The former secretary of the Leinster branch of the Irish Amateur Swimming Association did not reveal her close connections with the sport's governing body when she phoned Joe Duffy. Her purpose was solely to oppose the death penalty in the US. On 7 February last year, she attended the execution of a convicted multiple rapist and murderer, Glenn Benner II, in Southern Ohio Correctional Institution after a 20-year pen-pal correspondence. Around the country, survivors of child sexual abuse in Irish swimming listened with appalled incredulity as Hughes mentioned in passing to Joe Duffy that she was also a friend of Frank McCann, the former IASA vice-president who murdered his wife and foster child. It was not until Aidan O'Toole, father of the former European silver medalist Gary O'Toole, phoned the show that Hughes' identity as a senior swimming official was revealed.

She had served for seven years as secretary of Glenalbyn swimming club in Dublin, where George Gibney was sacked as coach. O'Toole said he had written to her about complaints of child sexual abuse in Irish swimming more than a decade ago but she had not even replied to his letter. Two letters outlining complaints against Derry O'Rourke and sent to the IASA's head office in 1993 subsequently went missing from the association's office.

Bart Nolan, one of the foremost campaigners, along with the O'Tooles, in exposing the swimming scandals, says that Hughes requested a �10 fee to make a formal complaint about Derry O'Rourke. Nolan, a founding member of Parents for Change in Swim Ireland, recalls that it was Hughes who informed Gary O'Toole that the Leinster branch would not meet him when he wanted to address them with his concerns about George Gibney at a meeting in a Dublin hotel.

Frank McCann, the former Leinster branch president, was given two concurrent life sentences on 15 August, 1996 for murdering his wife and foster child in an attempt to conceal the fact that he had fathered a child with a young swimmer. McCann, Gibney and O'Rourke were the three supremos of swimming in the 1980s and early 1990s. Garda� sent a file to the DPP in 1993 with 17 charges of statutory rape of boys and girls against George Gibney, the former national and Olympic swimming coach. Gibney succeeded in a High Court judicial review of his prosecution by arguing that the allegations dated too far back to allow him to defend himself. Even as garda� were preparing a fresh investigation on foot of new allegations by other complainants, Gibney did a runner; first to Scotland and then to the US.

Gibney was succeeded as national and Olympic coach by Derry O'Rourke, a daily massgoer who was fixed up with a job as a primary-school caretaker in the midlands while on bail awaiting trial in 1997.

A file on a fourth senior swimming official, this one based in Co Wexford, has been with the DPP since last July. It is believed that five male swimmers have made allegations of sexual abuse against him.