RTÉ’s tributes to Joe Murray fail to mention how they pilloried him over beef investigation
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Leonard Cohen
IN THE last few days RTÉ paid tributes to its former agriculture editor Joe Murray. Oddly, the recollections of his career left out the time RTÉ humiliated and suspended him. In February 1989, Farm Diary, presented by Pádraig Mannion, under the supervision of Murray as head of agricultural programming, reported that a leading Irish meat company was involved in a fraud investigation in relation to the misrepresentation of the age and quality of meat being sold to Iraq.
The export of the meat in question was being supported by the State in the form of export credit insurance guarantees. The company was not named, but it was not hard to identify it as Larry Goodman's Anglo Irish Beef Processors. The report was repeated on Morning Irelandand on news bulletins.
The next day, people listening to or watching the RTÉ news were treated to a cringe-making exercise in public grovelling. Several minutes of every bulletin were devoted to an exercise in journalistic self-abasement. The story was “completely false and without any basis in fact”. Not only was there no irregularity in relation to the meat in question, but “no irregularity of any kind . . . was carried out by the company in question”. As for export credit insurance, “there is no question of such facilities being abused in any way”. Furthermore, “no attempt whatsoever was made by the Irish company – or anyone on its behalf – to misrepresent the age and quality of the meat”.
By this time Murray had spent the best part of three decades building a relationship of absolute trust with the Irish farming community. Now, here was his own station, RTÉ, telling the nation that he had been responsible for the broadcast of a series of outrageous lies.
Murray and Mannion were then hauled up before an internal RTÉ disciplinary tribunal. Mannion was able to show that his investigation had been thorough and responsible. He had spoken to sources in the meat trade in Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, to Irish diplomats and to sources in the insurance industry.
He had put the allegation to the company, which had neither confirmed nor denied it. He had spoken to first-hand witnesses who had seen labels on meat being changed at the port of Aqaba.
Murray, as his boss, had assured himself that the investigation was as rigorous and thorough as it could be.
It was also, as it happens, quite right. After four years and tens of millions of pounds in legal fees, the beef tribunal concluded that Goodman’s company had been abusing the export credit insurance scheme by sending beef to Iraq, much of which was not Irish at all. The age and quality of the beef was indeed not as stated on contracts with the Iraqi buyers. Murray and Mannion had done fine work for the Irish public.
The thanks they got was abuse. Goodman threatened to sue. RTÉ capitulated and broadcast a pack of lies, the biggest of which was that the Goodman group, which was dodging tax, misappropriating meat and abusing export credits on a vast scale, was engaged in “no irregularity of any kind”.
The RTÉ internal inquiry found Mannion and Murray guilty of unprofessional conduct. Both men were suspended for a week without pay, a punishment changed on appeal to a reduction in their salary increments.
The money was much less important than the destruction of the most valuable thing a journalist has – credibility. Mannion’s excellent career in agricultural journalism was effectively ended – he left RTÉ and, so far as I know, the country.
Murray stayed on in RTÉ but the assault on his integrity must have been deeply painful. Murray had been, for decades, arguably the most influential journalist in Ireland. People listened to lots of other journalists, but farmers acted on what Murray said. They put up farm buildings, bought new machinery, changed the breeds of their cattle because of what they heard and saw on his programmes.
Along with Justin Keating, Murray was a key figure in the modernisation of the Irish countryside. He loved the small farmers but hated their poverty with a passion.
He believed in the power of education through broadcasting to change a farming culture in which, as he put it, “there was a lot of lore, there was a lot of tradition, but there was very little science”. But he was no time-and-motion man. Farmers trusted him because it was obvious that he really cared about them and their families. It was no small thing to make such a man out to be a liar and a bad professional.
And why does this matter? Because the Joe Murrays lost and the Larry Goodmans won and that’s one of the reasons we are where we are. Goodman is richer than ever. Murray was vindicated but never got a public acknowledgment, let alone an apology.
Perhaps Goodman, whose fortune has been built on the farming community that Murray helped shape, might offer that small tribute to his memory.