AFTER last Monday, something that has long been suspected can now be said with absolute conviction. The suspicion that the State, in the form of the Department of Agriculture, colluded with beef processing companies, including those owned by Larry Goodman, in breaches of the law has been turned by a Supreme Court ruling, delivered by Mr Justice Blayney on Monday, into a statement of fact.
To suit these companies, the Department not only flouted the law, but also misled the EU Commission. Eight years of denials by the State, pursued through the courts at great cost to the taxpayer, have turned to dust.
The case, though it has huge consequences, arose from a small issue. Under the GATT agreements, the EU is obliged to import a small amount of beef. A licence to do so is worth money: with it, you can buy beef at low world prices and sell it at artificially high EU prices. It was almost literally a gift, worth about £1,000 a tonne to a company with a licence. Ireland had to take its share of these imports - around 400 tonnes a year - and the Department of Agriculture decided to divide the licences between the major beef processors.
These processors, however, did not bother to import the GATT meat, but simply sold their quotas, mostly to Emerald Meats, a small trading outfit based in Dublin. In effect, the Department was giving the processors free money, amounting to about £500,000. It was, as Mr Justice Blayney put it "aware from the outset" that the meat companies were not actually importing the meat, and when, in 1988, the secretary of the Department was informed of this, he commented on an official document: "Did we ever think they would?"
This cosy arrangement for the processors was overturned in 1989, however, when the Commission began to allocate the quotas itself. It decided that they should go to the "traditional importers" and it passed a binding regulation to this effect.
This, though, was terrible news for Goodman and the other processors. Since they had never actually imported the GATT beef, they were not now legally entitled to the quotas, which would pass to Emerald Meats, depriving the processors of what had been a source of very easy money.
The processors, however, moved into action and arranged meetings with officials in the Department, after which an Agriculture official told Emerald Meats that it would not be getting the quotas and that Brussels would be told that Goodman and the others were the "traditional importers" a statement that the Department knew to be untrue.
This was a clear breach of the law. As the Supreme Court put it this week, the Department's legal obligation "was not a matter of interpreting the regulation but of applying it".
THE list of "importers" sent by the Department to Brussels was in fact, so flagrantly misleading that the EU Commission smelt a rat. Its officials checked the files and found that, the previous year, Emerald Meats had been described by the Department as the main importer of GATT meat in 1987 and 1988, but that, on this new list, it had "disappeared as an importer for 1987 and 1988". The Department was asked for an explanation.
It replied to this demand by further misleading the Commission. It now claimed that Emerald Meats was not an importer at all, but merely an agent for the meat processors. The official who sent this reply later admitted in the High Court that it was "untrue" in a number of respects. As Mr Justice Costello put it: "To conclude, as was done, that the meat processors had `imported' the meat was a travesty of the true position."
In a ruling upheld this week by the Supreme Court, he made it clear that the very highest levels of the Department had been at least passively involved in this breach of the law. He noted that "none of his colleagues in the Department" pointed out to the official who was sending the reply to Brussels that the Department knew all along that Emerald had been buying the quotas "even though those that were then serving in the Beef Division, the deputy secretary and the secretary of the Department were well aware of it".
On two separate occasions in the course of these extraordinary events, senior Department officials were in close contact with Goodman companies. One told the High Court that on January 23rd 1990 he contacted John McCarthy of Emerald and told him that Matt Doherty of Shannon Meats, part of the Goodman Group, was with him in the Department and wanted Emerald to drop its claim for a GATT licence.
A second official was in contact with Goodman headquarters. Emerald, in an effort to prove that it was the importer of the beef, had contacted the Goodman company Euroscot and got it to confirm to the Department that it had sold its quota to Emerald.
The official told the High Court that he himself then contacted Goodman headquarters in Ravensdale, Co Louth and "queried this with them". The following day, the Department received a second fax from Euroscot entirely reversing the thrust of the first, and claiming that the meat in question had been imported by another Goodman company, Silvercrest.
The Department misled the EU Commission again in September, 1990 when, having refused to grant Emerald a licence, "it failed", as Mr Justice Costello put it, "to inform the Commission of this fact, and on the contrary informed it that there were no unused allocations on August 31st."
In the High Court in 1991 Mr Justice Costello ruled that the Department not only broke EU law but that its "manifestly unfair" conduct in not even giving Emerald a chance to state its case was against the principles of Irish administrative law and that it "failed to carry out the duty the law imposed on it."
THE State, however not merely failed to institute any inquiry into this disgraceful behaviour after the devastating High Court ruling, but continued to appeal to the Supreme Court and to ask it, in turn, to refer the case to the European Court. This request was dismissed by Mr Justice Blayney this week.
The only financial effect of these appeals has been to increase the damages - never mind the massive legal bills - that the public will have to pay. The High Court awarded Emerald nearly £500,000. The Supreme Court has ruled it is entitled to as yet unspecified "general damages" as well.
The political effect, on the other hand, has been to keep the implications of the case under wraps, in the never-never land of sub judice. But now the stalling has to stop. On every single ground of appeal, the Department of Agriculture's appeal has been thrown out. What remains is the stark fact that a powerful arm of government was prepared to make a nonsense of the truth, to try to bamboozle the EU Commission, and to flout the law, merely to serve the interests of a group of meat companies.
Where are the special expert groups, the parliamentary party meetings, to consider the implications of this Supreme Court ruling?