NRA boss defends budget blowout of almost €10 billion

THE National Roads Authority (NRA) chief executive Michael Tobin yesterday strongly defended the almost €10 billion budget overspend over the past five years.

Mr Tobin predicted new NRA contracts would reduce the overruns in major road projects and they were expected to come in under budget this year.

The NRA chief executive was appearing before the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee where he was subjected to tough questioning by politicians.

Green Party TD Dan Boyle said he could not understand how the NRA was allowed to get away with such huge budget overruns when no other State organisation seemed to have the same leeway. “CIE has to account for every bit of extra money it gets, but the NRA seems to be the only body that has the right to write its own cheques,” Deputy Boyle said.

The scale of the cost overruns were revealed in the Comptroller and Auditor General's report earlier this year. The C&AG made similar findings about the lack of financial controls in 1999.

“The NRA does not seem to have learnt any lessons from the past,” Deputy Boyle said.

But NRA chief executive Michael Tobin said one of the main reasons for the gap between the amount allocated to the roads under the 1999 National Development Plan (NDP) and the amount spent was the 40% inflation over five years. “And the 5.6 billion NDP programme was just an estimated cost of the project not an actual budget allocation,” Mr Tobin said. The type of contracts the NRA had been obliged to use also left them liable for unexpected risks in road projects which could also lead to budget overruns, he said.

Department of Transport secretary general Julie O'Neill rejected the claim that the NRA was given and special treatment as a public body. She said the NRA got no supplementary budget in the past two years.