Over €150m spent on MetroLink project to date, PAC told

More than €150 million has been spent on the MetroLink project, up to the end of 2023, an Oireachtas committee has heard.

The Public Accounts Committee heard that to date €158m has been spent although “no significant physical work” has taken place.

Hugh Creegan, deputy CEO of the National Transport Authority, said that the money had been mostly spent on “design, investigations, planning processes and so on”.

“The next stage is an intensive stage to prepare the tender documents and procurement,” he added.

He estimates that it will cost “between €100m and €200m to get all the contracts”.

Asked by committee chair Sinn Féin TD Brian Stanley if the cost could be in the region “of €300m before we get going”, Mr Creegan agreed that it was “the kind of order we could be talking about”.

A recent estimate put the total cost of constructing the project, which will run from north of Swords to the Grand Canal in Dublin city centre, at €9.5 billion.

Call for action on phantom buses

Meanwhile, there have been calls for the NTA to “start flexing [its] muscle” over the issue of disappearing or phantom buses.

Fianna Fáil TD Cormac Devlin said he was not seeing the level of urgency needed to deal with what he called a “serious problem”.

He said that operator Go-Ahead was failing to deliver an acceptable service in his Dún Laoghaire constituency on the 63 route.

Anne Graham, NTA Chief Executive, expressed a reluctance to comment on a single operator but said that most complaints relate to Cork due to driver and mechanic shortages.

Go-Ahead was fined €3m for failing to meet performance standards in Dublin in 2022.

Of this, €2.4m was for the outer metropolitan area, and €0.6m for the commuter outer metropolitan area.

Dublin Bus was fined €8m in the same year.

For the first half of last year, Go-Ahead was fined €450,000 and Dublin Bus was fined €4.5m.

Bus Éireann was fined €1.5m.

NTA aiming to increase workforce

Philip L’Estrange. Director of Public Transport Regulation at the National Transport Authority, said that the organisation will be recruiting more than 100 employees this year.

The NTA has 286 permanent employees and will be hiring 104 additional employees, he said.

It also outsources a further 275 placements, of which 115 are for day-to-day activities, and 160 for projects.

Mr L’Estrange revealed that “it’s about two-and-a-half times” as expensive to pay an outsourced worker, which is partly due to pension arrangements.

He said that the outsourced staff cost €46.9m, compared to the 286 permanent employees costing €26m.

This figure will rise to €32.63m once the hiring is completed and the complement of permanent employees reaches the sanctioned figure of 390.

Once recruitment is complete the total staff count for employees and outsourced workers will be 665.