I remain unconvinced that privatisation is plausible for the railways - nobody is ever going to make a direct profit from railway operation, least of all in Ireland. It has a tendency to turn into a gravy train with little regard for the user. Bizarre levels of complication start to occur with regard to what is an individual company's responsibility.
We had a crash here some years ago, when a failed wagon derailed a mail train on the other track, the loco of which went up the embankment into the end wall of a chap's house. Neither the owners of the loco nor the people they had leased it to nor the people operating it for them nor Royal Mail, whose train it was pulling, accepted responsibility, as they had been derailed by the wagon from the other train. The owners of the wagon had leased it to somebody else who had put its maintenance out to tender elsewhere - ad infinitum.. After about six years of argument, somebody made an 'ex-gratia' payment to reimburse the repair of the house.
And one of the mail sorters died.