GOVERNMENT departments and agencies paid out more than €100 million in grants and other funding under social partnership in recent years, new official figures are expected to show.
Senior Government sources said last night that the total paid out to various bodies, committees and groups under social partnership will be in excess of €100 million.
The figures are expected to be contained in reply to a series of parliamentary questions tabled by Róisín Shortall of the Labour Party which are due to be answered today.
Last month the secretary general of the Department of the Environment, Geraldine Tallon, said that between 1999 and 2009 it had provided annual funding “for partnership purposes” of €37.7 million.
Separately a partnership forum involving trade unions and management in the health service received about €20 million in funding from the Department of Health and the HSE since 2004.
Documents published yesterday show the continuation of the payment of a controversial annual grant to the trade union Siptu by the Department of Health, which is at the centre of a number of official inquiries, was approved by the then minister Micheál Martin in September 2004.The documents, which have been published by the Dáil Public Accounts Committee, show that the Minister told a senior Siptu official, Matt Merrigan, that money would continue to be provided to support the training of “front-line supervisors”.
The undated letter, which is contained in a file of correspondence sent by the Department of Health to the committee in the last week or so, is the first occasion that any politician has been linked to the grant payments.
The committee heard in a public session last month that money from this grant was paid into a bank account, known as the Siptu National Health and Local Authority Levy fund, which was controlled by Mr Merrigan and another individual associated with the union, Jack Kelly.
The HSE has contended that money from this account was used to fund a number of controversial foreign trips involving trade union figures and public officials.
Siptu has said that it had no knowledge of such grant payments and that the account involved was not an official one.
The Department of Health had initially sanctioned the payment of €190,000 to Siptu in 2001 for the “frontline supervisors’ programme”. This money had been channelled through the former office for health management.
However the new documents show that with this agency due to be subsumed into the Health Service Executive in 2005, Mr Merrigan had written to an assistant secretary in the Department of Health, Frank Ahern, in August 2004 seeking to have the funding arrangement placed “on a firm footing going forward”.
He said that provision of the €190,000 annual funding had been “invaluable to both sides in improving and agreeing an understanding of the challenges facing a modern-day health service”.
The letter, written on Siptu notepaper, says that the payment of the grant had “subsequently led to a more harmonious approach between both sides in facing into these challenges”.
In a letter dated only as September 2004, Mr Martin wrote to Mr Merrigan at Siptu headquarters in Liberty Hall to say that funding was being provided for the continuation of the front-line supervisors’ training initiative.
In December 2004, a senior Department of Health official wrote to Mr Merrigan to say that €250,000 per year would be provided to support “Siptu’s human resource/personnel development schemes and the development of union/management partnerships of best practice in health enterprises”.
The official said that the move was aimed at putting a previous ad hoc arrangement “on a firm footing into the future with an enhanced funding provision”.
The file of correspondence sent by the Department of Health relating to the payments to Siptu has been published by the Public Accounts Committee on its website.
Grants investigated: controversy over €4m payment
There are several investigations under way into how about €4 million in State funding came to be paid into a bank account linked to individuals associated with the trade union Siptu.
About €2 million in grant payments made by the Department of Health, and channelled through the Health Service Executive’s (HSE) Skill programme was paid into the account known as the Siptu National Health and Local Authority Levy Fund.
In addition over €300,000 in controversial expense reimbursements were also paid into this account as part of the Skill programme.
Separately €925,000 was paid into the account by the Health Service Partnership Forum.
Last month it emerged that almost €800,000 from a local authority partnership body was paid into the same bank account over a ten-year period.
The money in nearly all cases was allocated to pay for training.
However the HSE has contended that some of the money was used to pay for controversial foreign trips undertaken by trade union figures and public officials.
The Dáil Public Accounts Committee has been told that the bank account was controlled by two individuals associated with Siptu, Matt Merrigan and Jack Kelly.
Siptu has said it had no knowledge of the bank account or the payments made into it from various State sources.
The Dáil committee is to hold further hearings into the controversy in mid December while reports from Siptu, the HSE and the Department of Finance are also awaited.
A Garda investigation is also under way. MARTIN WALL