A tangled tale of blood, lost lives, money and betrayal

In August 1982, during the short-lived term of office of one of Charles Haughey's more unstable governments, the Minister for Health, Michael Woods, appointed a new member of the Blood Transfusion Service Board. That new member subsequently became chairman of the BTSB, and remained in that post for nine years. This was a critical public appointment, an invitation to serve in a position of public trust that was, as subsequent events made all too plain, literally a matter of life and death for thousands of ordinary citizens.

The man he appointed was to hold this critical position until September 1994, and to oversee the operation of the BTSB in a period when a catastrophic breakdown of its standards led to the irreparable poisoning of about 1,600 people. Although he bore no direct or active responsibility for that terrible disaster, he did preside over structures which made its occurrence easier.

That crucial Haughey government appointee was Noel Fox, a senior partner in the chartered accountancy firm, Oliver Freaney and Co, a financial adviser to the Dunnes Stores group, a trustee of the Dunnes Settlement Trust, and a close personal friend of Ben Dunne. We know from the McCracken report that he was also the link between Ben Dunne and Charles Haughey's bag man, Des Traynor. In early or mid-November 1987, Mr Fox received a phone call from Des Traynor, who told him of Charles Haughey's "significant" financial problems, and asked him to approach Ben Dunne for a contribution. After Mr Dunne agreed to give Mr Haughey the money, Mr Fox was the point of contact for the payments. On four separate occasions, he was contacted by Des Traynor, and asked for specific sums of money. He was given all the necessary details - the name of the payee, the bank accounts to be used, the formulae for the great trick that was being performed. In spite of Mr Fox's close relationship to Dunnes Stores, most of these payments from the group's funds were not made known to its board.

Mr Fox is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland, and that body has announced that it will consider whether or not any of its members were guilty of misconduct in relation to the Dunnes payments. But there is another dimension to Mr Fox's involvement in the affair - the fact that he was, while all of this was going on, in a pivotal position of public trust, one that required of him, above all, a keen and rigorous sense of the public interest.

When Mr Fox retired from his role as chairman of the BTSB in 1994, its chief executive, Ted Keyes, thanked him in the organisation's staff newsletter for "his leadership over the past 12 years". He had, indeed, been in a position of leadership, not just for the BTSB, but for the public at large. And from both the Finlay report and the expert group report into the hepatitis C scandal, it is clear that he did not exercise that leadership very effectively.

The expert group, in particular, focused on the role of the BTSB's board. It set out what it ought to have done - to lay down a strategy for the organisation, to evaluate and monitor proposals for operations such as the anti-D programme, and to decide on "key policy matters". It should, above all, have taken steps "to ensure that it was being kept fully up to date by the management team regarding developments affecting the organisation".

The expert group found, however, that under Mr Fox the board of the BTSB did not do these things effectively. The board itself frequently had difficulty getting a quorum. It did not discuss critical issues like the shortage of plasma for anti-D at all. In 1985, one of the anti-D donors tested positive for HIV - the expert group noted that "despite the significance of this incident, there is no reference to it in the minutes of the board meetings".

Instead of the board making sure that it knew what was going on, there were "substantial communication gaps between the board, medical staff and senior management". Critically, the board of the BTSB, chaired by Mr Fox, did not discover for many years that women who had received anti-D made from the plasma of Patient X were developing hepatitis.

ONE of the things that ought to have been happening during all of this time was that the State, which funded the BTSB and appointed Mr Fox to oversee it, should have been exercising a reasonable degree of scrutiny over the organisation's operations. Had there been even a minimal level of political supervision, the State would have known, at least by the end of 1991, that the BTSB had poisoned large numbers of women. Yet, at that very time, the Taoiseach was Charles Haughey, and the chairman of the BTSB, Mr Fox, was helping to arrange secret payments to him. In 1989, while the BTSB was beginning a second round of infections, its chairman was arranging the payment of £150,000 sterling to the Taoiseach. In late 1991, while the BTSB was discovering the truth of what it had done but choosing to ignore that information, its chairman's client, Mr Dunne, was handing drafts for £210,000 sterling to the Taoiseach.

What, in those circumstances, would have happened if the State had been doing its job? If it had been asking questions of the chairman of the BTSB, examining its structures, asking why it had failed to get proper licences for anti-D, querying whether its chairman, appointed after all as the public's watchdog, was carrying out his role as efficiently as might be desired?

What if Charles Haughey's Minister for Health had come into conflict with Mr Fox - a conflict that should have happened and might have helped to save lives? What if Charles Haughey himself had discovered that the organisation led by Mr Fox was perpetrating a grotesque injustice on thousands of people? How could he have acted to stop it?

Those are, of course, hypothetical questions, but they do point to the scale of the betrayal involved in Charles Haughey's corrupt conduct. As the guardian of the public interest, he was hopelessly compromised in relation to the head of a State body that was itself involved in an appalling failure of public trust.

And this is the real point of the Haughey scandal. It's not just that a key figure in Irish political life was involved in sleazy, underhand dealings. It is that the Irish elite is a small world and that a betrayal of trust in one area has consequences in most others. The accountants, bankers and business people who are involved in offshore dealings and complex deceptions are also, in very many cases, the people who control the livelihoods and affect the lives of ordinary citizens. When they have the representatives of those citizens in their pockets, what chance do powerless people have?

Fintan O'Toole will be based in New York over coming months. Until further notice, this column will be written from there.