Mind the gap.

I'm increasingly sad and angry about how little care seems to be put in to public services by some people in Ireland. Today I got off an Iarnrod Eireann/Irish Rail train at Connolly Station. I had come from Malahide, but the train was a mainline commuter train rather than a Dart. This was how the train looked after arriving at its platform at Connolly Station, one of the two main train stations in Dublin, where intercity trains arrive and depart around the country.

This was the gap between the train and the platform:

There was also a high step down from the train to reach the platform:

It was so dangerous, and so inaccessible. Travelling with a young child it was quite frightening, it would have been so easy for them to fall into the gap between the train and the platform, and was quite a maneouvre for me to get them off the train safely. Indeed the gap was wide enough for me as an adult to fall in to. I dread to think what it would have been like for a wheelchair user, or someone using crutches, or someone with any kind of mobility impairment. Or an elderly person. Or a blind or visually impaired person, who would have virtually no chance of detecting the height or width of the gap that awaited them as they stepped off the train. Or a person with a buggy. Or a person just not paying enough attention, because they hadn't expected such a hazard as they merely got off their train.

As you can see from the first picture it was like this at every door on every carriage of the train all along the platform. That's what made me sad and angry. It was planned like this. It was left like this. There is this train, which is not at all unique, and it does not fit the platform correctly, and probably never has, and that is dangerous and inaccessible. There must be many trains like it. And no-one has bothered to fix this. It has been designed in this way, because when the train platforms were built, or when the trains were ordered to run on these tracks to these platforms, the train did not fit the platform or the platform did not fit the train. With hazardous and exclusionary consequences. And that was simply accepted as fine. And has remained fine. Was it even noticed? Either no-one cares, or more precisely, the people who could do something about this do not care. And that's also fine. It would seem like it is someone's job, to have trains that allow their passengers to reach the platforms safely and easily, or to have platforms that have been built or modified to ensure they reach the trains well, again so that passengers can get on and off safely and easily. That doesn't seem like an outlandish expectation. Yet this is the situation. And no-one seems to feel that it is a problem or it is their job to ensure this doesn't happen or fix it when it does.

There are no warning signs, or even announcements to mind the gap. It's not even considered worthy of an alert. It's simply expected. Have people complained? More importantly, has anyone been injured? Impossible to know.

And this is why I'm sad and angry, more and more, in our capital city, around the country, or reading the news. It's not that things are bad. It's that things are intentionally and simultaneously carelessly bad. Avoidably, unnecessarily bad. Yet persistently, consistently, compoundingly bad. It's that so few people who a citizen might reasonably expect to be concerned with and responsible for doing things well seem to care. And that they are not made to care. They can do very basic things badly, they can refuse to fix things for years or decades, and there are no repercusssions. And worse, that there is no sense of responsibility or even shame. That there is no vision, no expectation of better. It's not that things are bad but we know how they could be so much better and we're fighting for that better future. Some of us are. But it seems like those with the most power don't even have an idea of what better could be, they are unconcerned by just how unneccessarily bad things are, and how the status quo negatively affects the lives, deaths and health of so many. There is a vast chasm between how things are and even the basics of a decent public life that citizens have a right to expect, which they can envision and which could quite easily be achieved. The powers that be are whistling into this abyss. And we all, especially the most disadvantaged, are in danger of falling through the gaps.