Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)

All we have is a summary of the Irish Rail report. Although we only have a few pages of summaries and recommendations, it highlights an appalling failure by Irish Rail management and the Minister to look after the permanent way. Only for the bravery and courage of a driver, and the warning we got from the Malahide sea scouts, Deputy Dempsey would certainly not be here today as Minister for Transport. In addition, the management of Irish Rail would have changed dramatically. We came within a hair's breadth of a desperate tragedy.

The findings of the report are astonishing. It mentions a misunderstanding and says that as time progressed, the importance of maintaining the weir profile was no longer fully appreciated. In other words, the Irish Rail engineers did not realise that the Malahide viaduct comprised a series of piers built on top of an underlying structure. They had forgotten the basic structure of one of the key bridges in the rail network. Is that not an appalling indictment of maintenance in Irish Rail?

Since the disaster, the Railway Preservation Society of Ireland has informed me that original drawings of the Malahide viaduct and other drawings over the past 150 years are available in the society's office in Heuston Station. I have a photograph taken 30 or 40 years ago of a train crossing the viaduct. The relevant information was clearly there, yet the report's astonishing finding is that people in the company had forgotten basic maintenance procedures.

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