M'correspondent G sent me a link from the Kilkenny People about a free bus to the mountains running on Sundays this Summer. The new bus service is a cunning plan from Kilkenny Leader, whose CEO Declan Rice offered “the great outdoors in rural Ireland almost always requires people to have a private car.” errm quite so, although you could pile 5 people into a taxi and call yourselves the Boomtown Rats Bag'town Ramblers. I live in the mountains served by this bus service and say "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". Our mountain commonage is 200 hectares in extent, we could certainly disperse a 30-strong busload of TiredPoorHuddled across the heather so that they could not see / hear each other . . . but could see / hear skylarks.
It took a while before the distant bell tinkled by that short piece in the KK People overcame my residual tinnitus and I remembered that I'd been 'involved' with the birth of this worthy endeavour. Around Christmas time 2024, I had some to-fro with a couple of young Effectives from SETU = South East Technological University, including a Zoom-call. They were working on a "
Mobility Strategy for Lower River Barrow & Blackstairs Mountains Visitor Region" aka was it feasible to criss-cross this "here be dragons" backwater with bus stops or rentable bicycle stands to link the market towns along its periphery. In 2022, I had researched & written a Heritage Report bigging up the history, ecology and free-breathingness of the self-same
Visitor Region. So I had something to contribute. I'm old and forgetful, so my sharing report, opinions, contacts & IP with this project had long since flushed out of my memory-palace and down the streams of times past. Then G reminded me. So harrrumph, it might have been courteous to keep a tally of all the voluntariat contributions to the project and drop them a line to say
the Buses are running and thanks for your help. Even if you believed that
it was all your own work.
Anyway moan off!
It looks like I can catch a [free] bus at Sunday lunchtime from a car-park I can see from The Ringstone, pootle into town, buy a newspaper, skull a pint, and be back on the bus home half an hour later. Other permutations, involving more pints, are surely possible. Last Sunday, they were giving thundery downpours in the afternoon, so I resolved to catch the bus going South to the buzzing metropolis of Graiguenamanagh. Dep Car-Park 1110 arr Graigue 1130 and return 45 mins later. When he got there, the cupboard was bare: because Barrow Bus doesn't know where is the Car Park. I therefore missed that bus and reverted to Plan A: North to Borris. I made an informed guess about where B.B. thought the Stop was, was wrong, but flagged down the bus as it left the mountains for civilization. I shared the bus into Borris with two elderly ladies from St Mullins, who were going for Coffee in Goresbridge (and why not?).
I used to boast-moan, that our gaff couldn't be further from a regular bus stop [20km East or 25km West] and still be in the populous province of Leinster. I also used to rant at the precarity and unjoined-upness of Irish buses. But in the last tuthree years TFI - Transport For Ireland has really pushed the bus out. There are now five No.359 buses each way between Enniscorthy and New Ross via our mountainy hinterland. Whoa! and, like, woot! They have just installed a bus-shelter [R, as yet unvandalized] at the Dead Centre [note graves in background] of Kiltealy. I fully intend to walk 40mins down the mountain to the nearest stop - for the craic like. 
Or for utility:
- 🚶Shanks mare Home 0720 Kiltealy 0800
- 🚌359 Kiltealy 0805 New Ross 0840
- 🚌340 New Ross 0920 Waterford 0940
- 🚌360 Waterford 0943 Tramore 1005
They would still have croissants for sale at The Seagull Bakery in Tramore! I could afford one from the pot of gold saved by not driving 70km in my Yaris. And delighted to report that JJKavanagh buses covering Dublin-Déise have, after 40 years of capitalism red-in-tooth-and-claw, out-competed the state sponsored Bus Éireann to close down its parallel Rte 4.
