Last evening I was dealing with the very slow progress made by the Land Commission, first in the taking over of ranches, and secondly in the division of these ranches. I gave a few cases to illustrate this. I was dealing with the Pollock Estate. In County Galway, so far as I can see, more than in any other county in Ireland, the question of the division of the land is a tough problem. We have farms taken over by the Land Commission eight or ten years, and there has nothing been done in the matter of their division as yet. If one goes round and examines the circumstances of some of the tenants around these ranches, and sees how they are situated, one sees the little bit of land they occupy, while somebody or other in their immediate neighbourhood has 300 or 400 acres of a ranch. In one particular case to which I was called quite recently up in Clonfert, the average holding would be six or seven acres of low-lying land which is flooded nearly all the year round, and in the midst almost of such holdings there is one farm of 300 acres, another of 500 acres, and another of 1,700 acres. First of all, the people with the six or seven acres pay £1 2s. 6d. an acre for their land—land that is no good to them during the winter months, and off which they cannot take any hay or grow any crops in the summer. I would like to know from the Parliamentary Secretary what is being paid for the land all around these holdings, the large farms. The estate I am referring to is the Samer Estate. What is being paid for that? I believe that while the rent of the prime land is only 6s. or 7s. per acre, the poor people have to pay £1 2s. 6d. an acre for the rubbish that is left. That is one of the most disgraceful cases I have seen.
I asked a question here recently about the Buston Estate. It is flooded from one end of the year to the other, and the answer the Parliamentary Secretary gave me was that that was the first time he knew about it. There are numbers of Land Commission officials paid out of the public moneys to go and investigate those things, and it should not be my duty to go and bring it up here or anywhere else. These people are paid for doing that work, but they are not doing it.
Yet in spite of all that, if these occupiers refuse to pay a half year's annuity that they are unable to get out of the land, the sheriff walks in there almost at once and takes away whatever stock there is on the land. That side of the question is not overlooked for six months. There is no sympathy in that direction for these people. I would like if the Parliamentary Secretary when replying would tell us what his policy is in regard to men selling farms of 80 or 100 or 120 acres in congested areas where the people have no more than three or four acres of land, some of them not that much at all. I would like to know why the Land Commission do not step in and take over those farms if they are out to relieve congestion. There was one farm sold quite recently; I asked a question about it a month before it was sold. It belonged to Mr. Garvey in North Galway. Nothing was done by the Land Commission about it. Another question I raised here was in connection with the Bermingham farm on the O'Rorke Estate. I asked that question on the 5th March, 1930, and the Parliamentary Secretary said they were about taking it over. They are still about taking it over. Probably I will come into this House next year, if I do come into it, and ask another question about this farm and get a similar reply and the same thing will happen the year after. There is another case of a man who bought a farm of 150 acres of land. That man hopped off to America and he set the land for grazing to the people around. If he can afford to give it to people in that way I see no reason why the Land Commission cannot take that farm from him altogether, and hand it over to the people who have already to foot the bill. I could possibly bring up some 50 or 60 similar cases. There is then no use in standing up here and telling us that the division of the land is going on rapidly. We cannot see it, and we cannot believe it is. At any rate I cannot see it. There is not much use in a Deputy like Deputy Gorey standing up here and taking the part of the Parliamentary Secretary when he knows nothing at all about conditions in the West of Ireland.
I have been looking up some figures since speaking here on this debate last week, and I discovered that there are 396,245 occupiers of holdings in the Free State. I also discovered 254,020 of these have an average of 11½ acres each. That would be roughly about 62 per cent. About 62 per cent. of the occupiers hold only 3,000,000 acres, whereas 8,128 occupiers hold over 200 acres of land each, that is over 3¼ million acres. In other words, 2 per cent. of the occupiers hold more land than 62 per cent. of the population. I would like to ask Deputy Gorey, if he were present, if he stands up for this sort of thing. I would like to ask the remainder of the Cumann na nGaedheal Party on the opposite benches if they stand up for that sort of thing. It is all very fine for a man like Deputy Gorey to get up here and talk about the western congests, but he does not for one second think or know of the way in which a number of the people of Connemara are still living the lives of slaves. Of course, many of them got work on the Shannon Scheme recently, but a great many of them have to go over to England and Scotland, and if they were the type of workers that Deputy Gorey talks of I wonder where they would find employment. Whatever Deputy Gorey thinks, we believe that these people should be given a chance of making a living on the land. And the land, when it is acquired, should be allotted to them, and not continue the system that is being carried on at present—taking over a farm and holding it for five or six years, drawing rents out of the half-starved people's pockets, and then handing it over to them when they are not able to pay any more. One matter I mentioned last week was the question of the road in my area, Boher Branagh. I am glad the Land Commission has started work on it, and not before it was full time.