A senior CIE executive caused all the monthly meetings of the company's project monitoring group to be cancelled during the period that the cost of a new rail signalling system spiralled from £15.7 million to over £40 million, it was claimed yesterday.
The same executive, Dr Ray Byrne, also ended a long-standing system of supplying quarterly project progress reports to the board of the company.
He left the full-time employment of CIE in September 1999, by which time the full extent of the overrun in the signalling system was becoming clear.
However, he stayed on as part-time consultant until the following July, during which time he also became a consultant to Esat Telecom.
Work done for Esat by contractors for CIE's rail subsidiary, Iarnrod Eireann, has been blamed for some of the delays that caused the signalling system to go over budget.
Dr Byrne spent several hours answering questions from the Oireachtas subcommittee on Public Enterprise and Transport, which is inquiring into the overrun on the unfinished system, now thought to cost £50 million.
The former head of programmes and projects at CIE told the inquiry he thought Iarnrod Eireann had a fixed-price contract for the signalling system, known as mini-CTC, but now realised this was not so.
He could not explain why he sent the project to the board of CIE for approval first instead of the Iarnrod Eireann board, a procedure described by the current CIE chief executive as the "reverse of the normal procedure" and by the strategic planning manager as "unusual", but he later agreed the rail board should have seen it first.
Dr Byrne rejected the suggestion that his decision to replace quarterly project progress reports to the CIE board with an internal project monitoring group chaired by himself had deprived the board of important information about the project.
He said if information that mini-CTC was in trouble had been relayed to him by those directly involved in the project, he would have informed the board.
As it was, he had "no indication that early warning bells were being rung".
Dr Byrne disagreed with the claim of another executive that no meetings of the internal monitoring group took place in 1999 up to the time he left CIE because he was unavailable to chair them. He was unsure how many meetings he caused to be cancelled but thought some were missed because other key personnel could not attend.
Dr Byrne said he took on consultancy work for Esat with the knowledge of the then CIE chief executive, who had no difficulty with it. He was not obliged to reveal what other work he was doing but informed the chief executive out of "courtesy".