A writedown of €50 million on the development of a new IT system to control the movement of trains across the country is a “national scandal”, the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has heard.Members of the committee on Thursday expressed scathing criticism over the handling of the traffic management system (TMS), which is being delivered by Irish Rail and funded by the National Transport Authority (NTA).The Irish Times revealed on Thursday that accounts for the State-owned rail company convey a lack of confidence that the TMS system in its current form can be deployed on the train network.The accounts say the company is writing down by €50 million the value of its investment in the project.The TMS software controls signalling systems that oversee the safe movement of trains across the network. The Irish Times understands that the decision to write down the €50 million arose from a judgment made in Irish Rail that spending to date on software and the bulk of other support services had no usable value.The contractor on the project, the Indra Group, has been approached for comment.The TMS forms part of a larger National Train Control Centre. At the PAC on Thursday morning, committee chairman John Brady described the issue as “a national scandal”. [ New Irish Rail IT system is ‘a slowly developing shambles’, says Dáil committee chairmanOpens in new window ]“Given the cost-of-living crisis, anyone sitting at home looking at this has every right to be absolutely furious.”He said the committee needs to explore who knew what and when, as well as why a stop was not called earlier.Fine Gael TD Grace Boland said the issue calls into question oversight, procurement, contractor management and the contract itself.James Geoghegan of Fine Gael said €50 million was an astonishing amount of money to be written off. He said the committee needed to identify where accountability lay in relation to the project.Geoghegan said the NTA had told the committee at a meeting earlier this year that “the level of granularity of the definition of the requirements was not developed enough at the start”.“That is looking like the greatest understatement of the millennium,” he said.In a statement on Thursday, the NTA said it understands Irish Rail has “included an impairment” in its 2025 financial accounts to reflect that the TMS “has not been completed and is not yet operational”. Decisions about Irish Rail’s annual accounts are “a matter for the directors of Irish Rail”.It said Indra is continuing to work on the delivery of the TMS software for Irish Rail. In parallel, the NTA and Irish Rail are assessing options for the further development of the overall train control system and expect to make a decision on that matter in the coming weeks, it said.The Department of Transport said the TMS was scheduled for delivery by the end of 2024 but suffered from delays. A new plan for delivery of eight phases was agreed by Irish Rail in 2025, it said.“The first commissioning phase, the Rosslare line, is currently scheduled to go live in early 2027,” it said, adding that the contractor has been meeting milestones for this new delivery plan and delivered software for phase one in April. “Testing is now under way and a formal decision is expected to be made in mid-July on software acceptance and future phases,” the department said.