In 1952, the Irish government commissioned a report on the state of the economy from the US consultancy firm Stacy May. It concluded that “in the Irish economy, Cattle is King”. Much of what happened in Ireland from the 1960s onwards was about trying to dethrone King Cattle by creating an industrial society. This effort has been a spectacular success: meat now accounts for just 2 per cent of Irish exports.
Yet nothing goes in a straight line. Old structures of wealth and power don’t just disappear when new ones arrive. Ireland is a palimpsest in which traces of an earlier story are visible as ghostly presences beneath the surface of the new one.
If you want to see how this works, just think of the current Government’s astonishing decision to vote against the European Union’s trade deal with the Mercosur countries of Latin America.
Objectively, the deal was overwhelmingly in Ireland’s interests as a hyper-globalised trading economy. But politically King Cattle could still issue his edicts – the Government opposed the deal (albeit with its fingers crossed behind its back, hoping that it would go through anyway) because beef farmers are unhappy that it allows a small amount of extra Brazilian beef into the EU.
The disjunction between the Irish economy on the one hand, and Irish political power on the other, has seldom been more starkly illustrated. Our reality is stereoscopic – to see it properly the brain has to merge two different realities. In one it’s 2026; in the other it’s still 1952.
Within this parallel realm of the cattle kingdom, there is one High King: Larry Goodman. Ciaran Cassidy’s brilliant documentary Goodman: Too Big to Fail, the first part of which aired on RTÉ on Monday night, is a probe into this shadow Ireland. It does what great public-service broadcasting is for, helping us to see the layers of often hidden truths that lie beneath our feet.
I have a particular interest in the film (in which I appear as an interviewee) because I spent four years of my life in the 1990s analysing a tribunal of inquiry into the beef industry for The Irish Times and published a book called Meanwhile Back at the Ranch.
I did so not because I knew anything about beef beyond the various ways to cook it, but because the relationship between Goodman and Fianna Fáil was the only available lens through which we could peer into the hidden world where money and power, business and politics, private and public interests met and melded.
The Goodman story has never been easy to tell, partly because it is very complex, but partly too because journalists were often punished for telling it. Susan O’Keeffe, who is an eloquent presence in Cassidy’s film, made a ground-breaking programme – notably not for RTÉ but for the British-based World in Action investigative series. The only thanks she got in Ireland was abuse – O’Keeffe was the one person prosecuted directly as a result of the beef tribunal, even though its report showed very large scale abuses of tax law, EU intervention and the State’s export credit insurance scheme.
Goodman didn’t just survive all the revelations – he thrived. After his group collapsed in 1990 (the only occasion in Irish history when the Dáil was recalled during the summer break to deal with a crisis), he regained control of the beef industry and branched out to become the biggest owner of private hospitals in Ireland
In some ways, the public inquiry ended up doing more harm than good. Because, while it did uncover all those systematic abuses, it had no consequences for those who benefited from them. No one was prosecuted for the tax frauds, for example: Fianna Fáil made sure of that by (in a remarkable coincidence) introducing a tax amnesty just when Goodman International’s massive liability came to light. The tribunal found that Goodman was not personally aware of these practices and there has never been any suggestion of illegality on his part.
One of the highlights of Cassidy’s film is that it has the first substantial interviews with Paschal Phelan. Phelan was a very bright and ambitious entrepreneur in the beef industry, a protege of Goodman, who had the temerity to break away and set up a rival operation called Master Meats. Phelan was then manoeuvred out of control of Master Meats and the company was taken over by a mysterious entity.
Goodman vehemently denied to the Fair Trade Commission having any beneficial ownership in the Master Meats Group. The commission, however, concluded “that Mr Laurence Goodman was in effective control of the Master Meats Group”. In September 2000, Goodman admitted for the purpose of the proceedings in the High Court “that he is and was at all material times the owner” of the entity that took control of Master Meats.
But none of this had any real consequences – and the whole story disappeared into legal obscurity. At least now we have on the public record Phelan’s own account of it all. And we have in the film other figures such as Eamon Mackle, who was centrally involved in the systematic appropriation of vast quantities of beef belonging to the EU, speaking openly for the first time.
Goodman didn’t just survive all the revelations – he thrived. After his group collapsed in 1990 (the only occasion in Irish history when the Dáil was recalled during the summer break to deal with a crisis), he regained control of the beef industry and branched out to become the biggest owner of private hospitals in Ireland, controlling a group that incorporates the Blackrock, Galway, Hermitage and Limerick Clinics. His personal resilience is remarkable – but so is the way so much recent history (including the collapse of two successive Irish governments in the 1990s) has been forgotten.
I imagine anyone under 50 will find Goodman: Too Big to Fail quite mind-blowing. And that in itself is a mark of how effectively this whole story has been excised from public consciousness. The film feels almost gothic – the ghosts of Charles Haughey and Liam Lawlor coming back to haunt a shiny globalised Ireland. But it’s all too real. The parallel planet of the cattle monarchy continues to exist and Cassidy has done a great service in allowing us to feel the force of the gravitational pull it continues to exert.