CIE's chief executive Mr Michael McDonnell has refused to comment on whether he agreed with the views on CIE's alleged lack of autonomy expressed in the resignation letter of the group's former chairman, Mr Brian Joyce.

Mr Joyce resigned on Monday, stating that the Government's intervention in CIE's internal industrial relations was a recipe for "continuous conflict" and stressing the necessity of "handing back" the management of CIE's companies to their management teams.

Asked by Fine Gael's public enterprise spokesman, Mr Ivan Yates, whether he agreed with these views, Mr McDonnell declined to comment. Speaking at a hearing of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Public Enterprise and Transport, Mr McDonnell also declined to clarify whether he had received a formal letter of appointment to the board of CIE group from the Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke. E worker-director, Mr Bill McCamley, said in statement that he believed the reasons stated in Mr Joyce's letter of resignation were "substantially the ones for his departure". At the committee hearing, Mr McDonnell said CIE's poor industrial relations were caused by "low basic pay" due to gross underfunding for public transport. "Staff reacted to this by introducing restrictive practices to boost overtime earnings to obtain what they regarded as a decent living - it's not an excessively good living by standards in other sectors."

Young staff and new recruits were not prepared to subscribe to the "overtime culture" in the group. "Like any good employer, our aspirations are to pay our staff decent wages in line with average industrial earnings but, in return, we want and need increased productivity by the ending of restrictive practices."

In a wide-ranging presentation on public transport, Mr McDonnell referred to this week's audit on the implementation of the rail safety programme by stating that the group had exceeded its targets on the "most crucial" element programme last year - track renewal. The auditors said "very few" unreasonable risks on the network had been fully addressed. This was despite expenditure of some £100 million on the programme last year.

Labour's public enterprise spokesman, Mr Emmet Stagg, told the meeting that work by private contractors on a fibre optic cable on the railway between Enfield, Co Meath, and Clonsilla, Co Dublin, had seriously damaged Iarnrod Eireann's signalling system.

"As a result of their [the contractors] work on the line, there are 30 points of failure. The signalling is defunct on the line and telephones are being used because the contractors on your line broke it in 30 separate places," said Mr Stagg.

Asked about this, Iarnrod Eireann's managing director Mr Joe Meagher said he was not been advised of "any serious incident" in this case.

The full text of the Review of Rail Safety in Ireland is available on the Irish Times web site at: www.ireland.com/newspaper/ special/