Thomil's Random Ramblings

If you have a look at Irish news sites, or indeed newspapers, you’ll be hard pressed to find any positive news stories regarding Ireland’s National Transport Authority, the country’s official public transport body, or its customer-facing brand, Transport for Ireland (TFI). Likely, all you’ll find is stories about overcrowded vehicles, unreliable services, and projects that are behind schedule and over budget. So far, so normal for Irish government bodies. However, when you look more closely, you’ll find the occasional bright spot in all of this drudgery. One of these bright spots is TFI Bikes, the agency’s public bike share system in Cork, Galway, Limerick and, most recently, Waterford. Now, this system hasn’t been without controversy, from serious f unding shortfalls and lawsuits in its Coke Zero Bikes days to the fact that local councils in Galway and Limerick seem to be doing their level best to sabotage the very existence of the system within their cities. However, as far as Cork ...

We humans sure are a peculiar bunch. As we go about our daily lives, rushing from work to play to home, struggling with bills or chafing in jobs that, for the vast majority of people, simply aren’t that fulfilling, we often forget just how breathtaking, how staggering, the world around us is. Indeed, even in this time of unprecedented access to knowledge, many of us never seem to lift their eyes too far from the infinitesimally small part of our own planet we call home to marvel at the wonder all around us, from the lushness of this world to the magnificent desolation ensconcing that little aquamarine jewel we call home. I myself have fallen victim to this mindset more than once.  In light of this, it is always nice when Mother Nature sends us a reminder of just how incredible our cosmos is. One such reminder passed by Earth back in Summer 2020. As humanity lay in the grips of the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, it floated serenely through the evening skies of the northern h...

Recently, I needed to go to Dublin again, for the first time in two years. The reason? Well, my German ID card had expired all the way back in 2019 and after a succession of bereavement, job changes, hospitalisation and, you know, a pandemic, I finally got around to fixing it. I’ll spare you the details as the admin work in question is just a rehash of what I went through when I applied for my new German passport, something I already wrote a blog post on . Instead, what I want to focus on this time is the experience of shlepping all the way up from Cork to Dublin and back without a car. I’ve never had a driver’s license and, given how little money I have left over at the end of the month as it is, I have no desire to change that anytime soon. This leaves me at the mercy of public transport in Ireland, in particular Bus Éireann, something that is a frequent source of frustration. Having said that, my recent business in Dublin gave me the perfect opportunity to test how public transport ...