Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire agus roimh an fiosrúcháin seo. There are a number of aspects of this that deserve to be adverted to. The first one is the fact that we have a deficiency in our investigative procedures. Whatever the final outcome of this investigation is those allegations were very serious because of the form in which they were made, and the publicity they were given and because they were made by a television programme which has a reputation for rarely going wrong.
This television programme has done wonderful work on behalf of Irish prisoners, for instance, improperly imprisoned in Britain. This was not cheap, British tabloid journalism, it was a very serious current affairs programme. We have a failing apparently in our law which means that we could not have the Department of Industry or the Department of Agriculture and Food move in and freeze the records of these companies instantenously in the public interest. It appears to me that that leaves anybody involved in sharp practice with a quite significant interval of time in which to dispose of unsavoury records. I do not like that. I am not saying that in this particular case that was done, I have no evidence of that. I am saying that if allegations of this scale are made which have the possibility to do so much harm to what is potentially, I emphasise "potentially" a very important industry in this country that is a regrettable situation. It is also a regrettable situation that much of the debate, in the other House at least, descended into the realm of personalities. I believe our, perhaps, potentially most valuable and most lucrative industry deserves to be looked at in a little less partisan fashion.
I am not going to give the House a lecture about party political favouritism because before it was announced in the other House I was aware, perhaps not in detail, that at least two Governments identified the Goodman Group and Mr. Larry Goodman as the personage to achieve certain national objectives in terms of developing the beef industry. The approach under which that was taken was, to say the least, somewhat flawed.
The beef industry has a problem which goes deeper than Larry Goodman. The question is, is the beef industry going to be market driven or intervention driven? Will it be essentially producing products that can sell because of their quality, their price and their imagination? Is that how it will develop or will it develop in an entirely different way by relying on the fact that you can always fall back on intervention?
I would not say that the Minister was wrong during the recent price discussion to insist on some sort of a safety net provision but I believe that, whatever my views are on it, economics can contribute something. If you allow unregulated guarantees about a fixed price for a product you will produce a limitless supply. That is not an argument about intervention, price fixing or anything like that per se but the mixture of market place economics, intervention and guaranteed prices that constitute the way the Common Agricultural Policy gives us the worst of both worlds. It gives us complacent procedures, crucified consumers and large volumes of unsaleable products. It seems to me that successive Irish Governments did not recognise the way the world was moving.
In 1972, when we had the referendum on membership of the EC, I happily expressed scepticism about the long term future of the Common Agricultural Policy. I never believed it was sustainable; I gave up believing in Santa Claus when I was about nine years old and with the end of my belief in Santa Claus I ended my belief that there was a benevolent Europe out there that would hand over large sums of money indefinitely to enable us to keep on producing as much as we wanted whenever we wanted at prices that were acceptable to the producer. I never thought that would last. I am not in any sense gloating now, but I never believed it. I am bothered that a large section of our beef industry appears to have believed it.
There was and is a profound need for change in Irish agriculture generally and in the beef industry in particular. It hardly needs to be said that it should be based, first of all, on producing quality products that will sell in the market place. I will not give people, who are experts in that specific area, a lecture on how to do that. There are certain aspects in this area that I would have identified where any developing economy is concerned. One of those is a substantial and increasing investment in product research, market research, research and development, all the research and development being based on the existing and perceived future needs of the consumer and the capacity to anticipate new needs or new wants and to package products accordingly.
Of course, we have enormous assets. I heard the Minister for Agriculture and Food here in the last six months discuss the matter of agriculture at considerable length and with considerable eloquence and vehemence. He explained his view of us as the producers of the guaranteed green agricultural foodstuffs of Europe. It is a worthwhile vision but that requires an enormous investment in market research, market development, product development, etc., to develop products that are both made from green, as in environmentally friendly, raw materials and that are also packaged, produced and transported, etc. by methods that are environmentally acceptable. That involves huge amounts of money. I have a suspicion that the beef industry in particular, to a large extent expects the Government to do the research, while it cleans up the product.
I do not want to go off on too much of a sideline but the point is that what is needed is recognition of the primacy of the consumer. Anybody who has to deal with Irish agricultural products on a daily basis in our shops would not really come home with an idea that the primacy of the consumer was at the focal point of the thoughts of the producers of Irish potatoes when plenty of elbow grease and a scrubbing brush is still a necessary prerequisite for boiling a pot of potatoes because they are so filthy and dirty. That is not any sort of advertisement for a sense of the primacy of the consumer. I hope it is not equally true of more health sensitive products. To develop an industry like that needs creativity, imagination, research, ingenuity and, of course, it also needs scale. It was a perfectly right decision by successive Governments to move towards the rationalisation of the Irish beef industry. The mistake the Government made is an over-reliance on one particular producer or individual. There are certain characteristics of the Goodman group of companies that seem to make them — and this may well be hindsight — not suitable for the job successive Governments wanted them to do.
We want, as I said, a market-orientated, consumer-orientated body with a willingness to identify new products, not just new markets for old products or temporary markets in third World countries or in developing countries, but new products. We need new products that will sell where we can get the highest price for the best added-value for good quality products that would be within the EC not finding interesting new markets with State guarantees about risks given by a succession of Governments. That is not the way. It may guarantee markets in the short term but it is not the long term future of an industry which could well become a major industry here.
The problem is that the basic philosophy that seemed to drive that large organisation was not the philosophy that could do those things. It was a philosophy based on a particularly macho view of the bottom line being all. Nobody would deny the centrality of the bottom line. Businesses cannot be run if they do not operate profitably but it is what you do with the profits and what you do in order to achieve what is perceived to be a desirable level of profits that determines the ethos of a company. Our problem is that our beef industry was dominated by an organisation and an extraordinary complex network of companies which seemed to have, secrecy as their number one objective. That is, secrecy not just from prying television programmes or the media but secrecy from Government and, indeed, secrecy because shareholders did not exist or were a minority and an extraordinary network of companies meant that nobody with an involvement in that industry could really be sure what was being done anywhere else.
Enormous pressures were put on middle line managers to produce results out of which came the ethos in which the sort of things that were produced on the television programme were perceived to be possible. My understanding is that, for instance, when EC rules on disclosure by public limited companies were changed, a considerable number of the companies were converted into private companies to circumvent EC rules about disclosure. That is not the way to create the business ethos in which a large-scale industry, capable of trading within the EC, can operate. The EC is a well regulated marketplace based on public accountability, based on very strong, well developed employee rights, based on very strong consumer rights. The sort of obsessive secrecy that characterised the Goodman group guarantees that they will not develop or be able to identify with the social market ethos that characterises the European Community. It is based on an old-fashioned macho idea of business which does not fit in with the way successful countries in the EC, or indeed, in northern Europe have been successful. It seems that that is the bedrock of the problems.
Unfortunately, while the inquiry will, I hope, identify all of the truth and may well identify many sorded practices — I will comment on a couple of matters in a moment — the position now is, as I have said, shareholders in any of the Goodman companies that are public limited companies are given limited information because of the complex nature of the company. The employees in many cases do not exist because vast numbers of those who are perceived to be employees of the Goodman group are, in fact, service contractors on individual contracts. Perhaps the only other group who could have known are the Department of Agriculture and Food and we still do not know how much they knew, what they knew or whether they were happy about the situation. I am not talking about illegal practices, I am talking about the business ethos and the viability or otherwise of the company.
The only other group that could have known are the banks but, unfortunately, Irish banks have shown a capacity only to be equated with that of the lemming, in their chase after a fast buck. The list of their disasters is becoming endless, from ICI some years ago, to banks in New Hampshire and Maryland, on to their escapades in Britain, all of which resulted in enormous losses which ultimately will be paid for by the customers of the banks in Ireland. The Irish banks walked into this, they say somebody whom successive Government had, if you like, anointed and they did not, apparently, bother to be critical either. The mess blew up in their faces last summer and they were exposed as being as poorly informed as anybody else.
It is that ethos and the disingenuous sort of denials of the Goodman group that make all of us suspicious. When we are told an individual who is on the television programme is not an employee of the Goodman group it sounds very convincing. He is not an employee because the Goodman group have many people working for them exclusively who are not employees at all. Many of them are on service contracts because this is what happens in many of the companies the Goodman group take over. A whole shake-out follows in which people who are let go and re-employed on individual contracts are no longer employees. Therefore, you can make this beautiful statement that this person is not an employee. It sounds like a simple categorical statement. He is not an employee because they do not have employees in many of these areas, they have people on service contracts. They are just as much employees as anybody else except that the nature of the contractual relationship is changed. That is not the way to convince, however sympathetic an observer, that Goodman is a company that deals in simple straightforward, truthfulness.
There was a denial that the company actively encouraged the use of fraudulent stamps. I expect more from a major company. I expect the company to be able to say, "We did not know it was being done", or "It happened, we discovered it and we stamped it out." To suggest that it is an adequate denial to say "we did not actively encourage something" is to invite the suspicion that you did not actively encourage it but you kind of blinked, nodded, presumed and hoped nobody would find out. I am not saying that is what happened. I am simply saying that what seems to characterise this large part of the Irish beef industry is an inability for someone to precisely say what he or she wants to say either because the truth is less palatable or because they have got involved in this convoluted language which leaves everybody believing something different. That is what happened.
The other issue, of course, that does not make public perception easier or the average citizen easy in his mind is, for instance, the Classic Meats case, in which we had denials from the company of any involvement and then the Minister for Industry and Commerce concludes they are not telling the truth. There is the reported fact — perhaps I am wrong on this one — that the Goodman group having denied all connections with Classic Meats, were listed as an asset when they tried to make an arrangement with the bankers last summer. If that is not true I am happy to have it corrected. That was the reported situation at the time. It does not help the public view of how a company should operate if you have a denial on one hand, followed by a member of the Government saying the opposite, and a suggestion made that it was true all along. We have this current dispute in which we do not know if the company are being sold to people who claim to have broken all links with the Goodman group. The whole thing suggests a perception of business which is incorrect. This point needs to be made again and again, that the perception of business that the Goodman group create with their business practices — I am not talking about their alleged illegal practices — the secrecy, the manner in which they treat employees, the misuse of language, the obfuscating kind of language they use is precisely the way in which you will fail to build an industry that will succeed within the social market mechanism that is the European Community.
Whatever I may think about the European Community, it is not the United States and it is not the Third World. It is a very sophisticated marketplace with a considerable network of regulation, consumer protection, shareholder protection and employee protection. You cannot build a major player in that marketplace by ignoring those realities, by pretending that kind of slightly dubious nod and wink business practices, not necessarily the ones that are mentioned in the programme, but the general value system, the keep on squeezing them until the pips squeak philosophy that seems to be at the centre of the Goodman group in which everybody at a lower level was squeezed and in which corner-cutting was encouraged, will succeed.
It is not just the Goodman group. Certain dairy co-operatives have a certain reputation in the environmental area, for instance, of doing similar things. It is that ethos which seems so cute and so clever and, in the short term, seems so good, which will guarantee their failure because it does not direct the whole thrust of a company like that where it should be directed, which is at the consumer in the European marketplace, the only place in which we will succeed in developing and building successful industry. That is why this inquiry is so important. It is so important because it is necessary in order to clear the air, to identify a wrongdoing if necessary and, above all, to enable us to make a fresh start hopefully with companies that will accept public accountability and the rights of the consumers as the central drive of a large company.
