A cabinet decision is virtually ignored. Officials who alter public documents are promoted. People who take property that doesn't belong to them are allowed to keep it. Vast amounts of public money disappear into the ether.

This must be happening, surely, in some wild little statelet emerging from the ruins of communism. Or in Sicily, perhaps, or some banana republic in Latin America? Actually, it is in the Department of Agriculture and Food in Dublin.

On Tuesday, while listening to evidence from its secretary-general, John Malone, the chairman of the Dail Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Jim Mitchell TD, remarked that if the Department were in charge of the introduction of the euro or preparations for the millennium "the world would stop".

So extraordinary is the accumulating evidence of the state of the Department that the PAC agreed to ask the Department of Finance to initiate a "forensic audit" of its operations. If the Department were a private company, Jim Mitchell said, "a High Court inspector would already have been sent in". He also felt it necessary to warn the Department of Agriculture that the PAC "will take no more nonsense, fudging or prevarication".

What can have prompted such outrage against one of the major arms of the State? There is, for a start, evidence that extraordinary behaviour by officials is not regarded within the Department as a barrier to a brilliant career. On at least three occasions in the last decade, officials of the Department have been involved in the creation of false documents or the alteration of proper ones. It seems from the hearing of the PAC on Tuesday that all these officials have since been promoted or recommended for promotion.

The cases are:

The official who admitted at the beef tribunal that he had altered a document written by CBF, the meat and livestock board, for the information of a government minister by removing references to the fact that intervention beef was being improperly sold to Iraq. At the time, this official, Joseph Shortall, was an assistant principal officer. He is now the principal officer in charge of, among other things, the Department's information section.

The official at the AIBP (Goodman) plant in Rathkeale, Co Limerick, who admitted that he had regularly forged the signature of another man on official EU documents. The secretary-general of the Department, John Malone, accepted on Tuesday that "there is no denying that an official of the Department inserted the name of another individual on intervention forms."

These documents were crucial because two managers at the plant subsequently pleaded guilty to the theft of large amounts of EU beef. Desmond O'Malley told the PAC on Tuesday that he had asked what happened to this man, Denis Carroll, and another official who he said had been involved in the same activity at the plant. "I inquired where were the two officials who carried out this activity and was informed that both had been promoted."

Pat Rabbitte TD asked Mr Malone about the official in his Department who, in a case involving Emerald Meats which has cost the taxpayer about £2 million, sent a "document to Brussels knowing it to be incorrect". It seems from his answers that the official in question, Danny Carroll, was given a bonus payment and has been recommended for promotion to assistant secretary:

Q: Is he contemplated for promotion?

A: The system for promotion from principal officer to assistant secretary is the TLAC system.

Q: Has he been recommended to TLAC for promotion to assistant secretary?

A: He was interviewed by TLAC about a year ago.

Q: Did he get a bonus for all of this?

A: He did.

Mr O'Malley interjected to suggest that the bonus in question was £3,000, a suggestion from which the secretary-general did not demur. Nor, it seems, does the Department think it necessary to be entirely frank in what it tells the EU Commission about the way it deals with errant officials.

At Tuesday's meeting, Pat Rabbitte produced a document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by his colleague Eamon Gilmore TD. It shows, disturbingly, that as recently as last April the Department was corresponding with the Commission about an EU investigation of how British beef was "laundered" through the Goodman plant in Nenagh, Co Tipperary, and exported to the Netherlands in defiance of BSE controls.

As a result of this investigation, according to the document sent by the Department to Brussels, "the Department has initiated disciplinary action against the two senior Department officers at the plant in question."

The Commission can only have understood from this document, dated April 20th, 1998, that disciplinary action had already been initiated. Yet on Tuesday Mr Malone, in response to repeated questions, could say only that "the question of disciplinary action is being examined". In other words, nine months after telling Brussels that two senior officials were being disciplined the Department has still not done so.

What, though, is the Government doing about all this? In theory, quite a lot. In March 1996 the rainbow cabinet took a radical decision to take responsibility for the operation of EU agricultural schemes (called, in the jargon, FEOGA) away from the Department and to set up an independent agency to handle them.

The new body would be "an operationally autonomous executive unit . . . reporting to a director recruited by open competition". This director would, in turn, report directly to the PAC. This was democracy in action, an elected government acting to protect the public interest. Except that the Department of Agriculture simply sat on the Cabinet's decision.

It might be supposed that the failure to implement this democratic decision resulted from the change of government later in 1996. On the contrary, however, the Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrats Programme for Government lists as its first "key priority" in agriculture "the establishment of an independent agency to administer FEOGA". Yet, almost three years after the Cabinet decision, nothing has been done.

On Tuesday Mr Malone insisted to the PAC that "we do not ignore Government decisions". He explained the complete lack of action to implement the Cabinet decision by the fact that the Department was too busy setting up the Food Safety Authority and transferring some functions to new offices in Wexford. He added that "the intention is that the Minister will submit a memorandum to Government over the next few weeks".

Pat Rabbitte asked Mr Malone whether that same Cabinet decision of March 1996 made any reference to "recoverability", the question of getting back from the beef processors money which they took from the EU and which the Irish taxpayer ended up having to pay for.

The secretary-general's reply was: "Not as far as I am aware."

Mr Rabbitte, who was at that Cabinet meeting, then produced his own notes of the decision which included a stipulation that the Minister for Agriculture must "report to the Government periodically on the progress of recoveries from irregularities in the meat industry".

Mr Malone then accepted that his suggestion that there was no such requirement was "an error on my part". The fact, however, that the secretary-general of the Department could not recall a specific Government decision in relation to the recovery of money unlawfully taken from the taxpayer by wealthy beef barons was in itself remarkable evidence of how seriously the Department seems to have taken the whole matter. For, in the 4 1/2 years since the beef tribunal reported on systematic misappropriation of EU beef by Irish companies, almost nothing has been done to recover the money.

The largest scam engaged in by Irish beef companies like Goodman International (trading as AIBP) and others was the misappropriation of EU intervention beef. This meat had been bought and paid for by the EU, and the processors were hired to cut it up and prepare it for storage. Their contract with the EU (represented by the Department of Agriculture) required them to put into intervention storage at least 68 per cent of the weight of each carcass.

Instead, they treated this 68 per cent figure, not as a minimum but as a maximum. They took prime cuts from the EU's beef, sold them to their own commercial customers and made up the 68 per cent figure by leaving more fat on the meat than was legally allowable.

In July 1994 the beef tribunal reported that "there is no doubt whatsoever but that it was the deliberate practice and policy of the management of AIBP in the State engaged in intervention operations" to make sure that no more than 68 per cent of the weight of each carcass was handed over to the EU and to keep the rest.

This remaining meat was, as a matter of Goodman company policy, sold to supermarkets like Tesco. Vast amounts of EU property were siphoned off in this way. Evidence from factory employees, accepted by the tribunal, suggested that of every 500 to 600 cartons of beef being processed for the EU, the factories took between 20 and 40 cartons and sold them to supermarkets, keeping the money for themselves.

By far the biggest personal beneficiary of this practice was Larry Goodman, who owned 98 per cent of the shares in Goodman International until the group went into examinership in 1991.

From at least 1989 the Department of Agriculture knew this was going on because diligent officials (a large majority, it is worth remembering, of the public servants involved) explicitly raised the issue both within the Department and with the beef companies. But nothing was done to recover the money.

The Department's duty, especially after the beef tribunal report, was crystal clear. The relevant law is EU Commission regulation 729/70. It imposes on the State as a whole a legal obligation to "recover sums lost as a result of irregularities" from the people who carried out the scams in the first place. Furthermore, the State has to go to the Commission and inform it of the "judicial procedures" it has followed to get the money back. In other words, the Department was legally obliged to take Goodman and the other companies to court as soon as the beef tribunal report was published.

It still has not done so, and its extraordinary reluctance to apply the law to Mr Goodman and other beef barons resulted in the Irish taxpayer having to foot the bill of £70 million which Brussels presented for the frauds in the operation of the intervention scheme.

And this is merely the starkest of several such failures over the last decade. The Comptroller and Auditor General told the PAC that the Department of Agriculture had managed to lose an astonishing £400 million on the operation of EU intervention schemes in the 1990s.

If Jim Mitchell is serious in his insistence that enough is enough - and he seems to be - the public may finally discover why so much of its money has found its way into the pockets of a few private individuals and why the Department of Agriculture has done so little about it.

A 12-page statement issued yesterday by Heneghan public relations consultants on behalf of AIBP took issue with several comments in recent days by Desmond O'Malley and Fintan O'Toole, describing them as "untrue", "misleading" and "incorrect". A spokesman said AIBP welcomed the forensic audit requested by Jim Mitchell "as this will hopefully ensure that full clarification is available to the public".