I think this Bill is an extraordinary production to meet a very serious situation. I do not think anybody realises that more than the Minister himself. The whole framework of this Bill is nearly a year old, and the Minister has hesitated, and rightly hesitated, about putting it into operation. The desperate position which the farmers found themselves reduced to a couple of weeks ago drove them into the action they took. The proverbial worm turned. When they see all that the Minister has been able to give them I think they will definitely turn. The Minister realises and admitted throughout his introductory speech that the whole trouble is the surplus of milk. The farmers' trouble was an uneconomic price. Naturally, when there is a surplus of anything the price will be low. It was not looking for a market the farmers were when they took action a few days ago, but looking for an economic price for their milk. I should like to know from the Minister—he carefully evaded it in his introductory speech—whether this Bill proposes to give them an economic price for their milk, which is alleged to be a glut in the Dublin market. He has, I suppose under advice, adopted the principle in this joint board which all up-to-date dairymen in Dublin have adopted from experience for many years. He is giving this joint board power to work off surplus milk. Every prudent dairyman had pretty well every day of his life to work off surplus milk.
There is nothing original in the conception of this Bill. The Minister is trying to establish a kind of super-dairyman for handling the milk trade, and in that he proposes to destroy all private enterprise and initiative. On whose advice is he doing that? I challenge him to produce the advice of any successful dairyman or farmer. I know there have been a number of job-hunters, broken-down creamery managers, promoting organisations of this kind for the last year and a half. Have any successful dairymen, who knuckled down and built up their own business, advised the Minister on these lines? The Minister realises that it is a problem of finding a market for a very perishable commodity that has a surplus. Driven to the wall, as he was a couple of weeks ago, he had to fix maximum prices. In introducing the Bill, he said that these could not be sustained. He had to go on, and, driven to fix prices, he has gone on and produced this Bill.
It seems that, instead of the Minister and the Government generally facing up to the outstanding facts of the economic situation which confronts this country at present, due entirely to the policy pursued by the Government, they bring in a Bill. A year ago we spent a long time passing a Milk and Dairy Bill through all its stages in this House until it became an Act. Was there any necessity for that Act? Why is it not in operation now? It was hung up as soon as it was passed and it has never been put into operation. Here is a Bill which proposes to cut right across the fundamentals of that Act.
Deputy Dockrell, in referring to the way to increase milk consumption, said that if a good, clean article is produced at a reasonable price the consumption will go up. Is the Minister proposing to do that? Section 2 of this Bill says:
The word "milk" means whole milk which is sold for consumption as whole milk or is used in the manufacture of butter, cheese, cream or ice-cream.
I put it to the Minister that such milk is prohibited by law from sale in Northern Ireland and Great Britain as unfit for human consumption as liquid milk. I do not think the Minister will contradict that statement. If he does, I have the Order made by the Department of Agriculture in Northern Ireland. That Order grades milk into four grades. Grades A, B and C can be sold for human consumption as liquid milk. A licence is not required for the production or sale of grade D milk, but such milk may not be sold for human consumption as whole milk. Grade D milk is milk produced under these conditions—milk not sold under a grade A, B or C licence. Grade D milk cannot be sold for consumption as liquid milk and must be disposed of on the farm or sold for manufacturing purposes. That will usually mean sale to a creamery. That milk is not subject to any inspection at its source and the milk the Minister proposes to have dumped into the City of Dublin is milk that is not subject to any inspection whatever at the source of production.
While I agree that this matter requires investigation at the moment, I at the same time agree with the view put forward by Deputy Dillon that the Minister should go slowly and get sound advice. The members of the County Dublin Board of Health, at their meeting to-day, asked themselves these questions: "What are we paying a veterinary organisation for in the County Dublin? What are we paying a medical officer of health and the organisation of his department for in the County Dublin?" If a single farmer in County Dublin sold, in the City of Dublin, the milk certified by the Minister in this Bill he would be prosecuted, and, mind you, prosecuted not under any bye-law made by the Dublin County Council or by the County Dublin Board of Health, but under an Act passed by this House. Why should the people of the County Dublin be taxed to provide machinery to make the cost of the production of milk greater in their case than it is elsewhere? The people in the County Dublin are obliged to do that by an Act of this House under the Milk and Dairies Order and under the Bovine Tuberculosis Order. This Bill is now before the House while we have on the Statute Book an Act, passed last year, the object of which was to provide a cleaner and better milk supply to the people of this country, that has never been put into operation. We are asked by the Minister to give a Second Reading to a Bill the object of which is to provide us with milk that, according to experts and to the report of the Milk Commission that sat in Great Britain, and according to the best opinion that we have at the present time, is unfit for human consumption. I do not know whether it is unfit for human consumption or not, but what I do know is that under an Act passed by the Oireachtas the obligation has been imposed on farmers in the County Dublin not to produce that milk.
In the County Dublin we have been obliged to set up machinery under the Department of Agriculture and under the Department of Local Government and Public Health, but in view of the introduction of this Bill we have decided to call a meeting for Tuesday next to decide as to whether we are going to scrap the organisation that we have in the County Dublin. If other counties can produce cheaper milk and sell it in the market at our doors, then we are going to produce milk and to scrap the machinery that we have been compelled to provide.
The Minister thinks that, by juggling with an organisation, he is going to get a better price for the milk. We all know that you can only put into a gallon measure a gallon of stuff. It has been said that about 20,000 gallons of milk per day are required to supply the needs of the City of Dublin, and that after meeting that demand there is still a surplus available. How does the Minister propose to find a market for that surplus in the city? He is proposing to introduce a series of registrations, the object in view being to attempt to get an economic price for the milk and to have a market for all the milk that is offered. Joint boards are to be set up, prices are to be fixed and machinery provided whereby both wholesalers and retailers can buy more milk than they require. A dump will be provided for that, because that is really what it amounts to, by the board which apparently will manufacture all the surplus milk that goes into the dump into butter. I presume that butter will be sold at a lower price than the prevailing price for creamery butter. Obviously, butter made from milk that is carted about to many destinations and that finally cannot get a market as liquid milk, and is then brought to this dump, will hardly be up to the same standard of quality as butter made from fresh milk. There will be a loss on that milk.
When people know that there is a dump they may not be so anxious about the amount of milk they buy. They may be inclined to buy too much knowing that they have the dump to put it into. But where, in all the organisation of this Bill, is there any further outlet for milk? At the present time every dairyman in Dublin is producing more milk than he requires for his contracts or for his customers. He knows that he must always have a little extra milk. Following a cold night, the quantity of milk that he gets from his own cows may be reduced by 10 per cent., so that the prudent dairyman who wants to hold his customers and to obviate the necessity of buying milk from other people, the quality of which he cannot guarantee, always aims at producing a surplus which he churns into butter. Now, instead of one person doing that, the Minister proposes in this Bill to jumble all these little surpluses into a dump. All that milk is to be churned into butter, but so far as I can see the Minister is not making any other attempt to provide a further outlet for the milk.
The board will be confronted with two problems. One will be not to admit into the city, or into a sale area, any more milk than is required for use as liquid milk. It will either have to limit the supply of milk or allow milk in ad lib and then turn the surplus into the dump to make inferior butter. But does that remedy the situation with which the Minister has been called upon to deal, and it was to remedy that situation, apparently, that he introduced this Bill? I do not see that it brings him one inch further.
There may be a nominal minimum price fixed, higher than the prices that have been obtainable in the last couple of years, but the levies will have to go up, because the joint board will sustain a loss. That loss will increase as the amount of milk allowed into the sale area exceeds the amount of consumption in that area. That loss will have to be made up by a levy on the whole of the milk, so that the net result will be that the price of milk will go down, or the supply must be curtailed. What is going to be done with the land which is producing that milk? First of all, what is going to be done with that milk if it is not admitted into the towns but is turned back into the country? By creating an artificial shortage you can keep up the price. You can fix a minimum price for a certain number of gallons, but the whole problem is not that price but what is to be done with the extra amount of milk. I certainly cannot see in this Bill—and the Minister has not elaborated the point—any indication as to what will be done with that milk.
Deputy Dillon, and to a lesser extent Deputy Dockrell, touched upon the main point. The trouble with the market to-day is that there are people producing milk in the last couple of years who never before produced milk for sale. Why are they producing it? Because they had nothing on their land which they could turn into cash. Instead of dry stock, which proved a failure on their hands, they went in for cows. They sent milk to the local towns; they sent milk up to the City of Dublin. The result is that there is a superabundant supply of milk, and, of course, down goes the price. Does the Minister not realise that it is not at milk he should start in order to relieve the milk situation in Dublin? Is it not clear to him that that situation is a manifestation of the failure of the Government policy in regard to agriculture? The people would not be producing milk and sending it to Dublin at 5½d. per gallon unless that was the best profit they could get out of their land. If those people could make a better profit by tilling their land, by growing any of the ordinary agricultural crops, by grazing dry stock, by raising sheep, by growing corn or wheat or the famous beet, they would not be sending milk to Dublin at that price. One does not require any expert knowledge of agriculture or any other business in order to realise that. If there is any grumbling about the price of an article produced in a workshop or a field where other articles are capable of being produced, and the price of that article which is being produced at the moment is not an economic one, the fact that the people still continue to produce it at that uneconomic price is in itself proof that, although it is not an economic price, it is more nearly an economic price than that which can be secured for any other article capable of production in the same workshop or the same field.
I will not go into the general agricultural policy, but the Minister should realise that the uneconomic price of 5½d. a gallon for milk, and the fact that the people have no line of retreat from the production of milk but are forced to go on producing it at that price, are proof of the fact—and he ought to sit up and take notice of it— that that is the best which can be made out of land under his administration. The situation generally is very serious, and it must come to a head sooner or later. Perhaps we are nearer to its coming to a head now than we realise. My opinion is that this Bill, perhaps unknown to the Minister, puts him and his Government in the dock. The uneconomic price of 5½d. a gallon for milk is the best that can be made out of the best land in Ireland within five miles of this city. The Minister proposes in this Bill to fix an artificial price for that article sold in the limited market, and by a series of registration fees and levies he tries to deceive himself into the belief that he is raising the price.
He is going to set up a new department somewhat similar to the Bacon Marketing Board and the Pigs Marketing Board. If it is to be similar— I am quoting his own words—then if the price is to be kept up it will have to limit production as in the case of the Bacon Marketing Board. That new department is going to cost something. The chairman is going to be a civil servant, though perhaps he may not be so styled. The Chairman of the Pigs Marketing Board and the Chairman of the Bacon Marketing Board have not, I think, been so styled. A question put to the Minister about pigs or bacon is very neatly side-tracked by him. He says: "The Pigs Marketing Board or the Bacon Marketing Board is dealing with that. I have no control over them." The Minister for Agriculture has no control over pigs and bacon? I suppose he will be telling us in the near future that he has no control over milk either. If he keeps on legislating in this way he will legislate himself out of existence. It will be a race between the Minister and the farmer as to which of them will go out of existence first. There are many points in the Bill that require attention, but this is hardly the appropriate Stage at which to go into them in detail. They will be more properly dealt with on the Committee Stage.
I should like if the Minister, when replying, would deal with the all-important question which prompted this legislation, and that is the low price for milk and the limited market for liquid milk. I should like him to tell us how he proposes in this Bill to raise that price of milk without keeping back the surplus—without letting in anything but what is required or thereabouts.
If those are the lines he proposes to pursue, in order to get what he styles an economic price for the milk producers, will he tell us what is going to happen to the milk that is being produced, of which there is now a surplus here, that is pulling down the price below the economic level? If it is to be thrown back on the people's hands, they will stop the production of so much milk, and what is going to be done with the land then and how is the Minister going to face up to that problem? It will not be solved by any sleight-of-hand tricks such as levies and apparently inflated prices — prices the effect of which is taken back again by a levy per gallon on the amount of milk sold in order to pay for the loss that will be on the dump, for there will be a big loss there, and superimposed on the expenses of marketing milk in the future. If this Bill goes through you will have the cost of this machinery of the milk marketing board, as one might call it, and you will have the cost of the big staff that will be required, the expenses of the board, and so on. All that is coming out of the price of milk, because it will be financed out of levies which the milk marketing board will collect from the producers of milk. So that the Minister's proposition really boils down to this: He has an article for which he wants to get a better price. There is a small price because there is a surplus of it put on the market. He now proposes to set up machinery to sell that article in the same market in which it has been sold heretofore. The market is no larger and the number of articles put on that market will be the same or perhaps greater, as turned out to be the case with pigs when the machinery was set up to deal with that problem. There was a surplus of pigs produced and they were put on the market. As I say, the Minister adds to the expenses of marketing by whatever will be the cost of the marketing board or of the general organisation he will set up under this Bill, and all that has to come out of the price.
Now, the Minister increases the cost of marketing. In other words, he increases the cost of production, and the market remains the same. How is he going to increase the price? These are some of the general matters which I certainly should like to hear answered on the Second Stage. The more detailed matters relating to sections and sub-sections, and the details of organisation, can best be dealt with in Committee, but I should be very interested to hear the Minister tell us how we will get a better price for milk, in the limited market we have, in the future than we have been receiving in the past, and at the same time provide as big a market in the future as we have had in the past.
