Dr. Geraldine Smith:

An important issue is that any officials to whom I or others in the Department have spoken believed that Mr. Merrigan was acting as a SIPTU official. Funds were paid from the Office for Health Management, OHM, the securing knowledge intra lifelong learning, SKILL programme, the Health Service National Partnership Forum, HSNPF, and Local Authority National Partnership Advisory Group, LANPAG, to Mr. Merrigan in his capacity as a SIPTU official. When officials travelled and got a phone call to say there was a trip to Savannah and to turn up at the airport, they would have believed that it was being paid for by SIPTU from an account to which the money provided by the HSNPF, SKILL programme and other programmes had gone. People in SIPTU were surprised that this was an unofficial and unauthorised account. Nobody believed it was an unauthorised account. When people went on the trips they did not think it was the SIPTU members who were funding it. They would have known that SIPTU – I am not necessarily talking about Liberty Hall – as people understood it, was in control of an account into which State funds had gone for partnership, development and such matters, and that was part of the funding involved. That is the piece perhaps that is missing, that people did believe they were dealing with SIPTU as an organisation and that the money from the State was going into it and that it had control of the account.