At the opening of his first day under cross-examination yesterday, the former BTSB chief executive, Mr Ted Keyes, made a seemingly uncontroversial yet crucial admission.
Asked whether the board believed it had different duties regarding imported commercial concentrates and blood products which it made itself, Mr Keyes replied with refreshing candour: "We did not distinguish".
If the board was "the handler" of products, be they imported or made at Pelican House, it had a responsibility for them. That was, at least, his understanding of the issue, he said, as the official responsible for dealing with any administrative needs which might have arisen following claims over HIV or hepatitis C infections.
Mr Keyes's evidence directly contradicts that of Dr Emer Lawlor, the blood bank's chief medical witness and deputy medical director of the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (as the BTSB has become). She said the BTSB had always maintained a clear distinction between products made at Pelican House, which the board stood over, and imported commercial products, which have been blamed for causing the vast majority of 220 haemophiliacs becoming infected.
The safety of commercial products, Dr Lawlor had argued, rested primarily with the manufacturers, the physicians who treated haemophiliacs and the licensing authorities, namely the National Drugs Advisory Board and the Department of Health.
It would not have been the board's place to have interfered with such imports, she said. What Mr Keyes's evidence suggested was that the distinction between imported and locally made products was a recent invention. Whatever about now, it seemed the BTSB in the 1980s did not distinguish between the two types of product.
Ultimately, it is a matter upon which the tribunal chairwoman, Judge Alison Lindsay, will have to decide. Mr Keyes's evidence, however, does lend weight to the argument that the BTSB should be held accountable for all the products which it supplied, regardless of their source.
This theme of the BTSB's attitude to liability ran throughout yesterday's evidence as counsel for the Irish Haemophilia Society, Mr John Trainor SC, questioned Mr Keyes about a key decision of the board on July 1st, 1986, to change its heat-treating protocol for the Factor 9 clotting agent for haemophilia B patients.
A meeting of senior medical and technical staff was convened on that date by Mr Keyes whose minutes of the meeting were scrutinised by the tribunal. The meeting had been called just weeks after personnel had learnt that BTSB Factor 9, as opposed to imported concentrate, was likely to have been responsible for infecting a number of haemophiliacs.
Mr Keyes agreed that medical staff coming to the meeting were aware that the heat-treatment protocol which the board had been using did not safeguard against HIV transmission.
Asked why this knowledge was not recorded in the the minutes, Mr Keyes replied that the objective of the minutes was not to provide a verbatim account of the meeting but to record the "one decision" which had to be made, namely what heat-treatment protocol the board should adopt.
Mr Trainor put it to Mr Keyes that there was a deliberate attempt to create an "inaccurate record" as there would have been serious implications in terms of liability if the minutes recorded the fact that personnel knew what the situation was regarding Factor 9.
But Mr Keyes strongly rejected the claim. He said it was never his intention to mislead people and "I take exception to that remark". He will continue his evidence today.