Beef Plan co-chair Hugh Doyle has clarified the full detail surrounding a blank cheque issued in late 2019.

The cheque, which was never cashed, was issued to Dermot O’Brien, the Beef Plan’s southwest regional chair, Doyle said.

“I was careless doing it, I put my hand up,” Doyle told the Irish Farmers Journal on Tuesday. “Dermot had travelled four hours to a meeting in the midlands and he had no invoice on him for expenses owed. I trusted him implicitly.

“But it was careless on my behalf. It’s unfortunate he felt he had to highlight it but I felt sorry sending him back to Kerry.”

Doyle also clarified that there are three people authorised to sign Beef Plan cheques – Doyle himself, treasurer Moira Doyle, who is also Hugh’s wife, and Eamon Corley.

Cheques could ordinarily be signed by any two of three people, while all three are required to sign cheques over €5,000, Hugh Doyle told the Irish Farmers Journal.

Membership

Doyle also referred to a challenge by the western regional chair Eoin Donnelly to him in late December regarding the number of members in Beef Plan.

Donnelly alleged in correspondence that there was a discrepancy of €20,000 between the number of members Doyle quoted in the Irish Farmers Journal in December 2019 (10,500) and what the national committee has been told at a meeting in Portlaoise a few months earlier.

“I told Eoin at that meeting [in Portlaoise] that to the best of my knowledge we had in or around 12,000 members but we also had a cohort of 1,200 farmers with old-fashioned phones, landline numbers or who were not on WhatsApp,” Doyle said on Tuesday.

“I explained to him [Donnelly] that it was a moving figure. I didn’t have button on the computer to press to add them all up, they are all individualised per county,” he said.

“I understood that those 1,200 farmers were in a separate group to the but they were not, they were included,” said Doyle.

No cover up

“There has never, under no circumstances, been a cover up on any registration,” he said.

He highlighted issues with membership, where more than 100 membership forms have been received at his home in the last three weeks, but many of which date back to 2019 and in some cases do not tally with the money enclosed.

“We have a bundle of 37 forms dating back to February and March 2019, but the money is not €370 – how do we put that into the system?” said Doyle, adding that there were another 56 forms from another county that dated back a number of months and where the money did not tally with the number of forms.

Responsibility

Doyle said that in some cases, “the money might come through three sets of hands” and the only place where he was responsible for collecting money at the door of a rally was in Navan.

“For every other rally, I left a box at the door with a small float and I would collect the box and give it to my wife to lodge,” he explained.

“Unfortunately, I can account for everything that came in my door but how it gets to my door I could not account for,” he said, adding that 100 to 150 people would have been responsible for collection and sending on of funds collected at rallies nationwide.

Doyle said he was working on a mechanism that would allow memberships under question be assessed and taken into account.

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