The disease affects the foot and the mouth, but its underlying causes can be found in the eye and the ear. For years, blind eyes have been turned to corruption in the meat industry, deaf ears to the warnings of possible catastrophe.
If you court disaster so assiduously, is it so surprising that one day it will rush into your arms? If you run the country's most important indigenous industry on nods and winks, collusion and complacency, you end up with just one administrative device left: the power of prayer.
The roots go deep. Almost as soon as the Border was drawn, there were those who cried into their beer about the injustice of partition while exploiting it as a god-sent opportunity for profit.
The general attitude was summed up by the man who later became, as Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich, the nation's leading moral arbiter in his ballad The Boys of Crossmaglen, celebrating the smugglers of south Armagh. It concluded: "For there's not a cop could ever stop the Boys of Crossmaglen."
With Ireland's entry into the EEC these attitudes were turbocharged. The opportunities for frauds blossomed. Intervention, aids to private storage, headage payments, export refunds, and currency supports created a culture in which the industry's main product was not meat but documents.
The Border became a merrygo-round, with animals dizzily spinning back and forth. And every time they passed "Go", someone collected a few hundred pounds.
In the Republic's meat factories, the manager who did not sanction frauds was regarded as a fool, and the veterinary inspector who tried to enforce the law was seen as a crank.
Stealing intervention beef, claiming subsidies for ineligible products, paying under the counter, using false names, forging documents, these were merely the tricks of the trade. Inspectors were threatened or bribed. Some gave in and colluded. Those who withstood the pressure had to be brave.
Many farmers, some processors and most public officials remained honest. In a way, though, it is quite right to suggest, as the Minister for Agriculture did this week, that "a small number of people had proved again and again that they were prepared to flout the system".
As the Minister for Agriculture who received the report of the beef tribunal in 1994 he should know better than most that this is true only in the most ironic sense. The "system" has been one of endemic corruption.
The most obvious sign of how deep the rot has gone went up just a year ago, with the conviction of Colm Fox. As the superintending veterinary inspector for Co Louth, he was in charge of policing the status of animals on the Border between south Armagh and the Republic.
Yet, at the height of the British BSE crisis, he was taking bribes from "a Dundalk man" for supplying stamped international animal transport certificates and ear-tags used to export British cattle from Greenore port as if they were Irish.
Fox was sent to jail for just six months. Joe Walsh, who on Thursday accused some sections of the media of being "treasonous" for playing up the foot-and-mouth crisis, never used such a term about Fox or about the myriad frauds disclosed in the beef tribunal report.
Evidence that the man supposed to be enforcing regulations along the Border was in fact colluding in their evasion might have acted as a long overdue wake-up call. The BSE crisis was continuing. And in spite of the Department of Agriculture's insistence that this outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease was "a bolt from the blue", the prospect of just such a disaster was in fact a live one.
As recently as April 1999, the Department warned there was a serious outbreak of the disease in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria and that Irish people returning from holidays there might have to have their clothing and footwear disinfected and should not bring back food products. Yet, if the risk was so real in 1999, it seems astonishing that no contingency plans were put in place.
In 1998 an RTE report showed thousands of Northern Ireland animals being slaughtered at a processing plant in the Republic as part of a VAT fraud. This week Joe Walsh indignantly denied claims that he and his Department had done nothing about this. They had, in fact, "formally raised it with the Revenue Commissioners".
So all that happened was the Revenue recovered £300,000 in VAT rebates. No one was prosecuted. And the fraud continued, with an estimated half-million lambs brought across the Border every year.
Thousands of animals arrived at processing plants every day with holes in their ears where UK tags had been. Dozens of trucks sped off to France loaded with UK meat now certified as Irish. Thousands of cheques in the names of farmers who were not the actual owners of the sheep were cashed in main street banks. But no one saw anything.
With such wilful blindness and the knowledge that even if you were caught you would merely have to repay the money you got from the fraud, there was no reason to fear the law.
And even if it all ended in tears and scandal, what would happen? There would be a tribunal of inquiry. After many years and millions of pounds, it would produce a report detailing numerous frauds, with names, dates, and sums of money.
Joe Walsh would utter a few low-key rueful remarks and promise administrative changes. There would be no prosecutions. When the EU came looking for its money back, the taxpayer, and not the people who benefited from the frauds, would generously cough up. The same people would remain in charge of the industry.
The innocent majority, as ever, will pay the price.
fotoole@irish-times.ie