Three former CIE personnel involved in the awarding of a rail-signalling contract told an Oireachtas inquiry into a £36 million overrun in the contract they rejected the consultants' report which prompted the inquiry.
The three, who later took up jobs in one of the companies awarded the contract, questioned whether the consultants, from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), were qualified to write the report. They also told the inquiry at Thursday's hearing that PwC had not contacted them while compiling the report and claimed it contained serious errors as a result.
The three are Mr Brian Powell, managing director of Modern Networks Ltd (MNL) and former head of procurement at CIE; Mr Bernard Kernan, a director of MNL and former engineer at CIE; and Ms Mary Hand, an executive at MNL and former CIE solicitor.
Mr Powell described the PwC report as "remarkable" and claimed the consultants, Mr William O'Riordan and Mr Michael O'Neill, were "rank amateurs" because of their own admission that they had no expertise in engineering or EU procurement law.
He had no involvement in rating any of the companies which tendered for the project, known as mini-CTC, he said. He said he did not know that a paper prepared for the board of CIE advising them of the companies shortlisted for the contract had been changed to omit serious reservations expressed by CIE engineers about Sasib, the company which subsequently shared the contract with MNL after quoting a price of £15.7 million. But he denied the altered paper misled the board. He said he believed the engineers' reservations had been largely addressed in the interim.
Mr Powell also denied the decision to exclude a performance bond from the Sasib/MNL contract had left 0Iarnrod Eireann at a disadvantage. He said other clauses were inserted which better protected the rail company.
He questioned the decision to terminate the Sasib/MNL contract before the signalling project was finished, saying the cost overruns were due partly to changes in safety procedures which came into effect while work was under way.
Mr Kernan also denied that inadequate specifications in the Sasib/MNL contract had contributed to the cost overruns. He said the specifications changed over the course of the contract because of new safety regulations.
Meanwhile, the most senior solicitor in CIE told the inquiry the contract drawn up for the rail-signalling project in 1997 was "totally inappropriate". Mr Michael Carroll said the project was "hugely sophisticated" and needed something other than the standard "design and build" style of contract used.