Ruling a small but significant victory for the public

WHEN the beef tribunal report was finally delivered in August 1994, many of those who had been most intimately involved looked first at what it had to say, not about great issues of state, but about legal costs.

For lawyers and witnesses, and for the various interests represented before the tribunal, the issue of who was going to foot the bill for the two and a half years of hearings was seldom far from their thoughts.

In the event, Mr Justice Liam Hamilton, now Chief Justice, decided to award costs to almost all the parties who had been legally represented at the tribunal.

He did so on the basis of his belief that he could not use his own findings - for example, his finding that Goodman International had engaged in systematic and large scale tax evasion - as a criterion for deciding who was entitled to have their costs paid by the Exchequer.

The only criterion, he maintained, was the actual conduct of the witnesses at the tribunal. Hem therefore awarded costs to everyone who Was lethally represented, with just one minor exception.

In the case of Goodman International and Mr Larry Goodman personally, this has created a somewhat anomalous position. On the one hand, the tribunal disclosed that the company had withheld at least £8.5 million in taxes from the Exchequer.

It showed that the company had benefited enormously from an abuse of the export credit insurance scheme. And it showed that close to £2 million worth of beef had been misappropriated from public storage by the company, of which nothing has been recovered by the State.

But in spite of this, the State will have to pay huge sums to Goodman International and Mr Goodman to defray the costs they incurred in the course of the tribunal.

Goodman claimed that its costs amounted to £9.1 million, but it is up to the taxing master of the High Court, Mr James Flynn, to decide how much of this claim is justified.

The significance of yesterday's judgment is that it effectively rules a part of this claim to be invalid. The precise amount of the reduction is impossible to calculate at the moment, but it is certainly many hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Broadly, costs fall into two categories. One is the payment of solicitors and barristers, and the consideration of that part of the Goodman claim by the taxing master will now resume, having been adjourned last November pending the outcome of the High Court case which ended yesterday.

Yesterday's ruling relates to the second category of costs - witness expenses.

This should have been a relatively straightforward matter, since Mr Justice Hamilton's order on costs made it plain that the Minister for Finance should pay "such witnesses expenses as relate to those witnesses who actually gave oral evidence before the tribunal" on behalf of Goodman International or Mr Goodman.

But in the High Court, counsel for the Minister for Finance maintained that Goodman International was trying to get money under this category to pay for support services to its witnesses - the Pat Heneghan PR company, and various firms of international economic consultants, including one Yugoslav expert who prepared a report on the deboning of carcasses.

During the tribunal, the Pat Heneghan company was employed by Goodman on what seemed to be a full time basis, briefing journalists, seeking to ensure favourable media coverage, and writing letters of complaint about journalists whose coverage was judged by the Goodman side to be unfavourable to it.

In its claim, Goodman sought to have much of this activity paid for by the taxpayer, on the basis that it represented an expense for its witnesses.

Instead, yesterday's ruling makes it clear that the public purse will have to pay out only for expenses connected to the actual giving of evidence before the tribunal.

It represents a small victory for the taxpayer, who still faces the prospect later this month of EU penalties of up to £100 million for the activities of Goodman International and other beef companies. But victories for the public of any kind, even small ones, have been so rare in this saga that each is significant.

February 10th, 1846: A meeting in west Clare is adjourned when a priest breaks down describing the state of his parish.

At the meeting in Miltown Malbay courthouse to consider employment for the people, Father Edward Barry, PP Kilmurry, "became so overpowered at the thoughts of the distress and wretchedness he had for the last month witnessed, that he lost all power of utterance and had to resume his seat in a flood of tears".

Charles Clements reports to the Relief Commissioners that, with the destruction of the potato crop, the large farmers of Co Meath are remitting the rent for patches sublet to cottiers.

The cottiers live in clusters of cabins, or clachans, and grow potatoes for their families on a strip of conacre. They are without employment from the end of the potato digging season until the start off planting.

During those winter months the farmers employ only their "bound" labourers, who are hired by the year but "do not form more than one tenth of the labouring population. Potatoes obtained from conacres afford the only means of subsistence to the labouring population generally during this season of almost total idleness, and upon the failure of this stock they will become perfectly destitute.

The Tablet explains that the common appendix to a London advertisement - "No Irish need apply" - arises less from considerations of race or religion, than from unsuitability as servants in England. It illustrates this by describing the condition of Irish labourers in English towns: often herded together in filth and ignorance, and at war with the natives.

The Nation asserts: "We will take home and employ and educate our poor exiles in good time; and drive away (please God) the tribe of English born corruptionists, who live and thrive at the expense and the ruin of a country which they despise."

Father Thomas Meagher writes to the Relief Commissioners from Cappamore, Co Limerick, suggesting land reclamation projects for the vast unemployed population of his parish. An expenditure of £12,000-£13,000 would establish 500 or 600 families in the neighbourhood of the Slieve Phelim mountains.

If the government showed "a little determination" towards the landlords - whose absolute rights of property might be infringed - 4,000 acres could be brought into cultivation "which are now only a receptacle for wild fowl".