Rural services are endangered - National bus routes

THE National Transport Authority may indeed be “acutely aware” of how deeply the loss of buses and other services will affect the people of rural towns and villages but what really counts is Bus Éireann’s attitude.

Judging by the company’s stance at yesterday’s hearing of the Oireachtas transport committee, it comes down to a stark choice between using it or losing it. The troubled company bluntly warned committee members that some of its 23 Expressway routes around the county were now under the microscope.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny recently defended Bus Éireann plans to cut certain routes by saying that that buses can’t be driving around boreens. Nor, by any yardstick based solely on economic considerations, can schools be provided for children in country areas where the population is withering. Not to mention the closure of hundreds of local Garda stations which once maintained a comforting presence of the man-on-the-beat in areas where elderly people now live in constant fear of being attacked in their own homes.

Add to this growing list a threatened post office or two plus a bank branch no longer seen as commercial and one gets a frightening picture showing how rural Ireland is gradually being decimated. Viewed from a ‘use it or lose it’ standpoint, the community is certain to be the loser. The burning issue raised by such a cold, calculating attitude goes to the heart of what public service means in rural Ireland: endangered.