THE acting secretary of the FAI, Brendan Menton, has confirmed that their chartered accountants, Bastow and Charleton, will incorporate an examination of the FAI's 10-year ticket scheme as part of their investigation and presumably anything else that crops up between now and the senior council meeting of March 8th.

This follow's further embarrassing revelations affecting the besieged association's ticket management (in particular their 10-year ticket scheme) and the officers' discussions about Wimbledon's proposed relocation to Dublin which came to light yesterday.

During the association's senior council meeting last June, the FAI president, Louis Kilcoyne, said the former chief executive, Sean Connolly, had mislaid a copy of the contract which dealt with the 10-year ticket scheme launched in 1994 with Sean McHale and Associates.

Several members of the council, as well as the National League president, Michael Hyland, expressed their concern about the deal, which was originally negotiated by members of the officer board and subsequently relayed to the council.

The contract had to be renegotiated in time for the first game under the scheme, the Republic of Ireland's Euro `96 qualifier with Liechtenstein in October 1994. Falling some way short of the FAI's original target of 3,500 to 5,000 tickets, approximately 1,500 tickets were first sold under the scheme, yielding the association gross returns of roughly £2,750,990, with Sean McHale and Associates receiving a commission in the region of £350,000

A spokesperson for McHale and Associates confirmed that the "FAI is still a client of ours", news which may come as a surprise to members of council and will be seen as indicative of the officers' lack of consultation with the council.

Neither Kilcoyne nor one of the FAI's main negotiators in the deaf, treasurer Joe Delaney, were available for contact yesterday, and two other officers, Michael Hyland and Des Casey, were abroad.

However, Sean Connolly yesterday admitted that, as general secretary to the association, he had signed the contract and then expanded on what followed. "The famous contract, which obviously you'd expect to have two halves to, one in McHales and one in our offices, disappeared.

"Obviously We got into a negotiation situation then to sort it out. McHales were able to produce something off their first draft of the contract. We settled on an agreement and I got my knuckles rapped for losing it, and I've absolutely no way of saying yes or no, I did or did not mislay, delay, lose or whatever, a contract, but it's very odd.

"Of course I had a contract at an earlier stage but the physical copy went missing, which is most odd."

A spokesperson for McHales, when asked about the missing contract, replied "no comment" and had no further comment on the affair. Neither Sean McHale himself nor another senior member of the firm, Sean McGlynn was available for comment.

As with the ongoing dealings with Sean McHale and Associates, the majority of executive and full council members will not have been aware of the extent to which the officers, during the course of 1995, discussed Wimbledon's proposed relocation to Dublin.

The Wimbledon chief executive, David Bernard, couldn't recall who precisely was in attendance on August 8th 1995 at a meeting in Davy House, the offices of DKM economic consultants, at which two documents commissioned by DISC were presented.

Titled "Professional Football in and "Revenue Potential of a Dublin club", the documents explore the feasibility of Wimbledon's relocation to Dublin. The former document even goes so far as to say that a strategy may have to be found to persuade" the Dublin-based National League clubs.

Members of the executive and senior councils were not kept abreast of these developments nor of correspondence between DISC's chairman, Jonathan Irwin, and the officer board. Irwin was unavailable for comment yesterday while the financier Colm McCarthy is in Chile.

There was unanimity from the floor of the 51-member senior council meeting of December when they rejected any notion of Wimbledon relocating to Dublin and playing in the English premiership.

A member of senior council commented last night: "The executive is entitled to know if there were discussions and documentation on an ongoing basis about Wimbledon's proposed move to Dublin and these developments will merely fuel the suspicion amongst many club representatives about the way the officer board conduct their business."

Last night the Shelbourne chairman Finbarr Flood confirmed that his club will" deliver motions of confidence in the five-man officer board. They will be voted upon at the Senior Council meeting of Friday week and it is believed that Bohemians will take a similar course of action.

Speaking on RTE's Prime Time, Hood said: "I think the clubs were probably waiting to see what they were going to do and they have to consult their boards. I think this is the easiest way, that we put forward the motion because it was perceived that we had done that and it gives clubs the opportunity to think about their position and to vote one the 8th, said Flood who repeated his calls for a full external review of the FAI's finances.