BRENDA POWER WHY IS IT ALWAYS MEAT PLANTS?

THE Beef Tribunal. The footand-mouth outbreak. Mad cow disease. The horsemeat controversy. The pigmeat dioxin scare. When you start to tot them up, it is striking how many national scandals and scares over the past couple of decades had meat production at their core.

The other thing you’ll notice, as you list them off, is that every time something went wrong in the meat industry, it was the public who paid the price to put it right.

We paid financially: The famous Beef Tribunal, set up to investigate serious malpractice, tax evasion, fraud and corruption in the beef industry, is believed to have cost the taxpayer in the region of €50million, but the only person prosecuted as a result was a journalist who helped break the story.

We paid with risks to our lives and our health: mad cow disease, or BSE, caused when cattle were fed bonemeal – basically forced into cannibalism – as a cheap food source, caused a fatal brain condition called CJD in humans.

We paid with restrictions to our food supply and to our most basic liberties: the foot-andmouth outbreak of the early 2000s brought an early flavour of the Covid lockdown, with sanitising stations at shopping centres and supermarkets, parks and public amenities closed down, and members of the public advised to cancel holidays and trips.

Something else you’ll notice, as you look back over these episodes, is that for all the inquiries, recriminations and promises, nothing much seems to have changed in meat production in this country, and all those expensive lessons remain unlearnt.

Outbreaks

Once again, the meat industry is at the forefront of a crisis arising from its work practices, hygiene measures and treatment of employees and, once again, tens of thousands of innocent people are taking the hit.

The Covid outbreaks that have closed down three counties originated in four meat factories: Kildare Chilling, O’Brien Fine Foods, Irish Dog Foods, and Carroll’s of Tullamore. Not in pubs, not in hairdressing salons, not in supermarkets, but in meat factories. And yet, astonishingly, the question of whether to close these hotbeds of lethal disease was basically left to the factories themselves.

Three of them closed voluntarily. Carroll’s of Tullamore had said they were staying open but eventually closed yesterday. Despite its folksy name Carroll’s of Tullamore is not a local ‘mom and pop’ business; there’s no Mr and Mrs Carroll lovingly boiling sides of ham and slicing it by hand. Once a family business, Carroll’s is now financed by a private equity, real estate and investment management company.

So, while pubs are still closed across the country, despite there having been no outbreak from any hospitality-industry business, a meat factory part owned by wealthy investors and identified as a live risk of viral transmission was left open.

Asked about this utterly bizarre situation yesterday, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar declared that ‘I don’t really think it’s helpful for individual politicians to be falling over each other telling people to close their businesses…’

Funny, that, because they had no difficulty telling publicans and restaurateurs to close their businesses, and in ordering 3,500 pubs to remain closed having been promised they could resume badly needed trading yesterday. And pubs and restaurants, despite few ever attracting the interest of international private equity firms, could afford to take safety precautions, fork out for screens and sanitisers, reduce capacity and lose revenue, to keep customers and staff safe.

And yet these meat factories, with their massive profits, cannot, it appears, stretch to decent sick pay for their largely migrant workforces; why else would desperate people resort to taking paracetamol to mask the symptoms of a fatal disease, unless it was that they couldn’t afford to miss a day’s work?

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that if the people working for peanuts in these places had been treated with due care for their health and wellbeing, if they weren’t forced to live in cramped conditions, and if they’d been able to avail of adequate sick pay when they were unfit for work, then we wouldn’t be looking at this shutdown of three counties.

And even that decision raises an obvious question: why shut down the counties at all? Why not just target the source of the clusters, and close them on the spot? Why not send in inspectors, identify the problems, and compel their wealthy owners to address them at whatever cost, on pain of permanent closure?

Why is the Tánaiste so reluctant to tell meat factories to close, when he didn’t balk at ordering small rural pubs to shut their doors back in March?

Why didn’t anyone look at the legacy of meat industry crises in this country, months ago, and pre-empt this?

Why go to such lengths to spread the blame when it’s clear where it lies? Why, when meat factories were identified as hotbeds of covid months ago, and the cause of the current outbreak, were meat factories still operating up until yesterday?