Missing ingredient is accountability
Dinner eaten, he scanned his Sunday paper, glancing at the big screen as kick-off time approached.
I’m there with the kids for more or less the same reasons. “Get ye all out of the house and you can watch the match,” my wife had said: which translates as “Get ye out of the house, so I get a bit of peace and quiet.”
The older man folded away his paper and, turning in my direction, asked, “What do you think of the burger story, Martin?”
“I don’t know. There seems to be a lot of questions, and no clear answers yet,” I replied.
“You know, the problem isn’t what’s supposed to be in them. It’s that when the truth comes out, no one will be responsible, no one will lose their job”.
I asked what he meant. He said the Irish get a perverse pleasure from washing their dirty laundry in public. “We’re good at it, and, what’s more, we’ll wash and hang it out several times, but nothing really gets done afterwards”.
I have to agree. He cited the banking crisis. “Endless talk as the country went bust, yet no one was held to account”.
I mentioned the planning tribunals, endless money spent, to do exactly what? Produce weighty reports and provide many in the legal profession with a retirement nest egg.
My friend nodded in agreement. “This time, if a couple of fellows high up the ‘food chain’ got their marching orders, it would send a very strong message to those either above or below them that, in the future, their jobs could be on the line if they screw up the country.”
Enda Kenny was reported as saying last weekend that the Government “wasn’t satisfied” that it had learned how horse meat got into the burgers.
For my part, as a farmer, my concern is for the reputation of the country, and the possible knock-on effects on farm-gate prices. I did a piece on the Joe Duffy programme shortly after the story broke, last week, and said that it was the levels of traceability and checks, both direct and indirect, seen and unseen, that brought this story to light.
But, from a farmer’s point of view, that wasn’t really much of a consolation.
I was sick of those further up the line cutting corners in the hope of increasing profits that, yet again, may have put my livelihood in danger.
I cited the BSE disaster, caused by those charged with sterilising the constituents of meat and bone dropping the temperature in their furnaces by a few degrees to save on oil costs; and the dioxin scare that caused millions of pounds of damage to the pig industry — and now this.
All that said, I’m not in favour of regulating any industry to death.
Businesses must be able to do business without having to answer to a civil servant at every turn in the road.
What we need in this country is to develop a culture where those in charge understand that with success comes responsibility, and when the system breaks or fails, the buck stops at the top.
Those who reap the biggest rewards cannot be allowed to hide behind the alleged ignorance of those further down the line. Theirs is the responsibility to see to it that everyone in their employ knows the rules, and the consequences of getting it wrong.
