Yesterday's decision by the European Commission on the scale of the fines to be paid on foot of malfeasance in the beef industry is good news and bad. Good because the amount demanded, largely as a result of skilful advocacy by the Commissioner, Mr Flynn, is considerably less than it might have been, and may be reduced still further; bad because of a widespread public perception that there is something inherently wrong and illogical in the notion that a state - i.e. the taxpayers - should have to pay for the deliberate actions of individuals who have drawn the benefit and can evade the consequences.
Maladministration - the proximate cause of the fines has already cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds in recent years witness the Hepatitis C fiasco and the bungling over the equal treatment of women for social welfare benefits. In this case, both farmers and PAYE workers are equally convinced that the buck should not stop at them.
There could never be a good time for Irish citizens to be told by Brussels that they will have to pay huge penalties as a result of the failure of their Department of Agriculture and Food to police the activities of the beef industry. But there could hardly have been a worse time than this week. Representing as they do, a severe indictment of the Department's recent record, the penalties come precisely at a moment when trust in, the integrity of controls on Irish cattle and beef is critical to the survival of our largest indigenous export industry. The dismal record of the Department in the early 1990s, expressed in cold cash terms yesterday, does little to inspire that trust.
The public is entitled to be outraged at the idea that it should pay the cost of private greed, and to insist that every effort must be made to recover the penalties from the companies that benefitted from malpractice. But there is now an even more urgent imperative: it is to answer the question at the heart of the BSE crisis, that is, what the State should do when the interests of the public and the interests of the beef industry come into conflict.
Behind the EU penalties lies the apparent inability of the Department of Agriculture to place the public interest above the interest of beef producers. The Department knew at least from 1989 onwards, that many beef companies were abusing the intervention system. It was given, in at least one ease, detailed and specific proof of such abuse. Yet its failure to do anything with that knowledge betrays an underlying assumption on the Department's part that it should not undermine the interests, narrowly defined, of the beef producers. In Britain, a similar assumption by the state authorities, evident in the failure to take public concerns about BSE seriously enough, has brought the entire beef industry to the brink of collapse.
To avoid such a catastrophe in Ireland, it is necessary to question in the most searching way, the Department of Agriculture's dual role as promoter of the interests of food producers on the one hand and of consumers and the public in general on the other. In particular, the Government's decision last year to leave overall responsibility for the development of the food industry with the Department of Agriculture needs to be reexamined.
From bitter experience we know that charging the same people with responsibility on the one hand for keeping prices up and consumption high and on the other for protecting public health and the public purse, is a recipe for fatal ambivalence. Yesterday's penalties are a reminder of just how costly such ambivalence can be. The case for separating food from agriculture, and the interests of consumers and the public from those of producers, has never been greater or more urgent.