"I had a very hard week at the Ard-Fheis and I just came down to talk to you like this. I knew you would not take me too serious." Words taken from speech 446 delivered by the extern leader of the Opposition Party at Kanturk on Sunday last. "Don't take me too serious." I do not think anybody believes that any person in this country or any Deputy in this House takes the proceedings of the Opposition Party in relation to this or any other motion too seriously. I think that the House will remember that, on the last occasion, in the few intervals in which I was able to intersperse my remarks among the interruptions which were hurled at me from the Opposition Benches, I endeavoured to point out that since this motion was first put down in the name of Deputy Belton and of some other Deputies, whose experience of this House might have taught them to have greater regard for the time of this House, the Opposition had not taken this motion seriously. One could only come to the conclusion that the Party managers, finding, as previous associates of the Deputy had found, that it was difficult to restrain him in his wilder moments, had allowed Deputy Belton to put this motion down in order that he might blow off steam and if any proof of that conjecture were necessary, we can find it in the recorded proceedings, or at least, in such of the proceedings of the Fine Gael Ard-Fheis as appeared in the daily newspapers for February 9th. Those proceedings were full of interest because one of them, at any rate, was the last gulp which Fine Gael had made at swallowing holus-bolus the complete Fianna Fáil programme.
In that connection, I should like to remind the House that General O'Duffy, in the intervals when he is not unfolding his life story, which he tells with so fervid a fancy and so fertile an imagination, has already told us that the Fianna Fáil wheat and tillage policy is not going to be abandoned. Why? When the measures which were necessary to give effect to that policy were going through this House, they were opposed with great vehemence and great bitterness by the Opposition. When the Department of Agriculture was endeavouring to get farmers to adopt that policy, certain Deputies of this House told the farmers to have nothing to do with the Fianna Fáil wheat policy. Now, we hear that the short experience of 12 months has convinced the leaders of the Party, at any rate, that the policy is popular in the country, that the policy is beneficial to the country and that they would risk their political future, insecure and uncertain as that future is, by announcing that if they were to be returned to office, there was to be a complete right-about turn and that they would not go back to the policy which they pursued under Deputy Hogan when he was Minister for Agriculture, when he was, in the words of Deputy Belton, Minister for grass in this country. Then we have heard just this morning, I think, that the land annuities are not going ever again to be paid over to Great Britain. Why not? We have been told by one of the circulating VicePresidents of the all U.P. organisation that in keeping these annuities here, we were guilty of the foul and dishonourable crime of embezzlement. We have heard ourselves denounced as men who have no regard for the Ten Commandments. I heard Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney, in his speech during the last Autumn session, calling the country to witness that Heaven will yet wreak vengeance on the Irish people because we had been guilty of a breach of the Seventh Commandment. If it is dishonourable for us to retain the annuities now, if we have no right to them, if the retention of the annuities is the cause of the economic war——