Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We will discuss it in private session.

The other issue concerns business cases for infrastructure. I saw on the eTenders website at the weekend that Irish Rail called for a consultancy to develop a commercial business case to secure support for the expansion of the DART. I am not getting into policy areas. The issue was announced about three times. On the record of the Dáil in 2015, there is a reference by the Minister to the then updated business case for July 2015, and now we are calling for another business case. The public is quite rightly expecting that it concerns the expansion to Kildare, Drogheda and so on given the commuter crisis and rail-capacity crisis.

What are the rules? How many business cases do we need? It seems that the dogs on the street could pull the business case together. We were talking about numbers of staff earlier. If we are putting this out to tender, I presume it costs money. I do not know whether it will be hundreds of thousands, millions or tens of thousands of euro, for what seems to be the third business case for the expansion. With all the staff we have, and with the expense involved, are we really saying the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, Irish Rail, the National Transport Authority, NTA, and Transport Infrastructure Ireland are so lacking in appropriate expertise that they cannot produce the business case for a DART extension? I believe there is an administrative merry-go-round. Everybody needs plausible deniability and no one is prepared to take a decision. I can understand that regarding more spurious issues. With the public services card, there was no business case. We all had an issue with that. When it comes to public transportation, however, we do not need much convincing that certain things are needed. So many years on, we have just gone to tender for what appears to be the third business case. Two issues arise in this regard. Why do we need external consultants to produce a business case? Why do we need a business case at all? While I know I can be accused of being facetious from time to time, I fully understand that any Minister would want to secure value for money. As we heard at a meeting of this committee, there were not too many business cases for reopening Stepaside Garda station, yet, while the DART extension is a much greater and more pressing issue, we are looking for the third business case, effectively six years after it was announced by the then CEO of Irish Rail, Mr. David Franks, as something Irish Rail intended to produce. There is not a commuter in Ireland who could not write the business case pretty quickly.