The National Lottery financed a £1 million trust fund established by the Government in 1989 for haemophiliacs infected with HIV, it emerged at the tribunal yesterday.
The fund was established after the 1989 general election which was brought about by the refusal of the then minority Fianna Fail government to accept a Labour party motion seeking the establishment of a trust fund for infected haemophiliacs.
When Fianna Fail was returned to office in coalition with the PDs, with Mr Charles Haughey as Taoiseach, it was agreed to establish a £1 million trust fund, something the Irish Haemophilia Society (IHS) had been campaigning a long time for.
The present chairman of the society, Mr Brian O'Mahony, was asked yesterday if he knew where the money for the fund came from. He said he didn't.
However, a letter from the Department of Health opened to the tribunal showed the money had come from the National Lottery.
"Well thank God for the National Lottery," was Mr O'Mahony's response.
The tribunal has already heard that lottery funding was also resorted to in 1988 to provide extra social workers to counsel haemophiliacs testing HIV positive at St James's Hospital, Dublin. The hospital had been writing to the Department of Health for three years for assistance before it came in the form of a £15,000 National Lottery grant.
Earlier Mr O'Mahony said the offer to the IHS by the former health minister Dr Rory O'Hanlon at a meeting in early 1989 of £50,000 for counselling was like "a slap in the face" when the society had been seeking humanitarian aid for infected members who were "in dire need". The minister said he could not accept that the government "had a moral or legal responsibly" towards those infected.
It also emerged yesterday that an incorrect information leaflet sent by the IHS to its members in January 1985, stating that all products were being heat treated to virally inactivate them when this was in fact not the case, had also been sent to the then head of the Blood Transfusion Service Board, Dr Jack O'Riordan.
Mr O'Mahony, who believed the leaflet to be correct at the time, said Dr O'Riordan wrote to the society thanking them for the "most informative" leaflet. He would have expected him to state if the information in it was incorrect, he said.
The tribunal has adjourned to June 12th when the administrator of the IHS, Ms Rosemary Daly, will give evidence.