Yes, Yes, yes, we all now know that some beef farmers were sailing so close to shore that they left keelskids down the main street in Birr, and that rubbish was being fed to hooved meat. One wonders: why did the State even bother with tipheads ten years ago, when all along there were farmers who would have happily have fed the nation's waste to their beefherds?
Some were feeding their cattle concentrate of sheep eyeball and distillate of ovine spinal fluid. So what other rubbish might have been making the melancholy journey past the bovine tonsils to the great brown yonder beyond? Washing machines? Old television sets? Used cars? What, for example, happened to all those Ford Cortinas which were once everywhere? Did they end up in our beef herd, and ultimately, us?
Is there a part of us which is for ever Dagenham? Does the heart of Essex girl - or for that matter, any other part - pulse gently inside us all? Or is our frontal lobe recruited from the engine-block of a 1600E Executive, and if you tap your teeth, is there an echo of the ghost of a Mark III on the road to Monte Carlo?
Plutonium waste
What else went into the beef herd? Were our farmers able to find a use for all that plutonium waste which Sellafield was so generously giving away? Plutonium could well be the very thing for a growing herd of heifers - not merely do the beasts sprout the odd extra loin or two, admittedly from somewhere unexpected, like between the eyes, but also, owing to their close resemblance to Las Vegas, they are rather easier to find at night than is normally the case.
None of these things seems to be a cause for concern. What is causing concern - and understandably - is the cross-species infections which result from cow eating sheep. I still do not know why a cow with BSE should be regarded as a threat to civilisation as we know it, and should be executed and incinerated forthwith, while a sheep with BSE is seen merely as the tough kid on the block: shucks, he'll grow out of it in time, probably join the cops and be a credit to the neighbourhood.
So, for whatever reason, cows with BSE are far more dangerous than sheep with BSE. And I am perfectly prepared to accept that human beings have contracted CJD from the consumption of beef - though I am lost in wonder at the ratiocinative powers of the coroner in England last year who pronounced as a fact that a vegetarian who died of the disease had contracted from it eating hamburgers ten years before, though absolutely no evidence to justify this had been adduced before him.
This seems to be one of those philosophical leaps of faith which, one is warned about in the creation of syllogisms, and which have a particular potency when powers of reasoning are addled, but not removed entirely, by fear. So that if the factor Y has two qualities, one of which is to promote fatal disease among the incredibly unlucky few, the other to cause the partial suspension of critical faculties of the vibrantly healthy many, it is possible to concoct the following falsehood: X can cause Y; W died of Y, therefore X killed W.
Panic syllogisms
Well, maybe. Panic syllogisms, which appear both to have the virtue of sequential logic and simultaneously to possess a high moral tone, are the engine of every virtuous scare story there ever was - from the witch-burning of the Middle Ages to the McCarthyite Communist-hunts in the 1950s. And a panic syllogism appears to power our reaction to CJD, which has now reached ludicrous, insane proportions.
As far as I can understand, some British experts think that one infected animal might have escaped the beef-cull of the past year or so, and could enter the human food chain over the coming year. They have calculated - though speculated is a better word - that there is a 5 per cent chance that one individual might contract CJD through beef-bone. So all beef on the bone has been outlawed in Britain.
This is fatuous, a hypothesis of preposterous construction. Even if it weren't, is the rogue cow the one thing between the population of Britain and guaranteed immortality? And is the death of one individual, which is most improbable anyway, sufficient reason for such draconian interventions in ordinary eating habits?
T-bones banned
We, in effect, are following suit, though not but by law but through the more invidious process of shame. The Government advises a ban, and retailers are shamed into compliance. The result: T-bones are now impossible to get. Heron's, the legendary butcher's in Phibsboro, is, tragically, now shut, and Superquinn, easily the best supermarket butcher in Ireland, has banned T-bones. Why? The risk of the maverick cow entering the food chain in Ireland is infinitesimal; and the extreme heat used to cook such steaks reduces the risk even further.
We know that 500 people will die on the roads this year. Is this a reason for Feargal to close down Superquinn's car-parks? We choose to drive: why should we not choose to eat T-bone steak? We are adults; let us choose for ourselves. What butchers and restaurants will still let us choose? Names please. T-bone lovers of Ireland unite, before the summer and the barbecues.