The irony of the occasion was not lost on me last week when the publishing of a year-long investigation into meat factories and Covid-19 outbreaks I had been working on coincided with the loading our beloved stock bull Rambo into the trailer to take him to the factory. 

He went like a lamb to slaughter, his old stiff limbs struggling to carry his one-tonne weight as he took one heavy trusting step after another up the steel ramp we closed quickly behind him. 

Cattle prices are relatively good at the moment as the supply has tightened. Even an overage bull like Rambo, who is technically “only fit for burgers”, is in demand. I could have rung factory agents shopping around for the best price, but Rambo is an old bull who had a long life and deserved a quick exit.

As I drove him to the nearest factory early in the morning, dark-skinned workers lined the high chain-link fences waiting for their shift to start. Many of them were sitting on the grass or slouching on the fence, sucking on cigarettes and soaking up the pale September sunshine. In an odd way, their youth made it look like they were waiting for a university class to start. 

My automatic culchie flick-of-the-finger salute as I trundled by in the ancient farm jeep and trailer elicited nothing but hard stares.

The next closest factory is almost double the journey time and given Rambo’s stiff joints, it did make me wonder what I’d do if my local factory had been closed due to an outbreak of Covid-19. 

I’ve been accused in the past by some people of “wanting to close meat factories” because of the work I’ve been doing since April last year in uncovering Covid-19 outbreaks and employment issues in the sector. 

I rely on meat factories as much as the next beef farmer, but I’m also a citizen that relies on a system of government that enforces protocols, safety measures and legislation at any time in history and most importantly at a time of global pandemic. 

The struggle to access information

To this day, I struggle to know why there was so much reluctance to provide information about Covid-19 outbreaks in meat factories. 

It is only with documents obtained after the event through sources and Freedom of Information (FOI) requests that we can see there had been outbreaks since March 2020 catalogued by the HSE with a corresponding community spread rate. 

Yet asking the HSE for information on Covid-19 case numbers in factories was like trying to get blood out of stone and trying to get information from Meat Industry Ireland (MII) was little better. 

Early on, I realised it was quicker to wait four weeks for the response to a FOI than for most of the various department and HSE press offices. 

Throughout the pandemic, most of the meat factories declined to alert anyone when there was an outbreak of Covid-19 in their area and the HSE did not give a county breakdown of outbreaks as it was deemed too commercially sensitive, but it did provide a HSE region list of outbreaks. 

This led to me sketching a map of HSE regions onto a county map of Ireland, and then another sketch of all the meat factories in the country on top of that, and ticking factories off one by one as I heard of another outbreak from a source.  

This didn’t always work but it yielded some significant results when I quickly became aware that there had been 226 cases – the highest ever in Ireland – in a meat factory in Cork, which would have been about a third of that factory’s workforce. When I further joined up the dots from other documents obtained by a source I could see that there were at least 60 people in the local community who had caught the disease from those meat factory workers. 

The ability to constantly join these dots was the lynchpin of the entire investigation. For the 6,000 words I wrote for The Currency articIe, I have at least 60,000 of typed notes and FOIs written late at night or on Sunday evenings – simply because as cases grew and sparked the first local lockdown in Co Kildare last year, I couldn’t understand why harsher enforcement of protocols wasn’t being utilised by the authorities to prevent more outbreaks. 

For example, the government knew from March 2020 that there were outbreaks in factories but it was almost the start of May 2020 when then Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed, after being put under intense questioning in the Dáil from opposition TDs, admitted that there were clusters of Covid-19 in meat factories. 

At a time of national crisis, why did the public have to wait almost two months to hear that and why was almost every other business facing closure due to the pandemic?

By that stage in April 2020, Tyson Foods – one of America’s largest meat processors – had taken out full-page ads in The Washington Post and The New York Times to warn the American public that the sheer scales of their workers falling sick with the virus meant that “the food supply chain is breaking.”

Meanwhile, in contrast to his MII Irish colleagues, the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) CEO Nick Allen had already taken part in an Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee (EFRA) committee meeting with other food industry representatives to address concerns around food supply and workers at processing sites. 

Allen said: “Simply put, plants are not designed to cope with 2-metre distancing and everyone involved has been on a deep learning curve.”

He added that while precautions had been taken, including the construction of Perspex screens between workers, this could also be problematic as they could get in the way of people who were “brandishing sharp knives.”

The simplicity of a sign

I have already gone into quite a lot of detail in the two-part series on enforcement by the Health and Safety Authority (HSA), Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) and the lack of sick pay schemes in regard to meat factories. 

However, one area still irks me – signs. We saw them plastered across the country, in shops, restaurants, bathrooms, the inside of bathrooms doors, work sites, playgrounds, hospitals and yet the confusion over the use of signs in the native language of meat workers still baffles me.

As I reported last week, some 20 per cent of the workers in meat factories come from non-EU countries while another 60 per cent come from EU countries outside Ireland. Wages are low or minimum wage.

Many of the workers 15,000 workers in the industry come from low socio-economic backgrounds and have poor levels of education. 

This is acknowledged in a report prepared by the National Outbreak Control Team as a briefing paper for NPHET and dated June 3, 2020 that I obtained from a source. 

The part of the report submitted by Dr Mai Mannix said: “Communication difficulties represent a significant threat to outbreak control. This is driven by language barriers. It was also noted that particularly in at least one plant, levels of literacy in some workers’ own principal language were low.” 

Through last year’s summer, conflicting information kept coming from public health officials and meat factories about the accessibility of Covid-19 prevention information in their own language.

Bearing this in mind, when mandatory testing in meat factories was brought in in August 2020 in response to the Kildare lockdown caused by outbreaks in factories, I asked the HSE how many languages the information leaflets for workers was being published in. 

The response – English. 

The HSE was sending out thousands of information leaflets in English – printed with taxpayers money – to migrant workers who struggled with literacy in their own native language.  

An end to the bull

In answer to my earlier question about what I would have done if my local meat factory was closed due to Covid-19 and I couldn’t give Rambo the quickest death possible, I would have called the local knackery to come and shoot him. 

It might not have made business sense, but it would have been the humane thing to do.

Further reading

Special investigation: Meat factories and Covid-19 – the unsacrificed lamb

Meat factories and Covid-19 – Part 2: Pay, conditions and bogus subcontracting via Poland