In any other week, it might have been a big story, but this week, there were more expansive dramas in the beef industry than the grim little tragedy which was reaching its climax in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. Yet in its own way the 12-month prison sentence imposed on Tuesday by that court on Colm Fox said as much about the beef industry as all the highstakes, high-level conflicts between farmers and the processors.

Fox was the senior Department of Agriculture vet in charge of supervising the industry in Co Louth. He was an important link in the chain of supervision which was supposed to assure consumers at home and abroad that Irish beef was safe.

Yet at the height of the BSE crisis in 1994, he was, as he admitted, accepting payments from "a Dundalk man" for handing over stamped official Department of Agriculture animal transport certificates. The purpose was to allow British calves, whose export was then banned, to be shipped to Spain and Italy under the pretence that they were Irish.

Even at a time when the future of the State's largest indigenous industry was at stake, the temptation to indulge in corrupt practices for short-term gain was, for some, irresistible. That willingness to sacrifice future gains for immediate profits is what lies behind the present crisis in the industry.

With the runaway success of high-tech industry in the State, it is easy to forget that beef production is still a vital part of the economy. The days when a single beef baron, Mr Larry Goodman, personally controlled about 4 per cent of Irish GNP are gone but, even when direct EU payments to farmers are excluded, beef still accounts for 2 per cent of GNP and 3.5 per cent of exports.

The industry is critical to the livelihoods of 130,000 farmers and 5,000 processing workers, yet for well over a decade, its longterm problems have been allowed to fester.

Most people fondly imagine that Irish beef is a top-quality product with a wonderful international image. Since Irish farmers have the great natural advantage of being able to feed animals on grass for most of the year, this is not an unreasonable notion - but it is an illusion.

The quality of the Irish herd is acknowledged, most recently by the Beef Task Force last year, to be poor. In the marketplace which matters - the European supermarket trade - Irish beef commands a consistently lower price than that of its competitors. Most of it is sold at cheap wholesale rates rather than directly into the lucrative supermarket trade.

Prices paid for Irish beef by customers in France and Germany in the first quarter of 1999 were just 78 per cent of the average.

This, in essence, is what has caused the current crisis. The processors may well be operating a cartel and creaming off some of the money which should be paid to farmers, but the product itself is being sold at a discount.

An industry which should be producing a high-quality, value-added product is instead churning out a cheap bulk commodity which fewer and fewer people want to buy. Until that changes, the processors will continue to squeeze the farmers, and, until now, the processors have always had easier options than real reform.

In spite of the emotive nature of the current conflict, there is no lack of agreement about the basic problems and what needs to be done to tackle them. As long ago as 1986, the National Economic and Social Council identified the underlying weaknesses of the industry and the kind of strategy which might transform it.

There was an over-reliance on the easy option of EU intervention. There was too heavy a dependence on unstable markets outside the EU, such as Libya, Iraq and Russia. Too many cattle were slaughtered at the end of the summer, leading to an autumn glut which depressed prices and made it necessary to freeze what should be a fresh product.

This seasonal glut also encouraged the employment of casual labour in the factories, instead of the full-time staff which might achieve high levels of skill. There were too many processing plants with poor facilities.

Everybody - farmers, processors and the State - agreed that all of this would have to stop. The quality of the herd would be improved. The seasonal glut would be evened out.

Instead of chasing the short-term highrisk markets outside the EU, the industry would target the stable and lucrative European supermarket trade. A primitive primary industry would be turned into a smooth, high-tech, state-of-the-art enterprise supplying safe, value-added products to discerning consumers. All of this was going to happen by the beginning of the 1990s.

Spool forward to 1999 and what do we see? Exactly the same analysis and the same proposed solutions. The Beef Task Force report last June proposes to create an industry whose "emphasis will be on a market-led approach through the development of highvalue markets within the EU". In 13 years, in other words, nothing has happened.

The only real change is that, with the winding-down of EU intervention, the real failure of the industry is far more starkly evident.

The grand plans of the late 1980s failed for one simple reason. They were predicated on the belief that the biggest player in the industry, Mr Goodman, would lead the transformation. Charles Haughey's government chose Goodman International as the vehicle for change and made tens of millions of pounds of public money available to fund the modernisation of his empire.

For reasons which have never been adequately explained, however, that same government also made huge sums of money available for Goodman International to pursue precisely the opposite strategy - selling huge amounts of frozen intervention beef to the notoriously unstable Iraqi regime.

With the quick profits from this trade, there was no real incentive for Goodman International to implement a long, painstaking process of reform.

Even when the Iraqi adventures collapsed and the beef tribunal revealed the depth of corruption in the industry, remarkably little changed. Since very few people at any level of the industry - and none at the top - had to pay any price for the scams which were revealed, there was no real reason to alter the prevailing culture of the industry.

Reformers, on the other hand, were demoralised by the debacle.

Without the events of the last fortnight, the industry might have continued in its crude high-turnover, low-margin ways. Except, of course, that something had to give at the bottom of this particular food chain.