Siptu president Jack O’Connor considered resigning after it emerged that much of the €4 million in public funds paid into a union bank account for the training of health service workers had been used to pay for trips abroad by officials of the union, civil servants and others.

In an interview with The Irish Times, Mr O'Connor revealed: "I did consider resigning and I was persuaded not to on the grounds that I had no hand, act nor part in it and that it arose while I was presiding over the direction of policy . . . in the midst of the most serious economic crisis since the second World War. To do so would have amounted to abandoning responsibility."

Mr O’Connor was persuaded not to resign by members of the union executive. He chose to put himself forward for re-election a year earlier than required and won a new term.

The funds were paid by a number of public bodies into the Siptu account between 1998 and 2009. Mr O’Connor became Siptu president in 2009 and became aware of the misuse of the funds that year.

“It continued on my watch. It was remiss of me to allow it to happen,” he said. “I’m on the record repeatedly of apologising for what happened and I’ve always taken responsibility for what happened. But I’m absolutely clear that no impropriety is attributable to myself or the office I hold.”

Mr O’Connor also blamed the country’s economic collapse on policies that were pursued by the Progressive Democrats from 1997.

“The biggest single omission on the part of the trade union movement, which I regard as an unforgivable omission, was that we failed to alert our members and society in general to the threat posed by the PD agenda in the 1997 [election],” he said. “We allowed a small group of people promoting an unbridled free- market agenda to grab the balance of power.”

Mr O'Connor also warned that the Reform Alliance, a movement promoted by Lucinda Creighton and other dissident Fine Gael deputies, was nothing more than a new iteration of the PDs.