Our strange sense of priorities will always put pigs before people

BOY, was my local shop on the ball on Sunday morning.

I was there at 8am, waiting for the croissants to come out of the oven. It may be a small thing, but it really is one of the great pleasures of modern Irish life — and to be treasured in a recession — that shops are able to open so early and to supply freshly-baked bread at that hour of the morning.

It’s one of the things we’re really going to miss when all our immigrants go home, isn’t it? But anyway, as a good citizen, I was ready to alert them in case they hadn’t seen the news the night before.

The newspapers already on display in the store had missed the announcement that dioxins had been found in Irish pork, so there was every possibility that Sunday morning fry-ups might still be on the menu.

To my surprise, however, the first thing I saw when I went in was a notice saying that all pork products had been recalled and there was neither a sausage nor a rasher to be found in the shop.

Fast action, no doubt. But it always seems to be like that where food is concerned. As the day unfolded, we discovered that confirmation of test results had been made available to the Government at 3.40pm on Saturday and that a recall of all pork products had been decided on and implemented — immediately.

I checked the Food Safety Authority’s website after the RTÉ news at 9pm and they already had a pretty comprehensive list of questions and answers — everything you needed to know if you had a fridge full of pork products in your kitchen.

Agriculture Minister Brendan Smith has acted with great expedition and speed in the matter. He seems to have absorbed all the lessons of the past and allowed no chances whatever to be taken.

He may even have over-reacted — we know that only a small proportion of Irish pork was affected and that the real issue seems to have been the traceability of that pork. Because it wasn’t possible to isolate and recall only the affected products, everything had to be condemned.

But I guess when it comes to public safety, it’s right to err on the side of caution. An over-reaction is certainly better than an under-reaction.

We’ve always done that in the past. Remember the last time foot and mouth visited these islands and we turned the Republic into a kind of fortress against contamination?

Ministers were highly praised then for their handling of the situation and no doubt Minister Smith will get, and deserve, the gratitude of the people for acting so decisively this time. It was noticeable too that the pig producers and the IFA, whatever sinking feeling they had about a body-blow like this, rowed in behind the minister.

There was no demurring about the recall, even though it is happening at the worst possible time of the year for them. And it took a good 24 hours for the inevitable mention of the word ‘compensation’ to appear.

Of course, we’re not out of the woods, not by a long way. And we still don’t know exactly how this happened. If it transpires that any laxity in inspection procedures, or any blind eye turned to the enforcement of standards, allowed dioxins to get into the food chain, there will be terrible political repercussions.

Praise will turn to condemnation overnight and it will seem the announcement of immediate and draconian action only happened to cover up the failure of inspection in the first place.

For now though, we are reacting as we always seem to when confronted with a threat to any section of our agriculture industry. Two rules always seem to apply. First, bring total government to bear. It was clear all through the weekend that senior ministers were briefed and involved as the crisis unfolded, and were in concert in advocating swift action.

It’s always encouraging, isn’t it, to see the full capacity of a government swinging into action in a crisis.

And the second rule is — don’t count the cost. We’re already hearing that it may cost the industry as much as €1 billion to cull the pigs and recall the products.

And guess what? Ultimately, that will cost us, the taxpayers. Just as in the past, producers will have to be compensated, at least in part, for their losses.

And that’s only fair — there is nothing to suggest that any pig producer in Ireland was operating to anything but high standards when this disaster befell them. It’s unlikely in the extreme that whoever was responsible, even by accident, for allowing contaminants into the food chain will be able to bear any of the costs of contamination. So it will, inevitably, fall to us.

And the question that raises in my mind is this — why is it that there are only two circumstances in Ireland that ever seem to warrant a total government, money-no-object approach? A crisis in agriculture or an upsurge in crime — they have been the only occasions in the past when we have seen the resources of the State mobilised in a state of high alert and activity (I suppose you could add a crisis in the banking sector to that list — we haven’t had too many of them in the past, but it does seem to bring out the same willingness to expose the taxpayer to virtually unlimited risk).

A few weeks ago, we all became aware of another significant danger to public health. It was a danger to the health of women and it was caused by a virus that carries with it the risk of cervical cancer. And oddly enough, all that was required to avert that risk was fast action, effectively managed, and a small investment of cash — an investment that would repay itself over time.

IMAGINE what would have happened if it had been discovered that a contaminant had been found in (let’s say) Irish potatoes that caused cervical cancer.

Some of those potatoes could have been exported and hence the risk could have spread to women throughout the world. Imagine the crisis. Ministers in constant attendance at press conferences, Irish potatoes in all their forms banned. Compensation packages would be worked out for potato producers and processors, and chip shop owners all over the country would be demanding compensation.

And of course the Irish taxpayer would be offering to pay for screening for any woman anywhere who had ever eaten an Irish potato.

None of that actually happened, of course. We only discovered that the Government was prepared to live with the risk of cervical cancer when they told us they weren’t prepared to pay for an effective vaccine. Ministers attended a lot of press conferences, of course, but only to say no.

Will that decision be revisited in the aftermath of this latest public health scare? I don’t think so.

For some strange reason, there are some things the system manages to get really exercised about and some things that don’t seem to bother us that much.

Pigs? Yes. Young women? No, not really.