Why does Planning Suck: you've just given the game away: due to the small scale of overall operations, rail services in Ireland are close to being what economists call a "natural" monopoly - which is probably not the case in the UK. The analogy with eircom does not hold, where technology has undermined the previous telecommunications Natural Monopolies world wide. Slightly off topic, but the Eircom fiasco (for investors, that is) proves very little: there was a wroldwide share bust in 2001-03, in which the ICT sector (and Eircom along with it) suffered most.
Separation of track owners/companies and train operating companies is more or less required by the EU. Privatisation is another matter: the biggest argument for taking it out of the public sector is to break the rotten culture of the semi-states. But any privatised monopoly rail operator would have to be heavily and intelligently regulated: do our politicians and civil servants know how to do this? I doubt it.
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