Bus Eireann

[Clubber_Langer]

Sure it's just our taxes they're spending. Plenty more where that came from.

The problem is zero individual responsibility.

If someone could be sacked from the civil service for making such a disastrous purchase or or prosecuted for wasting public funds, you'd see different behaviour.

Ah 38 million down on electric buses gathering dust. thats the climate sorted.

 

[Rebel CNC]

Sure it's just our taxes they're spending. Plenty more where that came from.

The problem is zero individual responsibility.

If someone could be sacked from the civil service for making such a disastrous purchase or or prosecuted for wasting public funds, you'd see different behaviour.

Nail on the head. If a manager in Google, Musgraves or wherever oversaw this shambles he/she would be turfed out of the place. Here, the lads responsible will continue as they are, get the promotion when it's their turn and walk away few years before retirement with a fine pay-off as part of some redundancy scheme.
€38m wasted on the buses is high profile and newsworthy but the €38m is dwarfed by the amount pissed away every year on excess employees, archaic work practices, absenteeism rates off the charts and inability (refusal) to use modern technology!!
I know a guy working with Mater Private Health and he says dealing with HSE re treatment purchase fund is like going into black hole of red tape, delays and inefficiency for every single patient referred.

 

[jeepers]

76 €500k buses?

That's €38,000,000 of taxpayers money rotting away. All because nobody checked whether they had the ability to charge them before they bought them.

And EV batteries don't like sitting discharged for two years, so those buses will need new batteries (at additional taxpayer expense) if they're ever brought into service.

It's the e-voting machines and Defence Forces armoured vehicle fiascos all over again. Do we have anybody at all in this country who's competent at procurement?

David McWilliams has a bit on this in a recent podcast. He really goes after the senior civil servants, and rightly so. The ministers get it in the neck, and often deserve it, but they aren't the ones running the departments. FDI taxes are used to mask their incompetence and they never face consequences. Ever.

And they'll all retire on pensions that you and I couldn't ever afford to match.

 

[Yermon]

When wishing to purchase anything costing above €25,000 of public money, then as far as I know it has to go out to tender. Somebody went through all the paperwork to arrange the purchase of these busses and it had to be assessed and signed off higher up the chain. It's quite astounding that nobody thought to ask about having chargers to charge the busses. Without a doubt they should be censured and at the very least be moved away from ever making such high-cost decisions again.

 

[White Van Man]

The ministers get it in the neck, and often deserve it, but they aren't the ones running the departments.

As anyone who's ever watched "Yes Minister" knows Ministers don't concern themselves with such mundane things.

 

[Meridian]

This is a mix of the shy of work Irish Civil Service and Green Party Mandates.
No more diesel city buses they said, this is the result now of Green headbanging policies meeting up with that thing called reality which the protein lacking vegetarians have huge issues with.
Anyway a batch of them are heading to Dumplin Bus soon, whenever they get the chargers at their Phibsboro Garage sorted.
Bus Eireann Galway have 40 odd of those PADs in service ( Hybrid Diesel's ), they applied for planning around 3 years ago to install chargers but were turned down, they tried again and got the nod, they should be commissioned towards the end of this year, so safe to say it will be this time next year.
So here is the entertaining part, a Diesel Bus can operate for 20 hours constantly, an electrical one can do 12.
So Galway will need 60 electric buses to replace those hybrid ones.

Anyway here is the classic as usual, Tivoli Bus depot is laying there now and complete for a few weeks and still not handed over, the usual Civil service bull shit in action here. I have no doubt that Dave Long will have his own new depot at The Viaduct up and running before Tivoli is.

The plan then is, the vast majority of the buses at Capwell Garage will be transferred to Tivoli, this will allow for space to be available for the fitting of chargers there.
Then as soon as Galway goes electric, their current batch of PADs are coming to Cork

Its great, we keep getting the hand downs from Limerick and Galway

 

[Yermon]

SNIP
Its great, we keep getting the hand downs from Limerick and Galway

Par for the course by the decision makers in this country. Far too often Cork is treated shabbily when it comes to disbursement of public funding.

As a county we’ve circa 10% of the population, and probably contribute 10% of the individual tax take and likely much more of the corporate tax take, but we’re being treated as third class citizens by Dublincentric cunts

 

[White Van Man]

Par for the course by the decision makers in this country. Far too often Cork is treated shabbily when it comes to disbursement of public funding.

As a county we’ve circa 10% of the population, and probably contribute 10% of the individual tax take and likely much more of the corporate tax take, but we’re being treated as third class citizens by Dublincentric cunts

The Business Post has the numbers on spending under the National Development Plan:

Regional imbalance: How Ireland’s regional cities’ funding compares to Dublin – and why it matters

www.businesspost.ie

Paywalled article, you can find it here too: https://archive.ph/yntDU

New figures show that Dublin is by far the greatest beneficiary of spending under the existing National Development Plan (NDP) – receiving many multiples of the country’s next greatest beneficiaries.

Out of €23 billion in large government infrastructure projects currently underway nationally, more than half (€13.1 billion) is going to Dublin alone.

On a per capita basis, that means Dublin is receiving €9,096 per person in capital investment, nearly four times the average investment per person across all other regions (€2,254), or twice the national average (€4,639).

Clearly, as the capital, Dublin will benefit from higher capital investment than any other country with several key pieces of national infrastructure located in the city and county, as is common across the world.

Even still, Dublin is getting nearly four times the total investment of Cork (€2.4 billion), the second city, and more than twice the level of investment per person in Cork (€4,297).

The figures show that Dublin is receiving 13 times the investment of the state’s third-largest city, Limerick (€1.1 billion), and nearly twice the level of investment of Limerick’s per capita spend (€5,670).

Dublin is at nearly 15 times the level of total investment going into Galway (€890 million) and nearly three times the level of capital per Galway resident (€3,219).

 

[Meridian]

Oh Christ, way over budget and delayed eventhough the place looks finished. WTF can't the civil service work ?

New Cork bus depot to be operational ‘in the coming months’

Earlier this week, The Echo confirmed that the depot, which can only be used until the end of 2030, according to planning documentation, had missed ...

www.echolive.ie

 

[BlackpoolTerrier]

Oh Christ, way over budget and delayed eventhough the place looks finished. WTF can't the civil service work ?

New Cork bus depot to be operational ‘in the coming months’

Earlier this week, The Echo confirmed that the depot, which can only be used until the end of 2030, according to planning documentation, had missed ...

www.echolive.ie

Civil / public service and national/ local govt department general operational rules:

1. The primary purpose of any state-funded outfit is to provide employment/salaries/ flexi-time/ long holidays/ automatic annual increments/ generous expenses / even more generous pensions for those employed there. Everything else comes a distant second

2. Never, ever, call out poor performance or suggest an innovative efficiency - remember that you will need your peers to cover for your own underperformance some day

3. Spend as much as you can as often as you can - nobody will ever call you to account on either the efficacy of what you buy or the millions that you waste. Remember, it’s not your money

4. Take every perk offered to you by vendors - ye are all in this together

5. The one thing that always unites you and your state employee brethren in other departments is the utter contempt in which you hold those you are paid to serve - so relax and enjoy it - there will never be any consequences for you (Frontline staff working with or caring for members of the public are regular exceptions to this rule)

They are products of a century of zero accountability, pisspoor leadership and the peasant mentality.