DOES it ever occur to Ivan Yates, John Donnelly and the farming lobby to wonder why so many people are so sceptical of their attempts to persuade them to shed bitter tears over the problems of the beef industry?
On Tuesday, for instance, it was announced that the European Union is to cut export refunds - the subsidies it pays for the export of beef to countries outside the Union - by 10 per cent. Ivan Yates issued a statement condemning the cut, and the Taoiseach raised the matter personally with Jacques Santer. The Irish Farmers' Association told us that it was "a stab in the back". A spokesman for the meat factories told us that it was "a catastrophe". Yet somehow the public at large finds it hard to work up a great sense of outrage. And it may be that the public at large is not altogether wrong.
On the same day that all of the rhetoric about perfidious Brussels was issuing forth, the secretary of the Department of Agriculture was answering questions about the 1995 report of the Comptroller and Auditor General before the Public Accounts Committee of the Dail. And as it happens, one of the issues that is highlighted in that report is export refunds. More precisely, it is the fact that, yet again, Irish taxpayers (a body in which farmers and beef barons are not overly prominent) have been forced to fork out for the scandalous way that the export refund system has been mismanaged. This time the bill is £2.29 million.
As with most of these subsidy schemes, the issue is not a real product (in this case, beef) but documents. Brussels pays the money on the production of documents proving that the beef has in fact been imported for home consumption by the relevant country (in this case, our old friend Iraq.) But before Brussels pays out the money, our own Department of Agriculture does so. It then has to get the money back from the EU.
To protect the Irish taxpayer in the meantime, a company claiming export refunds is required to lodge securities with the Department of Agriculture. These securities should not be released until the Department is satisfied that everything is in order. And this is where the problem arises: Brussels does not accept that there is proper proof that the beef for which these export refunds were paid was in fact imported into Iraq.
This is a rather extraordinary revelation in itself, considering that almost a decade ago Albert Reynolds and later Ray Burke were issuing export credits and guarantees for the export of this beef, risking vast sums of Irish taxpayers' money. But it also means that money that could have been used, for instance, to refurbish a few rat infested primary schools has instead ended up in the pockets of a few already wealthy beef barons.
THE proofs that are generally required by Brussels are, in normal circumstances, customs documents from the country that imported the beef. In some circumstances the Department of Agriculture may be allowed to accept secondary proof documents. The Department in this case accepted certificates issued by an agency in Paris called Bureau Veritas. The Department's secretary, Michael Dowling, told the PAC (in reply to questions from Des O'Malley) that a "substantial proportion" of all the beef sent to Iraq was certified by Bureau Veritas. "We had," he said, "no reason to doubt the accuracy of the proofs and had no reason to investigate Bureau Veritas in Paris."
But there was, in fact, every reason to doubt the accuracy of certificates issued by Bureau Veritas. This company's dealings with the export of Irish beef to Iraq were through its wholly owned subsidiary, Le Controle Technique (LCT). And LCT was at this time issuing some very dodgy documents. LCT's certificates were, in fact, worthless. In his report, Mr Justice (now Chief Justice) Hamilton concluded that "No reliance whatsoever can be placed on the certificates issued by LCT or the facts contained therein."
And the Department of Agriculture must have known all along that Bureau Veritas's certificates for Irish beef going to Iraq were, at best, dubious, since LCT was certifying that the beef was fresh, Halal slaughtered beef, while the Department of Agriculture knew that most of it was in fact intervention beef which could not be certified as Halal. The Department knew this because it was itself at one and the same time selling the intervention beef to Goodman International and Hibernia Meats and paying them the export refunds when that same beef was exported to Iraq.
And if it knew that there was something dodgy about the certificates being issued by LCT, why did it place so much reliance on certificates issued by LCT's owners, Bureau Veritas, that it was willing to back them with large amounts of money from the Irish exchequer? It was not obliged to accept these documents. It could have sought binding guarantees from Bureau Veritas. It could have held on to the securities lodged by the beef companies until it was sure that Brussels was satisfied with the proofs. But that, presumably, would have been "a stab in the back" and a "catastrophe".
Predictably enough, the EU Commission was not impressed with Bureau Veritas's proofs that the beef had been imported into Iraq, and docked £2.29 million from its payments to the Irish exchequer. This money was taken directly from Ruairi Quinn's Budget for 1995, and no attempt has been made to get it back from the companies that actually exported the beef.
The Department of Agriculture sought legal advice from the Attorney General's office as to whether the EU's action should be challenged in the European Court of Justice, and was told that it would not have a good case. It also asked whether it could take the exporters to court and was told that since the fault lay with the Department for accepting the documents in the first place, there would be no point in doing this either.
All of this is, by now, routine stuff, just one more instance of the taxpayer picking up the bill for the indulgences of the beef business. Nurses, looking for what Michael Noonan alleges is £150 million in pay rises, are greedy and irresponsible. But we could have paid the nurses twice that sum from the amount the exchequer has lost in recent years because of the behaviour of the beef industry and the Department of Agriculture's apparent belief that its primary function is to be that industry's defender and protector.
Why is it a national catastrophe when farmers lose money over beef exports, but not when the rest of us, through no fault of our own, do so? Why does one situation call for immediate action by the Taoiseach and the Minister for Agriculture while the other provokes shrugs, excuses and vague suggestions that it must all be the fault of the bureaucrats in Brussels? And why has the IFA so little to say about the damage to our beef exports that is done in the name of protecting farmers' incomes? A little more outrage on the IFA's part over the abuse of taxpayers might encourage a little more sympathy on the part of taxpayers over the plight of beef farmers.