Company pledges to continue to improve

Iarnod Eireann last night declared that the company's safety record constantly guaranteed Irish passengers the "safest possible means of travel" and it promised to "continue to improve and develop our systems to ensure that this continues to be the case".

In a statement issued after the publication of the latest report on rail safety, the company said it was in the first year of a £430 million investment in rail safety.

It said that the report, by the British consultants International Risk Management Services (IRMS), had not found the rail network "to be unsafe in any respect or area".

Iarnrod Eireann highlighted the comment in the IRMS report which acknowledged that significant progress had been made on safety issues in the past year.

However, the company did acknowledge that "a number of areas have been identified in the report as requiring further attention". It said these related to old infrastructure which was "effectively managed" at all times.

Iarnrod Eireann added that it would be meeting IRMS today to discuss the details of the report, and would continue to work with the consultants.

The company noted that there have been no accident passenger fatalities since 1983.

Mr Tony Tobin of SIPTU, one of the Iarnrod Eireann unions, said he was annoyed and disappointed at what he said was "the suggestion in the report that industrial relations difficulties were an impediment to rail safety".

Mr Tobin said he would be seeking information on "how the consultants came to that conclusion or who fed it to them".

He said he had been a train driver himself and had "never, ever said or done anything that could be considered an impediment to rail safety".

Mr Tobin said he would be critical of both management and IRMS in that he had not been consulted for more than a year by IRMS and the safety management teams at the company.

"I attended a meeting in Liberty Hall on January 6th, 1999, when Mary O'Rourke was present, and she said we would be involved all the way in the safety programme, that we would be regularly consulted, but we weren't," he claimed.

Mr Liam Tobin of the National Bus and Rail Union, (NBRU) which also represents staff at Iarnrod Eireann, said that as the report was only published yesterday he would like some time to study it before commenting.