EARLIER this week a man in a long black coat spent the day in Maynooth mart trying to buy calves for a knockdown price of £70 to put on a truck and bring to a beef factory for immediate destruction under an EU scheme.
In the west of Ireland, farmers were frantically looking for a plot of dry earth to bury dead sheep and cattle because for the past four weeks the collection service has not been available.
In Egypt, one of Ireland's best known cattle exporters concluded a deal for a boatload of cattle which he had shipped, not from Ireland, but from Australia, because the Egyptians will not buy cattle from Ireland.
During the week too, Irish consumers buying the Sunday joint were paying 15 per cent less than they did this time last year and were getting guarantees on its purity.
All these happenings are linked to one event, the announcement on March 20th last year in the British House of Commons of a possible link between BSE in cows and a new variant of CJD in humans.
The fall out from that announcement affected the European beef industry in the same manner as the collapse of the Wall Street stock markets affected business in the United States.
The impact on Ireland's beef industry, which produces the EU's surplus beef, was immediate. Markets which had been growing steadily over the years were closed and Ireland found its industry tarnished with the BSE brush.
Thousands of Irish cattle were stranded on boats off the Egyptian coast and major overseas customers, especially in Britain, cancelled orders for Irish beef.
At the marts and in the factories prices fell dramatically from above £1 per lb to under 80p, while in continental Europe, where a taste for grass produced Irish beef had been developing, consumers demanded their own national product.
To protect the Republic's remaining markets, the Government ordered a sealing of the Border to prevent cattle from Northern Ireland and Britain, banned from the markets of the world, being smuggled south.
Ireland looked to the EU for help as the UK began slaughtering cattle over 30 months old. But the British refusal to slaughter the number of dairy cows specified by the EU caused a major political storm.
When the crisis broke last March, Ireland had recorded only 118 cases of what has come to be known as "mad cow disease" since 1989. There were never more than 19 cases of BSE in any of the intervening years.
But as the months progressed, Ireland's BSE figures began to climb. By the end of the year the BSE total for 1996 had reached 74, nearly four times higher than in any previous year.
The consequences of this unprecedented increase led in the autumn of 1996 to the Russian authorities placing a ban on the import of beef from three Irish counties, Cork, Tipperary and Monaghan.
By the end of the year this ban had been extended to cover five more counties, Limerick, Cavan, Wexford, Meath and Donegal.
Beef market prices might have collapsed altogether in 1996 had it not been for the live cattle trade, which had resumed in the summer when Egypt lifted its ban on imports.
But as the BSE totals climbed, Egypt stopped taking live cattle. Thereafter, all animals had to be processed by factories for overseas markets or EU intervention, which had been reintroduced after an absence of three years.
One year into the BSE crisis, curious facts are beginning to emerge and the beef industry is far from destroyed.
For instance, Irish beef factories slaughtered more bullocks last year than they ever processed before. And while the ban on eight Irish counties by the Russians has caused administrative difficulties, factories are busily filling contracts for 120,000 tonnes of beef, the equivalent of 360,000 animals.
In 1996 the factories slaughtered over 1.5 million animals, a 10.7 per cent increase on the previous year. Since the beginning of this year, slaughterings have been running at 14 per cent over 1996 figures.
While the UK beef market, which was worth over £100 million last year, dropped by 8 per cent on 1995 figures and the continental EU market by 12 per cent, international markets increased by 10 per cent.
Domestic consumption fell over the year by only 1 per cent and the remainder of the market was made up by the reopening of EU intervention coldrooms.
Those who predicted that farm income would decrease by 15 per cent got it wrong too at the end of the year, it had dropped by 7.5 per cent.
There is no doubt that the hardest hit sector has been livestock, but over the year £70 million in EU compensation was provided and a further £31 million is due, not to mention a further £20 million in compensation for the revaluation of the Irish green pound.
There may be more good news in this election year as the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Yates, has said he will ask the Cabinet to provide additional national funding to compensate farmers for loss of income.
On a wider front, for the first time in the history of the State, the importance of the consumer is being recognised. The Food Safety, Authority of Ireland was set up as a statutory group under the aegis of the Department of Health.
Last week, a consumer liaison group, set up to convey views on health and safety directly to the Department of Agriculture, met for the first time.
However, it would be wrong to suggest that the crisis is over. Experts say it may be another two years before stability returns to the market.
And despite the introduction of strict new controls on meat and bonemeal products, which effectively remove all meat and bonemeal from any source from cattle feed, there have been 19 cases of BSE in the first two months of the year.
There is also a fear that farmers may have held back cattle from last year and that this autumn could see the collapse in market prices predicted this time last year.
The recent drop in the price farmers are being paid for milk will not help either, and will render Irish farming less robust in the face of the challenges the coming year will undoubtedly bring.