are deemed of little value.

This results in a succession of wide-boys (and Girls),careerists all,peddling ever more delusional Computer Based schemes to “Improve” our public transport services.

The integrated ticketing fiasco remains the most obvious of these madcap schemes as a seemingly bottomless pot of Public Funds is divvied out amongst a favoured collection of “experts” all of whom fail to remember that we HAD a fully intigrated Ticketing system 40 years ago,when we called it a Rambler Ticket,valid on ALL CIE Road and Rail passenger systems Urban and Rural for a specified time.

If the headline of this article is actually an indication of Minister Dempseys thinking then we can kiss goodbye to any notions of a high frequency full bus service in Dublin.

Instead all we will see is yet more sharp suited Laptop Larry`s doling out ever larger amounts of increasingly meaningless statistics in an attempt to convince the Emperor of Meath that his new clothes really are the biz…