About €225 million in exchequer funding spent on preparations for the original Metro North and Metro West projects as well as the Dart underground interconnector tunnel has now been written off.
The report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) said that €166 million had been spent on the Metro North project until 2011 when it was postponed by the then government.
“Only around €6 million of that expenditure, for properties acquired as part of the project, continues to have potential value for the current version of the Dublin underground railway, known now as) MetroLink,” the report said.
“The remaining €160 million was written off as ‘sunk costs’. Expenditure of €18.7 million on Metro West, together with expenditure of €46 million (of the €48.6 million incurred) on the related original Dart Interconnector project have also been written off. The total write off on the three related projects is around €225 million of exchequer funding.”
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The CAG report said that the current MetroLink plan demonstrated “compliance with the Government’s official public spending code for capital projects”.
However, it said that the plan to reintroduce the freight rail line to the port of Foynes “identified a high level of noncompliance with the code”.
“The Foynes project currently has an estimated cost of around €152 million over two project phases, both of which must be delivered before the investment will yield any benefits,” the report said.
“A number of the key requirements of the public spending code were not complied with in respect of the project. Voted funds totalling €64 million were issued to Iarnród Éireann in December 2022 before any detailed appraisal of the project being undertaken. At the time, Government approval to proceed was required under the code for a project costing over €100 million, but this was not sought.
“A final business case for the Foynes project was prepared in November 2023 by the sponsoring agency, Iarnród Éireann. In July 2024, the NTA [National Transport Authority] gave its formal approval for the commencement of the second and final phase of the project, at a cost of €47 million.
“The €105 million phase one works were already well advanced at this stage, and there was a significant risk that those works would have been of little or no value if phase two of the project had not been approved.”
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