Irish Madness....or how to not make travelling by train simple

Ok, I now this post is pretty random, but I just had one of those OMG and WTF moments. This is just proving once more that a lot of big Irish companies are totally stupid and backwards. Soooo, I was thinking about travelling to the big smoke (aka Dublin) by train in the near future.  If I bought a single ticket at my usual station on the day I would be handing out nearly 30 Euros. Now, funny thing is...if I book a ticket online, I can only book from certain stations...yes, you heard right...only the ones that do have a machine that can print your online ticket by you bringing a printout of your booking confirmation. That ticket would be nearly 10 Euros cheaper. Because our local train station has no ticket machine it's not listed to book online. Ok, so logic makes me think why not book a ticket for a station before mine that has the machine, get on the train at my usual station and show them the booking confirmation to prove I have paid for this
journey...but NO, that's not the way it works in Irish Rail. When I rang them I was told that the printed confirmation could not be accepted because anybody could bring a printout...yes, and how please would they get my name and booking reference etc??? And if they had the printout, surely they could just go to the station that can print tickets and get a ticket printed there...so that response just totally defied my sense of logic. When explaining that surely it wasn't right to only allow passengers at the bigger stations to travel cheaper because they have the online option and can print at the station, I was put on hold for ages....obviously they had no answer for that one. And the response I got after a few minutes of waiting nearly made me laugh out loud. I was told, yes, I could book online for a station that the train passes before it gets to mine (so I would have paid for the full journey), advise the conductor of my online booking and that I have no ticket but the booking confirmation, which I can show to him/her (which up to here makes perfect sense...but unfortunately it doesn't end here as any person in sound mind would assume). I was then told that I would need to hop off the train at the next station that does print tickets and get my ticket printed  there, while the conductor will hold the train for me so it doesn't just leave with me still at the station, just so that I do have a printed ticket in my pocket (as the conductor already knows I have paid for the journey as he will have seen my booking confirmation when I got on the train)....I was just thinking "Are you f***ing serious???" So not only do they not accept a printed confirmation of you having paid for the journey you are making, they also waste their money on unnecessarily printing out tickets and they also happily accept a delay of the train because of people hopping off at stations to get tickets printed...If that's not madness... Maybe they believe that by making it complicated people will just pay the extra 10 Euros on the day at their station to save themselves all the hassle. I definitely don't think that's right. Either ensure that there are ticket machines at all stations or allow people to just use their booking confirmations. Is it that difficult??? Surely that's putting people living in small rural places into a worse position (not sure would I already call it discrimination) than ones that live in bigger towns with larger stations that have ticket machines...Fact is that online there is not even an option to book a ticket from my local station...What a farce...all I can say to that is WTF?!?! Cop on Ireland!!! ...