Bolting the stable doors in Ireland - laughing at the horse meat scandal while the food industry suffers

Horse meat controversy continues in Europe

Don't you love the way the Irish laugh in the face of adversity? Whatever the problem is, you can count on us to turn it into a joke. And let's face it, this horse meat scandal was just made for it ... it's all over Facebook and Twitter here.

There are the ones that give advice on ordering in an Irish restaurant: "I'll start with some horse d'oeuvres before I go on to the mane course."

There are the obvious ones: "So that's what happened to Shegar!" "I just checked the burgers in the freezer -- and they're off!" "It’s tough working on the meat counter in Tesco these days - I feel like I’m flogging a dead horse." "My brother ate two burgers yesterday and ended up in hospital - but it's OK, he's stable!"


There are the clever ones like "A horse walks into a bar. The barman says sorry mate, we don't serve food in here."

There are the risque ones about Irish Viagra and Italian Stallions ... and worse.

But my own personal favourite was the following: "Enough about the burgers, check out Tesco’s meatballs - they’re the dog’s bollocks!"

You can laugh, but the way things are going here, no one would be too surprised if dog meat traces did turn up somewhere in a burger. It's meat, right? And it's not like it's rat.

It's easier for us to laugh these days, of course, because what started out as a major embarrassment and potential catastrophe for Ireland a few weeks ago has now been exposed as a Europe wide problem. It's not just us, it's everyone else as well. Horse meat has been found in "beef' products across the continent, in frozen burgers and various supermarket ready-meals like spaghetti with bolognaise (boloneighs?) sauce and lasagne. All forms of frozen dinners and processed meat items are being tested. In Britain they have found horse meat in school dinners, hospital food and prison meals.

Some of the biggest brand names in the food business in Europe have been implicated, although all of them are saying they did not realise that the meat they were putting in their "beef" products had been adulterated with horse meat by the suppliers somewhere further back in the food supply chain.

In one way, the spread of the scandal across Europe is good for us here in Ireland. It shows that although the problem was first revealed in Ireland when testing here revealed that frozen beef burger patties made in an Irish meat factory contained some horse meat, the problem is not solely an Irish one. It's just that it was found here first, mainly because as a beef producing country we have more rigorous testing than anywhere else in Europe.

It was, of course, extremely damaging, delivering a serious blow to our international reputation as one of the leading quality food producing countries in the world. And the damage will not be repaired easily. The initial publicity went global, not least because the Irish meat plant where the problem was first uncovered was huge, producing millions of these frozen burger patties for big supermarket chains here and in Britain.

The patties were supposed to be 100 per cent Irish beef. The ones that ended up in the chilled cabinet in British supermarkets proudly said so on the packs. Since they were coming from Ireland, British consumers would have bought the burgers presuming the beef was from Irish cattle grazing on grass in the lush Irish countryside.

That is the image we trade on, the most natural beef in the world, raised on the best grass. We're well known for horses as well, of course, but not in the burgers!

The crisis started in the middle of January when the tests at the plant in Ireland showed up traces of horse meat in some burgers, with one burger tested turning out to be almost one third horse meat. The Irish Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney immediately released the information, claiming that we were completely transparent.

It was a huge shock. At risk immediately was our beef industry, because we export around 90 per cent of the beef and it's worth over a billion euro a year to the Irish economy. So what might be an embarrassment for some other country was a potential catastrophe for us.

The Minister pointed out that testing in Ireland was much more rigorous than anywhere else and that might be one reason why the problem emerged here first. He also said he was determined to get the complete truth on what was going on.

Very quickly, as other countries in Europe began testing, it emerged that there were "beef" products (mainly ready meals containing minced "beef") being sold in several countries which contained horse meat.

But what was really interesting was the exposure of the complexity of the meat business and food manufacturing business in Europe, involving meat suppliers and traders who moved meat across the continent, sometimes meat that was frozen for months or far longer. And what was even more interesting was the reality behind those lovely pictures that were on the "beef" burger packs and lasagnes in the supermarket chiller cabinets.

We've all heard about mechanically recovered meat, the stuff that comes out of those suction machines that extract every last sinew and speck of flesh off bones and parts of the cow you don't even want to think about. All that goes into dog food, right? Maybe. Maybe not.

But new to most of us were the revelations about the frozen blocks of meat trimmings -- big boxes of all the bits of meat, fat, gristle etc that are discarded in butchery plants when the standard cuts of meat are being produced. These trimmings are frozen in big blocks and then sold to meat traders who sell them on to plants making burgers, ready meals, and other minced meat products, as a cheap way of bulking up meat content. They are traded like a commodity and the traders involved often never actually see the meat they are buying and selling.

What we now know is that these frozen blocks of trimmings often come from Eastern Europe, and are sold on by traders in other countries, sometimes after being held in cold stores for months. They can end up, for example, being used by a French company making lasagne or bolognaise sauce, or by an Irish company making burgers, and then end up in these products on supermarket shelves in Britain, or Ireland or other European countries.

That is what has happened. And the problem is that a significant amount of this stuff was not just beef trimmings, but horse meat. Beef trimmings are cheap. But even cheaper is horse meat. The Irish plant where the problem first emerged -- where the frozen burgers were supposed to be 100 per cent Irish beef -- has now accepted that maybe 10 per cent of what was going into the burgers was imported meat.

Which begs the question: Why is Ireland, probably the country in the world best suited to producing beef thanks to all the rain and the green grass, importing "beef" to put into frozen burgers? Profit, that's why.

Imported trimmings and horse meat are a fraction of the cost of natural Irish beef, which is a quality food.
It was a real eye opener for people here, not just for our customers in Britain and elsewhere. Suddenly everyone could see the reason why the frozen burgers in the supermarket chillers were one third the price of fresh burgers in Irish butcher shops. The reason is you can't be sure what's in them and a lot of them are garbage. Seduced by the pictures of juicy burgers on the packs, people had forgotten that you get what you pay for.

It was a shock. And people have reacted sharply. By last week sales of frozen meat products in Ireland had fallen by 44 per cent. People were going back to their small local butcher shops, where you can see the beef being minced if you want. Or you can buy a nice piece of steak and fry it up or slice it and make a stew.
We now know that the meat that caused this problem came from Eastern Europe, from Poland, from Romania and maybe from other countries over there where agriculture is like Ireland used to be in the 1950s. There are millions of horses over there, many still used for farm work. When they they get too old to work or they get sick, they are slaughtered. And they end up in the food chain.

The complex paperwork involved in traceability that is now routine in Ireland and in countries on the western side of Europe is all new to Eastern Europe. It's not really enforced properly, even though these countries are now part of the European Union. The poverty in rural areas means that corners are cut and rules are unknown or ignored.

It's ironic that the EU, which has probably the strictest food rules on the planet and drives farmers demented with all its form filling, has been asleep on the job while horse meat was being passed off as beef right across the continent. They still would not know what was going on if the Irish testing system was not so good.

One thing that may interest American readers is that it has also emerged that the horse meat detected in "beef" products here was not just coming from Eastern Europe. Some of it was coming from Mexico and, unexpectedly, from Canada. Now it's a long way from Mexico to here to be transporting cheap horse meat. So where is there a huge market where they love beef and burgers that is a lot closer to Mexico than Europe?

You got it in one.

Truth behind the debt deal with the European Central Bank on Anglo Irish

Finance Minister Michael Noonan and Minister for 
Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin at a press conference last Thursday 

What a week!  You will have read about the dramatic events in Ireland last week, culminating in a deal with the European Central Bank that the government claims is a significant victory in our battle to get some of the massive debt burden we carry lifted off the nation's shoulders. 

The deal means that our borrowing will be cut by €20 billion, the headlines said.  

The hated annual €3 billion promissory note payments over 10 years are being replaced by a much longer 25 to 40 year repayment schedule which will significantly lessen the amount we have to repay every year.  That is a big relief because these promissory notes were a noose around our necks. 

Last year the government did a financial three card trick by taking the money from one of the banks here to make the payment. But that has to be replaced this year, so as well as the €3 billion payment for 2013 due at the end of March we were also facing last year's €3 billion payment a couple of months later.  

That adds up to an incredible €6 billion we were supposed to cough up on the promissory note debt in 2013.  Our total deficit this year will be around €13 billion, which gives you some idea of the scale of this.

It simply was not possible which is why, as the March deadline drew near, the government was getting frantic in its negotiations with the ECB to find a way out.

Of course, these promissory notes are only around half of our total bank debt.  But they were the immediate problem and they were so huge that there was no way we could pay them.  

So it's worth remembering where they came from -- Anglo Irish Bank and the Irish Nationwide Building Society, the two small rogue banks that played lead roles in the toxic boom and bust that crippled Ireland. 

The drama last week included a late night sitting of the Dail (Parliament) to rush through legislation to liquidate what was left of Anglo and Nationwide.   No one is sorry to see them finally removed from the financial landscape here.  

They were already in wind-down mode and it's good they are gone for good.  But they have left a poisonous legacy in their wake, the bad debts of €30 billion, which the last government covered by issuing the promissory notes. 

It's incredible to think that these two small institutions are responsible for around half of the total mountain of bank debts here, including those in the two main banks, the much bigger Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks.  

That the regulator allowed these minnows to swim so far out of control is a disgrace, but that is what happened.  They achieved their infamy by a record of reckless lending to fuel the property boom that was not just outrageous, but stupid.

The money they were lending out was, of course, all borrowed from European banks and the money market players who piled in here in search of the higher returns that were on offer.  They all wanted a slice of the boom in Ireland.

When it all started to go belly-up in 2008, the then minister for finance stepped in with the blanket state guarantee for the Irish banks.  The Irish banks were the first in Europe to go broke as the crisis as developed across the continent. 

Terrified of what any default by Irish banks would do to confidence in the financial sector across Europe, the EU put the muscle on the Irish government to shore up our banks here. 

We were told initially that it was a temporary liquidity problem, that the Irish banks were solvent and that the state would only have to put in a few billion to keep the show on the road until the banks could sort out their problems.  

Little did we know. 

The "temporary" crisis turned into a catastrophe for the Irish economy and the Irish taxpayer who was left holding the can as billions and billions were poured into the banks.   Within a year or so, the depth of the €30 billion hole in Anglo and Nationwide was being exposed.  

Now part of the state guarantee, the government had to find a way of paying back their bondholders and lender banks in Europe.  

The two banks were bust, but we had guaranteed their debts and default was not an option we were told, because of the EU policy of avoiding any bank collapse. 

So the government wrote a series of promissory notes or IOUs to pay the Anglo and Nationwide debts.  These were then cashed by the administrators of the two closed banks, and the money used to pay back all the bondholders and European banks.  That's where the €30 billion in promissory notes came from.  

What should have happened, of course, is that the debtors of the two defunct banks should have been told, tough, your money is gone.  You took a gamble on the Irish property boom and you lost.

But instead of that, all the Anglo/Nationwide bondholders and European banks got all their money back.  (Among the last repayments is €750 million that will be going to one of the big German banks this year.) 

They have all got their money back and the debt, like the debts of all the Irish banks, has been transferred on to the Irish taxpayer. We will be paying it off for decades. 

This scandal has been copper-fastened by what happened last week.   Although the promissory notes were a quasi government backed financial instrument, they were not the same thing as sovereign debt.  

Promissory notes are not traded like government bonds.  So there was still the possibility that they could have been renegotiated. 

That possibility is now gone because of last week's deal which has turned them into sovereign debt. 

Of course the same thing could be said about the overall Irish bank debt, which eventually resulted in our collapse and us having to get an IMF/EU bailout.  

We could have insisted that we get significant debt reduction, not just on these promissory notes but on our bank debt in general.  After all, we only got into this mess because we went along with the ECB/EU policy that bank default had to be avoided at all costs. 

We paid all the banks and bondholders and everyone else back to keep the European financial system stable.  The ECB owes us big time.

Instead of that, the Irish government has insisted that there can be no write down on our debts because of ECB rules.   Under these rules, sovereign debt cannot be written down by the ECB because they say that is "monetary financing" (Europe printing money to give to a government).   

This is legalistic drivel.   It suits the ECB to take this stance at present, but you can be sure they will change it if the banks in a big economy like Spain looks like they are going to collapse the country.   

And what about Greece?   There have been huge write downs in the debts of Greek banks.  

The ECB says that is different because this was "private" debt -- a lot of the money was owed directly by Greek banks to French banks.  But our debt -- including the Anglo and Nationwide €30bn -- was "private" debt until we were forced to turn it into sovereign debt! 

As I said, it's all legalistic drivel dreamt up by bankers and lawyers on big salaries. 

To make all this worse, it has now emerged that the saving resulting from last week's deal will be around €8 billion, not €20 billion.  And to get even this much off the debt mountain has meant that we have had to agree to a 25 to 40 year payback schedule. 

Which means our children will be paying back this "deal" for years. 

Why would anyone think it's a good idea to stay here?

The murder of police officer Adrian Donohoe and Sinn Fein hypocrites

The widow of murdered Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe, Caroline Donohoe, 
leaves St Joseph's the Redemptorists Church in Dundalk after his funeral Mass last week.

The callous, almost casual, murder of a detective Garda (police officer) here more than a week ago united the country in outrage and grief.  It also made it a very uncomfortable week for  the reformed IRA gunmen in Sinn Fein who now sit in the Dail (Parliament). 

Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe was part of one of the usual two-man security details that accompany significant cash transfers here.  This involves two armed detectives in a car who accompany the cash vans as they do their rounds transferring money between bank branches and savings and loans offices, post offices, credit unions and so on.   

In this case, the two detectives were guarding a cash transfer to the bank from a credit union at Lordship, a village just outside Dundalk in Co. Louth.  When Donohoe saw someone approaching the person carrying the cash he got out of his car to check, but as he got near he was shot in the head at close range by a raider with a shotgun.  As far as we know there was no warning. 

Donohoe had not even taken out his gun.  It was a summary execution, immediate and instantaneous.  It was this almost casual killing of a Garda that made it even more of a shock to people all over the country here.

It seemed to sum up just how much our society has changed, how violent and dangerous this country has become.

Robberies and burglaries these days are routinely accompanied by a level of savage violence, often inflicted on victims who are old or isolated in rural areas.  

This shocking murder seemed to fit the pattern.   The raider, from what we know, could have disarmed Donohoe.  Instead, almost as casually as you would swat a fly, he blasted him with the shotgun at point blank range.

The five man gang got away and their burnt out car was found on the other side of the border, near the town of Keady in South Armagh.  This is the famous  bandit country, during The Troubles an area of fierce resistance against "the Brits."

These days it's home to criminal gangs, "dissident" Republicans and young men who can fit either description, depending on what they are up to.  Smuggling fuel, cigarettes, drugs and other things across the border is still big business, as it has been for decades. 

And ordinary criminality is rife,  since the border offers a convenient getaway in either direction in spite of the increased cooperation between the Gardai in the south and the PSNI in the North.

The cross-Border gang who Gardai believe murdered Donohoe are at the criminal end of the chain and are mainly from South Armagh.  They were probably the same gang who hit the Lordship Credit Union a year ago and got away with around €60,000.

Low level criminals like this often repeat themselves.  This time they got only €4,000, which somehow added to the tragedy.

For that paltry sum they killed a young Garda who was an exemplary member of the force, a married man with kids who was popular with everyone in the area and deeply involved with the local community (a talented footballer, he trained kids in his local GAA club).

His funeral last week saw a massive turnout not only of his fellow Gardai but of all sections of Irish society from the president down.  It was a powerful expression of the revulsion felt across the country, a national rejection of this kind of thuggery, whether cloaked in republicanism or not.

Which brings us to the discomfort of Gerry Adams and the other Sinn Fein members of the Dail last week.  The murder of Donohoe brought back vivid memories of the murder of Detective Garda Jerry McCabe who was shot by an IRA gang robbing a cash van outside a post office in Adare, Co. Limerick in 1996.   

The similarities were striking. McCabe was also one of a two-man armed Garda security detail in a car with the cash van.  As with Donohue, he was given no chance by the gunmen.  

Obviously aware of the political damage this could do to him and Sinn Fein, Adams last week in the Dail apologized to McCabe's family.  It was 17 years too late. 

And whether genuine or not, it was also hypocritical.  Why wait so long to apologize and then do it in the week after Donohoe was  murdered? 

Because Adams, a TD (member of the Dail) for Louth where the Donohoe murder happened, could feel the icy wind of revulsion blowing around him.  

Not only was it 17 years too late, but those of us with long memories found it hard to take at face value, given what Adams and Martin McGuinness got up to in the aftermath of the McCabe murder.  

Back then, cash raids were part of the IRA's “fundraising” and justified as that, even though the gangs who carried them out did not necessarily pass on all of the proceeds to the "movement." 

Most of the "fundraising" happened in the North, but there were occasional examples of it in the south as well, the raid in which McCabe died being an example.  At the time, Adams and McGuinness refused to admit that the McCabe killing was the responsibility of the IRA, saying that the raid had not been sanctioned, etc. 

Mind you, this did not stop them engineering the intimidation of the jury when five men were brought to trial.  As a result, at the last minute the charge was changed from murder to manslaughter to get convictions.

Again, mainly because of pressure from Adams and Co the five guilty men were eventually moved to a low security prison where they were housed in units that were more like apartments, for which they had their own door keys and where they were able to organize their own time, enjoy the garden, order in takeaways and so on. 

And of course, despite saying all along that these Garda killers would not be freed under the Good Friday Agreement settlement for the North, the Irish authorities eventually gave in to pressure from Adams and Sinn Fein and they were released.

It is in that wider context that we need to weigh up the value of the Adams apology last week to the McCabe family.  Given what McCabe's widow Ann went through over the years as a result of the Sinn Fein campaign to get her husband's killers released, it was hard to take.  As well as being 17 years too late.

Coincidentally, the murder of Donohoe came at a time when the government is implementing a rationalization and modernization plan for the Gardai.   Part of this is the immediate closure of 100 Garda stations in small villages around the country. 

This has caused an outcry because of the growing number of attacks and burglaries on vulnerable people in isolated rural areas, often elderly people.  As mentioned above, some of these attacks have been carried out with extreme violence, with very disturbing pictures in the papers of old people who have been beaten up as thieves forced them to give up any cash in the house. 

This has become a real problem, with criminal gangs roaming the country in powerful cars, using the motorway system to get away quickly.  Some traveler gangs were involved, but more recently "ordinary" criminal gangs from the cities have joined in to benefit from the easy pickings.   (With all the bad publicity the banks have been getting some old people no longer trust them and prefer to keep their savings hidden in their houses, and the gangs know this.)

The closure of many rural Garda stations is disturbing for people in these areas.  But the government has to cut spending and the Gardai cannot be an exception. 

The reality is that policing in Ireland has to change to get the most value for tax money and to reflect the changes in Irish society.  Most of the Garda stations being closed were one-man operations which were only manned for a few hours in the morning each day.  And they gave no protection against the highly mobile gangs which so many old people fear.

We also have far too many Gardai doing clerical work, stamping forms, issuing permits and so on, stuck in their stations instead of being out fighting crime. 

Despite all the arguments about keeping rural stations open, the fact is that we have significantly more police stations here per head of population than they have in most European countries, including our nearest neighbors.  We also have an overall police force which compares favorably in size with places like Wales and Scotland, although we don't have as many police out on the job because of doing paper work in the stations. 

None of this was a factor in the death of Donohoe.  That was both a tragedy and an outrage.

It was also a wake-up call.  The aftermath of decades of cross-border IRA criminality has left a legacy behind that we still have to confront.