Agree with you Kevin about Abbey St. It's going to be a waste of time. It was little more than a useful place to park buses in the past and that's all it'll be in the future if you ask me. It's just too awkward to get in and out of and anyway, we should be getting away from city centre termination completely.
I still like Alek Smart's Drumcondra idea the best. Could have been very useful with the short term involving 46A's etc. being extended there to connect with Maynooth trains (they'd be empty picking up-perfect!) and then post T21 you go the other way and buses runing north-south along the N1 terminate there and transfer their passengers to metro and DART for onward travel to Intel, Maynooth Uni, City Centre destinations and so on. That's how it works at Muenchener Freiheit U-Bahn station in Munich for all buses coming north-south along Leopoldstrasse (no train service of any kind along that route so buses fill the gap), and it's fantastic. It actually encourages you to use the bloody bus!
Looking north here we can see the Munich equivalent of the N1 (leopoldstrasse which ultimately becomes the A9 motorway and runs on to Berlin) but under which there runs no u-bahn and along which runs no trams, so the buses come in this far, dropping passengers onto the U-Bahn and then all turn back north, totally avoiding the nasty traffic. Simple and ingenoius, and totally reproducable at Drumcondra....
