Cathal O'Shea has no trouble selling Irish beef or lamb in the heart of Europe. It is walking out the door of the young butcher's shop on Brussels' Rue Franklin as fast as the container-loads are delivered from Ireland. "I think Irish beef is the easiest to sell in the world," he says.
O'Shea's is a surprising success story, and one that speaks volumes about both the potential and problems involved in selling Irish beef in Europe.
In the gradual recovery from a disastrous 1996, last year Ireland sold some £280 million worth of beef to continental Europe, 130,000 tonnes - up 40,000 on 1997.
But the EU market is still dwarfed by comparison to the Irish dependence on third countries in the Middle East and the collapsed Russian market, markets which depend on heavy export subsidies due to be phased out under World Trade Organisation agreements. Open barely a year on the edge of the European quarter, the genial son of a Templemore butcher has turned the family business into a small multinational and is prospering on word of mouth in the Irish and international communities. He already has itchy feet and talks of opening up elsewhere - perhaps, in the tradition of the Irish pub, he could export ready-made Irish butcher's shops.
Yet, as Mr O'Shea admits, he is not selling a cheap product. Despite the fact that farmers in Ireland may be receiving some 2025 per cent less from the factories for their meat than their Belgian equivalents, he says he is buying Irish meat wholesale at some 15 per cent above local Belgian wholesale prices.
He admits there are some problems with local tastes, a difficulty that Irish beef faces in other European markets. Most Belgians traditionally prefer completely lean meat - yet the famous Belgian blanc-bleu meat is often tasteless and has a reputation for not exactly being hormone-free.
Mr O'Shea is scathing: "You should see their animals, they're elephant-like."
And in southern France and Italy meat-eaters expect a different colour to the deep red meat produced by Ireland's extensive, grass-based production system. Yet surveys show consumers do want less intensively produced meat.
Changing tastes takes time and money, as evidenced by Bord Bia's £15 million annual budget. But its efforts do not impress Mr O'Shea.
Supermarkets, like the GW chain here, have also in the past complained that the problem with Irish beef was that they could not be guaranteed a continuity of supply. In part that was because the production cycle in Ireland had traditionally been deeply seasonal, with large gaps between slaughtering months. It is a problem, the Department says, which has now been largely resolved.
In part it was the result of the generous intervention system which in the past often seemed an easier option to Irish producers than the hard graft of adapting to the market needs.
Yet if some of the structural problems of the Irish beef production system have been or are being addressed, the vulnerability of Irish dependence on exports has been exposed again by the experience of the closing down of European markets to "foreign" meat in the wake of BSE. That too will take time to overcome.
A spokesman for the Department acknowledges the problems and accepts the future of the Irish beef industry will depend on its ability to conquer the European market.
What they need is a few more Cathal O'Sheas.
