5 hours isn't an especially long rail journey but Irish Rail's standard of catering wouldn't cut it on that length of journey. Given that it would have to reverse in Dublin, you might as well just have one or two trains a day run through to Connolly and time them so as to enable a connection.
Of course the platform arrangements at Connolly don't exactly suit this nor is there enough space currently to do it without transferring a lot more commuter traffic to Docklands. This is hardly sensible to inconvenience a captive market of thousands of commuters for the sake of 20 or 30 people a day who might want to travel from Cork to Belfast and most of whom will be doing on a free pass anyway.
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