If every country gets the larger-than-life mogul it deserves, then it was all too telling that the face of big business in 1980s Ireland was Larry Goodman. The buccaneering baron of beef at one point presided over the largest meat export enterprise in Europe and is now the subject of the riveting Goodman: Too Big to Fail (RTÉ One, 9.35pm) documentary.
He, along with Michael Smurfit, was the closest the country had to a Donald Trump or Steve Jobs – a swashbuckling tycoon who seemed to stand for something beyond his own success. But where Smurfit was a posh boy who went to Clongowes, Goodman was part of a dynasty of cattle dealers who grew up in hard-knock post-war Dundalk.
Goodman is still alive, but the now 89-year-old declined to be involved in this film, as might be expected given the unflattering portrait it paints of a businessman who soared too high only to discover even he was subject to the forces of gravity.
Just as Goodman symbolised something bigger than the 1980s beef industry, so this film functions as more than a portrait of a corporation’s rise and fall. It is also a portal back to pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, where every politician not named Charles Haughey wore a cheap and nasty suit (if there were any female politicians around, we do not see them here), and few in public life seemed to have access to a decent barber.
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As is often the case with super-sized figures, Goodman comes across as a contradiction. He did not seek publicity, but he certainly didn’t object to going on television and wasn’t much bothered whether he was loved or hated. He was also a self-made millionaire who enjoyed the confidence of select politicians – in particular, Haughey and his sidekick Liam Lawlor.
Goodman was relentless. He shrugged off a scandal involving counterfeit South African stamps at a plant in Waterford and pushed Haughey and his finance minister Albert Reynolds hard to support his business dealings in Iraq via a huge expansion in the government’s export credit guarantee system, by which the Irish taxpayer underwrote his exports to Iraq (a country no private insurer would touch with a barge pole by the late 1980s).
What was he like as a person? In the 1980s, he was on television constantly, yet it is hard to get a sense of him, then or now. That’s despite contributions from journalists Fintan O’Toole, Susan O’Keeffe and Ivan Yates and beef industry protege-turned-rival Paschal Phelan.
“There was no small talk,” recalls Eamon Mackle, a former Goodman employee. “No, ‘Were you at the match last week?’ He wouldn’t have been at the match.”
This opening episode ends just as the cracks are beginning to show in Goodman’s beef empire after the “black swan event” of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait pulls the rug out from his business dealings in the Middle East.
Goodman’s fall and the political aftershock will be covered in part two – but such details pale in comparison with the stark truth that 1980s Ireland was a strange and faraway place. Back then beef barons had the ear of government, and successful businesspeople were held in a reverence that ranked alongside moving statues. People both worshipped and feared them, but could never quite work out if they were the real deal or not.
Goodman: Too Big to Fail concludes next Monday, March 9, on RTÉ One at 9.35pm
