I was being a bit of a smart-ass on the 50% suggestion, but 1% is equally absurd. You can be very sure that Eircom get a lot more than 50% of the retail rate for a phone line that in a lot of cases will go equally rarely used.
I think the fair solution would be to add a surcharge to tickets amounting to something around 20% of face value when using any peak services. This could be waived for travel for medical appointments and other state services. There is no real marginal cost for off-peak travel where the services have to be provided anyway, so it makes sense that the status quo should continue off-peak.
However, doing anything about this is politically extraordinarily difficult due to the face that the 1.1 million pass-holders makes up about half of an election turnout.
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