My former colleague in this House and former Minister of State, Ms Joan Burton, brought this matter to my attention. It was given some publicity in the media a couple of weeks ago when the EU Court of Auditors reported, unfavourably in many respects, on the disbursal of funding and the use of funding here. The former Deputy and Minister of State was amazed that an area she has represented for almost five years, namely, the district of Lucan, should somehow have been caught up in an apparent new beef scam and in a litany of unfortunate events which have gone on in Irish trade for far too long. I am calling now on the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform and on the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, to bring in the National Bureau of Fraud Investigation to examine all the circumstances of this matter and report to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
The EU Court of Auditors discovered that a 455 tonne consignment of Irish beef which was originally destined for Egypt ended up travelling around Europe and perhaps part of Africa for many months before finally reaching the Congo Republic. This consignment was accompanied by a false and forged certificate of origin and the auditors drew attention to it in the context of illegal claims for export refunds. The certificate of origin was endorsed by a non-existent chamber of commerce in Lucan, County Dublin, with an accompanying signature. The Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Mary Harney, said over the weekend that she was putting in an inspector to examine this matter urgently. She needs to go much further. We need a Garda inquiry into why the good name of the business community of Lucan was impugned in this way.
It is also extraordinary that a French meat exporting company, Sogeviandes, should have picked on this district of County Dublin to validate their unlawful certificate in this way. The former Deputy and Minister, Ms Burton, I and everyone else in this House feel that the Lucan business community and their public representatives should be rightly outraged by this discovery at the European Court of Auditors.
The Department of Agriculture and Food has made the usual lukewarm, almost lackadaisical, response to the disclosure of this matter by the EU Court of Auditors, saying basically that it did not affect the beef, etc. It affects the reputation of the village of Lucan, now grown into a huge and important district on the west side of Dublin. There has been massive development there of residential housing and business over the past 20 years and it is deplorable that its reputation has been impugned in this way.
We had the famous beef tribunal, a number of years ago in which many investigations took place in front of lawyers about tax evasion, damaging behaviour in the meat plants of Ireland, with a damaging outcome for our meat exports, and this was accompanied by the huge scandal of massive fees for the legal profession. We ended up none the wiser and now we have somebody using the name of the village of Lucan in this illegal scam.
The Committee of Public Accounts, of which I was proud to be a member during the course of the 27th Dáil, tried to re-examine the territory covered by the beef tribunal. I remember important contributions by Deputies O'Malley and Rabbitte to our discussions over those four and a half years. We too ran into a kind of cul de sac. What I am asking this evening is that the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Harney, take responsibility on a day when one of her junior Ministers had to come in here and defend the indefensible, voting against his own Bill. She should take this matter to the National Bureau of Fraud Investigation to examine it and to see why on earth the business community of Lucan was impugned in this outrageous way.
