When moribund body language threatens to derail the bus debate

You don’t often get Government ministers casting dead bodies in the path of senior civil servants, but Robert Watt had barely finished an expository sentence on an interesting transport-related topic when Shane Ross made with the dead bodies. 

Well, dead body singular. To be honest, Shane isn’t a reckless corpse-thrower and, to give him his due, it was his own corpse he was offering, in the fine old tradition of “over my dead body”.

Over his dead body was evil Mr Watt, him who sits at the top of the department mandated to control public expenditure, going to stop elderly citizens of this State from travelling for free on public transport whenever the hell they want to.

Personally, I wouldn’t have thought that the right to infinite transport impulsivity merited the investment of your own dead body, but Shane lashed his corpus delicti into the situation without a moment’s hesitation.

You could tell nobody was going to tell HIM when to use his free bus pass.

Never mind that it is widely believed that he never actually uses it, because why would he with a State car at the ready at all times, but for him, this is a matter of principle.

Shane can spot a matter of principle at 10 metres.

Plus, the demographic of his constituency means a bunch of elderly southside people possibly want the right to go on the bus to Stepaside Garda Station (as soon as he manages to get it open again) whenever the fancy takes them, and they know a rights vindicator when they see one, the way Shane knows an issue of principle when HE sees one.

It would have been so easy to do a cartoon of Mr Watt, as the story cartwheeled.

Robert Watt

All that was needed was horns, tail, and a pike or a trident or whatever is the spikey weapon Beelzebub’s lads carry, the pike applied to the throat of a harmless old lady or gent, despairingly supine at the onslaught on their basic human rights.

With Minister Ross approaching, clad in tin and so gloriously backlit, you couldn’t be in any doubt as to his role: Knight in shining armour (well, I’m giving him that role. He was happy enough to be just a dead body).

Except — and this is important — Mr Watt had done a perfectly legitimate thing. He hadn’t poked his pike into any old-age pensioner. He had merely suggested we have a debate about the use of free transport.

You might think, in this situation, that a parliamentarian such as Mr Ross, whose daily business is argument (and some would say always was argument, even before he got into the Seanad) would have been delighted to do what most of us do when offered a debate.

Have a little think, first, starting with that rare accessory, an open mind. Then we go off and do research. We ask questions, talk to humans, ask questions of Google, gather the evidence for a good spoken-word discussion.

You might expect Shane to do some of this. But no. He took a reflexive stance. Reflexive stance-taking simplifies everything, but is not what you expect of a senior parliamentarian.

I think myself that he fell suddenly in love with the idea of himself, embalmed, cast in front of Mr Watt like a human speed bump. Or maybe that should be a formerly human speed bump.

Now, here’s the central premise, the issue that in one fell swoop radicalised Ross.

It is not pleasant for unfortunate workers in the commuter belt to pay the full whack for a train or bus ticket and then find themselves having to stand or sway from boarding until disembarkation because the seats are already taken by older people who haven’t paid anything.

Basic premise has to be accepted. Makes sense. But that’s where further research becomes imperative, as I’m sure Mr Watt would agree.

Because getting old doesn’t generally mean you get stupid. Or more stupid than you used to be.

Absent the unfortunate contraction of dementia, older people stay pretty much as dumb as they always were.

Stupidity is a continuum, rather than something that suddenly hits you, like a falling election poster.

So why would old people do what they seem to be doing in large numbers, ie willingly and gratuitously submitting to rush hour?

Even if you’re lucky enough to get a seat on a train or a bus in rush hour and can gloat at the strap-hangers who get on later than you, it’s still rush hour, with all the discomfort attendant upon too many stressed people crammed together in a metal tube.

Accordingly, it is legitimate to be curious as to why older people who are not subject to sudden-onset stupidity in large numbers, would bother to get out of bed early in the morning and hurl themselves onto a train or a bus to re-live the misery of their working days.

Of course, there’s a bunch of age-haters who will just add the allegation to their pre-existing pile of outrage about older people.

The age-haters already exchange stories of old farts getting on the Dublin/Cork train every day to go have lunch with their daughter in Cork and then come back, all nice and warm and with WiFi instead of having to heat their own home at their own expense.

The age-haters would like to extirpate these old exploiters. Cast them out at Mallow. That’ll teach them. But that’s a digression. Mallow always is.

Stefanie Preissner came from Mallow, I hear you say? Someone had to, is my riposte.

The fact is that we have no clue why all these sane old people are doing what they’re doing.

This presents us with a golden opportunity to ask them about it. Politely. They’ll be delighted to share.

Everybody loves being asked questions about themselves, but older people particularly love it because so few people other than the GP do it to them.

Maybe those older people are on the bus or train at that crazy time because they still go to work.

Those in the workforce represent only a tiny proportion of the over 65s, but it’s growing, partly because money that was supposed to sustain them in their old age shrank in the wash and partly because they’re good at what they do and intend to keep doing it.

One radio commentator whose knickers got nautically knotted about this seemed to think that, a few years from now, instead of the wheels on the bus going round, round, round, they’ll be going flat, flat, flat from the weight of older people travelling in rush hour just for spite.

Which underlines the need for information. Then a debate.

Then maybe gently suggesting to older people that they might think of the common good when using their bus/train pass.

Nobody’s suggesting snatching it out of their hands. So Shane’s dead body is not in play.