When we were young, we sometimes amused ourselves by telling the story of the man who suffered with the name Johnny Stinker. After a lifetime of embarrassment, he took the decision to change his name by deed poll. Meeting a friend afterwards he was asked what new name he had chosen. “Paddy Stinker”, came the cheery reply. The saga of Ireland’s new National Children’s Hospital is reminiscent of this story. Originally planned to be located in the inner city constituency of then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, that plan was abandoned in the face of a chorus of outrage which argued that accessing such a facility in an already heavily congested area would be a nightmare. It was decided to build the hospital on a different site but, astonishingly, one that was equally congested. No-one, other than those involved in making this decision, could understand the logic of this. If you were planning to build a state-of-the art facility for the nation’s sick children, why not locate it on a green-field site in an accessible location out on Ireland’s Beltway, the M50 motorway , from which radiate most of Ireland’s major roads. There would be no constraints on the size or design of the building, it would be easy to access, and low-cost or no-cost parking could be made available. But the provision of low-cost or no-cost parking seems to be anathema to those who run hospitals. Instead, most of our hospitals seem to function as expensive car parks with hospitals attached. Those of us who have had to spend time visiting aged parents in hospital have also had to spend large amounts of our life savings in parking charges. Now that we are of an age at which we ourselves require frequent medical care, we spend much of our time trying to ease our car into the narrowest of spaces, or circling around multi-storey car parks hoping to spot a parking space that is being vacated before it is snapped up by someone else with sharper sight. Recently, having been sent for consultation at a South Dublin hospital, I circled the car park seven times looking for the spaces that had been indicated as vacant. Luckily I had taken the precaution of asking my wife to accompany me and I was able to exit the car while she resumed the search.
Most of our hospitals are car parks with hospitals attached. Who benefits from these? Do we dare to ask? And what else? The busiest airport in Ireland is a car park (or several car parks) with an airport attached. Almost uniquely in Europe there is no rail link to Dublin Airport, Apparently this is due to the fact that the Dublin Airport Authority has always scuppered plans to provide a rail link to the Airport. Two railway lines and one LUAS line come within touching distance of the airport. In Belgium and in Holland the rail lines were diverted to serve Zaventum and Schipol Airports. In Dublin they once introduced an Air-DART service linking Dublin Airport with the DART station at Howth Junction. The service was not well-publicised. That was probably for the best. I used this service several times. Howth Junction was close to the airport. They provided a nice bus. The distance between the DART station and the bus stop was like the surface of the moon. Coming in the opposite direction, from the airport, passengers were left to manage the lunar landscape as best they could, dragging their cases behind them. Howth Junction had four lines and four platforms. One had to access these platforms by means of metal stairs. There was no way of knowing at which platform the next train to Dublin might arrive. Imagine coming off a plane with a full suitcase and dragging that suitcase up and down the metal staircases, desperately trying to determine which platform might see the arrival of the next train to Dublin Howth Junction was notorious as the recreation ground for feral teenagers. There is a notorious video clip of a teenage girl being pushed under a train there. It is not surprising that the Air-DART service did not operate for very long.
Despite the lip-service urging people to use public transport, all over the country parking spaces near railway stations have been put behind double yellow lines. If you want to park at a station, you pay by the hour
Mary Harney as Minister for Health once addressed The American Bar Association and told them approvingly that Ireland was closer to Boston than Berlin. Well, SHE may have been closer to Boston than Berlin but most Irish people are closer to Berlin when it comes to social services.
As Joni Mitchell sang,
They’ve taken the trees and put them in a tree museum, and they charge all the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘em
Even worse than that, Jude, when the hospitals charge their own staff for parking. Look at that collection of farm buildings that has the gall to call itself an international airport in the NoI. This is a private enterprise but they seem to be able to arm twist the DoE to put in parking restrictions everywhere and then on top of that charge 3.00 for the privilege of driving past the front doors. This tax is to be used for capital development. Maybe if they made fewer donations to political parties they could bypass the capital developments or at least pay out of their own pockets.