Protected witness John Dunne said at the Special Criminal Court today that he was paid £1,000 a time by a man called John for shipments he arranged from Holland to Cork.
Mr Dunne was giving evidence on the 11th day of the trial of John Gilligan (48), who has pleaded not guilty to the murder of the Sunday Independentcrime reporter Veronica Guerin (37) at Naas Road, Clondalkin, Dublin, on June 26th, 1996.
The prosecution has claimed that the shipments contained hundreds of kilos of cannabis resin that murder accused John Gilligan illegally imported.
Dunne is the first protected witness to give evidence in the Gilligan trial. He is currently in the Witness Protection Programme and serving a three-year sentence for illegally importing cannabis resin into the country.
He told the court today that in 1994 he was the operations manager at Seabridge, an international freight company based at Little Island in Cork.
Early in 1994, he met a man who told him his name was John at the Silver Granite pub in Palmerstown. The man was stocky and had black hair and later he got a phone call from the same man who arranged to meet him in Cork.
He met the man in a car outside the Seabridge depot and they had a 20-minute conversation during which the man asked him about importing goods from the UK and the continent.
Dunne said he gave the man the names of three agents used by Seabridge in Holland and the man told him he would be paid £1,000 a shipment.
He later got a phone call from "John" telling him that three cartons were being moved across from Holland and they arrived in Cork and he brought them to Dublin.
Dunne said that he was contacted again and asked to drive another shipment to the Ambassador Hotel in Co Kildare and there he met two men and gave them the consignment. He went into the hotel and "John" arrived and paid him £1,000.
He said that throughout 1994 the shipments were irregular, arriving every three or four weeks and the same thing happened each time.
Dunne told prosecuting counsel Mr Eamonn Leahy SC that he arranged shipments from early 1994 until October 1996. He said he met the man called John three or four times in 1994 and then did not see him for a whole year until the summer of 1995.
He said he then met the man outside the Silver Granite pub and was paid by him because shipments had come in while he was on holiday which he had not been paid for.
Dunne described the man as "small, a low size, stocky man with black hair" and aged around 40 or 45.
Gilligan also denies 15 other counts alleging the importation of cannabis and firearms and ammunition offences.
The prosecution has claimed that John Gilligan was "in control and command" of a criminal gang that imported and distributed large amounts of cannabis and that he organised the murder of Ms Guerin.
The trial continues tomorrow.