Irish Rail wanted a contract terminated a year ago with the company developing software for a long-delayed IT system to manage the movement of its fleet across the network, the State-owned train operator has told an Oireachtas committee.
In a briefing document for the Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Irish Rail said it had met the National Transport Authority (NTA) – which was providing funding for the new system – about a continued lack of confidence within its project management and technical teams in the ability of the Spanish IT company Indra to deliver the project.
Irish Rail chief executive Mary Considine is expected to tell the committee on Wednesday that six years after a contract was signed and two years after the original date for its commissioning, Indra “still does not have a developed product that is fit for deployment on the network”.
She will say Indra “remains in a product development cycle”.
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Considine is expected to maintain that there is no programme in place for commissioning any of the eight planned phases of the IT project known as the traffic management system (TMS), on which about €30 million has already been spent.
The separate briefing document prepared by Irish Rail for the committee reveals that it has written down payments of €28.2 million made to Indra.
In addition, it has written off more than €17 million spent on project management costs to support Indra in its work.
This forms part of the overall €50 million impairment set out by the board of Irish Rail in accounts for last year.
Considine is also expected to say technology in the existing central traffic control facility at Connolly Station, which was due to be replaced by the TMS in 2024, “is life-expired, is not supported and will not allow for further expansion or support the capital investment programme”.
In April Indra provided Irish Rail with software for the first phase of the TMS project – covering the line from Dublin to Rosslare. However, the train operator said problems were experienced.
“In April 2026, Indra formally released their redeveloped commissioning phase one (CP1) software product to Irish Rail (Iarnród Éireann) for testing. Many of the systemic issues from mid-2025 remain and it is clear that a further major and unplanned software release is required, and that further major delays are inevitable,” it said.
The Irish Rail briefing document says “there is no confidence that the next software release (by Indra) will resolve issues” that have emerged in testing of software delivered by the contractor in April.
The TMS forms part of a broader project to develop a new National Train Control Centre, which includes a new building at Heuston Station.
The briefing document sets out the history of the project and issues that had arisen. For example, it states that following an assessment of software delivered by Indra in early 2025 – known as principles testing – Irish Rail met the NTA to discuss its concerns in mid-2025.
“This centred around the continued lack of confidence within Irish Rail’s (Iarnród Éireann) project management and technical teams in Indra’s ability to deliver the project and to discuss options for a way forward.
“In particular, Iarnród Éireann were concerned with Indra’s ability to deliver the additional planned functionality across the more complex areas of the network in the later commissioning phases. Iarnród Éireann did not consider that the project reset which had been agreed in late 2024 had resolved the underlying problems. Iarnród Éireann recommended that termination of the Indra contract be considered and that a plan B be developed.”
The briefing document says external consultants WSP advised that Indra had the capability to potentially deliver the project if recommendations it had set out in an audit were implemented.
