Dr. Geraldine Smith:

That was one of the points I wanted to come to. Obviously, it is a significant issue and I appreciate where SIPTU are coming from on that. Again, chronology is so important throughout all of this because I have been investigating this for the past four and a half years. It is three years since we issued the original SIPTU report in June 2010, and throughout all of that there was no one bulk of records available. This has all been gathered through bits and pieces.

In relation to those two particular sums, the last day we were before the committee was December 2011. Before that we were engaged in a process of trying to pull together funding expenditure from all sources, including Committee of Public Accounts transcripts. That is where we came up with that document which the committee has. As part of that I went to the Department and asked them to check their records and give me a list of all payments it has authorised to be paid to SIPTU, whether through the Office for Health Management, OHM, the SKILL programme or whoever. That was around October 2011. The Department came back with a list. I went through that list comparing it against the various sources we had, including SIPTU's trustees report which they issued on 25 March 2011, and from that I identified that there were some sums, according to the Department, which were not in the SIPTU report or in any records I had been able to identify. We went to SIPTU and explained the situation, namely, that the Department had identified these amounts and asking them if they could confirm that they were not in the account of SIPTU or real SIPTU, as the Chairman refers to it, and if they could check with the financial advisers of the trustee to see if they were in the unofficial account. SIPTU came back and said it was not there. I went back to the Department again and told them that SIPTU had said it had no sight of it. I asked the Department to check its records again and give me any documentation it had on it. The Department came back with a few documents. This was all happening in a very short space of time between October and December 2011. They mainly centred around the £150,000 which was authorised in, I believe, July 2001, and €190,000, which was authorised in April 2002.

In relation to the £150,000 - July 2001 - there was a letter from the Department to, I believe, the general manager of the OHM, who was also the general manager latterly of SKILL, saying that the Department had approved £410,000, part of which was for the front line, and asking if he could arrange to make the payments to Mr. Matt Merrigan, SIPTU. We then see a letter from the general manager of OHM going back to the Department in August 2001 stating that he had made the arrangements to pay the said amounts to Mr. Matt Merrigan, SIPTU national industrial secretary, etc. On that basis, why would an official say he has paid it if he has not paid it? That was one part. Regarding the €190,000 in 2002, we have a letter from, I believe, the first Department official referred to, Mr. Frank Ahern, in 2002 saying that €190,000 was approved. I believe that was for the front line. I would have to check the exact documentation.

We went back to SIPTU and gave it all of that documentation. Any paper we had we gave to SIPTU and told it that was the basis on which we were wondering if it had seen it or if it knew where it was. SIPTU came back and said it was not there. SIPTU took issue with my last evidence to the committee saying I had not said this was unofficial, and the committee would have seen the correspondence where I wrote back to SIPTU stating that at least three times during my deliberations and evidence to the committee I had clearly identified that SIPTU had not been able to identify it.

To come to the point - where is it? After the meeting, a lot of further tortuous work went on. We had the OHM accounts and some bank statements. I went through all of that to see if there were bulk amounts or if there was a cheque for €190,000 or £150,000 because until that point in all the investigations, any amount provided by the Department had always been paid out in bulk. We had never seen it split. I think it was reasonable to assume, therefore, that if the Department was providing £150,000 or €190,000, we should have seen a cheque. We went through 3,000 OHM cheque stubs. There were 12 cheque books to which we did not have access. We went through all the statements, looked for these amounts but could not find them. We then decided to see if there were smaller amounts. I also identified that there were bank statements that we did not have and bank accounts that we did not know about. There is no issue about them, I hasten to add. We went to the bank and got the bank statements. Altogether, OHM had about nine accounts. We went through all of them and all the bank statements and identified what I would consider to be round sum amounts. There were bank drafts so I went to the bank and looked for those amounts, again thinking that perhaps it had been split up.

To cut a long story short, none of the cheques and bank drafts that came back were made out to SIPTU. I went back to the records again and asked more people to look for records. The bottom line is that of the £150,000 the Department approved in July 2001, £40,000 was paid by the OHM to the SIPTU national levy account in January of that year, £25,000 of that amount was paid in August 2001, and I believe the remaining £85,000 was retained by the OHM for its own purposes. What has added to the confusion, I corresponded with the general manager of the OHM, latterly SKILL, in January and he told me that if the cheque for £150,000 does not appear, it was probably never cashed but we now know there was no cheque for £150,000. I am satisfied that we have identified that.

Regarding the €190,000 for April 2002, we have been able to identify that €90,000 of that was paid by the OHM to SIPTU - €50,000 for a study visit and a €40,000 levy. That is the only information we have.

The remaining €100,000 actually was retained by the Office for Health Management, OHM, for its own purposes. We subsequently found a letter to that effect from the general manager back to the Department. Consequently, the mystery, per se, of those two amounts has been solved. However, it has taken a long and winding path to get there.