Mr. Tony O'Brien:

Looking back at it through the lens Deputy Nolan describes, it is clear that the arrangements were both Byzantine and labyrinthine and created a significant risk of control failure. In terms of the funding side, it was not entirely unusual for funding to be routed on a conduit basis for various projects - that is via one health board to a specific shared office, in this case the office for health management. The overall governance arrangements and the lack of clarity on them created a context in which there was insufficient scrutiny of how the funds were then used and managed. On the other side of the equation - and I do not want to impute motives because I have no evidence upon which to do so - the establishment of an account and the management of it by the most senior health sector official of a trade union bearing the name of that union and operated in the same branch as that union operated its corporate accounts clearly and could only give the impression that it was an official union account. Why, therefore, it was not a union account is open to question. In other words, what was the objective of giving the appearance of it being a union account when it was not?

The overall view, however, is that all of the official objectives of this approach as set out in the original Labour Court recommendation could have been achieved much more satisfactorily in a much more streamlined way with effective governance and without the risk of misuse of public funds. The bottom line is that the learnings from this were implemented as soon as they became available. No such arrangements will ever exist again.