It was no surprise but, still, it took a devastating cull of livestock to finally deliver the proof. As even the sheep in the fields could tell you, farmers have for years been systematically defrauding the State - not all of them, needless to say, but, on recent evidence, more than a third.

Granted the sums involved in the Cooley Peninsula ewe premium fraud were small in absolute terms but, if the figure was used as a basis for assessing the scale of the problem around the State and the length of time such practices have been going on, the problem is serious.

So brazen were some instances that farmers were claiming ewe premiums even when they owned no sheep at all.

For years, even people with the most limited exposure to farms were familiar with tales of livestock moved from farm to farm to satisfy Department inspectors. How strange that such a tight community as farming was unaware.

At a time when the State has been put in effective quarantine to protect one sector - agriculture - at great cost to others, especially in tourism, it seems that some within the farming community have effectively been thumbing their noses at the rest of us - ripping off the State and undermining efforts to contain foot-and-mouth with illegal movements of animals. Maybe it is they who should compensate the rest of us.