When Ireland’s Food Standards Authority announced that it had found beef products sold by popular food brands contaminated with horsemeat, it was the start of a scandal that spread around Europe and to parts of Asia.

“We found with one product that about one third horse DNA in it which was just, you know an incredible finding. And we double checked and we triple checked because we understood that if we were to go out public with such a story, it was going to have quite an effect.” Alan Reilly, CEO, Food Standards Authority

Many Europeans are happy to eat horse and in some countries it’s considered a bit of delicacy, but consumers in the UK and Ireland were upset and angry.

What many didn’t realise, though, is where a lot of the horsemeat was coming from, and why.

“Nobody cared and that’s the bottom line in this whole story, nobody cared. Nobody bothered asking the question, where are all the Irish horses going?” Stephen Philpott, Ulster Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

One man, animal rights activist Stephen Philpott, knew the answer because for the previous couple of years he’d been running a surveillance operation on gangs smuggling thousands of unwanted Irish horses across the border for illegal slaughter.

He’s uncovered a criminal conspiracy that’s netted millions, and seriously undermined consumer confidence in processed food.

Tragically, the abandoned horses are an unexpected and little reported consequence of the global financial crisis. As Campbell finds, when Ireland’s economy was booming and the housing bubble was at its biggest, every Irish builder bought a horse and joined a racing syndicate.

When the bubble burst, the animals were the first thing to go – dumped and left to fend for themselves in parks, fields and by the side of the road.

It wasn’t long before criminal gangs got in on the action. One whistleblower who is now in fear of his life tells Campbell horses too weak to travel were routinely drugged to make sure they arrived at the abattoir still alive – where they were then killed and their meat illegally entered the food chain.

Snowy Dublin general views

00:00

CAMPBELL: Snow in Dublin in March is about as popular as the meal I’m about to eat.

00:11

Temple Bar Food Market. Horsemeat stall set up

00:18

Every Saturday, in the Temple Bar food market, Pat Hyland serves up a highly controversial dish.

00:23

Pat cooking and serving horse meat

PAT HYLAND: “Very healthy. It’s very high in protein. All the Italians and the Spanish and the French and now the Irish are eating it”.

00:33

CAMPBELL: Until recently Pat, known here as Paddy Jack, thought he was a bit of a trendsetter, the only man in Ireland serving horsemeat.

PAT HYLAND: “Yeah well see I thought I was the first

00:45

to do horse in Dublin but I didn’t realise they were all eating it anyway”.

CAMPBELL: “Just without knowing it”.

PAT HYLAND: “Yeah”.

CAMPBELL: In January the Irish

00:57

found they had been eating horse meat labelled beef in their supermarket frozen food. Many Europeans don’t think there’s anything wrong with eating horsemeat as long as they’re not told it’s something else. It’s low in fat, high in iron and cheaper than beef or pork.

01:04

Campbell tries horse steak

“Is it good meat to eat?”

PAT HYLAND: “It’s lovely meat, yeah. You can have a taste yourself. Want to put a bit of salt on it?”

CAMPBELL: In places like France and Belgium, horse meat is considered a delicacy.

PAY HYLAND: “That’s the back end of the horse now. The front end of the horse is a bit tougher you know?”

CAMPBELL: “Mm that’s very good”.

01:26

Customers at Pat’s horsemeat stand

Normally Pat only sells to foreigners but since the scandal broke his trade has actually increased.

01:47

WOMAN: “What is that? Horse?”

CAMPBELL: “Venison.”

PAT HYLAND: “Beef”.

WOMAN: “Right go on, go on…”

CAMPBELL: [laughing] “You can’t say that”.

01:54

Adventurous Dubliners have been curious to find what the fuss is about.

02:01

WOMAN: “It’s nice. The flavour of the chargrilled is very nice. It’s nice and lean”.

02:06

Hunt horses

CAMPBELL: But for others, eating Ireland’s favourite animal is little short of a sin. Millions love to pet them, punt on them, even hunt on them.

MARY FENELON-BOURKE: “The Irish love their horses.

02:15

Mary

The Irish, you know don’t want, we don’t want to eat horses. [laughing] You know even though that may be in the news at the moment.

02:30

Hunt horses jumping

Music

02:37

MARY FENELON-BOURKE:  See the horse is you know loved by all of Ireland really and we do love our horses and we use them”.

02:39

Hunt in progress

Music

02:46

CAMPBELL: But the story we’ll tell tonight isn’t simply one about a horse loving nation being duped at the dinner table. It’s far more disturbing.

02:53

Horses being loaded into floats and lorries

Music

03:06

CAMPBELL:  We’ll reveal a wholesale, systematic, criminal harvest of thousands upon thousands of horses. They were spirited into a black market that stretches well beyond these borders and we’ll show the appalling treatment of the doomed animals that fuelled much of this substitution scandal. It’s a story told with hidden cameras

03:09

Science lab

and startling discoveries in the science lab.

03:32

Reilly. Super:
Alan Reilly
Food Standards Authority

ALAN REILLY: [Food Standards Authority] “We found one product with about one third horse DNA in it and which was just an incredible finding”.

03:39

Food Safety scientist analyses pie

CAMPBELL: The fraud was only found when Ireland’s Food Safety Authority did some random tests.

ALAN REILLY: “We looked at a whole range of different products, those products that consumers wouldn’t quite know what they’re buying. Things like products that are covered in pastry, products with something like a potato topping on them and also beef burgers because the meat is minced. You’ve no idea really what’s in a beef burger you have to rely on the supplier, you know, to sell you a beef burger instead of selling you something else.

03:47

Reilly

In fact, we didn’t believe the finding initially because when we started to see traces of horse meat in beef burgers we went back and checked, we double checked and we triple checked, because we understood that if we were to go out public with such a story,

04:30

Man in lab with pie

it was going to have you know quite an effect – certainly here in Ireland.

CAMPBELL: The shockwaves spread far wider.

04:47

Supermarkets/ Products montage

Music

04:56

CAMPBELL: Supermarket chains across Europe had to withdraw big brand products from Findus to Bird’s Eye.

05:00

Ikea/ Burger King

IKEA found horsemeat in its meatballs. Burger King says it stopped it just before it reached its burgers.

ALAN REILLY: “At the time we thought it was an Irish problem. It’s turned out to be a European problem now, in fact nearly a global problem. There’s over 26 countries in Europe who are now involved in this scandal

05:11

Reilly

and products have been withdrawn from shelves in places like Singapore, Hong Kong and some of the Caribbean countries, so really we are looking at what really has developed into a massive fraud”.

05:35

Supermarket/ Fast food montage

CAMPBELL: The horsemeat scandal has raised some disturbing questions about how confident we can be in what we eat. But here in Ireland it’s also exposed some uncomfortable home truths.

05:46

Campbell to camera

Ireland isn’t just a victim of this scandal, it helped create it.

06:01

Irish countryside

Music

06:06

Horses in fields

CAMPBELL: Look around the Irish countryside and it seems like an equine paradise with horses roaming free across the land, but two years ago over the border in Northern Ireland, one man sensed something was terribly wrong. Horses were disappearing en masse.

04:17

Philpott driving animal rescue vehicle

Stephen Philpott heads the Ulster Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

06:42

Campbell in car with Philpott

STEPHEN PHILPOTT: “This was thousands, thousands of horses. We’ve just driven past a field here, you know four years ago there were 38 horses in that field and they disappeared overnight. Once that got onto our radar, we made it our business to find out what was happening to these Irish horses”.

06:48

Video footage. Horses being loaded on to lorries

CAMPBELL: He and his colleagues began to video what they thought was strange behaviour. Horses that appeared to have little worth were being collected in fields, loaded into trucks and driven off.

STEPHEN PHILPOTT: “There was a huge systematic hoovering up of horses going on. Five years ago horses like that were everywhere in Ireland. They were

07:06

Philpott and Campbell look at video footage on laptop

on the sides of roads, they were in fields, they were all over Ireland. Those animals systematically started to disappear and what we’re trying to show here is that, you know, that’s how quickly the whole thing happened”.

07:31

Race meets

CAMPBELL: It was all an unexpected consequence of the global financial crisis. Early last decade Ireland experienced a brief, debt fuelled economic boom.

07:42

Music

07:56

CAMPBELL:  There was a frenzy of construction and newly cashed up builders knew exactly how to celebrate.

08:00

Music

08:06

CAMPBELL: Almost overnight, everyone wanted his very own horse. Racing syndicates boomed – so did horse breeding. Nobody worried about the cost of housing, feeding, medicating and training them”.

08:13

Seery

JOHN SEERY: “There was a lot of people involved in syndicates who just had money and it became a prestige thing, you know, to get involved in horses and they thought like that this is great”.

08:29

John Seery at track

CAMPBELL: John Seery was one of the multitudes who bought into a syndicate and one of the few who’ve stuck it out. When the economy crashed in 2007 the first thing to go was horses.

08:42

JOHN SEERY: “A lot of them horses were put down I suppose, you know, or they were sold off. A lot of them were sold off to England, a lot of them went to, you know, they were left trainers, trainers were left with maybe a load of horses on their hands because people just walked away, you know?”

08:57

Race meet

CAMPBELL: And he’s horrified to think they may have ended up on his dinner plate.

JOHN SEERY: “Oh when they were eating the horses,

09:10

Seery

oh it was terrible really. You know, when we heard this, it really puts you know a damper on everything”.

09:17

Race meet

STEPHEN PHILPOTT: “We saw some very bizarre behaviour. We couldn’t give an animal away, yet people were falling over themselves. Certain individuals were falling over themselves up at the sale yards to acquire the same animals that we couldn’t give away.

09:27

Animal Rescue video footage sale yards

CAMPBELL: Back in Northern Ireland the USPCA was growing even more suspicious about horses disappearing. It began visiting sale yards, where despite the glut of horses, a handful of the same people were buying up big.

STEPHEN PHILPOTT: “Now to us that just did not make any commercial sense whatsoever.

09:48

Philpott driving. Super:
Stephen Philpott
USPCA

You would need to have been in the whole horsy world to actually understand what was actually going on”.

10:14

USPCA vehicle/ Race meet

Music

10:20

CAMPBELL: What was going on was a massive criminal conspiracy to substitute cheaper horsemeat for beef and foist it onto unsuspecting consumers. Every day, Irish race horses and show jumpers are legally exported to Britain and France without any need for inspection. But if they’re being sent for slaughter, the transporters have to show horse passports.

10:27

Collins with horse passport. Super:
Joe Collins
Veterinarian

JOE COLLINS: [Veterinarian] “It has pages for inserting any medication that might be given to the horse, relevant medication. There’s a lot of medication that doesn’t have to be recorded, but there are those pages and there are certain pages that are specifically to allow a vet or the owner of the horse to record whether or not the animal is intended for slaughter for human consumption”.

10:57

Horse being injected with medication

CAMPBELL: The idea is to keep dangerous drugs and diseases out of the human food chain. Many racehorses, for example, are given anti-inflammatory drugs like Bute that are harmful to humans.

11:23

Race meet

To ensure passports aren’t switched, horses born since 2009 are injected with microchips to record their identities. It sounds fine in theory but the rules have been enforced so lightly, you could literally drive a truck through them.

11:36

Collins with Campbell

JOE COLLINS: “There are many horses transported between the states that are going to go for slaughter

11:58

Collins. Super:
Joe Collins
Veterinarian

but they’re not declared as going for slaughter . And so horse transporters will travel on the ferry, in lorries, perhaps in the night time sailings, perhaps when they expect there aren’t inspectors present and they expect that if they are challenged, they can present a number of passports so there are ten horses on the lorry and they can present ten passports and they may have an expectation that the horses won’t be specifically checked, cross referenced to the documents”.

12:03

CAMPBELL: “So what you’re saying is that it hasn’t been hard to beat the system”.

12:38

JOE COLLINS: “I think that’s a fair comment”.

12:41

Campbell in car

12:44

CAMPBELL: The reason for beating the system is money. If you can pass off cheap horses as fit for eating, then a lorry load that cost a thousand Euros can be sold for four thousand. And it’s been happening with ease on a massive scale, as the animal rights activist Stephen Philpott learned when he made contact with one of the smugglers.

STEPHEN PHILPOTT: “When the USPCA developed their own source from with inside

12:50

Philpott driving

this criminal conspiracy, it became very apparent from him that in over a three year period, he’d never been stopped once, he’d never been checked on a boat, he’d never had his passports checked and he told us that on many occasions all that was ever done was a head count at the abattoir. No one ever checked the individual passports for the horses -- and we believe him”.

13:15

Campbell with informants

CAMPBELL: The informant goes by the code name of Green Grass. He’s now in fear of his life. So to protect his identity we’ve used an actor’s voice.

13:48

GREEN GRASS: “Some horses had passports. Any horses that needed passports -- there was duplicate passports or whatever you want to call them – homemade passports sitting there to do the job”.

13:58

CAMPBELL: “Right, you’d just forge passports for the horses?”

GREEN GRASS: “Or make them up”.

CAMPBELL: “Did anyone ever check these passports?”

GREEN GRASS: “Never”.

CAMPBELL: “Never?”

GREEN GRASS: “Never”.

14:07

CAMPBELL: “The whole time you were doing this, you were never stopped by officials?”

14:18

GREEN GRASS: “Never. Not at the boat anyhow”.

14:21

CAMPBELL: “That’s extraordinary”.

14:24

USPCA night surveillance footage

The USPCA now began a full scale surveillance operation of horse laden lorries.

14:31

STEPHEN PHILPOTT: “Well this is just one example you’re looking at. I mean this happened time and time again. During the night we’d pick up horse lorries on the move,

14:41

Philpott and Campbell at laptop

stuffed full of horses and we’d stay with them until eventually they would take us, in this instance, to an abattoir in the Republic of Ireland.

14:49

USPCA night surveillance footage

You’re now in the dead of night and as if by magic, out of the darkness you’ll see vehicle after vehicle starting to appear stuffed full of valueless Irish horses.

14:57

Hidden camera footage. Empty abattoir

15:15

The next morning when we got back there, it was as if it had never happened. The abattoir was locked up. There were no horses there.

15:20

Philpott and Campbell at laptop

All that was left was their hooves and their heads and their guts and the horse meat had gone. So that was when we worked out what was actually happening. This was all to do with horsemeat. These animals were being spirited away in the middle of the night and the reason for that was their meat”.

15:28

Following lorry to port

Music

15:47

CAMPBELL: The informant Green Grass helped transport thousands of horses out of Belfast Port to abattoirs in England. Officials barely glanced at the consignments. He says some horses were so weak they were dosed with Cortisone and Bute before they were loaded otherwise, they wouldn’t survive the journey.

“Just how bad were some of the horses?”

15:53

Campbell with informants

GREEN GRASS: “On a scale of one to ten, maybe three”.

CAMPBELL: “Really. So very poor condition?”

16:17

GREEN GRASS: “Yeah”.

CAMPBELL: “So was there any horse you wouldn’t take?”

16:23

GREEN GRASS: “No. If it could walk up the ramp, if you could get it up the ramp, it would be on”.

16:26

Hidden camera footage. Horse slaughter at abattoir

Music

16:33

CAMPBELL: This is one of the English abattoirs he says he brought them to. What you’re about to see is upsetting.

16:39

An animal rights group secretly filmed slaughtermen committing acts of sickening cruelty. As many as three horses at a time were forced into the holding pen for shooting.

STEPHEN PHILPOTT: “You’re not allowed to do that. You’re certainly not allowed to kill animals in the presence of another animal.

16:47

Philpott and Campbell at laptop

The animal is dead, is supposed to be dead and not moving by the time it goes up on those foot jackals”.

17:06

Hidden camera footage. Horse slaughter at abattoir

CAMPBELL: “It’s still alive”.

The informant Green Grass says the abattoirs knew exactly what they were getting.

17:12

“Did you ever see any officials at the abattoirs?”

GREEN GRASS: “Never”.

17:20

Campbell with informant

CAMPBELL: “Never?”

GREEN GRASS: “No”.

CAMPBELL: “Did that surprise you?”

17:25

GREEN GRASS: “Yeah”.

17:28

CAMPBELL: “So all the abattoirs are saying they had no idea that they were using meat that shouldn’t be used for human consumption. What do you say to that?”

GREEN GRASS: “They knew”.

17:29

Dublin general views/Supermarkets

CAMPBELL: In this scandal nobody’s accepting blame, not the supermarkets, the frozen food companies, nor their suppliers. But the illicit meat was allowed to pass through every link in the food chain.

STEPHEN PHILPOTT: “This financial scam was

17:40

Philpott driving. Super:
Stephen Philpott
USPCA

based on the conversion of a valueless Irish horse with fraudulent passport, was being converted into a sought after delicacy on the continent of Europe, i.e. horsemeat”.

17:59

CAMPBELL: And the problem that started the whole mess -- unwanted, abandoned horses -- continues.

18:14

Horse in development lot

“This is the kind of depressing sight you see round Dublin these days. This was going to be a housing estate before the recession killed the building industry so now it’s just vacant land and lots of people have simply abandoned their horses here.

18:23

Campbell to camera beside motorway

Hardly any grass after a long winter, so a lot of the horses are hungry and sick ....and horses here are dead. You see dead horses just lying in the field right beside the motorway”.

18:37

Dead horse in field

Music

18:50

Hilary unloads horse float

18:53

CAMPBELL:  Hilary Robinson runs a small rescue charity called Hungry Horse Outside.

HILARY ROBINSON: “Just this morning we picked her up. She was left on the side of the road. She has no microchip in her – we checked. She’s not too poor but she’s very, very frightened.

19:05

Poor pet, poor, as you can see. Poor little girl”.

CAMPBELL: “Ribs sticking out”.

HILARY ROBINSON: “A bit yeah and she’s full of these old sticky backs and she doesn’t look too well love, no. Good girl”.

19:26

Hilary leads horse to stable

CAMPBELL: She says she’s shocked by Ireland’s failure to enforce the rules. One of the horses she rescued, named Charlie, is living proof of that.

19:39

Hilary with Charlie. Super:
Hilary Robinson
Hungry Horse Outside

HILARY ROBINSON: “Well before I loaded him onto the horsebox I decided I’d scan him to see if he had a microchip -- I never thought he would have -- and he did. So on the Monday then I rang the department, but they said data protection, they couldn’t give me out any information about his owner or anything like that but they could tell me it was Sport Horse Ireland. It’s a passport agency. So I rang them and they said ‘Oh yeah, we have his passport but he was slaughtered back in March 2012’. I now know it was the 24th of March and…”

CAMPBELL: “So according to his passport, he’s dead?”

HILARY ROBINSON: “He’s dead, yes, and on the third day he rose again”.

19:50

Hilary leads Charlie out of stall to field of rescued horses

CAMPBELL: The likely explanation is that someone used Charlie’s passport to get another horse slaughtered for meat.

“What does that tell you about the passport system?”

20:26

HILARY ROBINSON: “It’s very, very poor. Very poor. We’ve always known it was poor but not to this extent, not to the extent that somebody in Charlie’s place went down the slaughter line for food”.

20:39

Hilary feeds horses

CAMPBELL: The good news is that the Food Safety Authority hasn’t found dangerous chemicals in the process meats it’s tested, but that doesn’t lessen the fraud on consumers.

ALAN REILLY: “Well it’s difficult to speculate on exactly you know how long this scam has been going on,

20:52

but what we do know is that manufacturers have been drip feeding horse meat into the food chain and they’ve being doing that at the expense of the consumer.

21:10

Reilly. Super:
Alan Reilly
Food Standards Authority

It’s a blatant fraud. You know as well as that, fair trading practices, you know, really have to be questioned because if you are bidding for, let’s say a contract for, you know, manufacturing certain beef products, and you’re undercutting your competitors and knowingly adding horse meat instead of beef, I mean to say, that is going to impact hugely on industry.

21:24

Dublin

And it’s something that we have to stamp out very quickly, because what you will have here is a race to the bottom and that’s really not where we want to go”.

21:52

Supermarkets

CAMPBELL: In Dublin now, supermarkets aren’t promoting cheap processed food. It’s all about being natural and home grown. Regulations are being toughened up and the passport system tightened,

22:01

Philpott and Campbell in car

but to Stephen Philpott it’s all happening after the proverbial horse has bolted.

22:12

STEPHEN PHILPOTT: “In one fell swoop we have neglected an entire species of animal and we really all, as welfarists, as a developed country, we should all be ashamed of that. Nobody cared and that’s the bottom line in this whole story -- nobody cared. Nobody bothered asking the question we asked - where are all the Irish horses going?.

22:22

In the situation the Irish economy found itself in 2007 we loved money more. Money was more loved than the horses”

22:47

Hyland unloads race horse from float

CAMPBELL: But sometimes the two can be combined. Today Paddy Jack, the only man in Ireland to openly serve horse, has come to race one.

“So you bought him to basically sell as horsemeat

23:01

Hyland

and then what happened?”

PAT HYLAND: “It’s just we were coming home along the road and we had his book, you know, and his book was -- he had a very good pedigree on him.

23:14

Horse being lead

We were going to kill him and then we changed our mind. My daughter said we’ll give him a chance, and here is it”.

23:23

CAMPBELL: “So instead of becoming a horsemeat sandwich, he’s a racehorse again”.

PAT HYLAND: “Yeah, yeah, yeah”.

CAMPBELL: “And what’s his name?”

PAT HYLAND: “Do or Die”.

CAMPBELL: [laughing] “Do or Die”.

23:31

Do or Die races

Music

23:38

CAMPBELL: And so, without realising the inherent threat in his name, Do or Die was given a second chance.

23:49

Music

23:56

CAMPBELL: As Ireland comes to terms with the failures of the past, there’s hope the future will be brighter for its horses.

24:05

Music/ Race call

24:11

CAMPBELL: The future for Do or Die may be slightly more problematic. In this, his first race, he was nearly last.

24:17

Hyland

“Is it horse burgers for Do or Die?”

PAT HYLAND: “Nah, I’ll give him another go. He had a big day”.

24:27

Do or Die

CAMPBELL: Lucky for him, the Irish still love their horses.

24:34

Music

24:37

Credits:

Reporter: Eric Campbell

Camera: David Martin

Research: Susannah Palk and Roisin Boyd

Editor: Nicholas Brenner

Further Information Hungry Horse Outside

24:42