It's to stop ticket fraud
The reason I have been told that child tickets are not sold in TVMs is simply because there are too many 16-19 year olds who will try it on and generally get away with it. The turnstiles making noises and different colour lights is all well and good at stations like Pearse or Connolly where there is someone there to spot it, but the majority of the one-man stations down the way have no way of stopping people. Therefore to get a child ticket you need human interaction.
Same logic applies to student/faircard/weekender tickets although you can order those online now and pick them up at a collection machine.
Veolia allows it, although they don't have human ticket sellers (for single/return tickets anyway) so I suppose it's more that they have to than that they are a more trusting bunch than IÉ.
I haven't yet tried travelling without a ticket when a TVM was the only option and I wanted to buy a ticket that wasn't available on the TVM. (In fact, since I generally use weekly tickets, I've not yet needed to travel without a ticket at all.) I wonder what would happen. The National Rail conditions of carriage in the UK say that if the type of ticket you want isn't available, you should buy any lower-priced ticket valid to your destination and you can trade it in against the ticket you actually want there or on the train. I suppose that would make too much sense for IÉ to come up with something like that...
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