Forged documents were the focus of the Morris tribunal this week, writes Christine Newman.
Was it normal practice in Sligo Garda station in the late 1990s to forge witness claim forms with an employer's signature?
The question hung in the air this week as handwriting experts confirmed that seven claim forms for witness Bernard Conlon, which were written out by hand and signed with the name of an employer, were forged.
From the experts too came the revelation that a garda in Sligo station at the time had forged the employer's signature on four of them.
The forms were certainly not written by Bernard Maguire, Conlon's landlord, whose name was on the bottom. He had already said he had nothing to do with the forms and furthermore denied he had employed Conlon in the first place.
The text of the handwritten form confirmed in the name of the employer that Conlon worked for him as a caretaker and claimed £40 a day expenses. It was signed by the purported employer.
Conlon had pestered for his court expenses. He had attended court a number of times in Letterkenny where he was a State witness in a licensing case against the McBreartys.
He claimed he was told by John White, the detective in Letterkenny who was looking after the court case, and John Nicholson, a garda in Sligo where Conlon lived, that they would take care of the expenses.
In order for the claim to go through to Letterkenny, the certificate of loss of earnings had to be obtained.
Nicholson, now retired, said he had tried to find Maguire but was unsuccessful. He then said he asked a garda at Sligo Garda station to obtain claim forms for him. The garda returned with the written-out forms, he maintained.
Nicholson denied all along that he wrote the claim forms. However, he did plead guilty and was prosecuted in 2002 in court for uttering, in other words submitting, forged claim forms to the Garda authorities.
The garda Nicholson implicated and named was John Keogh, who died in 2000.
Nicholson's implication that Keogh was in any way involved this week brought his widow, Kathleen Keogh, mother of five, to the witness box to defend her husband's good name.
Then the handwriting experts appeared. John Nash, a forensic handwriting expert, was the first to give his findings after comparing the handwriting of certain gardaí with the claim forms. He concluded the seven certificates had been written by at least four people.
However it was when he gave evidence of the signatures that the revelation came.
"On the balance of probabilities, the author of these signatures, John Nicholson, wrote the four questioned signatures and in my opinion it's unlikely anybody else was involved," he said. Nash also ruled out Keogh as writing the text of the certificates or signing them.
A Garda handwriting expert, Seán Lynch, a detective sergeant, agreed with Nash's findings that Nicholson had forged the signatures on four forms, that all seven certificates were forgeries and that Keogh was not involved.
Lynch provided another name, that of Paul Casey, a Sligo detective garda, as having written the text of one of the certificates but not the signature.
Casey confirmed this in the witness box. He said he was asked by Nicholson to write it out. Nicholson dictated it and Casey said he wrote it but did not sign it.