I move that the Bill be now read a Second Time. I think the House is sufficiently aware of the purposes of this Bill to obviate the necessity for any explanation of it on my part. In addition, Sir, as you may remember, Deputy Belton was in possession last night when the House passed the Vote on Account. I undertook not to monopolise too much of the time of the House to-day and to allow the Deputy to continue, if he so desired, on the Central Fund Bill.
Public Business. - Central Fund Bill, 1935—Second Stage.
Surely the Minister for Finance is going to discharge his ordinary duty of introducing the Central Fund Bill with some explanation of the policy and the purpose for which the money is to be voted; or is the Minister simply shirking his duty in endeavouring to explain his action as an elaborate sense of courtesy to the Deputies of the House, because if that is the explanation it is a newfound quality in the Minister.
Is Deputy Dillon going to make a speech?
No, but I want the Minister to explain the Bill. I propose to refer to the points of this Bill at some length with your permission, Sir.
Is the Minister not going to offer any explanation? We would like to hear the Minister explain the Bill.
If the Chair will permit me I will deal with the Bill.
Apparently the House desires it.
Not so much to deal with the Bill, but the Minister was terribly anxious to get in a half an hour's speech last night. Deputy Belton was fighting for his rights. We would all wish now to hear what the Minister for Finance wished to say last night.
I undertook last night not to trespass on private Deputies' time but to allow Independent members the latitude they desire. I do not propose to break that undertaking.
But the Minister got Deputy Flinn, the Parliamentary Secretary, to do it.
I will deal as concisely as I possibly can with the Bill. This Bill is a conventional measure. It is a Bill to give effect mainly to the decision of the Dáil in Committee when it passed the Resolutions by which it adopted first of all the Vote on Account, and then the necessary ways and means Resolutions authorising the Paymaster-General to issue out of the Central Fund the amount required to meet the Supplementary Estimates to provide for the services of the balance of the current financial year and the Vote on Account of the services which have been set before the Dáil in the volume of Estimates but which will not fall for detailed discussion until after the 1st April next, but in regard to which it is also necessary that the Dáil should make provision to ensure that these services are not interrupted. The purpose of this Bill is to give effect to the Resolutions of the House. I must say that I am surprised to find that Deputies with the experience and, presumably, the intelligence of Deputy Dillon, Deputy Belton and Deputy Mulcahy, who have been in the House now for a number of years and who have considered these Central Fund Bills from time to time should require even that explanation of the purpose of the Central Fund Bill.
We always appreciate a master.
Section 1 of the Bill provides for the issue out of the Central Fund for the service of the year ending 31st day of March, 1935, the sum of £2,170,047 in respect of Supplementary Estimates every one of which has already been discussed and voted upon by the House. I regret that Deputy Belton has a memory so loose and so unreliable that he is unable to recollect what those Supplementary Estimates were for. One of them, for instance, was for——
Increased unemployment assistance.
I am dealing with the Supplementary Estimates. One of them, for instance, was to provide for the payment for the advance to the Guarantee Fund of something like £250,000 so that a corresponding amount might be distributed to the local authorities. The Deputy probably remembers the debate on that Estimate.
I remember that the local authorities have not got it.
Another one was for a sum of £750,000 for the provision of additional export bounties and subsidies. The Deputy probably remembers that Estimate, too. He spoke on it at length, even longer than he spoke last night, and even oftener than he spoke in the debate earlier yesterday afternoon. Other sums were for the provision of additional Gárdaí for the enforcement and for the provision of the services which are necessary to enforce court orders and decrees. The Deputy and the House have discussed all these at length. These and a considerable number of others are covered by Section 1 of the Bill, and the House has already endorsed the policy represented by these Estimates. I consider it would be trifling with the Dáil to waste the time of the House if I were to deal with the matter further than that.
Section 2 of the Bill provides for the issue out of the Central Fund of a sum of £10,172,000 to be applied towards making good the supply granted for the service of the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1936. This is, in fact, the payment which has to be made in respect of the Vote on Account on which Deputy Belton was so voluble yesterday, and whose very interesting speech I was anxious to allow him to continue to-day without interruption. Section 3 of the Bill gives general statutory authority to the Minister for Finance to borrow, if necessary, the two sums, £2,170,047 and £10,172,000 which are referred to in Sections 1 and 2 of the Bill.
Sir, the Minister has chosen to conduct himself in a farcical manner, and I do not blame him, because he is in a farcical position, so farcical that it becomes necessary to remind him of the view he took of the financial situation before he took office and to compare it with the view he takes of it now as Minister for Finance. "They call it folly. What do you call it?" This is from the financial statement of policy of the Fianna Fáil Party in 1929:—
"The Free State Party, who have nominated Vincent Rice as their candidate in this election, proposed the other day in Leinster House that they be allowed to spend the huge sum of £27,674,547 on the government of the Twenty-Six Counties. When the Fianna Fáil Party proposed a reduction of £3,000,000, Cosgrave denounced the proposals as childish folly, and used the automatic majority (to which he is now trying to add Vincent Rice) to vote down every argument used by the Republicans in favour of this reduction."
The House will note the use of the word "Republicans." These are the Republicans who turn as white as a sheet whenever they hear the word "Republican," and one cannot see them with the dust of the road when anyone asks them to declare a Republic.
"Sez you."
The statement of policy continues:—
"What Cosgrave calls childish folly any business man worth his salt would call good business. The Irish people are far poorer than they were during the Great War."
This was in 1929, remember. Let us make a comparison in our own minds with the financial condition of the country in 1929 and now. The reference is to a circular published by Bernard J. Egan, election agent for Mrs. Thomas Clarke, who was then Fianna Fáil candidate in a Parliamentary contest in North Dublin City. "The Irish people are far poorer than they were during the Great War."
May I put a question to you?
Is it a point of order?
It is.
O.K.
What exactly may be discussed on the Central Fund Bill? I understand it is the policy of the Government and possibly the expenditure for the year.
I am coming to that.
The Chair has been asked to define the scope of discussion allowed on the Central Fund Bill. Administration and policy can be debated. Taxation may not be discussed, nor may legislation actual or prospective.
I am coming to the policy. This is a very exhaustive subject when one endeavours to cover the whole ground.
We have a few of them.
The circular proceeds to say that: "The Irish people had more trade in 1911-1913 than they have now." And again: "Yet during the Great War the British governed the whole of Ireland at a cost of £12,761,666, and everybody knows Britain was not niggardly in spending Irish money." The circular tells us that the Irish people had more trade in 1911 than they have now. Let the House bear in mind that since Fianna Fáil came into office they have reduced whatever trade we had in 1929 to half what it then was. "Yet in the three pre-war years (1911-1914) the average cost of British Government for the whole of Ireland was £11,975,833. For the Twenty-Six Counties the Irish people are now made to pay £27,674,548," and in this year of grace, 1934-35, they have been asked to spend not £27,000,000 odd, but £37,000,000 odd. "Cosgrave and Blythe admit that the taxable capacity of the Free State is 1½ per cent. of that of Great Britain. In other words, if the Free State were to be as lightly taxed as Britain, the cost of government should only be £12,085,815. But, in fact, it is more than £15,000,000 above this amount. Therefore, the Irish people are being taxed twice as heavily as the British people." What is the comparison now? Would it be a serious exaggeration to say on that calculation that the Irish people are now being taxed three times as heavily as the British people?
"The cost-of-living figure shows at the very most the cost of governing Ireland should have increased by 75 per cent. since 1914. In fact, it has increased from less than £12,000,000 to almost £40,000,000 for the whole nation." Now we are in a position to say that it has increased from £11,000,000 to almost £40,000,000 for the Twenty-Six Counties. "To-day the agricultural prices show that for every £100 they made in 1911, the Irish farmers now make £131. But for every £100 of taxation in 1911 under the British, the Cosgrave Government now rates £376." That may be paraphrased for 1935 as follows: "To-day the agricultural prices show that for every £100 made in 1911 the Irish farmer now makes about £75, but for every £100 of taxation in 1911 under the British, the de Valera Government now require about £450." The circular goes on to say: "When Fianna Fáil pointed these facts out in the Free State Parliament"—those were the days when the validity of the jurisdiction of this House was put in serious question; it was not Dáil Eireann or Oireachtas Eireann; it was the Free State Parliament—"and declared that it showed the absolute necessity for a reduction in the appalling cost of government, Cosgrave and his automatic majority called it childish, and voted down the proposal, even for a reduction of £3,000,000. Vincent Rice stands for this impudent refusal to reduce taxation nearer the pockets of the people. He asks North Dublin to vote for more impoverishment still. Vote for Mrs. Clarke and taxes the people can bear."
Is it any wonder the Minister for Finance did not want to discuss the Bill before the House now? Nobody who had not a face like the hull of a battleship could face this House on this Bill with that present to his mind. Of course, one does not notice that as the programme is produced in this House and as the promises are produced, the depression and gloom of the Fianna Fáil Deputies become deeper and deeper.
Not at all.
Unfortunately the depression and ruin which they are bringing on the Irish people become deeper at the same time and it is very necessary that they should be brought to remember from time to time what their view was when they were fraudulently seeking the suffrages of the people and what it is now.
And they got the support of the people.
Yes, by undertaking solemnly if the people would vote for candidates like Mrs. Tom Clarke, who was supporting Fianna Fáil, that they would reduce the burden of taxation by £3,000,000, when, in fact, they have increased it by approximately £10,000,000. They can triumph in the fact that they have deceived the people, that they have successfully defrauded the people. I wish them joy in their achievement. It is sad enough to think they have deceived the people, but to triumph over it is not alone humiliating to themselves but to the whole country.
If this appropriation of money was for any useful purpose one would be inclined to consider a justification of it on its merits. But what is this Government doing with the money they are extracting out of the people? We observe that the Revenue Commissioners will require £94,000 more. We observe that our old friends, the Secret Service, require £20,000 this year. This Christian Government will be looking for information from Christian sources and it will cost them, according to their own estimate, £20,000 to get it. The Gárda Síochána is to-day costing £250,000 more than it cost when Fianna Fáil came into office. It used to be the favourite cry of the Minister for Defence that this increased expenditure was made necessary by the provocative incursions of members of the League of Youth into otherwise peaceful towns. The Minister for Justice loved to describe how the innocent creatures in Ballina were so outraged by the invasion of rowdies who came in and disturbed the town that they had to turn out and demonstrate. I wonder were these the same virtuous creatures who came out and pelted the Minister for Defence with rotten eggs in Tralee? Is it the same virtuous crowd that was transported then to College Green to unfold black flags when the Minister for Justice was taking the salute from the Saorstát Army? Are these the innocent, guileless creatures who were stirred to indignation by the riotous and uproarious conduct of the members of the League of Youth, or is it perhaps true that there is in this country a gang of blackguards who would intimidate anyone whom they thought they could intimidate? Is it perhaps true that exactly the same scum who sought to prevent the forces of the State from legitimately parading on the National festival are the individuals who would have interfered with the members of the League of Youth when they were going about their lawful purposes in other towns in this country? I invite Ministers to turn that question over in their minds the next time they try to defend an increase in the Gárda Síochána Estimate by explaining that they had to import police into one town or another throughout Ireland in order to protect the people from the uproarious conduct of the members of the League of Youth.
I think that is a useful experience for the Minister. I think that the deplorable scenes that took place in this country on St. Patrick's Day have one redeeming feature, and that is, that they bring home to the responsible Ministers of State a realisation of the state of affairs that they themselves have played no small part in the last three years in promoting here. They have encouraged and defended the very blackguards, who attacked themselves and forces of the State, in this House, and, having done so, the very gentlemen whom they sought to defend here have turned upon them and given them some taste of the attempts at intimidation and insult with which we are familiar and which the League of Youth has shown itself eminently competent to deal with and will, on future occasions, show itself equally competent to deal with wherever we may encounter it.
Now, you are talking.
The present situation is largely centred in the condition to which agriculture has been reduced. We have heard that the traditional agricultural policy of this country is a bad policy and the Deputies of Fianna Fáil, in order to be given something sufficiently simple for them to elaborate, have been told to go out to the crossroads of the country and bleat wheat, peat and beet, and to explain to the people that an enlightened Government has decided that agricultural prosperity can be built upon that tripartite foundation. Let us examine the question and it is a desirable thing that it should be examined in detail somewhere, some time. Let us begin with peat. Peat was to be a source of revenue for all and sundry.
Take care you do not go bogging.
If I do, I will have a bag of British coal on my shoulder to help to sink me—the British coal which the Deputy is clamouring for everyone to buy. I should be interested if Deputy Jordan, from a constituency in which there is a great deal of turf burning and turf cutting generally, would intervene in this debate after I have done and explain to me how the peat scheme of the Government can be reconciled with the coal-cattle pact of the Government. Perhaps he would explain to me, if we undertake to accept from England 1,250,000 tons of coal per annum, which represents our total consumption, how we are going to burn the peat which his constituents have been told is going to be one of the sources of their future wealth? I think, in justice to his constituents, he ought to get up here and tell us that. If he does, he will be forced to admit here, as he ought to try to admit in his own constituency, that the peat scheme has gone up the spout——
No.
——and that, as we prophesied here when it was first adumbrated, the only people who are going to make money out of the peat scheme are the gentlemen who have supplied the bags and they have made all the money out of them that they are ever going to make.
That is all the Deputy knows about it.
Now, let us take wheat. It seems to me strangely typical of the Fianna Fáil mentality that when they started casting round for an alternative crop to those which we are already cultivating, they landed on wheat. Wheat to-day is the only crop the soil produces of which there is an absolute surplus. If you take—and I mean no indelicacy—all the human stomachs in the world and fill them with all the wheat those stomachs can contain, taking into consideration that Orientals prefer to use rice, and after you have filled every stomach in the world to its capacity, there will still be wheat left over and that is the only crop in the world of which that can be said. That is the one crop that this intelligent, native Government has elected to promote in this country at enormous expense and with apparently no regard whatever for the interests of the least defensible section of the community, the poor, in whose dietary bread bulks larger than any other comestible. We are now to embark in this country on the production of wheat, and, to finance that operation, the entire cost is going to be passed on to the price of flour, and, through that, on to the 2lb. loaf, so that an entirely artificial crop is going to be financed out of the pockets of the poorest section of the community, because it is common knowledge that the more restricted a man's personal budget, the more bread he consumes, in comparison with other articles of food.
That is one side of the wheat problem, but we are also going to be induced to grow a crop which every person who has any acquaintance with the land knows is probably the most exhausting of all crops on land and is a crop which, above all others, requires a rotation and requires a liberal manure. When we ask the Minister to advise the people how to provide that rotation, his mouth falls open and he simply turns away, because he knows as well as I know that that rotation must include a substantial quantity of roots, grass, and other animal foodstuffs, and he knows perfectly well that that rotation can only be efficiently maintained so long as we have the byproduct of the live-stock industry— animal manure. He knows that his colleagues, for political reasons, are destroying the live-stock industry and he finds himself in the dilemma of advocating wheat on the one hand and advocating a state of affairs in which it is impossible to grow wheat on the other, so that you have a clear-minded, intelligent Government advocating the cultivation of a crop of which there is an absolute surplus in the world—and the only crop of which that can be said—while they themselves are creating a state of affairs in which it is a physical impossibility to grow the crop they want to see grown.
Why is there a surplus of wheat generally?
The answer is that there is too much grown, and you are trying to grow more.
Why is there too much grown?
I shall be glad to give way to Deputy Donnelly when my speech is finished. It will be a welcome thing to hear some Deputies on those benches getting up to tell us their views as to why we should grow wheat and how we should grow wheat. I shall be very much interested to hear it and I will ask them, when doing that, to justify the raising of the cost of bread to the poor in order to grow the wheat which we all know we do not want. Lastly, in regard to wheat, having considered the two questions I have raised, let the House consider that the Minister for Agriculture knows as well as I do that climatic and soil conditions in this country do produce a wheat of a lower quality than that which is to be obtained in Manitoba or in some of the more naturally-suited areas in the world for the production of wheat. I do not say that the wheat produced here is in any sense inferior to the Danubian wheat or to some types of Pacific wheat, but it is clearly No. 2 or No. 3 grade wheat and there is no possibility of producing anything approximating in quality to No. 1 Manitoba in this country.
That is the wheat situation, and now we come to beet. Prior to the war, the greater part of the world sugar supply was produced from sugar cane. During the war a variety of reasons promoted the growth of beet sugar on the Continent and the reasons principally were that the embargo imposed on the Central European powers by the allied nations at war with them made it impossible to get outside sugar supplies and they were driven back on the production of a substitute in the form of beet sugar. Shortly after the war, as the Deputies know, the Javanese sugar cane growers, by a process of Mendelian selection, evolved a type of sugar cane in Java which immeasurably increased the sugar content of sugar cane and reduced the economic price for cane sugar to a figure far below that which obtained in years gone by. In face of that the Cumann na nGaedheal Government, having had representations brought before them that Germany, France and England were also subsidising beet sugar, determined to try an experiment out here under Irish conditions to see would it be possible to justify subsidising it to a certain limited extent on account of the increased labour that would be made available in the agricultural industry and to assist certain areas of the country that, up to that time, had been dependent on cereal crops that were not as remunerative then as in the past. But, like prudent men, they insisted that the first stage should be an experimental one, so that having tried it out they would be irrevocably committed to nothing, but would be quite free to develop it fully if it proved to be reasonably successful, or to abandon it without any very serious loss if it were hopelessly uneconomic.
Deputy Seán MacEntee, as he then was, now the Minister for Finance of Saorstát Eireann, witnessed that experiment over a period of five years. Having seen the accounts year after year, having frequently discussed it in this House, having himself come into office and having all the relevant information under his hand, having given the whole question all the consideration which he was competent to give it —and it is not for me to say how much that was—went to Seanad Eireann and said that having reviewed the whole situation all he could say was that the only things bequeathed to them by the Cumann na nGaedheal Government were two white elephants, one the Carlow sugar beet factory, and the other the Shannon electricity scheme. The Minister remembers that famous dictum.
I said three white elephants.
You backed up the other since—the Drumm battery.
About the third one I am still sceptical.
That is not going to effect the ultimate success of the Drumm battery if what happened the other is to be any criterion. That was a solemn declaration after protracted consideration. Having considered the question at great length and given his final decision that they were no better than white elephants, this same Minister announces that, although he believes the thing to be a white elephant and a futility, he is going to spend £1,250,000 per annum in subsidising the maintenance of three more of them, he himself having explained to the House and the country time and again that the only effect of subsidising beet was to have beet planted where other crops had been cultivated before, and it was all substituted tillage, perfectly worthless from the community point of view.
So that the second leg of the Fianna Fáil agricultural prosperity is not only condemned on the merits but it is condemned by experiment and by the judgment of their own Ministers; not in their salad days when trying to fool the people, but after they had come into office and had the advantage not only of seeing the confidential files of Ministers, but of consulting the permanent officials and experts of the Civil Service. So that you have a miserable, knock-kneed, collapsing tripod of wheat, beet and peat as a substitute for the agricultural industry of this country which put us all in comparative luxury. There is not a single rural Deputy here who does not owe the comparative comfort in which he was living two or three years ago to the agricultural policy that obtained in this country and that was established by our fathers and grandfathers before us. They were lifted out of the mire in which the tenant farmers of this country lived in 1879 and put into the comparative comfort they enjoyed up to two or three years ago by the agricultural policy which was built up on the foundation of the tenants being proprietors of their own holdings and being allowed without interference to improve those holdings, to put their work and produce into those holdings, and to take out, after the passage of time, the decent livelihood that the majority of them were getting from 1900 to 1931.
When I refer to the inflated figure which Fianna Fáil sets down as its estimate of expenditure during the coming year, and compare it with the figure that obtained when the previous Administration was in office, I do not tell the whole story, because not only has that increase of nearly £10,000,000 in the national expenditure taken place, but over and above that you have Deputy Dowdall couching a lance to tell us what the real implications of the Fianna Fáil policy are. I have heard from those benches time and again the allegation that tariffs did not materially increase costs to anybody and that if there is any attempt made behind tariffs to increase costs the Prices Commission is there to correct it. But Deputy Dowdall, honest Deputy Dowdall, the Deputy Dowdall of statements rather than promises, comes out at the Cork Chamber of Commerce and says: "That is all eye-wash; everybody knows that merchants and manufacturers are only human and it is only human nature to get the best profits you can under the protection of a tariff; and so far as I am concerned I get the best profit I can in any industry that is a protected industry in which I am interested." That is honest plain talk. All honour to Deputy Dowdall for coming out and telling the truth.
If that be the truth, we have to face the fact that the added burden on the backs of the ratepayers is not truly represented by the increase in national expenditure of £10,000,000. It could be only ascertained if we could find out how many Deputy Dowdalls there are in industry in this country and how far do his standards of mercantile probity obtain through the ranks of Fianna Fáil industrialists. I am glad to think that there are a great many men engaged in industry in this country who would scorn to adopt that attitude. I know many of them. I have the privilege to be associated with many of them in industry who recognise the obligation that devolves upon anybody in this country who is manufacturing for home consumption to sell his product at the lowest price consistent with the payment of fair wages and a reasonable margin of profit. At the same time, however, we have got to recognise that Deputy Dowdall does not make these statements in public unadvisedly. It is necessary, therefore, that the House, in considering the magnitude of the burden being laid on the backs of the people, should take that into account, and ask themselves how much greater is the actual burden than the Estimates would make it appear.
The maddening part of all this agricultural folly, that has been described as the Fianna Fáil agricultural policy, is that really we have not begun farming along modern lines, and that the scope for development is endless, if only we had the good sense to develop it. There is an enormously valuable trade being done at present by the north of France, the Channel Islands and by many of the southern shires in England, in the intensive cultivation of fresh vegetables and fruit. There is no reason on earth why this country should not capture a very substantial part of the enormously lucrative trade that is there for the taking, in Great Britain in early potatoes. There is no reason on earth why the cultivation of tomatoes and other comestibles of that kind, for which there is a great demand even on the home market, as well as in Great Britain, should not be intensively developed. The amount being done in that way in this country at present is infinitesimal. It is the kind of agriculture that will pay for itself, and pay handsomely for working, without any subsidies at all.
There is no reason on earth why the live-stock industry should not be developed and made far more valuable than it is. If we could make a coal-cattle agreement in the middle of the economic war, surely we are entitled to believe, if we had rational Ministers, who did not carry on an economic war with one hand, and a palm leaf in the other, that we would be able to make a better trade agreement than they made. Let us remember that in doing that we would be doing what the President of the Executive Council was himself forced to say in an interview with a deputation of farmers from Louth, that on reflection he had come to the conclusion that the best real factory he could provide was the bullock. I wonder does the President of the Executive Council remember that declaration. He was perfectly right when he made it.
Except that heifers would be better.
Due allowance must be made for the fact that the President is not familiar with the details of agricultural economy, and if he goes anywhere near the truth let us give him all the credit for his precedent. The live-stock industry could be profitably developed. In doing that I think it right to point out this, that President de Valera was peculiarly right in saying that he had made up his mind that the livestock was the best method of giving real factories to rural Ireland, because, while Fianna Fáil T.D.s are throwing their hats in the air over back lane hovels, which are masquerading in the name of factories in this city, they entirely forget that in the process of promoting these institutions of which they are so proud, they have made bankrupts of 370,000 factories up and down the country, that were paying good wages and providing good working conditions to those in that industry, men and women, who were prepared to work hard in order to get a living out of it. After all is not the small farm a factory just as much as an industrial plant? A small farmer is converting the raw material of agriculture into the finished product. The industrial plant, on the other hand, is converting the raw material into the industrial finished product. The difference between the two is that one provides a decent livelihood for the operatives, whilst the other, in rare cases, provides trades union conditions, and in many cases provides slave conditions, that were so aptly described by Deputy Norton, as conditions that would bring the blush of shame in a Babylonian city.
I want to make another suggestion to the Minister in that connection, as to how he might mend his hand and employ some of the money usefully, as in doing it he will instruct not only himself but his colleague, the Minister for Agriculture. Let him use some of the money for the purpose of setting up demonstration farms. We have at present a number of agricultural instructors riding around in whom a large number of country people have no confidence whatever. They take the view, and in many cases rightly take the view, that these gentlemen have highfalutin notions of what farming really is; and that if they were put down on a 20 acre farm, such as farmers have to make a livelihood out of, they would starve in a month. I would like these instructors to justify their own existence by putting them on demonstration farms—I do not mean experimental farms— where they would be required to do the same kind of work that the small farmer has to do. I want them in doing that to keep accounts and every six or twelve months to show the Minister for Agriculture the results of their labour. That would serve many useful purposes.
A competent man would demonstrate to farmers that he was competent to be an instructor, and it would give them confidence as to where information and advice could be got. It would do another useful thing because, when that man is carrying out what the Fianna Fáil Party describe as the Fianna Fáil agricultural policy, farmers would be able to see the basis of farming run by one of their own instructors, and what that policy means to the individual farmer working on the land. It would do another thing, as when prices are being fixed, as is contemplated under the Pigs and Bacon Bill, it would provide the Minister, or the body concerned, with the appropriate data to arrive at the true cost of production under practical conditions. This House could then require these bodies or that Minister to take that very relevant consideration under their attention if and when they purport to fix prices of agricultural products. When they fix 22/- per cwt. for the best beef, let them send down to one of their agricultural instructors and ask him to produce it at 22/- a cwt, and see what he will make of it. With that experience it might do something to make them realise what some of their schemes mean. Let them send down another agricultural instructor with authority to produce beet at 30/- a ton of 15½ per cent. sugar content basis, or a 37/6 a ton flat rate delivered at the factory, and see what kind of a livelihood he will make out of it. Let the Minister for Industry and Commerce, who is so justly concerned to secure trades union conditions for employees, for whom he is responsible, inquire of that agricultural instructor what hours he has to work every day in the year, to make a livelihood on the land, and what his average weekly remuneration is out of that work. Let him further inquire when paying 22/- or 24/- weekly to agricultural labourers, what hours he expects these labourers to work, and what is the minimum daily labour these men must do, if it is to be possible for farmers to pay them whatever miserable wages they get. When these facts are brought to light experimental farms will justify themselves a thousand times. As far as I can see it is very necessary that some such machinery should be set up whereby to instruct the gentlemen we have in charge of the country at the present time. The advice, counsel and experience of others seem to have no effect upon them. Let them send their own agents down and get the information confidentially or otherwise or through their own experience, and then they may begin to realise the true repercussions of the disaster that they are bringing on the ordinary people who are trying to earn their living out of the land of this country at the present time.
There is one similarity between President de Valera and Lord Craigavon. Both of them are the servants of the Irish people, and both of them keep step in regard to one matter: that is in hoisting taxation and the burden of public expenditure. We slip a step every now and again in the matter of extending the social services of this country. We take money out of the people's pockets, and so far we have not succeeded in putting it back in the same proportion as Lord Craigavon does. Let me not further refer to the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, nor do I desire the analogy that I have made to be carried further in the remarks with which I propose to conclude. But this I must say, that if the only contribution to the national life of this country is that which Fianna Fáil has made to date, do they not think themselves that it is nearly time to get out? Everything they have promised, everything they undertook to do of substance they have gone back upon it; every bribe and every corrupting influence they could bring to bear on the ordinary body politic they have used to date, and I freely admit that they have reaped considerable benefit from that line of conduct.
Democracy is open to that abuse. Democracy has one vulnerable spot, and that is that its leaders will degenerate into demagogues who are ready not only to deceive the people, to prevaricate to the people, but to bribe the people as well with the savings in the National Exchequer that those who went before put by for them. Now, Fianna Fáil has pretty well exhausted all that, and they are now seriously threatened with the danger of having to sit down and do some hard work. For their own sakes, do they not think that it would be better to get out? Hard work is a thing that Fianna Fáil and its supporters were never fond of, and it might seriously interfere not only with their health but the general administration of the country. They could do a great service to this country —it would be the first real handsome just one they ever did since they came into office—if they reconginsed their own limitations and quit before the damage they are doing is irremediable.
I was not in the House when Deputy Dillon referred to some remarks of mine at the Incorporated Chambers of Commerce and Shipping in Cork. After the President of the Chamber had stated that he trusted that merchants would not take advantage to charge exorbitant prices by reason of the tariffs, I said that human nature is human nature, and that in all probability people would take as much as they possibly could. I further stated that competition would probably settle this, and that if it did not do so, Government regulation should do it. I do not think that it is an honourable course for Deputy Dillon to quote a statement of that sort here without the qualification which I made to it. It would look as if people in the position of traders sitting on the Fianna Fáil side here were out to loot the public which, of course, is not what traders can do in the ordinary course of business competition. People are bound to take limited profits, but if opportunities arise there is no question about it that whether people are Fianna Fáil, or Unionists or Cumann na nGaedheal or U.I.P.——
They loot.
——they will take as much profits as they can.
Hear, hear!
That is usually what is done.
Deputy Dillon does not do that.
The representatives of the Press are here. The representative of the Cork Examiner is here, and the report of what I am saying will appear in the Examiner in the morning. When the public read it they will say that “Dowdall is an awful old fool.” That is the explanation. I simply stated that. I do not wish to have any misrepresentation of what I said, or that it is my intention or the intention of anybody else to go and loot the public.
Arising out of what Deputy Dowdall has said——
A personal explanation, such as that made by Deputy Dowdall, may not be discussed.
May I say that I did not misrepresent the Deputy? I have been charged with dishonourable conduct, but all that I did was to attribute to him the words that he is reported to have used.
I think that the speech of Deputy Dowdall emphasises the natural tendency of the system that he and the Government he supports stands for. That is precisely the real value of the statement of Deputy Dowdall, and not that it for a moment reveals or is alleged to reveal any special iniquities on the part of Deputy Dowdall or any of his friends. If that were the implication the statement would have little value. The real value of the statement now made in the House by Deputy Dowdall is that the system the Government stands for and the system that Deputy Dowdall supports leads to the particular development referred to by Deputy Dillon and Deputy Dowdall. The only value that Deputy Dowdall's statement in Cork, and in the House here to-day, has is this: it proves that the system is wrong. It is a confession on their part that that is undue profit seeking, the inevitable result of it, human nature being what it is—not Fianna Fáil human nature, not ex-Unionist human nature, not U.I.P. human nature, but human nature in general. Deputy Dowdall referred to the fact that competition might remedy that particular evil. If there is one thing more than another that the Government have tried to stamp out since they came into office it is competition. Is not their whole policy an effort—certainly many aspects of it—to see that there is no effective competition? Thus the rider that Deputy Dowdall added does not at all take away from the value of his statement as an indication of the inevitable tendency of the policy that he stands for.
We had the Vote on Account, embracing the Estimates for the various Departments, before us yesterday. They are incorporated in the Central Fund Bill which we are discussing now. I think there is one thing upon which the Minister for Finance can be congratulated both in connection with Votes on Account and Budgets, and that is, that he has a new dodge every year that momentarily, at all events— there is a great deal of virtue in settling a thing for the moment from the propagandist point of view—will convey information that will inevitably mislead the ordinary man. There is no longer any uniform plan for the presentation of Budgets. Now, apparently, there is no uniform plan for the presentation of Estimates. Take up yesterday's newspapers. What is the cry of the "Press"? Expenditure reduced by several millions. Is there any foundation for that particular boast? It gets across in the headlines—that is the main justification for this method of presenting the Estimates! As the Minister knows quite well, there is no comparison between the lump sum this year and the lump sum last year, for the reason that certain borrowings—local loans and so forth—do not appear to the same extent this year as they did last year. As in the case of the Budget every year the Minister has presented it, the ordinary man is deceived. He will think that the costs of administration are reduced. The ordinary man does not examine the Estimates to find out whether or not the happy belief he has got into his mind about the decreased cost of running the State is or is not correct. He has neither the energy nor the time to do that. If he did examine the matter, he would find that his belief was not in accord with fact. I think that the Minister himself, in an aside, here admitted that. Yet the general public is deceived because of the absence of a uniform method of presenting either the Budget or the Estimates. We have several Budgets in the year now. If a person in the spring of any year since Fianna Fáil came into power were to assume that the amount of money included in the Budget was the amount to be levied in the way of taxation during the year he would be grossly deceived. Several Budgets are presented during the year and it is only when we come to the end of the year we know what the amount of taxation is. The same thing applies—this is the only reason I refer to the Budget by way of analogy—to the presentation of the Estimates. Take the original Estimates as presented last year. Compare them with the expenditure on Supply Services for 1934-35 and what do you find? The original Estimates are, as a result of Supplementary Votes during the year, increased by £1,400,000. Just as the Minister's Budget is no index whatsoever to the taxes that the country will ultimately have to suffer, so the Estimates are no index either. Hardly a month passes without some change in taxation. In the same way, the Estimates presented at the beginning of the year are no indication of the services for which the country will have to find money during the year. A great deal of the estimated expenditure represents cost of administration. Yet, one of the principal slogans of the Fianna Fáil Party was that regarding the reduction of expenditure on administration.
I am not going to ask Deputies to compare the cost of the administration of any of the services in the year 1932 with the cost at the present time but, even since last year, there have been rather interesting increases. Between the beginning of last year and the end of last year, there was an increase of £36,000 in the cost of the Gárda service. Similarly, right through these Estimates, Deputies will find increases not merely for the purpose of assisting various industries, providing bounties and so on but increases in the mere cost of staffs. For the moment, I am not referring to the fact that no person in the country is in a position to say, to within £1,000,000, what the expenditure of the Government is likely to be until the year is closed. Supplementary Estimates may be necessary but there is a tendency on the part of the Government—apparently, a deliberate tendency—to under-estimate at the beginning of the year and then to depend on Supplementary Estimates to pull them through. Last year, in the way of Supplementary Estimates we voted £1,400,000—£68,000 extra for public works, £36,000 extra for the Guards, £182,000 extra for agriculture and £193,000 extra for bounties, etc. At the end of this year, we shall have the same state of affairs. Is this volume of Estimates any index to the real intentions of the Government in certain matters? I do not believe it is. One thing the Minister can be congratulated upon is his ingenuity, not in saving the country's money but in finding new dodges to prevent the facts from reaching the people. He does that in the presentation of his Estimates. He has done it consistently up to the present so far as his Budgets are concerned. He knows perfectly well—I give the Party of which he is such an illustrious member credit for this—the advantage of getting away misleading information at the start. They know perfectly well the difficulty of getting after it and of catching up with it. The one thing of which they are masters is propaganda. It is natural that a Government like that should have an information bureau. An information bureau in the hands of a Government that understands propaganda so well is, in reality, a bureau for the control of the Press, a bureau that under the guise of preventing the Press from making mistakes tries third-degree methods on the Press. After all, I admit that they are masters of propaganda. That is one of the things that anybody acting under their influence can well understand. They are not the best propagandists in Europe, but they are not bad. I remember reading about one Press correspondent who, when he was in Moscow, went to the head of the publicity bureau there and was told by the head of the publicity bureau: "There is no such thing as censorship here. We would not think of doing that; we have no censorship, but surely the gentlemen of the Press ought to be extremely grateful to me because I prevent them from making so many mistakes." Now, I suggest that the main purpose and the main function for which money is being asked in the Information Bureau Estimate is to enable this Government to get more control of the city and provincial Press; in other words, to try successfully on the Press the third degree method. Of course, it is not that anybody wants to interfere with the liberty of the Press! Oh, no! Far be it from the Government to think of such a thing! They only want to prevent inaccuracies! That is all the gentlemen in Russia wanted to do—to save the Pressmen from themselves.
Everybody knows that there is no more effective method of stifling freedom of opinion and the free expression of opinion in the country than by, in that way, preventing people from, supposedly, making mistakes. No doubt, too, they are using broadcasting for that particular purpose. It is amazing, in that connection, how the Government point of view is always put forward. Again, I will admit quite freely that it is merely an effort to tell the truth! But apparently, in this country, the truth is desperately one-sided. Public money is being used for that purpose. After all, what can we expect from a Government that came in here two years ago, practically, to ask for money for its own Press? We cannot expect anything else. We are asked to approve of this, and ultimately we will be asked to provide money. Now, in connection with all these Departments, I think the House and the country ought to consider whether the Government is, to any degree, fulfilling the primary duties and the primary functions of a Government in any civilised country. Is it properly protecting the people? Is it making any effort properly to protect the people? We have an increased vote for the Guards. Again and again, from this place, I have expressed my belief that if any encouragement were given from the Government to the Guards, to get after crime of any kind, they would get after it. I have never been convinced that there is any real effort on the part of the Government to get after certain kinds of crime. I think that they are putting the members of the Gárda Síochána into an impossible position by pretending that they are anxious to get after crime of a certain type, when they are not anxious to do so. Why is it that, again and again, we have merely the repetition of the same answer, no matter how often repeated, about any of these outrages throughout the country—the answer that "Inquiries are proceeding"? No further answer is given. It rarely gets beyond that. I admit that the Government set certain machinery going, but against whom? Against their constitutional opponents. And once having set the machinery going, their friends' fingers get caught in the machinery occasionally. That is the worst of setting up this kind of machinery, that the real malefactors may sometimes get their fingers caught in it! But does anybody believe that if one-tenth of the energy displayed by the Government in the harrying of unfortunate farmers. whom they are destroying anyway, were given to encouraging the Guards in pursuing crimes of that kind, we should not have any other answer from the Government Benches except that "Inquiries are proceeding"?
As a result of this kind of policy— and the Ministry must know it—as a result of their economic policy and their failure to keep order, not merely has there been economic loss-bad enough as that is, as I pointed out in this House last week—but the morale of the people is being broken. Although the economic situation may be set right in time, it will not be so easy to set right the morale of the country again. Everybody will admit the deplorable character of the scenes on St. Patrick's Day, or any scenes like them. Nothing is to be gained by attacks on the duly and legitimately elected forces of this country by the forces of disorder. It can only lead to further chaos, and it contributes to the further weakening of public spirit in this country. But the Minister for Finance, as he knows perfectly well, and his colleagues, have set a lot of that thing going since they took office, by the glib way in which he spoke of traitors. I am dealing now with the responsibility of the Government for disorder and their failure to keep order. I quite admit that the Minister may object to these particular references. What is there strange, when you go out through Kerry, and see pasted up on the walls: "Down with the new traitors"? Did not the Minister himself teach that kind of thing?
Was that in 1935?
Yes, you will find such inscriptions on the walls in 1934 and 1935. They are pasted all over. After all, it is only about 18 months since the "new traitors came in," was it not? It is only quite recent. The Government themselves, by their reckless statements have unchained that sort of thing, and it is the duty of the Government to put it down. Nothing can be gained by any decent class in the country by that sort of talk, whether it is directed against the Minister and his colleagues or against anybody else. In whatever direction we look, what can be hoped for from the policy of the Government? Have the Minister's Party or his followers in the country, after three years of the administration of the Government, the same high hopes for the future as they had when the Government took over office? Is the future now quite as rosy—it may be a little redder—but is it quite as rosy as it seemed to the followers of Fianna Fáil three years ago? If it does not appear as rosy, I say that it is the policy, or rather the lack of policy of the Government that is largely responsible. Had the Government any plan really of any kind for the economic welfare of the country or for securing order? As regards order in the country, a speech such as that made by the President on the adjournment the other evening is of no help towards the restoration of order in this country. Has the President ever made from the Government Benches in the Dáil or in the country a real denunciation of the challengers of State authority in this country? Has he ever made a denunciation that would carry conviction to their breasts or to the breasts of any decent citizen in this country? He has contented himself with platitudes and platonic appeals. His denunciations are not vigorous except when he and his Party turn against their constitutional opponents. Sometimes his friends get uncomfortably mixed up with the forces of law and order in this country and to them he practically says: "Bear with it for a while; the country will soon be yours." If that is not the policy of the Government I do not know what their policy is. So far as the forces of disorder are concerned they have no plan and no policy that any decent Government could stand over. Minister of State ruling with the authority of a majority of this House have no policy capable of securing the respect that is due to their official position.
Let us look at their economic policy for a moment. Leaving aside all their promises before they took office does anyone pretend that they have any plan for promoting the economic life of the country at the present moment. Does their action or their policy in the last three years suggest any considered plan? I admit that they had a genuine belief that if an indefinite number of tariffs were put on the whole economic problem of the country would be solved and that nothing more would remain to be done. Once you have got a Government into office that would not hesitate to put on tariff after tariff without any examination then you would have this country turned into a land overflowing with riches. That was the genuine belief of members of the Government before they took office; that was the only plan they had to deal with unemployment; that was the only plan they had to increase the prosperity of the country. They believed that with plenty of tariffs the country could be made a land overflowing with riches. What was the result? They tried that in their first period of office. We had tariff after tariff, a regular spate of tariffs. Of course, it did not work.
We are still waiting anxiously, three years after they took office, to know what employment they have given. I do not now discuss what effect indirectly these new tariffs may have had in driving people out of industry in various walks of life. We have tried vainly to get the figures as to the effect of their plan of tariffs in the way of promoting employment. Of course, to believe that tariffs, irrespective of whether or not they are really an economic proposition, can get rid of unemployment and promote prosperity is simply childish. Hence, what do we find? Month after month, effort after effort is being made to stop the holes in the jerrybuilt structure they have reared. That is their plan—nothing thought out in the beginning, plenty of tariffs, with little, but unfortunate, results. Then a system of licensing and control has grown up. There was no indication of this when tariffs were first introduced. I am not now discussing the question how far that system of licensing has been abused. I am not saying the system is largely abused at the moment, but I say that it is a system that will inevitably lead to corruption. I say that, whatever be the character of the State or whatever be the personnel of the Government. It would be extremely difficult with such a system in existence to avoid corruption of every kind, and corruption on a large scale. I do not believe that we in this country have a double dose of original sin—neither do I believe that we have entirely escaped the con sequences of Adam's fall. Were we a nation of angels we should escape the corrupting effects inherent in this ever-extending system of licences. But, again, to use the words of Deputy Dowdall—"human nature being what it is," I shudder at the abyss of corruption towards which all unconsciously we may be hastening.
But the House will recall the vain efforts to get from the Minister's colleague—the Minister for Industry and Commerce—some indication of the additional number that his extended system of tariffs and monopolies has put into employment. And in this connection I do not want included those who are provided with work owing to money provided in these Estimates—such as works on roads and on housing. I recognise that useful work can and should be done on housing. But however usefully and even necessarily money may be spent on building better houses, the money so spent is not productive—at least not except very indirectly—of wealth. If the industries established recently here were sound, then we might claim that they were wealth-producing. But in all this the Government will give no information on which the country or the House can base any useful conclusion. Three years after they took office it is impossible to get any information out of this Government— a Government, remember, which is otherwise not so very apt to be silent about its performances. It is impossible to get information about the industries which they boast that they set up. What has been their principal contribution to the increase of economic productivity in this country? There is only one answer—the economic war. That is the one contribution they have made.
As Deputy Dillon rightly pointed out, supposing their industries were at least three or four times as productive as they actually are, does anybody believe that they at all compensate for the damage to productivity which the Government has inflicted on the country by its political policy? I wonder whether the bulk of their supporters in the country believe anything of the kind at the present moment? It is a very nice question. Again, the House is not in a position to examine it, owing to the extraordinary modesty of the Government with regard to their achievements, and as to what is the value of those various industries. I have not the slightest doubt but some of them will turn out well, even very well. It is inevitable. With all this setting up of industries some of them must be good, but unfortunately, the country is not in a position to form any idea as to what percentage of them is likely to be good, or as to whether or not they are suitable to the country. Tariffs are, apparently, granted on demand without any examination. It is obvious that there can be no proper examination as to the suitability or otherwise of many of those industries. How can there be? You can set up any industry if you are determined to pay for it. I have no doubt you could start tea growing in this country, and save the temperance leanings of the President, so that he need no longer advocate light beer. By the way, as to light beer, we have heard very little about that particular method of saving the country. I have no doubt you could set up a tea-growing industry here if you spend sufficient money. You can set up almost any industry if you can and will pay for it. That is true whether you set out making electric bulbs or start tea growing. Some of the industries may be good; some may not. There is no information given to the House which would enable anybody to decide whether the actual industries set up are or are not likely to be a boon instead of a burden to this country. Some of them will, undoubtedly, turn out to be satisfactory industries. That must be so. If you set up enough of them they cannot all fail unless the country fails altogether. Some of them must succeed. We are quite willing to admit that. If you are extravagant enough on a large scale in that respect some of them must succeed, but the House, owing to the modesty of the Government, is not in a position to get any idea of them.
I think on the occasion of the first Budget the Minister for Industry said that eight months would show the success of his policy. The economic condition of the country, as a whole, to any person who knows it, is a sufficient answer to that particular promise. In eight months the success of the tariffs was to be demonstrated. Some of the tariffs were necessary. But neither in eight months nor in three years did the tariffs produce the millenium here—and we have no evidence that we are not moving in the opposite direction. Other measures were necessary to prevent the complete collapse of the wretched building that the Government was setting up. As usual, there was the confidence trick—be bold enough in your statements and the people will be taken in. But not all the time; not even their own followers all the time. Not even the Minister for Industry and Commerce can altogether persuade, for instance, the people of Kerry whom I represent, that his policy is a success. Did Deputies read the statement in the organ of Fianna Fáil, or is it the Republican organ, in Kerry——
A Deputy
The Kerryman?
Oh, no—the Kerry Champion. Did the Deputy read the condemnation of the Minister for Industry and Commerce in that paper? Did he read the resolutions of the Fianna Fáil club, Tralee, more than 12 months ago, about the Minister for Industry and Commerce, showing their inability to see any of the industries which he had set up? No? He missed that, and yet that particular resolution was circulated to all the Deputies. It is not merely that members on this side of the House cannot get information—owing to the modesty of the Government—as to the Government's achievements, but, apparently, their own followers are equally blind as to the existence of those great industries. We know, at all events, the opinion of the supporters of the Government in Tralee as to the value of the Fianna Fáil promises about industry. There is a gradual awakening of the people to the value of the statements made by the Government. They have actually no policy about industries. That is the difficulty with them. They had simply a childish belief that tariffs could accomplish everything. Then there were various expedients to fill up the holes that quickly showed themselves in that particular building. Have they any policy as regards agriculture? They have several. The difficulty there is it varies every six months. Deputies have only to come into the House here and listen to the Minister's colleague, the Minister for Agriculture, to see the value of their agricultural policy. That is quite clear from the statements of the Minister. On one Estimate his policy was more wheat and, of course, more cattle.
Anybody who was not blind, we were told, could see that the Fianna Fáil policy of more wheat and more tillage meant more cattle. The Minister, it will be remembered, twitted Deputies of this House because they could not see that that was always the policy of Fianna Fáil—a policy made clear as far back as the minority report of the Economic Conference. He twitted this side of the House because there was any doubt as to that being the policy. He admitted, of course, what any sensible man must admit, that in a small country like this you cannot have a successful wheat-growing policy without a successful cattle policy as well for two reasons—for the reason indicated by Deputy Dillon, into which I do not intend to go because he dealt with it very fully—the question of manure, and also because you must have rotation of crops and the root crops must be fed to the cattle. The Minister recognised that as his policy. He stated it as his policy in the summer of 1933. But nine months afterwards what was his policy? The very opposite: more tillage and, therefore, less cattle. At that particular moment he was defending the slaughter of calves and pointing out that it was necessary to get rid of cattle, necessary to undermine, to get rid of the main source of the economic wealth of this country; deliberately to bankrupt the future in order to save their faces in the present.
Does anybody think that there is any agricultural policy in that Government when we have the man responsible for its agricultural policy blatantly contradicting himself as regard the principal product of this country— crying out at one period that his policy was more cattle and in the next period that it was less cattle. In the same way he told us that he had found alternative markets to Great Britain. He refused to disclose them to this House because we might sabotage the plan. That was his attitude two years ago—that we might "sabotage the plan." Unfortunately, he kept the knowledge of the alternative markets from the farmers as well as from the House for two years. That was unfair if he had the markets. He kept those markets hidden from the farmers. Deputy Jordan—I gathered from his interruption to Deputy Dillon— approved of a certain settlement made by the Government, the coal-cattle pact. Bury the hatchet and buy English coals—as was blazoned in an advertisement in the West of Ireland. Is that the policy? Does the Government really believe that the English market is no good? Does it still think it necessary at any cost to the people of this country—certainly at the cost of putting up the cost of living in town and country—that we must keep our hold on that market by artificial means? Does it think it necessary that we are to do that at the time when the Government has deliberately thrown away our real and direct hold on it by means of ordinary trading? Various Ministers told us quite a long time ago that in this economic war England was beaten. A few days ago Deputy Little told us that England was nearly beaten.
Deputy Curran said so, too.
The war was over some years ago and we had won. But the progress made with the economic war that we were told was won a considerable time ago is this: that now we are told it is nearly won. That is an extraordinary advance! If we advance at that rate the war will soon be over, but apparently will not result in a victory for this country. If the Government had made up its mind to destroy the ordinary farmer in this country they could not go a better way about it than the way in which they had gone. I thought they had got over that particular ambition on their part. To some extent it had vanished from their speeches. I confess that I find it very rarely in their speeches or in the speeches of some of their supporters now. We do not find the wild talk that one met with a couple of years ago, when, apparently, any man who gave employment, any man who had built up a well-established industry was an enemy of the worker and was grinding out the faces of the poor. That was the time when, apparently, any man who had 50 acres of land, or even 30 acres of good land, and was giving employment, was described as a rancher. We were getting particularly close to that frame of mind a couple of years ago. But I thought, judging by the care now exercised in the speeches, that the Fianna Fáil Party had outgrown that phase of infantile development. But apparently they have broken with the habit of speech but not with the practice. If the Government wanted to destroy the ordinary farmers, even the smallest farmers on the Kerry mountainside as I said last week, they could not have gone a better way about it than they are going by their policy of making the farming industry completely unremunerative. So much is that the case that it is now acknowledged by the Government to be unremunerative. There has been a good deal of talk about wheat growing. I would ask the members of the Government, and the supporters of Fianna Fáil, to say if a certain amount of extra wheat has been grown in this country, on what class of farm has it been grown? Is it on the very small farm that it has been grown? Not certainly on small farms in my constituency. If grown at all, it has been grown on moderate sized farms. That is precisely the size of farm that the Government is anxious to break up. Of course, as long as the Government insists on making any other form of farming unremunerative and paying out the taxpayers' money on bounties on this wheat growing, people will grow wheat.
The other day a farmer who grew wheat said he would continue to grow it and that he will grow it next year and the year after. He said that with the bounty he would make it pay. He would put no manure on the land. We asked him what then, and he said that in six years' time his land would grow nothing. He said to us: "What else am I to do? I am now paid for doing this. It is the only way at the present moment in which I can make my farm pay. I cannot think of the future because I must think of the present. It is quite true that the land from the point of view of producing crops will be no value at the end of six years. It will simply be a desert, but I will at least get something out of it now instead of losing." In that way if you go on inducing people at the taxpayers' expense they will grow wheat of course, but it will be to the ultimate destruction of the country. That will be the result of the adoption of such a policy.
The other activities in which the Government are engaged hold out no hope as far as the future is concerned. The Government simply plunged into these agricultural subsidies and they subsidised certain industries. Just as they made no inquiries as regards urban industries they made no inquiry as to what particular form of agriculture they would subsidise. The only thing on which they seemed to be determined two years ago was to get rid of the cattle trade at any cost to the country. This House is certainly entitled to ask, after three years of Fianna Fáil administration, after three years of Fianna Fáil responsibility for the Government of the country, whither are they drifting and whither is the country being driven by the Government. It is quite true we were promised, so far as agriculture was concerned, that there would be no compulsion on any man to go in for wheat growing. But if the non-growing of wheat was not made an offence, the Government has seen to it that it would be no longer profitable. I admit no one has yet been put into jail for not growing wheat, and no small farmer has had his farm taken from him because of his refusal to grow wheat. But the fact remains that economic pressure is being put upon him. The Government is taking good care that the only thing that the farmer believes to be remunerative in his farming operations will not continue to be remunerative. It is time that the Government told the country whither they are drifting in this wild policy of theirs. It is quite obvious to the Fianna Fáil Party themselves that whatever their belief may have been three years ago or five years ago, that belief has largely faded away from the minds of their followers at the present moment.
Mr. MacEntee rose.
The Minister to conclude?
On this stage. We will have the other stages.
The Minister cannot speak now except he is concluding.
The Chair was about to point out that the Minister could only intervene to conclude the debate. As regards the other stages of the Bill, the practice has been that no stage of a Central Fund Bill is debated but the Second Stage.
I have listened to the speeches that were delivered yesterday evening on the Vote on Account and to-day in connection with this Bill. I was particularly interested in the speech delivered by Deputy Dillon to-day. One can observe from the few members of the Opposition present, the few who have been in attendance since the sitting opened to-day, that there is a certain liveliness in their attitude and a certain hopefulness in the tone of their speeches that was absent for quite a long time. That is probably due to some of the things that are taking place to-day, the putting back into the leadership of their organisation people in whom they will have more confidence, and possibly they have made a firm resolve not to fall again into such errors as they committed during the last twelve months. The ranks are being re-formed now, and there is at least one sign of common-sense and returning sanity if what we hear over here is true, that Deputy Cosgrave resumes the leadership of the Opposition. That is a satisfactory thing indeed, and maybe that accounts for the hopeful tone in all the speeches that have been delivered. I, for one, wish to congratulate them on getting away from the foolishness of the last twelve months, away from all the terrible doings they patronised and fathered during the last twelve months. It is a good sign, and I am glad to observe it. I am glad to know Deputy Cosgrave will be the Leader in this House and in the country as well, not alone in name but actually in fact.
What will we do with the Generals?
The Generals will look after themselves; they are already doing that; they will go into oblivion. Deputy Dillon to-day ridiculed the idea of wheat growing and so, to a certain extent, did Deputy O'Sullivan. They told us that it cannot be done, this thing of growing wheat. It is a marvellous thing how much of it was grown in the past. It is marvellous how much wheat could be grown, not only for home consumption, but for export after the entire requirements of the people had been looked after. That is not a statement of mine. Years ago, before the Treaty came along and before there was any split in our ranks, we all professed to follow a great Irish economist, a great Irish economic leader, the late Mr. Arthur Griffith. His praises were sung all over the country, not only by the people on this side of the House, but by members of the Opposition—by all those who took part in the earlier stages of the Republican movement. He was the great authority on all these matters, so great that, in the little work we all used to read and quote from occasionally at public meetings, I find a note on the front page written by President Cosgrave, as he then was, and here is what he wrote:
"Arthur Griffith was not merely a great patriot; he was a great man, and for the rest of the history of this country his name and his work will be a lesson and an inspiration to those who come after him."
There is a monument to his memory out on the lawn attached to this building.
It is very interesting to note what he said about the growing of wheat. It is very interesting also to know what the Deputies now in Opposition, who were his followers up to the time of his death, believed in the matter of wheat growing. It is interesting to know whether they believed at any time in Arthur Griffith's writings. Here is what he said, and I wish Deputy Dillon were here to hear it:—
"In the year 1840 Ireland, after supplying herself with wheat from her own soil, exported 174,000 quarters of wheat and flour, and nearly 2,500,000 quarters of corn of all kinds. Her wheat export in 1844 had risen to 200,000 quarters, and her total export of corn to nearly 4,000,000 quarters."
Of course, that was written some time ago, but at that time the late Mr. Griffith was advocating the get-back-to-tillage policy. We all followed him in that, hence the note in the front of this little booklet written by, as he then was, President Cosgrave. To-day we find the same people in this House ridiculing the idea that this country could grow sufficient wheat to feed our own people. I am not surprised at Deputy Dillon's attitude. Nobody ever suggested that he ever followed the teachings of Griffith or was ever influenced in the slightest degree by them. I am quite aware of that. But Deputy O'Sullivan was influenced by them and so was Deputy Cosgrave and quite a number of others in the Opposition; yet we find them here ridiculing the idea they once professed to believe. We have them turning down every thing that the late Arthur Griffith stood for and worked for. No one in ordinary public decency could in any way defend such acts of political apostasy as the turning down of the doctrines preached by such a great man.
Let us look at what he said in connection with the alternative. This, afternoon Deputy Dillon said we should go ahead and foster the live stock trade, the cattle trade. The late Arthur Griffith had a word or two to say on that point:—
"Next in importance to the education question in this country is the question of our industries, and the greatest of these is agriculture; but agriculture in Ireland is resolving itself into the cattle trade."
Taking generally all these quotations from this booklet, all the things the late Mr. Griffith had in mind when he preached this doctrine, I consider that if ever any Government attempted to carry out the economic and political programme advocated by such a great authority, it is this Government. No Government has tackled the situation so effectively as the present Government. That brings us to the promises that we made to the people at the time of the general election. I thought there was only one Deputy who had a monopoly of taunting us about our promises, Deputy McGilligan. He came here several times with the document that he usually trots out, the old battle-scarred document from which he quotes our promises, out of which he reads everything we promised to the people. He takes little extracts occasionally as they suit him and then he taunts us, just as Deputy O'Sullivan did to-day, that we got in here by false pretences as a Government and that our promises were fraudulent. I suggest that we did not get one solitary vote at the last election under false pretences. We put our cards on the table in every constituency. I read out the manifesto issued by the President; I quoted it on another occasion and pointed out the various things we promised to do. I took it paragraph by paragraph and I did not hear any Deputy in the Opposition saying that any of those things had been sidestepped or that we had not made as good an effort as it was possible to make to put these things into effect. We promised that we would go in for intensive tillage. We have done so. We promised that we would keep certain payments that used to go across to England here at home and we have done so. In regard to all these promises and all the things we have attempted to do in this House, not-withstanding the opposition we have met, I believe we could go again to the people at another general election— and there will be an opportunity in the near future at by-elections—and we could come back stronger than we are at the moment.
Deputy Dillon and Deputy O'Sullivan both seemed to harp upon incidents that have occurred throughout the country, such as those that took place on St. Patrick's Day, and other incidents of that kind. I am not one of those people who think that these things reflect any credit at all on the country, and I am not one of those people who think that anybody who does anything outside in public which tends to bring discredit on the country is a patriot. He is not. All these actions are regrettable, and they are the more regrettable on an occasion like St. Patrick's Day, when the national holiday should be observed by not only a particular class in a community, but should be valued, respected and commemorated respectfully by everybody who is an inhabitant of the country. That is my opinion of it. All Governments have these difficulties. We have our difficulties to face, but we had difficulties to face that were engineered by members of this House. Deputies on the Opposition benches taunt us with having increased by £61,000 the Vote for the Gárda, but surely to goodness, they are not going to run away now from the encouragement they gave 12 months ago to people not to pay rates and annuities and generally to upset the social order.
I quoted previously a speech delivered by Deputy Minch in Monasterevan. It is on the official records of this House that a member of the Opposition definitely and distinctly told the people not to pay rates or annuities while the economic war was on. I will admit that he did come in here later on and tried to give some sort of explanation as to why he said that. Nevertheless, that was said, and it appeared in a public paper. When you have a situation like that, in which responsible Deputies tell their followers at public meetings that it was their duty not to pay rent, rates or annuities, surely that was creating a position that had to be dealt with. It is dishonest, in face of speeches of that kind, which were never repudiated, so far as I know by any other Opposition Deputies——
Nonsense.
I have not seen the repudiation.
What speech is the Deputy referring to?
The speech delivered by Deputy Minch at Monasterevan advocating the non-payment of annuities and rates.
That speech was brought up in this House in the presence of Deputy Minch and repudiated in this House in the presence of Deputy Minch.
He did repudiate it, but not when it was first discussed, when the quotation was read from the newspaper. That is one of the justifications for the increase in the Gárda Estimate. I am delighted for one to see this being done, and I am delighted that the Ministry took cognisance of the necessity for increasing the Gárda to such an extent that it will be made impossible for such things as have occurred during the last 12 months to occur in future.
I was much impressed by a remark made by Deputy Murphy here last night when he complained that the Estimate for forestry was not sufficient. I agree, and I think the Minister would be well advised if he increased the Vote in that respect. It is one of the things that would help to cure unemployment and one of the things that would be of benefit to the country in more ways than one. There are lands in many constituencies, in the constituency of Laoighis-Offaly. for instance, which are unsuitable for tillage, unsuitable for grazing and unsuitable for anything else.
The details of the Estimates are not before the House. As a matter of fact, a glance at the Order Paper will show what is before the House. Even on yesterday's debate on the Vote on Account, the amounts for the different Departments were not itemised, and such suggestions as the Deputy is now making would be much more relevant to a debate on the Estimate for the Department concerned, for, if we were to enter into the advocacy of afforestation claims for the different constituencies, this debate would be very long indeed, I fear.
In any case, you can grow wheat.
I do not know whether the Deputy was here while I was reading this document——
No, he clears out.
——but we could grow wheat and we are growing wheat.
And Deputy Mulcahy used to say that we could not grow it.
With regard to the discussion on the details of the Estimates, I bow to your ruling, Sir, and I come back again to the matter dwelt upon by Deputy O'Sullivan— the question of the preservation of law and order. As I said at the commencement, new developments have taken place which will possibly keep the Opposition somewhat on the rails during the two or three years of the remainder of this Parliament. We will have less trouble and, as a result of the sanity which is showing itself in their ranks, it will quite likely be possible to reduce the Estimates in future. We will not have, as somebody suggested here yesterday, organised bus-loads of people being transferred from one portion of the country to another to provide audiences for people decorated in blue shirts and to try to bring about the destruction of the Fianna Fáil Government.
I remember, during the last year, some meetings held in the constituency of Laoighis-offaly. Quite big audience attended. The people were brought in from various places, and I remember Deputy Dr. O'Higgins and his colleague, General O'Duffy, being at a public meeting in Edenderry. Certainly if many more meetings of that type were to be held in the country, I do not know what the Vote for the Gárda eventually would turn out to be. If the kind of speeches delivered there had ever been made effective and if there had been people foolish enough to pay much attention to them, it would have been very hard to forecast what expenditure would have been necessary to maintain social order and to maintain control over certain events in various localities. I gave a quotation from these speeches, As I say, perhaps as a result of all these proceedings, these things are fading out and we will not be troubled with them in the future. The probabilities are that the Estimates in future under such headings will be much lower than they are now.
There is another matter about which I want to say something. Deputy Belton mentioned it last night when he spoke about the coal-cattle pact. He was speaking about certain things which had occurred during the course of the year and he was very strong indeed in his condemnation of the Department of External Affairs, which, he said, had sold the pass and destroyed the country by entering into the pact which was recently made. It is very strange how these condemnatory remarks are always launched against the present Department of External Affairs in the settlement it has made. If there are any people in the world who should say nothing about pacts or settlements——
They are the members of the present Government.
—— or say nothing about arrangements made via the Department of External Affairs or in any other way, they are the Deputies on the Opposition Benches—the whole lot, including Deputy Belton. I know perfectly well that Deputy Belton did not approve of some of the pacts that were made by the leaders of the Opposition in various cases. There is the Ultimate Financial Settlement for one. When you have Deputies opposite condemning this recent pact and complaining that it was not produced to this House, it makes one wonder exactly where they are. Deputy Cosgrave was responsible for the Ultimate Financial Settlement, and we saw the document produced by the President here one day. We saw a long type-written sheet in front, the envelope next, the postcard next, and the scrap of paper next, which was described by the President as a thing of shreds and patches, which would not be tolerated in any third-class solicitor's office in Dublin. Would you call that an international document? I would remind Deputy Belton that when criticising the Department of External Affairs he should advert to a speech delivered by a gentleman of great weight on the other side of the Channel, Mr. Chamberlain, who said that it is not money that matters, that it is not the annuities that matter, that it is not the minor things that matter, but the big political issues which are at stake that really matter in determining the result of the economic war. The big political issues did not seem to be very much in evidence in the document produced here. How Deputy Belton could launch an attack on the Department of External Affairs and prior to that accept for his leader the Deputy responsible for what was produced here——
On a point of order. I thought we were discussing matters within the present year?
The Deputy was discussing the coal-cattle pact, and I am relating his remarks to another pact that was made by a Deputy whom he afterwards followed as his leader.
Twelve years ago.
That discounts a great deal of the Deputy's remarks. His views are slightly volatile, we know, but we will be delighted to hear what he has to say on the pact or anything else. We would be more interested, however, if he could attempt to reconcile his attitude to-day and his attack on the Department of External Affairs with his allegiance to the Deputy who made the pact disclosed here—that incompetent thing of shreds and patches which, according to British Ministers, we must honour before we can come to an end of the economic war. I should like to hear the Deputy on that, and I should like to hear Deputy MacDermot or any member of the Opposition on it. They cannot have it both ways. They may attack items in these Estimates; they may attack the increase in the Gárda Estimate; and they may say that we are not living up to our promises in the reduction of expenditure. But no Government was faced with such a situation as we were faced with twelve months ago. There was a gentleman, who was then the external leader of the Opposition, parading this country prior to the local elections some nine months ago, saying they would capture 23 out of the 27 county councils. Placarded all over the big English cities we had: "President de Valera does not speak for the Irish people; his Government is tottering; President de Valera has no authority to make a settlement; he has no authority to carry on the economic war." That was the type of placards we had in the English cities at one time. Then came the results of the local elections, which were held on a restricted franchise, and which showed that the President did speak for the people. The Opposition then went off in another direction and discarded their leader and said he was an impossible man. If his predictions had come off he would not have been an impossible man.
Will the Deputy relate that to this Bill?
I relate it in this way, that during the campaign carried on prior to the local elections many of the meetings held were the cause of disturbances in several localities. Hence the increase in the Gárda Vote.
Placarding things in English cities does not seem to have much relevancy to this Bill.
The Government at that time found themselves in a position that was unprecedented and that no other Government really had to face. At any rate, the Opposition saw the folly of it themselves. Their leader was discarded and they are becoming a little bit more sensible. With the re-installation of Deputy Cosgrave as leader perhaps we will get on a great deal better in the future than in the past and then these Estimates will be lowered and, as the Minister for Finance said, we will be able to have a normal Budget in 12 months time. Things are beginning to be a little bit normal, or at least more normal than they were. I should like if Deputy Belton would become a little bit normal and throw in with the Government his undoubted experience in tillage; and instead of always indulging in destructive criticism give us some constructive remarks.
Did you not expel him?
We did. At the same time, even now we have learned a little bit. It is not a competition between all the Parties as to who expelled him.
There is not a word about Deputy Belton in this Bill.
I sincerely hope that there is a new feeling amongst the Opposition. I sincerely hope that perhaps even Deputy Belton will use common sense and stop making those foolish speeches both in the House and outside and come down to help the Government along the path in which they are going to build up the country and make it what it ought to be.
I could not resist the invitation of my old friend, Deputy Donnelly, because, even with all his criticism and all the hard things he says of me, he is conscious of a very memorable night in a certain house not far from where we are when I showed him the direction he ought to go; just as later on I endeavoured to show the Party that he is now associated with, and that he was not then associated with, the direction they ought to go, but they would not. Neither Deputy Donnelly nor his present Party would lead or drive, so I came in here and led them in here and Deputy Donnelly followed afterwards. Having been so successful on that occasion, I hope to be somewhat successful with Deputy Donnelly and his Party on the present occasion. I am glad Deputy Donnelly does not forget past services that I rendered him and hopes that some day I shall be more closely associated with him and his Party. I hope so. I also hope that Parties in this House generally will be more associated with one another in future for the common good of the country than they have been in the past.
It is no harm to have a little friendly criticism. Deputy Donnelly is an adept at platform oratory and he can put a very good face on a bad case even in this House. How neatly he stepped around but did not come to the real point at issue? I made a statement last night about the coal-cattle pact and I repeat it now. I do not want to say any more beyond what I said last night except that I would like to see it published, if such a document exists. The only answer that Deputy Donnelly could give to the request I made last night was to go back 12 years and say that somebody else signed an agreement then which was discovered by Deputy Donnelly's Party when they came into office. Even if all that is true, it is no answer to an alleged agreement between the Department of External Affairs and the British Government. I do not even know if it was the Department of External Affairs or who it was. I have not heard of a single representative of the people coming into this at all. It was only the High Commissioner was mentioned. The Minister for External Affairs was not mentioned in it. Why? Is it not the Minister, and not the High Commissioner or a civil servant, is responsible to this House and the people? Did the Minister for External Affairs sign that document? If not, why not?
Deputy Donnelly should remember the importance of that document. It has a double importance for me. If I know anything about the economic life of this country it is about agriculture, and many people, including Deputy Donnelly, give me credit for knowing a little about that. I have pretty large interests in agriculture, and therefore on one side of this pact I am very much concerned. On the other hand I am not entirely dissociated from the coal business. In addition I represent a city constituency that is very much concerned about the price of coal. The price of coal has gone up. I believe I was the first man in public life to forecast that it would go up, and I practically shot the mark to which it would go. Coal has gone up in price since the pact was signed, and contracts that were made prior to that have had to be broken, both with private merchants and with public institutions. Coal users in this country have to pay from 7/- to 10/- a ton more for supplies. We have no corresponding advantage, although Deputy Donnelly when dealing with the matter practically put it to me that there was. I will make him a present of this, that there was a slight advantage, and that the necessity for the pact was due to the maladministration of the bounties. This country found itself with a surplus of aged cattle that could not be given away and there was a necessity at any price to get them out. I agree that this coal-cattle pact helped to get them away, but the advantage to the body economic of such a deal was precisely what an operation would be to any of us who might be unfortunate enough to be run down by a motor, a lorry, or by one of the buses that are not now running, and have a limb broken. A surgeon would come along and say that in the state he found us it was better to amputate the semi-dead limb, as by cutting it off the condition of the patient after the amputation would be better than before. But the patient would be a long way from being in as good condition as before the accident.
The coal-cattle pact is like the condition of that patient after the operation but it is in no way comparable with the trade that existed here, both in coal and live stock, before the advent of the economic war. Deputy Donnelly may not have an opportunity of speaking again on this debate, but it is due to the House that the Minister should tell us if such a pact was in existence; if it was reduced to paper, and to give the exact signatures. We were told that 150,000 cattle could be exported in return for coal worth £1,000,000. Does the Minister or Deputies on the opposite benches realise that that would represent an average of £7 each for cattle. What sort of a deal is it to make a present to England of 150,000 cattle at £7 each? It is only an Executive Council without knowledge of practical things would put their hands to such a document. It is quite obvious they are ashamed of its publication. The Minister for External Affairs is ashamed to publish the document over his own signature. I challenge publication of it.
This is needless repetition. The Deputy has said that about ten times.
I hope I have said it so often that the Minister will not forget it when he is replying. As to general policy, it is extraordinary how an Executive Council of men of experience should endeavour to carry on a war, economic or military, and at the same time endeavour to develop industry, in order to bring about what they call a change in agricultural economy. Deputy Dillon has criticised the agricultural economy of the Government. I must say frankly that I do not share Deputy Dillon's outlook on agricultural policy. My view always has been, since I entered politics, that the agricultural policy for this country is, in the main, a tillage policy. But the misgivings I had about the Government's application of what they call a tillage policy are such that I am afraid the wrong method of application will sour the country against tillage in the future. I do not see how a change in the economy of this country can be effected at a time when any sort of a war is going on. The only hope for success in the change-over, with the minimum of suffering, lies in our being at peace with Great Britain during the change-over. Deputies on all sides will appreciate that we could not hope to make a profit out of grain production at a time when the markets of the world are saturated, and the granaries of most producing countries filled with "carry-overs" from harvest to harvest.
Deputy Dillon pointed out that wheat was a commodity that was, in effect, a drug on the markets of the world. That, to a great extent, is true. The wheat producing countries of the world do not know what to do with wheat. In some parts of America the farmers are paid for not growing wheat because there is too much of it about. Now, I do not find fault with our Government for endeavouring to grow wheat, even though the markets of the world are so saturated with it, but what I do find fault with them for is to be encouraging the growing of wheat at a time when they claim to be carrying on an economic war and when the other end of agriculture—the live stock end—is so impoverished. Any Government that would endeavour to change the agricultural economy of the country should, first of all, make secure the live stock end before they changed over to tillage, but the present Government proceeded to carry out the change at a time when live stock were going for scrap. The best they are able to do now is to offer us the coal-cattle pact under which our live stock are being given away for little or nothing to the Britisher. At the same time they are taxing the people to pay 26/- a barrel for secondrate wheat, whereas the best wheat in the world can be bought at 14/- a barrel.
That is not business. Take, for example, a shopkeeper carrying on a grocery business. There are four or five big items in that business, such as butter, bacon, sugar and some packed stuff. These items represent the largest part of that man's business, but there is no profit on them. In the case of butter a man needs to handle it very carefully in order to get his own out of it. It may be asked how does he continue to carry on. The answer is that he has a profit on some other lines of his business, and these make up for the losses on the big items that I have mentioned. What is the farmer handling at a profit to-day? We will be told by people with a narrow point of view that if you grow wheat you will be paid for it. I agree, but who will pay the farmers? The answer is, themselves. We know that 80 per cent. of the producing income of the country is from agriculture. Agriculture is the beast of burden carrying all the industries that are springing up. The new oil that the Minister discovered in Cork has not made its arrival there yet, but when it does the Minister is to give it a preference of 2d. a gallon. Agriculture will have to bear that as well as all the other burdens that it is now carrying. I am not speaking from the narrow view of a farmer, because I have other interests that financially are of far greater importance to me. Despite what may be said to the contrary, this proposition cannot be disputed; that if the land of this country is not paying its way nothing else can. It is there that I differ from the Government in their agricultural policy. Their policy has no chance while the economic war is going on. It has not a chance in a million.
With regard to tillage, I am afraid that Deputy Dillon is a bit misinformed as to the gold mine awaiting us in Great Britain by growing vegetables and sending them over there. I can speak with some authority on this, because I believe that at present, and for some years past, I am the largest grower of vegetables in the Free State. I have tried every trick in the pack, so that I might make money out of them. For the last ten or 12 years there has not been a market in Great Britain for Irish vegetables, due to no fault of the people on this side or to the Administration here, but rather to the exchange advantages as between France, Holland and Great Britain. France, in particular, has ousted Dublin grown vegetables, not only out of the English but out of the Scottish markets, in the last ten years. Perhaps we have not improved our technique as well as France and Holland, but what I think had something to do with the matter was that we allowed too large a quantity of foreign produced vegetables that could not find a market in Covent Garden, to be dumped on the Dublin market. Of course, that situation no longer exists.
I would like to know if the Minister for Finance has ever consulted the Minister for Agriculture with regard to the disadvantages under which the agricultural producers of the country have to carry on our export business to the British market. I wonder has the Minister for Finance ever thought of becoming a real Minister for Finance or does he merely look on himself as a Minister—I say this without meaning any disrespect to him—who is there to impose taxation, see that it is collected, and then pay it out in different allocations. The Minister, I am sure, is aware that since the 18th September, 1931, we have been sending dairy produce to the British market in competition with Danish dairy produce, the Danes having a 25 per cent. preference over us, due to the exchange advantages which they enjoy. At the present time Australia, New Zealand, and, I think, South Africa, have a similar 25 per cent. advantage over us in the British market, due to the fact that they are working on a currency that is depreciated below sterling. I submit that it is impossible for any industrial activity to survive in this country under such withering conditions. I am sure that the Minister keeps himself informed of world events. If there is one man in the Cabinet who should keep himself informed of world events it is the Minister for Finance, because world events hinge more now than they have ever done on finance, banking, credit and currency. The Minister knows that the difficulties and bickerings amongst the nations are due to depreciation of their currencies by certain countries in order to reap industrial advantages. The Minister knows that it was by depreciating their currency that the Japanese collared the Chinese and Indian markets.
Has that matter any relation to the Bill before the House?
It has in this way—that our Minister for Finance, though claiming to be a Republican Minister, has the farmers of this country exporting their produce to the British market, where they are suffering the disadvantage of a currency uniform with that of Britain, whereas the Dane has a 25 per cent. advantage.
Surely legislation would be necessary to alter our currency?
Deputy Belton will do it without legislation.
I am referring to the trade disadvantage which we are suffering.
Are you advocating new legislation?
I am advocating nothing. I am speaking of the facts as they are. The Minister would like that I should advocate something, but I am not going to do so.
I should not like the Deputy to advocate legislation, because it is not allowable in this debate.
I am not advocating legislation. I am advocating nothing. I am stating the facts. I am hitting the Minister hard enough in reminding him that he is there anchored to British sterling.
And so is the Danish currency.
I gave the Minister credit for keeping himself informed of those matters. By the remark he has just interjected, he shows that he is hopelessly ignorant of the situation.
Which situation has nothing to do with this Bill.
It has a lot to do with the man who is feeding pigs and producing butter for the British market. The Dane gets 25 per cent. more for his produce. I am sorry I must differ with Deputy MacDermot in an issue which he introduced here yesterday. Deputy MacDermot, in a long and interesting speech, counselled the desirability of this country forcing the issue as to whether we are to remain in the Commonwealth or declare a Republic. I think that nothing could be more disastrous to this country than the pursuit of such an issue at the present time. I do not see how such an issue arises. If any leaders were so foolish as to endeavour to make that an issue, it would be perpetuating the economic war. The economic war did not start on a political, constitutional or Commonwealth-versus-Republic issue. We are in some kind of arrangement—call it a Commonwealth arrangement, if you like—and it is only those who want to leave it who have any need to raise an issue about it. I do not know anybody in this House who wants to leave it. If there is one Deputy in this House who wants to leave that Commonwealth, he is keeping very quiet about it. I do not know if Deputy MacDermot is the only one in this House who wants to leave it——
He does not know what he wants.
If that be true—I am not saying it is true—there is a gentleman opposite Deputy MacDermot who hardly knows what he wants either. Deputy MacDermot has made no secret that, so far as he is personally concerned—he is perfectly straight and honest about the matter—he advocates membership of the Commonwealth. I am not going to attack him for that. I am not going to support him in that either, but he has given a perfectly honest statement of his conviction.
There will be no split.
Deputy Flinn will not create a split in the opposite camp while he is in office. He might have tried it outside office but, once he has tasted the sweets of office, he will keep sucking them. I am sorry that all the orators who spoke with full authority for the Government yesterday are conspicuous by their absence to-day. Even Deputy Flinn was like the historical swallow that rushed into the light and immediately flew out again. Deputy Robert Briscoe is absent too. Deputy Briscoe said yesterday, in relation to unemployment assistance, that the Government accepts the principle of maintenance of the unemployed. Deputy Flinn, in dealing with the additional £100,000 allocated for unemployment assistance for the coming year, said that their Estimate was marvellous last year since they had not missed the mark by more than £100,000. I asked Deputy Briscoe whether he meant that the Government was standing by the principle that the State should maintain the unemployed. He said: "Certainly." I asked if the Government were taking that responsibility and he said "Yes." If the Government is taking that responsibility, the amount of assistance they are giving measures exactly what, in their opinion, is fair maintenance for the unemployed. I invite any Deputy on the Government Benches to get up and say whether the maintenance being given to the unemployed is too much or too little——
Is not that fixed by legislation?
Well, those are the people responsible for the legislation.
Yes, but legislation is passed by the Oireachtas, and the Deputy cannot discuss legislation that is passed. The Deputy can discuss the administration of the legislation.
The administration?
Well, in administering unemployment assistance, I suggest that the correct principle to work upon would be for the local authorities—the boards of assistance—to take the Government at its word and say that, since the Government is providing for the able-bodied unemployed, there can be no charge on the local administration. Now, it might be news to Deputies opposite, who claim to have redeemed their promises and who claim that they look after the able-bodied unemployed as a national matter, but the amount of money paid out of rates in County Dublin last year for the relief of able-bodied unemployed was £112,119. I should like to know, during the course of this debate, are we in County Dublin doing something that is wrong? Are we robbing the ratepayers of County Dublin by collecting this money from them and using it to do work that the Government are claiming that they are doing? If the Government make that claim, I guarantee that there will not be a penny of rates collected in Dublin this year to scatter in that way. Empty promises and empty boasts will have to be cut out. If the Government are looking after the unemployed—and I subscribe to the principle they advocate, that they should produce conditions that will give work to the unemployed—I hold, as it is the Central Government that is responsible and as it is the Central Government only that can remedy national conditions, that the responsibility must rest on the Central Government and not on the local authority. I hope the Minister for Finance, or the Minister for Local Government and Public Health, or some eloquent Deputy of the Government Party, will deal with that matter when they come to speak.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance, Deputy Flinn, addressed a question to this side of the House yesterday, and asked how would any Deputy over there settle the economic war. I have heard it said in this House to the Government: "Go and settle the economic war." I do not agree with that, nor do I agree with that spirit. Personally, I was as much against the economic war as any man in Ireland, but the country has given a mandate for the economic war.
Hear, hear!
Accordingly, we must approach it in that spirit. Although we may differ as between Party and Party, or as between individual and individual, on the question of the economic war, when it comes to a question as between this country and England we must speak with one voice and that must be the voice for which a mandate has been given by the people.
Was that the policy in the past? Was it followed up by the Party in the past?
Was it the right policy?
I am not concerned with what was done in the past. I am just giving my simple view on this matter now. If it was not done in the past—and I concede that it was not done in the past—what price was paid by the ordinary man in the country? And why should the ordinary man in the country have to pay now because we did not do it in the past?
This is a national issue and not a domestic issue.
Well, it may be a national issue, but I hope that the national issue will be dealt with more ably than the coal-cattle pact. Personally, I deprecate saying: "Go and settle the economic war." Suppose, for example, I had a dispute with Deputy Donnelly and I heard Deputy Corry say to Deputy Donnelly: "Go and settle your dispute with Deputy Belton," I would know that I had Deputy Donnelly beaten, and if Deputy Corry meant to give that advice as a friend he would be really giving advice to an enemy.
Hear, hear!
Accordingly, from that point of view, I do not think that we should shout: "Settle the economic war," although nobody in this country would rather see it settled than I. Deputy Flinn asked the question: "How would you settle it?" That, however, is putting anybody who would attempt to answer that question in an almost impossible position. I am not going to attempt to answer it. There is one thing, however, that should be done by all Parties in making this a national issue—and this also should be made a national issue —and that is to cut away all the trimmings that have been tacked on to this question for political reasons. The trouble arose about making certain payments to Great Britain, payments that should be localised; and nothing else should be allowed in. Let the financial dispute with Great Britain be discussed and settled on its merits and allow nothing else into it. That is my view, but I question whether or not Deputies on the Government Benches would support that view. In my opinion there is a terrible lot of face-saving going on in this connection. I feel that it is now a question of face-saving and not a question of how the dispute arose originally. I am quite certain that if the British Government were approached in the same spirit in which the British Government approached the United States, and in which Germany approached her creditors in Europe and America and said: "In the altered conditions we cannot pay this debt and we will not pay it," there would not have been an economic war; but without that approach I feel that the matter would not have been settled and will not be.
What about Mr. Chamberlain's attitude?
Mr. Chamberlain made those statements. Deputy Hugo Flinn, Parliamentary Secretary, addressed a question to this side as to how we would settle the economic war. I am giving my opinion. I do not want to get into a detailed debate because if I did I would be doing what I disagreed with a few moments ago. I am afraid that one side went a bit in introducing irrelevant matter; the other side also went a bit, and nobody in this House knows better than Deputy Donnelly the camouflage by which diplomatists and politicians try to conceal the real thing which they want to settle. I am quite satisfied that if this matter were approached in a business way, with nothing allowed in but just the £5,000,000, the matter would be very easily adjusted. If I did not misinterpret gestures which had been made from the other side, it has been made fairly plain that if it were only a question of £.s.d. it could be easily settled. Why not keep it to a question of £s. d.?
How?
By not allowing anything else in.
How?
That is what the row was about. Of course, if people go around the country and put this kind of dope over on the farmers: "It is absolutely essential and it is the first consideration and most important issue for the Irish farmer to-day to decide whether he will be in the Commonwealth or in the Republic," you will never have a settlement, because if that is put up to the ordinary farmer of this country he will go hungry before he will vote for the Commonwealth against the Republic.
Deputies
Hear, hear!
I know what I am talking about.
Now you are a real man.
I know what I am talking about. Deputy MacDermot should know.
He does not know a thing about it.
I am only speaking from a recollection of the atmosphere in which I was reared, and I think that most Deputies of this House are in the same boat. We were brought up to look upon the Empire, the Empire's flag and all it stood for, as representing to us conquests, confiscations, hangings, deportations, famine, clearances by landlords, and finally the Black and Tans and executions. That is how we have been brought up to look upon the Commonwealth. You cannot expect people throughout the country to enthuse over the Commonwealth when they have seen with their own eyes the latter part of what I have described, and known people who were the victims. I am not speaking against the Commonwealth. I am only giving the position as I know it to be. No matter what the cost, I know that if in that atmosphere the issue is put up: "You must vote to be in the Commonwealth, or you must vote to be in the Republic," even if the last calf and the last old cow had to be skinned, most of the people in this country would vote against the Commonwealth. It is keeping in power the present Government who have made this trouble as far as this country is concerned. I am not saying they are more blameworthy than Britain, but for the Government here, which allowed this trouble to start and develop, to put up this issue is the best help that can be given to President de Valera and the Fianna Fáil Party. That is what won the elections for them—"We stand for the right of self-determination of the Irish people."
We all do.
Then why circumscribe it by saying "remain in the Commonwealth"? President de Valera is as anxious to remain in the Commonwealth as Deputy MacDermot.
Hear, hear.
Sure, he is. If not, why does he not go out of it? He is not so foolish politically as Deputy MacDermot.
So foolish or so honest?
He will not say anything about it. That is the greatest asset President de Valera and the Fianna Fáil Party have when they go to the hustings.
You yourself are the only Republican in the House!
Never mind what I am. I am rubbing sore spots all round. I would strongly advise Deputy MacDermot to keep to the economic issue. He has said here that he stands for self-determination. Let it be self-determination. Do not tell me: "Now, my boy, you and I stand for self-determination, but you can only determine to remain in the Commonwealth." Where is the self-determination there?
Who said that?
He said that the best thing for the people of this country is to remain in the Commonwealth.
Did not the Deputy say that the best thing is to go into a Republic?
Where did I say that?
Whoever said it, there is as much circumscription in one as in the other.
But you have not heard me advocate looking for a Republic. The Minister for Defence fought and ran away and lived to fight another day for a Republic. When I say that, I do not say it with any disrespect to the Minister for Defence. As a compliment to him I just say this: I was speaking to a neighbour of his who is not now a political friend of his, and he said to me: "Well, surely, if there is one man who fought for old Ireland it is Frank Aiken." But the Minister for Defence, Deputy Aiken, may talk about a Republic as an ideal but he will not leave the woolsack; he will not leave the Front Bench, and I admire him for it, because if you are going to play the game of politics you should play it. When it comes to an election he can wave as high as he likes the flag "Up the Republic." Let Deputy Aiken go down O'Connell Street waving the flag "Up the Republic" and let Deputy MacDermot come after him waving the flag "Up the Commonwealth," but I should not like to be near Deputy MacDermot.
Flag or no flag.
Deputy MacDermot is making a mistake both for himself and for his Party. If, in the present political atmosphere in this country, you are going to appeal to the suffering agricultural community behind the cry: "Up the Commonwealth" you may as well take out the farmers and shoot them out of hand, because you are going to starve them to death. You are going to put them out of business by advocating a policy of that kind. There are some very technical matters which the Parliamentary Secretary, Deputy Hugo Flinn, mentioned here yesterday. He started by making suggestions, the effect of which were that the less you exported the less you had to import. He was going on making suggestions of that kind. He was very suggestive at that stage. I asked him whether he was making that as a positive statement. He said he was not, but that he would be glad to hear the Deputy on the matter. He will not hear the Deputy on the matter. I leave it to him to take his courage in both hands and make that as a positive statement. If he does so in this House I will be very soon after him. He also said it was stated that we were not paying our way and that we had an adverse trade balance for ten years, but still we were carrying on. I asked him had we really an adverse balance. He said no, only a visible adverse balance. Deputy MacDermot, I think, stated that he was informed by somebody whom he took as an authority on it that we have a real adverse trade balance of about £10,000,000. Fortunately, I have something here which will shed some light on it. This is the Economist of the 21st July, 1934. It is dealing with the Irish Free State and its growing passive trade balance:—
"The increase in the passive trade balance," it states, "is very disquieting, especially as the tendency is in the direction of a continuing increase, and the question must be asked whether the total balance of payments has not already become unfavourable. The invisible imports and exports of the Free State have been officially estimated more than once, but the published Estimates are, admittedly, imperfect. The latest figures which refer to the year 1933 show an income from abroad of about £15,000,000, and remittances abroad from the Free State of about £5,000,000. The adverse balance on invisible account is, therefore, about £10,000,000, and is not nearly sufficient to offset the unfavourable trade balance. If the figures are correct, the Free State must be living seriously beyond its income."
I commend that to the study of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance, Deputy Hugo Flinn. For a number of years we had a favourable invisible trade balance. During the war years, up to, I think, 1931, we had a visible trade balance. There were no figures published for 1922 and I do not know whether the figures for 1923 were published or not. But the first published figures after the civil war showed an adverse visible trade balance and that has been on the whole increasing since. But that was more than offset by the favourable invisible balance. If what I have read to you is correct—and it is very seldom that an incorrect statement can be attributed to a journal of the repute of the Economist—we are living beyond our means. I accept the statement of the Journal as true. The Journal then goes on to state:
"The net sterling reserves of the banks continued to increase until the first quarter of 1933, when they took a downward turn, which has continued unchecked until the present time, the decline in these reserves between the first quarter of 1933 and 1934 being about £10,000,000."
The reserves are leaving the banks and that is a very disquieting situation. I need not speak of the difficulty of raising money here as compared with Great Britain. At the present time no municipality can raise money here on favourable terms. I notice a big fall in the money allocated for housing—nearly £3,000,000. The Minister for Local Government and Public Health is a very strong advocate of expensive house-building. He and many others of his Party throughout the country are very strong advocates of extensive cottage schemes. Might I ask him where the money is to come from? Up to the 1st October last we provided local authorities with no money under 5¼ per cent. It is now 4¼. In Great Britain money can be got for less than 3 per cent. As we know to our cost, it cannot be got here at anything like that figure. We have learned that in the experiment tried a few days ago. The difficulties here are mounting up and I am afraid we will soon be faced with the cumulative effect of these difficulties.
There is an increase, I notice, in the Agricultural Vote and there is a diminution on the agricultural grant of £400,000. We were told by the Minister that there would be some legislation dealing with agricultural grants. I hope that legislation will be in the direction of complete derating. It is very wrongly assumed that relief of rates should be given only in cases where there is a certain amount of tillage. I till all my land, and I do not agree with that condition. Derating has been given to me on the basis that I have no rates to pay but it is not a good principle. You must consider agriculture as a whole. In many parts of the country one farmer is the market for the other farmer. If one farmer has derating and the other has not, then in the intermixing of the economy of the locality the whole local community has to bear the cost of the rates on the land that is not derated.
It is not given on that basis.
There is a motion on the Paper giving a full opportunity for the discussion of rates on agricultural land. The Deputy cannot anticipate that and continue to debate it on this Bill.
Deputy Smith says it is not given on that basis at all.
It is given on the basis of employment.
In conclusion, I just want to make a remark in answer to the question put by Deputy Hugo Flinn. He asked were we going to oppose the growing of sugar beet and the production of sugar; were we going to oppose the tax on butter; were we going to say that the price of bacon was too high and that all these taxes should be reduced. It was the Government of which he is a member that imposed these taxes, and it is for the Deputy to justify them. The tax on butter is a real tax. Without going into detail, I would say that that tax could be remitted and the producers would get as much for their produce as they are now getting if the Government settled the economic war. What they are losing on their calves and the replacement of cows is more than offset by the increase they get in connection with milk and by the increase in the price of butter as it is done artificially under the Butter Act. The same applies to bacon, but the general discussion on bacon can well be postponed to another occasion.
I am sorry that Deputy Belton has seen fit to imply that there is a certain lack of patriotism in the attitude of the Opposition on the subject of the economic dispute with Great Britain.
On a point of order. I did not say anything of the kind. I never mentioned the Opposition while I was speaking. Let everyone stand on his own feet.
I am glad to hear that no such suggestion was made.
None whatever.
I deduced it perhaps wrongly from remarks the Deputy made with regard to the mandate alleged to have been given for the economic war——
It was given.
——and the absence of national unity in dealing with the question of the economic war with which, I understood, he was reproaching the Opposition. I do not know that it is worth while to spend any length of time examining the statement that there was a mandate for the economic war; but I do just wonder when it is that Deputy Belton supposes that that mandate was given. Certainly not at the general election of 1932——
Agreed.
——because at that time the Fianna Fáil Party confidently asserted that they could withhold the annuities without causing an economic war; nor do I think was it at the General Election of 1933.
The war was on then.
At that time they assured the electors that they only had to be returned to power again to effect an immediate settlement. There remain then only the local elections.
That is a bitter pill.
That is what got the new leader to-day.
Whether the local elections can be regarded as a mandate for the economic war is at least a highly disputable question into which I do not propose to enter. But if there were a thousand mandates for a policy that I believed to be bad for the country, I should still go on opposing that policy.
So would I.
While that is the situation, and while we believe the Government's policy in relation to this dispute is bad for the country—we oppose it and denounce it now just as we did from the beginning—we have done nothing to impede any effort at a settlement. On the contrary, we have encouraged every effort at a settlement. Behind the scenes many members of the Opposition have worked very hard to help the Government to secure a settlement at various times in the course of the economic war. In such matters as attempting to get an international tribunal instead of an imperial tribunal, and on the matter of the isolation of the financial dispute from the national issue, members of the Opposition have exerted themselves to the extent that it would be proper for members of an Opposition to do; they have exerted themselves to try and help on towards a state of things that would enable the Government to bring this disaster to a conclusion.
Deputy Belton is very confident that it is possible to isolate the financial dispute from the other causes of difference between us and Great Britain. I wonder on what he bases that confidence. It is possible that the thing could be managed; I would like it very much to be managed. I would like the financial dispute to be treated as something quite separate, but I am afraid that the evidence of the speeches of British Ministers is against Deputy Belton on that point.
Why accommodate them?
What Deputy Belton means by accommodating them is not clear to me. You have to face facts. If it is true that the British are refusing to deal with the financial dispute in isolation, it will not help us in any way to shut our eyes to the disposition of the British. We have to take cognisance of it.
Are we sure that they refuse?
I have said it is just possible that the thing could be isolated. If it could be isolated no one would welcome it more than myself, but the balance of evidence is, in fact, against Deputy Belton on that point.
There is another matter distinct from the financial dispute, and that is that our trade relations with Great Britain are affected by the new British policy of protection for agriculture. Even if we got the whole financial question isolated and disposed of we would still be face to face with that question of trade relationship, a question that, undoubtedly, cannot be severed from the matter of our constitutional relationship with Great Britain. Therefore, we are not raising a hare unnecessarily when we say that the time has come when the Irish people and the Irish farmers must stop doing what Deputy Belton has so amusingly described to us this evening, must stop funking the national issue and going on indefinitely calling themselves Republicans on the strict understanding that we will do nothing so stupid as to set up a Republic. The time has come when in this matter honesty is, undoubtedly, the best policy. I am, of course, aware that there are a number of unpleasant recollections and ideas associated in the minds of the people of this country with the British connection, and no wonder. But the same was true of South Africa, and if statesmen in South Africa had gone on indefinitely with the sort of hypocrisy which Deputy Belton is recommending to us here to-night, the relations between South Africa and Great Britain would be very much less satisfactory than they are, and the prosperity of South Africa would be very much less than it is.
The Deputy is aware that General Hertzog said years ago that they would remain in the Commonwealth while it suited South Africa to remain in the Commonwealth. There is no hypocrisy about what I say.
That is exactly the attitude I recommend for this country.
They are not raising the issue, and you want the issue raised here—that is the whole trouble.
I am raising no issue that is not absolutely vital to the whole of our economic and national life at the present moment.
All right.
If we want to get satisfactory relations, sensible relations, with the people across the water, we have to face that issue, and if we want to breed among ourselves a spirit of honesty and courage, we have got to raise that issue. If the people of this country really want a Republic as badly as Deputy Belton says they do, then in God's name let us have it and not sit eternally on the fence or go parading down O'Connell Street, as Deputy Belton pictures us, with the green flag waving over our heads.
There is no danger of it being done.
I do not think that an extended discussion of the advantages or disadvantages of belonging to the Commonwealth would be appropriate to the present debate or else I would detain the House for a considerable time on it.
You are doing very well.
But, at any rate, it is not wholly irrelevant to it and I am glad that Deputy Belton raised it in the manner in which he did.
And not for the last time.
If there are unpleasant associations connected with the past history of this country in relation to Great Britain, so there were in the past history of South Africa, and if they can be replaced in South Africa by pleasant associations, they can be replaced here by pleasant associations.
But we must live them down before we put it to the issue. The Deputy wants to put it to the issue while passions are inflamed.
Deputy Belton has intervened several times in the course of my remarks, and I think I am not being bad humoured about it, but I would ask him not to interrupt me again unless he wishes actually to stand up and make a point of some substance, because, to tell the truth, it puts me out of my stride.
I am very sorry; I will not interrupt the Deputy any more.
Take him back into the Party.
To turn from Deputy Belton to Deputy Donnelly, Deputy Donnelly quoted Arthur Griffith and he was very scornful of the infidelity of this Party to the teachings of Arthur Griffith. It amused me a little bit that he seemed to consider references by Deputy McGilligan and others to the gap between Fianna Fáil promises and Fianna Fáil performances as nauseatingly trivial, whereas he attaches great importance to the alleged gap between the teachings of Arthur Griffith and the present policy of the Opposition. I do not know that it is fair to Arthur Griffith to associate his memory with a particular statement made at some particular time in his career. I do not know whether Arthur Griffith finished up his career as full-blown a protectionist as he was at one time. As a matter of fact, I was informed twice by the President of the Executive Council that Arthur Griffith had modified his views very considerably at the close of his career and that, at the time of the Treaty negotiations, he was actually prepared to include perpetual free trade with England as one of the items of the Treaty. Whether the President of the Executive Council was correct in that statement or not, I have no means of judging, but, at any rate, I am not prepared to accept Deputy Donnelly's assurances as to what Mr. Griffith stood for at the close of his career.
Even if I were, I do not believe it is a sensible way to form one's outlook on present day problems to go back and study the text book of any individual 20, 30 and 40 years ago. We have got to face problems as they come and to use the best of our judgment on them and not to be afraid of offending against some authority, but to use our minds for the purpose for which they were given to us. I think this this country does undoubtedly require a good deal of protection for infant industries, but I am not prepared to go the length of saying that everything we can produce we should produce, no matter what the economic cost of producing it may be, and I have yet to have any evidence that the Government, when starting a new industry here, devotes attention to that aspect of the case. I do not know whether they make any attempt at calculations about the cost of the new industry. If somebody, as Deputy Belton was saying yesterday, who may be a man of straw, who may have no record of success in business at all and who may not have even a character of a very elevated kind, wishes to start an industry in this country and is able to exercise a little political pressure, my impression is that the Government come out with tariffs and money to help him without further inquiry or calculation.
That statement shows just how much the Deputy has done for Irish industries.
What bearing that could possibly have on what I have done for Irish industry is beyond me to imagine, but if the Government do enter into any calculations as to the economic cost of the industries they are introducing, they do not take the House into their confidence. I have never known them on a single occasion to stand up and to try seriously to show, say, with regard to such a proposal as the manufacture of industrial alcohol here, how they have arrived at their calculations that economically it is sound and that financially and as a business proposition it is sound in the interests of the country as a whole to get it established. Provided there is somebody who wants to do it and they calculate that it will give so much employment, they go ahead with it, without taking into account a great number of very important factors that ought to be taken into account.
Deputy Donnelly, as I have said, objected very much to our comparing Fianna Fáil statements about the proper expenditure in this country before they came into office with what they are doing now. I cannot honestly see why he should object to that comparison being made, because it is a perfectly relevant and a perfectly proper one. He says that at the last general election no delusive promises were made. Does he wish to imply that at the last general election all the promises of the previous general election were ipso facto wiped out, because if they were not wiped out, we are absolutely justified in continuing to reproach the Party opposite with the difference between what they are doing and what they promised? He asserted that whenever the Opposition challenged the authority of the present Government to represent the opinion of this country, their speeches were placarded around all the cities of England. It has never been my fortune to see any of these placards on any journeys I have made through England. My impression is that the people of England care mighty little about what is happening in this country——
Not twopence.
——and that Ireland is, I am sorry to say, associated almost completely in the minds of the British people, to a degree that ought to please the Party opposite enormously, with President de Valera. President de Valera and the Irish Free State are regarded as identical now for all purposes, on the opposite side of the water, whether that is a matter for congratulation or the contrary. I am sorry the Minister for Finance is not here because I should like to put a few questions to him. Except for Deputy Belton and Deputy Donnelly, I really intended only to rise to put a few questions and not to make a speech at all. I wanted to ask for one thing what is going to constitute victory in the economic war? We sometimes hear that we are on the brink of victory; sometimes we hear that victory has already been won; sometimes we hear that victory would be won but for the unpatriotic conduct of the Opposition; and sometimes, on the contrary, we are told that, owing to the British Minister of Agriculture, victory is now impossible, if victory includes any sort of recapture of the British market. What do Deputies opposite mean by victory in the economic war? How are we going to know it when we have got it? Or, have we got it; and, if so, what are the signs of it? I think the country is entitled to a little enlightenment from the Fianna Fáil philosophers as to what they really mean and as to what their hopes are in regard to the triumph that awaits them.
How could we expect you to understand what victory would mean when you did not know you were beaten after you had been beaten three times?
I think that interruption was hardly worth making. Another question I should like to ask is, whether I am wrong in the statement I was making a few moments ago, that the Government do not really go to the trouble of applying any test as to whether a new industry is an economic proposition or not? I shall like the Minister to say if I am wrong in that and I shall be glad to withdraw if I am. If a test is applied, I suggest that in future the House should be given the benefit of knowing what the test is on each occasion when a new industry is started after getting assistance whether in the form of a tariff or a trade loan.
Another question I should like to put to the Minister is one I put to him yesterday. What is his present philosophy about the whole matter of Government expenditure? Is he in the expanding frame of mind or the contracting frame of mind? Does he still hold by what he said in 1932, when he represented the then great expenditure, which was less than our present great expenditure, as being of an emergency nature that this country could not afford to continue permanently? Or is he in the mood that he was in last year when he talked of the necessity for expanding and extending and asked the House not to stint in the provision of money? Is it the Government's view that we can spend ourselves into prosperity and that there is to be no limit to that process?
Finally, I should like to put to him a question I also put to him yesterday, and that is, what he means by a normal Budget? When he says the Budget of 1936 will be a normal Budget, what exactly does he mean? What are to be the signs and tokens of a normal Budget? In talking about a normal Budget, is he assuming that we shall be in the Commonwealth or outside of it? Because, if normality for the Fianna Fáil Party involves remaining in the Commonwealth, I think that would be very interesting for the people of the country to know. If, on the other hand, he is supposing that we shall be outside the Commonwealth, I think that that will have a very considerable effect both on decreasing the revenue that he can count upon and increasing the expenditure that he will be called upon to provide for.
The House will observe that in the Press on Monday we were told by the Minister for Finance, speaking at a function in Dublin on Saturday night, that he had rosy anticipations of a balanced Budget and a surplus on the financial working for the current year. That was a rather interesting announcement for the Minister to make and, on the whole, a very welcome announcement. But there are some questions which I should like to address to the Minister following an announcement of that kind. In, I think, October, 1933, we were told by the President that it was the intention of the Government to make provision in the 1934 Budget for a scheme of widows' and orphans' pensions and, in the 1934 Budget, provision was made to the extent of, I think, £250,000 for pensions to widows and orphans. It is now ten months since that Budget was passed through the House and 18 months since the President first made his declaration on the matter. Yet, in spite of the fact that we are assured by the Minister that we are to have a balanced Budget this year and a surplus on this year's working, there is no sign of the introduction of the Widows' and Orphans' Pensions Bill. I know it may be urged that the Vice-President has indicated that a Bill to provide such pensions will be introduced before Easter. But, it seems to me that the delay in introducing that Bill is wholly unwarranted from the point of view of time and wholly unwarranted, furthermore, if the delay was in any way related to the shortage of money, or an anticipated deficit on this year's working. In view of the rosy declarations by the Minister, the assurance of financial stability and the prognostications of a surplus, I hope that no further delay will take place in introducing that very necessary Bill.
The Deputy should know that legislation may not be advocated in discussing the Central Fund Bill.
I am quite aware of that. What I am trying to ventilate on this Bill is the fact that we were promised legislation, and I am criticising, constructively, I hope, the Government for having promised one thing in their Budget and not having acted upon it during the ensuing ten months. To that extent I am criticising the Government for not implementing a promise previously made. We were assured then that the provision of £250,000 in the Budget was definitely earmarked for widows' and orphans' pensions.
The Deputy has been informed that legislation may not be advocated on this Bill. Having made his point, he should let it rest there.
Am I not entitled to criticise the fact that £250,000 voted in the Budget is now to find its way back into the Exchequer while there are hungry women and children looking for that £250,000 which this House voted to them?
The matter before the House is a Bill to enable the moneys voted yesterday to be drawn from the Central Fund. Administration of the various departments concerned is the proper matter of debate. It would be difficult to discuss the administration of a Bill which has not yet been introduced.
Am I not entitled to criticise the Department of Local Government and Public Health for its failure to utilise £250,000 made available to it by this House?
The Deputy must desist from advocating legislation.
I am quite prepared to bow to your ruling, but I do think——
The Deputy will have further opportunities on other Bills.
I opened by saying that this legislation was promised 18 months ago, and it is no consolation to widows and orphans that a Deputy has an opportunity of complaining. What I want to endeavour to do is to have the Bill introduced with the utmost possible expedition, and there I leave the matter.
One of the Departments that will participate in the Vote on Account is the Department of Industry and Commerce. Here again the Minister's anticipated surplus seems to have a close relation to the method of administering the Unemployment Assistance Act by that Department. We were told by the Minister for Industry and Commerce some time ago that there were 22,000 appeals awaiting decision by the Unemployment Appeals Committee. We were told in the same discussion and by the same Minister that it would be nearly two years before they would be all disposed of. Now we have a declaration from the Minister for Finance that a Budget surplus is anticipated, and, in face of that fact, I think some of the money might be spent, not alone in constructing machinery to expedite the decision of the 22,000 appeals, but that the Minister and the Government generally should recognise that the first claim on that surplus is not relief from taxation for wealthy income tax and super-tax payers but the payment of reasonable rates of unemployment assistance benefit to beneficiaries under that Act. I hope that in the coming Budget the Minister will make provision to ensure that there will be a lifting up of the people on the lower rungs of the ladder before there is any relief from taxation for people who are already on the top of the ladder.
I referred on previous occasions to the growing evil of employing excessive female and juvenile labour in some of the new factories which are being established. I want to ascertain from the Department of Industry and Commerce what their proposals are for dealing with that grave evil. Questions addressed to the Minister elicited replies indicating that the whole system of factory inspection is not only antiquated but hopelessly inadequate. The Minister told us that the percentage of factories inspected by factory and workshops inspectors was as low as 33 per cent. We cannot have a healthy and a satisfactory industrial system as long as there is an inadequate staff to carry on the regular inspection of these factories. Inspections which were originally designed as a safeguard for industrial workers are now being utilised as a means by which employers may be excused for failing to provide the necessary safeguards. I stated previously, and I think the Department of Industry and Commerce will now be compelled to admit that my statements were absolutely correct, that many of the industries which have been helped by tariffs are employing as high as 90 per cent. of female and juvenile labour. One can readily perceive what are the prospects of adult men securing employment when owners of factories are allowed to recruit female and juvenile labour to that lop-sided extent. I have charged that in a number of factories the rates of wages paid are diabolically low and the hours intolerably long, while the structural and hygienic contions are such as would do no credit whatever to any civilised community.
I got an instance from my own constituency, where seven men are employed for 13 hours daily, six days a week, for the magnificent wage of 33/-, and side by side with the seven men are five youths, whose ages range from 17 to 19 years, who receive the magnificent sum of 5/- each per week. As if that were not bad enough, the person responsible for the establishment of that factory has a State guarantee of £3,000 without a single assurance being extracted from him that he would pay decent rates of wages in his factory. I want the Minister for Industry and Commerce to tell the House what is proposed in order to curb that particular form of sweating. I think the House will have little difficulty in recognising that to employ young men from 17 to 19 years of age for 5/- a week is nothing but unmitigated sweating. We should have from the Department some indication of its intentions to deal with that grave problem, because every day it is neglected vested interests are growing up, and entrenching themselves. When the State comes ultimately to deal with the problem it will find itself confronted with these vested interests, and they will be so strongly entrenched that it will be much more difficult to dislodge them than by tackling the problem at the present time.
Having read some recent declarations by owners of factories, and by chairmen of companies, if these statements are analysed, one cannot help getting the impression that many of these people thought tariffs were imposed for the particular benefit of individual manufacturers. When proposals for tariffs were going through this House, the general view was that they were to be imposed, not in the interests of manufacturers, not even exclusively in the interests of the workers, but for the purpose of strengthening the whole nation. Many of the people who own factories appear to imagine that tariffs were imposed for their benefit; that the purpose of these tariffs was to assist in shutting out competitors, and to enable them to collar the full benefits which accrued. There has been no question, in many cases, of sharing any of the consequent benefits of the tariffs, no question of voluntary increases in wages, and no question of voluntary reduction of hours. Anything that could be wrung out of some of these manufacturers was wrung out of them only by militant trade union action, showing that their whole attitude towards the problem of tariffs is one of regarding the tariffs as something imposed for their benefit and not as a means of garnering the fruits for the whole nation, and in particular, for those who supply the needs of the nation. I should like the Government to tell these manufacturers that the imposition of tariffs was for the purpose of strengthening our industries and enabling us to build up a healthy, industrial position, and to enable the best possible conditions to prevail, in the matter of hours, circumstances of work, and wages to be given to those that the nation desired to safeguard against the low wage standards associated with foreign countries, as well as against dumping.
The Government has acted much too generously towards manufacturers in permitting them to garner the full benefits of the tariffs, and in not insisting that these people should be compelled to share with the community as a whole, in the form of reduced prices, and in particular with the workers who produce the commodities, the undoubted benefits which have followed the imposition of tariffs. I am not denying that there are decent manufacturers who are only too willing to pay decent rates of wages and to observe decent conditions of labour. Decent manufacturers will support what I am saying, because they know perfectly well that their biggest enemies are not their employees or the trade unions of which their employees are members, but the gentlemen operating in back-lanes or in back kitchens, who pay low rates of wages and compel employees to work for long hours. They are a graver menace to the stability of well-established industries paying decent wages than any other menace these industries could be confronted with. I hope whoever is replying for the Government will tell the House that it is the intention to face up to that problem at an early date, and to do something to ensure for the workers and for the community some of the benefits that have resulted from tariffs, instead of letting some of the rapacious manufacturers put all the profits which have followed from the imposition of tariffs into their own pockets. I hope, further, that having assisted those manufacturers by the imposition of tariffs the Government will do something to insist that the conditions of employment in their factories will be very much better than they are to-day.
There was a matter raised in the course of this debate, namely, the question of the economic war and the Government's responsibility for starting it and, as some Deputies suggested, its responsibility for ending it. The one question that was asked more frequently than any other was: what were the Government doing to settle the economic war, and the one advice given to the Government more frequently than any other was to settle the economic war. But, although the Government was asked what they proposed to do to settle the economic war and was advised to settle it at the earliest possible moment, nobody attempted to show in what way and on what conditions it could be settled. I think I am entitled to ask some of the Deputies who took that particular line in what way they would propose to settle it?
We will tell you that when we get back.
Then you will never tell it to me because you will never get back.
We will, and you know it.
The Deputy may whistle to keep up his courage, but he knows that he will never sit on these benches again.
Wait and see.
The Deputy and his Party are now like Humpty-Dumpty— all the king's horses and all the king's men will not bring them to sit on these benches again.
You are a nice selection over there, anyway.
I want to know from Deputy O'Leary in what way he would propose to settle the economic war. The Deputy is very voluble with his interjections. Would he interject now and tell us in what way he would settle the economic war; in what way he would go about settling it?
As Deputy Cosgrave told you the other night, it is your job to clear up the mess.
Would the Deputy tell us how he would approach the question? He heard Deputies on his own benches give the advice that the economic war should be settled. I want to know from him in what way he would settle it or in what way his Party would propose to settle it. I think that is a fair question to address to a Party which has advised that there should be a speedy termination of the economic war.
Settle it in the way you made the coal-cattle pact by making a hash of it.
Would the Deputy or someone in the Party tell us in what way they would settle it without making a hash of it? Is it a fair question to ask the Deputy whether they would settle it by paying £5,250,000 a year to Britain?
Sure we are paying it.
Would the Deputy propose to end it by handing over the land annuities to Britain?
Sure we are paying them over.
You are paying a footpad's ransom, but you are not paying £5,250,000 voluntarily, and apparently the Deputy is incapable of distinguishing between the one and the other.
I have the experience of paying some of it, anyway.
Would the Deputy or some member of the Party tell us whether they would propose to settle the economic war by continuing to pay Britain voluntarily, and acknowledging as legally due the disputed moneys? Is that the way that the economic war is going to be settled? Is there anybody on the Opposition benches going to settle the economic war on that basis, of paying £5,250,000 of our own people's money voluntarily to another nation, for no other reason and with no more authority than that you are afraid of the superior force which that nation can exercise against you? Is that the way in which the economic war is going to be settled, or is it going to be settled by the restoration of the Oath, or by acknowledging that the Treaty is superior to the municipal law of the country, or by a combination of all three, namely, by putting the Treaty in a superior position and having ourselves permanently anchored to it, no matter how much our people may dislike its provisions, with the Oath back and the Treaty in a superior position and the £5,250,000 on top of that? Is it on that basis that the Party opposite want the economic war settled? Would they tell us what their proposals are for settling the economic war?
Deputy MacDermot told us that the members of the Opposition Party were anxious to assist the Government in trying to secure a settlement of the economic war, but on what basis? Can we not have a declaration from the Party opposite as to the way in which it would settle the economic war? After all, they should not have the slightest hesitation in telling us the basis on which they would settle it, because, in the 1933 General Election, Deputy Cosgrave, in an eleventh hour attempt to pull the political chestnuts out of the fire, announced to all and sundry that he would go over to Great Britain and get a settlement in two or three days. Has anybody asked Deputy Cosgrave what kind of settlement he would get in two or three days, or ascertained from him on what basis the economic war was going to be settled in two or three days? Was Deputy O'Leary curious enough, during the last two or three years, to ascertain what Deputy Cosgrave's scheme was, or what his formula was for settling the economic war in two or three days? At any rate, the two or three days' promised settlement of the economic war held very little allurement for the people, and apparently they were not going to be put off with illusory promises of that kind. Some of them, perhaps, remembered that in 1923 the Party opposite sent representatives to Britain to negotiate a settlement of the land annuities, and the millstone that was then put around their necks.
That is not in the Vote on Account.
But these issues were raised, and I suggest that I ought not to be completely muzzled in replying to them.
It is not muzzling the Deputy to prevent him from going back to 1923.
I will not stay there very long. Deputy Belton took us to Manchuria and Japan and was, with difficulty, brought back to Dublin. When the Party opposite say that they could get a settlement of the economic war in two days, surely I am entitled to ask on what basis they propose to negotiate a settlement, whether it is to be the same kind of settlement that they negotiated in 1923, or is it to be the kind of settlement that they negotiated in the heads for the ultimate financial settlement? Is that the kind of settlement that is going to be offered to the country by the Party opposite? I understand that the Party opposite, one section of it, is holding a convention these days. Surely it ought to be possible to get a declaration from them as to the way in which they would settle the economic war: on what basis and at what price, whether the Oath is to go back into the Constitution, whether the Treaty is to be made superior to the municipal law of the country, and whether we are to resume the export, voluntarily, of the £5,250,000 that properly and morally belongs to our own people? We are entitled to have an answer from the Party opposite as to what is their suggested basis for a settlement of the economic war, or is Deputy MacDermot nearer right when he has got his foot on the loud political pedal? Deputy MacDermot is taking great pains to ensure that he will not discuss very closely the financial issues involved in this dispute. He would like to create a fog around the relations of this country with the Commonwealth. Does the Party opposite want to settle this economic war on a financial basis or does it want to settle this dispute with Great Britain on the basis of bartering the national rights for exemption from a financial liability which had no moral or legal sanction? Deputy MacDermot in every speech he makes in this House and in every speech he makes outside the House tells the country that the only thing that matters is its association with the British Commonwealth. Deputy MacDermot's line is to advise the people that they will be in permanent, inescapable poverty, that poverty is their destiny, unless they are prepared to stay in the British Commonwealth. I reject as apostasy advice of that kind. The Dane has not to remain in the British Commonwealth in order to trade with Great Britain. The Dane has not to take an oath of allegiance in order to trade with Great Britain. The Dane has not to pay for his own land to any other country in order to trade with Great Britain. He is getting, as Deputy Belton suggested, an extra price for his produce in Great Britain. Neither the French nor the German—no other free people in Europe as a matter of fact—has to belong to the British Commonwealth in order to be able to trade with Great Britain. The one country in Europe that Deputy MacDermot selects for inclusion in the British Commonwealth, against its will and as the price of its national existence, is the country of which he is a citizen. That is strange advice from a Party which says it is acting in the best interests of the Irish people.
In any event, where does the Party opposite stand now in respect of the payment of the disputed moneys to Great Britain. Their titular leader— now deposed—declared in the County Monaghan a short time ago that neither this nor any future Government would pay the land annuities to Great Britain again. Does that statement represent the policy of the Party opposite or has that statement, like the leader who made it, been repudiated? If that statement still holds the field— it does not appear to have been officially repudiated by the Party—on what basis are they going to negotiate with Great Britain in their attempted settlement of the economic war? I seriously suggest to Deputy McDermot in particular that in the speeches which he feels he must make throughout the country, week-end after week-end, he should give less attention to the national destiny. Deputy MacDermot knows too little about it to be able to talk with any authority upon it. If he feels he must make some criticism of this Government or of the Labour Party, let him, as an Irishman, let Britain make her own case for the payment of these moneys to her. If Britain thinks she has a case, Deputy MacDermot might well let Britain make that case and spare us the miserable and disedifying spectacle of an Irishman making Britain's case better than Britain can make her own case.
I have always regarded this economic war as just another outburst of agelong tyranny by a powerful country against a relatively helpless people. The economic war, launched by the British Government in July, 1932, was just another one of these attempts by a powerful neighbour to teach, as she would say, manners to the Irish people. The economic war was launched to try to curb the national, fiscal and economic development of our people. However, our people, in spite of all the pressure and coercion used through the instrumentality of the economic war, have been able to develop nationally, fiscally and industrially. They have been able to do that while deprived of the services and the enthusiasm which, in a crisis of this kind, they have a right to expect from the Party opposite. This economic war is just another attempt to dictate to our people. The authors of it still think that this is one of their Crown Colonies. They still think that it is another Lancashire or another Yorkshire, but the inherent patriotism of our people has shown that they are prepared to suffer many privations and many hardships rather than surrender to any attempt to dictate their national, economic or fiscal policy. The Party opposite might well take a lesson from the experience of the last two years. They can see clearly now that our people are prepared to suffer hardships—even grave hardships— rather than permit an outside nation to dictate to them by force, to attempt to compel them to do by force what they dare not attempt to justify on the basis of either reason or justice.
The Government has been asked to settle this economic war. I would welcome, and have always declared that I would welcome, an honourable settlement of the economic war—a settlement which would enable the people of the two islands to live in peace and to trade to their mutual advantage. I think that the geographical position of the two islands is such as to destine the people, even against their wills, to live as friendly neighbours. There can be no friendship and no cordiality so long as one of the two neighbouring nations attempts to impose its will on the other. If the British Government seriously desires peace and mutual trading relations with this country, they can have that peace and those mutual trading relations by recognising the equality of this nation with their own nation. Our people have no imperial designs on Great Britain. Our people do not desire one square foot of British soil. All we ask is that, as the Irish nation, we should be permitted to exist as a free and unfettered nation and not be curbed by the purely material and military designs of a powerful next-door neighbour. This Government, if it can, will settle the economic war on honourable terms, but it ought not to settle the economic war on any dishonourable terms. It ought not to put the nation's national rights on the block and allow them to be auctioned merely for the privilege of being in the British Commonwealth —an objective so dear to the heart of Deputy MacDermot. It ought not to allow the nation's rights to be sold for any purely imperial mess of pottage. While that effort should be made, and I believe will be made by the Government, to secure an honourable settlement of the economic war, there will be short shrift awaiting any Government which attempts to settle this economic war on terms which are dishonourable to the Irish nation and which would continue to place it in bondage. I believe the Government would welcome an opportunity of settling the economic war on honourable terms, but I would say to the Government: "No matter how long the economic war may have to last, no matter what new tyranny Britain wants to visit our people with, the overwhelming majority of the Irish people would prefer to stand up to and meet that tyranny rather than see the nation pawned, either nationally or materially, in the interests of a more powerful neighbour.
There was one rather hopeful glimmer, I thought, in the rather interesting speech made by Deputy Donnelly. In referring to incidents that occurred on St. Patrick's Day—even though his condemnation was of the mildest kind—Deputy Donnelly went so far as to refer to them as regrettable incidents. That attitude on the part of Deputy Donnelly might lead one to hope that Deputies opposite, and especially the Deputies in front of him on the Front Bench, might eventually come to the point that they would call a spade a spade, that they would call blackguardism by its proper name and deal with it accordingly. That was the mild hope I got from Deputy Donnelly's very mild condemnation of the blackguardly things that occurred in different parts of the country on St. Patrick's Day last. I can assure Deputy Donnelly that if the time comes when the Government take their courage in their hands and deal with that kind of thing, we will have no complaint to make about any money they may ask for here in order to deal with such a situation.
Deputy Donnelly tried to make us believe that the increase in the Vote for the Gárda Síochána was due entirely to the fact that last year for a period, as he put it, lorryloads of men wearing blue shirts were going around from town to town—again using his words—swelling some of our meetings. Deputy Donnelly knows, as well as I do, that that is not so. Deputy Donnelly knows, as well as I do, that before these men went around to those meetings there had been a deliberate attempt made by a certain section in this community to prevent our people from holding a public meeting at all—and that was with the assent of the Government or with something very like the assent of the Government—and that it was only when we, through force of circumstances, dealt with the situation ourselves, by organising the youth of the country to safeguard the interests of free speech, that the Government began to sit up and take notice. He knows that it was then that the Government began to give lip service themselves to the rights of free speech. It was then that we had the dictum from, I think, the President himself that he could not make persons or causes popular.
Deputy Donnelly went on to refer to the old exploded yarn that there had been a conspiracy on the part of Deputies on this side of the House to advocate non-payment of rates and non-payment of annuities, but the only case he could cite was a speech by Deputy Minch, which Deputy Minch repudiated in the House. At any time, and from the very first time that there was any suggestion of any such campaign, it was repudiated, and strongly repudiated, by every responsible Deputy on this side of the House.
In dealing with the Vote, there is one matter to which I should like to draw the attention of the House, especially in view of the again attempted misrepresentation that has been made by the Party opposite generally, and particularly, yesterday evening, in Deputy Briscoe's speech. Deputy Briscoe spoke as if they, on that side of the House, were the only protagonists of breaking up huge ranch lands and placing the tenant farmers of the country on them. Deputy Briscoe referred to our supposed advocacy of a 1,000 acre farm with a man and a dog. I should like to know from Deputy Briscoe when he heard any Deputy on this side of the House advocating any such policy. Has he been asleep for the last twelve years? Did he never hear of the Land Act of 1923? Was he in the House two or three weeks ago when various Deputies on this side of the House got, in reply to various Parliamentary questions, the figures both of persons settled on the land and of the acreage of land divided amongst them during the years from 1925 to 1934, inclusive? What did those figures show? They showed that in any one of the years, from 1925 to 1931, more people were placed on the land and more land was divided amongst the people than in any one of the years since Fianna Fáil came into office. The reply to the various questions is reported in the Official Debates, in the form of a table, in Volume 54, 13th February, 1934; column 1834. The figures are given for every county in Ireland, and the totals are illuminating. For the year 1925 there were 374 persons placed on holdings, and that constituted a division of 12,726 acres of land divided. It must be remembered that the 1923 Land Act was becoming effective only then.
In the year 1926, 684 persons were placed on the land, and 22,835 acres were divided amongst them. In 1927, 864 persons were placed on the land, and 31,643 acres were divided amongst them. In the year 1928, 982 persons were placed on the land, and 31,480 acres were divided amongst them. In 1929, 711 persons were placed on the land, and 23,276 acres were divided amongst them. In 1930, 1,013 persons were placed on the land, and 27,553 acres were divided amongst them. In 1931—the last year we were in office— 614 persons were placed on the land, and 23,122 acres were divided amongst them. That was, practically, the smallest figure from 1926 onwards, 1925 being the year when the 1923 Act was only coming into its stride. Then comes the year 1932 when Fianna Fáil had been nine months in office. In the year 1932, 456 persons were placed on 18,484 acres, a fall of 150 persons and some 5,000 acres from the year before. In the year 1933, 517 persons were placed on 15,685 acres. Then there was a drop in the year 1934, only 485 people being placed on 14,000 odd acres. I do not know how Deputy Briscoe can reconcile those figures, given in reply to questions as to the activity of Fianna Fáil in placing people on the land, with his statement last evening that we were the persons who were the advocates of the ranch whereas the people on those benches were for breaking up the ranches. We have not yet seen any great signs of it. I hope we will see them during the coming year. I am hoping that the fact that the Vote for the Land Commission shows under Item 1, Improvement of Estates, an increase of £80,000 is an index that the dilatoriness which has been shown in the past three years is going to stop, and that there is going to be a forward move in the division of land and the placing of people on the land.
There is another fallacy into which even Deputy Belton fell; it has so often been reiterated from that side of the House. As one Deputy, I think it was Deputy O'Sullivan, said here this evening, the Fianna Fáil Party are excellent propagandists. They know that if you say a thing sufficiently often it is bound to stick, at least some of it is bound to stick. They try and hold themselves out before the people as being essentially the tillage Party, in contrast with the Party on this side of the House. They refer with sneers to the bullock, as if the tillage policy and the bullock were absolutely inconsistent. The fact of the matter, as the Minister for Agriculture has come to realise and as he has mentioned in the House, is that the more you develop your tillage probably the more you will also develop your live-stock trade. At any rate there is no inconsistency between a tillage policy and a live-stock policy. As I say, Deputy Belton has become imbued with the statement. It has been so often said from that side of the House that he assumed that this Party stood for something other than a tillage policy.
The one outstanding thing in the administration of the Government during the year, to which I wish specially to refer, was their treatment of the Gaeltacht. At the moment I do not intend—because I know it would be improper—to go into any details of the Estimate dealing with Gaeltacht services and allied services, but I think I must refer to it to the extent of saying that the money provided every year since Fianna Fáil came into power shows a very considerable decrease. No quibbles can explain away the fact that the nonprovision of money in the Estimates for the year must mean that there is an intention of contracting the activities which were formerly carried on, or certainly that there is no intention of making any attempt to expand them. As far as Gaeltacht housing is concerned we had a great "how do" there last year when after two years ballyragging from this side of the House a new Gaeltacht Housing Bill was brought in, bringing the sum of money available for houses in the Gaeltacht up to £650,000, which was voting in effect £300,000 in addition to the £350,000 provided in the 1929-1931 Acts. It had been pointed out time and time again to the Government, and indeed it had not been denied, that the delay in bringing in that Act meant that there were, to put it mildly, at least hundreds of applications awaiting sanction here at headquarters. I do not think it would be an exaggeration if I said that there must have been at least 1,000 cases held up awaiting sanction because of the delay in bringing in that Act. The Act was brought in and was given very great praise by Deputies on that side of the House, who, I suppose, expected that the money was going to be made available, and made quickly available, for those whose applications had been held up for two years. What is the position? After all the delay, the provision in this year's Estimate for Gaeltacht housing is only a miserly sum of £45,000. Surely to goodness there is no need for the slow motion in dealing with Gaeltacht housing that that £45,000 displays.
The 1929 Act, if I remember rightly, was passed only in December, 1929. That Act made £250,000 available. All the machinery had to be created for the administration of the Act—the machinery in the country and the machinery in the office—so you may take it that at least six months of the year 1930 had elapsed before it could be said that the Act was in working order. But when it began to work it worked with smoothness and rapidity, so that in the autumn of 1931 it was seen that a further £100,000 would be necessary, and it was assumed that future requirements would be at the rate of £100,000 per annum.
On a point of order, will speakers from the Government Benches be allowed to deal with the statements which Deputy Lynch is now making with regard to the application of this Act?
Certainly.
Mr. Lynch
The Minister attempted criticising it before, and I think he made a hopeless failure of it. £250,000 had been spent in a year and nine months. A further £100,000 was made available, and that again was practically fully allocated early in 1932. That was the rate of speed at which the Gaeltacht Housing should have progressed. The whole attitude of the Minister for Finance on the matter is reflected in the present Vote. The case is plain here.
In the year 1933, in reply to my criticism of the Estimate, he said that we had spent the money too quickly. That is to say, we had spent this £350,000 too quickly in allocating it by way of sanction for the building and repair of houses in the Gaeltacht. That was the then attitude of the Minister for Finance. Obviously he has not since changed his attitude as this provision in the Estimate shows. I pointed out at the time or, I think, on last year's Estimate, that I was carrying out the wishes of the House in moving quickly in dealing with the allocation of money under the Gaeltacht Housing Act. I quoted speeches made on every side of the House advocating the speeding up of the allocation of the money which was available. Deputy Derrig, as he then was, was amongst those who advocated that very strongly. Deputy O'Connell, the then leader of the Labour Party, also urged it very strongly, and there were various other Deputies from the Gaeltacht who advocated it. Deputy Tubridy and yourself, Sir, in your capacity as Deputy for Galway strongly favoured that the money should be allocated quickly so that the building of houses should go forward speedily.
That attitude as to the speeding up of housing is now apparently reversed at the behest of the Minister for Finance. I said that I was not going to go into the lessening of expenditure in the various other services of the Gaeltacht because there would be an opportunity for doing that when a discussion on the Estimate proper comes before the House. I will then avail of that opportunity. But I should like to say that no explanation has been forthcoming during the year as to why there has been a big decrease in the money provided for rural industries. In quite recent months 17 of these little industrial centres throughout the country have been closed down. In Kerry four knitting centres and one weaving centre have been closed down. I am not going to say that the Minister was not, perhaps, justified in closing down a great many of these. I know that some of them, as far as I can gather, were not being availed of. For one reason or another girls in the locality did not take advantage of the facilities offered them in acquiring skill in these arts and earning something substantial for themselves. In Cork three knitting centres were closed down. In Cavan one knitting centre was closed down. That is not the Gaeltacht. In Galway there were three knitting centres closed down. In Donegal two knitting and two tweed centres were closed down. It may be that the Government have come to the conclusion that these are all wrong. If they have come to that conclusion they ought to tell us so and tell us what they are going to put in substitution. I think myself that the policy of the Government in closing down these centres is entirely wrong. I do not say that they would ever reach the stage when they would be strictly run on industrial lines and self-supporting——
I suggest to the Deputy that that matter might be discussed on the Estimates.
Mr. Lynch
Very well, I will merely say this: that I think the House ought to express its disapproval of the general tendency of the Government in singling out the Gaeltacht specially for its economies. In addition to closing down these centres, there has been a certain cutting both in the wages and in piece work, a cutting which I think was absolutely uncalled for. The other matters that one would be inclined to raise are strictly matters for the Estimate when it comes before the House and I will postpone what I have to say until then.
There is just one other point that I wish to refer to on this Vote. That has not to do with the Gaeltacht at all. It is a matter in connection with the agricultural grant. I understand there is an increase provided in this year's Vote for the agricultural grant. I gather that within the last month or two a circular was issued to the various county councils informing them of the withholding of a large portion of the agricultural grant which they had been promised. I understand that the procedure is that after a certain date in February the county councils are informed of the amount that would be coming to them out of the agricultural grant and that they are enabled to go then and base their rate on the strength of getting that amount out of the grant. I learn now that in recent months the county councils have been informed that the amount that they were promised is not going to be forthcoming.
I know that that was so in Kerry, because I read a rather interesting report of a discussion at a meeting of the Kerry County Council on that matter. The Kerry County Council, I might say, is something like 95 per cent. Fianna Fáil. Not quite that but very near it. At any rate, it is very strongly Fianna Fáil and the Chairman of the Kerry County Council is a very strong supporter of Fianna Fáil. At that meeting he complained bitterly of the retention of the agricultural grant "in a loyal county" like Kerry. He said he could assure the Government that there, at any rate, there was no trace of any campaign for the non-payment of annuities. Other county councillors agreed with him that there was no campaign in Kerry or any allegation of a campaign, wherever there might be one. Well, there was no allegation of any such campaign in Kerry and they asked therefore why should this agricultural grant be withheld in Kerry. There is some substance in that. It blows sky-high the allegations of the Fianna Fáil Party here in this House about such a campaign. I do not believe there was a campaign in any other county any more than in Kerry. I am satisfied that these county councillors knew what they were talking about— that there is no campaign in Kerry.
I believe that we ought to look upon the allocation of this money from the viewpoint of the new circumstances of the country. Farmers are placed in a certain position as a result of the economic war. Undoubtedly, in Kerry, on the admission of the Fianna Fáil County Council, the falling off in the payment of rates and annuities is due to the fact that the people are not able to pay. In these circumstances I think it was entirely unjust to withhold their portion of the agricultural grant from the Kerry County Council. There is inability on the part of the county council to pay its way. The county council urged that its financial position does not allow it to meet the ordinary liabilities including salaries and wages of the workmen, unless it was met in some way by the Government. I think, in the circumstances that prevail, the Government ought to consider cutting out this old idea that we had of reimbursing the Guarantee Fund from the agricultural grant. I think that no matter how the annuities come in, the agricultural grant that has been voted by this House ought to be made fully available to the county councils.
I would like to deal first with Deputy Lynch's point in regard to the division of land. While Deputy Lynch's Government, undoubtedly, placed a large number of people on the land, I wonder how many of those people who were placed on the land in 1925 were there in 1929? I know several estates in my immediate neighbourhood that were settled in that manner in 1925 and 1926 and three years later those farms had changed hands at least three times. Further, nearly half of them were derelict, because no one could be got to take them in view of the value the Deputy's Land Commission put on them and the price at which they were bought. At that time they simply took land wherever they could get it and paid whatever price was asked for it. Then they put in unfortunate fellows whom they knew could not hold it. I could give the Deputy instance after instance of that type.
When he talks of dividing the ranches he should always remember the stock case of his former colleague, Deputy Hassett, and the famous District Justice in Tipperary who got 350 acres in addition to the 200 he already held. I suppose he was a small holder! I will not make any further allusions to that. When we came into office we had to fight through the Dáil a Land Bill that would put us in some position to deal with that aspect of affairs. It took months to fight that Land Bill through the Dáil and the Seanad, and in the finish it had to be passed, even though in a mutilated condition. The Party opposite were very anxious that the ranchers should not be dispossessed. I admit that the position is not satisfactory in regard to the Land Commission. The old machine that we inherited needs to be improved. The old cogs have got rusty, some of them are broken, and something will have to be done to oil the machine up. Unfortunately, when you are handed over a broken-down machine, such as the Land Commission was when we took office, it takes some time to put it in working order.
Get a new one.
We will have it in order soon and then we will be able to deal with the ranches and the ranchers who are not paying their annuities. Deputy Anthony is now constituting himself a patron of law and order and the special protector of the Masonic Order. Deputy Anthony could find no cases to talk about last night except the breaking up of a spree given in Cork by a certain secret society and the case of a notorious individual who, when his activities were found out, was made a present of a farm in England and all his cattle were shifted over to it. These are the two cases Deputy Anthony picked out as instances of outrageous conduct. He deliberately closed his eyes to the biggest, the ugliest and the most outrageous campaign ever tried in any country, the campaign that has been tried here within the last 12 months and that was broken only within the last few months. When we are talking about the increased Estimate for the Civic Guards we ought to consider the unlimited funds—God alone knows where they came from—that were used in the beginning of last year and throughout the county council elections for the purpose of transporting hooligans from one side of a county to another in lorries. One has to consider the protection that had to be afforded to the various hooligans going and coming.
Then we had the definitely deliberate campaign in regard to the payment of land annuities, fostered not by farmers in any sense of the word, but by individuals who had no farms or, if they had, did not know how to plough them. Why, if you gave them a pair of horses they would tackle them to the plough handles! Look at the evidence tendered in the court in regard to unfortunate dupes paid £2 apiece to get into a lorry to charge the gates of Marsh's Yard and consider the £50 paid to the man who drove the lorry. When we have cases of that description brought out in open court, is it not enough to justify the Government's attitude? The leaders of those parties had not the pluck to lead them on those occasions; they led from behind. That is the sort of campaign that has been carried on in the last 12 months. Deputy Anthony, so far from condemning it, has been anxious to show his sympathy for it. The moment the leaders of that campaign were brought for trial and punishment, Deputy Anthony went to Mountjoy to show his sympathy with them. I am really amazed at the attitude adopted by Deputy Anthony. It is a long fall from being a pretty decent Labour representative down to representing those who, apparently, are the only people he can speak for now, the members of the Masonic Order. We found ourselves obliged to end the campaign of destruction carried on and we had to increase the Gárda Vote.
We heard a lot from Deputy Dillon in connection with the special farms he wants to have set up all over the country in order to show the people how to farm. He wants special instructors sent down and they would take off their coats and work. I wonder why Deputy Dillon does not apply that to himself? If he would, I will freely give him half my farm and then he can show us how to farm properly and he could send vegetables to the Channel Islands about which he was speaking to-day. We would soon see how he would get on. When they got office, the Government found themselves in the position that they were dealing with a farming community who, for ten years, had been led to look to one thing only. Tillage was the thing that should be abolished and it was abolished, to a great extent, during the time Cumann na nGaedheal were in office. People in the country had gone back to the ranch and the bullock and we found ourselves facing a falling market, a market which had fallen considerably during the last three years Cumann na nGaedheal had been in office. For instance, beef had fallen from 64/- to 43/-; bacon had fallen from 104/- to 64/- and that within 12 months, and butter had fallen from 127/- to 93/-. These latter prices are the prices paid for those particular articles in the British market in 1931. They have fallen considerably since.
Deputy Belton said here to-night that it was a foolish game to start our wheat campaign at that particular period, but I think it was a wise thing. The only pity was that the unfortunate farmers of this country were so duped by their advisers on the opposite benches that they did not go in for the policy in time. In the last year of Cumann na nGaedheal 26,000 acres of wheat were grown in the Free State and sold at £6 a ton. This year we have 200,000 acres of wheat grown. At the present moment there are fully 200,000 acres of wheat planted which is worth £2,000,000 to the farming community. We have reserved a market here for bacon for the farmer. The bacon imported into this country in the last year of the Cumann na nGaedheal régime cost £1,700,000. That market is altogether in the hands of the Irish farmer now. We have increased the beet acreage so as to afford an extra market worth £900,000 to the farmer. Those are three items I should like Deputies to consider.
The farmers must be very prosperous now.
They are not prosperous.
According to that, they must be.
You forget the peat.
Oh, Columbcille! You are like an old stick that is crooked. No man will ever straighten you. That is the position we have brought about. We have at least afforded that much of an alternative to the farmer. We have to subsidise him in various other lines. For instance, if the farmer had a free open market for his butter in Britain to-day and if he were selling that butter without any tariff at all, he would be getting at his local creamery 1½d. a gallon for his milk.
Deputy Mulcahy complained last night of the taxpayer having to subsidise the farmer in the price he was paying for his butter. I consider that even now it is not high enough, and if the farmers of this country are going to be asked to till and produce they are entitled to the complete home market, and they are entitled in that market to their cost of production plus a profit. I think that should be the first aim of any Government. We have also afforded him an increased market and a fairly guaranteed market for his oats and for his barley. There are a few other matters I wish to touch upon. Complaints were made here as to the large amount of this demand and reference was made to the promises which, we are told, we made before we came into office. We have increased services in the State enormously. For instance, we are paying £750,000 more in old-age pensions to-day than Cumann na nGaedheal were paying before they left office—£750,000 to the old and infirm people of this country. Is there any Deputy here who grudges it to them? Still, there are Deputies over there who for ten years kept it from them. There are many other things on the same lines. Unemployment assistance, for instance, £1,300,000. That will at least ensure that they will not go hungry.
We heard Deputy Belton complaining to-night that it was not enough. We do not consider it enough, but we had Deputies complaining that the rates were higher than the rates of agricultural wages and that they could not get men to work on the land on account of the dole and the free beef. I know that, in my constituency at any rate, there was a very deliberate campaign carried on immediately after we came into office to wreak vengeance on the agricultural labourers of this country for the definite stand they took for Fianna Fáil at the general election. On the night of the poll, in my own district, I had nine agricultural labourers thrown on my hands who had been sacked from their employment because they would not hand themselves over, their souls as well as their bodies, to their taskmasters for a couple of shillings a week. I would urge the Minister for Finance to increase as far as possible the agricultural grant this year, because I think it is necessary. I would also call his particular attention to the beet subsidy, because, in my opinion, it is not justified by the price paid to the farmers for beet. The Beet Company in Britain get 12/- subsidy and they pay 39/- for the beet.
The Deputy might raise that when the Estimate for the Department concerned comes up.
I will have another opportunity and, I hope, a better one than this. Deputy MacDermot gave us another glorified description to-night of his Commonwealth. Deputy Belton did not stop long in that Party when he found out their shortcomings, and I think he gave us the reason he left to-night and he told the truth for once. He told us that if we would go to the farmers of this country on the question of the Commonwealth or Republic, the farmers would bury their last cow and skin their last calf before they would go into Deputy MacDermot's Commonwealth as against the Republic.
Is that the reason that Deputy Belton left your Party?
I am not going to go into the reasons why Deputy Belton was removed from our Party and removed himself from the Cumann na nGaedheal Party, or why Deputy Morrissey and Deputy Anthony were removed from the Labour Party. I will leave that for another day.
You are wise.
I do not think I would be strictly in order if I were to go into it at the moment, and even if I were to carry it further and to discuss the division between Deputy Anthony and Deputy Morrissey and why they find themselves in two different Parties to-day, we would have a regular day's discussion. We will leave that for another day. One thing, however, I will tell Deputy MacDermot, and that is that the Irish farmer never funked anything, and when he speaks here of the Irish farmers funking the issue he is libelling the Irish farmers. The Irish farmer is not funking the issue.
You want him to.
No, he is not funking the issue, and I would advise Deputy MacDermot, instead of going across for his holidays to Paris or London, to travel amongst the farmers of the country and he will know them a little better. When he knows them a little better, he will not talk of their funking the issue. When the issue of the Republic will be put up to the people of this country I think that the description given this evening by Deputy Belton of what would happen when Deputy MacDermot walks down O'Connell Street with his flag of the Commonwealth will happen, and 95 per cent. of the people will vote for the Republic. Deputy McGovern can put that alongside the prophecy of Columbcille. They will go side by side. Deputy MacDermot need not be so fond of that threat he uses here when he asks the Minister for Finance to take into consideration those who will leave if the Republic is established. I do not think there will be too many tears shed if he does leave. If he does not like the Republic when it is established, he can leave. I do not think there will be many tears shed. I do not think that his roots are so well dug in here, either in industries or in the land, that he will upset the calculations of any of the unemployed or create any stir in the unemployment market by going. I do not wish to take up the time of the House on this matter. I expect to have a better opportunity later, on the Estimates, of going into these matters more particularly. I think, however, that Deputy MacDermot ought to take his holidays in future in Ireland. If he will come down to Cork with me I will show him a few farmers there and he can have a chat with them, and it will do him all the good in the world.
I think this is the most interesting debate we have had for a long time. Deputy Belton has drawn out the Fianna Fáil Party completely this evening. He started by attacking the attitude of Deputy MacDermot to the Republic and to the Fianna Fáil sham republicanism, but he finished up by agreeing with Deputy MacDermot that they were all sham republicans on that side; in fact, that he was a sham republican himself; that there was not a member on any side of the House a real republican; that they were only pretending to be republicans; that they did not really mean a republic, but that they had not the moral courage to come out and tell the people. This is the only difference between Deputy MacDermot's point of view and the Fianna Fáil point of view. While Deputy MacDermot has the courage of his convictions they have not the courage to say what they mean because, I suppose, of the I.R.A. who carry guns. That is the only difference. We know that they agreed with Deputy Belton because they applauded him when he spoke, and Deputy Corry, who always speaks for the Party, has approved of everything Deputy Belton has said about the Republic. We can take it, therefore, that he has enlightened the House and the country this evening and I think some good will come out of this debate. It is a good thing to clarify the position once and for all and to know whether they stand for a Republic or not. It is admitted on all sides of the House that they are sham republicans; that they do not want to leave the Commonwealth, but that they have not the courage to say that.
You will know that after the election.
Order.
Let him go to College Green and say what he stands for.
I want Deputy Corry to realise that it is grossly disorderly to persist in interrupting after the Chair has called for order.
I did not interrupt Deputy Corry. There is nothing which hits so hard as the truth. If they had not applauded Deputy Belton when he introduced the subject, and if Deputy Corry had not approved of it, they could have repudiated Deputy Belton's statement; but they have accepted it. I congratulate them on having the courage to do that for once. Deputy Belton also referred to the economic war. Deputy Belton was a little bit contradictory about that. He talked about settling the economic war and he did not know exactly whether it should be settled or not. I think he favoured settling it; so that there is no difference really between him and the Opposition.
He wanted to settle the economic war, but he did not want to say that he wanted to settle it.
He is following your General.
It is hard to know exactly what he meant. One thing he made clear was that he did want a settlement of the economic war. I think, however, from what he said about the coal-cattle pact that he does not seem to approve of that pact. I have no doubt that there is really no economic war any more. The coal-cattle pact has finished the economic war, or whatever pretence there was for the economic war, because one Party has capitulated completely. They have given the British a monopoly for the supply of coal to this country and killed the peat schemes they started a short time ago, and which they took credit for having started. When they gave the British a monopoly for the supplying of coal to this country, did Great Britain in return give us a monopoly for supplying cattle to the British market? That is the real test of whether this secret agreement was a good one or not. Great Britain did not give us a monopoly for the supply of cattle. We gave Great Britain a monopoly for the supply of coal. That is the outcome of this secret agreement.
We have heard a lot for the last couple of years about secret agreements. We have heard of the secret agreement of 1926 or 1925; and we heard of it every day. But I think it was a better agreement than the last secret agreement. However, the Opposition have not made political capital out of that. The Opposition are not making political capital down the country out of this secret agreement. Why? Because we always understood the difficulties the President was in, and in the circumstances he did the best possible. We gave him credit for it, instead of criticising and trying to make political capital out of it. If Deputies opposite did likewise and gave President Cosgrave, as he then was, credit for doing the best he could in the circumstances in 1926, it would bring about a better understanding on both sides of the House. Like the sham Republicanism, this is a sham economic war. There is no economic war in view of that agreement.
A couple of Deputies, including Deputy Corry, referred to the Blueshirts. Deputy Corry called them hooligans and said that they were really the cause of the increased expenditure on the Gárda Síochána. If the Deputy goes to the root of the matter he will find that it was his friends who were the cause of the Blueshirt movement being started in this country. It was his friends—the hooligans—who prevented free meetings that created the necessity for an organisation like the League of Youth that had the courage and the manliness to go out, not with guns but without guns, and in a colour that everybody could see, to show that they were not afraid of the hooligans who are the friends of Deputy Corry. The Blueshirts were not the cause but the effect of this condition of things which existed before they came into being. They have succeeded in establishing in this country the right of free speech and the right of public meeting.
We have also been told from the other side—I think it was by Deputy Donnelly—that the Fianna Fáil Party had kept their pledge by keeping the money at home. Have they? How can Great Britain claim that she is still collecting it if they have kept it at home? Does Deputy Donnelly deny the statement of British Ministers, that they are collecting this money? Instead of collecting the amount of the annnuities they are collecting a great deal more from the farmers, and they have not given them receipts, and because they have not complied with legal formalities by giving farmers receipts for moneys they have paid, the Fianna Fáil Party comes along and squeezes what they have left out of them. It is now becoming very difficult to squeeze money out of farmers, because they have not got it. Farmers are almost squeezed out of existence. I am afraid the Government will find it very difficult to squeeze blood out of the turnip in future. Half of the farmers are on the dole, many of them are receiving home help, and they are all broken because their market has been destroyed. Of course, we were told that the policy of the Fianna Fáil Party was to destroy the British market and to establish self-sufficiency in this State. Can this country support itself? Of course, it can, in a sort of way.
What is to become of the surplus agricultural produce if we go in for more and more tillage? Deputies on this side are as much in favour of an extension of tillage as members of the Fianna Fáil Party. Supposing we have three times as much tillage as we have now, what will that mean? It will mean that we must feed more live stock of some sort. We have been told that it is disgraceful to have anything to do with bullocks. If we accept that absurd view, what are we to turn to? Are we to go in for egg production? The Minister for Agriculture says that we must cut down the production of eggs, and that he must reduce the bounty, because we have no market for surplus eggs. The same applies to pork. We are going to have pig production regulated in order that it will correspond with the market that we still have for pork. It is the same way with everything the farmer produces. What are we to do with the increased production that will result from an extended tillage policy? I want someone on the Government Benches to answer that question. If we are to cut down the production of cattle, eggs, pork and every form of farm produce, what are we to do? Yet we are asked to give more work on the land. The difficulty I see is that there will be no return for the work, because there is no market. There is no use trying to confuse the issue by trying to make people believe that by producing more we can do without a market.
Everybody is aware that half of what is produced on the land is surplus. After supplying our own needs, no matter what we do, we will have to export half our produce, until our population is doubled. That cannot be done overnight. The population is doubling faster than we can find employment for it. Until our population is double what it is now there is no hope that it will be able to consume all our agricultural produce. Every country is endowed by Providence with special sources of wealth. Our source of wealth is in our soil and climate. If the Minister for Industry and Commerce could only discover a little oil spring or a little coal mine or a little gold mine, ten thousand feet below the surface, it would be hailed as a Fianna Fáil victory. The production of hydro carbon oil is to cost £25,000 and 100 men are to be employed. That represents £250 a man that the taxpayer will have to pay. Of course, that is a Fianna Fáil victory. It is only one of the Fianna Fáil victories. On the surface of this country we have an industry that is worth £20,000,000 annually which can be picked up, if you like, by bullocks, horses, sheep, cattle and pigs, and turned into cash, and that will find employment for those who produce cattle, butter, eggs and pork. The Government would be better employed in finding a market for these products than in trying to cut down their production. The national wealth would thereby be increased by £20,000,000 annually. These millions are now being thrown away. The Government should endeavour to find markets for these products instead of looking for minerals that are not to be found.
The Minister for Industry and Commerce has established some industries and he has certainly done his part better than the Minister for Agriculture. We have to give him some credit, even though he takes a narrow view. He forgets that his baby industries are supported by the milch cow of agriculture. If he kills the milch cow these baby industries will starve. He may be able to feed them for a while on the blood of the cow but eventually he will lose. It is like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. The Minister should feed the milch cow that will feed his baby industries. He told us about the factories that had been opened but he did not say anything about the factories that had been closed. The Minister for Industry and Commerce was in Cavan at the last General Election and he used the products of one of the factories there as an advertisement and made presents to all the electorate that gave him a cheer. I will not undertake to prove that there was anything corrupt about that. But we do not hear a word about that factory now. I hope that when he gets up to speak again in this House he will tell us something about that flourishing factory that won 1,000 votes for him in West Cavan because I am going to tell him something about it. I am going to tell him that that factory and the other factory that existed in Cavan have been closed since the general election. I have observed that, when he goes to open a factory around Dublin, he gets his photo taken with a key in his hand, but he will not go back with the key in his hand to close factories in Cavan. I should like to see him go to Cavan and get his photo taken closing factories and opening pounds instead of going around getting his photo taken with the key in his hands opening the few little factories that have been started in the country and that are costing the taxpayers so much money, as in the case of the industrial alcohol where the Minister is giving away £25,000 to find employment for 100 men.
We are told that all will be made right when we get down to self-sufficiency. Now, self-sufficiency has been tried in many countries. That great country, the U.S.A., is composed of nearly 50 States. They are scattered over a wide area. It is a country of wonderful resources and wonderful wealth. Some of these States are larger than that part of Ireland which we can call our own, but there is this to be borne in mind: that all the States which comprise the U.S.A., taken together, have not been able to make a success of the policy of self-sufficiency. They have to go outside their own boundaries to trade with other countries. If that great conglomeration of States has failed to make a success of self-sufficiency, how can this little State of ours, with an exportable surplus from agriculture, which is our main industry, hope to succeed with such a policy? There is only one country that I have ever heard of that gave self-sufficiency a fair test. History or fiction only furnishes one example, and that example was a State consisting of a monarch and a slave. The monarch was very glad to change his State, and at the first opportunity he got out of that State, and that was Robinson Crusoe. If we are prepared to adopt the standard of living of Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday, then perhaps we may be able to put the policy of self-sufficiency into operation.
I think that Robinson Crusoe has a parrot in this House.
We are here midway between the United States and Robinson Crusoe's Island, but we are not quite so isolated as Robinson Crusoe was, and we are not as great as the United States. Yet neither State could make a success of self-sufficiency. How, I ask, is the Free State that is middle-way between the two going to succeed? We are told that this is an experiment. It is a very foolish experiment, like all the other experiments tried by Fianna Fáil. I am afraid that it will turn out like all the other promises they made before they got into power. The Utopia that they held out to the people was a selfsufficient State. I am afraid that that self-sufficient State will be like Robinson Crusoe's Island, and that a lot of people will be very glad to get out of it.
We have been told again and again by the President and by other speakers on that side of the House that they are prepared to make any sacrifices for the sake of the Republic, although they have admitted this evening that they are not Republicans at all. I do not see anybody prepared to adopt a lower standard of living. Everybody is trying to keep up the standard of living as long as he can, but the country is reaching the position when the standard of living must be lowered if we are to continue to carry on things as at present. The supplementary agricultural grant, I believe, is to be reduced, and also the bounties, so that agriculture is to be still further impoverished unless the Minister for Finance has something better to offer when he introduces the Budget. I think he has given the hint that he proposes to do something. Perhaps he is going to give complete derating. At any rate we must await the introduction of the Budget to learn what he has up his sleeve. I do not propose to say anything further on that until we learn what the Minister has to offer to agriculture.
It has been boasted by some speakers on the Fianna Fáil side that an increased sum of money is being given to the Department of Agriculture. That might be all to the good if this increased expenditure was not to be on officialdom. I see that the number of officials in the Department of Agriculture is to be increased, as in every other Department of State. That increase in the number of officials will, of course, mean increased expenditure and increased taxation, but of what avail is that to agriculture? What benefit is it to agriculture to have money spent on the salaries of officials dealing out licences and giving them to people who are not entitled to get them, to people to sell them because they have done some political service and not because they were entitled to get them? Cattle have been seized from farmers for the non-payment of annuities and rates. They have been sold at the sales at ridiculous prices. The men who buy these cattle at the sales get licences as well as other people who are friends of Fianna Fáil, and they are sold. At the cattle market in Dublin and at fairs through the country, people who are not entitled to get licences have them and are able to sell them for pocketfuls of money. That is so much loss that is added to the other deductions made in the price paid for the cattle.
Has the Deputy proof of that?
Yes. I will get you lots of proof. If the Minister for Agriculture asks for proof it will be forthcoming.
The Minister admitted it to-day.
He explained it quite well.
If there is to be increased expenditure on the Department of Agriculture I suggest that the Department should employ some of the money in giving some practical instructions to the farmers of the country. I have suggested here before that the experts in the Department of Agriculture should take over farms of various sizes in the different counties—land of mixed quality—and run them in such a way as to show a profit, or at any rate show that they can make ends meet. If that were done it would put an end to a great many debates in this House on the question as to whether farmers are prosperous or not. Let some of the experts whom the Department of Agriculture has at its disposal operate some farms on their own, independent of all other activities, keep accounts, and show whether they are able to make a profit out of them or not. If the Department of Agriculture agrees to do that we will be very glad to co-operate. I will undertake to get a number of farmers in Cavan not only to co-operate by supplying the experts with land but who will be glad to get work on the farms.
It will be for them to keep their accounts and furnish a report to this House to show how they are progressing—whether they are winning or whether they are losing. Of course, they will be expected to pay the ordinary wages. These wages would not be as high as the wages in Dublin but they should be sufficient to give the people working on the land the means of living in ordinary decency. At present, we have unemployment increasing. The reason is simple and plain—because the farmer finds that it does not pay him to produce crops, cattle, pigs or eggs. When he finds that there is no profit to be obtained from his farm, he thinks it as well to sit idle as to work. He does not hire help because he would have to pay for it and he is not able to do that. He does not employ his own sons because they would not stay with him. They find that they are better employed at work on the roads or anywhere else, even if they only get two or three days' employment a week. Even if they do not get work and draw unemployment assistance, they will receive more than if they were working on the land. That is the position to which the agricultural industry has been brought. Until the Government realise the truth and change their policy so as to give agriculture a chance, there is no use in hoping for the success of industries. We are all in favour of creating and fostering industries so as to provide employment but, until the main industry gets a chance to exist, it is hopeless to push forward these other industries. In a short time, they will inevitably collapse. When agriculture collapses, they are bound to collapse. When the credit of the State is gone, there will be no chance of raising money for industry or of keeping industry going because, after all, the people on the land are the consuming public for the products of the factories.
There are a number of subjects to which I should like to allude, but they can be discussed on the Estimates. We have been told by Deputy Corry, or Deputy Donnelly, how the markets were falling for a number of years before the late Government left office. I quite agree. The price of agricultural produce was falling everywhere and there was general depression in the years from 1929 to 1931. There has, however, been since then an improvement in every country but our own. Instead of improving in 1931 or 1932, as agriculture in other countries has done, agriculture here is going head-long downhill. While the other Commonwealth countries improved their position on the British market and considerably increased the value of their exports there, this country's exports to the British market have decreased at an alarming rate.
We were told that the British market did not count. Some people thanked God that it was gone. We were told that the Government were going to open up other great markets. We were told that three years ago and what is the result? The exports for 1934 to these other markets do not furnish us with any cause for rejoicing. We should all be very glad if the efforts made to obtain alternative markets had been successful.
The value of our exports in 1934 to markets other than those of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was £1,152,137. In order to sell goods to that amount to these countries, we had to buy from them goods to the value of £12,993,163. That is the alternative market that was to make this country prosperous. Let us compare the figure for 1934 with that for 1933 in order to show how trade has been progressing in these alternative markets. As compared with 1933, we increased our exports to these markets in 1934 by £22,717. That was an enormous sum. But, at the same time, we increased our imports from these countries by £2,236,214. That was in the ratio of ten to one. We had to pay out £10 for every £1 we took in in increased trading. If we are to go on increasing our trade with foreign countries at that rate, where will it end? Deputies may talk about an adverse balance. If we have not an adverse balance, and a serious one, at present, it will not be long, with our present rate of progress —ten to one—until we have. Of course, there are some agreements being made now in the ratio of three to one. That would certainly be an improvement, but I cannot approve of Ministers making arrangements with foreign countries on the basis of one to three, because it is calculated seriously to prejudice our position in making trade agreements with other countries, including Great Britain. When the Minister gives his official sanction to an arrangement on a one-to-three basis it is a very serious matter. Seeing that the Fianna Fáil Party have admitted that they do not want a republic, that they really want to remain in the Commonwealth——
If you say that often enough you will believe it yourself.
You have all approved of Deputy Belton's exposition, and he has drawn you into that admission. Having gone so far, and seeing that you do not want a republic, all I ask you to do is to take every advantage possible from your position in the Commonwealth. Since the real policy of Fianna Fáil is to remain in the Commonwealth, why not have all the advantages of the Commonwealth position instead of having all the disadvantages of a republic and all the disadvantages of remaining in the Commonwealth at the same time.
I am rather glad that the Minister for Industry and Commerce has come into the House, because I want to deal briefly with a matter from which all the speakers from the Government side have steered clear. I want to inquire from the Minister if he has discovered, since the debates 12 months ago, that famous plan he had prior to the 1932 election —the plan for dealing with unemployment. Deputies on the opposite side talked about many matters, but, quite naturally, they kept as far as they possibly could from the question of the policy, or lack of policy, of the Government in respect of unemployment. There were two notable exceptions.
I do not suppose that there are two men, not alone in the Fianna Fáil Party, but even two men in this House, who know less about the matter than the two men who attempted to deal with it—Deputy Hugo Flinn and Deputy Briscoe. There are, roughly, 140,000 persons registered as available for employment at the present, and the figure has ranged in or about that for a number of weeks past. The Minister, when he attempts to deal with the matter in any way, usually deals with it in a rather airy sort of way, to the effect that, of course, those figures do not mean what they appear to mean. The Minister, apparently, has been getting rather fed up with seeing the figures increasing week after week and month after month, and seeing the latest returns of the unemployment figures in the newspapers day after day. Apparently he decided that he would abolish the title used hitherto and no longer describe them as unemployment statistics. We got a longer and more impressive title—such a title that one would need a dictionary in order to find out what it meant.
The Minister, however, is very fond of attempting to explain the increase in this way, just as some of the members of his Party are fond of doing so. Of course, they say, "there are numbers of people and types of people registering for unemployment assistance who never registered before." That is quite true. That is absolutely true. The reason for that, however, is that there are numbers of farmers, small farmers, and the sons of substantial farmers in this country, who never had to enter the labour market before and who are now forced to compete with the workers in other industries because of the policy of the Government. I have no doubt that the Minister cannot accept that, but I should like to hear his explanation of the fact that there are, not hundreds, but thousands, of small farmers' sons registering at the employment exchanges. Arising out of the economic war, one finds that there are numbers of agricultural workers who were always in constant employment with farmers—some of them, whom I know of in my own county, were working for 14 or 15 years with the same farmer—who now cannot find employment. In many cases these farmers have been compelled to let one or two men, or even more, go because they are not able any longer to employ them.
That is one case. I understand also that farmers find it very difficult, if not impossible, to continue to pay to their agricultural labourers the same rate of wages they were paying a few years ago. In other words, the rate of wages they could afford to pay in cash a few years ago has been brought down to the level that those people would be entitled to get by way of unemployment assistance, free beef, free milk, and all the rest of it. I am satisfied that a number of these labourers have been thrown on the unemployment list in that way. I think that we are entitled to ask the Minister if he has considered, as I am sure he has, whether, even if his own highest hopes with regard to his own industrial development were to be realised, and even if we were able to reach the point where we could produce all that we required for ourselves, these industries would be sufficient to absorb all the unemployed in this country? Does he believe that for one moment? Of course, he knows that it is not so. Unless the agricultural industry is put into such a position that it can produce sufficient to employ all the labour available, it cannot be done, and the Minister must know that. I think we are entitled to ask the Minister, as he is the Minister primarily responsible for this question of unemployment in the State, what plan he has, if he has any plan, to deal with this problem, or whether we are to carry on for the next year, as we had to carry on for the last year, just watching the figures go from 90,000 to 100,000 and up to 140,000. In that connection, it must be remembered that the number would be far greater than 140,000 were it not for the housing schemes set up by the Government. It must be remembered also that those schemes will be completed very shortly, and that means that you will have hundreds, if not thousands, of men unemployed again. In my opinion, that is one of the most serious matters with which this House could concern itself.
I quite realise that the Minister is a hard-working Minister. Perhaps he is one of the most hard-working members of the Government—particularly at the present time—but I do submit that the responsibility for dealing with this great question of unemployment is a responsibility that devolves, not alone upon the Minister, but upon the whole Government. I should also like to hear from the Minister for Industry and Commerce and from the Minister for Finance what progress, if any, has been made by the committee over which the Parliamentary Secretary, Deputy Flinn, has presided. Deputy Flinn comes in here, in his airy way, and his way of meeting his responsibility is to say to us: "What do you suggest?" He gets a reply, such as the reply he got from the Clare County Council, who quite properly submitted a scheme to take up all the money from the Free State for this purpose. So far as we know, however, no progress has been made by Deputy Flinn along the lines of providing employment. I suggest to the Minister that he has failed absolutely in that particular section of his Department.
Now, there is another matter that I should like to mention. I do not know if it has been put before the Minister previously. Under the Unemployment Assistance Act, or, if you like, following upon the passage of that Act and the putting of it into operation, it is impossible for an unemployed man at present, and for a considerable time past, to obtain employment unless he has qualified for unemployment assistance. That is a regulation by the Department. Of course, it is quite understandable why that regulation was made. The Department, and perhaps the Minister for Finance, naturally want to get those who were in receipt of unemployment assistance off State funds as fast as they can. I am afraid, however, that it is working out, in practice, in this way, that many men who did not desire to qualify for unemployment assistance have, in order to qualify for employment, been compelled to qualify for unemployment assistance. That is a matter to which I should like the Minister to give some further thought, because I am afraid that many undesirable results have flowed from the making of that particular regulation. There are other points of detail with regard to delays and so on which will more properly arise when the Estimate itself comes up for consideration.
Deputy Corry entertained us in his usual manner this evening. He had a tilt at Deputy Anthony arising out of a speech which Deputy Anthony made last night on the question of law and order. I do not of course believe for one moment that the views to which Deputy Corry gave expression in that speech are the views of any responsible man on the Government Front Bench or of any responsible men in the Party. I was rather sorry to see one or two members of the Party apparently expressing their assent to Deputy Corry's view that if a citizen of this country is a Freemason he is not entitled to any protection from the State. As I say, I do not believe for one moment that that is the point of view of any responsible member of the Government, or any responsible member of the Party, but I think it is a pity that that sort of statement should be made in this House by any man elected to this House. We all may have our own views upon particular societies. I dare say we all have, but certainly those men are entitled—just as any of us is—to the fullest protection which the State can give, so long as they are keeping within the law of the country. On the question of law and order, and the way in which the Department of Justice and the Gárda Síochána have been administered in the last 12 months, I want to say quite candidly that the general impression throughout the country, whether it has reached the Government or not, is that the law is not being administered in an impartial way. Further, there is an opinion through the country— whether it is well founded or not the view is held fairly generally—that if members of the Gárda Síochána take action in certain directions they are going to be penalised. It has gone further. That particular point of view has permeated many branches of the State.
That is nonsense.
I should like to believe that it is nonsense, but I have had a number of cases brought to my own knowledge, and I say further that it is the general opinion. Certainly, that is a state of affairs which we ought all to be heartily ashamed of. I know it seems a rather extraordinary thing that when any unlawful act, or alleged unlawful act, is committed by people of a certain political outlook, there is apparently no difficulty whatever in bringing them to book, having them brought before the courts and charged, but when crimes are committed on other sides, they are not able to be as prompt in their arrests. Deputy Donnelly may smile at that, but it is a fact. The cases are so numerous that there is no necessity to repeat them here. I do not believe that in one major crime there has been an arrest or conviction in the last 12 months. Why? Because you have this sort of mentality, I am sorry to say, amongst supporters of the Fianna Fáil Party down the country. There was a resolution brought before the North Tipperary County Council last week—and I am glad to say the Council unanimously adopted it—forwarded from the Dublin County Council, condemning the murder of the late Mr. More O'Ferrall. In the case of one member of that Council, a distinguished and educated lady, the first and only comment she made on it was: "This is no place for politics." As I say, if anybody—particularly a highly educated lady and, I am sure, one who would be shocked if she were accused of not having a Christian and humane outlook—by the longest stretch of imagination, could describe that crime as political——
Or the resolution.
That places him, too.
Quite. That particular lady whom I have in mind lives within a mile of where the last crime was committed on St. Patrick's Day. If a resolution were forwarded about the burning of the church at Birr, I wonder if she would say: "This is no place for politics." There would be as much justification for saying it in connection with the burning of the church as there was for saying it in connection with the murder of Mr. More O'Ferrall. I say that is a mentality which is not going to do any good to any Party, or to this country. People on public boards ought to give a lead to the people, and to try and encourage a respect for law and order. So far as I am personally concerned, if a crime is committed—I do not care whether it is by members of the Blueshirts, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil or any other Party— the culprits should be arrested, brought before the courts and get the full measure of the law which the judge decides to give, having heard the evidence. So long as we can keep the belief of the people in the integrity and impartiality of our police courts, then the country is, in my opinion, safe, but immediately the view gets abroad amongst any considerable section of the people—and I am afraid it is getting abroad—that that impartiality is being threatened in any way, then, I am afraid it is going to be a bad day for the country.
There were other points with which I wished to deal, but perhaps it might be better if they were left for the detailed Estimates. I should like, however, if the Minister for Industry and Commerce, either to-night or to-morrow, or whenever he gets an opportunity of dealing with the matter, would enlighten us as to his policy for dealing with these 140,000 persons. After all, I think the Minister has got a fair chance. He has now been three years in office and he ought to know what the problem is. Even if he had no plan when he told us he had one in 1932, he ought to have been able to evolve some plan in three years. In any case, even if he were not able to decrease the unemployment he ought to have been able to keep it stagnant, but it has increased in spite of the very large sums of money spent on relief works. The number of relief works which have been absorbing so many of the unemployed will come to an end within the next four or five months.
I am always very glad to listen to Deputy Morrissey talking on such a subject as unemployment. This pilgrim's progress is one which naturally interests anybody who studies political developments in this country. It is a very long time since I first laid eyes on Deputy Morrissey. I think it was in the town of Carrick-on-Suir on the occasion of a meeting there, and Deputy Morrissey was teaching an audience of about 50 workingmen how to sing the "Red Flag." He was teaching them the words and they were endeavouring to learn them.
When was that?
It is a number of years ago.
Will the Minister put a date on it?
About eight years ago.
I want to say, Sir, that that statement is absolutely untrue——
Well, nine years ago. I am not sure how far or how fast Deputy Morrissey has been travelling since then.
That assertion made by the Minister has its origin in a statement made by Senator Quirke that I sang the "Red Flag" at a meeting in Carrick-on-Suir in 1922.
Did the Deputy ever sing the "Red Flag"?
The Minister has repeated Senator Quirke's statement that I sang the "Red Flag" at Carrick-on-Suir in 1922. I was never in Carrick-on-Suir until 1923 and I never sang the "Red Flag" in Carrick-on-Suir.
Did the Deputy ever sing the "Red Flag"?
If the Minister wants to know did I ever sing it, I probably did and I know more about the words than the Minister does.
Does the Deputy contradict the statement that he sang the "Red Flag"?
I contradict the statement made by the Minister that I sang it in Carrick-on-Suir in 1922. Will the Minister withdraw the statement that he has made?
The Deputy is now singing a different type of song.
Is the Minister withdrawing what he said?
If the Deputy says he did not sing the "Red Flag," I withdraw it.
It is not the first time the Minister was caught in that way.
Since then the Deputy has moved fast and far. To hear him talking now on unemployment brings back very pleasant recollections of the speeches he used to make on the same subject here when he was not in the bosom of Cumann na nGaedheal. Perhaps I should not call it Cumann na nGaedheal. Cumann na nGaedheal is dead, but the spirit lives on in the men of to-day.
Good enough. Anything to get away from the 140,000 unemployed.
The spirit of Cumann na nGaedheal lives on, the spirit which has inspired Deputy Morrissey to make the speech which he made to-night. I do not think there was any member of the Dáil which ended in 1932 who used to denounce more emphatically the then Minister for Industry and Commerce, Deputy McGilligan, than Deputy Morrissey——
Hear, hear!
Whenever the then Minister for Industry and Commerce issued unemployment statistics which he represented as a fair tabulation of the unemployed workers in the country, Deputy Morrissey used to say that they were faked figures——
I did not say so.
——they had the effect of deceiving the public though they were not intended to deceive them. But the figures were procured on a basis which made it impossible for them to give any accurate picture of the state of unemployment in the country. Deputy Morrissey used to denounce those figures on every possible occasion. I do not suppose there was a debate upon a Central Fund Bill since Deputy Morrissey came into the Dáil in which he did not make a speech regarding these figures and in which he did not describe them as unreliable and a misrepresentation of the position in respect of the unemployed. I have heard him repeatedly suggest with respect to these unemployment figures that the position was vastly different from what these figures represented. Now, however, he is moving a little to the right and he is addressing himself to the unemployment problem from the point of view of a loyal member of the Cumann na nGaedheal Party. His argument now apparently is that a comparison between the figures which he did not accept as accurate a number of years ago, and the figures now available and compiled upon an entirely different basis, represents a big increase in the number of unemployed.
I never said any such thing.
Apparently there is no need for me to deal with what Deputy Morrissey said, but I have to answer other Deputies.
There are 140,000 unemployed now; deal with that matter.
There are 140,000 people registered at the unemployment exchanges, but I want to point out to the House that a very large proportion of those on the unemployment register are small farmers, the sons of small farmers and fishermen who are qualified to receive unemployment assistance because the incomes which they are in receipt of from their farms or other means of livelihood are less than the amount prescribed in the Act as qualifying a person to receive unemployment assistance. These people are on uneconomic holdings. I may remind the Deputy that there were uneconomic farms in Ireland before Fianna Fáil came into office. Perhaps Deputy Morrissey himself will admit that.
Not so many of them as now.
The exact number is ascertainable. There was once an effort made by the Government which preceded this Government to find out the truth about unemployment conditions in this country. That was on the occasion of the Census in 1926. They found out so much about the state of unemployment then that it took them four years to publish the figures they got and, even when they did publish them, they did it in a manner which made it difficult for the average person to grasp their significance. I suppose Deputy Morrissey or Deputy McGilligan will admit that a farm of three or four acres can be very properly described as uneconomic, and the farmer of such land as available for employment in 1926. I ask Deputy Morrissey to take the number of such farms in 1926 and then to work out the number of persons who on that basis were available for employment.
Men who did not describe themselves as unemployed.
Let him count their sons also, and on that basis he will be able to ascertain the number of people who, in 1926, would be qualified for unemployment assistance if the Act had been in operation.
Does the Minister say that the Census did not include the sons of these farmers?
It did not.
Very well, get the return and you will find that it did.
I state with all the emphasis and——
——with a certain amount of hesitation.
Having gone into this matter, I state that the sons of the small farmers were not included amongst those who described themselves as out of work.
I am absolutely certain on the matter; they were so included.
We will leave it at that. I will produce here for the Deputy whatever evidence he desires to show that before the Census was published the matter was fully considered as to whether these figures should be published or not.
Does the Minister mean published in the Census returns?
The Census return of unemployed persons included only those who described themselves as unemployed. It did not include the holders of uneconomic farms or their sons or part-time fishermen. The sum total of the people who in the Twenty-Six Counties would be entitled to unemployment assistance was available.
If their lack of means were the same.
There were 20,000 more people with less means than the number now registered, despite the fact that there are now 45,000 more people in the country than in 1926.
What was the Census return?
It was about 165,000.
How many returned themselves as out of work?
The number was greater than the number registered at the unemployment exchanges now——
By just half.
——who have no other means of livelihood except what they can earn at their work.
This is a great fake.
Not half as big a fake as the Deputy attempted to bring out when he burst out with a whole group of figures to prove that there was a smaller number employed now than before.
It is your own statement.
The Deputy took a simple device to deceive the unwary. No doubt, he deceived Cumann na nGaedheal because they are easily deceived. He divided the price of the stamps into the increased revenue of the fund and then he said the figure he got represented so many additional people at work.
It represented nothing of the kind.
If every employed person were employed for 52 weeks in the year the Deputy's method would be right.
I said that.
Well, then the reporters did not hear the Deputy.
I said that, and it was reported that I said it.
The fact is, and it is well known to Deputies, that there are more people in employment than ever there were.
And more out of it.
Quite so.
Nonsense. The available statistics prove beyond doubt that, despite a rising population, there are fewer people unemployed than ever there were since the Free State was established. This is the first time that the figures have been properly tabulated and I think Deputy Morrissey will go some distance towards admitting that. It is the first time that any effort has been made to get a real register of the people unemployed, the people under-employed and the people so poorly supported from existing means of livelihood that they are available to take work when it can be offered to them. That register is there. We have not tried to conceal the facts. It is precisely because we seriously intended to tackle the problem that we took the first step to get accurate information about the existing situation.
You have had that information for quite a long time.
We have not; we have had it only for six months, and even still a full analysis of the figures has not been made. That analysis is proceeding and, as the results are available, they are published so that even Deputies opposite may get information from which they may at some time attempt to formulate a policy for themselves.
I thought you had a plan?
We have, and that plan is working out.
You mean it is worn out.
It is working out satisfactorily and that is what happens to be annoying Deputies opposite— because it is working out satisfactorily. We are prepared to take the opinions of the people for whose benefit the plan was devised. Are the Deputies opposite?
Certainly. What about Gallaher's employees?
I do not believe the Opposition are so prepared.
They have not a plan even to build up their own organisation.
We know there is joy in Heaven when a sinner comes to repentance, but there is disgust on earth when a sinner wraps himself in a white sheet and represents himself a saint. We have been listening to-day and yesterday to the Party opposite pretending to be the guardians, and the only guardians, of law and order left in the country, the only people, with high moral standards, whose sacred function in the Dáil is to try and force the Government to do its duty in the maintenance of law and order. Even Deputy Morrissey can be bitten by that bug. He had to get in a few phrases of that kind in order to show his Cumann na nGaedheal colleagues that he is loyal to their newfound policy, this policy of law and order, the acceptance of the Crown and its various symbols, the House of Hanover and the Protestant succession. The Party opposite are moving a long way from their base. They ought to be careful or they may get lost.
We might find ourselves in a republic one of these days when the Party opposite have moved out.
They have even lost Deputy Belton and now, having got rid of the reckless irresponsibles who dragged the Party into such unconstitutional action last year, they propose to be the ultra respectable Party in the country, the very symbols of law and the only guardians of order. Just look at them! They must think our memories are as short as their own. We had a speech from Deputy MacDermot who is a leader of the Party; in fact, it is quite obvious from his speech to-day that he considers there would be no Party there at all only for him. The Deputy made a speech yesterday on precisely the same lines as a number of speeches he made in the past criticising the Government because there is an increased provision for the Civic Guard, an increase in the Estimate for a larger number of Civic Guards. He argued that last year we had to get more Guards because the unruly followers of his Party were doing unlawful and unconstitutional things about the country, knocking down telegraph poles, blocking the railway lines, wrecking trains, burning down State property, interfering with the Guards in the administration of their duty and so on. But, he said, the Government having claimed to have suppressed that campaign was now in a position to get rid of the additional Guards employed and consequently the Dáil should expect a decrease rather than an increase in the Estimate.
There are, of course, several answers to that. You cannot recruit Civic Guards on a temporary basis. The circumstances under which a member can be taken into that force are well known. If he is taken in he stays in unless there is good cause to put him out. The causes on which he can be removed are stated in the regulations which are well known to Deputies. One of them is drunkenness. Deputy Anthony here yesterday adopted the usual disgraceful tactics with which he has associated himself always in reporting, as an incident on which the Government was open to criticism, something which happened in Cork and in which a member of the Guards involved was under the influence of drink. If Deputy Anthony raised that case for the first time yesterday and was demanding an explanation from the Government as to the action taken, one could understand it, but that was not the first time he raised it. He raised the matter before and he was informed that the member of the Guards involved in that incident had been immediately dismissed from the force. The Deputy did not say that yesterday. He merely brought forward the case, disguising the main fact that the man had been dismissed. The Deputy mentioned the case merely in order to get some stone, however dirty, to throw at the Government. He is sitting too close to the members of Cumann na nGaedheal these days to be able to keep his mind from running along grooves of that kind.
Can we be assured that the Party opposite has become entirely constitutional, that they are not going to be involved in any more of these unlawful acts which they participated in and advocated last year? What value can we attach to their assurances? Do you think this Government would be wise in placing such value on their assurances that they could proceed to disband portion of the Civic Guards? Can the Party opposite answer for their followers? Apparently not. I will admit they themselves do not go with hack-saws, axes, and petrol tins and things of that sort for the purpose of blocking roads, tearing up railway lines or destroying telegraphic communications. They merely smile benevolently upon those who do that work. If they can assure us that they have their unruly followers under control and that they are going to remain what they now profess to be, a constitutional Party assisting the Government in maintaining law and order, then possibly a saving and even a considerable saving could be made in State expenditure; a considerable saving in maintaining the machinery of law would be possible. But we must have more than their word for it. We will have to have some visible proof of their faith and conversion. There was a meeting in Kilmallock on Sunday last at which members of their Party attended in fairly large numbers. About 400 persons dressed in blue shirts ran amok in Kilmallock and made determined efforts to wreck houses and injure the persons of a number of the townspeople who happened to be political opponents of theirs.
What is that you are quoting from?
It does not matter what I am quoting from.
Is there a case coming on arising out of that?
Not that I am aware of.
The people who ran amok will be charged?
Possibly they will be.
Therefore, the Minister is prejudicing the case beforehand?
I am not prejudicing any individual. Whatever individual was responsible for that should be charged, but it is the function of the court to determine who was responsible.
You are reading your paid rag's account of an incident that happened in Kilmallock, and you are prejudicing any case that may be tried in connection with it.
Are you the Chairman here?
When the police interfered to preserve order, they were assaulted by Blueshirts with batons and with stones, so that some fifty Guards were scarcely able to deal with the situation. Indeed, it was only when, amid scenes of wildest disorder, General MacEoin personally appealed to the mob, protesting against their behaviour and threatening to leave the meeting, that peace was restored. Every tribute is to be paid to Deputy MacEoin for his action, but can we get an assurance from the Party opposite that they are going to restrain their followers from that lawless conduct?
What are you quoting from? Will you tell us that?
From the Cork Examiner.
That is what you think to be an unbiased account of what happened there? Have you a police report? Read us that.
I think it is a report good enough to go upon. What is the attitude of Deputies opposite? Do they approve of that type of lawless conduct or do they not?
Certainly not.
I cannot allow the Minister to be cross-examined in this fashion across the floor of the House. Deputy McGilligan has not yet contributed to the debate. He can do so afterwards and make all the points.
Might I make a point of order to you, Sir? I put it to you, and I suggest, that it is quite unusual and quite definitely out of order to read an account of a matter which may be the subject of a judicial trial.
The Minister cannot prejudice the trial if the matter is publicly reported in the Press, and if he reads what is reported there.
And he reads it and gives it out here, with challenges to people "Do they stand over that?"
The matter which the Minister is purporting to read is, he says, an extract from the Cork Examiner. That is available to the court and to the jury, if it goes to a jury, and to the public. It cannot necessarily prejudice anyone.
The Minister's comments are not given in the Press.
The reading of it cannot prejudice the trial.
Let him comment in any way he likes.
"For three hours an atmosphere of tension prevailed. Earlier skirmishes between Blueshirts and persons of different political leanings gave place to scenes of grave disorder, in the course of which the Guards were stoned, shop and private windows were broken and in a series of baton charges men were felled in the streets and arose bleeding and dusty."
This is an extract from the Cork Examiner?
From the Cork Examiner of Monday last, March 18th.
And the first extract you read was from the Cork Examiner?
No, from certain notes I have here to refresh my memory.
The first extract was not from the Cork Examiner?
I am entitled to have notes and to refer to them the same as any other Deputies, except that they are much more intelligent than they are likely to have.
Of course, the whole thing is very scandalous.
If Deputy MacDermot, the Vice-President of that Party, who wants to save money by reducing the number of Civic Guards, will co-operate with the Government in order to make that economy possible, he can start off amongst the supporters of his own Party by ensuring that such things as took place at Kilmallock on last Sunday will not be repeated. One single word from him in condemnation of that conduct, one single assurance that he was going to prevent its repetition by the followers of his Party, would be much more effective than a lot of the hypocritical utterances which we have heard from him and other members of the Party opposite yesterday and to-day. This campaign around the country which they were engaged upon, these lawless activities, arose, of course, out of the campaign against the payment of land annuities. The members of the Party opposite have been associated with that campaign, although frequently, when challenged about that association, they deny it. Deputy Fionan Lynch yesterday said that at no time had any member of his Party—I presume he is a member of the Cumann na nGaedheal Party— advocated the non-payment of land annuities.
Now, I am going to read a few more notes. The campaign against the payment of land annuities and against the payment of rates has been encouraged, not merely by individual members of the United Ireland ex-Cumann na nGaedheal Party, but it has been repeatedly and emphatically encouraged by its official organ. The official organ of that Party keeps on telling the farmers week after week that they cannot pay and that, consequently, any law that is designed to make them pay is an immoral and tyrannical law and so need not be obeyed. They try to give their campaign a certain moral gloss by arguments of that kind. On 30th December last, the United Ireland paper wrote as follows:
"If the Government misuses its power, so that it injures rather than promotes the common good, then it may be that it can put laws on the Statute book, declaring it sedition to point out that fact, but it will still remain that the Government, and not its critics, is the party guilty of sedition. The Government has received its authority for the purpose of promoting the common good. In so far as its power is used to that end, it has a right to expect our loyal obedience to its laws, but in so far as it departs from that end, its ordinances have not the sanction of authority. They can claim no respect and can be made operative only by force and without moral sanction."
That is fairly revolutionary teaching. You will not find that in any of the Bishop's Pastorals recently published. That is the new theology produced for the convenience of the United Ireland Party by that eminent theologian, who is the editor of their official organ. It is by statements of that kind, repeated week after week, that that Party is deliberately encouraging that campaign. Politicians as astute as Deputy Cosgrave and Deputy MacDermot do not go out openly and say to the farmers or to the other members of their Party: "Cut down trees; wreck railway trains; destroy telegraph communications; throw stones at the Guards; and interfere in whatever way you can with the administration of law and order." Not at all—they are too clever for that. They merely talk that kind of stuff through their official organ and at public meetings so that men who have a little more backbone than they have shown might be induced to do the things they want to see done, even though they have not the courage to advise their doing.
I am not sure if it is strictly fair to quote here at this stage a statement made by the ex-leader of the Party opposite, but my only justification for doing so is the fact that, when this statement was made, General O'Duffy was still the leader of that Party and the statement was not repudiated by the Party at any time. The statement reported to have been made by him on 5th September last is reported in the Clonmel Nationalist—shades of the Red Flag—as follows:—
"They have asked the Government to cease collecting land annuities and rates during the economic war. They were quite prepared to maintain the public services, but when the farmers were compelled to pay their annuities through the medium of rates, then they said they would include the rates in their campaign. If that did not suit, they asked the Government to set up a tribunal, with an impartial chairman, and if that tribunal found that the farmers were only paying what was just, they would not grumble. The farmers always paid their bills when they could and were quite happy to do so. If the Government refused all those things, the League of Youth had taken it upon itself to say `Do not pay.' "
You set up a tribunal in respect of the tram strike, but you would not set up a tribunal to consider whether the annuities are being paid twice. You have got enough on hands now with the tram strike.
We also set up a tribunal to deal with the cases——
Will you deny that they are being collected by the British Government?
I say that we also set up a tribunal——
Will you deny that they are being collected?
Deputy Belton made a speech and he will have to allow the Minister to proceed. Even a Minister is entitled to make a speech.
He is perfectly entitled to speak the truth here.
The gallery is full now.
The Deputy will not insinuate that anybody is not speaking the truth so far as he knows it.
I withdraw that, but I say that he is misrepresenting the position.
I am not misrepresenting this position, that there was a tribunal set up to deal with the people who participated in that campaign, and when Mr. Cronin was put up for election, as the successor of General O'Duffy, in the leadership of the League of Youth, the biggest argument that was advanced in his favour was that he was the only man in the country who had as yet appeared twice before that tribunal. That was the great thing to his credit—twice he has been charged there with a breach of the law. These are the people, this guardian, with the other guardians of law and order, who come here and pretend to criticise the Government on the ground that the efforts being made by it to preserve law and order are not fully satisfactory and to represent themselves as the only people in the country who are really serious in their desire that law and order should be preserved.
We have had references here before to Deputy Bennett's famous speech at Kilmallock—the incendiary speech which in due course produced the flames—as reported in the Cork Examiner of the 25th September, 1934:
"The reason his cattle were sold was because he was in a political fight."
I thought it was only a question of the farmers who could not pay; that the poor hard-pressed farmer members of the Cumann na nGaedheal Party, who could not afford to pay, were being oppressed by the Government. Deputy Bennett was not standing any of that nonsense. He could pay. He was not going to let his credit be damaged by the speeches of Deputies Belton, Morrissey and McGilligan. He could pay but was not going to pay:
"The reason his cattle were sold was because he was in a political fight. His cattle were sold because he did not find it convenient to pay. He would not say he could not have found the money, but there were other people to whom he owed money; there was the bank, there were shopkeepers and others, and he considered it his duty to pay these latter just debts first, rather than a debt he had already paid."
Contradict the latter portion of it.
Sure.
You will not apply yourself to it. You cannot contradict it.
Then we had Deputy Minch on the 20th August saying:
"I advise the farmers to pay their rates, but not to pay their annuities. I make that statement at the barrack door and it will be in Dublin in three minutes. I stand over what I say."
Then Deputy Fionan Lynch said to-day:
"At no time did any member of his Party advocate the non-payment of land annuities."
Has there been another split?
And that Deputy Minch denied making the statement.
It was Deputy MacDermot said that.
It was Deputy Lynch said it.
Then Deputy Bennett broke out again at Kilfinane. This is the report in the Cork Examiner on the 19th September, 1934:
"Mr. George Bennett, T.D., in the course of an address, said there was no moral obligation on the people to pay the debts for which the seizures were being made, even though there might be a legal obligation of a sort."
That is more good morality. Consult the editor of United Ireland about that and he will write a thesis on it. He might even found a new church on it.
And get it burned.
If he thought it was good propaganda.
That is good propaganda too.
It is these people who are making speeches of that kind throughout the country, who are advocating that illegal campaign, who are inciting younger men to take violent action against the law which lands them before the Tribunal and in jail, who pose here as the defenders and guardians and advocates of law and order—sinners in white sheets trying to appear before their misguided followers as saints. I do not know that they are deceiving anybody —not even themselves. We had, of course, other speakers opposite adopting the usual tactics of trying to destroy the instrument that the Government has for the preservation of law and order. We have Deputy Anthony and Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney, who never lose an opportunity of speaking here, who try to distinguish between the old Guards and the new Guards, using words in praise of one and denouncing the other, trying to work dissension in that force, so that it will become less effective against the lawless allies when they renew, if they ever do, this campaign against the peace of the country. Their tactics are obvious.
We had Deputy Morrissey talking about the crime in Longford. When the Government offered a reward for information concerning the persons responsible for that crime, who was the first person who came forward to say that we were appealing to the lowest instincts of the people? Deputy O'Higgins. When it was obvious that certain information had reached the Government, who was it came in here to say that all the information on that matter which reached the Guards was being transmitted in some way to members of the I.R.A.?—Deputy Mulcahy. What purpose had he in making that statement? He knew it was untrue. He only had one purpose, and that was to ensure that information would not reach the Guards. Who was it put down a Parliamentary question for the purpose of trying to find out from the Minister if he got information concerning that crime from a particular source?—Deputy MacDermot, Vice-President of the Party. That is the type of assistance we are going to get from Deputies opposite in our efforts to preserve law and order. There were other crimes committed in this country besides that one, which of course was one of the worst. There was shooting in Tipperary, when the house of a rate collector was fired into. Did Deputies go round the country trying to get resolutions passed denouncing that?
There was no necessity, because there was a man tried for that almost immediately and convicted.
The type of crime which that represents is one that we have experience of before and may have experience of again unless we are going to get into a situation in which no responsible member of a Party is going to give even the support of his benevolent smile to those who participate in them. (Deputies: Hear, hear.) When we have men like Deputies Dillon, MacDermot, Bennett and Minch going round making inflammatory speeches of the type I have quoted it is sheer hypocrisy to come in here subsequently and say: "hear, hear" to remarks of that kind.
"The anarchists are now in office." That is the way to secure respect for the Government in office. That is the way to secure obedience to its laws. That is the way to secure support for constitutional authority. "The former anarchists are now enjoying the benefit." Deputy MacDermot is moving as fast as Deputy Morrissey in the direction inspired by the spirit of Cumann na nGaedheal. He will be talking about petrol tins next.
I am going to talk about the torch in a minute.
Deputies Morrissey, MacDermot and McGilligan, who talk about these things here, who will try to represent themselves as men belonging to a Party into whose minds the idea of lawless action would never enter, are, outside this House, the men who are promoting a campaign that necessitated the increase in the cost of the police which Deputy MacDermot deplores.
That is not true.
Of course, you say it is not true. I would not expect you to say anything else. I would admire Deputies Morrissey and McGilligan a lot more if they would take public responsibility for these things their followers are doing.
Were any extra Guards protecting the Minister for Defence in Tralee on St. Patrick's Day?
Have manners over there.
That is expecting too much.
I do not know if it is necessary to labour that point any more. I think it is patently obvious to the members of this House, and probably equally obvious to most people throughout the country, that when Front Bench Deputies of the chief Opposition talk in that strain they are talking with their tongues in their cheeks. They have one purpose only in mind, and that is to try to find some basis upon which to reconstitute a political Party which crumbled to pieces underneath them. That is why we have this anxiety to change its name, and to indicate that, even though we have still got the same personnel, and even though the change of name deceives nobody, nevertheless we have changed our opinions, and that the new Party stands for some policy very different from that that the Cumann na nGaedheal Party had. What is that policy?
That is what you did in 1925.
Time and again we pleaded with the Party opposite to act as a responsible Opposition, and to indicate clearly the policy upon which they were prepared to stand on any question. They have never done so. When we were in opposition we were a good Opposition. Whenever we criticised proposals of the Government we put up alternatives to those proposals, and we let it be known clearly where we stood on every issue. We got into office because of that. If Deputies opposite have ever the slightest hope of getting into office again they will have to be equally precise about what they will do when they get in.
What about the reduction of taxation you promised?
Is the Party opposite promising to reduce taxation?
Certainly.
I am not taking Deputy O'Leary's word for it. I want to get agreement about what they are going to do. Are they going to cut old age pensions again in order to reduce taxation?
They suffered for that once.
These are things that the Party opposite ought to tell us about. It is usually regarded as being the practice on a debate on the Central Fund for the Opposition to have a field day in the Dáil by making manifest and telling the country what they stand for. The only thing we learned in two days of dreary debate was that the Opposition stood for hypocrisy, again hypocrisy, and always hypocrisy; nothing concrete. In not a single economic issue on which they spoke did they indicate in any way, or did any member of the Party indicate, what precisely they would do if, by any misfortune, they were to get into the position of doing anything again.
Deputy Dillon is going farming.
The Deputy makes the usual debating speech, one which is mainly a collection of meaningless phrases, uttered with great pomposity, with all the air of statesmanship but leading nowhere. I know that Deputy Dillon is a novice in politics, and as a new member of the Party to which he now belongs it would not become him to point out to his older colleagues the fact that they do not know what they are talking about, and have not attempted to formulate amongst themselves what policy they stand for. A political Party cannot remain in existence merely for the purpose of opposing the Government in power. The Party opposite had their convention to-day and they came to some decision. They decided, even though there is the same leader and the same personnel as there was in the Cumann na nGaedheal Party, that they are going to accept the British Commonwealth and its symbols.
Donal O Buachalla.
And the Protestant succession. They decided that this Government is a bad Government. This is the only thing they decided that had any relation to present-day politics. If they want to remain in existence as a Party—and I am giving them some advice that they need——
What has this to do with the Vote on Account?
Not very much.
Very little, I submit.
If they are to remain in existence as a Party they must have some principles. If they have principles the policy will follow.
That is what you are depending upon.
Get principles first. I know that that will be difficult. I cannot imagine Deputy Dockrell, Deputy Morrissey, Deputy O'Neill, Deputy McGilligan and Deputy Dillon all agreeing on a principle.
Surely we are not to be asked to have the time of the House wasted with this absolutely irrelevant humbug?
Surely the question of the Commonwealth was discussed?
I submit that the Minister's speech is completely irrelevant and out of order.
The programme of a political Party is scarcely relevant.
I am speaking about a particular political Party, a new one, and I am inviting them to tell the House, when they criticise the policy of the Government, what their policy is. I know that it is a very awkward question.
Is it in order to refer by name to certain members on this side of the House as being unprincipled?
Certainly.
It is not a desirable Parliamentary expression if used in a personal sense.
I object very strongly to the names of Deputies being mentioned. I think the Minister may take it that it was a rather offensive remark.
The sense in which I used it was obvious. I said that a political Party with any hope of remaining in office must have principles and that the Party opposite has no principles.
The Minister used the word unprincipled.
If there are no principles it is unprincipled. That is the first thing a Party must have, if they want to keep in existence.
I submit that the Minister is flouting the authority of the Chair in this matter, and is deliberately wasting the time of the House.
Might I point out that the Ceann Comhairle said that the policy of a political Party was not in order? I am not talking about the policy of the Party opposite because I do not know what it is. I am pointing out the fact that I do not know and that no one knows what it is.
I submit, Sir, that you ruled a reference to individuals as being unprincipled, as being unparliamentary. I think the Minister should have the decency to withdraw.
The Minister explained the sense in which he used the word. If it were in a personal sense it would be a different matter. As the Minister explained his meaning the term is not unparliamentary.
I submit to Deputies opposite that their criticism of Government administration in every single sphere would be much more effective if they could put up against Government policy a policy of their own, or even a glimmering of a policy. I appreciate that in asking them to try to agree upon a policy I am risking disrupting the whole Party. I would not like to see that Party disappearing, because it is the greatest asset the Government has. Our own supporters sometimes criticise us and people frequently pass resolutions and send up communications expressing dissatisfaction with things the Government has done or proposes to do. They can be all kept quite by pointing to the Party opposite as the only possible alternative.
Mr. Brady
The bogey men.
As soon as they realise that, they are all prepared to accept this Government, no matter what it does.
And one section in particular, and the Minister knows that.
The farmers, I take it.
No.
That situation will continue as long as that is the policy. I am not forcing them to get a policy, because I fear if they did, they would split up again, and that would be a big loss to the Government. I ask them to try to get something that will pass as a policy, to the extent of enabling them to make speeches with a little more intelligence than those to which we have listened for the last two days. The Government's policy is known. It may be thought a good policy or a bad policy. It may be thought that we are not working energetically enough in putting that policy into operation, or, alternatively that we are going too fast. In any event the people know where we stand on most issues. They do not know where the Opposition stands. They know where the Labour Party stands and where Deputy Belton stands. We even know to some extent where General O'Duffy stands, but as far as the Opposition is concerned the only thing that is known about them is that they oppose the Government.
Now, if we are going to have a continuation of democratic institutions here, then we must have these democratic institutions 100 per cent. An essential part of an effective Parliament is an Opposition. Any Parliament that is going to function properly must have within it an intelligent Opposition, and if any criticism has come to this Parliament it is because it is defective in that respect. The only people who can act in that capacity are the Deputies opposite, and they cannot do that unless they are prepared to do more work outside the House, studying the facts of the situation, than inside the House making speeches. They make too many speeches. There was a French philosopher who said "Speech is a method of stifling thought." and one of the reasons why the Deputies opposite have not been able to do any thinking on these matters is because they talk too much.
The Minister himself has done something to stifle thought in the country. He makes too many speeches.
I did not say that I was thinking. We have done the thinking already, but what the Party opposite have not yet succeeded in doing is to give themselves a rest for a little while from speech-making. If they did they could do some thinking. For instance, they could think what they are going to do about the agricultural situation. They are always talking about it. The agricultural situation is a serious one not merely for us but for all countries. It is possibly a little bit more serious for us than for some other countries because of this outstanding fact: during the course of economic development in the past four years countries which specialised in any particular form of agricultural production were hardest hit and, to a large extent, we were specialists. Because of that our problem is more acute than the problems facing some other countries. But in every country the position of the farmers constitutes a problem, and you cannot solve it merely by talking about the economic war.
What does the Minister propose doing about it?
I told you in great detail at least once last week, and the Minister for Agriculture told you at least twice.
He is going to kill the hens now.
We are looking for knowledge and we have not got it.
We did our best.
If that is your best it is a poor standard.
In any event, what was stated by the responsible Minister as representing his programme represents at least one line of action. If there is another and a better line——
Is not the Minister aware that the Danes have a 25 per cent. preference over us in the British market because of exchange advantages, and that Australia and New Zealand have a similar advantage?
That is not so.
How does the rate of exchange in Denmark compare with sterling?
They are on a sterling basis.
They are not. The parity of exchange is 18.159 kroners to the £, and the present rate of exchange is 22.47. That gives the Danes a 25 per cent. advantage over us in the British market.
What is a kroner?
Look up the dictionary and you will see. It is time that you learned that before you came in here. The Minister has made a statement and I contradict it.
What are you going to do about it?
You are the Minister, and what are you going to do about it? You know it is true.
In any event, the point that I am trying to make is this: that there is one clear line on which to go in relation to our agricultural policy. It is the line that takes cognisance of the facts of the British market and of the declared policy of the British Government as well as the circumstances affecting other countries and the policies adopted by those countries. All these things are going to produce reactions here, and in relation to all of them we have attempted to formulate a clear plan of action. It is not an easy one and it is not going to produce prosperity for the farmers overnight. It is not one that is going to be capable of easy adoption. It is one that is going to involve considerable sacrifices by the rest of the people of this country in the financing of it.
What is the policy of the Party opposite for agriculture? We have heard nothing from them on that subject. When I asked that question, in so many words, last week I was told "Settle the economic war." I ask them to realise this: the economic war is not the root cause of our agricultural difficulties. I said here before, and I say it again, that I would like to see it out of the way if for no other reason than that it would make the Party opposite face up to realities and come to a recognition of the fact that there is an agricultural problem here which has no relation to the economic war and which we must face. They have got farmers in the Party opposite, and these farmers profess to know the conditions prevailing not merely amongst agriculturists here but in the markets for agricultural goods generally. I suggest to them that they should sit down and try to formulate for themselves a policy by the simple device of asking themselves, what they would do if, by some miracle, the responsibility of directing national policy was given to them? Let them do the same about unemployment. We read their speeches in the papers about their enthusiastic effort to settle unemployment. Just imagine Cumann na nGaedheal, even under a new name, making an enthusiastic effort to settle unemployment. It is enough to make a cast-iron dog laugh. In any event, we want to know what is their plan for dealing with unemployment. We want something more from them than an enthusiastic effort because we doubt their enthusiasm. We ask them to let us see their plans.
We would like to see your plan.
It can be easily seen throughout the country in all the new factories that our springing up and in the numbers of men and women at work. You can see it in operation throughout every part of the country in increased production. The Deputy can see it in his own town.
And I can see those who are not in any employment.
We never claimed that it was possible for us to undo in a day or a year the damage of 100 years of foreign government and of ten years of native misgovernment. But, we indicated that there was a way, and that that way was going to be tried. We are trying it, and it is working out very successfully. Even the Party opposite dare not stand up and say that, if they were put back into power, they would reverse our plan. On the contrary, every public speech that they make is one in which they indicate that they have adopted the plan, and the only thing that they have to say in criticism of Fianna Fáil is that we are not working the Fianna Fáil plan as well as Cumann na nGaedheal would work it. In conclusion, I want to ask them what are they going to do about unemployment and what are they going to do about every other branch of public policy. Not until they formulate answers to these questions can they make any claim to be taken seriously as a political party.
In these gathering shadows of anti-climaxes and fiascos there has been no more amazing fiasco——
What about the agreement that was come to to conclude to-night?
There was no agreement. There has been no more amazing fiasco than the little Napoleon kicked out from the Ministry of Defence in 1926 and coming in here to lecture on constitutionalism. Deputy Kelly, about a month ago, objected to a particular site being taken for new offices for the Department of Industry and Commerce. He wanted it for bands. Is there not brass enough in that man over there to give you bands galore? Put him up and let him blow his own trumpet and win music sweet to certain ears—this Minister who came in here and accused Deputy Morrissey of teaching someone "The Red Flag." We had heard him in this House tell how he had taught red revolution in this country. He is going to be a torchbearer in Easter Week, but the emblem may fall out of his hands when he thinks of the destruction that that Party did in the country through constitutionalism.
The Deputy might now move the adjournment.
I move.
Debate adjourned.
The Dáil adjourned at 10.30 p.m. till Friday, 22nd March, at 10.30 a.m.