As far as I know in Ireland, season tickets are directly proportional to distance and don't make the allowances to quality of service that are included in ticket office fares.
The real elephant in the room in Ireland is the massive implicit discount handed to top-rate tax payers which is very regressive. While I am personally a huge beneficiary of this it is fundamentally unfair that somebody on the top-rate tax pays less for their train pass that somebody on the minimum wage or even a student.
It would be far better for the government to just increase the subvention to support heavier monthly pass discounting and kill Taxsaver or else convert it into a Tax Credit.
Without tax-saver the discount for a monthly pass (over return tickets for each working day) on the Sligo line past Maynooth is only around 25% which is very low. I got a 60% discount in Germany for a weekly ticket between two cities about 40km apart and the weekly also included all local public transport in both cities. No faffing about with point-to-point, bus, bus+rail, bus+rail+Luas, etc - it included everything.
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