JOHN Fleury has the powerful physique and the ruddy complexion of a farmer accustomed to heavy outdoor work but tears spill down his face when he recalls one of the last conversations he had with his mother. Even on her death-bed, Patricia Fleury (78) could not quieten her distress at the memory of a Department of Agriculture raid on her home a year before.

She had been recuperating after surgery to remove a cancerous kidney when the men arrived at the house where she and her late husband had reared their family and where Patricia was, by then, living alone. It was four days to Christmas.

The raid had begun at her son's house, a short distance away in the townland of Killyon, Co Offaly. The clock in his bedroom had shown it was 7.10am when John Fleury first heard the commotion outside. He had crossed to the window to look down and saw a small group of men below. They were shouting: "Department of Agriculture, open up." Six officials from the department's Special Investigations Unit, the SIU, escorted by a local garda, spent the next five to six hours searching the farmhouse John Fleury shares with his schoolteacher wife and their five children.

When the men from the department finished there, they moved on to Patricia Fleury's house where, according to her son, one of them attempted to search his terminally-ill mother's handbag. After her death 13 months later, still agitated to the end by the memory of that day, John Fleury vowed to vindicate his family's name.

The raid took place on 21 December 1999.

Next Wednesday, in the cut-throat bustle of Dublin's Four Courts, Fleury will squeeze his big farmer's frame into a seat in the land's highest court, to await another instalment in his epic fight for justice. He has spent "an awful lot of money and time" in the past eight years engaged in a David-and-Goliath struggle arising from 150 charges brought against him and his former business partners, Golden Vale Marts, by the Department of Agriculture, in the course of which their jointly-owned cattle export company, GVM Exports Ltd, went into liquidation with losses of Euro380,000. The company's liquidator, accountant William Carey, says: "The company was effectively closed down because it could not trade its produce."

In the DA il three years ago, Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte accused the SIU of falsifying evidence and forging documents while investigating Fleury.

Fleury will not be alone in the courtroom.

Other farmers as well as pharmacists and vets who feel that they too have been unfairly treated by the SIU, while denied any right of redress, will hang on every word uttered in the Supreme Court. In the DA il last Thursday week, the SIU was accused of "using a heavy hand" in enforcing its powers to investigate and prosecute members of the farming community.

Fine Gael TD Denis Naughten recounted a recent incident: "It happened in Ardara, Co Donegal, " he told the DA il. "The SIU official inspecting the potential sale of prescription drugs for animals in a pharmacy searched the handbags of customers in that pharmacy. That is a blatant infringement of the right to privacy of individuals who were innocent bystanders in that situation. There is a need for checks and balances to be put in place with regard to the function and role of the Special Investigations Unit."

By coincidence, another farmer locked in battle with the department, John Hanrahan, who famously sued Merck Sharp & Dohme for polluting his farm, will also be in the Four Courts this week for a judicial review of his case against the department. When the Master of the High Court heard two weeks ago that EU farm payments of more than Euro40,000 owed to Hanrahan had been passed directly to the Revenue Commissioners by the department, he described it as "tactics akin to the Nixon era".

Master Edmund Honohan said: "This was an attempt to shut Mr Hanrahan down" and he warned that the department "need to behave themselves".

The case to be heard by the Supreme Court next Wednesday is the culmination of Department of Agriculture charges in the District Court against the three appellants, two pharmacists and one farmer, under the Animal Remedies Act. In an unusual, though not unique decision (the same occurred in the landmark 'C case' on statutory rape last year), the Supreme Court consented to hear legal arguments on a point not orally raised by the same appellants in a case it had already ruled on last November. The appeal hinges on a technicality: whether ministerial orders giving effect to EU directives since 1973 are valid in light of section three of the 1972 European Communities Act, which forbids government ministers to create indictable offences in relation to EU law.

Wider ramifications According to one lawyer, "hundreds of prosecutions have been frozen pending the outcome of this appeal". He expects that, if the appeal is successful, it could have "far wider ramifications than the C case for Irish laws". Ministerial orders are routinely signed for such issues as waste and sewage disposal and marine and agricultural matters, including the granting of criminal sanction. It was such a ministerial order that established the Special Investigations Unit within the Department of Agriculture.

The extent of the ramifications was indicated by Green TD Dan Boyle when he said in the DA il that "there are several thousand legal instruments emanating from the EU every year".

In order to close the loophole, the government is rushing amending legislation through the DA il, designed to give the state retrospective immunity against potential claims for compensation. The European Communities Bill 2006 passed quietly through the Seanad before Christmas and had its second-stage reading in the DA il in the first week of February. During that debate (which had to be halted at one stage because there were not enough TDs present to form a quorum), Denis Naughten, describing it as an attempt "to paper over the cracks of the last 33 years", predicted that the bill would eventually be referred to the Supreme Court by the president.

A lawyer who has defended clients against criminal charges brought by the Department of Agriculture says he is "aghast at bad law being passed by a parliament that's too busy to scrutinise it and that will give licence to public servants to continue with their jackboot behaviour in the name of the state".

Farmers, vets and pharmacists who feel aggrieved at their treatment by the SIU agree that stringent policing is vital to eradicate banned substances and illegal practices in the sector. What they object to is the SIU's "absolute power to search and destroy". They want a complaints forum to be established, similar to the garda ombudsman, because, they say, they cannot match the department's deep pockets in order to appeal cases up through the courts system.

"We're law-abiding. We believe in the rule of law, " says PJ Buckley, chief executive of Golden Vale Marts, the country's secondbiggest livestock mart company. "We accept there has to be a means of ensuring the regulations are kept but, equally, the state has to ensure that all the people working in its name are above reproach."

Court proceedings brought by the department against the now defunct GVM Exports, the company jointly owned by John Fleury and Golden Vale Marts, collapsed in a mistrial at Kilcormac District Court in January 2003. The charges - 150 of them - arose when the department placed a restriction order on a herd of the company's cattle, claiming that five of the animals had tested positive for brucellosis. Before the trial collapsed, Fleury's lawyers had read a report into the court record from Dr Brendan Cunningham, retired professor of veterinary pathology at NUI, stating it was "incontrovertible" that the herd did not, in fact, have brucellosis.

A second witness report was read to the court. This one, by hand-writing expert James Nash, said that signatures on test-result documents, all in the same name, were unlikely to have been penned by the same hand.

Stolen animals During a lunchbreak in the hearing, a department official told two journalists that John Fleury had stolen animals from GVM Exports.

This false allegation was put to Fleury's business partner, PJ Buckley, outside the courthouse half-an-hour later and he responded: "John Fleury broke his back for our company. Besides, if the department really believed he was stealing animals, why didn't they come to us, his partners, and tell us?"

Among the battery of charges brought against Fleury was one for possession of a prohibited drug, chloramphenicol, which is used in the treatment of animal typhoid and meningitis. Bottles of chloramphenicol had supposedly been seized during the raid on his house in December 1999. Neither the bottles nor any samples of their contents were shown to the householder and no lists was presented of the items seized. At the request of Fleury's solicitor, a hand-written list was submitted by the department the following day but it made no mention of chloramphenicol.

On 5 September 2002, the state solicitor in the case wrote to Fleury's solicitor informing him that he had been instructed not to proceed with the chloramphenicol charge. No explanation was given.

"There was a headline in my local newspaper that said 'Well Known Offaly Farmer in Court on Drug Charges' and it was flung in my face by a priest only two weeks ago, " says an emotional John Fleury.

His words are echoed by his business partner PJ Buckley. "My whole issue is the way they come down on top of you. It's very threatening, " he says. "It's throwing the book at you. We were a big enough company. We could take it.

We could fight it. We've spent a lot on legal costs.

But how could an individual farmer? Eleven of them [SIU investigators] came into my office and searched it. I went to make a phonecall to my chairman and I was told I could not.

"We've seen with the gardaA- in Donegal that there were questions about the behaviour of some of the guards. There should be some checks of these people too. I'm even conscious saying this that, if I'm quoted in the paper, they'll be down on top of me. There's the whole psychologial aspect of this. I've had visits from guards and appearances in court. People are being made criminals."

A farmer in Munster become so exasperated by what he perceived as harassment by the SIU that he instructed his solicitor to write a formal complaint to the department. Within 48 hours, he received a hand-delivered letter of apology. When asked to tell his story for this article, the farmer declined, explaining that the department's apology had come with a confidentiality clause affixed.