Some prepaid commuters on Dublin’s public transport are finding they have to pay again

On 2 September, Mary Gilmartin was at her usual train station in Drumcondra, heading to work in Maynooth, and found that her Leap Card didn’t work.

Then, the next day, it happened again.   

She gets the pass through her employer, under Transport for Ireland’s TaxSaver scheme, which allows employees to pay for annual or monthly transport passes from their gross salary, before tax is applied, meaning it’s cheaper.

“I've been getting an annual ticket through work for a long time now, gosh probably since 2006,” said Gilmartin, a geography professor.  

But she’s never had a problem before, Gilmartin says. And it’s not just her. 

When the National Transport Authority rolled out some changes in June, it had some unexpected effects, NTA spokesperson Aoife Smith says.  

“Upon the launch of the new commuter zones and multi-modal tickets we identified an issue with ticket collection that impacted a small number of tickets,” she said.

Tickets issued from 1 September onward should work, but annual passes issued between May and September may still be broken – and will need to be reissued, she said. 

The NTA expects to have those reissued “before the end of this year”, she said.

Leap-less life

On the second day of September, stuck on the platform with a broken Leap Card, Gilmartin bought a new ticket, despite having paid for her transport already via her annual pass, and got on the train.  

And she did that every day for the next week or so, while trying to figure out what was wrong with her Leap Card.

At first she had thought the Leapcard issues were a mix-up with Maynooth University’s  HR department.

But when she reached out to Irish Rail, after a few exchanges, she was told by someone from its TaxSaver team that the issue was on their end.

“I got an email from TaxSaver saying, we know that this is a problem, so just flash your ticket and staff should know, and let you on without paying,” she said.

That didn’t work out very well in practice though.

“Any of the staff I spoke to didn't know that this was an issue,” said Gilmartin. “So every time I try to use it now, I have to explain that there's a problem, and TaxSaver said it was okay to use it.”

Gilmartin said she was told by Irish Rail on 4 September that the issue would be fixed in 24–48 hours. But she checked just today, Tuesday, and nothing.

“It's a 48 hours that's going on for a very long time.” she said.

By now, on the train, where she’s familiar with some of the staff after years of commuting, just showing her pass and explaining is kind of working okay now. 

But she hasn’t tried to use it on the Luas, and she has paid for bus trips rather than risk being refused – even though her annual pass should have already covered those trips.

“I don't know how understanding staff who don't know me would be in that situation,” she said.

She used to love the flexibility of the pass, and not having that has changed her travel habits.

Having a multi-modal annual pass “encouraged me to travel differently”, she said. “Using lots of different modes of transport to get from one place to another. And definitely, like, just short trips, like, oh, let's go and explore this place that I haven't been to before.”

Now, she said, she’s more cautious. “If I don’t absolutely have to go somewhere, I don’t, because I don’t want to deal with the hassle of it.”

What’s gone wrong

There clearly wasn’t enough testing of the new system before it was rolled out in April, says Mark Gleeson, the treasurer of Rail Users Ireland. 

“It's a very complex system, and you're migrating from one system that was working just fine, and you're migrating everyone up to use a new setup which is different, and things break," he says.

“There’s a lot of different combinations and permutations you can get into, and it doesn’t look like they touched on all those permutations,” he says. 

It won’t be just Gilmartin affected, Gleeson says. “There's gonna be quite a few people impacted, because it's a computer system. It's not random. Things don't just happen. There's a pattern to it," he says.

There’s been a notice on Transport for Ireland’s TaxSaver website about problems with multimodal TaxSaver Leap Cards since at least 2 July.

Feljin Jose, a Dublin city councillor, and the Green Party’s spokesperson on transport, says the continuing issue shows two failures: the fix is too slow, and staff haven’t been properly briefed.

“Drivers and ticket staff do not all seem to be aware of this, and that has to be sorted as soon as possible,” Jose says. “That should not be happening three, four months into the problem.”

Long-term, José said, asking passengers to “flash” passes and explain their case to staff is not the solution.

“That shouldn’t be up to them to basically convince the driver to let them on,” he said.

Likewise, Gleeson says, "You paid your tickets, you have done everything right, and if your ticket doesn't work, it's a very uncomfortable position to be in.” 

“You're assuming the person you're dealing with has been adequately briefed and understands the situation,” he said. “And you know, there's an awful lot of drivers and ticket inspectors, and you know, that may not always happen."

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.