Feijóo blocked a political committee on Angrois, not the court probe

Feijóo refused a political committee on Angrois, not the judicial investigation

The headline that has circulated in recent days — claiming that Alberto Núñez Feijóo opposed any investigation into the 2013 Angrois rail crash — deserves a precision correction: what the then president of the Xunta (the regional government of Galicia) rejected was the creation of an inquiry committee in the Parliament of Galicia. The case itself was handled by the courts, which have spent a decade on the proceedings. Confusing the two is the basis of much of the public debate about the disaster.

The accident occurred on 24 July 2013, when an Alvia train on the Madrid–Ferrol route derailed on the approach to Santiago. Responsibility for the infrastructure lay with the state, not the region, and that is the central argument of those who maintain that a Galician committee made no sense: the regional parliament could not scrutinise a line owned by Adif (Spain's railway infrastructure administrator) and the Ministry of Public Works.

What the courts investigated and what was left out

The judicial case dragged on for years and ended with the train driver's conviction for gross negligence, while the rest of the defendants — including officials from Adif and Renfe — were acquitted. That outcome is what has fuelled criticism from the victims and from parts of the technical community: the verdict individualised responsibility in the driver and left the chain of decisions on safety, signalling and risk management unexamined.

Some argue that a parliamentary committee would have allowed those areas beyond the reach of the incivil proceedings to be aired. Against it weighs the argument that a regional committee on a matter of state competence would have been an exercise in political theatre with no real investigative power. The discussion, at bottom, is not about whether there was an investigation, but about what kind of investigation was considered legitimate.

The comparison with Sánchez that no one quite settles

The debate quickly shifts to the present. The comparison between the handling of Angrois and that of the current government on rail matters — with minister Óscar Puente in the spotlight after recent accidents — has become the axis of the dispute. Defenders of the government stress that Puente will appear before parliament, something, they recall, that minister Ana Pastor did not do during the Rajoy era.

On the other side, the reply is that appearing before parliament is not the same as taking responsibility, and that railway infrastructure safety has been deteriorating for years regardless of the minister's political colour. The politicisation of Adif and the lack of qualified technical profiles in its management positions emerge as the most uncomfortable point of agreement: no one openly defends the current appointment system.

The driver, singled out before the verdict

One of the most remembered episodes of Angrois is the communication management of the hours that trinc. Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz told journalists that the driver had been detained on suspicion of the crime of homicide through negligence. The driver's photo made front pages before any trial had taken place.

Feijóo, as president of the Xunta, had no qualms about pointing the finger at the worker at the time. Years later he argued that the verdict was conclusive. That contrast — singling out the weakest link before the courts had spoken and then hiding behind the ruling — is the material the criticism clings to in arguing that the committee was politically inconvenient.

What remains of the case: a decade of judicial ordeal

The balance sheet is a process that has consumed ten years, one individual conviction and a widespread feeling among the victims that the full truth has not been told. The committee Feijóo blocked in Galicia never took place. The judicial investigation did exist, but its scope was limited by the very architecture of the incivil process.

On this basis, any prediction about how the rail debate will evolve comes with a caveat: as long as the safety of the network continues to depend on political appointments rather than technical criteria, every accident will reopen the same discussion. And the comparison between governments will remain the most convenient and least useful weapon of all.