There is very definitely an air of unreality about this debate, and the reason for that is fairly obvious. It is that there is no one, either on this or the other side of the House, the Minister included, who believes that this Bill is going to achieve its principal object, namely, to secure a guaranteed minimum price for beef sold in the market. On the very face of it, the Minister, in the Bill itself, confesses that he is not engaged in a genuine endeavour to secure that end. He states, of course, that his object is to secure that particular price for farmers. There is a certain number of beef cattle killed here for consumption at home, and there are so many others exported— and a great number more — for consumption abroad. He has the same powers to fix a price for one as he has for the other, and if he definitely wanted to raise the price of all, he would begin by raising the price of the greater numbers; that is, those cattle which are for export.
We have mixed up in this Bill a thing which appears to me to be a real legislative paradox. We have the Bill ostensibly designed to raise the price of beef — to make beef dearer— and, at the tail end of the Bill, we seek to utilise it to distribute cheap beef. Surely, if any two things are directly opposite, they are "dear" and "cheap," and you cannot achieve both objects at the same time and through the same instrument. The Minister knows very well that he is merely playing with the troubles of the farmers at the moment by introducing a Bill of that kind. It is merely one of those futile, silly little rear-guard actions that are calculated deliberately to take public attention off the main front of the economic war and the main cause of all these foolish little Bills. The Minister knows in his heart that, by legislation, he cannot interfere with the laws of supply and demand, and that if the supply is in excess of the demand, no price fixed by any statute will, in fact, apply.
Previous speakers have pointed out that it does not pay anybody to sell a fraction of their goods at a reasonable price and to leave the main portion unsold, and that if they are business men, they will sell the whole lot, if they can, at a lesser price and make more money by doing so. As long as the Minister leaves the big, wide-open doorway of an uncontrolled price for the export market, all the policing and amateur detective activity that can be introduced into a country will not govern the price at home. It has failed abjectly and miserably so far, and it will fail again under this. The very serious thing, when you look into it, is that you are forcing people — traders, farmers and others — by bringing in foolish Bills that cannot possibly be implemented, to become in a mild way law-breakers, and practically every farmer who has spoken with regard to the original Bill, one after the other, has admitted that he breaks the law every day of the week. The Minister introduces this Bill because, he tells us, his other Bill was scoffed at by all, and that butchers and farmers broke the law. It is a mistake for a Government to put people in such a position that they break the law daily.
I believe further that if the Minister really meant business and not propaganda, if he meant to raise prices rather than to raise political propaganda, he would face up to this problem of the supply being in excess of the demand by tackling it at the real centre, at the real heart of things, by trying to get a greater quota, by trying to get increased facilities into an unlimited market. And, even assuming that he is over-ridden, or bullied, or intimidated by others in that direction, if he were honestly out even to control the prices at home, instead of play-acting about counting sheep-skins hidden under beds and going out into the fields to count the number of lambs, counting the amount of heads and feet lying in the dung-heap at the rear of the butcher's premises — if he really meant to try to control a price for the cattle and sheep slaughtered at home, he would begin at the beginning in a bold, honest way, and have a public abattoir in every parish, and he would have directly inside that abattoir a census of every beast killed. That would not cost a fraction of the amount he is frittering away in trade interference, in shadowing traders, both the farmers and the buyers, in searching premises, annoying the lives out of men in business and in private life.
This is just another of the types of Bills of which we have had too many of late, a mixture of petty tyranny and an unfair interference with a man in his own business. We are rapidly approaching the point where no man in business in this country can carry on from one hour to the other without having some unskilled, inexpert Government inspector walking in to interfere with his business, to tell him how it should be done or how some Minister considers it should be done. That is one side of this particular Bill. We have hordes of these inspectors, clerks, detectives, call them what you will, spotters, informers, harassing the farmer in his sales and the butcher in his purchases. You are giving them the right to invade a man's business, his land, to count hides and horns and heads, to interfere with his stock, to visit him at any hour and put a whole litany of questions, and if he has not time to answer these questions in a very meek and humble way, that man is reported.
And what is the result? The result is that a man who knows nothing about the business is to become the buyer for that businessman. Is there anyone who could reasonably be expected to carry on any type of business with an unasked-for buyer buying for him, a man who does not understand the business, a man who has no experience in buying the goods which the other man has to sell? Would it not be more honest to say you will immediately put that man out of business, you will have his licence withdrawn, his premises closed? There would be something honest and something decent in all that, but this left-handed way of crippling a man in his business, by interfering with him, by taking the power to purchase for his business out of that man's hands, is a state of affairs that should be regarded as intolerable by all Parties in this House.
What powers are you giving to these poorly-paid people you have appointed — these inexperienced inspectors, boys, I suppose, or young men previously unemployed, who sat for a competitive examination and got higher marks than perhaps the cattle man who was not so good at geography or arithmetic? You are giving them tyrannical powers, unequalled in any civilised country at the present moment. You are giving those inexperienced, newly-made, temporary clerks powers practically amounting to life and death over the whole trade of victuallers in this country. You are giving them powers to close up a man's business. You are giving them powers merely by report unverified, not proved in court, without any evidence that any legal man would accept, to paralyse and finish a man in his business. Not only that, but you are giving these poorly-paid people powers to act as the buyers for the highest butchers in the land. You are giving them absolute discretion as to whom they will buy from and where they will buy. You are putting temptation in the way of those men that should not be put in the way of any unqualified lowly-paid officer in any State.
You are throwing open wide to those people the gates that lead to financial corruption. The Minister must know that human nature has its frailties and that temporary officers previously unemployed, in receipt of wages of a few pounds a week are going, as Deputy Belton said—some of them at least—to make hay while the sun shines. Imagine the temptation you are putting in the way of those men? Imagine the hundreds of people who will come after these lowly-paid officers and say: "Look here, if you buy all you want for so-and-so's business from me I will give you a tenner a week." The Minister is not inexperienced in these matters. Every one of us has seen the number of temptations that are put in the path of any person dealing with finance or contracts, but particularly the man who is merely buying for another, not for the State, buying for another who in fact, in the Bill, has put himself, as it were, outside the protection of the State.
That is the one side of it. Look at the other side. Let us say they have other weaknesses. Look at the power you are giving to these men to break an enemy, to get their own back, to get the better of a private feud, to get their own back on a person with whom there is bad blood. Look at how the life business of a man who may have been 30 or 40 years in a well-established premises is placed absolutely in the hands and at the discretion of a temporary official, with no court of appeal, no regular tribunal before whom charges must be made. I think the Minister is trying the Dáil rather far and he is trying even the tolerance of his own Party and the obedience of his Party rather far in asking them to pass a Bill containing sections of the kind we have here. I think such powers should only be sought by any Minister after a very bad state of affairs has, in fact, arisen in the country and, before the Dáil should vote such powers to any Minister, or to the officers of any Minister, the Dáil should be fully satisfied that there is a very serious set of conditions existing in the country.
In bringing in this Bill did the Minister come before us looking like a man conscious of a sense of responsibility? Did he come before us in the mood of a man who knows that he is going to ask for very terrible powers? Did he come as a man who knows that he is going to jeopardise the business and the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of decent men but that he considers such powers are necessary because of the really appalling conditions existing? Did he make any case? Did he convince anybody sitting behind him that such awful powers were required by his Department? Did he even attempt to do it? He came in here and seemed as if he were asking for a penny postage stamp, giving it little or no attention, telling us that there were certain irregularities.
And what is the great crime that the people in this country had been guilty of that brings upon all their heads all the clauses in this Bill? Merely the natural crime and desire to live, a desire to face the laws of supply and demand whether the Minister is facing them or not. Those men are going to live as best they can and in spite of all the little political wars and political feuds that the Minister and his colleagues may be experts at starting and inefficients at finishing they will go on trying to live as best they can. Does not the Minister know that all this is paltry, that it is a paltry, petty attempt to do the impossible? If the prices of beef or any other type of live stock in this country or in any other country are to be raised by putting it back even at a world level, it is only when we are in a position to compete with the world level that this can be done, and if the Minister is the least bit perturbed or the least bit concerned he would know the conditions in which these people are trying to carry on. He would not start trouncing the seats of the butchers' breeches. He would fight the case with the people who jammed the doors in the faces of the Government and he would risk even his own political fortune in an attempt to reopen the arteries of trade for the country. I believe this Bill should be opposed by everybody in the Dáil because it is a little bit of hollow humbug. It is side-stepping and trying to divest himself and his Government of the responsibility for settling in the only sensible way cattle and beef prices in this country. It is an attempt to make scapegoats of the farmers of Ireland.
The Minister, when introducing this Bill to us put it that he could have got better prices only he did not get cooperation from the farmers. The farmers are getting hammered from abroad, and the responsibility is over there. The butchers are to be hammered now, and if it were possible to secure conditions in the Bill to do so, the consumers would also now be hammered. Is it not time that those responsible for creating the mess, took some of the responsibility for cleaning it up? Anyone with any knowledge of buying and selling in the country would tell the Minister this: that if he appoints one of his paid inspectors to every butcher's shop, to every market and every fair in the country and if he increases the number and appoints one for every farmer in this country, nevertheless the prices that will obtain will be, not the prices fixed by any legislative enactments, but the prices fixed by the common, natural laws of supply and demand.
