The label on the can is a lovely fresh green. A picture of a fine-looking cow against a blue sky with fluffy white clouds stares reassuringly out. The words "Emerald - Beef in Juice" and "Department of Agriculture Ireland Inspected and Passed" are printed on the label. The best-before date is February 1997.

The label could hardly be more deceptive. The meat was on sale in the Dublin suburb of Clondalkin early last month, two years and eight months after the sell-by date. It was not produced by Emerald Meats, a company that has been in the news this week amid renewed allegations that the Department of Agriculture conspired with some of the major beef-processors to destroy its business.

And, most remarkably of all, the stuff in the can was certainly not "beef in juice". Most of it is, in fact, pork.

This has been confirmed to The Irish Times by the Food Analysis Laboratory at Teagasc's National Food Centre. Its director, Michael O'Keeffe, tested the contents of four cans, and the tests, he says, "suggested to us that the main meat content was pork". The tests suggested that very small amounts of beef and poultry might or might not be present, but at levels that were less than 1 per cent.

So the description on the label, "Beef in Juice", is, to put it mildly, pure bull.

The one true statement on the can, however, is that the meat inside was inspected and passed by the Department of Agriculture. At a time when food safety is one of the hottest topics in Europe and when Ireland is beginning to restore its reputation for producing safe beef, the extraordinary fact is that very dubious products like this are still being sold in Dublin.

That says a great deal about the persistence of poverty. It also says a great deal about the difficulty of banishing the bad old days of the meat industry once and for all.

In reply to a letter from Des O'Malley raising concerns about the strange cans of meat, the Minister for Agriculture, Joe Walsh, gave some details about their origin. He confirmed that the meat was canned at the Irish Country Meats plant in Rooskey, Co Roscommon, owned by Avonmore (now Glanbia), in 1997, and sourced from the ICM plants at Ballaghaderreen and Ballyhaunis.

"The cans," wrote the Minister, "had been intended for the Russian market but the market had collapsed around that time and as a consequence the cans were held in storage by the company until after the `best before' date had expired. They were then sold on by ICM as pet food."

Nothing on the cans indicates, however, that they are intended for pets or that they are unfit for human consumption. They were meant to be sold for human consumption in Russia and they ended up being sold in Dublin simply as "beef in juice" passed by the Department of Agriculture. And, leaving aside the alarming fact that cans containing hardly any beef were passed as "beef in juice" by the Irish authorities, there are grounds for serious concerns about the safety of what was actually inside.

In a letter this week to Jonnie McCarthy of Emerald Meats, who raised the issue because of concerns about the misuse of his company's name, Joe Walsh has confirmed that "MRM was included in the tinned product manufactured by Glanbia and sold under the Emerald name."

MRM is short for what is known in the trade as "mechanically recovered meat". It comes from a process used to extract shreds of meat from the bones of slaughtered animals after the recognisable cuts have all been taken.

MRM can lawfully be used, but it ought to be subject to especially tight controls. Because the meat is not recognisable as coming from any particular part of an animal, the fear is that it could contain shreds of those organs that are specifically excluded from the food chain because they carry a risk of BSE infection.

Tight controls on its use are therefore essential. But the kind of controls that allow pork MRM tinned in 1997 to be sold in Dublin as "beef in juice" in 1999 hardly inspire confidence.

As well as these concerns about food safety in Ireland, similar concerns must also arise in relation to Russia, the intended destination of the product. In 1997, the year in which this meat was canned in Roscommon, Ireland exported 3,400 tonnes of stewed beef to Russia, about 7 1/2 million cans of the stuff. How much of this was really pork? How much of it contained MRM, a product of such low quality that it could not do much for the reputation abroad of the Irish meat industry?

And there are also concerns about the financial implications of all of this. Beef exported to Russia attracts EU subsidies called export refunds at a rate of about 50p a lb. But pork does not. If pork was being sent as beef, then it would have been possible to claim large sums of money to which the Irish industry was not entitled.

If the EU found this to be the case, the penalties that could follow would be levied on the Department of Agriculture for its failure to control the production process. The cost would be borne, as so often before, by the taxpayer.

It is remarkable, too, that of all the names that could have been chosen to label this very dodgy product, the one that was used happened to belong to a company that was at the time involved in a very bitter and contentious dispute with both the major beef-processors and the Department of Agriculture. The name "Emerald" was not a registered trademark of the company that produced the cans, Avonmore, which marketed its meat products under names like ICM, Roscrea, Master Pork and Irish Gold.

The Emerald Meats saga, which surfaced again this week as a political issue after Mike Milotte's fine television exposition for Prime Time, has already caused more than enough embarrassment to the industry, Department of Agriculture and to Joe Walsh.

Now a bogus Emerald, masquerading as a true gem from Ireland's green pastures, has returned to haunt the reputation of a tarnished trade.