It’s not all that often that I use this blog to indulge a particularly intense pet hate of mine; in fact, it’s not all that often that I actually write to this blog, full stop - but this morning, I got a bit of an inkling of job satisfaction of the type that would make for a particularly heart-cockle-warming episode of The West Wing.

Some of you may or may not be familiar with the Student Travel Card. Basically, the Student Travel Card offers holders the privilege of travelling on Iarnród Éireann, Dublin Bus and Luas services at specially discounted rates, as well as other discounts such as student concessions for GAA tickets and cut-rate deals on 3, among other benefits.

Which, you might find, is all well and good. And you’d be somewhat right to - those students getting stuff cheaper than the rest of us, when they’re going to be earning thousands more than us in a few years, etc etc. Well, the problem with Student Travel Card is that it’s a complete scam.

You see, Student Travel Card is an arm of Stylemark Holdings Ltd, a completely private company based in Coolmine, Dublin 15. And Student Travel Card seem to have - somehow - muscled their way into a position where they’re CIE’s sometime official agent for proof of student status.

So Stylemark Holdings Ltd, under their STC arm, are in a position where students have to pay them €12 - or €15 if they need a photo taken - to take possession of a completely unofficial student ID which they need then to present to CIE whenever they’re looking for a student fare on the train or buying a Student 7-Day ticket for Dublin Bus.

That might not sound very emphatic, so I’ll borrow an analogy I used earlier when explaining this to my mother.

Imagine, if in the [Company X] canteen, there was a special rate for staff and you could get your meals for half-price as a staff member, but in order to prove that you’re staff, they wouldn’t accept your work ID, and instead you had to pay a random private company €15 and get them to prove you’re actually an employee there. Does that not seem a bit daft?

Now, USI, the national Union of Students in Ireland, have had mandates to campaign against Iarnród Éireann’s policy of using the STC (as outlined on pages 63 and 64 of the 2006-07 Policy Manual) which for some reason haven’t been acted upon in a couple of years. A fuss has also been kicked up by Young Fine Gael among others in the past, although YFG managed to make a particular balls of their effort. They started off well:

This situation means that if a student in college in Galway, who doesn’t usually use Irish Rail to travel to Galway from her home, wishes to make a one-off journey to Dublin then her options are:
• Pay the full adult fare of €35/€38;
OR
• Buy a €15 ‘National Student Travel Card’ and pay the Students fare of €24.50 costing a total of €39.50

• i.e. no discount is available to that student!

…but go on to suggest that the alternative would be a ‘new €5 National Student Travel Card’. Uuuuuh.

It should be pointed out at this stage that Bus Éireann are saints in this regard and do pretty much as they should - they accept the student card issued by a third-level institution as valid student ID.

Anyway, USI didn’t seem to be budging on their responsibility, so the Council at UCDSU (of which I’m Chair) passed a mandate (page 7) of its own encouraging a campaign at more local level.

Today, having lodged a query with the National Consumer Agency, we received a reply which included this:

We have looked at your query and we do consider Iarnród Éireann to be breaching consumer legislation by asking for this specific method of ID from students.

We were encouraged to get in touch with Minister Noel Dempsey (God love him) on the issue - so we did, emailing him at all three of his public addresses. If he doesn’t get back to us sometime soon, he’ll be getting a very, very hard time from students who he’s already almost completely fucked over by stopping them driving to college unaccompanied.

I look forward to booking a constituency clinic with him in the near future.