Failed €50m Irish Rail IT project to face €226,000 independent review

The committee heard on Thursday that the failed project had incurred almost €10m in costs since 2025 alone. File picture

The head of Irish Rail has spoken of the organisation's "deep regret" over an aborted €50m IT project, while a review into the debacle is set to cost an additional €226,000.

Mary Considine, chief executive of the company, told the Public Accounts Committee on Thursday that "every opportunity has been given to the contractor to deliver", referring to Indra, the Spanish corporation contracted to design a new traffic management system for Ireland's rail network. 

The company also holds the contract for the National Transport Authority's (NTA) next-generation ticketing system, which remains under development.

The project was cancelled earlier this year after it became clear to both Irish Rail and the NTA that there was little prospect of the system being delivered, despite being more than two years overdue and after €50m had been spent.

The committee heard on Thursday that the failed project had incurred almost €10m in costs since 2025 alone, as Irish Rail significantly increased its spending in an effort to salvage the work already completed.

The NTA also told the committee that a separate independent review, to be carried out by consultants EY at a cost of €226,000, has been commissioned and is due to be completed in September.

While the review has been described as independent, NTA chief executive Anne Shaw conceded that it is being funded by the authority, prompting Social Democrats TD Aidan Farrelly to ask: "How is it independent if you're paying for it?" He described the expense as "an absolutely offensive waste of a quarter of a million euros".

Asked why Irish Rail had not been permitted to terminate the project in 2025, despite long-standing concerns about its viability, Ms Shaw replied that the company's board "did not make that request".

When asked who ultimately bears responsibility for the failed project, Ms Considine said the 11-member executive team at Irish Rail "would take responsibility".

While acknowledging that the six-person project team within Irish Rail has faced no consequences for the project's failure, Ms Considine insisted that "our team have through their best endeavours done everything to support this project".

“They have really lent in. We have a contractor who has an underdeveloped product who hasn’t delivered for us,” she said.

Ms Considine, who was not in her current role when the contract was awarded to Indra in 2019, defended that decision, noting that the Spanish corporation "is a multi-billion-dollar company that provides systems all over the world".

“They pointed to their 15-year history of 21 successful deployments all over the rail network globally,” she said.

"There was no reason to believe that they were not in development of their generic product as they had led us to believe," she added, referring to an established system that, she told the committee, had been promised for delivery to Irish Rail in 2021. However, it later emerged that the system had never been successfully deployed in any country.

She added that no decisions regarding the project were made without the NTA's approval.

Ms Considine also said that, although no replacement traffic management system will be delivered in the near future and the current system is obsolete, Irish Rail would "stop running services rather than compromise safety", describing the situation as "really unfortunate".