What will happen to the guilty operators?

At about two o'clock in the morning of October 4th, 1991, 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 had the office safe opened. They spent three hours going through documents and 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), and the Goodman offices at Ardee.

What they were looking for, and what they found, was detailed evidence of the misappropriation by AIBP of beef that belonged to the European Union, including meat that was meant to be sent as food aid to the people of Russia. As a gesture of compassion and friendship, the EU had decided to donate a part of its massive beef mountain to the Russians. In the summer of 1991, therefore, the Goodman boning hall and cannery at Rathkeale was contracted to process and can 1,600 tonnes of prime quality intervention beef for export to Russia.

GOODMAN International was well paid for doing this work, the fee being £1.25 million. But that was not enough for the company. It decided to misappropriate about 10 per cent of the meat that was intended for the poor of Russia. Good beef that was supposed to be stewed and canned was siphoned off and replaced by low-quality meat from old cows and with offal.

Frozen beef hearts, some of them so old and poorly stored that they had turned green, were put into the cans to make up the weight of the misappropriated meat. AIBP took, almost literally from the mouths of hungry Russians, over 10,000 cartons of good beef worth almost £1 million. These were sold to the company's commercial customers, mostly British supermarkets, at a handsome profit to the company's sole owner, Larry Goodman.

Larry Goodman strongly denied knowing anything about this crime and insisted he would not have tolerated it if he had known about it. But someone else at a high level in AIBP clearly did know about it. In sentencing two managers of the Rathkeale plant to suspended prison terms, Mr Justice Moriarty made it clear 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 financial gain personally 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.

The minister for agriculture at the time, Ivan Yates, asked the office of the DPP to investigate the possibility of further prosecutions, but nothing ever came of this approach. Who within the company actually instigated the crime remains a mystery.

Fast forward now to last week. The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, is going to Moscow and St Petersburg for meetings with the Russian Prime Minister and other officials. They will talk, among other things, about crime and terrorism. But the main aim of the Taoiseach's trip is to boost trade between Ireland and Russia. The purpose of my visit, he tells us, is to raise the profile of Ireland as a world-class supplier of products and services in the Russian market.

He is accompanied, therefore, by a high-level business delegation. Among those invited to go is the company that misappropriated European food aid to Russia, AIBP. The Department of the Taoiseach, as it happens, expects the company's representative to be Larry Goodman himself and briefs journalists to this effect, but in fact it is Colm O'Loughlin, the AIBP chief executive, who goes on the trip.

In any other country, this would be an astonishing occurrence. The prime minister, going to visit one of the world's great powers, brings along a company that benefited from a cruel sleight of hand on its people. As a paragon of our business community, we are prepared to present them with a company that made money from their misery.

As proof of our standing as a world-class supplier of products and services in the Russian market, we send them the company that, just eight years ago, sent them green hearts instead of prime-quality steak. If this was not Ireland, we might think that this was all intended as a deliberate insult to the Russians.

But this is Ireland, and AIBP's re-emergence as an official paragon of Irish business is unremarkable. The company may have engaged in what was then, in the words of the current Attorney General, Michael McDowell, the greatest single revenue crime detected in this State.

Its malpractice over the course of many years may have contributed substantially to a £70 million fine being levied by Brussels on the compliant Irish taxpayer. The company may have persuaded an Irish government to put huge amounts of taxpayers' money at risk in its dealings with Iraq, and then supplied the Iraqis with large amounts of British beef. But that kind of carry-on, as we know, has no consequences here.

FOR hanging over all the current investigations of corruption by the Public Accounts Committee, the Flood tribunal and the Moriarty tribunal is a question that none of those bodies can answer. What will happen to the guilty men?

The tribunals can find facts and issue recommendations, but they cannot instigate prosecutions. The only sanction the PAC can apply, as its excellent chairman, Jim Mitchell, has made clear, is embarrassment. If this era of revelation discloses crimes but provokes no punishments, public cynicism will reach new depths. And all the evidence is that this is precisely what will happen.

Certainly in Goodman International's case, there have been precious few consequences. The taxpayer forked out for the EU penalties. The taxpayer forked out for the beef tribunal. The taxpayer may, if Goodman International wins a High Court case against the State, even end up paying for its Iraqi misadventures. Larry Goodman is back in control of the largest slice of the beef industry. And, as the invitation to Russia makes clear, there is not even a price in embarrassment. The State, certainly, is not too embarrassed to have his company represent us abroad.

Are we, perhaps, fooling ourselves when we imagine that the painful and painstaking revelations of corruption are part of a process of genuine change? Is the dirty linen that is washed in public merely dried, aired, put on again, and worn on State visits abroad like a quaint and colourful national costume? Did we discover the rotten green hearts only so that we can wear them on our sleeves?