A battery of barristers was present yesterday at the opening of an Oireachtas inquiry into a £36 million cost overrun on a CIE rail-signalling project. Yet, while certain witnesses among the 120 to be called had been thought likely to mount legal challenges, none did.
So the lawyers looked on as a sub-committee of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Public Enterprise and Transport embarked on hearings into why, as CIE's executive chairman, Dr John Lynch, put it, the cost of the signalling project escalated "out of all control".
The system is still not operational. Its projected cost has risen to £50 million from £14 million; and a December 1999 deadline for 85 per cent European Cohesion Fund support has been missed.
Chaired by Mr Sean Doherty TD, the sub-committee is keen to uncover the links between CIE's rail company, Iarnrod Eireann, and Esat Telecom, which completed a telecoms system on the railway as the signalling project ran into difficulty.
Then controlled by Mr Denis O'Brien, Esat had secured the State's second mobile phone licence in circumstances now being investigated by the Moriarty tribunal. A report last year by CIE's auditors, Price waterhouseCoopers (PWC), said that construction of the Esat system hindered progress on Iarnrod's own project, known as mini-CTC.
As the inquiry proceeds, Esat's founder, Mr Denis O'Brien, and a former acting chief executive, Mr Leslie Buckley, are likely to be called to outline their side of a deal which was not subjected to CIE's own public procurement policy.
Yet the hearing yesterday had another focus, the signalling programme itself, and there were two strands to the subcommittee's questioning.
First, Mr Doherty and his five colleagues asked how the cost overrun had come to light within CIE and the Department of Public Enterprise, which monitors the State transport group. Second, they asked Iarnrod's most senior engineers about the project's genesis and the involvement of two sub-contractors, a Dublin firm, Modern Networks Ltd, and an Italian group, Sasib.
The scale of the difficulty was confirmed in the PWC report, a draft of which was received by CIE in March last year. But Dr Lynch said yesterday that the report was not discussed by the group's board until six months later. He was appointed to CIE the day after the PWC report was received by the company, but he did not see it until July.
He said he could not remember whether he had advised the Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, of the cost overrun. Ms O'Rourke told the committee last year that she heard of it "through outside sources".
There was some confusion over the work of PWC, which was told by CIE not to complete a "final report". CIE's chief financial officer, Mr Jim Cullen, said he had a consensus with the group's chief executive, the late Mr Michael McDonnell, and PWC that only a "summary report" was required. Mr Pat Rabbitte TD, a member of the sub-committee, alleged that the summary was a "partial report" which "did not deal at all with the Esat connection".
There was confusion also as to why Ms O'Rourke's Department learned of the cost overrun only in late 1999, two years into the contracts. This was despite quarterly reports by CIE to a monitoring committee led by the Department of Finance. Mr John Loughrey, who was secretary-general at the Department up to January 2000, was clear as to where responsibility lay. As costs rose, he said, there was "an element of wishful thinking" in CIE that somehow the wheels were not coming off the car.
Iarnrod Eireann's projects director (infrastructure), Mr Joe Leahy, who devised mini-CTC, said he was confident that the company could have completed the project itself for £14 million. The failure of CIE's head of programmes and projects, Dr Ray Byrne, to release funds had led to delays and to the hiring of sub-contractors.