The admission in the Dail on Thursday by the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Ivan Yates, that he would "shed no tears" if Mr Larry Goodman were to withdraw from the beef industry may strike a chord with many members of the public. For it now seems increasingly likely that it is the public that will have to pay the bill for the malpractices in the beef industry in which Mr Goodman was, and still is, a leading force.
Goodman International was by no means the only firm to engage in malpractice, but the Tribunal of Inquiry into the beef industry found that it was "deliberate practice and policy" of the management of the group to package and sell to its commercial customers beef which properly belonged to the EU. That practice is about to prove a very expensive one for the taxpayer for while the £103 million in penalties against the State proposed by the EU Commission may yet be reduced, the final bill will still be very substantial indeed.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Mr Yates has had a change of heart since he publicly welcomed Mr Goodman's return to the helm of his company last year. That change of heart may go some way towards convincing the Commission that official attitudes to the misuse of EU funds in Ireland really have been altered beyond recognition. But it would be far more convincing were Mr Yates and his Department to go considerably further by admitting not just the seriousness of the malpractice but his own Department's failings in preventing it. Such an admission might be more eloquent evidence of a lesson painfully learned not in need of being reinforced by making an innocent public pay for the deeds of the guilty.
The Minister told the Dail that he found it invidious to have to go around the corridors of Brussels defending the good name of the Irish beef industry in these circumstances. But the public surely is entitled to ask what business the Minister has trying to defend the good name of an industry that has so demeaned itself that it barely deserves it? The line of argument adopted by the Department of Agriculture in negotiations in Brussels has been to suggest that the malpractices did not really happen on the scale that is obvious from the findings of Chief Justice Hamilton's beef tribunal. It is a doomed argument, more calculated to defend the interests of the industry and by implication of the Department of Agriculture that knew about the malpractices and failed to stop them, than to defend the interests of the taxpayer.
It is, to say the least, disturbing that it has taken so long to institute civil proceedings against Goodman International for the recovery of £1.8 million worth of beef known to have been misappropriated in its two Rathkeale, Co Limerick plants. From Mr Yates's Dail statement this week, it appears that it took four months for a barrister to be appointed to pursue the case, and a further twelve months for proceedings to be issued. And it also appears that there is virtually no prospect of further criminal prosecutions arising from the entire unhappy saga. Looked at from Brussels, neither of these facts can appear very impressive. There has been a lack of resolution by the State which no amount of protestation from Mr Yates can obscure at this stage.