thats mad. i have done the trip from tipp to belfast a few times and any possible marginal savings on purchases would be wiped out by the costs of the ticket. it is also far cheaper to drive to Belfast and back. plus, you wont be able to do a massive amount of shopping anyway considering the physical limitations of carting stuff about unless it is high end stuff, which is all cheaper online anyway.

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.

There are bags of spare platform capacity at Connolly - the terminal platforms are not heavily used.

I don't accept that a few trains in either direction from Connolly towards Drumcondra couldn't be accommodated without impacting on other services.

A service could be provided from Belfast to Cork supplementing the existing timetable (there are huge holes in the service on the Belfast route) and generating modest additional and potentially high revenue business. Prospects of anything happening in the near future are virtually nil as the various bodies concerned (particularly in the Republic) have zero interest in developing intercity traffic on the Belfast line as it is seen as a potential obstacle to DART expansion.

If my memory serves me correctly...

It was a Belfast to Cork flight with just a handful of passengers on board that had an unfortunate incident a couple of years back at Cork airport.

Aer Arran operated the service before Ryanair and people probably flew who were on business in the days when faced with the alternative of a 4+ hour journey each way by road.