Last Tuesday the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, responding to public dismay at the rise in organised crime, warned the gangsters that "their day will come". He assured the public that "these people will be tracked down and brought to the courts and brought to justice", writes Fintan O'Toole.
Just three days later the Government of which Michael McDowell is a member capitulated to crime in a truly extraordinary way. In a laconic 195-word statement from the Minister for Agriculture, Joe Walsh, approved by the Cabinet, it allowed one of the most significant examples of crime, most certainly organised, uncovered in Ireland to go effectively unpunished.
The very language of this ignominious document was telling. It spoke of "irregularities in the operation of the beef intervention system during the early 1990s. The irregularities included the non-declaration of intervention beef during deboning and irregular activities during canning operations".
The "non-declaration of intervention beef" means the theft and sale of huge quantities of valuable meat. "Irregular activities during canning operations" means the theft of EU food aid to starving Russians and its replacement by rotten offal.
The determination to call a spade a manual excavation implement suggests not only that something shameful was going on but the Government knew just how shameful it was. In return for a payment of less than €3 million, the State has dropped all efforts to bring to justice those responsible for a large-scale theft that has cost the Irish taxpayer £68 million (€86.3 million). The State's legal costs will almost certainly eat up virtually all of the €3 million. Five years ago the Taoiseach told the Dáil that at that point the State's costs stood at £1 million.
All of this goes back to October 4th, 1991, when three car-loads of detectives pulled up outside the headquarters of Goodman International in Ravensdale, near Dundalk, Co Louth. They handed a copy of their search warrant to the chief executive and owner of the company, Larry Goodman. They took away about 20 files detailing operations at the company's plant in Rathkeale, Co Limerick. Over the following days, the Garda also raided the Rathkeale plant run by the Goodman company, Anglo-Irish Beef Processors (AIBP).
The investigation established facts that have been upheld by both the beef tribunal and the criminal courts. In the boning hall at Rathkeale, the company was siphoning off meat which belonged to the EU and selling it to its own commercial customers. In the cannery, 10,700 cartons of EU beef meant to be supplied as food aid to the Soviet Union were stolen. In all, the documents seized proved that EU meat worth almost £2 million had been taken over a 34-day period.
These crimes were significant in themselves, but also because they were the best documented part of a much wider scam. We know from the beef tribunal report that the practice of stealing intervention beef was widespread in the industry and 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 give the EU the minimum legal amount of meat from each carcass and to keep the rest.
Evidence from factory employees, accepted by the tribunal, suggested that of every 500 to 600 cartons of beef processed for the EU, the factories took between 20 and 40 cartons and sold them to supermarkets, keeping the money.
These scams proved extremely expensive to the public purse. In 1996 the EU Commission fined Ireland £68 million for the Department of Agriculture's failure to police the factories. Under EU law the State was obliged to get this money back from the beneficiaries of the scams. There were thus two separate imperatives: to bring those responsible for the crimes to justice and to get the public's money back.
Neither of these things has been done. Two executives at Rathkeale were found guilty of fraud, but in giving them suspended sentences Mr Justice Moriarty made it clear that they were neither the instigators nor the beneficiaries of the crime. He noted that neither of those relatively low-level employees had made the slightest personal financial gain from any of the dishonest dealings.
He also cited the evidence of the Garda superintendent who led the investigation, that higher levels of management had impressed upon the defendants and others that inappropriate practices should be implemented, and those unwilling to comply would be deemed expendable. Yet these people have never been identified or prosecuted.
And then last Friday the Government quietly dropped the whole notion of recovering the proceeds of these crimes for the taxpayer. We have a Criminal Assets Bureau specifically established to seize the proceeds of crime even when no criminal prosecution is possible. Why was it not used in this case?
Could it be because, as Mary Harney told the Dáil in 1994 in relation to this very matter, "not a single person in this country believes that even though [THE STATE] uncovered evidence of significant fraud somebody will carry the can"? The disbelievers, as the Tánaiste must have known when she endorsed this shameful decision last week, were right.