The Minister for Public Enterprise has offered to resign if she is found not to be telling the truth about what she knew about a consultants' report into rail safety.
On RTE's Questions and Answers programme last night Ms O'Rourke vehemently denied she had advance knowledge that the term "intolerable" was used to describe the safety risk in a working document which formed part of the basis for the final report.
Pressed by Fine Gael's Mr Jim Mitchell if she would resign if found not to be telling the truth, she said: "Yes, I will resign."
However, Mr Mitchell, the chairman of the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee, said his suspicions were aroused that the Minister was "up to her oxters" in sanitising the final report from the British consultants, International Risk Management Services.
Earlier Fine Gael had produced additional data showing discrepancies between the five working papers that formed the basis of the final report produced by the British consultants last October.
Mr Mitchell queried the Minister as to whether or not she had seen the "final, unedited report" during a briefing from her officials on October 6th. Ms O'Rourke flatly denied she had seen the report before it was finalised.
A spokesman for her Department last night confirmed the Rail Safety Task Force, appointed by her, met yesterday. It would report to the Minister before the end of the month on areas that require priority spending, he said.
Ms O'Rourke is expected to bring their recommendations to Cabinet to seek approval for immediate funding.
However, Fine Gael Senator Fergus O'Dowd, who spent 10 weeks sifting through the documentation surrounding the IRMS report, said the tone and tenor of elements of the report were changed to make rail safety appear less critical than it was in reality. In some instances, actual phrases had been dropped.
The report, commissioned by Ms O'Rourke following the Knockcrockery derailment, was extremely critical of rail safety standards and proposed investment of more than £590 million over 15 years. Senator O'Dowd said changes came about after a meeting between officials of the Department of Public Enterprise and representatives of IRMS in Manchester in October. No minutes were kept of this meeting.
The Minister, he claimed, was told in September by officials that IRMS would not support the findings of an earlier report - by A.D. Little - for Iarnrod Eireann which said "engineers and staff are currently succeeding in keeping lines running safely" and "for signalling . . . there are no areas which are currently unsafe".
According to Fine Gael's spokesman on Public Enterprise, Mr Ivan Yates, the most glaring change involved three rail lines: Athlone to Claremorris; Mallow to Tralee and Limerick Junction to Waterford, which were the subject of risk assessment.
The original report, which helped form the genesis of the final work, predicted these subsections were posing risks to passengers "that are above the intolerable limit".
The final report did not use the word "intolerable".
A spokesman for the Department said the risk criteria being applied by IRMS were raised by officials during the Manchester meeting. As a result of the queries, IRMS sought additional data from Iarnrod Eireann. It subsequently came up with a league table of 17 sub-sections of rail line which posed risks to passengers.
Another section of the early report, dealing with the Clare morris to Athlone line, stated "the real problem is that no other serious railway in the world would be running such a lightweight and obsolete rail section in main lines . . ." This does not appear in the final report either.