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Fintan O’Toole, Meanwhile Back at the Ranch: The Politics of Irish Beef (1995)

In a 1994 essay, ‘Scenes from the Birth of a New Morality’, Fintan O’Toole argued that the twin monoliths of Irish culture, the Catholic Church and Fianna Fáil, had lost all credibility. It had just become public knowledge that Cardinal Cahal Daly had known for many years about Fr Brendan Smyth’s sexual abuse of children but had covered this up and that Bishop Eamon Casey had fathered a son:

If anything, Bishop Casey’s fall from grace looked by the beginning of this week in November 1994 like a golden memory from an innocent past. On Monday, the three big stories on Irish radio and television news were the political repercussions of the Father Brendan Smyth case; the death of a Dublin priest in a gay sauna (fortunately, two other priests were on hand to give him the last rites), and the conviction of a Galway priest for the sexual assault on a young man. What was significant was not that these events had occurred, but that they had come into the public domain.1

By a new morality O’Toole meant the replacement of blind trust in authority by expectations of accountability. The initial controversy in the Fr Brendan Smyth case centred on the fact that the Cardinal had not reported him to the police. The old presumption that the Church was somehow beyond and above the power of the State was now under direct assault. But it also emerged that the Irish State had delayed for months in extraditing Smyth to Northern Ireland where he was to stand trial for the sexual abuse of children. The Smyth affair came on top of the findings of a tribunal of inquiry (into the beef processing industry) established by the Oireachtas in May 1991. O’Toole diagnosed similar underlying pathologies in both cases:

Even in the 1990s, the church had not grasped the fact that most Irish people now find such notions of unaccountable authority intolerable. But then neither had the State, or more precisely the State’s vicar on Earth, Fianna Fáil. While Father Brendan Smyth’s long career of abusing power and trust was beginning to break the surface of discreet silence, Fianna Fáil’s use of power was also coming under scrutiny. The tribunal of inquiry into the beef processing industry was producing tangible, if complicated, evidence of a murky relationship between politics, business and the state.2

O’Toole’s seminal 1995 book Meanwhile Back at the Ranch set the template for a whole genre of books on political corruption and the lack of accountability in Irish public life. The long-running Beef Tribunal for its part set the template for subsequent investigations into payments to politicians and planning corruption. It investigated relationships between the Goodman Group of companies, Ireland’s largest beef processing company and the government led by Charles Haughey from 1987 to 1989. Meanwhile Back at the Ranch wove together evidence of murky business dealings, tax fraud and scams to defraud EU subsidies with analysis of a reckless government decision to guarantee payment to Goodman International for beef exports to Iraq.

Goodman International had an annual turnover of about £500 million during the 1980s and this accounted for about 4 per cent of Ireland’s GDP. Larry Goodman sold 1.3 million head of cattle a year, ‘one pound in every twenty generated in the country passed through this man’s hands’.3 Despite this, Goodman International paid only £80,000 corporation tax between 1986 and 1989 whilst drawing large-scale subsidies from the exchequer.4 It made cash payments to non-existent companies so that employees could be paid off the books. It also made large donations to Fianna Fáil and to other political parties.

In September 1987 Haughey’s government agreed to indemnify Goodman for the sum of $134.5 million for a beef sale deal with Iraq that depended on the Irish government providing credit insurance. On one hand the political view was that Goodman’s success was in the national interest. Beef stamped as sold outside the EU was worth £150 million per annum to the Irish economy. Yet Goodman International was simultaneously under investigation for several kinds of fraud.

In 1983 a Cork customs officer discovered South African customs stamps en route to an Irish printer that had been ordered by one of Goodman’s subsidiaries. The Department of Agriculture called in the Fraud Squad and this led to a three-year investigation of Goodman International. Much of Ireland’s beef was sold to the EU beef mountain at subsidised rates. Further EU subsidies applied to beef sold outside Europe. There was much money to be made by surreptitiously relabelling the nature, origins and destinations of produce. Investigations of two of Goodman’s plants revealed practices of over-declaring weights of shipments in order to increase the amount of export refunds from the EU, substituting ineligible trimmings and cheap cuts for the more expensive cuts declared on shipping cartons.5

For example, in 1991 a Goodman plant at Rathkeale obtained via the Department of Agriculture an EU contract to process and can 1,600 tonnes of frozen intervention beef as food aid to the Soviet Union. Some of the beef paid for by the EU was instead sold on to commercial customers. Low-grade meat, mostly frozen hearts, called ‘buffer stock’ was used to make up the weight of the cans bound for Russia. According to workers at the plant some of the beef hearts going into this enormous stew were green.6 ‘Anybody’, Larry Goodman’s counsel told the beef tribunal, ‘who thinks that the meat industry is conducted according to the same principle as the activities of Mother Teresa of Calcutta would be mistaken.’7

Much of the beef Goodman supplied to Iraq went to feed Saddam Hussein’s army, his officials and their dependents. Iraq was at war with Iran and neutral Ireland acquired a vested interest in success for Iraq.8 The transaction with Iraq was fundamentally political. The deal was represented by Hussein’s Ba’athist regime as one with the Irish state. It was in Iraq’s geopolitical interest to turn its trade with Ireland into a political deal underwritten by the Irish government. The requirement that the Irish government provide export credit insurance covering the imports accomplished this. Goodman’s contract with Iraq was for high-grade halal Irish beef that had been slaughtered no more than 100 days previously. The beef they got was often years old and invariably not halal; much of it was neither high grade nor Irish. In any case, Saddam Hussein never paid for his beef. The eventual losses covered by the Irish State were around €83 million.9

The previous government had refused to provide credit insurance for trade with Iraq partly because of the poor reputation Iraq had acquired for making payments and partly because of the Iran–Iraq war. Iraq had acquired the reputation for only servicing debts when ever-increasing amounts of credit were forthcoming. From 1983 the Department of Industry and Commerce had recommended limiting credit exposure to Iraq and in March 1987 Michael Noonan, the then Minister, submitted a memorandum to Cabinet confirming that no cover was being granted for Iraq and that this would remain the case until there was an identifiable improvement in Iraq’s repayment record.10 But within days after Fianna Fáil returned to power in 1987 this policy was reversed by Noonan’s successor Albert Reynolds, without a Cabinet decision and with no input from government officials.

Meanwhile Back at the Ranch emphasised how Fianna Fáil’s own history and that of the cattle and beef industry had long been intertwined. Fianna Fáil under de Valera had been rhetorically committed to the break-up of the cattle ranches and to the redistribution of the land to land-hungry labourers. In the post-Famine era many Irish nationalists, including John Mitchel, had equated cattle farming with land clearance. In 1687 William Petty, one of the architects of the Cromwellian plantation of Ireland, had notoriously proposed to James II that most of the Irish, one million persons in all, be transplanted to England, leaving Ireland as a thinly-populated agricultural ‘factory’. The export of livestock coincided with emigration, often using the same cattle boats. But ideological ambivalence to the ranchers could not be squared with the economic importance of the beef industry.11 Between 1932 and 1938 de Valera waged and lost an ‘economic war’ with Britain aimed at breaking Ireland’s dependence on the cattle trade:

Between the end of the economic war and the great shift in Irish political and economic policy in the early 1960s, cattle exports became a steadily more dominant fact of economic life. In 1937–8 cattle and beef exports accounted for just over half of all Irish agricultural exports. By 1960–1 they accounted for over 70 per cent. In the meantime emigration, mostly to Britain, reached levels of 50,000 a year. William Petty’s colonial vision of Ireland as a giant cattle ranch with the bulk of its population resettled in England was being realised.12

Goodman as a major political donor and economic player had access to Fianna Fáil’s inner circle. Direct access to Reynolds and other government ministers and a very forceful personality enabled Goodman to bypass the proper channels by which applications for credit insurance, subsidies and other considerations would ordinarily be processed by government departments. Reynolds was cut from the same cloth as Goodman. He owed his wealth to a chain of rural dancehalls and later moved into the meat industry, specialising in the export of pet food as distinct from beef. Reynolds had a reputation for shrewdness and competence and famously refused to read any report that was longer than a single page, which turned out to be particularly reckless in the case of the Iraq deal. He took no heed of concerns about Goodman International or about the risks of indemnifying exports to Iraq raised by officials.

The Beef Tribunal found no specific proof of political corruption. O’Toole argued that the problem was not corruption per se, but that the government had abased itself and bent the law in support of Goodman:

Over a period of five years, certain fundamentals of democratic government – accountability to parliament, the assumption that governments obey the law, the conduct of an independent foreign policy – had been set aside. The government had conducted a secret policy at odds with the stated principle of Irish neutrality, with public agreements between the government and social partners, with the constitutional requirement that the government be answerable to parliament, and, in some instances, of the law of the land. In effect, it had detached itself from the things which made democratic government democratic.13

For reasons that still remain unclear the Irish State placed the financial interests of one company above the national interest, a scenario that was arguably replayed on an immensely larger scale when in 2009 another Fianna Fáil-led government recklessly committed the Irish people to guarantee debts run up by a deeply corrupt and irresponsible banking sector.

What responses to revelations of cover-up of child abuse by the Church, of murky business deals by politicians and the State and the Northern Ireland peace process had in common according to O’Toole, was a momentum towards democracy: ‘away from all forms of private power’, whether it be the brute force of private armies, the subtle hints of senior churchmen, or the discreet intimacies of the Cabinet room. ‘A new settlement in Ireland’, he argued, would only be possible ‘if ideas like democracy, accountability, consent and trust are given real meaning.’14

It was the mishandling of the Fr Brendan Smyth affair rather than the Beef Tribunal that brought down Albert Reynolds’ government in 1994. Smith had sexually abused children in the United States, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and in Northern Ireland over four decades. In 1990 The Royal Ulster Constabulary began an investigation into his abuse of children in the North. In August 1993 nine warrants for his extradition were submitted to the Republic’s Attorney General Harry Whelehan, who Reynolds intended to appoint as president of the High Court. The Attorney General came under considerable criticism several months later for being unwilling to process the warrants. He was appointed regardless but resigned a few days later. This immediately triggered Reynolds’ resignation as Taoiseach. The Attorney General’s role in the Beef Tribunal investigations (acting for the government, O’Toole emphasised rather than in the public interest) had been to shield Reynolds from scrutiny. The Brendan Smyth affair proved the final straw for the Labour Party, Fianna Fáil’s coalition partner. Irish society was ready to be outraged at clerical child abuse and the failure of the State to prosecute it but not yet ready for the new public morality O’Toole hoped would also apply to politics and the economy.

BF

Notes

1Fintan O’Toole, ‘Scenes from the Birth of A New Morality’ in The Ex-Isle of Erin (Dublin: New Island, 1997), pp.197–235.

2Ibid., p.205.

3Fintan O’Toole, Meanwhile Back at the Ranch: The Politics of Irish Beef (London: Vintage, 1995), p.35.

4Ibid., p.93.

5Ibid., p.64.

6Ibid., p.272.

7Ibid., p.25.

8Ibid., p.49.

9Elaine A. Byrne, Political Corruption in Ireland 1922–2010 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p.125.

10See O’Toole, Meanwhile Back at the Ranch, p.68.

11Ibid., p.15.

12Ibid., p.18.

13Ibid., p.275.

14Ibid., p.206.