Committee on Finance. - Vote on Account (No. 2), 1943-44. – Dáil Éireann (11th Dáil) – Wednesday, 7 Jul 1943

An tAire Airgeadais (Seán T. O Ceallaigh)

Tairgim:—

“Go ndeontag suim nach mó ná £8,423,000 i gcuntas chun no mar chabhair chun íoctha na Muirear a thiocfaidh chun bheith iníochtha i rith na bliana dar críocha 31adh lá de Mhárta, 1944, i gcóir seirbhísí áirithe puiblí, eadhon:—

That a sum not exceeding £8,423,000 be granted on account for or towards defraying the Charges that will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1944, for certain public services, namely:—

	£		£
1 Teaghlachas an Uachtaráin	1,300	1 President's Establishment	1,300
2 Tithe an Oireachtais	42,100	2 Houses of the Oireachtas	42,100
3 Roinn an Taoisigh	5,150	3 Department of the Taoiseach	5,150
4 An tArd-Reachtaire Cunntas Ciste	6,890	4 Comptroller and Auditor-General	6,890
5 Oifig an Aire Airgeadais	26,200	5 Office of the Minister for Finance	26,200
6 Oifig na gCoimisinéirí Ioncuim	320,000	6 Office of the Revenue Commissioners	320,000
7 Pinsin Sean-Aoise	1,265,000	7 Old Age Pensions	1,265,000
8 Deolchairí Cúitimh	100	8 Compensation Bounties	100
9 Oifig na nOibreacha Poiblidhe	47,800	9 Office of Public Works	47,800
10 Oibreacha agus Foirgintí Poiblidhe	335,000	10 Public Works and Buildings	335,000
11 Longlann Inis Sionnach	1,000	11 Haulbowline Dockyard	1,000
12 Saotharlann Stáit	3,350	12 State Laboratory	3,350
13 Coimisiún na Stát-Sheirbhíse	8,100	13 Civil Service Commission	8,100
14 Bord Cuartaíochta na hEireann	Nil	14 Irish Tourist Board	Nil
15 Coimisiúin agus Fiosrúcháin Speisialta	2,400	15 Commissions and Special Inquiries	2,400
16 Aoisliúntais agus Liúntais Fágála	176,500	16 Superannuation and Retired Allowances	176,500
17 Rátaí ar Mhaoin Riaghaltais	88,500	17 Rates on Government Property	88,500
18 An tSeirbhís Seicréideach	6,700	18 Secret Service	6,700
19 Costaisí fén Acht Timpeal Togha chán agus fé Acht na nGiúirithe	Nil	19 Expenses under the Electoral Act and the Juries Act	Nil
20 Costaisí Ilghnéitheacha	4,200	20 Miscellaneous Expenses	4,200
21 Páipéarachas agus Clódóireacht	62,000	21 Stationery and Printing	62,000
22 Measadóireacht agus Suirbhéireacht Teorann	11,500	22 Valuation and Boundary Survey	11,500
23 Suirbhéireacht an Ordonáis	8,900	23 Ordnance Survey	8,900
24 Deontaisí Breise Talmhaíochta	100,000	24 Supplementary Agricultural Grants	100,000
25 Dlí-Mhuirearacha	23,500	25 Law Charges	23,500
26 Ollscoileanna agus Coláistí	39,500	26 Universities and Colleges	39,500
27 Pinsin do Bhaintreacha agus do Dhílleachtaithe	150,000	27 Widows' and Orphans Pensions	150,000
28 Oifig Thaighde Eolaíochta Ré na Práinne	11,000	28 Emergency Scientific Research Bureau	11,000
29 Bainistí Stoc Riaghaltais	50	29 Management of Government Stocks	50
30 Talmhaidheacht	450,000	30 Agriculture	450,000
31 Iascach	4,500	31 Fisheries	4,500
32 Oifig an Aire Dlighidh agus Cirt	Nil	32 Office of the Minister for Justice	Nil
33 An Gárda Síochána	Nil	33 Gárda Síochána	Nil
34 Príosúin	Nil	34 Prisons	Nil
35 An Chúirt Dúithche	Nil	35 District Court	Nil
36 An Chúirt Chuarda	Nil	36 Circuit Court	Nil
37 An Chúirt Uachtarach agus an Ard-Chúirt Bhreithiúnais	Nil	37 Supreme Court and High Court of Justice	Nil
38 Clárlann na Talmhan agus Clárlann na nDintiúirí	Nil	38 Land Registry and Registry of Deeds	Nil
39 Oifig na nAnnálacha Puiblí	Nil	39 Public Record Office	Nil
40 Tabhartaisí agus Tiomanta Déirciúla	Nil	40 Charitable Donations and Bequests	Nil
41 Riaghaltas Aiteamhail agus Sláinte Phoiblidhe	523,000	41 Local Government and Public Health	523,000
42 Oifig an Ard-Chlárathóra	4,530	42 General Register Office	4,530
43 Gealtlann Dúndroma	5,000	43 Dundrum Asylum	5,000
44 Arachas Sláinte Náisiúnta	150,000	44 National Health Insurance	150,000
45 Oifig an Aire Oideachais	Nil	45 Office of the Minister for Education	Nil
46 Bun-Oideachas	Nil	46 Primary Education	Nil
47 Meadhon-Oidheachas	Nil	47 Secondary Education	Nil
48 Ceárd-Oideachas	Nil	48 Technical Instruction	Nil
49 Eolaíocht agus Ealadha	Nil	49 Science and Art	Nil
50 Scoileanna Ceartúcháin agus Saothair	Nil	50 Reformatory and Industrial Schools	Nil
51 An Gaileirí Náisiúnta	Nil	51 National Gallery	Nil
52 Tailte	Nil	52 Lands	Nil
53 Foraoiseacht	Nil	53 Forestry	Nil
54 Seirbhísí na Gaeltachta	Nil	54 Gaeltacht Services	Nil
55 Tionnscal agus Tráchtáil	Nil	55 Industry and Commerce	Nil
56 Seirbhísí Iompair agus Meteoraíochta	Nil	56 Transport and Meteorological Services	Nil
57 An Bínse Bóthair Iarainn	Nil	57 Railway Tribunal	Nil
58 Muir-Sheirbhís	Nil	58 Marine Service	Nil
59 Arachas Díomhaointis agus Congnamh Díomhaointis	Nil	59 Unemployment Insurance and Unemployment Assistance	Nil
60 Oifig Chlárathachta Mhaoine Tionnscail agus Tráchtála	Nil	60 Industrial and Commercial Property Registration Office	Nil
61 Puist agus Telegrafa	862,000	61 Posts and Telegraphs	862,000
62 Fóirleatha Nea-shrangach	26,300	62 Wireless Broadcasting	26,300
63 An tArm	2,836,000	63 Army	2,836,000
64 Arm-Phinsin	207,000	64 Army Pensions	207,000
65 Gnóthaí Eachtracha	32,500	65 External Affairs	32,500
66 Cumann na Náisiún	Nil	66 League of Nations	Nil
67 Scéimeanna Fostaíochta agus Scéimeanna Práinne	300,000	67 Employment and Emergency Schemes	300,000
68 Conganta Airgid alos Tortha Thalmhaíochta	233,000	68 Agricultural Produce Subsidies	233,000
69 Soláthairtí	Nil	69 Supplies	Nil
70 Institiúid Ard-Léighinn Bhaile Atha Cliath	Nil	70 Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies	Nil
71 Liúntaisí Bídh	Nil	71 Food Allowances	Nil
72 Cúiteamh i nDíobháil do Mhaoin (Neodracht)	40,000	72 Damage to Property (Neutrality) Compensation	40,000
73 Cúiteamh alos Díobhála Pearsanta (Síbhialtaigh)	2,430	73 Personal Injuries (Civilians) Compensation	2,430
AN TIOMLÁN	£8,423,000	TOTAL	£8,423,000”

Is dócha gur cuimhin leis na Teachtaí a bhí ina gcomhaltaí den Dáil deireannach gur chuir an Vóta i gCúntas don bhliain airgeadais seo a ritheadh i Mí na Márta so caithte dóthain airgid ar fáil chun na Seirbhísí Puiblí do choimeád ar siúl go dtí tímpeall an lá deireannach den mhí seo, tráth bhéadh mion-scrúdú na Meastachán críochnuithe againn de ghnáth. Ní dhearna an Dáil deireannach ach naoi geinn ar fhichid de na Meastacháin do rith, ámhthach, agus ní foláir anois, thárla gur ar éigin a fhéadfaí deighleáil láithreach leis na ceithre Meastacháin is dachad atá fágtha, ní foláir Vóta eile i gCúntas do rith, mara bhfuiltear chun na seirbhísí lena mbaineann na Meastacháin sin do leigint in éag ag deire na míosa.

Sé an méid atá ag teastáil ná ocht milliún go leith púnt, go garbh, agus tá sé curtha le chéile mar atá leagtha amach ar Chlár na hOibre agus ar an bPáipéar Bán a cuireadh timcheall chuig na Teachtaí. Meastar gur leor an tsuim sin do mhíosa Lúnasa, Meán Fómhair, Deire Fómhair, agus na Samhna, agus tá súil agam go mbeidh breithiúnas déanta againn ar na Meastacháin go léir sar a mbeidh an tréimhse sin istigh. Go generálta, sí an tsuim a hiarrtar do gach Vóta ar leith ná timpeall trian den Mheastachán iomlán glan in aghaidh na bliana; i gcásanna áirithe níorbh fhéidir claoidhe leis an riail sin, ámhthach.

Sé an méid iomlán glan atá ag teastáil i mbliana do na Seirbhísí Soláthair ná £40,978,579, agus dhá Mheastachán Fhoirlíontacha gur glacadh leo tar éis foillsithe Imleabhar na Meastachán d'áireamh. Is méadú de £546,751 no 1? per cent. é seo ar an soláthar iomlán de £40,431,828 a deineadh don bhliain seo caithte. Foluíonn an tsuim dheireannach sin, ar ndóigh, na Meastacháin Fhoirlíontacha agus Bhreise do ritheadh i gcaitheamh na bliana. Bé an chéad soláthar glan don bhliain seo caithte ná £39,112,301 agus, i gcomórtas leis an fhigiúr sin, tá soláthar 1943-44 imithe in áirde £1,866,278 no 4¾ per cent.

Den tsoláthar a hiarrtar i geóir na bliana so, tugadh £14,419,294 cheana chun crícheanna na naoi Meastachán ar fiehid go bhfuil glactha leo ag an Dáil. Cuireadh £8,952,595 den fhuighleach de £26,559,285 ar fáil sa chéad Vóta i gCúntas.

Deputies who were members of the last Dáil will recall that the Vote on Account for the current financial year, which was passed in March last, provided sufficient moneys to enable the various public services to be carried on up to approximately the 31st of this month, by which time the detailed consideration of the Estimates would normally have been completed. Only 29 of the current Estimates were passed by the last Dáil, however, and, as it would hardly be feasible to dispose of the remaining 44 Estimates immediately, it is necessary to pass a further Vote on Account if the services to which those Estimates relate are not to be brought to a standstill at the end of this month.

The amount required is approximately eight and a half million pounds, and is made up as indicated on the Order Paper, and on the White Paper which has been circulated to Deputies. This provision will, it is calculated, be sufficient for the months of August, September, October, and November, by which time I hope we shall have completed our consideration of the remaining Estimates. The sum required for each particular Vote is in general about one-third of the total net Estimate for the year; in some cases, however, a departure from that proportion is necessary.

The total net sum required for the supply services for the current financial year, including the total of two Supplementary Estimates passed since the volume of Estimates was published, is £40,978,579, representing an increase of £546,751 or 1? per cent. on the net provision of £40,431,828 for last year. The latter sum includes, of course, all Supplementary and Additional Estimates passed during the year. The original net provision for last year was £39,112,301, and, as compared with that figure, the 1943-44 provision is up by £1,866,278 or 4¾ per cent.

Of the sum required for this year, £14,419,294 is in respect of the 29 Estimates already passed. £8,952,595 of the remaining £26,559,285 was provided in the first Vote on Account.

Deputies who sat in the last Dáil have already had an opportunity of studying the Estimates for the current year. For the information of new Deputies I may say that the increase over the original Estimate for 1942-43 is due mainly to a substantial increase in the amounts needed for certain social and emergency services. The payment of emergency bonus to State servants will cost approximately £656,000 and the improved rates and enlarged scope of unemployment assistance and food allowances £240,000. There is also an increase of £120,000 in the provision for old age pensions due to an anticipated increase in our septuagenarian population. An additional £200,000 (making a total of £700,000) is being provided to subsidise the price of agricultural produce, and the maintaining of a special register of agricultural and turf workers in order that labour may be available for the saving of turf and the harvest is estimated to cost £104,000.

The subsidy on the price of turf will cost £650,000, and we are spending this year £634,000 to enable fertilisers to be supplied to farmers at reasonable rates. These new items alone account for approximately £2,610,000 and it will be apparent that, had they not been rendered necessary by the events of the past year, there would have been a reduction of about £750,000 over the whole supply services, notwithstanding the substantial rise in the cost of materials reflected through many of the normal services.

Mr. Hughes

I move that the Vote be reduced by £1,000. The only inference that can be deduced from the result of the election is that the people, notwithstanding the stampeding and terrorist tactics of Fianna Fáil, have expressed their dissatisfaction with Party Government and with the manner in which national affairs have been handled. We opposed the nomination of Deputy de Valera as Taoiseach and we opposed the Ministry nominated and assigned by him. We are satisfied that the people would have approved the procedure adopted by this Party, since the Taoiseach gave no indication of respect for the people's wishes by making a substantial change in his Ministry. Far from taking cognisance or the people's wishes, he refused to reshuffle his Ministry and, in replying to the debate, he said he was not prepared to deviate the slightest hair's breadth from the policy he had pursued. We feel that the low standard of production which now obtains in some of our main branches of agriculture is due to inattention and neglect by the Government and their failure to apply modern methods to the industry. A policy of drift and despair has been permitted to continue since the inception of the emergency and we think that the present position is due to the incapacity and incompetence of the Minister in charge of agriculture. If this situation is permitted to continue, it is bound, inevitably, to precipitate a crisis in the immediate postwar period.

We feel that, owing to the gravity of the circumstances, it is our duty and the duty of the Parliament—the supreme authority—to criticise the alarming decline in our production, and expose the failure of the Government to adopt modern methods and modern technique. We deem it our duty to call attention to the failure of the Government to maintain, as far as possible, our own people in productive occupation, their failure to rehabilitate and fortify our primary industry, and to utilise to the full the export opportunities which we believe exist, so as to guard against the danger of economic collapse and be in a position to take maximum advantage of the export market in the immediate postwar period before European reconstruction commences and keen international competition is revived. We feel that it is our duty to use every means in our power to compel the Fianna Fáil Party, who have accepted responsibility for Government, as a single Party, to drop their cant, humbug and deception and face up to the realities of our position in a more constructive and business-like way, so as to bring hope and courage to our people.

The Taoiseach is very anxious to concentrate on that period when we were in the throes of economic depression. The percentage was lower then, but it certainly was not as low as it is at the present time. Even assuming that the Taoiseach is right, and that our production did not fall over that ten year period he singled out—1929—39—is he satisfied, and is this House satisfied, that our production should remain static at a time when competitor-countries in the market in which we were selling had, by the adoption of new technique and more scientific methods, enormously expanded their production? The Taoiseach seemed to me last week to be quite satisfied with that position. It is an extraordinary state of affairs that from 1939 onwards, there was a steep fall in production in some of our principal branches of agriculture. It is accepted that food producing countries —and we are almost exclusively engaged in food production—enjoy a high measure of prosperity during a war period, because the greatest munition of war is food. Our country lay along one of the biggest belligerents, a country which had not enough food to maintain itself, and a country that had to try to maintain its food lines and keep the sea lanes open against the greatest blocade in history. We made no effort to utilise the opportunity offered to us or to organise our resources so as to expand our production and supply that market.

It is true that our cattle population remained more or less on a level over the period referred to by the Taoiseach but the milk used for industrial purposes—that is to say, mainly in creameries—had fallen from 197,000,000 gallons to 188,000,000 gallons. Pigs had fallen from 1,450,000 to 878,000. Ordinary fowl fell from 9,000,000 to 6,946,000. Our production in eggs fell from 10,492,000 great hundreds to 7,156,000 great hundreds.

There was a very substantial expansion in wheat production—from 221,000 cwts. to 5,573,000 cwts. Oats fell from 2,521,000 cwts. in 1929-30 to 2,281,000 cwts in 1941-42, barley fell from 1,313,000 cwts to 1,247,000 cwts. I am now reading from the Irish Trade Journal of June, 1943, Table II, Index Numbers of Volume of agricultural output (Base, 1929-30=100). Our live stock and live-stock products fell from 95.9 in 1939-40 to 85.4 in 1941-42. Bacon fell from 93.2 per cent. on the basis of cwts in 1938 to 90.0 per cent. in 1939. It was 99.7 per cent. in 1940 and 81.4 per cent. in 1941. In the September quarter, 1942, the equivalent annual average was 19.8 per cent. On the basis of 100 per cent., in 1936, our butter, cheese, condensed milk, and margarine production in 1938 was 93.4 per cent.; in 1939, 89.4; in 1940, 83.4; in 1941, 84.0 per cent. For the September quarter, 1942, the equivalent annual average was 85.3 and for the December quarter 74.1. That all indicates that there has been a fall in our production over that period.

At the annual meeting of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, the president, Rev. E.J. Coyne, S.J., stated that the milk supply for 1942 was probably less in 1941 by anything from 10,000.000 to 15,000,000 gallons, and that in regard to creamery butter there was an enormous drop in production, from 837,879 cwts. in 1936 to 611,201 cwts. in 1942. All these figures indicate a substantial fall in production here. It is true that value appears to have been maintained but the increase arose, particularly, since the outbreak of war, and is, in fact, due to the rise in prices and to scarcity. Shortages were so acute that price ceilings had to be fixed by the Minister for Supplies. Comparing the production of competitor countries and the technique and methods employed during that period in New Zealand, in the Scandinavian countries, and even in Great Britain, since the commencement of the emergency, I think the Taoiseach has nothing to be proud of, and nothing to boast about. I do not think it can be suggested that our people are indifferent or that they are too lazy to work the land.

I definitely charge the Government, and the Minister for Agriculture in particular, with failure to do their job, by not introducing into our methods the technique that has resulted from the pioneer work of great agricultural scientists in other countries. No effort has been made to do that here. In my opinion the mentality of the Government is indicated by the reference that was made to this matter by the Taoiseach on the last occasion the House met, when he talked about his knowledge of agriculture, as if that qualified any man to speak about modern agriculture. The most that the Government have done is simply to plan for to-morrow's breakfast. There has been no long-term plan, and no vision or foresight with reference to agriculture. We should realise that we must have exports in the form of cattle, bacon, eggs, butter, poultry, and mutton, of which we were exporting large quantities ten years ago, the aggregate value of which was something like £13,000,000. These exports have completely disappeared and consequently our purchasing power has been reduced. I am sure Deputies realise it as an elementary principle that the foundation of our whole economic structure depends upon being able to import such essential requirements as coal, iron, steel, raw materials, machinery, transport vehicles, electrical equipment and many other things which we cannot produce, if we are to maintain a decent standard of living. These can only be bought by exports and with foreign exchange. If our exchange disappeared the whole structure here would collapse, and our position would be amongst the worst in Europe. In that respect it is interesting to note that the Minister for Agriculture, when speaking in Cork a few months ago, expressed the view that there was no future for the dairying industry or pig industry. His colleague the Minister for Local Government when speaking about the same time at University College, and later when opening a housing scheme in Kildare, envisaged a post-war situation in which our exports of livestock would completely disappear. Anybody who hopes for any decent conditions here must view with horror and alarm a situation of that kind developing.

We recognise this fact, and I think it cannot be questioned, that in the last resort, our prosperity and our whole future depends on how we utilise the 12,000,000 acres of irable land we possess. It seems an extraordinary situation that in a country like this, bearing in mind our geographical position and the advantages we have as a result of it, with a population of less than 3,000,000 souls we should have any difficulty whatever in producing the food required to feed our people. Economists compute that an acre of land, reasonably will used in a modern manner, will maintain a human being. On that basis, even allowing for a considerable margin of error, we should be well able to maintain in our people on 5,000,000 acres and we should have the production of 7,000,000 acres for export purposes.

We are not getting anything like that result at all. I might say in that regard, in passing, that so far as the 12,000,000 acres of arable land are concerned, no attempt has been made by the Government to classify them. We do not know how much is first grade, or second grade, or third grade. That classification has been carried out in almost all the other countries I mentioned—in the Scandinavian countries, in New Zealand, and in Great Britain itself. One of the biggest things that have been tackled in this respect by other countries is the expansion of production by the application of scientific methods to the utilisation of the soil. Fertility, where fertility can be conserved and improved, is the best guarantee of our prosperity.

If science can bring to the aid of the farmer new techniques and methods for the utilisation of the soil to step up its fertility to higher production, then great advantages would accrue to the nation as a whole. That has been done in a great many countries by a new technique with which I propose to deal later. No effort has, in fact, been made here to face that problem. We are all following the old happy-go-lucky methods. We are leaving it to the farmer himself, to a very great extent, to use his own land in his own way in a sort of rule of thumb fashion. No real effort is being made to bring science to his aid.

Take the wheat scheme, about which the Government has boasted so much. We have 580,000 acres under wheat this year. Taking the yield of six barrels to the acre, it is a low yield. I suggest that eight and a half to nine barrels per acre in our circumstances would not by any means be an impossibility. On that low yield of six barrels to the acre for 580,000 acres, we should have 3,500,000 barrels of wheat. The consumption of flour in this country, allowing one sack per year to each individual, is 3,000,000 sacks. We have less than 3,000,000 people. Our consumption should be under 3,000,000 sacks; we are extracting, at present, 100 per cent. Allowing for shrinkage and drying in the mills in preparing the grist, that odd half a million barrels should cover our requirements, so that from 580,000 acres we should have produced our total needs. It is true that we would need something over and above for seed purposes, but from that 580,000 acres, with good tillage methods, we should have produced approximately our requirements.

What is the result? The national quota was fixed last harvest at 70 per cent. on the basis of the acreage under wheat. In my opinion it is a conservative figure. Two months ago that had to be adjusted to 50 per cent., and on the 23rd June last, it had to be reduced eventually to 47½ per cent. Therefore the official quota for milling purposes is 47½ per cent., and the balance has to be imported. There is the result of the Fianna Fáil wheat scheme. Ships were on the high seas intended to carry home cargoes of raw sugar. They had to be diverted to bring cargoes of wheat—at least three of them—and the situation to-day in regard to supplies of wheat is dependent to a large extent upon imports. I am not condemning wheat-growing. What we have condemned is the system of wheat-ranching, regardless of fertility, ruining the land, the most precious asset we have. Every practical farmer in this House knows the result of it, and knows that there has been a decline in production.

On many farms production has reached margin levels of diminishing returns, and a situation often where there have been little or no returns. The result of that policy has been reflected in the production figures, the milling quota of 47½ per cent. Failure has occurred mainly in the districts where production should have been greatest, because, since the war, the greatest difficulty in wheat production has been experienced by tillage farmers, who rely to a large extent on artificial manures, and who had not those reserves of fertility possessed by the grazing districts. Through stress of circumstances due to the war situation, nations like Great Britain and other countries decided to call on that reserve of fertility built up in grass counties, and I suggest that where the reserves of fertility were greatest, we would have got considerably better results. No effort was made, however, to properly utilise those reserves of fertility. The Government introduced a Compulsory Tillage. Order, and sat back, feeling that its duty was done.

We heard from the Taoiseach that we cannot get the farmers to produce more butter. That is the Government's excuse. The same thing applies to wheat-growing. No effort was made to provide technical knowledge where there was no tradition of tillage. No effort was made to provide credit. No effort was made to provide modern equipment. No effort was made by means of barter agreements to exchange animal and animal products for commodities which we required here such as essential equipment in the expansion of production and the extension of tillage operations.

As a tillage farmer, I saw myself where production was seriously affected, not because of any lack of attention on the part of the farmer, but because he had not the knowledge or experience necessary to increase it. The Government made no effort to provide him with the knowledge or experience required—none whatever. In a great many counties, the result was that the farmer grew more weeds and dirt than cereals. Take the case of dairying. My particular friend, the Minister for Finance, boasted about the largesse that the Government are providing for the dairying industry. In his Budget speech, and in his reply to the debate on the Budget, he said we were providing out of the taxpayer's pocket no less than £700,000 for dairying. Notwithstanding that, there is a further decline in the dairying industry, as if the provision of more and more subsidies made the situation worse.

Subsidies, it appears, are the only solution that the Government can provide for the dairying problem—the collection of more and more of the taxpayer's money to hand over to the farmer. Notwithstanding that, there was a definite decline in dairying production, and no one would attempt to question the sincerity of the statement of the president of the I.A.O.S. when he dealt with the falling-off in production. Take the case of New Zealand. Her exports to Great Britain in 1927 were 1,252,475 cwts. Ten years later the figure had increased to 2,950,000 cwts., more than double in ten years, while over that period ours has been declining, and has now disappeared. Surely, one is entitled to ask what is wrong with the dairying industry in this country when you compare our average production of 400 gallons with their production of 800 gallons? There seems to be something extraordinarily wrong there.

If you examine, for instance, New Zealand's milk production graph, you will find that it is almost a straight-line production all the year round; it is not a seasonal production. But when you examine our milk production you find that it is seasonal, and that our production is 14 times as high in the summer period as it is in the lowest period of the winter. It is true that they have not a winter problem in New Zealand, but other countries have got over that difficulty. Finland has solved to a great extent the problem of winter feeding by the A.I.V. process, I always associate the great expansion in dairying production in New Zealand with the visit that was made there about ten or 12 years ago by Sir George Stapleton. He introduced new ideas with regard to grass production, and the result is that they look upon grass there as a crop, a cultivated crop, and they have adopted a completely new technique and a completely new outlook in regard to grass and its utilisation, not only for the feeding of animals, but in connection with increasing the fertility of the soil. because the basis of all production, whether from the point of view of proteins or humus for soil, is grass. Yet. no effort was made by the Minister for Agriculture here to adopt these principles or to make use of the researches of many great scientists in other countries. We are still plodding along in the happy-go-lucky method.

I think that these principles should have been applied long before this to the dairying industry. There is no use in blaming the individual farmer. The reorganisation of the dairying industry will require a far greater effort than any individual effort on the part of the farmer. The responsibility rests with the Government, and the failure of the dairying industry here is due to the failure of the Government, and of the Minister for Agriculture in particular, to face up to their responsibilities and to realise that the condition of that industry for many years past has been an unhealthy one. The only way in which the Minister has faced up to his responsibility in that respect is by collecting, out of the taxpayers' pockets, more taxes, more largesse, more subsidy. I am not condemning the subsidy when the industry needed it, but a subsidy helps to crystallise the status quo and to destroy the possibility of any other effort being made to maintain the industry. Side by side with that subsidy, some real effort should be made by the Government and by the responsible Minister to examine the problem and to remove whatever defects there may be in that organisation.

Take the case of our cows. What is wrong there? I suggest that a biological examination should have been made into this whole problem of trying to get our production stepped up. If that had been done I am sure that, at all events, you would have got some results. The Live-stock Breeding Act was passed some years ago which secured a general improvement in our live stock. That served its purpose, but I suggest that at the present time, and even long before this, we should have realised that in its application to the dairying industry it is not perhaps to the best advantage of that industry. You cannot judge a bull simply on confirmation, you must have some reference to milk records. The single dairy shorthorn has a record on the dam side, but bred from beef on the sire side, that animal will almost inevitably revert back to beef in its progeny. Those are the things that should have been considered and examined long ago. I do not think it is too late to do so, and that is one of the reasons that we felt all along that a monopoly of the brains in this House does not rest with the Fianna Fáil Party. We have had ocular demonstration of their failure to look ahead, to sec for themselves the decay that was going on, and to keep our people abreast of the times. The work of reconstruction and building up will become all the greater as the years pass by, and in those circumstances we felt that we should at least pool the resources of all the brains in this House. Even the proposal of the Labour Party to set up an economic council, thus referring the matter back to the arm-chair economists, is not enough.

Mr. Davin

That was not our suggestion.

Mr. Hughes

It was discussed on the last day.

Mr. Davin

Did the Deputy listen to Deputy Larkin?

Mr. Hughes

I did, and that is the only suggestion the Labour Party have for dealing with this problem. I have great respect for economists and scientists, but I think that side by side and in co-operation with their technical knowledge you will have to have the knowledge and experience of practical men who know something about the subject, who live by that industry and who have made good in it. I believe that with their knowledge, experience and ability it would be well worth while to bring such men into the service of the State in order to improve the particular industry in which they are interested.

I have stressed on more than one occasion in this House that, so far as my knowledge, ability and foresight serve me. I see opening up for this country, if we make use of the opportunity, a great future for the dairying industry. The greatest problem that Great Britain has experienced since the outbreak of this war has been the production of milk for her people. Even before the war, the average consumption of milk was below a half-pint per individual—far below what was required for the safety of the health of the community. Even in the years before the war they had, through their public health authorities, what is known as a milk drive—to provide more milk and to have more consumed. The idea of the drive was to provide more milk for the poorer classes. If you examine the proposals of the Beveridge scheme, I suggest that, in effect, it simply means guaranteed minimum standards for the low wage earners. That means switching from cereal consumption, consumption of bread only, to a higher dietary—the consumption of milk, butter, eggs, meat, and so on. That means more dairying—and this is the only country where they can get the basic stock for dairy purposes.

If the Minister for Agriculture would read the articles that have been published by well-known authorities on this matter in Great Britain, he would find, that, time and time again, it has been clearly admitted that our stock is superior to their own, and that, in so far as the provision of milk is con cerned, they have looked to this country during this time of difficulty for basic stock. No effort has been made to make use of that situation. I think that in the future there will be a greater and greater demand for basic stock, and in face of that we are still subsidising the breeding of the Aberdeen Angus and Hereford, ignoring our basic stock to a great extent, and allowing our people to cross and recross the basic stock here. It may be all right to have one cross so far as the Aberdeen Angus is concerned; it produces a very fine store beast. But when you cross a second and a third time— every farmer in this House knows that that has been the practice—what do you produce? From the dairy point of view, it is a scandalous state of affairs to permit that situation to continue.

There ought to be a definite future for our live-stock industry. The only way we can ensure that and discover the measure of the requirements of Great Britain is by direct negotiations between the Government here and the responsible Ministry at the other side. There has been no effort to make any contact between the Ministers of this Government and the Ministry at the other side. The practice has been to put a civil servant on the telephone at this end for the purpose of getting in contact with his opposite at the other side, and the result has been failure. No effort Has been made to lay the foundations before it is too late. If the British farmers start breeding their own dairy stock, they will continue to do so. If we avail of the opportunity now to provide them with stock, they will continue to take our stock. Why has not something been done about it? Is it because, notwithstanding the experience of the present emergency, Fianna Fáil still believes in a policy of self-sufficiency? Why is this House not utilised in the proper way? Are decisions to be made by civil servants inside. Government Buildings? I do not want to be disrespectful in any way to the civil servants of this country, but I do suggest that this Parliament ought to be utilised to a far greater extent by whatever Administration is in office.

Again, I might point out with regard to the live-stock industry here in this country that in several other agricultural countries—in some of the Scandinavian countries and in Great Britain since the war—provision has been made for State veterinary services. It is a well-known fact that the greatest curse of our live-stock industry here is disease—abortion, sterility and mastitis. These diseases have raged up and down the country, and no effort has been made to attack that problem with vigour and determination. If we turn up the Book of Estimates we will see the small sum of money that is being devoted to veterinary scientific research, or in fact to any research. The amount spent in that respect is negligible, while vast sums have been to a great extent wasted in other directions. Here again one would expect that the lead given by other countries and the success achieved there would convince the responsible Minister here that some effort should be made to provide State veterinary services, so that we could reduce to a minimum mortality amongst calves and the loss of valuable milking herds. But apparently we are quite satisfied to allow that state of affairs to continue. Then the agricultural community is blamed; they are not making the effort; the Government lias done this and has done that, but the people will not respond.

What is the position with regard to the pig industry? Even within the last six weeks, to my personal knowledge, individual farmers had to take back pigs from the market because the local factory quota was filled. Is not that a fantastic situation during a period of acute scarcity of bacon in a country which at one time exported about £5,000,000 worth of live pigs and bacon? Now we are able to provide only about 50 per cent. of our own requirements. In face of that situation we still have in operation factory quotas and restrictions which compel farmers to bring their pigs back from the market simply because the local factory quota has been filled. Is that the way to stimulate production? Is that the way to encourage farmers to go in for more pigs? We have suggested here over and over again that the only way to do it is to protect the consumer and give a free market to the farmer. I do not think there is the slightest danger of cutthroat competition between the different factories. In any case, they got their whack out of it before; the Government permitted them to do it. If there is a period of scarcity now, the producer is at least entitled to free competition between the factories. Protect the consumer by all means, and leave us a free market after that. I know we will be told that the scarcity of bacon is due to the fact that we cannot import any raw materials for the production of bacon here. That is true, but when we examine the figures which I have already quoted to the House we have to consider, first of all, the ignominious failure to get any decent result from the 580,000 acres we have under wheat. Any ordinary farmer down the country, put in the same position as the Minister for Agriculture, would have got better results, because he would have known how to go about it. Side by side with that, there is the reduction in our production of oats and barley, the basic food for the production of animals and animal products. What effort has been made by the Department to examine alternative foods? The journal of the Ministry of Agriculture in England refers to the fact that a series of experiments was carried out in Northern Ireland to discover what is the maximum quantity of oats which can with safety be fed to pigs. After that series of experiments there, it was discovered that pigs could be profitably fed on oats up to 80 per cent. of their total meal. The British journal goes on to say:

"Where direct comparisons were made with barley meal, it was found that the amount of starch equivalent required to produce 1-lb. of live-weight gain on rations containing percentages of ground oats rising to 80 per cent. was practically the same as that required on rations containing the same percentages of barley meal. In none of the experiments did the high levels of ground oats have any serious effects on the health of the pigs. A few pigs were affected by pneumonia and a few others made poor gains for reasons apparently unconnected with feeding. The only case of serious digestive disturbance occurred when a pig died on a ration including 40 per cent. of crushed oats."

Many other animals showed great progress with the 80 per cent. mixture. The gain in live weight was 1 Ib. per 4 Ibs. of oats fed. That was an extraordinarily high result. The journal goes on to say:

"The quality of the carcasses was investigated by the Chemical Research Division. It was found that high percentages of oats had some tendency to produce a softened and slightly thinner layer of back fat. However, the quality of the fat and of the carcasses in general was satisfactory, provided that the pigs had been fattened rapidly—i.e., had put on 1¼ Ib. or so per head daily."

What effort has been made by the Minister and by the big organisation that is behind his Department to help farmers in our present circumstances? What benefits have we got from the huge sums of money which this House has provided, as against the advantages which agriculturists in competitor countries have got from a similar provision?

No effort has been made to provide marketing boards here, although they have been found very useful and advantageous in other countries. In that connection I should like to mention that the marketing board for the pig industry in Northern Ireland has made a deal with the railway companies under which a pig can be carried over the whole system at a flat rate, almost a nominal rate, of 7d. or 8d. per head. A similar arrangement applies in the distribution of raw materials for agriculture, such as artificial manures. They are carried at a flat rate over the whole system. The marketing board approaches the railway company and says: "We want to distribute so many hundred thousand tons over the whole of your system. What is the aggregate cost of that?" The result of an arrangement such as that is that a man in County Kerry will get his phosphates at the same cost as the man in County Dublin, and it will be a very low rate. That is some of the work that has resulted from the operations of marketing boards. No effort has been made here by the Government to set up such boards to try to get a fine cut in transport charges for raw materials and for the products of agriculture.

Take again the case of eggs. Eggs are worth approximately 1/8 a dozen here, and many people in the Border counties cannot understand why eggs in Northern Ireland should be fetching as high as 3/1 per dozen. Of course, it will be suggested by the Minister that the production of eggs is subsidised in Northern Ireland. It is not subsidised, but consumption is subsidised. Great Britain is subsidising food consumption to the tune of 140 millions per year. They are in a desperate way for eggs. They have not sufficient eggs even for institutions such as hospitals. Here we are, at a time when all competition from the Scandinavian countries has disappeared from the British market and we have made no effort to avail of this opportunity. Great Britain has tried to import eggs from America without success. In an interview given to the Sunday Times by Lord Woolton, he makes special reference to the fact that they were not able to import eggs from America because of the effect of long transportation on the condition and quality of the egg. He expressed in that interview the view that the provision of eggs for their people was one of the biggest problems confronting them. I suppose we shall be told that they made no effort to stimulate production here, because we are only getting 1/8 a dozen. I think they are justified in that because our supplies are so negligible. Has any effort been made to make a bargain along these lines: “What is the price going to be if we guarantee to increase production by 25 or 50 per cent. in any particular year and step it up from that?” No effort has been made in that direction, and, naturally, while we can give them only a negligible amount, they are not prepared to give us increased prices. I think that they would be prepared to stimulate our production if we made any effort to supply them in reasonable quantities, and if we were able to enter into an agreement on a basis that would ensure greater supplies for that market.

I return, as I said I would, to the question of the fertility of the land. Nothing whatever has been done in that regard. No efforts have been made to avail of the results of years of research in Great Britain by Sir George Stapleton at Aberystwith, and by other scientists in other countries, notably in Finland and in the Tennessee Valley in America. There are thousands of acres of our land which are completely decalcified and while they are in that condition, we cannot grow legumes. In the four beet areas we have farmers trying to grow beet on soil that is highly acid, on soil from which they cannot get satisfactory results, soil which is suffering from various diseases such as blackleg. The laboratories have not been used to correct these conditions. The farmer is handicapped by ignorance of the condition of his soil and he cannot get the best results from it. I shall give you an example of that. We give a lime subsidy of only £71,000 a year. That, I suggest, is the smallest provision that could be made and it is entirely inadequate to correct the high state of decalcification that exists in the soil of this country. There is no information, good, bad or indifferent, in the Minister's Department as to the extent to which soil acidity obtains in the different counties and it is quite on the cards that some farmers in this country are applying lime to alkaline soils. The result of that is to make the land barren. Even the lime provided here is too costly and expensive for the farmer. In Northern Ireland, in New Zealand, and other countries, lime is provided and graded into different qualities. You have ground limestone graded into fine lime and coarse lime. To get an immediate reaction from the soil over the earlier years, fine lime is applied and for reaction over a period of years the coarser qualities are used. That is provided at a nominal charge. Farmers are encouraged to use more ground limestone to correct whatever acidity is present and to make good any deficiency in calcium in the soil.

We must remember, apart from these considerations, that we have been mining the surface of the soil, that we are a stock-raising country and that it requires a considerable quantity of minerals, of lime, calcium, phosphates and potash, to build up the bone of these young animals that we are exporting to Great Britain. No attempt has been made to make good the loss caused by that mining effect. The deficiency ought to have been, and could have been made good, years ago by encouraging our people to use more and more phosphates. Instead of that a tax was imposed on phosphates coming into the country in order to give a monopoly of the market in these phosphates to a small ring in this country. Our farmers were handicapped by reason of the fact that they were not able to buy phosphates as cheaply as their competitors in other countries and although, owing to climatic conditions, we get hotter results than most countries, we were relatively the lowest users of artificials of any country in the world. The Taoiseach, who claims to be an authority on agriculture, and the Minister for Agriculture, who has been 11 years in charge of that Department and who ought to have done something along these lines, have ignored these fundamental considerations. They cannot be ignored if we are going to build up a sound agricultural economy in this country. As regards scientific research, I might again point out that no provision has been made here to provide our research department with the work that has occupied the Aberystwith Station, for the purpose of improving the quality of our grasses generally.

The farmer-Deputies must know as well as I do that there are thousands, in fact, millions, of acres of land in this country infested with Yorkshire fog, agostos, bent, daisies, cat's ear, brom and other weeds, and that the percentage of nutritious grasses of high feeding value is very, very small. No effort, as I said before, has been made to classify our grass lands. To say that so many million acres are first-class grass land that need not be touched, is not enough so long as we have a number of acres that either could be rejuvenated by direct reseeding or by a course of rotation going down to proper grasses, and, side by side with that, seeing that the soil is in a fit state to produce the right type of grass—above all to produce legumes. It is absolutely essential that we should have clovers intermingled with our grasses because it is realised that these clovers have the quality of taking the nitrogen from the air and fixing it in the soil. That is the cheapest of all forms of nitrogen. There are thousands and millions of acres of land in this country that are in such a highly acid condition that the farmer is unable to get clovers to grow on it. Many farmers do not know the reason for that, and no effort is being made to instruct them in that respect. No effort has been made to establish a grass-breeding station here. Those countries that have adopted the new technique, a technique that has completely revolutionised agriculture in other countries, have started off by establishing grass-breeding stations. We have been importing grass seeds from other countries that are not indigenous grasses at all, and that are not suitable to our conditions. The Minister has told us that we have perennial grass grown here. That is mostly of the stem variety. It is simply a hay variety, and is not suitable for grazing purposes. They have bred several varieties of grasses in those grass-breeding stations, suitable for different purposes. For instance, they have the leaf variety for grazing. No attempt is being made to adapt these methods to our circumstances.

I do not want to weary the House unduly in dealing with these matters We have now a new Parliament—new blood if you like—in which we have a number of men who, at all events, profess to be interested in agriculture. We should make every effort to compel those who have taken on the responsibility of looking after agriculture to face up to their responsibilities, and to ensure that we do not slip behind. We are definitely going to be behind if we allow the present position to continue. What is our position likely to be in the post-war period? If war has the effect of doing tremendous destruction, it has also this effect: that it quickens the means of production and the power to invent. It is having precisely that effect in Great Britain. The result has been that British agriculture is far more efficient to-day than ever it was before. If we believe in producing so as to have a surplus of agricultural commodities to sell in the British market, remember we will have to sell in competition with that efficiency. If we do not adopt the methods, the means and the organisation, and the modern equipment that will enable us to ensure that efficiency, then we will be simply left out of the picture. Higher efficiency means cheaper production.

Unless we adopt the technique which will enable us to reduce our cost of production, we will not be able to compete, and therefore we will simply fade out.

The muddling and the incompetent methods that have characterised the agricultural policy of Fianna Fáil, will not be good enough for the future. We on this side of the House have no confidence whatever in the present Minister for Agriculture. That, as I said before, is the reason why we divided against the Ministry nominated by the Taoiseach the last day. We felt that the Taoiseach would hearken to the warning given to his Party in the ballot boxes, and that he would attempt to put in charge of our primary industry some other man who would introduce new ideas, and who would face up to his responsibilities in a more courageous way than the present Minister. He simply sits like a glorified civil servant in his office signing documents, a thing that any civil servant could do. That is not enough. He ought to be down amongst the people. He ought to be contacting the people who are engaged in agriculture, particularly those who he must know are in a position to advise him. He ought to contact the people who have grievances and troubles, and make himself conversant with those things. He should listen to the suggestions made to him, and see how far those suggestions can be implemented. It appears to me to be a strange situation that, in a live-stock producing country such as ours, the Minister for Agriculture who has been in that office for 11 years has not once, I suppose, in all that time put his foot in the Dublin cattle market. That is not an indication of his interest in our agricultural community.

I am sorry to have to say those things, but I feel that it is our responsibility that they should be said if we are to avert the danger of an economic collapse in the country. The drift is there. It is definitely and surely downhill, and it will inevitably result in an economic crisis. It would be a sorry day, indeed, for our generation if we had to admit to the world that we had failed in our responsibilities. I suggest to the House that this is a time for serious stocktaking. If Fianna Fáil have failed to realise and appreciate the gravity of our position it should be magnanimous enough, in this hour of crisis, to appeal for co-operation to form a national Government. For the moment we have to accept the other position, but wo must watch carefully, we must criticise and make suggestions in the national interest. That has been the job of this Party for a long time. Very many more errors would have been made by the Ministry opposite but for the fact that this Party have tried to keep them on the rails, and to make them pursue a line that, at all events, was as near as possible to the best interests of the people. I hope it is not yet too late to appeal to the Government, and to the Minister for Agriculture in particular. He has a very responsible position at the present time, and he ought to face up to that responsibility with more vigour, courage, determination and foresight.

Minister for Agriculture (Dr. Ryan)

I think Deputy Hughes has left Deputies in no doubt about his opinion that there was a good deal of muddling on this side of the House as far as agriculture is concerned. He repeated that fairly often. I would like any Deputy who has taken notes of his speech to say whether Deputy Hughes has proved there has been muddling or incompetence. He talked about scientific progress, and said that we had failed to avail of the material that was available to us in other countries. He stressed, in particular, the opinion of a man of very high repute, Sir George Stapleton. I think I read the last book that was written by Sir George Stapleton, a book in which the writer deplored the very small progress that had been made in British farming. He certainly did not give the picture of British farming that Deputy Hughes gave to the House to-day.

Mr. Hughes

What about New Zealand?

Dr. Ryan

I quoted here before from the New Zealand Journal of Agriculture. The progress that was made there did not appear to be very much either. To Deputy Hughes, far away cows have very long horns. We always hear what grand things are going on in New Zealand, Great Britain, Denmark and other places and we are always in a very poor way here. I advise those farmers who have not been long in this Dáil not to be too upset by Deputy Hughes' gloomy outline of the situation because every year he prophesies that we shall be “broke” or bankrupt next year, but so far it has not come off. In fact, he takes such pleasure in talking about bankruptcy, one would imagine that he is most disappointed that it has not come off already.

Mr. Hughes

We sent only 135,000 of our young people out of the country.

Dr. Ryan

I asked Deputy Hughes only one question. God knows it was hard enough to stick it, but I did, and he might listen to me now. I am sure that other members of the Dáil agree with me on that. With regard to scientific progress, Sir George Stapledon in his book came down to three things which he urged should be done for British agriculture. I do not know if Deputy Hughes has read the book. Probably he has read only some references to it in some farming magazine, but the three things were, first, that the farmer in England should get possession of his land, should become the owner of his land. That has been done here already, so that on that point Sir George Stapledon was crying out to the great and enlightened British Government, according to Deputy Hughes, for something which they will not do, but which has been done for years past here. Secondly, he urged that there should be a scheme of reclamation and drainage. He said that it was a first essential—something which we have here already, but which he cannot get the British Government to adopt. He also asked for liming, and Deputy Hughes, of course, makes little of our lime scheme. It may not be sufficient, but still we have it.

The second big point in Sir George Stapledon's programme, however, is reclamation and drainage, together with liming, and we have done it here already. His third point was that they should produce and distribute proper grasses, which he points out in his book has not been adopted in England except in a very small way. We have listened to a long speech from Deputy Hughes, gathered from where I do not know—from some of the British farming journals—telling what he regards as the uninformed members of the agricultural community in this House what he has learned about what they are doing in England and what we are not doing here. We find that the fact is that we have adopted here already a great part of the programme recommended by Sir George Stapledon and that it has not been adopted in the least in Great Britain. That is Deputy Hughes' great scientific programme. Soil testing, I admit, is something which must come. I have said that in the Dáil already.

Mr. Hughes

How long will we have to wait for it?

Dr. Ryan

In these times of scientific progress—and I agree very much with scientific progress—soil testing is something which must come, but so far as the highest scientific opinion goes, if Deputy Hughes has been reading these scientific magazines—I do not know whether or not he has, but if he has, he has not got a proper grasp of it —he will find that so far it has all come to this, that the only real test is the test on the field, by the application of a particular manure on land and finding out whether it is required or not. Laboratory testing is perhaps some use, but it is not nearly as important as the other, and that is the line we have been taking here. We have recommended committees of agriculture to try the field test. The important point is that we are in line with good scientific progress, but of course we are not in line with Deputy Hughes' idea of what scientific progress should be.

Deputy Hughes quoted a lot of figures, and I have some figures here which I should like to give to the Dáil. They agree with Deputy Hughes in some respects, but I do not propose to pin all my reliance on exports. I propose to pin my reliance on what is produced. If we are consuming more here at home than under the Cumann na nGaedheal Government, and if our people are better fed, it is all to the good, but we may not then have so much to export. He talked about the yield of wheat and in that connection a certain figure should have been explained. It should perhaps have been explained to the public—and I do not blame Deputy Hughes for this—that the national percentage was reduced more with a view to getting over internal difficulties of administration than from the angle that not as much wheat was produced as was expected.

As a matter of fact, we got in just as much wheat as was anticipated, but we found it more convenient to let some mills mill more of the homegrown wheat and a number of mills mill more of the foreign wheat coming in. The percentage in the case of the mills milling a good proportion of foreign wheat would be low, and the Order was made so that they would not commit any offence. I have not got the exact figure of the amount of wheat received by the mills last year, but I should be delighted to give it on some future occasion.

We hear the expression from Deputy Hughes very often that the Minister was afraid to face up to his responsibility, and so on. I was anxious that Deputy Hughes should elaborate that point to some extent, because there were certain things suggested by Deputy Hughes which I should very much like the Fine Gael Party either to endorse or to reject.

I admit that I am in a difficulty about the Live-Stock Breeding Act. Some people say to me: "Do not subsidise Herefords and Polled Angus cattle any longer; go in completely for Shorthorn cattle and let us have a good milking breed," while others say: "If you do that, you will destroy the store trade in this country and the store trade is a very valuable asset." Is Deputy Hughes going to attack me for giving subsidies to the other breeds, like Polled Angus, Aberdeen-Angus and Hereford breeds, and if I decide— I do not say that I propose to do it— that all these subsidies are to be cut out and that we are going to rely entirely on the Shorthorn breed, can I be sure that nobody on the Fine Gael Benches will say that I am doing wrong, because my experience of the Fine Gael Party is that they are all freelances? They can attack me for what I am doing, but if I do the opposite, some of them will attack me also.

I do not know whether Deputy Fagan will agree that we should go in entirely for a milking breed of cattle. that we should ignore completely the beef qualities of certain breeds, that we should, if you like, make up our minds definitely that we ought to pay no further attention to the store cattle business, but should turn over completely to milk-yielding cattle and let stores look after themselves. We will not, of course, have as good stores in that event. Deputy Hughes has spoken evidently as the chosen member of the Fine Gael Party, but I do not know if he is talking Fine Gael policy, especially on that point. It is a point which I think might be discussed, if not in the Dáil, by Parties in another way, with a view to seeing whether something should be done in that respect; but we will not get very far by Deputy Hughes making a sort of sniping attack on me, for subsidising, as he calls it, the Aberdeen Angus and Hereford breeds, unless he has made up his mind, and the Fine Gael Party have made up their minds, too, that we should depart entirely from these beef breeds and turn over to the milking breeds.

Mr. Dillon

In certain areas, surely?

Dr. Ryan

That is something, but Deputy Hughes did not confine himself to that. Deputy Dillon, of course, can speak for his Party.

Mr. Dillon

I am a lone ranger now.

Dr. Ryan

I do not know if Deputy Hughes was speaking for the Party in what he said.

Rinne sé a dhicheall.

I cannot give the page.

Mr. Davin

The Taoiseach wants the page. He wants the reference.

Dr. Ryan

You get that for him.

In 1931.

Mr. Davin

You did not take over until 1932.

Dr. Ryan

I am giving the figure for the last year. Deputy Fagan got so wroth with some remarks made from the Clann na Talmhan Benches that he left the House. He went out saying that the policy of his Government was another cow, another sow and another acre under the plough. How did they succeed so far as that is concerned? They did not succeed at all.

Mr. W.T. Cosgrave

That is not yet published?

Dr. Ryan

No.

Mr. Bennett

Could the Minister give us the figures in respect of farmers' butter?

Dr. Ryan

The next point raised was with regard to the consumption of agricultural produce and, from the same Trade Journal—it is given in one Trade Journal, anyway—it would appear that the percentage consumed on farms has remained pretty constant from 1936-37 to 1940-41. It has never been lower than 32.6 and it has never been higher than 35, and that was in 1940-41. That represents the percentage of the value of the agricultural output consumed on the farms by people working on the farms. The percentage consumed by other people has gone up from 17.9 in 1926-27 and in 1940-41 it was 33.6. It was practically twice as large—the amount of the produce of the land consumed by people other than agriculturists, taking a period of 13 or 14 years.

Mr. Bennett

The agriculturist could not afford to consume it all.

Mr. W.T. Cosgrave

The figure in the Trade Journal for June, 1943, is 33.1.

Dr. Ryan

These figures must be correct. Anyway, these appear to be the final figures.

Mr. W.T. Cosgrave

The figures I have are the latest published figures.

Dr. Ryan

The next point I want to deal with is the point raised by Deputy Hughes with regard to the yield of wheat. I do not know if everybody here is as familiar with the wheat question as some of us who have been here for the last 16 or 17 years. I do not want to weary the two Parties who have been discussing the wheat question all that time by going over the whole thing again, but if any of the new Deputies would like to get the background of the wheat question, they should get the report of the Economic Committee of 1928. They will see there the reasons given by the Ministers of the last Administration why we should not grow wheat in this country. They will see there also that wheat growing was advocated by the Ministers of the present Government who were then in opposition. The only point of interest so far as that is concerned is that in the concluding portions of the majority report, which was signed by three Ministers of the last Government, it was stated:

I was asked to refer to the pig industry. I should like Deputies to cast their minds back a few years and consider the factors that necessitated regulation as regards the marketing of pigs. The necessity arose about 1933 or 1934, when the British Government passed an Act which made it imperative on any country sending bacon to Great Britain to send it through one agency and on a quota basis. Those were the two points we had to keep in mind. We had to send it in a regulated way through an agency, and we had to send only a certain quantity per year. That necessitated regulation on this side. A tribunal was set up, the personnel of which had already been examining the bacon industry when the question of putting a tariff on bacon was being considered. That tribunal was called the Pig Industries Tribunal, and it considered this whole question, and made recommendations as to how it should be dealt with. As a result of these recommendations, a Bill was drafted. I brought that Bill before the Dáil, and there was general agreement as to its provisions. It was one of the Bills—one of the very few—for which a special committee was set up to consider any amendments that might be necessary, and there was no such thing as any Party cleavage on the provisions of the measure——

After all, what is the use of talking? The number of pigs has gone down to half of what it was in 1939 and 1930, or, if you like, half of what it was in 1940, because it happens that the number of pigs was higher in 1940 than in 1939. But it has gone down to half because we have not got the feeding. Will any Deputy state to me that I am not right in that? Will any Deputy say that there is feeding for pigs if we had the pigs to give it to, or if people were satisfied to feed pigs under the present way of working? We know that the feeding for pigs is not there. Deputy Hughes did make a sort of suggestion that we could consider the position and produce the feeding, but that appears to me to carry the implication that we could till more land. I am very much in favour of tillage, and if I thought that there was a strong volume of opinion in this House that we should put up the percentage for tillage, well, I certainly would advise the Government strongly to adopt it. But I am quite sure that we will not get that strong volume of opinion here, that we should increase the percentage of tillage, because it appears that we have gone nearly as high as we are likely to succeed in going.

Next year, the percentage will be 33?, including first crop meadow, not exceeding a fourth of that total. I think that if we tried to go higher, it would be difficult to enforce the Order. We may have to go higher. Circumstances may be different in two or three years' time. If the war were to go on for five years more, we would want to be careful—we are not getting any artificial manures—that we will have the land to produce the crops Unless, as I say, there are Deputies who are prepared to say that there is feeding in this country that could be given to pigs, or who are prepared to say we could produce more feeding for pigs, I do not think there is any use in going into the question of the small number of pigs in the country. It cannot be helped.

We are in a very different position to-day from that of the last war. Someone said that we were able to produce pigs in the last war. We were, I know, but we were in a different, position. In the last war, it must be remembered that there was a good deal of wheat and flour, as well as other classes of feeding stuffs, coming into this country. For instance, in 1916, when the war was on for three years, 10,000,000 cwts. of maize were imported. In the next year, 1917, which corresponds to this one so far as the present war is concerned, about 7,000,000 cwts. of maize were imported, as well as bran and pollard, linseed cake and linseed meal and quite a large quantity of wheat and flour, so that we had in the last war good supplies of wheat from which we got offals. As well as that, we had a lot of maize, a good lot of offals apart from the wheat, and a good lot of linseed meal and other things. In fact, if any Deputy will look back over those figures and examine them for himself he will find that there were enough feeding stuffs to feed up to a million pigs in the year. We have not that now, and what is more, although we have as much tillage as we had during the last war, we are now growing 575,000 acres of wheat. There was much less than 200,000 acres of wheat in the last war.

Mr. Dillon

Less than what?

Dr. Ryan

Less than 200,000 acres. If we were only growing the same amount, obviously we would have 300,000 acres of oats and barley for pigs. To-day we have less oats and barley, no offals from the mills and no imported feeding stuffs, and if any Deputy will examine these figures, he will see that the difference would be sufficient to feed a million pigs in the year. There is no use, therefore, in comparing the position here during the last war and the position to-day.

Another point that was raised was in regard to potatoes. Figures were given here recently, I think, to the effect that, as a matter of fact, the production of potatoes in this country in 1931, the last year of the Fine Gael Government, was 1,932,000 tons, and that in 1942—that is, the crop of which we have just finished the consumption —the production was 3,120,000 tons. So that the production of potatoes in 1942 was very much higher than in previous years, but we all know that there was a very much bigger call on potatoes last year and the year before than in previous years. We ourselves know that men with pigs had to feed potatoes to them—pigs that otherwise might have been put on the market—because they had nothing else to give them. The same applies in regard to cattle. For that reason, the potatoes did not go as far as we should like them to go, and there was a shortage. The shortage, however, was of comparatively short duration and was confined practically to the City of Dublin. I think that these are things that it would be impossible for any authority to avoid, whether by regulations or otherwise. I remember that during the last war, shortages of potatoes occurred frequently. I remember going into hotels here in Dublin during the last war, on more than one occasion, and potatoes could not be got for lunch. You got rice or something else because there were no potatoes to be had. Nobody, however, seemed to find fault with the British Government at that time for the shortage of potatoes. I suppose we were more lenient in connection with the difficulties that the British Government had to face at that time than we are with the difficulties of our own Government now. At any rate, there was no complaint at that time. I do not think that I have anything else to talk about. Sir, as I think I have dealt with any point that was raised.

Mr. Dillon

The House has now heard from the Minister for Agriculture an account of his stewardship, and I wonder is the House edified? I gather from the Minister for Agriculture that he has thrown up his hands in the air, admits that the situation is extremely unsatisfactory, and asks how can he be blamed for it. I think that the Minister himself now realises that the whole country believes that the administration of his Department has been a disaster. The facts are there: that we have reached the astonishing position in an agricultural country, in which we have neither bacon, butter nor eggs, and in which we are eating black bread.

Now, the Minister read out here from the report published in 1928, a statement by very distinguished men. I think that he himself will agree with me on that. They were no tyros, and, having gone into all the resources of this country, they foresaw that there would be a large surplus of bacon, butter and eggs, and foodstuffs of that kind. I think that most rational people would have shared that view. I doubt if any person in Europe could foresee that in Ireland, of all countries in the world, we would at this stage be confronted with a shortage of bacon, butter and eggs. The Minister was constrained to prove here the other day that that was not his responsibility, and that at least we have bread; and in the process of developing that argument he seeks to justify his policy of "grow more wheat" pre-war, and to decry most of us who had the wisdom and foresight to condemn that policy unreservedly in the years before the war. I want to repeat explicitly now that the "grow more wheat" policy in this country before the war was a disaster for our people then, and that it is a disaster for our people now. The shortages that we are at present experiencing in this country are in some measure attributable to the wheat policy pursued in this country before the war.

Now, it is sought to make capital cut of the fact that in 1935, I think, I said that I would sooner be dead than grow wheat on my land at that time. I wanted to call to the minds of Deputies of this House the situation that then obtained in this country. You had in this country then, as an integral part of the "grow more wheat" policy, the operations of a flour-milling ring, headed by the firm of Rank & Son. At that time, Joseph Rank & Son were bringing into Limerick cargoes of foreign wheat, leaving half the cargo at Limerick and proceeding with the other half to Liverpool. They milled that wheat in Limerick and compelled the agricultural labourer of this country, who had a wage of 24/- a week, to pay 36/- a sack for the flour milled from it. They milled the same identical wheat in Liverpool, sold it to the people of Great Britain for 19/- a sack, and put the excess profit of 17/- per sack into their own pockets. I say, as I have frequently said in public before, and as I repeat now, that during nine years of Fianna Fáil administration in this country the flour milling racket in this country was allowed to rob our people, and mainly the poor, of £2,000,000 per annum, which they put into their own pockets.

I well remember standing behind my own counter and selling to an agricultural labourer, earning 24/- a week at the time, a bag of flour for 36/-, which he had to pay for in instalments, and as I collected those instalments from him I realised that the last eight instalments were going simply to swell the excess profits of the Rank milling combine, to pay the fantastic dividends that were paid on the inflated share capital of the Dock Milling Company. Those last eight instalments from that worker were stolen from him by the milling racket in this country, just as certainly as if they had broken down his back door and stolen the money from the pockets of his clothes beside his bed; and I say that one of the most dastardly crimes against the poor of this country was the permit that was given to that racket by the Fianna Fáil Government to rob the poor, and the Fianna Fáil Government has never dared to deny those facts. We are told now that because it is expedient to grow wheat here during the middle of a war, it was obviously expedient, therefore, to grow it in times of peace. During the siege of Derry the people were glad to eat rats when they could get nothing else; but would it be contended that, because they had to eat rats during the siege, they should also eat rats during the piping times of peace? Was it good policy for people to eat rats in 1850 because they had to eat them in a time of starvation? Is it good policy to-day to suggest that we should do, in the piping times of peace in this country, what we have to do when we are being blockaded and in a state of what amounts to siege? Nobody but a fool would run this country in times of peace on a basis which is expedient in times of war. Do Ministers of that Government believe that it is expedient, to maintain in times of war all the tariffs and quotas that they believed it was expedient to maintain in times of peace? Are they at this moment removing all the tariffs and quotas that they themselves put on in times of peace? If it is consistent to be protectionist in times of peace and free trade in times of war, what inconsistency is there in believing that it may be expedient to grow wheat in times of war, and in times of peace to grow the crops which can be more profitably produced on our land? I say, and I repeat, that before and after this war it was and will be suicidal folly to use the land of this country for growing inferior wheat at an exorbitant price, when we can purchase far superior wheat at an economic price and import it here, using the exports that we can profitably produce here to pay for it.

No sane man in this country or in any other country contends that we can produce wheat on our land in competition with Canada, Australia and the Plate. It is perfectly true that, if we choose to pay an excessive price for wheat, we could make wheat pay the man who sows it here, but, in open competition with the rest of the world, we can produce on our land agricultural produce superior in quality to any agricultural produce in the world, we can sell it in the markets of the world, and, with the proceeds of that sale, we can get from our land 150 per cent. more wealth than if we were employing the land in growing wheat. Now, that is in times of peace. But, when you are confronted with the situation which is produced as a result of universal war, it may become expedient to grow upon the land a crop you would not contemplate growing under the ordinary economic conditions that obtain in times of peace. In those circumstances, if we must have wheat and have nowhere else to get it, I think the sensible thing to do is to grow it on our own land, but, having made up our minds that that is a necessary thing to do, we should do it firmly and resolutely, and not in the half-hearted kind of way which contorts and destroys our whole agricultural economy.

The Minister laments that we have not the wherewithal to produce pigs and so forth. "Why have we not enough barley?", he asks. I repeat the question, and I will supply the answer. Why is it that the farmer who grows barley in Ireland has to sell it at 35/- a barrel, while the farmer who grows barley in Great Britain gets 70/- a barrel for it? Do Deputies know that? Do Deputies know that at this moment the price fixed by the British Government for barley in Great Britain is 70/- a barrel? For the barrel of barley grown in Ireland, the price fixed by the Government here is 35/-. Messrs. Arthur Guinness, Son & Co., at the present moment pay 70/- a barrel for barley in Great Britain. Messrs. Arthur Guinness, Son & Co., were perfectly willing to pay 70/- a barrel for barley in Ireland. Who stopped them? Was it their customers? Was it their shareholders? Was it their board of directors? It was not. It was Deputy Dr. Ryan. He stepped in and said: "No, you will not pay 70/- a barrel. We will not let you pay more than 35/- a barrel." Why? Because, he said, if the farmers get more than 35/- a barrel for barley they will stop growing wheat at 50/- a barrel; because barley at 40/- a barrel would pay them better than wheat at 50/- a barrel; and, because we want to keep up the fiction that wheat is a popular crop which everybody wants to grow if they are given a chance, we will not allow the farmers of this country to get an economic price for their other cereal crops in order to force them to grow wheat if they want to get a profit.

Do Deputies in this House realise what the law is relating to oats? If a farmer in this country produces oats on his land, he must sell it at 14/8 a cwt. But if he finds that he sold a bit too much, and wants to get a couple of cwts. back from the dealer, the dealer can charge him 25/- a cwt. for it. The man has produced the oats himself, and has been constrained to sell it at 14/8 a cwt., and if he takes a penny more he has broken the law, but when he goes to buy back a cwt. of it from the man to whom he sold it he can be charged 25/-. Why? Because the Government contends that, if you allow the farmer to get more than 14/8 a cwt. for oats, oats will become a more attractive crop to grow than wheat at 50/-, and you will not get the requisite quantity of wheat. At this stage of the situation, I do not believe it is profitable to be wrangling about who was right or who was wrong before the war. I am perfectly certain that I was right and that Fianna Fáil was wrong, but, if we are committed to a certain line of policy, the concern of us all ought to be—once the stage of discussion and argument is over—to make that line of policy as successful as we can. We are committed to get wheat out of our own land. I say that the proper thing to do is to require every farmer in the wheat-growing counties to grow a certain percentage of his land in wheat. If they complain that that is going to result in a certain loss, I would say to them: "Very well; sow more oats and barley. Sell it in a free market. If you can get 70/- or 80/- a barrel for barley, more power to your elbow. If you can get an increased price for oats, more power to your elbow. Make up in the profit on your oats and barley, and the live stock you can produce out of those crops, whatever loss you take on the wheat, and accept the responsibility of producing on your land for the period of this crisis a certain proportion of wheat, which we will perhaps be constrained to admit is not going to yield you much profit, but it is your contribution to helping to get the nation through this emergency."

I have heard the Minister for Agriculture saying that there are certain types of land in this country on which it would be a crime to sow wheat. Very well; no irretrievable harm would be done if wheat were sown on that land, under a compulsory scheme, for one year. An appeals board for each county could be set up, and, after a man had done his duty, he could lodge an appeal with the appeals board, and if, on examination, he proved that he had no land which could be profitably placed under wheat, he could be exempted from the general Order. But farms in this country of over 30 acres—I do not think a compulsory wheat Order should apply to farms of less than 30 acres—on which there is not some piece which would grow some kind of a crop of wheat are few and far between. It would be infinitely more advantageous to our agricultural community if they were allowed to get the full price for everything else they produced, and were compelled to sow a certain percentage of their land under wheat at 50/- a barrel, than to have the price of everything they produce slashed and cut down in order to make wheat at 50/- a barrel more attractive than any other crop they can produce. The net result of that line of policy is that there is not enough feeding stuffs for pigs; that there is not enough feeding stuffs for fowl; that there is no oatmeal; that there is not enough feeding stuffs for any of the things that we ordinarily produced, and the farmers are going back to subsistence farming.

Every Deputy in this House, Farmer, Labour, and everybody else, knows that for the past three months you could not get a stone of oatmeal in this country? Why? Because the farmers would not sell their oats to oatmeal millers at 14/8 and the oatmeal millers were not allowed to pay any more than 14/8. The Minister may rejoice that he has kept the price of oatmeal so low, but what is the use of that if you cannot get a stone of oatmeal anywhere in the country? What is going to happen, I believe, is that a considerable number of farmers will be driven into the position in which they will not produce any food at all for general consumption. They will produce sufficient only for their own needs because no man will engage in production if he is not allowed a reasonable profit on it.

The Minister for Agriculture expressed astonishment at the disappearance of pigs. I never met a man with a shorter memory than the Minister for Agriculture. Does the Minister remember the time when the bacon ring really got under way in this country? Does not every Deputy remember the time when you had reared a pig to a certain point and brought him to the factory hoping to get top grade? When you reached the factory you were told that they could not take the pig as he was just 2 Ibs. under weight. You were told to take him home and bring him again in a fortnight's time. You travelled, perhaps, seven miles home with the pig, and you brought him back again in a fortnight. Then you were told that the pig was now 7 lbs. over weight, and for that reason you would have to accept 20/- per cwt. less. You said: "Very well then, I will take 14 Ibs. of that bacon. It must be at least 6d. per Ib. less than top price, since you will not allow me the full price for my pig." Then you were told by the factory: "Oh, no; you will pay the same price for the bacon, no matter what pig it is taken from. We are cutting you 20/- per cwt. in the price of your pig, but that does not mean that the bacon will cost you any less." Does the Taoiseach not remember those days? Does the Taoiseach not realise ——

The Taoiseach

The Pigs and Bacon Board was set up to deal with that situation.

Mr. Dillon

Oh, no. These are the ridiculous stories that are told to the Taoiseach. That situation never arose until the Pigs and Bacon Board got into operation. Very few farmers sold their pigs direct to the factory in Ireland until the Pigs and Bacon Board was set up. They were sold at dead pork markets in Northern Ireland and at liye pig markets in Southern Ireland, but nobody ever brought his pig to a factory, except within a very restricted area, until the board was set up. That business was something which was initiated by the Pigs and Bacon Board. It was under their dispensation and the rules that they laid down, under the grading they stipulated, that this peculiar outrage was perpetrated on those who produced pigs. I know thousands of farmers in County Monaghan on whom that was done two or three times. That is what brought a speedy end to pig production in Ireland.

Sometimes I get a little impatient of arguing with the Minister for Agriculture because he is clearly incompetent. I do not think it is any use arguing with him. I think I might as well argue with a feather pillow; you can make no impression on him. I think I am bound to say he is a lazy man, that confronted with difficulties he runs away. He simply throws his hands in the air and says "What can I do?" I feel sometimes that we are getting nowhere when we argue with the Minister for Agriculture, on the assumption that he is going to remain here. That is why I felt so deeply when the question arose as to whether he should be removed from that office because I do not think that, so long as he is there we shall make any progress. He is a thoroughly incompetent Minister. No doubt he is a well-intentioned and kindly man but he does not know his job. He has been 10 years in office and if he is there for another 40 years longer he will know even less than he does now. I look with greater interest to the post-war period than to the acute difficulties with which we find ourselves confronted at present. I believe that we are in such an infernal mess now that nothing but the grace of God will get us out of it. I have no hopes of any effective reform coming from the Fianna Fáil Party in respect to the crisis with which we are confronted at present. The grace of God and our own exertions will get us through the next few years, but we shall get no help from Fianna Fáil.

I am thinking of the time post-war. Do Deputies ever ask themselves, what plans we should be making now to meet the post-war period? Fianna Fáil has intoxicated itself with the absurdity of economic self-sufficiency. The Taoiseach has intoxicated himself with that absurdity, too. He believes, with the Minister for the Coordination of Defensive Measures, that if all the ships in the world were sunk and we here were like Robinson Crusoe we would be very much better off. I differ with him fundamentally in that view. I am convinced that in the post-war period our people will still want tea and will prefer it to light beer, no matter how much the Taoiseach may advocate up and down the country the consumption of light beer. I believe that our people will want a drop of oil for their lamps. Possibly, the Taoiseach has in mind the melting of fat and the use of Egyptian lamps. I believe that our people will stick to the old paraffin lamp and will want a drop of oil for it. I believe that we will still use lorries and motor cars, and for these we will want petrol. I believe that the vast bulk of our people will continue to use bicycles and for these they will want rubber tyres. I believe that the vast bulk of our people will prefer cotton shirts to hair shirts, and, accordingly, we will have to import cotton. We cannot grow cotton in Ireland I do not think that even the Minister for Agriculture would undertake its production. If we do not grow it in Ireland, then we will have to get it outside the country. There are many other commodities that we do not produce and that we must get from elsewhere. If we have to get them from outside, then we will have to pay for them.

I would like to ask Deputies to consider the question: what are we going to pay for these things with? So far as I know we have no fund from which to pay for them except the fund created by the export of our agricultural surplus. Other countries, like South Africa, may have gold and diamonds which they can dig up and dispose of to purchase the things they must get from abroad. England has coal, iron and shipping to provide her with exchange to purchase from outside the things that she needs. The United States of America have oil and different natural resources which can be exploited to purchase from outside countries the things she needs. This country is not in that position and has nothing except her 12,000,000 acres of arable land. If we are not able to get an exportable surplus of agricultural produce which can be produced at a profit by the men who live on the land, then we cannot import the necessaries to which I have referred. Our people, therefore, will have to get along without them, and they will be reduced to the lowest standard of living of any nation in Europe.

It is true to say that ultimately every section in our community, whether people live in the towns or villages or in the country, depends on the land. Every civil servant, every transport worker, every shop assistant, every shopkeeper and every wage earner in this country ultimately derives his income from the land, and if the land does not produce it there is no other fund from which he can hope to get it. Everything that we import must be paid for by the money realised on the sale of our agricultural surplus. We cannot get an agricultural surplus off our 12,000,000 acres of arable land unless the farmers living on the land are in a position to earn a profit in producing it. What is the farmer's profit? It is the difference between his cost of production and the price that he gets for his finished product. Do Deputies realise that in many cases £10 can be a better price for a pig than £22? Most men, I am sure, would say that they would much prefer the £22 to the £10, but if they were prudent men they would say that they would like to know the circumstances surrounding the two transactions. If it costs £7 to produce a pig that you got £10 for, leaving you a profit of £3, and if you get £22 for a pig that it cost you £24 to produce, thereby losing £2 on its production, in those circumstances the £10 pig is the better transaction. We have got to sell our agricultural surplus in the British market, because we have nowhere else in the world to sell it. The Taoiseach and the Fianna Fáil Party went stamping around the world for three years looking for alternative markets. As Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, I heard of the crate of hens that went to Amsterdam and of the butter that went to Berlin. There were some other things that I cannot recall. I think there was something about a consignment of butter to Paris. In fact, it went somewhere else, but, finally, it was sold in London for axle grease. At the time, the smell from it was so bad that no one could get near enough to it to ascertain what exactly it was. Then we had the eggs that were sent to Spain and that were to be paid for with oranges. We are still waiting for the payment.

That bitter experience taught the Taoiseach what some of us already knew, that the British market is the only one in which we can sell our exportable agricultural surplus. If we are to have an agricultural surplus post-war, in order to be able to buy the things that we do not produce ourselves, then it must be produced at a profit. There is no use in pretending that we can control the price that we are going to get for this exportable surplus. If we cannot raise prices in the British market, how can we hope to increase the farmer's profit? I will tell you. If, as I have said, the farmer's profit is the difference between his costs of production and the price that he gets for his finished product, and if we cannot raise the price that he gets for his agricultural produce in the British market, can we not bring down his costs of production? If we can do that, does it not produce the same result?

How can we do it? By taking the taxes and restrictions off the raw materials of the agricultural industry. If we do not want our farmers to buy in the cheapest market in which they can buy the raw materials of their industry, then we cannot expect them to sell their finished products in one of the cheapest markets in the world. The British market is the most competitive market in the world for Irish produce. The farmers of this country have to meet there every exporter in the world, and have to take the prices that rule there as a result of that competition. At present our farmers have to bear all the taxes and restrictions that have been put upon their industry by Fianna Fáil. I stand for the removal of all taxes and restrictions from feeding stuffs, farm implements, agricultural machinery and artificial manures. The taxes that we have in operation should come off yellow meal, buckets, spades, shovels, agricultural machinery, artificial manures, and everything that a farmer uses in producing the finished product which he has to export.

Mr. Allen

What about his boots and clothes?

Mr. Dillon

That is another matter which we can consider on its merits. The farmer must get a profit on what he produces. If he does not get a profit on his agricultural surplus, then we must do without tea, oil, petrol, rubber and shirts, unless Deputy Alien is prepared to wear the Taoiseach's hair shirt. I certainly am not. If I cannot get an imported shirt, I will wear no shirt at all. Unless the farmer can get a profit on his agricultural surplus, that will be the inescapable fact. Deputies may like or dislike it, but that is the fact. If the Taoiseach could have sold our agricultural surplus in Persia or Samarkand in 1932 or 1933, it would have been a glorious day. The Tánaiste was then going around the country whipping John Bull. The idea of feeding the poor man was anathema to them. They would have preferred to sell to the Shah of Persia or the Nyzam of Hyderabad. But since then they have discovered that it is much more profitable to sell our stuff to John Bull. We may or may not like that situation. Unless we are fools we will face it, and, facing it, we will take the measures requisite to secure that we will make the best profit we can in the only market we have for our agricultural surplus. There is no use in pretending that we can control prices there. We cannot. Therefore we must take from the farmer's back as much as we can of his costs of production. We can do that by removing all taxes and restrictions from the raw materials of his industry which he has to import.

The farmers of this country have suffered themselves to be robbed by the Minister for Industry and Commerce. Any manufacturer who wanted to start up here in any line of business was entitled to demand concessions, trade loan facilities and exemptions from import taxes. When Salts (Saltaire), a firm from the midlands of England, wanted to get their raw material—machinery— to start a worsted factory they got it in free of duty with the greatest possible pleasure. I would remind the House that every small farm in this country is an industry. Any two dozen farms in any county in Ireland employ more men and will always employ more men than Salts (Saltaire) have ever employed or will employ in this country.

But do they get any facility in securing their raw material? None at all. They have to pay tax on a bucket to two gentlemen down in the back streets in Dublin. If they want to buy a rake, spade or a shovel, a tax has to be paid to somebody else. If they want to buy a mowing machine, a plough, a rake or a tedder, a constituent of Deputy Allen's comes into the field and demands that he shall get his pound of flesh in the taxes that have been levied on agricultural machinery. If they want to buy artificial manure, the manure ring in Dublin must be consulted and must get their pint of blood out of the farmer before he is allowed to buy a bag of super. If he wants to buy a bag of maize meal, he is held up as a kind of public enemy, as the awful man who wants to bring Indian meal into Ireland.

I want to bring Indian meal into Ireland. I want to bring into Ireland the cheapest and best Indian meal we can buy anywhere in the world, and if anybody sets up a mill in Ireland and mills Indian meal at a price cheaper than that at which I can buy it anywhere else, more power to his elbow— I will buy it from him—but if it is contended that in order to gratify the Indian meal millers, the shovel and grape makers, the fork makers, the mowing machine makers, the rake makers, the manure makers and everybody else who wants to line his pockets at the expense of the people of the country, the agricultural industry must be sacrificed to all these people and is to contribute something to the excess profits of all these gentlemen who are growing bloated behind the tariff walls erected here for the last ten years, the industry will collapse, as it is collapsing.

If it does collapse, bear this in mind; they will have this gloomy satisfaction, that the day the agricultural surplus ceases to be exported from this country there will be no found from which to buy the steel and iron that constitute the raw materials of the factories which produce agricultural machinery; there will be no money to buy the phosphate rock from North Africa which constitutes the raw material of the artificial manure industry; there will be no money to pay for the jute which makes the bag into which artificial manure is put by the manure ring; there will be no money to supply any of these gentlemen with the excess profits they have enjoyed at the expense of the agricultural community in the past.

What astonishes me is that the Minister for Industry and Commerce, who will no doubt intervene in the debate, will grow livid with rage at any adverse comment on the industrial elements of our community. To reflect upon them is an outrage, a betrayal and a sabotage of our national effort. They must be facilitated in every possible way, but if the unfortunate farming community come forward and ask for nothing more than this, that the Government should get out of their light and let them do their job without interference from anybody, they are told it is nonsense, that they must be content to pay whatever prices the manufacturers operating behind tariffs and quotas choose to ask and that, if they do not pay these prices, they can damn well do without the things they have to buy. Signs on it, we are where we are at present.

Mr. Kennedy

The farmers were never better off.

Mr. Dillon

That is what Fianna Fáil believes. Fianna Fáil believes in its heart that the rearing of pigs is a dirty job. The Tánaiste says it leaves dung on your hands and mouth, and they really believe that any sensible man would be much happier not rearing them. It is a dirty job, and, if you can get £480 a year, who the hell would rear pigs? The average Fianna Fáil Deputy thinks that farming is a contemptible, low occupation and that only wage slaves engage in it, and that really the farmer who is best off is the farmer who is getting through by some wangle, doing as little work as he can and getting as much profit as he can knock out of the land by honest or dishonest methods. The bulk of the people do not agree with Deputy Kennedy. The bulk of the people are born of parents who were members of the Land League and who wanted to own their own holdings in order to get a decent living out of them without being beholden to landlords or politicians. They wanted to be free men and not to be dependent on doles and concessions from the Fianna Fáil Party or anybody else.

Mr. Kennedy

They were as national as you ever were and from as good stock.

Mr. Dillon

The Deputy forgets that. The Deputy's instinct is to assume that every farmer in the country who has been driven to the desperate straits of having to depend on doles, pensions and subsidies of one kind or another ought to be happy and grateful to the Government who supplies them. Most decent farmers are humiliated by the thought that, their fathers having shaken off the shackles of the landlord, they are obliged to draw on the shackles of Fianna Fáil in order to be given a chance to live. Sensible people want to restore to the farmers the independence born of prosperity which was won for them and which has been taken from them by the folly of Fianna Fáil. I do not think we can content ourselves with simply removing the levies and taxes put on the raw materials of the agricultural industry by the Fianna Fáil Government. I think we must go further. We must derate agricultural land as it has been derated in Northern Ireland and Great Britain, because if our farmers have to compete with the British farmer and the Northern Ireland farmer in the British market, they ought to be put on an equal footing with them.

I believe that another most urgently necessary reform is to put an end to the system whereby new buildings on a farmer's holding should be made the subject of revaluation for the purpose of increasing the rates. I well remember my father telling me that one of the great nightmares of the tenant farmers of the 70's was that they dare not repair their houses because the moment they did so, the landlord came down and increased the rent. The situation at present is exactly the same, if you substitute "rate collector" for "landlord." If you venture to build a new pigsty, or turn what was a lean-to into a decent, well-ventilated building for cattle, the rate collector comes in and there is a revaluation and you discover that the rateable valuation has gone up by £2 or £3 which may represent an annual rent of anything from 10/- to 30/- per year. No landlord would have dared to ask for more and in face of these demands by landlords, we fought the land war, in order to get a fair rent and to prevent these activities. I feel that just as great an evil is growing, and it is a comment amongst those who understand Irish agriculture that one of its characteristics is a deficiency of farm buildings on very small holdings. One of the reasons is that people are afraid to build them because it means an increase in valuation, which means an additional annual rent.

I think we have to go beyond that. It is true our farmers in many places are not getting out of their land the maximum return they should get, and I therefore want to see a system of agricultural education developed which will enable the boys coming out of the schools to go on their fathers' lands with at least some elementary education in agriculture. Accordingly, I suggest to those who are responsible that every elementary school should, in the last year, when a boy is 13 years of age and in sixth book, offer him the alternative, with his parent's consent, of leaving the primary school and going to a technical school to spend two years, up to the age of 15, learning elementary agriculture under a system of compulsory attendance.

In addition to that, I have always believed, and still believe, that we should establish throughout this country demonstration farms. I do not mean experimental farms. There is all the difference in the world between an experimental and a demonstration farm. The experimental farm is one on which you primarily intend to lose money. You try out every experiment, and perhaps, out of every 100, 85 will fail. You winnow out the 15 worth following up. On such a farm you are bound to lose money. It is meant for that purpose—to be an experimental place. But when you have winnowed out the 15 successful plans, I want a demonstration farm where, under practical conditions, we can see these successful theories put into operation. We have to bear in mind in that connection that the system of farming suitable to County Meath may be highly unsuitable to County Mayo. What I want to see is the farmers of Mayo having demonstrated before them the most efficient methods of husbandry suitable to the conditions obtaining in County Mayo.

The Department of Agriculture here, I believe, is a very fine Department of Agriculture, in so far as personnel is concerned. We have some of the finest men in the whole world in the Irish Department of Agriculture. Some of the higher officials of that Department would take their place beside agricultural experts in any country in the world. I am convinced that, given a free hand, those men can make a great contribution to the agricultural economy of this country, but I want to ensure that any advice they have to give us will be demonstrated to us as practical propositions before people are required to undertake expense on their own holdings in the attempt to put their proposals into operation. If all these schemes that the Department believe could profitably be employed upon the land of Ireland are valid, what conceivable objection can there be to demonstrating them? They ought to make money. Demonstration farms should be self-supporting. If a farm of 25 acres is sufficient for a farmer, his wife and family of four children. surely it ought to be adequate for one inspector. Let the inspector who is prepared to tell the farmers how to run their farms, come down and take the kind of farm that the people he is instructing have to live on and demonstrate to the people on that farm that he can make more out of it than they can. That is the acid test. If he cannot make more out of 25 acres than the local farmers can, let him go home to Dublin and think again, but if he can come down and demonstrate to the local farmers a better method of using a 25-acre holding than is at present being employed by the farmers, I venture to say that he will be a very welcome person and the more demonstration he does the more welcome he will be.

It is that post-war situation I am thinking of. I do not think the Taoiseach can charge me with having spent the time I have taken up in this House in making nothing but an unconstructive and malignant attack upon the Minister for Agriculture. I do not think I have wasted much time in talking about the poor Minister for Agriculture. I do not think he is worth talking about. I have tried to indicate quite clearly what I believe is the only hope of agriculture post-war. That is what really matters.

I have tried to demonstrate to this House—and I think it is time the Labour Party looked to it—that unless agriculture is saved our people are going to have a lower standard of living than any community in Europe because we are one of the poorest countries in the world in the matter of natural resources, and the inevitable result of that poverty would be that vast masses of our people would emigrate. We would become a nation of old men and children, because everybody who is capable of hard work and enterprise is going to fly this country if he finds there is no place in it where he can earn a decent livelihood. If agriculture perishes, every other element in our community perishes.

Post-war, God knows, we are going to have problems enough. If we have a prosperous agriculture I believe we will be able to survive. If we have not, we will all sink together. I have no place to go to out of this country. Everything I have got is in this country. I cannot shift and I have no desire to sink. I want to keep afloat, and my interest in this business is in no sense philanthropic. I am here. I cannot get out. I would not be happy out, and if the country is going down I have to go down with it. I am perfectly certain the country need not go down. I do not believe we will ever be rich in this country—we have not the wherewithal to make our people rich—but we could be comfortable. If the land of this country were used with common prudence there is in these 12,000,000 acres sufficient to give every person in this country a modest standard of comfort. If we get that, that is all we want, but unless we are prepared to turn our backs most definitely on the Fianna Fáil theories in relation to agricultural economics, sink we certainly shall. It is possible to do that, and I am not without hope that we will do it, but it may be necessary to change the Government before we do it.

I see here in the ranks of the Farmers' Group a body of men who claim to be intimately associated with the agricultural industry. I shall watch with interest the result of a year or two of their experience of Fianna Fáil. I sympathise with them in their hope that, by persuasion, remonstrance and argument, they can get the Government to do better in the future than they have done in the past. My bitter experience has taught me that there is no hope whatever along those lines, because they are thoroughly incompetent on the Fianna Fáil Benches. There is no use in arguing with them. You can never get them to do what is right. However, I suppose I had to learn that bitter lesson by experience when I came into this House. I hope and believe the members of the Farmers' Group will learn it too, and I look forward to a situation post-war in which they and the rest of us will cooperate, not only with those who live on the land but with every section of the community.

There is one last word I want to say. The Taoiseach, on Friday morning, was in one of his familiar moods until Deputy Larkin let a roar at him. He was in the mood when the lock of hair was shaken down and he was whacking the desk—a mood with which we are all familiar. In that mood he was wagging his head and threatening us all with a general election on the ground that it was impossible for him to carry on by a logical, consistent line of policy, if he had not a clear majority. He has, of course, in back of his head some devious political purpose for that declaration. God knows what it is. Nobody else but the Taoiseach knows, but be sure of this, it is a shrewd purpose. It was stated by design for some purpose that nobody but the Taoiseach fully understands, and we will not see the purpose of it maybe for 18 months. But, it is right at this stage—because a great many peopJe in the country will be misled by that declaration—to point out this fact. Outside this House many people may think that a Government with 68 persons supporting them and 71 against them was in a permanent danger and in a position of grave instability and insecurity. That is all "cod" and, of course, the hardened political war-horse, the Taoiseach, knows that better than anybody in this House. If you have 68 disciplined lapdogs like the Fianna Fáil Party sitting behind you, you cannot be defeated by 71 Rapparees such as are sitting on the Opposition Benches. The 71 are scattered over four groups between which no particular love is lost, and the number of occasions when they will all walk into the Lobby together are few and far between.

If they could not get into the Lobby together on the subject of the Taoiseach's election, they will never get into it for anything else. Nothing could be more obviously wrong than that. If you could not rally them all for that purpose, you will never rally them. If the Minister for Agriculture was able to get unscathed through 71, no more scandalous proposition than Dr. Ryan will ever be produced by the Fianna Fáil Government in the next five years. So, therefore, if the Taoiseach wants to carry on for five years, he is as safe as any political Government in a democratic assembly in the world could be. It may be that for some political trick he does not want to carry on, but it is right that the people should know, when he comes to them with tears starting up in his eyes, protesting his reluctance to have another election and the fact that it was made inevitable for him because he had not a sufficient majority in Dáil Eireann, that that will be all cod. It will be just a political trick, designed to cover up his own desire to have an election in order to serve some political purpose he has in view.

Personally, I hope there will not be an election now. I hope there will not be any election until after the emergency, because I believe to launch our country into another general election would be an act of criminal irresponsibility. He might do it to-morrow morning, if he thought it would suit his political ends.

The Deputy had such an opportunity last week.

Mr. Dillon

I took the best advantage of it that I could. However, all I want to say is this: I warn Deputies to watch him, because he wants watching.

Mr. Davin

The threatening kind of speech delivered by the Taoiseach in the House on Friday last appears to me to have frightened the life out of the leader and, perhaps, all the members of the Clann na Talmhan Party. I presume that is the real reason why they refused to vote on the last day and why, to-day, they have so far refused even to speak. The Taoiseach, when speaking at the conclusion of the debate on Friday last, indicated clearly that he was very much disappointed with the decision of the people at the last general election. He indicated that if he were elected as Head of the Government, he would carry on, but he did not say how. He went further and he said: "The Government will not deviate in the slightest from its own programme," and proceeded to tell those of us who knew differently that he actually put a policy and a programme to the people in the last general election. I read the speeches delivered by the Taoiseach everywhere he spoke throughout the country in that campaign, and I failed to find in any of the Press records any indication of any policy or programme either for the immediate future or for the post-war period. It is quite true that the Taoiseach said—and his Ministers emphasised it more than he did—that he was the only living politician capable of maintaining the national policy of neutrality. Having failed to get the majority of the people to agree with him in that view, he is quite right in saying that he is sadly disappointed with the decision. But it is incorrect to state that the Taoiseach is the only living politician who can maintain the national policy of neutrality. That is proved by the fact that we are still neutral, notwithstanding the fact that the Taoiseach did not get the majority he asked for. He said he would carry on. I think we are entitled to ask him here and now how he intends to carry on, or on what policy he proposes to spend the £8,000,000 odd which he is asking the House now to vote for him.

"The Government will not deviate in the slightest from its own programme". That appears to me to be the day-to-day programme which the Fianna Fáil Government have been carrying out since the 1938 general election and particularly since the emergency arose. Is the policy and the programme of the Taoiseach and his Ministers in the immediate future to try to solve the problem of unemployment by providing passports for ablebodied citizens who would be better employed at home on work which is waiting to be done? Is that the only way in which the Government proposes to solve the problem of unemployment? The Taoiseach said that the only place where co-operation can be secured is in this House. If the Taoiseach wants the friendly co-operation of the members on these benches, the least we are entitled to, as representing 200,000 odd electors of this State, is to know the plan and the programme for which he requires the co-operation of the members of this section of the House as well as the members of every other section.

The Taoiseach, in reply to the discussion the other day, challenged in a very definite way figures which I gave here in this House and which I had previously given outside this House. I said that the policy of the Minister for Agriculture had been a dismal failure, and I proceeded to give figures dealing with the reduction in the value of agricultural production, the reduction in the value of the food consumed by our own citizens, the decline in the population of rural Ireland, and the total number of people who left this country with Government passports since the emergency period because the Fianna Fáil Party had not carried out their promise to provide work for those people. When I gave certain figures to prove my argument was correct in connection with the agricultural production, the Taoiseach resented that. I stated, and I repeat now, that within a certain period, for which Government statistics are available, the value of agricultural production declined by £15,000,000. In dealing with that statement, the Taoiseach, as reported in column 207 of Volume 91 of the Official Reports said:—

"The Deputy said that agricultural production, had decreased in value by £15,000,000 and that the value of food consumed at home had gone down by £8,500,000. Neither of those statements has the slightest basis in truth".

Then he went on to say:

"Let the Deputy give us the source from which we can obtain these figures. It is easier, of course, to make these statements in crossroad fashion and fool people who will not follow them any further. In this House a member will not get away with that."

Cars are given to Ministers at the expense of the people for the carrying on of their work; not for the promotion of Party interests or for looking after the interests of the Fianna Fáil Party organisation. I know of Ministers who went outside their own constituencies during the past six months —long before the general election campaign commenced—who picked up Deputies in these cars and carried them over constituencies on work of a Party nature. I want an assurance from the Minister for Supplies, when he intervenes in this discussion, that cars given Ministers for State purposes will not be used in the future as they were used in the recent past. I know owners of commercial lorries operating in my constituency who have been unable to get petrol with which to transport essential commodities from one part of the country to another. I think it is a shame—a damn shame— that Ministers and others should be using cars given them for State purposes to promote Party interests and, in some cases, to my knowledge to carry themselves and their families, after their day's work, to social functions. Can I have an assurance from the Minister for Supplies, who is also Minister for Industry and Commerce, that these cars will not be used by Ministers except for State purposes?

Mr. Lemass

Cars are given to Ministers to facilitate their protection. That is the primary reason, and clearly that protection is required.

Mr. Davin

I am aware that a car was used for a Party purpose. I think when Ministers are engaged on work of a purely Party nature State cars should not be used by them. In prewar days the cost of cars provided for Ministerial purposes came to about £700 per year. The cost has been considerably increased. In any case, I think I am entitled, when we are voting money belonging to the taxpayers, to request that in future the activities of Ministers in this respect should be under closer supervision than was the case in the past, by the Minister for Supplies; that petrol will be strictly rationed, and that it will be made known to Ministers concerned that it is to be used only for State purposes. I was questioned by the Taoiseach recently when I suggested that some highly paid civil servants had been using their position for the purpose of promoting the interests of the Government, particularly in connection with the recent election campaign. I suggested that a high official in the Department of the Taoiseach had been acting in that respect.

I think the Minister would be the last to allow an officer or a director of the Electricity Supply Board to sit behind him or me on a platform in my constituency. If the rule had been applied to all Parties I would not raise it or refer to it in this House.

There is one other matter I wish to refer to. I want to join with a number of other Deputies who, during recent times in this House and during the past year, strongly urged the Dáil to impress on the Minister for Defence in particular the necessity for providing allowances for soldiers when they get married. This question has been raised in another place without very much effect, but we are entitled to have it discussed here. I think it is altogether wrong—and I know of cases where it has happened—that when a soldier member of the Defence Forces of this State gets married, his wife should be left, as some of their wives have been left, as a charge on the local ratepayers. It is nothing to be proud of that in certain Command areas large numbers of serving soldiers who married with the permission of their commanding officers have had no provision made for their wives and other dependents.

Mr. Lemass

The Deputy knows that is wrong.

Mr. Davin

The Minister for Finance, in the last speech he made in the House before the last Dáil dissolved, stated, perhaps unconsciously, that every serving soldier is entitled to a marriage allowance. Surely, the Minister for Finance who is writing out the cheques for these payments should know that that is not so. Under the existing regulations, a serving soldier who gets married must be in the Army for two years before his wife can receive her marriage allowance. I think that if a soldier is allowed to get married or gets married, his wife should receive the usual marriage allowance immediately, rather than, as I know it has happened, have to depend on friends or relatives.

Mr. Lemass

There are cases where they get married without the consent of their commanding officers. The regulation provides that if the soldier has two years' service, or if be has shorter service, subject to the consent of his commanding officer, his wife is entitled to get the allowance.

Mr. Davin

I am making the case that when a serving soldier gets married, his wife should get the usual marriage allowance, and it is a disgrace that the present state of affairs should be allowed to continue. I believe that there are only a few hundred soldiers concerned, and I think the necessary provision should be made immediately to have their wives given the allowance rather than that they should be a charge on the ratepayers.

I am glad to hear that from the Minister for Agriculture. Other members of this Party will be speaking before this debate concludes, and I do not want to take up the time of the House. I am glad the Minister for Local Government and Public Health has come in to hear my closing remarks. I would like him to justify the interference and delay on the part of his Department in dealing with recommendations that have come to the Department of Local Government from county managers, in connection with increased rates of wages for road workers and other employees of local authorities. I know of a number of cases—they are limited in number because I do not interfere outside my constituency, as I have enough to do in my own—where county managers, with the unanimous approval of county councils, sent up recommendations for miserable increases in rates of wages to the Minister for Local Government, and he held them up for a period of three months, and in some cases, after he considered, or was supposed to have considered them, he cut down the amounts unanimously recommended by the local authority and agreed to by the county manager.

I know of a case where one recommendation was sent up for an increased rate of wages for a man in charge of a waterworks and sewerage scheme. It was delayed for six months in the Minister's Department, and at the end of six months, presumably in order to balance the Budget, he cut down the recommendation of 5/- to the miserable sum of 3/- a week. The Minister may have more time to spare for looking after the work of the Department in the future than in the immediate past, and I hope that when he gets the electioneering dirt off his feet, and cleans up the dirt that is apparently sticking to certain parts of his Department, he will remove the causes of the delay taking place in connection with ordinary administrative matters that should be dealt with in a reasonable period. Is there any Deputy who would get, up and say that the Minister for Local Government is worth £1,700 a year if he were to admit that an application for an increase in the rate of wages for a single worker had to be kept for six months and then cut down to the miserable sum of 3/-? I would like to get the opportunity of cutting the salary of a Minister who was responsible for such a policy, but, unfortunately, while he has all those yes-men lined up behind him, he will get his £1,700 whether he earns it or not.

Mr. Allen

Bring in a motion.

Mr. Davin

I would bring in one if Deputy Allen supported it, but if a motion was brought in to give another £1,000 a year to the Minister, and to increase his pension by another £500 a year, I am certain that Deputy Allen would walk into, the Lobby and do useful work for the Minister.

Mr. O Briain

Did you not do the same yourself? Did you not vote for it yourself?

Mr. Davin

Get up and make your speech.

Mr. Donnellan

We of the Clann na Talmhan have listened with great interest to the debate on agriculture, and I assure you that the praise from one side, the dispraise from the other, or the advice we have been given has not taken the slightest effect so far as we are concerned, because you people on either side of the House must realise that it is on account of the fact that the rural community, the agricultural community, have been dissatisfied with you both for the past 20 years that they have sent 14 Deputies of the Clann into Dáil Eireann. One very important matter was a statement made by An Taoiseach when he turned here to the Clann na Talmhan Benches and said: "It is from you people that we expect the advice—you are the people we expect to produce the food." Of course, that is all right so far as it goes.

We fully realise that the people on the land, and on the land alone, are those who produce the food. But, remember, it is the way the land of Ireland has been dealt with for the past 20 years by the present and past Governments that is responsible for the food position in our country to-day. Had the land of Ireland been placed in the hands of our people, our children who are forced to emigrate to England, and an economic price paid to us for our labour, you would have plenty of food in this country to-day. That cannot be denied, and here on the floor of the Dáil I, coming from rural Ireland, state that the day you were compelled to pass a compulsory Tillage Order, that was the day of your greatest admission of guilt, because the tenant farmers of Ireland, the people who are the chief producers, never required compulsion, and it was never necessary so far as they were concerned, to compel them to till the land and produce the food. Of course, we listened to the advice of Deputy Dillon and also to the statement of the Minister for Agriculture. As far as we are concerned, we will work here in a straight line for the people of rural Ireland. We do not forget the election that has just passed. We do not forget the statements made by Deputy MacEntee about Donnellan, the Communist——

Mr. Davin

The Hitler.

Mr. Donnellan

——Herr von Donnellan, and so on. Still, we do not wish to go back. Neither do we forget the statements from the Fine Gael Benches, which were to the following effect: "Do what you like, vote for any Party you like, but do not vote for the Clann na Talmhan candidates." I assure you, however, that as far as we are concerned none of those statements, or any statements made here, will change us from the one course that we are going to pursue, and that is to fight for rural Ireland and its people.

They tell us about the flight from the land. There is no such thing as the flight from the land. There is flight for the want of land, the flight of our rural population because they are not placed on the land. That is the flight that exists, and while you have a system in operation here, as you have had for the past 20 years, which is sending the life's blood of our country away, sending our children away and compelling them to leave, this nation of ours is dying, and dying fast. We have 12,000,000 acres of arable land in this country. According to the statistics, the return from that arable land, is, roughly, £5 per acre—lower than the return from any arable land in any other country in Europe. Why not try to do something to raise that by, say, even £2 per acre? If you could raise the income on that land by even £2 per acre, that would give an income of £24,000,000, which would be in the hands of the producers, the farmers and the workers, and every other class in this country would benefit by the increased circulation of that money.

Again, the educational system is all wrong so far as agriculture is concerned. We are told that agriculture is the most important industry in this country. What really happens, however? At the age of 14 the child comes home from school to carry on according to the same methods that his father and grandfather carried on before him. That is not advancing. You must face the facts. You must set up secondary schools or colleges in this country which will so train the child that, when he leaves school at the age of 14, he will know his job, and the same applies to the children of the workers. The children of the farmers and of the workers should be trained in these schools in such a way that they will know their jobs, so that the farmer's child, when he comes back to the farm in the course of two years will be a fully qualified person for his job. For instance, take the case of other professions, such as lawyers, doctors, and so on. They have to spend years and years in higher courses of education in order to qualify them for jobs which, we are told, are not as important as our job is.

Of course, we have been listening here to statements made in the year 1943, and you have people going back to 1938, 1932 and 1922, and telling us about the rights that were done and the wrongs that were done, but any statements that you may make here now will not make any righter the-rights or any wronger the wrongs: the rights were rights and the wrongs were wrongs. Coming from rural Ireland with my people here, I appeal to all of you on both sides of the House not to be looking back, but to be looking forward, with a view to seeing what we can do for 1944, 1945, 1946, 1956 or 1966. Adopt that attitude, and do not be raising up old sores or old bitternesses. It is to do away with that kind of thing that we have come here. Do not be looking back.

Take drainage, for instance. After 20 years of native government here, there are 4,000,000 acres of land under water. Had any of you on either side of the House had the interests of this country at heart, the first great scheme that would have been carried out would be a national drainage scheme in connection with 4,000,000 acres of the land of this country. If that land were only producing food to-day, there would be no shortage of bacon, of potatoes, of butter, and so on, and our children would not be driven away to seek their livelihood abroad. If those millions of acres had been restored to cultivation, we could be exporting those commodities to-day instead of being in the position of not having enough of them for ourselves. Of course, we unfortunately live amongst all this political trash that goes on-What happens is that whispering campaigns are being carried out. If one were to take the statements in the daily Press, after the last meeting of Dáil Eireann, one would imagine that Clann na Talmhan had sold out to Fianna Fáil, and that because I had a meeting with the Taoiseach I had handed over something to the Fianna Fáil Party, but, thank God, I had witnesses. As a matter of fact, Fianna Fáil Deputies went out and said that we were afraid to vote since that happened. That is not the case. Where the interests of rural Ireland are concerned, or where agriculture is concerned, our people in this House will vote and fight in defence of those interests.

Mr. M. O'Sullivan

I am interested in the Vote on Account from an entirely different angle from that of agriculture, and it is in relation to the question of local government. In this respect, however, it might be appropriate to refer to the fact that a number of Deputies in this House are associated with local bodies now operating under the County Management Act. I think it will be remembered that at the time when the Act was under discussion in this House reference was made to what was operating in Dublin as a sample of what might, perhaps, be operated with success throughout the country. In so far as my experience relates to Dublin, I think it as well that the House should know how, precisely, the City Management Act, as it applied to us since 1930, did operate. Thanks to the tact and ability, amounting almost to genius, of the late Gerald Sherlock, it was possible to initiate a system in the Dublin Corporation which gave to the members the semblance of authority, arousing interest so far as their work was concerned, but it was necessary for him to go outside the terms of the Act by setting up a number of committees, such as the Housing Committee, the General Purposes Committee, and so on. He was quite frank about what he was doing at the time. I distinctly remember his saying: "You are representatives of the people. You are sent in here to do certain work. Unless I give you that work to do, obviously you will not remain here." May I say to Deputies who arc associated with this new regime so far as the county is concerned, that perhaps they will now find in operation a very different system from that which operated under the old county council. I think there is evidence of that system just at the moment. In my considered opinion, there is no Act more calculated to paralyse local government than that particular Act.

May I instance a particular case which recently came under my notice. For over twelve years, I have watched the operation of that very fine committee, the Grangegorman Mental Hospital Committee. During the last 12 or 13 years, the Grangegorman Mental Hospital, under the benevolent guidance of that excellent committee, has improved both from the medical point of view and from, if you like, the social conditions point of view so far as the patients are concerned. Recently, under the County Management Act, that committee—the same in number, by the way—was brought into the hospital again, but now it has no agenda, as it had in the old days. The Act has gone so far as to enable the manager, even on the request of the committee, to refuse to give an account of the decisions taken by him during the previous month. I think an unanimous vote was recorded against that procedure. The answer given was that the orders of the manager were laid on the table for inspection by the members. Obviously, the proceedings of any meeting would be over before it would be possible for any member to raise any point in which he was interested. Notwithstanding the unanimous desire of the committee, that procedure remains in operation, and the committee are left without any formal indication of what the manager had done in the previous month. As a result, the attendance at the meetings is dwindling, the interest of the members is diminishing, and the committee is now reduced to the status of a visiting committee. I am afraid that what has happened in the case of that committee will happen all over the country. Men of independence, men capable of giving the public service to which we have grown accustomed in this country will feel that there is no further use for them, and we will have the whole system of local government centralised in a form which is positively dangerous. I suggest to the Minister that, while there is yet time, he should review the position, even from a Party point of view.

I do not want to be taken as indicating that everything is just as we would desire it in regard to the Dublin Corporation. It is nothing of the kind. As I say, there is a semblance of interest there because of the manner in which the foundations were laid under the 1930 Act, but in order to preserve the interest of the members it was absolutely essential that they should be met with symapthy and consideration by the Department of Local Government. I am sorry to say that, in recent years, the necessary contact and sympathy have been entirely absent. From time to time, matters have arisen which might have been very helpfully pushed along if it had been possible to establish the contact which I should like to see in operation. In the absence of that contact, a policy of despair seems to have been adopted. I cannot vouch for how long the present members of the Dublin Corporation will continue along those lines, unless, as a result of this debate, there is evidence of a complete change so far as local government is concerned.

The problem of housing is the biggest problem that the City of Dublin has to face. At the moment we are in need of 15,000 dwellings. I suggest that the housing problem is a national one, and it has been dealt with in piecemeal fashion. The question of finance is a fundamental one so far as housing is concerned, and I have no hesitation in saying that, in regard to finance, the policy under which the housing problem of the Dublin Corporation has been carried out was an insane one. Here again, may I say that we have looked in vain to the Department of Local Government for the necessary guidance and sympathy. We are forced to go into the market with our own stocks at 4 per cent. and 5 per cent., obviously causing hardship to the taxpayer and the ratepayer, and with serious consequences to the tenants themselves in regard to rent. I know that on previous occasions my colleague, Deputy Corish, has raised an aspect of the housing question which vitally affects the whole country, and for which apparently no remedy has been found. The Minister for Local Government is fully aware of the conditions-on which housing finance is operated under the 1932 Act, that is on the basis of 66? per cent. for loans for slum clearance and 33? per cent. for normal clearance. Frankly, I could never see why such a tremendous distinction should be made between slum clearance and normal clearance, because to my mind the dividing line is very slender indeed. The grave defect of that Act is that the maximum amount on which the grant will be payable in the case of a flat is £500, and, in the case of a cottage, £450. To-day, those flats are costing the Dublin Corporation an average of £750 for a three-room flat and £650 for a 4-roomed cottage. Obviously, the corporation is called upon to bear the difference between the maximum subsidy of £500 in the one case and £450 in the other, and the ratepayers are suffering heavily.

Sometimes, the contention is advanced by members of the Government that in fact they have provided the finance necessary for the solution of the housing problem. I suggest that that is not correct. This year, so far as our rates are concerned, we are contributing £214,000, the equivalent of roughly 2/1 in the £, while the State contribution is £157,000, a difference against the Corporation of £57,000. In cities on the other side, where they have a housing programme similar to ours, the comparable figure is much less than 1/- in the £. Therefore, I suggest to the Minister that there is need for examination so far as our housing programme is concerned, and that that difference in so far as the subsidy is concerned should not be allowed to operate against local bodies, particularly the Dublin Corporation.

Recently, because of conditions in the building industry in this city, the Housing Committee of the Corporation found it necessary to turn to a new angle, so far as the solution of the housing difficulty was concerned. They have entered upon a campaign of reconstruction and conversion as can be seen by anybody, particularly in the Gardiner Street area, where roughly 30 of the larger houses have been taken over, in some cases reconstructed and in others converted, to make suitable dwellings for our people. So far, our operations in this respect are costing the Corporation something like £75,000. We have found it necessary to seek a loan in respect of that expenditure. Since this scheme of reconstruction is entirely new, so far as the Corporation is concerned, I would be interested to know if the Minister is prepared to credit the Corporation with the subsidy in this new sphere on the lines of the existing scheme of flats or the scheme that was in operation up to the time we took over in Gardiner Street. It is important from the point of view of the Corporation that they should have definite information on that point because they are encouraged by the success of their schemes to go head and a big programme is envisaged in the Newfoundland Street area and other areas of that character so long as the emergency lasts. So much as far as the housing problem is concerned.

May I point to another incident as indicating the complete lack of sympathy of the Department with the activities of the Corporation? The Department of Local Government is the most important Department of Government, in my opinion, in the whole State. It is more closely associated with the activities and life of the people than any other Department. It should be a hive of industry. In that connection may I say that the impression is widespread, so far as the Corporation is concerned, that the dead hand of officialdom weighs heavily on that Department. I refer now to an incident which originated so far back as 18 months ago in connection with blind pensions. The Corporation, unanimously be it said, decided that this most defenceless section of the community, numbering about 1,000, should, if at all possible, have some addition made to the weekly allowance made, one section from the Corporation and the other from the Government. After an examination by a committee drawn from all Parties in the Chamber, it was unanimously decided that a sum of £4,000 should be conceded to the blind population of this city. That was 18 months ago. From previous experience it was decided that on this particular occasion we would not ask for an equivalent grant from the Government. The Blind Persons Act, as you are aware, fixes the contribution 50-50, but as a result of previous experience we decided that we should not ask the Government for any contribution on this occasion; we asked only that we might have the necessary permission to disburse that £4,000 amongst these 1,000 people. Actually the recipients would get sums ranging from about 1/10 to 3/- per week. That request was sent on to the Department, and finally, after a considerable delay the decision of the Minister appears to have been that if his consent were given to the proposal it would impinge on the means test regulations, and that because of that technical difficulty the amount which was included in the estimate of the Corporation should not be passed on to the blind pensioners.

I suggest to you, Sir, that it is the very negation of Christian law if an objection of that kind is allowed to stand in the way. If it is possible in the year 1943 to pass emergency laws, right, left and centre, on any matter affecting the life of the country, surely here was a case, having regard to the difficult times and the types of case involved, in which the Minister should have devised ways and means to give effect to the unanimous desire of the corporation. The money is still there for the blind pensioners, but the decision of the Minister stands. Actually we made an endeavour to get in contact with the Minister and to put to him the point of view that I am now putting before the House, but up to this stage, I am sorry to say, the decision still stands. I hope that even now, seeing that the corporation is still in a position to pay this money and is anxious to pay it, the Minister will find the necessary means to permit it to do so.

Another matter affecting people in the city is the question of relief schemes. Personally I do not like the designation "relief schemes". I think it is an abominable designation and carries its own condemnation. It might be styled a "scheme of public works". We do not like to stigmatise people engaged on those schemes as if they were working under a form of charity. The corporation had a very old-standing rule under which at particular times of the year, when due to stress of circumstances, it was necessary to supplement their ordinary activities, they took on a number of workers outside their own staffs. For all these schemes they provided a six-day week at full trade union wages. These schemes continued up to about three or four years ago, when our friends on the other side introduced what are known as rotational relief schemes. Obviously, rotational relief is not a solution of the unemployment problem. Deputies have already touched on the question of unemployment, and it will be dealt with by other Deputies later on, I am informed. I am particularly concerned that, here in Dublin, any schemes of that character will give us the right to employ men on the basis of the arrangement in existence prior to the introduction of rotational schemes, in other words, that men should be employed on the basis of a full six-day week.

This is the first occasion on which I have addressed the House and I felt that any remarks I should have to make should concern the city here, particularly so far as the Minister for Local Government is concerned. I should like from him an assurance that so far as the provision of fuel is concerned, he has made arrangements to preclude anything in the nature of hardship in the coming winter. The arrangements made last winter were of such a character, particularly in the early stages, that definitely serious hardship would have ensued if it were not for a merciful Providence. In the corporation we decided to set up a number of fuel depôts but through some extraordinary zeal, the Minister and his Department decided that the corporation should not have responsibility for the fuel depôts and they immediately transferred the matter to the Commissioners of the Board of Assistance. Even after the transference of these depôts to the commissioners, we found a defect in so far as people in outlying housing areas such as Larkhill and Whitehall on one side and Crumlin on the other side, were concerned. A number of people were not being served from the fuel depôts set up by the Minister, people who were in a position to pay for their fuel but who were unable to get it in the quantities and at the price they desired. We asked the Department at that time to be allowed to set up in our housing areas a number of fuel depôts to cater for that particular class of people. I hope the time is not yet too late, and that he will take a note of it now to give us the necessary permission.

So far as the Dublin Corporation is concerned, I, say again that it is a voluntary body. The members give their time and services without fee or reward and are prepared to continue along that line, while on the other hand the Minister and his staff—I recognise what the position of the Minister is—in the Custom House are the servants of the people. I hope that at this stage they will recognise that they are the servants of the people. Having said so much, I want to say, on behalf of the Dublin Corporation, that in the matter of these works schemes and on the housing question which is our main problem, the corporation will be prepared at all times to give that measure of co-operation to a Minister or to a Ministry which is prepared to recognise the difficulties on the other side.

Mr. Fitzgerald-Kenney

The Minister for Agriculture took, to my mind, a very disheartening attitude, because he took the attitude that everything which it is conceivable to do for agriculture has already been done. He took up Sir George Stapleton's last book, which he seemed rather proud to have read. It is not very much to have read Sir George Stapleton's last book, admirable as it is. It is in the Pelican series, and is quite a small book, which can be purchased for 7d., and is very well worth the money. It has undoubtedly got agricultural theory brought up to date, and is a synopsis of Sir George Stapleton's other works. The Minister says that everything Sir George Stapleton has suggested has already been done in this country. The three things which according to him Sir George Stapleton said were necessary for England were, first, that all farmers should own their own land—and he said that has taken place here; secondly, the drainage, reclamation and liming of land which was very much behind-hand in England. But it must have astonished the House when the Minister said that drainage, reclamation, and liming of land were as admirable in this country at the present moment as they could be in any country. Surely nobody could accept that proposition. Apart from the Barrow drainage and a few smaller drains, the drainage of the country has not been attempted.

The Minister for Agriculture ought to know that there has been a report from the Drainage Board. He ought to know that it will cost this State many millions of pounds to tackle the question of drainage. I forget the actual figure. I do not know that land has been reclaimed anywhere except a few odd acres here and there. As far as the liming of land is concerned, it is very much behind-hand in this country. I do not think there is even ground limestone to be got anywhere. I know some years ago when we were in office. I had worked out a little scheme for the establishing of a crushed limestone industry in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, where there happened to be electric power available. The Gaeltacht Services took it up. However, before it was put in operation the Government of which I was a member went out of office, and, of course, as the plan came from me it had to be pigeon-holed, and has remained pigeon-holed ever since, and nothing of that nature has been done. As far as I know, there is nowhere—certainly nowhere in Connaught that I have heard—in which crushed limestone is available at the present moment, although the modern experts are all of the opinion that crushed limestone is more useful than burnt lime for the reclamation of land.

The Minister went on to say that proper grasses was the third thing that Sir George Stapleton urged. That is correct; but do we use the very best grasses in this country? According to the Minister, we do. That is very doubtful. The mixtures which are used in this country are not at all in accordance with Sir George Stapleton's theories. I do not say that Sir George Stapleton's theories are necessarily suited to Ireland. I do not think they are. I would not like to try a pure cocksfoot lea, as Stapletpn urges, and I would certainly think that, so far as the West of Ireland is concerned, one of the most useful and early of all grasses is meadow foxtail and it is an indigenous grass. One sees it in every headland, and yet it is a grass which he considers should not be used at all. Stapleton bases his theories very largely upon Elliott's principles of the Clifton Park system of farming. I tried that system of farming. I laid down some acres of land some 25 or more years ago, under the Clifton Park mixture, and I found it admirable. The results were very excellent, although I did make myself rather a laughingstock before my neighbours, who could not understand the putting of chicory in land and the sowing of weeds, but certainly it paid.

The Minister asked us—and it is here I think the Minister showed his entire failure as a Minister for Agriculture—how would we administer the Live-Stock Breeding Act. Would we give a certain subsidy to Aberdeen Angus, to Herefords, to Shorthorns or to Dairy Shorthorns? Of course, that is a question that nobody could or should attempt to answer. For certain parts of the country you must have one breed of cattle. For other parts of the country you must have another breed of cattle, and if you specialise in any one breed of cattle you are making precisely the same blunder that the Minister for Agriculture has been making from the time he became Minister for Agriculture, that is, assuming that there is one agricultural policy and one only to be pursued all over this country, whereas in fact, the agricultural policy to be pursued in different parts of the country must vary.

There is a very playful old gentleman in Greek history, you may remember, who had a bed and when visitors came to him the visitors all had to fit the bed. If they were too short for the bed, their legs were pulled out until they were the same length as the bed and if their legs were longer than the bed their legs were cut off. They were all of them to be a complete fit. That Procrustean bed is just precisely the sort of bed into which the Minister for Agriculture has for years been endeavouring to fit Irish agriculture. He starts a policy which is based upon corn-growing as a cash crop. That should be, according to him, all over Ireland, the real basis of agriculture. He forgets that corn-growing as a cash crop can be the basis of agriculture in certain parts of this country but cannot be a basis in the major portion of this country. Attacks have been made upon us because we are supposed to have attacked wheat schemes. We did not attack a wheat scheme as being put into force in those parts of the country where a wheat scheme could be worked successfully and would pay. What we did attack was an endeavour to kill the live-stock industry and to substitute for it all over this country wheat and oats as a cash crop and the main basis of agriculture, whereas in the major portion of this country, and certainly in the parts of the country which I know well, live stock must be the basis of a successful agricultural industry and corn-growing as a cash crop must take a very subsidiary place.

We have had from the Minister for Agriculture or any other Minister who is concerned in this debate, an Estimate for whose Department is contained in this Vote on Account, no views at all. As far as we can gather, there has been no thinking, no planning for the future. Surely now is the time in which planning for the future should be carried out. We know that we will have to have immense public works if we are to support the number of people who will come back to this country. Now is the time in which the planning should be done. Are you going to reclaim any land? Now is the time in which there should be a survey and to decide what particular areas of land are to be reclaimed. The hostility to the Shannon Scheme has now, I think, been got over, even in Government Benches. I do not think it is likely that it will ever be described as a white elephant again. If there is going to be a further development of water power in this country, surely now is the time in which a survey should be made. There are obvious places, such as, I suppose a further development of the Liffey scheme, and the River Erne. But how many sources of water power are there in various parts of the Irish hills which have not been investigated and which no effort, so far as I know, has been made to investigate? There are two in my own constituency—the headwaters of the Aille and the Furness Falls coming out from Furness Lough in North Mayo. There are various other potential sources of electric power in this country, but no effort is being made, so far as we know at any rate, to survey the country and discover where they are and which of them can be profitably utilised.

So far as we know, not a single plan is being formed in the Government Departments. Now is the time for planning. Unless planning is done now, you will have to go back to the wretched old policy of living from hand-to-mouth. Think now, think in advance, be ready if the crisis comes and you have to start large-scale schemes of public works. Whether they are one year away or two years away, the plans ought to be under consideration now. They should not be left until the last minute. We have not even heard of a committee on planning or anything else of that nature. We have not had the slightest suggestion that any plans are under consideration by the Government. I do not suppose they ever will be. For that reason I think the Government are entirely lacking in imagination and lacking in energy. Certainly we have heard nothing of anything being done in that direction.

The Taoiseach

There are none so deaf as those who will not hear.

An Ceann Comhairle

Though the arrangement, that the House during the transport difficulty should rise at 9.30 p.m., is not automatically carried over to this Dáil, I assume, however, it is the desire of the House that it should continue for the present at least, and I shall call on Deputy Norton at 9 p.m. to raise a question on the adjournment.

Mr. Meighan

I should like to intervene in this debate for a few moments to put before you the views of my Party and, more especially, the views of my constituents, the farmers of County Roscommon. The Minister for Agriculture touched on the question of the creameries and the price of milk. That is a very interesting matter for us in Roscommon. We hold that the price of 7d. per gallon paid last year for milk was very detrimental to the production of butter. A deputation of dairy farmers waited on the Minister for Agriculture, I understand, 12 months ago and asked for an increase of 2d. per gallon, but that increase was refused. Finally, when the season's milk had been sent to the creameries and the butter was in cold storage, a levy of 3d. per lb. was put on butter and an increase of 2d. per gallon was given for milk, bringing the fixed price to 9d. per gallon. We hold that 9d. is not an economic price considering that milk is sold retail in the smallest villages at practically 2/- per gallon. The highest price you can put on the skimmed milk returned from the creameries is 1d., which, with the price of 9d. per gallon for this year, would mean 10d. per gallon as compared with that price of 2/-. I do not know exactly what the price is in the city. If the Government want to treat the agricultural community fairly, I suggest that the Minister for Agriculture should increase the price of milk supplied to the creameries to at least 1/- per gallon.

The question of drainage is an important one for farmers in my county and, I think, for farmers in the West of Ireland generally. Last August I asked the county manager in Roscommon to get the deputy surveyors to make a survey of small farms, from five to seven acres, in the county, where the crops had been flooded. In one townland alone twenty farmers living on five acres of land had at least one acre of meadow swept completely into the adjoining river in the month of August during the heavy floods. In addition to that their potato and oat crops were injured. The Government should take serious notice of this matter and, if they cannot put the national drainage scheme into operation within any reasonable time, they should devise some scheme to deal with cases like that, which may be small matters in their eyes, but are very important for the small farmers trying to make a living on five, seven and ten acres of land.

Another matter that my constituents are very interested in and are very disappointed with is the Pigs Marketing Board. Personally, I am not in a position to say whether that board should be abolished, but if it is not abolished, I say that the matter wants looking into. The Government would be well advised to look into it and consult the farming community and others interested in it and see if there could not be some change made. I should like to give an instance of what we consider very unfair treatment. Deputy Dillon referred to another factory, but I should like to give facts with regard to a factory in my own district. Within the last twelve months small farmers have taken pigs to the factory and the factory refused to take them. They had to take these pigs back home and keep them for a fortnight or three weeks and, when they brought them back to the factory, they were overweight with the result that they were paid a lower price for them. Recently, when pigs and bacon were very scarce and it was almost impossible to get a pound of bacon in the shops, farmers congregated on the streets to buy pigs as they were going into the factory. I understand that the Gárda insisted on the pigs being brought to the factory, although local buyers, farmers or others who wanted to buy pigs to make bacon were prepared to give £1 or 30/- a pig more than would be paid in the factory. That led to abuses later on as I understand that some factory owners, to put it in plain language, resorted to back-hand methods by paying the regular price, plus a bonus which was given on the quiet. I think these things go to show that it is very necessary that the whole question should be gone into. I have been informed by a number of farmers in my district that, if it was a profitable proposition to rear pigs, no doubt people would rear them. In my area there are small farmers who always reared pigs; they look upon it as a means of paying the rent and rates. Indeed, it was one of the few little industries upon which they had to depend for a livelihood. They feel rather keenly about this matter.

So far as the attitude of the farmers in the West of Ireland towards doing their share in the matter of food production is concerned, I am aware that some two years ago a meeting was called in Roscommon to discuss the necessity of increased food production. It was called at the instigation of the administrator of our parish. Numbers of small farmers were there, men who were quite prepared to grow their share of wheat, if it was possible for them to undertake the task. They declared that they were quite prepared to grow wheat if they could get the seed on credit terms. They were informed at that meeting that there was no possibility of securing such terms, that they would have to put down the cash. They went further and suggested that if they got the seed wheat on loan they were prepared to pay for it in November; that they would either give back a similar amount of wheat or pay cash for the wheat they obtained.

That was pretty late in the Spring, but there was some effort made later on by the county committee to meet those people. Further efforts were made this year by the county committee in Roscommon to extend credit facilities to meet the requirements of small farmers. I think the lesson to be learned from that is that suitable provision for such farmers as need assistance should be made in advance.

The farmers were appealed to by the Church and the State to help save the nation by producing more food. A very representative memorial was drafted and it was signed by the Bishops of Achonry and Elphin, by the clergy of Roscommon and by at least 900 ratepayers. A special meeting of the Roscommon County Council was summoned to discuss the matter of food production. Strange to say, when we went there we were practically turned away; at least, we were told by an ex-Deputy of the Fianna Fáil Party that he could allow only ten minutes for discussion of the matter. I must say I cannot exonerate the other Party either, as an ex-Deputy of the Fine Gael Party was present and neither he nor any other member of his Party raised a voice in protest.

An Ceann Comhairle

Does the Deputy hold the Minister responsible in that connection?

Mr. Meighan

Well, I think their Parties had some responsibility.

An Ceann Comhairle

The Deputy may continue.

Mr. Meighan

So far as the Minister for Agriculture is concerned, I would be very sorry to disparage him in any way. I have met him in interviews and I must say he received us very courteously; but, as to his position as a Minister for Agriculture, I feel bound to express the opinion of my constituents. So far as the farmers of County Roscommon are concerned, to be quite candid and honest about it and to put it very mildly, they do not consider him the best man for the job. That is giving a very honest opinion. On the shoulders of Deputy de Valera has fallen the responsibility of the position of An Taoiseach. I should like to inform the Taoiseach, knowing the feeling of the farmers of the country, that they expect a big change of front so far as the agricultural industry is concerned. I have no hesitation in telling the Taoiseach and the members of the House that, should the Minister for Agriculture not show an entire change of front towards rural Ireland, grave dissatisfaction is bound to arise. The farming community will hold the Taoiseach responsible.

I can state emphatically that we of Clann na Talmhan are an independent Party. We intend to remain so. I may say that we are unpurchased and unpurchaseable. We are prepared to support any measure put forward by the Government for the welfare of the country. Any measure calculated to be detrimental to the interests of the agricultural community wilI be relentlessly opposed by us with all the resources at our command.

Mr. Corry

Last week we had a debate lasting almost two days on the subject of the Department of Agriculture. Judging by the manoeuvring in this debate, Deputies seem anxious to centre around the same subject. We heard the budding Minister for Agriculture, the alternative Minister for Agriculture, a few minutes ago speaking from the opposite benches. He dealt with the system that has brought his Party to its present position— seven Parties with a membership of 32. Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney showed the attitude of that Party. He was too lazy even to prepare a speech and he went back to the speech he made in 1939. He told us all about the mercantile marine that he thought of some four months after the war started. He forgot to tell us about the other famous speech in which he qualified for the position of Minister for Agriculture. In that speech he stated that all the wheat, petrol, oil and cotton that this country required could be brought in by ships owned by United States firms with a perfect degree of safety. That was what he told us three months after the war started. That is the manner in which he would produce food for our people during an emergency and that, apparently, qualifies him to be a budding Minister for Agriculture, to take the place of Deputy Ryan, who has been so much abused here. We have had a great deal of statistical matter quoted. In my early days in this House, a Minister stated that there were three forms of untruth —lies, damned lies and statistics. I do not know to which of the three classes the quotations of the past few days belonged, but I do know that the agricultural labourer was being paid a wage of from 7/- to 9/- a week from 1930 to 1932. The minimum wage to-day is 36/-.

I maintain that the farmer is better able to pay that minimum wage of 36/- a week to-day than he was able to pay the wage of 7/- a week in the period of the Cumann na nGaedheal Govern— ment. I do not say that 36/- a week is enough. It is a sad commentary on our principal industry, which is agriculture, that the men working in it should be the worst paid employees in the State. I think that steps must be taken to improve the position of agriculture all out. Although the agricultural community are four times better off than they were under the Cumann na nGaedheal Government, still, their position as the principal producers of the nation entitles them to a far better position than they occupy.

If we examine the actions of the Cumann na nGaedheal Party from 1932 right along, we shall see the manner in which they endeavoured to prevent the farmer from getting anything at all. When the Stabilisation of Prices Bill was brought in here to provide 4d. a gallon to the farmers for milk at the creamery, Deputies on the opposite benches went into the lobby against it. They did not consider that the farmers were entitled to 4d. a gallon for their milk. I admit that there were a few honourable exceptions. Deputy Bennett and a few other Deputies from dairying constituencies dare not commit the crime which Deputy Mulcahy and others desired they should commit on that occasion. The people who committed those crimes against agriculture now come along to criticise the Minister and talk of the lack of foresight of the Taoiseach. The Deputy who spoke about the lack of foresight of the Taoiseach was the Deputy who, three months after this war commenced, suggested bringing in our bread from America in ships owned by U.S.A. firms.

What right has Fine Gael to attack any Minister for Agriculture? What right have they to talk about lack of foresight? From 1932 to 1939, they tried, by every kind of contemptible campaign that could be waged, to prevent the agricultural community from producing wheat for the people. By what right does Deputy Dillon speak of the production of bacon? Deputy Dillon knows that, for the past 3½ years, the production of bacon was absolutely dependent upon the grain grown here, and he stated in this House that our rotten Irish barley could not feed anything. That was a public statement made in this House and, then, Deputy Dillon gets up to criticise the position in regard to bacon. I remember quoting here, for the information of members of the Dáil, statements made by gentlemen whom I might describe as the three chief apostles in my county of the doctrine to which I have been referring. One of them was the late Mr. Cussen, who was then Secretary of the Farmers' Union. Here is a statement made by Mr. Cussen about the Pigs Marketing Board:—

"It may be taken for granted that, if the Pigs Marketing Board were not functioning at present, the price of pigs would be several shillings lower per cwt., and farmers would suffer a cumulative loss of several thousands of pounds in the period from 1st October to 1st November."

That is one statement made regarding a board which has been publicly attacked. There is another gentleman in my county with whose name Deputies on the opposite benches should be familiar—Mr. Dring. He made a public statement in connection with the feeding of Irish barley to Irish pigs. He went so far as to cross to Britain, where there was no admixture and where he considered he would have no trouble in fattening his pigs. He tried out the fattening of pigs on Indian meal there, and he landed back in this country after 12 months and started off producing pigs here again. These are two of the chief apostles in my county. I refer to them to show that any proposal by the Government in connection with control will find enemies.

I agree with Deputy Donnellan that we should endeavour to see if we can improve things quietly here without this eternal bickering between one Party and another. We are all here as representatives of the people. It is our duty to draw attention to things that are wrong and have them set right. I consider that it is wrong for the Minister for Agriculture to control the price of malting barley. That should end. Malting barley is being purchased by an industrial firm who sell the product of that barley in competition with stout produced from barley bought at double the price. Whatever is to be got out of it, the farmer should get his "whack" and he can get that without injury to anybody.

I move to report progress.

Dáil Éireann debate - Wednesday, 7 Jul 1943

Committee on Finance. - Vote on Account (No. 2), 1943-44.

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Mr. Cosgrave

Dáil Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 7 Jul 1943