IE is not alone in timetable padding. I travelled in Switzerland and UK recently and there is ample evidence of padding in both places. It is quite noticeable that the dwell times in stations, even small ones, is longer than typical IE stops. I've seen dwell times of 5 to 10 mins or more at major stations. When you have long dwell times, it is easy to keep to schedule. Having said that IE do this too; for example recently the 1805 Heuston-Portlaoise was 5 mins early in Kildare and sat there for the 5 minutes.
Swiss railways work like clockwork with many, many interdependent connections and precise passing on single tracks, so time keeping is very important. Without padding this would probably be impossible to maintain.
I suppose the question of IE is that, even with the padding, why do so many trains run late?
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