A hospital consultant in the northeast who was "not very assiduous in his financial affairs" had not bothered to cash salary cheques worth £122,000, the Committee on Public Accounts was told yesterday.

The same consultant worked long hours without charging for overtime, failed to take his full leave/rest day entitlements and provided cross cover so that the North Eastern Health Board did not have to employ locums.

During a 20 year period, the health board had saved about £300,000 because of the consultant's attitude, the board's chief executive officer, Mr Donal O'Shea, told the committee.

However, the same consultant, who was not named, had also failed to sign forms which were required for his hospital to receive payments from the VHI worth £140,000. This was for private work carried out in the hospital by the consultant between 1985 and 1992.

The net saving to the board was £160,000.

Mr O'Shea said: "He was a man who lived for his work, was available to his patients seven days a week, all the days of the year, had a very simple lifestyle and obviously had little interest in financial affairs."

He had "lived on the premises", had cashed "some" of his salary cheques and was an excellent clinician.

"This is definitely a very strange case", said Mr Eric Byrne. "I'm still trying to figure out if he was a villain or a saint."

The board had put pressure on the consultant to sign the forms required by the VHI, but had not succeeded in this. The board had no power to force him to do so.

Mr O'Shea said that the consultant was not paid for private work he did at the hospital. "If he had signed the documents he would have got significant payments for himself as well." The patients had been treated "for free".

In 1995, when the board investigated the consultant's affairs, it discovered that he had not had medical indemnity insurance between 1990 and 1993. The board immediately went to its own insurers, who had agreed to cover him for the period. The consultant was now retired. His affairs had been sorted out and £117,000 in unclaimed salary had been paid over.

Mr O'Shea, who is CEO of both the North Eastern and North Western Health Boards, said that there was a need to look at how health services in Border areas could be developed on a cross Border basis. The boards on both sides of the Border ended up "buying services from each other rather than jointly developing services".

Development of services was not possible because there were no structures for deciding who was going to pay for developing the service. All that could be done at present was "cross Border shopping".

He said that the two health boards in the Republic and the Western Health Board and Southern Health Board in Northern Ireland had set up a programme entitled "Co operation And Working Together". There was "tremendous co operation" in this in terms of exchange of information.