The Department of Education has gone over budget by €4 billion since 2022, the Oireachtas Committee of Public Accounts has heard. Secretary general of the Department of Public Expenditure David Moloney told the committee the department had “failed to manage within budget in a significant way since 2022”. Because of this, “the Government had decided that €646 million” extra would have to be provided to the Department of Education, some €200 million of which was within the department’s “expenditure ceiling”, leaving €446 million that had to be “funded in the longer term by a levy on other departments”, he told Fine Gael TD Joe Neville. Neville asked Moloney if he had an oversight role in a “€50 million write-off by Irish Rail” regarding a network management software project. Neville said the public would hold Irish Rail responsible, but Irish Rail said the project was sanctioned by the National Transport Authority (NTA). “It is like everybody is kind of responsible, [but] nobody is really responsible,” he said. Moloney was before the oversight committee to address various State expenditure issues. Neville also referred to “€7 million wasted on electric buses”, which he said were being stored at a cost of €20,000 per week. Legal obligations undertaken by the Office of Public Works (OPW) in relation to the provision of a Children’s Science Museum were also raised at Thursday’s hearing, a project which dates back more than a decade. Under a 2003 agreement, the OPW committed to delivering a museum. However, it fell apart after the 2008 economic crash. The Pac has been examining the troubled project, which is expected to cost more than €70 million. It emerged in April that the OPW – which is under a legal obligation to deliver a building for the science centre – paid legal costs of €1.1 million following two arbitration cases related to the project. Moloney said while the OPW had a legal obligation to build or lease a building, no Government department would take on responsibility and oversight for the project. Asked if there would be consequences for anyone over the loss of such large sums of money, Moloney said the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform “have a monitoring role ... but we do not have an enforcement role, just to be clear.”Committee chairman John Brady (SF) noted the total legal cost so far in relation to the proposed children’s science museum was more than €1 million and an arbitration process had confirmed the State’s liability for completing the project. “Money is still being spent on a project that is going nowhere,” he said. “The real frustration is that people are sick and tired of the waste of taxpayers’ money,” he added. Brady said the solution was political, calling on the Government to take responsibility. Grace Boland TD (FG) said the problem seemed to be that “no one seems to care that €50 million has been wasted on an Irish Rail project. No one seems to care about the electric buses.”Addressing Moloney, she said: “But you are responsible for reform secretary general. And surely this is an area that badly needs reform. “You know politicians are accountable on a very regular basis, are accountable in the Dáil, Ministers are accountable in the Dáil, accountable in the media, accountable at the ballot box. But not civil servants and public servants.”She said there were “departments and certain agencies that repeatedly have these issues and there is absolutely no accountability”. In the private sector where she had worked, she continued: “You would not have a project where there are serious issues in 2022 and you pump [in] millions more.”