Consultants this morning said the £14 million price estimate for a rail-signalling system were unrealistic when the project was being tendered.
Mr Michael O’Neill, a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner, said when preparing a CIÉ-commissioned report into the cost over-run, he did not believe the £14 million price tag was reasonable - especially not for an external contractor.
Mr O’Neill was responding to questioning on the second day of the Oireachtas sub-committee on Public Enterprise and Transport inquiry into why a CIÉ rail-signalling project over-ran its estimated costs by some £36 million.
The inquiry heard the PricewaterhouseCoopers draft report given to CIÉ in March 2000 detailed the inadequacies in one of the tenders for the project by Italian firm Sasib.
The proposal to the board of CIÉ in 1996 recommended the contract to install the Mini CTC rail-signalling only if a number of technical issues were resolved.
Mr O’Neill said there serious reservations about Sasib raised in the first draft of that proposal. These reservations were then diluted, rephrased and expressed in a much more general way in the proposal which was ultimately submitted to the CIÉ board members, he said.
He said that although diluting the concerns was not misleading, it was not a frank submission of the position.