We had a considerable amount of discussion on the Committee Stage of this Bill. The general burden of the discussion on the one side was that here we had a considerable increase of Customs duties, the alleged idea being to develop Irish industries. The effect, so far as some of us argued here, was to raise appreciably the cost of these articles to the people and to set up industries, where that did occur, under unsatisfactory circumstances. From the Government Benches there was no general statement on the industries that they were to set up, no general statement as to what they were doing to secure that a rise in prices would not take place. Their attitude generally was the attitude of people who introduce an order imposing a duty, who had not examined the situation beforehand and thought it too soon to lift the lid and see what was happening as a result of the imposition of the duty. The experience of the House during the discussion of this particular Bill will, I hope, have been such that in various directions and in various ways the Minister will be impressed and that both himself and the Minister for Industry and Commerce will deal with measures of this kind in a somewhat different way in the future. There is no Party in the House anxious to create difficulties either for the Minister for Industry and Commerce or the Minister for Finance in dealing with industrial affairs; there is no party in the House who wishes to snipe them in any way, who wants to examine too closely into any of their proposals or who wants to stand too closely over them in doing their work, but we do expect that they will make some kind of a reasonable presentation to us of what their hopes are, and that they will give us some indication that they have given a fair examination to the general circumstances before they imposed these duties and ask this House, even in a certain amount of darkness, to pass them.
One of the duties pointed to here was the Excise duty on sugar. I have charged the Minister for Finance and his Government with doing this, in the sugar business, since February last taking in a concealed way from the pockets of the Irish people, by means of their Customs duty and their Excise duty, approximately £730,000 additional per year for sugar. The Minister shakes his head, as he did before, and says that they are not doing it. He even says to us that they are going to get less money into the Revenue from Customs duties, but what I am telling the Minister is that he is going to make the people pay out of their pockets, for sugar, £735,000 additional, whether it gets into the Revenue or not. When we were dealing with the butter business in 1932 I put it up to the Minister for Agriculture that he was taking steps in that respect that were going to cost the people, in additional demands, £1,400,000 a year. My figures were wrong according to the Minister. They had worked it out carefully at £400,000 odd and the Minister gave, as his outside figure, £600,000. The Minister was telling us the other day what implied that the people are paying £1,200,000 out of their pockets in the increased price for butter as a result of the Minister's legislation.
What is happening in a concealed way with regard to butter is now going to happen in a concealed way annually as regards sugar, just as, in a different way, it would be happening as a result of some of the other industries, in cases in which they do succeed in starting industries, which are not capable of battling for themselves or standing in a fair way against competition from other people working under similar circumstances. Again, I challenge the Minister that he is, in taking this Bill away from the House, taking away the final act which draws from the pockets of the people to the extent of an additional £750,000 a year for sugar.