Adjournment of the Dáil. - Saorstát Conditions. – Dáil Éireann (8th Dáil) – Thursday, 25 Jul 1935

Adjournment of the Dáil. - Saorstát Conditions.

Minister for Finance (Mr. MacEntee)

I move that the Dáil at its rising to-day do adjourn until Wednesday, October 30th.

An Ceann Comhairle

I understand that an agreement has been reached that the Chair, not later than 7.30 p.m. —earlier, of course, if the debate concludes and justifies such action— would call on the President or whatever member of the Executive Council is to conclude. The Chair purposes to give effect to that arrangement.

Mr. Cosgrave

On the motion for the adjournment, practically, every year, some question forms the subject of major consideration. This year, by reason of the unexampled increase in taxation there is a slight departure from that practice. The taxation this year exceeds that of every other year since the State was established. The reason for that increase is probably to be found in the fact that last year's balances were not as favourable as those of the two preceding years. According to the Minister's speech on the Finance Bill, he proposes to take £1,500,000 in respect of export bounties and subsidies. One would imagine that the borrowing began and ended there. It appears, however, from the figures that in addition to that sum there was also to be advanced £350,000, and a further figure of £250,000 advanced to the Guarantee Fund in respect of the asset which was known as deferred arrears of annuities, and which has to be included in the borrowing. The position, then, that we find ourselves in is that, practically speaking, to balance last year's account we had to borrow the sum of £2,050,000. It would be well if the matter ended there.

But last year there was deducted from the Guarantee Fund the sum of £716,000, which meant that the rates of the country were called upon this year, or will be called upon next year, to make good that sum, and in so far as national and local expenditure is concerned it was short that amount which should have been collected in the financial year 1934-35. In the previous two years there had been a balance amounting to about £2,500,000. While the shortage in respect of last year might be said to be balanced by the surplus of the previous two years, the fact is we are faced this year with having to consider the accounts of the year, and the expenditure of the year, in the light of the experience which was derived from the year 1934-35. It is an unhappy experience; it was an inevitable experience, having regard to all the circumstances.

The Budget this year starts with the assumption that we are going to collect in money, in tax and non-tax revenue, the sum of £29,300,000—a sum exactly £6,000,000 in excess of the taxation on the basis of the figures existing in 1932-33. We are going to collect £6,000,000 in hard cash in excess of these figures. We need not, at the moment, bother as to how much extra taxation has to be imposed in order to get that figure of £6,000,000, because on this question of finance one may juggle with figures to a considerable extent. It may so happen that the level of taxation in one year will not produce the same amount in another year. We can ignore, for the moment, what extra taxation had to be imposed in order to secure the estimated receipt of £6,000,000 over the receipts which the taxation in force in 1932-33 would have brought into the Exchequer. That £6,000,000 does not exhaust the calls made on the taxpayers of the country. There are various impositions, of one sort or another, which are not different from, and are in no way dissimilar from the actual imposition of taxation. There is the butter levy of £600,000. There is the additional charge in respect of the manufacture of sugar in this country, over and above the import costs of sugar when we were importing it before we began to manufacture it.

I have been at some pains to examine the various returns, publications and statements that have been issued in connection with the sugar beet manufacturing industry. There is an article in the Trade Journal of last month from the Secretary. There were speeches by the President, and by the Minister for Finance, and by members of the Seanad, and there is last of all the statement made by the Chairman of the Company which appeared in the Press, I think, on Saturday last. But every one of these speakers evades the one question. While there is most exhaustive information upon every subject, and while practically every section of the community is invited to observe the advantage to be derived from the manufacture of sugar here, nobody has been informed, at least I have not been able to discover, what is the real cost per ton of sugar from the factory. One would imagine the Chairman would devote a little attention to that important item, but it seems to have escaped everybody's observation, and we are left in the dark as to what the figure is. And we are driven to the conclusion that the only way in which one can get an estimate of the actual cost of the production of sugar is first to deduct what is known as the excise duty on sugar from the customs imposition on sugar, and that the resultant figure would be the equivalent of the difference between the cost of sugar at the quays and the cost of sugar at the factory. I think that figure amounts to 16/4 per cwt. It would be interesting to know if we can get any correction of that figure. I am assuming that it is a correct sum, and, as there were 66,000 tons of sugar manufactured last year and that we have the figure of 16/4 per cwt. as a difference between the cost of sugar manufactured at the factory and sugar imported, the cost to the consumers in this country is consequently £1,000,000 in respect of their sugar.

Some short time ago when there was an election in Galway and all the virtues of the Government had to be exposed to the people, the President told an audience listening to him that £1,000,000 had been distributed amongst the farmers of the country for beet in the last 12 months. The actual figure, according to the Secretary of the Company, was £820,000, and according to the Chairman of the Company £821,000. If we add to that figure what was distributed in wages, which, according to the Secretary, was £160,000, we have a total of nearly £20,000 short of what the President said was given to the farmers. However, let us get along with the hidden taxation. I have been at some pains to discover what is the difference between the price of a sack of flour in this country and the price of a sack of flour delivered into this country free from duty or other such cost. As far as can be found the difference would be for a sack of flour in this country and in Northern Ireland or Liverpool 10/- or 12/-. We consume about 3,000,000 sacks of flour per year, so that the hidden taxation in respect of that commodity is £1,500,000. There is a levy on cattle and sheep made under the Slaughter of Cattle and Sheep Act which amounts to £285,000.

There is an imposition upon certain rate collecting bodies in the country of £195,000 in respect of unemployment assistance. There has been added and there is being taken from the employers and employees in respect of unemployment insurance over and above the 1932-33 figure a sum of £190,000. On the night previous to the introduction of the Budget there was a licence fee put on the importation of cement amounting to 5/- a ton, and the estimated receipts in respect of that imposition amount to £60,000. There will be before the year is out a tax in respect of bacon which will amount approximately to £200,000. All these hidden items make up a sum of approximately £4,000,000, which, added to the £6,000,000, means that the ordinary citizen — every man, woman and child—pays an average sum of £3/6/8 in extra taxation over and above the 1932-33 level. Reduced to a weekly contribution, it means approximately 1/3½ per head.

Some years ago when a small tax was put upon sugar in order to provide extra moneys for the relief of agricultural rates, much play was made about the effect of that particular tax, which would have produced in revenue a sum of approximately £400,000. We have arrived now at a figure far exceeding £400,000—25 times £400,000. We find the people who thought the imposition of £400,000 was a dreadful catastrophe rather patting themselves on the back with regard to this new imposition which is falling upon every family in the State, from which no one can escape. So far as my investigations go, the only person who can partially escape is a pilgrim in Lough Derg, because there is not yet a tax on salt, pepper or water. That is the only possible person who can escape, and the longer people spend up there the better off they will be, apart from other considerations, from the point of view of taxation. The members of the Government would be well advised to spend a little time on that pilgrimage.

Mr. Dillon

What about the dry bread the pilgrims eat?

Mr. Cosgrave

I said the only persons who can partially escape, because there are certain things the Government have not yet taxed. Tea, tobacco, sugar, coal and all those various items have been searched out one after the other in order to find some means of adding to the revenue, to provide the Government with money to spend. Occasionally, when the Government are addressed on the subject of economy, one hears statements to the effect that there are no economies possible except in respect of social services, and they say they are not going to save money at the expense of the social services of the State. Let us examine that. So far as I have been able to discover, there is approximately £60,000 less this year provided for social services compared with last year. When they were faced with the problem of finding extra money this year, they were not even satisfied with adding to the taxation of the country £1,200,000; they were not satisfied with imposing an extra tax on tea, sugar, coal, cement, and all those other items, but they actually raided the unemployment assistance fund and the old age pensions fund, and deducted from those two sources a sum of £400,000. That deduction puts them in the position that this year approximately £60,000 less is being spent on social services.

I can give the figures if they are desired. Is there any doubt about them? The difference between this year and last year is mainly in respect of housing, which is up about £240,000 The deductions amount to £400,000 from the unemployment fund and the old age pensions fund. The figure for the unemployment fund last year was £1,500,000. It was £1,600,000 this year, reduced by £300,000 and £100,000 was deducted from the old age pensions fund. On the other side we have £240,000 in respect of housing. There is practically no other change. It is nonsense to say that the only possible economy would be in the social services. If these social services are necessary by reason of the policy adopted during the last few years, then they must be maintained as long as the policy is maintained and as long as the necessity for them arises. It must be remembered that with the best will in the world, and with the greatest changes that could take place, it would not be possible, and it is very unlikely, that there can be any limitation in respect of the social services that have been inaugurated during the last couple of years to meet an abnormal situation and to deal with circumstances nobody ever considered would have arisen here.

The Government started off very gleefully saying that they were going to ensure that the richer classes would pay their proper quota towards the maintenance of the various services. They were joined in that chorus by some members of the Labour Party. Whether it is advisable in a country such as this, where the co-operation of all classes of citizens is so much needed towards balancing our economy, that a direct set should be made on one section, is a matter for serious consideration. That it is inadvisable I personally have no hesitation in saying. Let us examine how it has worked cut. It is one thing to impose taxation; it is another thing to collect it. In the mad race to show how democratic this present Government can be, they increased surtax and supertax by 10 per cent. and they widened the net. What were the results? In the last year of the previous administration there was collected from supertax payers £789,000. What have been the collections by this Government during the last two or three years, even with the additional 10 per cent. and widening of the net? They have not come within £137,000 of that amount. The previous administration made no boast of taxing the rich, but they have it to their credit that they got more money than their successors who boasted that they were going to make them pay.

This policy which has been in operation here for the last three years has very considerably disturbed the relative percentages of direct and indirect taxation. There is now falling upon those least able to bear it a burden far in excess, both in relative amount and actual money, of what they are able to bear or were ever called upon to bear. There is little doubt about it that every possible stringency known to the law is being evoked in order to rake in the money. In those circumstances one feels inclined to examine whence it is that this money is coming, upon what sections of the community it is falling most heavily. One of the first things that strikes us in connection with this new offensive on the taxpayers is the persistence, I will even say the violence, of this Ministry in respect of that class which has been most hit since they came into office, the farming community. We find in the supply services that the cost of the Gárda Síochána is up by almost £250,000 compared with what it was three years ago. One explanation given here in this House is that it is necessary on account of the disturbed conditions of the country and particularly of one section of the country. The people there have taken a very unreasonable view, we are told, of the liabilities the State has put upon them.

Let us examine, for a moment, what exactly the State has done in respect of those exactions. A man paid his rates last year, a man paid his annuities last year. He was advised to do it; he was exhorted to do it. He was told it was the duty of the citizen to pay up both to the local authority and to the State, and he did that. What was his reward this year? He finds himself this year being charged the same annuities and the same rates as last year plus whatever sums of money his weaker brethren were unable to pay in respect of annuities and rates last year. Assuming now that he is an honest man according to the mind of the Government, the consolation and reward he gets is to be told that he has got to pay what has been left unpaid last year by those who were unable to pay or who thought that they should not be compelled to pay. That is the policy he is faced with now on the part of the Government. In the light of these circumstances, and having regard to the reduced income which these people now enjoy as compared with two or three years ago, it behoves the Ministry to examine this question in all its bearings, to examine it, not simply from the point of view of the Government that they have distributed £1,000,000 amongst 30,000 farmers for beet or so much money for tobacco and so much money for wheat. It is not to be examined from the point of view that certain people who have grown tobacco have made money out of it, and not from the point of view that some farmers have got £300,000 for growing wheat. It has got to be examined from the point of view of the whole agricultural community in the country.

Looking up the returns in respect of the sales of agricultural produce outside this country and the main market in which these goods have been sold, we find that there has been a catastrophic drop in the moneys received for agricultural produce in 1931 and 1932 as compared with 1934. The Minister for Agriculture here yesterday pointed out that sufficient advertence had not been made in the figures which were presented here in this House to the drop in the importations of cereals. Now, we need not lose our tempers over those matters. We can just look at the returns. These returns are Government publications. Let us take the years 1932 and 1934 and compare them.

Mr. Dillon

1931 and 1934.

Mr. Cosgrave

Yes. I find in these returns of live animals exports and imports on the balance of the two comparing the year 1931 with 1934, the following figures: in 1931, the export of live animals amounted to £16,988,563. In 1934, the exports amounted to £5,600,986, or a drop of £11,387,577.

General Mulcahy

That is in live animals alone.

Mr. Cosgrave

There is another heading called animal food products. We have here the exports and the imports and deducting the imports from the exports in the same way as the imports were deducted from the exports in the other case, we find that the exports in 1931 were £6,360,107. In 1934, the net exports in this matter of animal food products were £4,762,360. There is there a reduction in 1934 of £1,597,747. The sum total of these two figures in connection with live animals and animal food products for 1931 is £23,348,670 and for 1934 it is £10,363,346. That leaves a difference of almost £13,000,000. That £13,000,000 was new money, new money coming in here. What we do in respect of sugar and wheat does not compensate for that loss because the sugar at its best, even taking the President's own exaggerated figure of £1,000,000 and taking wheat at its best, £1,000,000, these £2,000,000 bear no relation to the loss of approximately £13,000,000 in the case of live animals and animal food products. Do not these figures suggest first, that at least on that section of the community there is no case for an increase in taxation and does it not raise the question that if increased taxation is to be imposed a special effort should be taken to ensure that it will not fall upon the agricultural part of the community or that if it does fall upon them that no extra liability will be placed on them. Already there have been extra liabilities placed on the farmers and very serious extra liabilities.

We can deduct from those figures the cereals and foodstuffs that have been imported in both cases. The net imports of cereals in 1931 was £7,516,631. In 1934 the net imports of cereals were £4,887,093. Those figures can be deducted from the other figures that I have already given. I want to make no false case in respect of this matter. Representations have been made from the Government side that, while there has been a fall in respect of receipts for the sale of live animals, etc., that there has been also a catastrophic fall in respect of the imports of cereals. Well, there are figures here in respect of both under the sums received for cereals, foodstuffs and even sugar. The net sum in 1931 was £8,306,532, as against £5,453,298 for last year. That shows a drop of £2,853,234.

If, in the light of these circumstances, a case stands for increased taxation in respect of that section of the community, I would like to be informed how it can be arrived at? And in respect of the disturbances which have arisen in certain parts of the country a little more consideration of these matters and a little more consideration of the difficulties with which those people are confronted at the moment and some advertence to the fact that their capital has diminished to an enormous extent over that period, that their resources have been eaten into and that their reserves have been called up may minimise the disturbances to some extent. The Government's injustice towards this class of the community is all the more reprehensible when it is practised in the part of the country where the farmers are such that a more industrious or hardworking people never existed, where they have always been in the forefront in connection with agricultural advancement of any sort. If the Government wants its experiments in connection with the change-over, as it is called, from the sale of live stock and livestock produce to the production of cereals, let them remember that you cannot have those changes, those interruptions, and those experiments, without imposing to some extent losses and hardships upon the people who are affected. What I have got to say on this would take a very much longer time. Other members wish to address the House. I have much more to say, but I think it would be unfair, having regard to the fact that there are but four hours to be devoted to this subject, to absorb more time than this. I do say, in conclusion, that there has been no extension of our secondary industries to warrant these new impositions. It is unfair to all sections of the community. It is practically carrying out the policy which has been found wrong in almost every country in Europe. Practically every country in Europe has experimented on it, and all of them have found, after years of experience, that they have got to correct the evil tendencies which inevitably result from this policy. It must be remembered that if you depreciate people's incomes, decrease their capital investments, and absorb their savings, you cannot expect from those people that sense of citizenship which formerly existed here in this country, and which was well exemplified in the agricultural community before those experiments took place.

Professor O'Sullivan

I make one suggestion to the Government before I start. This is a debate in which the whole policy of the Government, in a general way, but only in a general way, will be traversed. It is inevitable that there must be many references in this debate to the Minister for Agriculture, and to the condition to which the policy of the Government has brought the main industry of this country, the industry which far outweighs all the other industries put together. I make the suggestion that there will be a certain amount of unreality about that debate unless we have the Minister for Agriculture in on it. Those of us who have, in the last couple of years, and especially in the last 12 months, watched the sufferings of the people of this country, and watched the continual heaping of burdens on them by the Government, have found it difficult to make up our minds as to whether the continuation by the Government in their blind policy is due really to blindness or merely to callousness. Perhaps a judicious mixture of both explains their conduct as regards the ordinary people of this country. I think we can say, after three and a quarter years of Fianna Fáil policy as the present Government have attempted to put it into operation, that the country is faced at the present moment with the bankruptcy of that policy; its bankruptcy from the national point of view—because I do not think anything that they have done has in any way enhanced the prestige of this country abroad; rather do I think they have seriously damaged that prestige in so far as in them lay—and its bankruptcy from the economic, industrial, and fiscal points of view as well. That is really the situation as it presents itself to anybody who, at the present moment, is willing to look the facts as they are in the face.

As Deputy Cosgrave has indicated in his speech, I think the decline and decay not merely in policy but in the general condition of the country is clearly illustrated not only in the tone of the Minister's speech in introducing his Budget, but in the difference in character between the first Budget and that presented here this year. At one time there was the simple hope—nothing except experience can, of course, teach the Government how unfounded that hope was— that they could get enough money for their various projects by taxing those whom they called the rich. It was pointed out to them—and it must be inevitable—that in a modern community it is idle to think you can tax any one particular class and let the other classes escape. Modern economic life and modern social life are much too complicated and much too inter-connected for any simple reasoning of that kind to have any proper application to them. They were bound to interfere with enterprise by their earlier Budgets, and possibly they recognised that, at least so we gather from those earlier speeches on this Budget in which the Ministers did take some part. They have realised that there was a limit to what could be done in that particular way. They had raided what another Finance Minister on one occasion called the "henroosts." This year we have seen an extension of the indirect taxes, an extension that hit practically every necessity of life, whether it tended to increase the amenities of life or to keep body and soul together. With the possible exception of potatoes, everything is taxed. The fact that the Government were driven, after three years' experience, to adopt drastic expedients of that kind shows the way their own particular policy—what they call their national policy and their economic policy—has driven this country which was entrusted to their care.

At the same time that we witness those increases of indirect taxation, those enormous increases in taxation on the very necessaries of life, not a week passes that we do not see further steps and further measures taken in this House to increase the grip of the Government over the lives of every individual in this country. It is no longer a Government by appeal or persuasion. It is a Government by the rigid application of an ever strengthening Government machinery, whether that takes the form of the battering-ram against the farmers' houses, or the form of terrorism exercised through the system of licences. As I have already pointed out in this House, we had the experience here in Dublin in the last election that businessmen who are strong supporters of our policy gave it as their reason for not coming out into the open that they were afraid of the licence policy of the Government if they did so. That is the feeling which is abroad. A policy of ever increasing impoverishment of the country, a policy of hunting every penny which they can get out of the poorest cabin in the land, combined with an increase of Party dictatorship—that is the record of the Government in the last three years, and that is the record especially increased in the last 12 months.

What can the Government hope to get out of the continuance of the present policy? Whether they like it or not, for many years to come, agriculture must remain our principal industry, and if you kill that industry you cannot build up any other. If you keep that alive, if you keep it healthy, if you keep it economically sound, then there is some prospect for a policy of industrialisation. But there is no prospect for any policy of industrialisation for the towns if you destroy the industry on which, for a number of years to come the towns in this country, at all events, must depend for support.

The Government may boast that they have reduced the annuities by one-half. They have reduced that particular charge on the land by one-half, but their policy has sent up various other charges on the land. Rates, in many places, have been sent up beyond all proportion to what they were. Leaving these things aside, though they have reduced the annuity charge on the land, they have diminished the value of the land a great deal more as a productive asset in the hands of the farmer and of his family. Any number of instances of that kind can be given. There is no Deputy, no matter to what Party he belongs, who does not know case after case where the productive value of the farms has been destroyed by the wilful policy of the Government.

Let us take a case that was referred to heretofore: What advantage is it to a man living on the borders of my native county and another county, who originally had an annuity of £2 15s. to get that reduced by £1 7s. 6d. when all he will get for his three-year-old beasts is about £2 7s. 6d. For the comrades of these same beasts, when they were sold as dropped calves three years ago, he got £2 10s. Of what value have the Government made that farm to that particular farmer? The Government may say that they want him to get out of cattle. But the Government speak with so many voices and their conduct is so conflicting that the unfortunate farmer, even if he were willing to follow their advice, will find it extremely difficult to know what the real advice is. If he is to rear pigs on meal or the new corn mixture, what does he find? Maize can be sold across the border at £4 17s. 6d. or £5 per ton, while the mixture on this side of the border will cost about £8 per ton. What advantage does he get out of that particular policy of the Government? By destroying their market, by destroying the value of their produce, on the one hand, and by putting up their costs of living and their costs of production, on the other hand, the Government seem to have set out deliberately to destroy any independent farming class, and by independent farming class I do not mean a rich farming class, but a farming class that can operate without the assistance of Government subsidies.

One of the principal boasts that the Government can make is that in their three years of office they have reduced what was a flourishing industry to an industry which has to live from day to day by Government doles and subsidies. I mentioned that particular case of the farmer with the £2 15s. annuity, not because it is isolated, but because it is typical; because thousands of such cases can be found in every constituency in the country. What is the Government's answer to the despair that they are creating and continuing to create, despite every warning, in the breast of every hardworking farmer? The President occasionally will tell them: "Our heart bleeds for your sufferings, but pay up." Another Minister will tell them that they were never so well off as they are at present. To tell a farmer, who is being reduced to beggary, who sees the whole future of his family, not merely put in jeopardy, but actually destroyed, that he was never so well off as he is at present, is a limit of cynicism to which even a cynical and callous Government should hardly be expected to reach.

The whole question of the collection of the annuities in the way the Government are collecting them at present is not one of justice. It is a vendetta, and it is being carried out as a vendetta by the Government. They know perfectly well, or they should know— ignorance of this kind on their part would be as criminal as deliberate action almost—the straits to which their policy has reduced the farming community. Large quantities of cattle are being seized by them. I admit that the price of cattle at present, even in the ordinary market, is remarkably low, tremendously low. But low as it is, when we have a Government, against all sense of equity and I am convinced also against the law, selling seized cattle at a small fraction even of their present market value, are we surprised that the people look on the Government, not as a Government, but as a Party carrying out a vendetta?

You have, therefore, a thing that undoubtedly must cause uneasiness to anybody who has the future of this country at heart—the revival in the '30's of the 20th century of exactly the same kind of conditions, as some of us are just old enough to remember in the '80's. It was the economic conditions of that time that brought about that particular situation and put the farmers up against a very serious situation in which, undoubtedly, the better-off had to make common cause with those who were not so well off in order to guard the interests of the farming community as a whole. There was this difference, however, that in the '80's it was due to a system which was scrapped, which was gradually recognised to be unjust.

Here the economic crisis that the farmer is passing through has been deliberately brought about by the Government itself, by that very Government that is now using the full extent of the resources of the State against the unfortunate farming community. Party allegiance will undoubtedly induce many people, not merely in this House but in the country, no matter what it costs, to support the Government. It is just 12 months ago that I remember meeting a man in the Dingle Peninsula driving sheep. He confessed that there was no price for them, that he saw no future. I asked him: "Are you going to vote for them again?""I am," he said; "we will all go down together." That is the feeling that undoubtedly Party affiliations and Party loyalties may bring people to, but it is a very poor look-out for the country. There are others, too, to whom the policy of the Government may make an appeal, those who, for the moment, at all events, are benefiting by the policy of the Government, by their tariff policy, their licence policy and their redistribution of wealth, as the Vice-President would call it.

I admit that there is many a man in this country making easy money at the present time, remarkably easy money, but if he is, it is the general public that is paying for it and paying very dearly for it. But even those people who are making easy money—that particular operation is very attractive— even those who one way or another are living on the various doles the Government gives out to the community, will have to ask themselves— and the Budget of this year ought to make this question a very pertinent one for them—where is it all going to come from? The camel may live on his own hump for a certain period but not for ever and the policy of the Government at the present moment is largely that particular policy of the camel's hump. What are they doing? Living on the resources that were accumulated in better times under their predecessors, wasting these and prodigally wasting them. And the very most they can do is to give a shout of triumph that there is still some money to spend, that despite all they have been able to do and all they have tried to do for the last three years, the country is not yet fully bankrupt. Listen to the Minister for Agriculture. What is his great plea for his Party at the present moment? "We were told we would be bankrupt. Well we are not fully bankrupt yet." Apparently, for him bankruptcy is not coming quickly enough. Will he not realise, will the Government not realise, will not even the Minister for Local Government and Public Health, the Vice-President, realise, that we are simply in a spendthrift fashion living on what we have saved, that we are preparing no solid foundation for the future, on the contrary, that we are jeopardising that future as effectively as any Government policy could jeopardise it?

We have heard of various industries established. Some of them, I have no doubt, are perfectly sound. They will justify themselves but many others of them—we have heard examples of them discussed in this House—are of the mushroom type that are of no advantage whatever to the country. The Minister for Industry and Commerce, I will admit, is the best propagandist the Government Party have and they should be thankful to him for that. He has been much more successful as a propagandist than he has as Minister for Industry and Commerce. Supposing the fantastic claims he makes for his industries were sound; supposing they had some real solid foundation—I am speaking of the claims as a whole—how can that compensate and how does the Government think it can compensate for the ruin, the deliberate ruin, of the principal industry of this country? How can you have a successful industrial policy depending on the home market, if you have not in this country at the present moment a successful system of agriculture? You may say that in this country we want a better balance between industry, in the narrow sense of the word, and agriculture. Perhaps, but certainly we ought to secure that, not by starting out to destroy what you have, therefore making it impossible to have any balance between the two.

The Government really has no industrial policy. You have bits of a policy. The attitude of the Minister for Industry and Commerce is quite simple. "Is there anything cheap coming into this country? Is there anything that the unfortunate people of this country can buy cheaply; if there is, we will not let it come in." Tax after tax, therefore, tariff after tariff. Tax every article of consumption, either by Customs or Excise, and neither in one case nor the other is there ever a single bit of advertence to the ordinary citizen, to the ordinary taxpayer, the ordinary man, to the person who has to keep body and soul together—whether he is poor or in fairly good circumstances. There is no thought for him. Not once in the debate on the Budget did we hear from the Minister for Industry and Commerce even a glimmering of an idea that there was thought for the consumer. "These particular articles are coming into the country cheap. If I put a tax of 20 per cent. on them they can be made in this country, so I will put a tax of 40 per cent. on them"— that was the burden of the speech of the Minister for Industry and Commerce, tax after tax on article after article. Where is that going to lead? Where can it lead? When you have deliberately destroyed your external trade, when you have deliberately destroyed all sources of wealth of that kind, where can a policy of that kind lead any country? It can only lead, if it is persisted in, to a rapid deterioration of the standard of living. It can have no other result. Unless there is a fundamental change in the attitude of the Government, it can have no other result than disaster to the country. It is absurd, all this tax after tax, to set up little industries that are of no importance one way or the other, and all the time the foundation of every existing industry is being destroyed.

Then you come to the principal industry. Does anybody pretend that you have a policy there? Again, you have only bits of policy, and they do not connect together; they make no pattern of any kind.

Several times in this House the Minister for Agriculture has been challenged upon a particular issue, and I do not think he has ever given an answer on this particular matter. The minority report of the Economic Conference of which the President and the Minister for Agriculture were members, went into the matter with geometrical accuracy and detail and their report contained this—and it was reiterated by the Minister for Agriculture himself—that you cannot have a successful cereal policy without an expanding cattle policy. That was laid down and signed by members of the present Government and was reiterated in this House by the Minister for Agriculture in 1933. He recognised that a cereal policy and a wheat policy inevitably meant an expanding cattle policy. Into these arguments, I need not go, but it was impressed upon us: the more wheat, the more rotation of crops, the more cattle. The Minister for Agriculture stated that that was always his policy, but that same Minister less than nine months afterwards told this House that his policy was the very opposite. Obviously, he had not any policy. He committed himself in the summer, 1933, to the policy that more wheat necessarily meant more cattle, and in March, 1934, he said that more wheat meant less cattle, which clearly showed that he had no policy. He could hardly contend that the economics of the world had changed so rapidly in nine months. The Minister was challenged on that bouleversement of his policy, but he has always failed to justify it.

President de Valera.

Mr. Dillon

I beg your pardon. Yes, President de Valera. President de Valera's activities have resulted in reducing the income of the farmer by £13,000,000 in respect of the matters I have mentioned. Let us examine that question. Somebody was greatly shocked here because I said that not one acre of wheat or beet would be grown on my land so long as I could prevent it. I want to repeat that to-day. Sugar beet at 37/6 per ton delivered in the factory at a flat rate is the worst sweating shop that could be invented in this country. There is no sweating furniture factory in a basement or in a back lane in Dublin which compares with the agricultural condition of those farmers and labourers working for a farmer who is raising beet at 37/6 per ton for delivery to Carlow, Tuam, Thurles or Mallow. I will raise no crop and I will ask no farmer in this country to raise a crop which requires him to employ men for its cultivation at wages which would disgrace a coloured labourer in the Southern States of the United States of America. There is not a single practical farmer in this country who will not agree with me that if one wants to raise sugar beet at that price one cannot afford to pay any man working for him more than 24/- per ton. In many cases farmers according to their location will find themselves unable to pay more than 21/- per week. It is a public scandal to ask any labouring man in this country to work ten hours a day for six days of the week and sometimes on the seventh day of the week as well, for 21/- a week. Everybody knows that, and it is an outrage on our people when 60 miles across the water from where we stand at present men doing the same work or less are being paid in Cheshire 33/- a week and in Gloucester 36/- to 38/- a week without perquisites.

I will tell you the difference, and I have demonstrated it to the Deputy before. The poorer a person is the more bread he will eat. The slenderer a man's weekly budget is, the larger bread will bulk in it. The richer a man is, the less bread you will see upon his table as compared with the other comestibles he consumes. That is the common experience of the Deputy and myself. If you place the subsidy of wheat on the loaf by raising the price of flour, as we have done in this country, by 10/- per sack, it means that the farmer who grows wheat is going to get the price of that wheat not out of the national Exchequer, which is filled out of the pockets of the community as a whole, but out of the pockets of the poorest section of the community, who are living in the tenement rooms of this city and every other city in the State. It does not come exclusively from those people, I admit. Part of the subsidy will come from everybody who eats a loaf of bread or buys a bag of flour, but the greater part will come from those who eat the most bread and buy the most flour, and those are the poor. I detest taking subsidies of any kind from the Government or any other source. I prefer to earn my living without being beholden to the Government or anyone else. I like to earn my living in open competition with those who are prepared to compete against me; but there is one thing I will not do, whether the Government wants me to do it or not; I am not going to screw my profits out of people who have not got enough to provide for themselves. I am not going to pay my working man 24/- a week to go home and look after a wife and four children, and take 7d. out of his pocket every Saturday night to provide me with a profit on the wheat we have grown together. If I cannot grow a crop which will yield me a livelihood without stealing it out of the 24/- a week labourer's pocket, then I will not grow any crop at all.

Mr. O'Reilly

Tell us what you would do.

Mr. Dillon

I would kick President de Valera out of office. That is what I would do, and while I would remove Deputy O'Reilly from those benches into retirement, I can assure him that I would do it with a gentler hand than I would be tempted to use on the august person of President de Valera. It is not Deputy O'Reilly's fault. He is a simple man, and he has been caught as a fly by the spider. I would release the fly, but I would restrain the spider. Deputy Professor O'Sullivan is usually a good prophet. Whenever the President is sitting there, Deputy Professor O'Sullivan is usually in a position to forecast with astonishing exactitude precisely what President de Valera is going to say in two and a half hours. To-day I gathered from Deputy Professor O'Sullivan that he expected the Government to answer the economic arguments which we had put up.

Professor O'Sullivan

Oh, no.

Mr. Dillon

Nothing of the kind! Let me prophesy for Deputy Professor O'Sullivan to-day. The answer he will get in Dáil Eireann to-day is the answer he got on the Dingle Peninsula a few months ago. The green flag will be wrapped around them. They will declare that they are defending the traditional right of the Irish people to be free, and that they are the Republican Party. They will ask: "What are we to reduce in the way of taxation?" They will tell us that in any case they are not going to let down the men who died for Ireland. All that will be said between 7 o'clock and 7.30 or 8 o'clock, with a guarantee from the Chair that no one will be allowed to answer. Whenever the Government is brought dead up against the realities of the existing situation, hasty research is made for the green flag. The persons who get up to speak are wrapped in it, and they are instructed to embrace Kathleen Ni Houlihan for the edification of the populace at large. Mind you, although that is merely disgusting when you see it going on in this House, it is something more than disgusting when you meet it in the Dingle Peninsula, because I do the Dingle Peninsula this much credit, that I do not believe it is party prejudice that makes a person living there say: "Well, we will all go down together," when he is rationally convinced that the policy of Fianna Fáil is destroying the country. It is not that. It is because he has been told, by Deputy Maguire for instance, that those who take the view of Fine Gael are Judases, spies, informers, traitors, Careys, that that man says: "My God, if I take that view too, Deputy Maguire might say all those things about me." Now it does not very much matter to the more prominent members of the Opposition what Deputy Maguire says about them. They recognise that when Deputy Maguire has not got anything else to say on a public platform he resorts to describing Deputy MacDermot as a Judas, but it is by no means the same thing for the gentleman who is living on the Dingle Peninsula. We all remember the words of the famous or infamous Judge Keogh: "Winter is coming and the nights are getting long." If anyone living on the Dingle Peninsula is publicly denounced as a traitor, a spy and a worthy descendant of Carey, is he not entitled to remember the historic words of Judge Keogh that "Winter is coming and the nights are getting long?"

Mr. Corry

They will be better nights for burning houses.

Mr. Morrissey

It is a pity the Minister does not say that himself instead of prompting Deputy Corry. He has not the courage to stand over his own words, so he gets Deputy Corry to say it.

Mr. Dillon

Let me point out that I believe and always have believed that the Republicanism both of the Minister for Finance and of President de Valera is cheap fraud. What I apprehend is that if the campaign is carried on by them and those whom they inspire, to set up the thesis that no man in this country is a patriot unless he is a member of Fianna Fáil, and to abuse and denounce everyone who does not share their view as to the best way of blooding our people on to prosecute the economic war for the edification of President de Valera's private pride, some day the people will find them out. When they do the indignation of the people will not be turned exclusively against the Fianna Fáil Party, who have fraudulently misused so splendid a thing as patriotism for their own ends. Patriotism in this country, I apprehend, may be succeeded by a disillusioned internationalism which has no place in this country, but which I think is a very real danger if the present codology is carried on by Fianna Fáil.

I know well what is going to happen here to-day. President de Valera is going to get up and make one of his sea-green, incorruptible speeches. He is going to shake the lock of hair into his eyes and say that the only suggestion we have to make is to surrender in the economic war; that he is not going to surrender to John Bull; and if the people want to surrender they had better get somebody else. We all know the same old blatherskite which we have been listening to on and off for 18 months. But the people are beginning to realise that it is blatherskite. People are beginning to realise that if President de Valera means what he says when he talks about a republic there is nothing to stop him declaring it; that he can declare it to-morrow morning if he wants to. People are beginning to realise that they have been worked up into a war frame of mind by that kind of talk when there was no legitimate ground for it at all.

I put it to Deputies on the other side of the House that they ought to bring pressure to bear upon their own leaders (1) to face the economic situation which is manifest from the figures I have quoted to-day; (2) to face the political situation which is of their own creation. I put it to these Deputies, who ought to be the leaders of their own people, to ask themselves the question that I have asked myself: What is it of freedom that we have not got now? What is it that could be done for this country by our Parliament that we cannot do now? What hope is there of inducing the people who live in the Six Counties to join us on any terms other than sovereign independence in association with South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the other nations of the Commonwealth?

If they seriously believe that it would be preferable to establish a Twenty-Six Counties Republic, then I am sorry for their obscurantism, but I understand their position. I do not quarrel with them for carrying on to any length it may be necessary to go, because I would not ask any man to compromise the sovereignty and independence of this country by a fraction for any economic consideration, no matter how valuable. But what I do exhort them is, not to allow themselves to be dragged into an interminable wrangle on the misrepresentation that the liberty and sovereignty of this country is at stake when it is not, and when the only issue at stake is whether President de Valera will be in a position to say that he is right, and that if a different course of action had been taken in 1922 from that which was taken, there would have been no trouble is this country at all. That is really what President de Valera is working for at present and that is not an object the achievement of which is worth all the suffering our people have been made to suffer during the last three years.

If it were the independence of this country which was at issue, I would have no complaint to make, but the independence of this country is not in issue. The existence of this country as a sovereign, independent State is guaranteed. The probability of our being able to restore the unity and independence of the whole country as a united nation is there for the taking if we will only take it. The alternative is to go on with the same kind of fraud that we have been going on with for the past three years; to go on in the face of figures that must make it clear to everyone that we are going to meet with financial ruin sooner or later; and to go on in the knowledge that we have nowhere to turn when the ruin comes upon us.

There is not an intelligent Deputy on those benches who does not know that the economic condition of this country is critical. I ask them to turn over in their own minds what it is all about. Why are we continuing to fight our neighbour and our best customer when there is absolutely nothing to fight about? I ask them to consider the question whether it is not all for the purpose of justifying the political past of an individual, or an attempt to conciliate a body of men in this country who do not want to be conciliated, and who will not be conciliated until they get their way in establishing a Communist régime all over the land. Mind you, such a body are here and I respect their honesty in coming out and saying perfectly bluntly, as the Republican Congress has done, that they do not stand for any of the old-fashioned republics or any clap-trap of that kind, that they are out for a Communist State and they mean to get it.

I ask members of the Fianna Fáil Party to consider whether all the sufferings, damage and misery which have taken place in this country are not taking place (1) in order to justify President de Valera's past political history; (2) in a vain and futile attempt to conciliate gentlemen who will not be conciliated unless they get their own way and make what they will of this country. I ask them to consider if the alternative for which we stand is not of infinitely more value, not only to the Irish nation as a nation, but to the Irish people and the influence they can and ought to wield through the whole world. I do not hope that they will have the courage or independence to cross the floor and help us in putting President de Valera where he ought to be, but, at least, I have this hope, that they will bring some kind of pressure to bear upon him in order to give our people a chance to live in their own country.

Mr. Moore

Deputy Dillon, I think, should be familiar with an argument that was common with Unionists in the British time. "What right has any British citizen got that does not belong to an Irish citizen at the same time? Have you not got the same right to elect representatives? Have you not got the same freedom individually that any British citizen has?" When he challenged anybody to say what liberty this country is deprived of that it could have by being a Republic, he should remember that argument because I think the two things are parallel. Surely when Deputy Dillon in other things attaches so much importance to the sense of the people, to the general feeling of the people he should attach more importance to the sense of the people on this big political question. Surely the sense of the people of the country cannot be far wrong. What that sense is has been demonstrated fairly often. Deputy Dillon should remember too that he was wrong in 1918. He was arguing just as logically in 1918 against Republicanism as he is arguing to-day. He was proved wrong then and I think he would admit to-day that he was wrong at that time. He was a very young man, of course, at that time— a great deal younger than he is now but he was quite as logical then I dare say as he is to-day. I am surprised it does not occur to him that just as he was wrong in 1918 he could be wrong to-day. I would remind him too, that the Republicans of to-day have the great name of Kevin O'Higgins to back them up in preferring a Republic to a Dominion. There was nobody who did more to establish the principle of Independence for Dominions than the late Kevin O'Higgins.

Deputies

Hear, hear!

Mr. Moore

Yet when he was challenged in 1923 in the Engineers' Hall in Dawson Street as to whether he would have preferred a Republic if he had a choice his reply was: "Certainly; I would have preferred the Republic." I think if you look up the Press reports of that time you will find that statement in them. It is futile for Deputy Dillon to try to combat that big feeling of the people on the question of their political rights. In my opinion, the great mistake that Deputy Dillon and his colleagues are making is in satirising that feeling in the country. When he talks mockingly about the Government invoking the name of Caitlin Ni Houlihan to cover a lot of economic sins and perhaps other sins, he is satirising the deepest feelings of the people. He is laughing at the people he is pretending to serve. The big mistake I see that Deputy Dillon and his colleagues are making on this question is that they refuse to take the economic war seriously. I am not arguing the rights or wrongs of the question but, viewing it objectively, nobody can deny that the economic war is taken seriously by thousands and thousands of people in this country.

Deputies

Hear, hear!

Mr. Moore

Mr. Dillon

I do not wish to interrupt the Deputy, and if it is inconvenient for him to answer my question I would be glad if he would rebuke me. Could he tell me what rate of wages they were paying their agricultural labourers?

Mr. Moore

Well, as a matter of fact, all the labourers in that particular district are boarded in the farmers' houses so that I could not give the Deputy useful information. I have only one complaint to make on that question and I wish the Minister for Finance would make representations to the Sugar Manufacturing Company in regard to it. My complaint has reference to the delivery of the beet. There are a number of farmers who are quite satisfied with the profits to be made on beet growing, but they were so impatient with the lack of organisation and the hardship attached to the delivery of beet last year that they very nearly threw it up in disgust. Curiously enough, a Parish Priest in County Wexford told me the same thing, that the arrangements had caused the greatest possible discontent amongst the beet growers in his parish, although he had the same thing to say as I had in regard to prices—that there was no dissatisfaction with the profits to be derived from it. The present method of delivery frequently means sitting up two or three nights in the winter loading beet in very bad weather. There have been cases where people have incurred serious illness through the hardships arising in that way.

The Deputy makes a big assumption when he talks of taxing the poor in respect of wheat as if it was something out of which they got nothing. The Government would be doing a very poor service if they said they will not produce wheat or beet or shoes or boots because in order to do that, for a certain period the cost of things might be increased to a section of the community. The Government might be doing a very poor service to the poor if they adopted that attitude. That is the attitude Deputies opposite want them to adopt. If it means a little increase in their cost of living, although the net effect may be for their benefit, Deputy Dillon will have nothing to do with it.

I think the poor have at least as much desire as anybody else to see the resources of this country in land and industry and in minerals developed to the fullest extent. They are at least as much concerned with that question as the rest of the community, and it is very shallow to say that in producing wheat and giving the farmers a guaranteed price you are attacking the poor people. The poor people would not be able to pay for much if the Government in a very difficult situation had not embarked upon this great policy of self-sufficiency which means so much benefit to the country as a whole. And the poor are not stupid or senseless; when it comes to the time to vote they know their friends. The poor of Dublin have not shown a terrible lot of interest in Deputy Dillon's Party, and I doubt if many have been converted to it. In Galway they were not over enthusiastic for the Deputy's Party and we know the extent to which they showed their enthusiasm for the Deputy's Party in Dublin at the last election.

Deputy Dillon's strangest point—the one which I think must fairly have shocked everybody in its exaggeration— was when he said that 32/- a week was worth far more at the time of the Shannon scheme than it is to-day. Surely to goodness, Deputy Dillon would not find anyone to agree with him on that point. His contention amounts to this: that clothes and food and shoes and all these things were more easily bought in 1924-25 than they are to-day. There are not many who would agree with that point.

Altogether I think Deputy Dillon's speech was not a useful speech and particularly I think the policy that is being adopted of trying to make people feel that bankruptcy is upon them and that there is a terrible future before them because of the incompetence or wrong-headedness of the present Government is a very bad message to send out to the people just as Parliament is about to adjourn. There were two bank meetings held last week—the Provincial Bank and the Munster and Leinster. I am sure the Munster bank may be said to have its ear to the ground so far as the farming interest is concerned. We did not hear any complaints from the chairman that we were in a terribly dangerous position or that the future of the country looked shockingly bad. I think the speeches of the chairman of both those banks were very hopeful, not that I have a terrible respect for a bank chairman. But I know they examine in detail the trend of events in the country and that they ought to be able to summarise fairly the general position. I would like to see things a lot better than they are. I know there is considerable hardship being endured and that a considerable amount of unemployment exists and that lots of farmers are not as well off as many of us would like to see them, but I do say they are far from being in despair, that the great bulk of them are hopeful of the future and they are well satisfied and even enthusiastic for the Government's policy. There is one thing the average farmer believes in and which the present Government represents for him more than any other and that is tillage. The farmer likes to see the plough move and the corn crops grow. There is a much greater feeling of hope and confidence amongst the farming community now than I have ever seen before. I think it may be said with regard to other sections of the population that they are by no means discontented with their prospects. In this connection, I would like to ask Deputy Dillon when he is dealing with rates of wages why it is he never looks at the good side. We are only something over 50 per cent. agricultural. There is a very big urban population in this country and Deputy Dillon will admit that as far as tradesmen are concerned they are earning far higher wages than in Great Britain.

Mr. Dillon

I would like to hear the Labour Party on that. Deputy Norton says certain wages paid here would disgrace a Babylonian city.

Mr. Moore

Now, the Deputy is putting the responsibility on to Deputy Norton. If Deputy Dillon has taken such pains to find out what agricultural wages are in Great Britain, he knows something about industrial wages in Great Britain, and I think he will find that there is no trade that is not more highly remunerated in this country than in Great Britain. For a time, it was part of my business to watch the trend of wages and make comparisons.

Two or three years ago, in the motor industry with which I was connected, the difference in wages was very considerable indeed, and in other trades the same thing applied. Deputy Dillon, if he wanted to make a speech that would be in some way proportionate to the real situation here, could have made a lot more helpful speech, a speech that would encourage the people and would be of some assistance to them in the struggle they are making.

Mr. Costello

There are so many topics that one would wish to discuss in this debate that it is rather difficult to choose between them. I find myself obliged by circumstances to confine my remarks to one particular topic. I am greatly tempted, however, having regard to some of the remarks let fall by the last Deputy, Deputy Moore, to follow him into some of his arguments. I find it somewhat difficult to accept his remark that true republicans have almost as their idol—so I gathered—the late Kevin O'Higgins. I was privileged to be associated with the late Kevin O'Higgins during his work at the Imperial Conference of 1926 and from that until the day of his murder. I was with him for some time in Geneva in the days which immediately preceded his murder, and I think I am in a position to know what his aims and his ideals in this country were and what he was actively working on just immediately prior to his murder.

He had no thought of a republic. His whole political ambition was devoted at that time to one object alone. The whole aim of his life to which he had devoted himself just immediately prior to his death was not the establishment of a republic in this country, but the end of partition in this country. He was working actively towards the achievement of that ambition when he was foully done to death, and the end of partition was postponed many years by that very dastardly act. He had hoped to achieve the end of partition and to bring about the unity of this country in a very short space of time. He had his plans and his hopes. He had concrete plans and active hopes to bring about the unity of this country. It is untrue to suggest that people who call themselves republicans here now are to derive their inspiration from the late Kevin O'Higgins. We on these benches who have as the foremost plank of our political policy the unity of Ireland draw our inspiration from his acts, and we were more closely associated with him than any of those pseudo-republicans.

I am tempted to follow some of these observations a little more closely than I had intended, but I must, in the interests of those who wish to speak on the variety of topics which must be adverted to, confine my remarks to the one topic I have chosen for myself. When the motion for the closure was being debated some weeks ago, I put forward as one of the grounds of my objection to that closure that it would result, in effect, in preventing us from discussing some portions of the policy of the Department of Finance in which some of us on this side were keenly interested. One of the topics I mentioned at that time was the Civil Service. Last Tuesday, I put down a question to the Minister asking him if he was aware of the dissatisfaction which existed in the Civil Service in consequence of the failure of the Government to carry out the explicit promise that had been made by President de Valera in January, 1932, to give to the Civil Service arbitration in their dealings with the Government in reference to their conditions of service. The Minister stated in reply that he was not aware that the civil servants were dissatisfied with the scheme which had been recently propounded by the Government in furtherance of the promise that was made explicitly in January, 1932.

He stated that he, as Minister for Finance, had promulgated a scheme based on the majority report of a commission which he had set up to inquire into the best method by which arbitration could be applied to the Civil Service and he was not aware that the scheme which he had propounded did not meet with the satisfaction of the Civil Service associations and organisations. He cannot but be aware of the fact that the scheme which has been propounded by way of supposed arbitration to the Civil Service has been condemned in no uncertain language by the vast majority of the representative associations of the Civil Service. If he had any doubt on that matter, he must know that over a year ago, when the report of the Brennan Commission, I think it was called, was issued, it was made abundantly clear that the Civil Service organisations would have nothing to do with the recommendations contained in the majority report of that commission. So far from holding out any hope of accepting anything on the lines of the scheme propounded by the majority report, none of the Civil Service associations would enter into any discussions with the Department of Finance on the lines of arbitration set forth in that report.

If that was not clear, pronouncements made by the staff associations themselves ought to have made it clear. I have a recent edition of the Civil Service journal in which there is a statement made by the Civil Service Federation that they will have nothing to do with this scheme. I have also got the official journal of the Post Office Workers' Union in which they refer to the proposals of the Minister as mock arbitration. It must be abundantly clear that these proposals cannot meet in any degree with the satisfaction of any branch of the Civil Service. I raise this matter towards the close of this long session because I feel that the time has come when an end should be put to the deadlock that exists in the Civil Service.

On the closure motion two days ago, I gave my reasons why I was fairly free to raise this matter on a purely non-contentious basis. I do not wish in the least to bring into Party politics the condition of the Civil Service in the Irish Free State. I hold the view, and I have always held the view that one of the greatest necessities in this country is to have an expert Civil Service and to have it at the disposal of Ministers who may come and who may go—whatever Party they may belong to at a given time. I realise the importance of having at their disposal men of proved capacity, and, above all, men of proved loyalty to the country, as a whole, and not to any particular Party. I think it has been demonstrated as a result of the change of Government in the country that we are fortunate in having a Civil Service that works its best for any Government that may be in power at a given time. Therefore, when I raised this question, I raised it entirely in a purely non-Party spirit. Personally, I may say it was out of my own sympathy with the demands of the Civil Service Association I raised it, because I feel that there are genuine grievances in the Civil Service and that there are in the Civil Service groups of underpaid people. There are principles operating in the Civil Service with which I profoundly disagree. I believe a position of deadlock has been reached between the Government and the Civil Service.

It is no use saying that the last Government did this or that the last Government did that. What we have to recognise now is that the man who occupies the office of head of this State gave, in January, 1932, a very explicit promise to the Civil Servants. I am quoting from his speech where he said: "I believe it is only right that there should be an Arbitration Board for the Civil Service to deal with matters between the Service and the Executive. We would be prepared to agree that an Arbitration Board be set up." That specific promise was given, and I think it is incumbent on every Party in this House to see that this promise is kept. I have a copy before me of the scheme that was propounded, and that scheme is described in the Post Office workers' journal as "mock arbitration from start to finish." None of the fundamental principles of arbitration is in the least degree adhered to. We favour the principles which have been in practice in the British Civil Service and which have worked successfully there for the last ten or 12 years. We put forward that scheme not because it is a scheme devised by the British Government, or that it is applicable to the British Civil Service, but because of the objections that have been put forward to the principles of arbitration in the Irish Civil Service. The chief objection was that this arbitration might impinge upon the prerogative of the Dáil to control the public purse. Now, our Civil Service has been modelled on the lines of the British Civil Service and the public finances of this State are modelled on the lines of those in Great Britain—the constitutional control of the Dáil over public moneys and funds is modelled upon the constitutional procedure in Great Britain. For that reason, I fail to see how a system of arbitration which has been tried in the British Civil Service cannot be operated here in this country in respect of a Service which is analogous to and based upon the principles operating in the British Civil Service. I fail to see how an arbitration scheme, which has been worked successfully in Great Britain in the last ten years without in any way impinging upon the prerogative of the British House of Commons in reference to its control over the public purse, cannot operate equally successfully here in the Dáil, giving the Dáil control over the public purse. The scheme operating in England is in essence arbitration in every respect. The scheme propounded by the Minister has in no respect in it the principles enshrined in arbitration. The scheme propounded by the Minister was referred to in the Post Office Workers' Journal which stated that "the scheme that is proposed to be set up is within the control of the Minisster." The Minister cannot dispute that. No doubt, this board is within the control of the Minister and the decision given by the board, if it could be called a decision, has to be referred to the Minister. The decision is referred to as a recommendation, but this recommendation is in no respect a decision; it is a non-binding recommendation. There is no provision in the scheme for voluntary arbitration or for the carrying out of the decision or recommendation of the board, when made. Everything from start to finish is under the control of the Minister for Finance. The British scheme, which does not in any way contravene the constitutional control of the House of Commons over the public purse, contains principles of compulsory arbitration. The main points are (1) that bodies consisting of the representatives of the Government and staff associations are entitled to reach agreements on service conditions. Agreements reached in that way are made binding; (2) if agreements are not reached, provision is made for compulsory reference to arbitration and the Government binds itself to act on awards, subject always to the overriding will of Parliament. I want to know why such a scheme cannot be given a trial here? I do not propose that such a scheme should in every respect be carried out here as in England, but at all events we do suggest that a scheme analogous to the scheme in Great Britain or something analogous to the scheme in Great Britain with these principles enshrined in it, should be given a trial here for five years and that the necessary qualifications or amendments of the British scheme to fit conditions here should be made. I think it is due to the Civil Service that this House should not adjourn without hearing something from the Minister as to what his proposals are, especially as he must be aware that the scheme propounded by him is entirely unacceptable to the Service as a whole.

Mr. W.J. Broderick

An adjournment debate usually means a review of the work and activities of the Dáil during the session. I do not want to give my interpretation too literally as to the activities of this House during the last session. I want to say that a good deal of time was taken up dealing with non-essentials and a good deal of unnecessary irritation was imported into our proceedings. I do not wish now to censure, but I believe the real interests of the country are agricultural. It is on agriculture the State depends. That industry now is in a hopeless position. The public services depending on agriculture are feeling the position. If we were to discuss the various Departments of the State we could leave Local Government and Public Health out possibly. We could leave the Department of Industry and Commerce trying out its experiments and letting time justify its activities and the enthusiasms of the Minister. But at the moment we ought to concentrate on the difficulties of agriculture which is the mainstay of the entire State. It is the difficulties of agriculture that are causing the present difficulties in the State. I have listened to a good deal of what I might call the exaggerated statements made here that the agriculturists of this country were never better off and that they are all happy and prosperous. Let us see what the exact position is. Whatever the activities of the Local Government Board and the Department of Industry and Commerce are, agriculture ought to be allowed to continue its primary functions. The primary functions of agriculture are the welfare of the agricultural operatives and the welfare of the community generally. Is it that the Ministry have forgotten its importance or have they decided on the destruction of the primary industry in the country? In spite of artificial respiration in the shape of bonuses and bounties, I think agriculture in the opinion of everybody outside this House—whatever may be the opinion of those on the Government Benches—was never in a worse condition than it is to-day in this country. Five years ago the total number of persons employed in agriculture was approximately 700,000, and in all other employments was a shade over 100,000. I put those figures merely to show the importance of agriculture. Five years ago we brought in £35,000,000. This sum is now reduced to £18,000,000 and that is only brought in after we have spent millions of pounds on bounties and subsidies to help to bring it in. Nobody in this House or outside it can deny the continual decrease in the farmers' income. One of the Minister's means of dealing with the present agricultural position, the Slaughter of Cattle Act, is in my view a ghastly failure, which can be summed up in a few words. It injures the farmer; it is costly to the State; it is disastrous to the men who try to work it in accordance with the law and it demoralises the recipients. The putting of an Excise duty of £1 per beast and 5/- per sheep on the farmers' production is not helpful. The amending Bill will in my view only tend to make paupers and criminals of the people engaged in that business.

In the matter of butter and wheat the Minister is realising that the central authority cannot bear the expenses of the bounties, and has coolly transferred them to the consumer. As I regard the milk stock of this country as the foundation of our agricultural economy, from which everything flows, I have no objection to a subsidy on that particular line, but it should be a subsidy at the expense of the State and not at the expense of the consumers. I believe also that compelling the consumers to pay 1/4 per lb. for butter to enable it to be sold in England at 8d. per lb. is a gross injustice to the consumers of this country, and is a rather curious form of war activities. Our wheat policy of increasing the price of bread to the poor of this country to induce agriculturists to grow wheat is unjust to the consumer, and, as experience will prove, disastrous to the farmer. A mere elementary knowledge of agricultural production is sufficient to show that wheat is the crop which will take all the productivity out of the soil, and that two or three crops will leave the land useless for any other purpose. Other portions of the Minister's policy have accentuated the trouble. He has practically done away with the cattle trade. He has taxed fertilisers. All this has practically done away with the possibility of feeding the land. The accumulated effects of his policy will be to leave the State without finances, agriculture without the necessary working capital, and the soil without fertility. The farmer was formerly the mainstay of the State. He was a great producer of wealth. The activities of the Ministry have transformed him into the State's greatest liability. Home assistance is costing the State a sum of £650,000. Unemployment assistance is costing £1,300,000. The farmer is now costing the State over £5,000,000, and that is not taking into account the indirect aids and assistances which he is getting. I can, if necessary, give the exact figure for that. He is costing the State well over £5,000,000.

We have heard it stated that some farmers are doing well. I do not deny that every farmer who wished to avail himself of tobacco in the first instance —until the Government put on its duty —and of wheat, is certainly doing better, but he is doing it at the expense of the rest of the State. He is merely considering his own selfish interests. He can see that everyone who eats bread in this country, and everybody who uses sugar, is contributing to whatever profits he gets, because it is not new revenue brought into the country; all those things are subsidised at the expense of everybody else in the country, which is proof positive that the farmer is now the greatest liability of this State. But the Minister can make his profits even more if he so desires. It is entirely in his own hands to make the subsidy as much as he likes at the expense of the rest of the country. The people who try to maintain the foreign market, and the people who try to produce things for export, are treated as outlaws. They have no rights at all in the country. The man who is a drain on the country is the man who is drawing revenue out of the country. The man who is compelling everybody else to contribute to him is the man who is appreciated in this country to-day. I disagree entirely with this policy, which, in my opinion, will ruin the finances of the State, but I never hesitate to advise farmers in their own interests to take up that policy. As a national policy, I believe it is wrong, but I believe that the farmers cannot be saved in any other way. As we all know, many holdings are entirely unfit for either wheat or beet growing, and the cattle trade being practically ruined and useless, the people living on those holdings are unable to meet their local or national liabilities.

I am not going to deny that some men who were able to meet their liabilities did not, in loyalty to the people who were not able to meet them, do so. I am not going to deny it. I do not know whether it is a fact, but it has given the Minister an excuse for the ruthless enforcement of the law regardless of whether or not the people were able to pay. At the present moment, you have those seizures and confiscations of cattle, particularly around Fermoy. It must be remembered that those people, as has been pointed out in this House, are the very best elements of the community. They are very hardworking people. They always joined in every national movement for the benefit of this State. Their efforts were progressive efforts, and, in all probability, without their assistance and co-operation this Parliament would not have assembled. If they were not behind the land agitation and the agitation for all the other rights of the people of this country, this Dáil would not have been established. The people whom you are now turning on in this fashion are the sons and daughters of the men who made this Dáil possible, and the thing which drives it to their hearts now is that all this destruction is brought about by the activities of the very assembly which they themselves helped to create. In connection with those seizures of cattle, I want to point out that the laws which we took over and are operating here provided that when cattle are seized for a debt their value should be approximately the amount of the debt. In the case of Mr. David Noonan, stock valued at approximately £1,400 was seized for a debt of £75, and the bid of whatever person he had there to bid for him was not accepted. I do not think that is legal, and it is certainly highly immoral.

I do not wish to delay the House too long in this matter. There are, however, a few outstanding points of dominant importance. How long is this condition of affairs to continue? At the moment, all ordinary finance of the State has failed. The Minister for Finance dare not increase income tax, not for any love of the income tax payer, but through fear that the tax will produce less. He has shown callous ingenuity in imposing levies on everything in his power, and he has failed to produce the necessary revenue. To run the State, he has now to tax all the necessaries of life, bread, butter, beef, tea, sugar, even coal and everything of ordinary consumption. With the destruction of the cattle trade, year by year the ordinary revenue is becoming less and increasing taxation of commodities is assured. We have to export £21,000,000 a year of our agricultural surplus to pay for the things we require from outside, and we have to pay £9,500,000 at the ports before we get the use of these. Does anybody seriously deny that we have to export £21,000,000 a year of our agricultural surplus to pay for the things we require from outside, despite all our industrial activity and the growing of sugar beet and the growing of wheat, and that before the people can make use of these commodities they must pay £9,500,000 at the ports? We have to tax food we produce in the country, even though it is consumed in the country.

When is this going to end? Can the Minister see his way to call a halt to this campaign of madness? I cannot be accused of being unkind to people who cannot provide for themselves. Everyone is prepared to make sacrifices for people, men and women, inclined to work who have no work, but the extraordinary position in this State is that you must be an object of sympathy before there is any consideration for you. If you are the State's greatest asset, as the farmer is, you are regarded as an outlaw. If you are a working man, with a wife and children, you must tax yourself and your family, or do without some of the necessaries of life, to provide for people, some of whom never did and never will work under present circumstances.

All the industrious elements of the country, the business and farming communities, are surrounded with law and regulations which they find it impossible to carry out, and to which they are fiereely opposed. In spirit, if you like, you have made them criminals before the law. This is a rather curious development of our boasted freedom. What is to be the end of it all? When one looks at the country to-day, the holocaust of unnecessary misery imposed on the farmer, the fierce Party conflict, we must confess that the forces of law find it increasingly difficult to cope with the destruction and turmoil in the country. In my opinion, the one way to deal with that state of affairs is for the Government to adopt a policy which would unite all the best elements of the community in a progressive, and not, as we have in a retrograde movement.

What is the cause of this trouble? The first cause was the withholding of the annuities, sums paid through the British Government to the investors in land stock, moneys due to the former Board of Works, police and judicial pensions. I feel that we should not have been called on to be responsible for the police and judicial pensions. They were purely of British conception and were a responsibility of the British Executive and Exchequer. I think a fair representation of that case would relieve us of the liability.

The Local Loans were moneys lent to us for the building of institutions which we still possess. These loans I regard as a just debt, as purely a contract between borrower and lender. As to the vexed question of the annuities, the repayment of principal and interest of moneys lent by the investors in land stock to enable the tenant farmers of Ireland to become the owners of their property, those sums I also believe to be due. Occasionally, we hear in this House and outside as a reason for non-payment that the lands affected by the annuities were confiscated lands and ought not to be paid for. If there were any substance in this argument, surely the same would apply to ground rents due in this country, and no one will contradict me if I say that the ground rents leaving the cities and towns of this country to go to British owners are considerably more than the entire annuities. Yet, any refusal to pay would be compelled by the courts of this country.

As an example, I can give you the instance of a quarry in which the Catholic church of my own town is built, a little quarry, possibly 60 yards by 30. In the year 1777, the Catholic people of Youghal undertook to pay a rent for this quarry of £17 a year. One hundred and fifty-seven years later that rent still continues and that rent will go on, apparently, for all time; while, in the case of the lands on which annuities are being refused, many of the annual payments would finish in the year 1939, including my own. Surely that Catholic church, where generations of Catholics of Youghal have worshipped, and which for the exiles from that town all over the world is the centre of their thoughts, spiritual and national, that hallowed spot is for us and them as dear a portion of Ireland as the neglected bogs and mountains of the country on which there is a refusal to pay annuities.

If we refuse to pay, as I have already said, your courts will compel payment, and rightly so. I do not subscribe to a doctrine of repudiation of a contract once made; there are other ways of coming to a just settlement. It seems strange that we should repudiate liability for what has been given to make us owners of our property. We strike at the people with whose assistance we became owners of our land. The working of the public mind on those matters is curious and is not understandable.

Take another case in my neighbourhood, to which I am referring merely as an example of how the public mind works, and I am not making any personal reflection on the Deputy concerned. We have property in the Youghal district, known as the Sloblands, reclaimed under the relief works of '47 and purchased by the family of a Parliamentary Secretary. This precarious property is subject to the fortunes and uncertainties of drainage and embankment. They worked it as a farm up to the year 1912 and then sold it to the Land Commission, who accepted in payment therefor moneys provided by the investors in Land Stock, which money was to be repaid, principal and interest, to the investors by the tenants placed on the property. A few years later that Parliamentary Secretary, owner of that property, heads an agitation to repudiate payment to the people who paid him. I do not want to accuse him of sharp dealing, but it shows a rather curious understanding of his duty and obligations to the people who provided him with his purchase money.

Mr. Little

That is much too complicated.

Mr. Broderick;

I do not think it is very complicated. The essence of it is that you got the money and you put the tenants on it; and now you advise them not to repay the people who gave this money. Is all this condition of affairs to continue, or is there another line of approach to end this welter of conflict and discontent in this country? I believe there is? When one considers the relation of the two countries we can sustain a very strong claim for equity to this country.

I see no use in going back into mediaeval ages, but I regard the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland as a definite starting point. We entered into that Union as a partner, the entire nation of Lords and Commons. We entered that partnership at the most precarious moment of Britain's existence when she was in conflict with Napoleon and when the result of that conflict could not be known for 15 years. We entered it to share victory or defeat. England was then a country of 18,000,000 population, whose annual Budget was about £15,000,000. For 121 years that partnership lasted and when the partnership came to be dissolved England had become a country with 44,000,000 of a population and an annual Budget of over £900,000,000, a nation whose power and prestige stood unrivalled amongst the nations of the world. Is it not only mere truth to state that this country always contributed its share to that expansion? For a considerable period the revenue derived from this country exceeded our national expenditure by £2,250,000 a year. Is it just that we should come out of that partnership less than we went in, accepting liabilities and leaving all assets behind?

There is another side to this which in no way weakens our claim to justice on the facts as stated. Since the passing of Union, every generation of Irishmen has set itself to undo that Union by constitutional or by revolutionary action, in every way by which the efforts of the people could be directed. We did not succeed in even partially undoing the Union until the Treaty Agreement of 1921. The men who made the Treaty had to accept less than they desired. They at least accomplished one thing, the dissolving of the Union in so far as it affected the South of Ireland, and they laid the plank of the Treaty which they worked in a progressive way and which we all believed would eventually lead to the reunion of North and South. Many limitations of that Treaty have been removed by the late Government—the imperial contribution. They appealed to the Privy Council and, by the Statute of Westminster, we were given liberty to do what we wished as far as our own territory was concerned. That was progressive action on their part and was gradually leading to a better understanding of the position.

The President was candid enough to admit at one time that he could not believe such progress to be possible. He quite appreciated that this was accomplished by negotiation but he saw fit to undo this progressive movement and start a retrograde movement. He initiated a disastrous economic struggle between the two countries and seriously weakened the plank of the Treaty on which all our hopes for the union and progress of our country depended. He has started this retrograde movement and he or anybody else cannot tell where it will end. We are gradually drifting into a wilderness of retaliation and recrimination, where it appears to be more meritorious to injure one another than to help the country. Clearly, and I speak with respect as I always will speak of any person who occupies the position of leader of my people, as the President now occupies, it is the duty of the President to end all this conflict internally and externally, to bring this disastrous state of affairs to an end by the acceptance of a frank and fair offer of negotiation, or make way for someone else to do so. I say with all respect that we are tired of listening to the excuse of the Feetham fiasco. But why take that as an example? Look at the results of previous negotiation by the late Government to which I have referred. Look at the results of the negotiations with South Africa, a country lately at war with Britain, to which the British made a voluntary gift of £50,000 to start their housekeeping. Look at the undoing of the Treaty of Versailles by negotiation. As a matter of fact in the world's history every lasting effect and result was arrived at by negotiation, not by arbitration or by war.

Mr. Donnelly

Hitler did not negotiate. He turned down the Treaty of Versailles.

Mr. Broderick

These men in all countries are thrown up by measures of expediency but as soon as reason reasserts itself, people come to recognise the real good in one another. The welfare of democracy is the general aim and people such as Hitler are gradually brushed aside. We have no Hitler here, nor have we any necessity for a Hitler. No matter how we may differ, though we may indulge in recriminations occasionally, I hope we shall always be governed by reason. I do not wish to add very much more to what I have said. I have given very close attention to the difficulties outside this House and I frequently watch the difficulties inside the House. In my view, a lot of them are entirely unnecessary. In my view a lot of the recrimination that goes on here should not take place here. I have deliberately refrained from entering the lists in recriminations of that kind, because I have considered what was due from the national assembly both to me and to the people outside. I have taken no part in invective or recrimination, nor shall I ever do so. I have, however, tried to show in a simple way what are the difficulties of the agricultural community. I have given a fair run to the Minister for Industry and Commerce to make the best he can of his Department and he will have plenty of time to prove whether or not the particular line he has pursued can be made a success. As far as the Department of Local Government is concerned, let the Minister for Local Government use his energies to provide the best possible social services for the people.

The President, I will admit, has the confidence of the people behind him— for what reason I do not know—and he can, if he so desires, by entering into negotiation, use the unique position which he occupies to bring any negotiations to success. Negotiation, in my opinion, is much better than arbitration, because in arbitration you have to accept the dictation of the arbitrators, whereas in negotiation you need only agree to whatever suits you. If, in negotiation, it is found that the people on the other side of the water wish to impose any humiliating conditions on this country or anything that would be designed to retard what we all hope for—the unity of the country, and the realisation of our national ideals—if anything of that nature should occur or should be attempted, there is no section from which you will get more support than from the Deputies on these benches and from the people whom they represent.

We do not believe that an end can be brought to the present conflict by firing long-range shots, by putting into the ground the real interest of the people and keeping, moryah, a mock fight on the top, covering everything with a veneer of nationality which is not nationality or has no pretence of nationality. Nationality has one meaning only—that we have our Irish ideals, that we inherit a certain spiritual life and that we have our regard for one another. It is in the translation of that regard, by the co-operation of one with another, that Irish nationality is best expressed and not in fierce wrangling as to what are the best forms of nationality. There are no Labour representatives now present, but I wish to make an appeal to Labour representatives to use their energies to bring an end to this strife. They have to bear a good deal of the effects of it. I cannot see how they can benefit by a policy of splendid isolation or a policy of self-sufficiency. How can the workers benefit by the creation of little centres, eight or ten miles in radius, in which the farmers will provide all their own necessaries, with no imports and no exports? They can live and be content it is true, but what is going to happen the Labour leaders? What is to become of the great industrial services—railway services, shipping and so on? That is their concern. I do not want to take up any more time. With the earnest wish of one who does not desire that this conflict should continue, I hope the President will seriously consider the question of entering into negotiations for its settlement.

Mr. Corry

Deputy Broderick made a useful speech inasmuch as it does not agree for one moment with the fulminations of Deputy Dillon. Deputy Dillon in his usual mournful way told us that he would not grow wheat or beet or have anything to do with it. Deputy Broderick made some full admissions. I would like him to pay attention while I read out for him a statement showing the conditions that prevailed in our constituency in 1929 and contrast that with the conditions of our farmers as Deputy Broderick put them to-day. Here is a resolution passed at a meeting of the Midleton Urban Council on the 6th October, 1929:—

"Owing to the general depression in agricultural produce during the last four years, together with the bad prices prevailing, a large number of farmers find it impossible to pay their annuities in the constituency of East Cork. We, the Midleton Urban District Council, request the Minister for Agriculture, to devise some means whereby outstanding arrears can be collected without undue hardship on the farming community—for instance, spreading them over a number of years at 3½ per cent. interest until they are paid."

That resolution was proposed by Mr. Edward Carey, T.D., and it was seconded by Mr. Connors, and carried unanimously by the Midleton Urban Council on the 6th October, 1929. That was the condition of the farmers in our constituency in that year, as set out by Deputy Broderick's predecessor in this Dáil. It stated that the farmers were absolutely unable to pay their annuities in 1929. Why? Because they held land valued as wheat land, upon which they had to pay rates as wheat land and they also had to pay their annuities. The Government of that day told our farmers to go into the world market and to compete with the ranchers of Canada if they wanted to grow wheat. Deputy Broderick told us to-day that the farmers in our constituency are growing wheat and beet and tobacco and that they are all right, but he said at the expense of the community. Still, he says they are all right. He differs from the Opposition and from the statements we get from Deputies like Deputy O'Leary.

I heard Deputy Cosgrave sympathetically talking of the cost of sugar. But Deputy Cosgrave had no scruple in handing over £3,000,000 to the Belgians to subsidise the beet industry in his own constituency in Carlow. He had no scruple at all in doing that. But when it comes to the ordinary farmer in Cork or Tipperary or Galway, there is a very decided objection, and then we hear any amount of talk about the price of sugar. The farmer is getting £1,000,000 a year out of this, and that is the objection.

Deputy Cosgrave alluded to the President's figures and ignored the value of free beet pulp to the farmers. That is the kind of thing you get here. Deputy Broderick asked what was the cause of the trouble. He talked about South Africa, but in their negotiations they had no gentleman like Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney in South Africa. When Deputy Norton was leaving here to go to England in an endeavour to settle this dispute we were told here "Oh, the annuities should be paid first." That was Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney's contribution to the settlement of the dispute. Mr. Blythe, who has since departed for another House, made the very same statement on the same night: "The half-year's annuities should first be handed over before there are any negotiations." A few days afterwards when attempts were made to negotiate the negotiators were met with the bullets prepared by Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney and Mr. Blythe.

If Deputy Broderick wants to know the cause of the trouble he must be very blind if he cannot see it in Cork County. There was a conspiracy there not to pay rates or annuities. There were threats used on farmers who did pay. We had the raiding of Deputy Kent's house last year and the boycott of Deputy Kent's threshing; we had the burning of Deputy Murphy's house and the threat to burn Mr. Leo Gorman's house because he paid his annuities. There was the statement that they would burn Corry's house too, but they were in dread because they knew it was not helpless women and babies they would meet: when they would come to my house they would meet lead. I had a letter a few days ago from one Blueshirt who spent six months in Arbour Hill. What does he say? "I am not able to pay now, but if the sheriff is called in and the cattle are seized I will be placed in the unfortunate position of having to accept compensation from those fellows." What is the compensation for? They will not pay a shilling if a farmer is down and out and the sheriff is calling. They will not advance a shilling to pay annuities. But if he lets his cattle go to Fermoy Pound to be sold for one pound apiece they will pay the expenses and compensate him.

It might be like the compensation a neighbour of mine got when he let his 25 cows go out. A neighbouring farmer, a good samaritan, valued the cows at £3 apiece down at Carrigtwohill, cows worth anything up to £12. That is the kind of conspiracy we are up against. I have not any great opinion of Deputies over there. Deputy O'Leary on another occasion alluded to the blowing up of bridges. When we blew them up we stood over it. Any job we had to do we led the men who did it. We led them to do it, right or wrong, and we took our beating when we got it, and our punishment too; we did not squeal or cry or wail. Those out to-day whisper and mutter: "Go ahead and do this or that, but I will not be there when you are doing it. You can do five years in Arbour Hill, but I will be in a far more comfortable position here in my soft seat."

It was happening and Deputy Morrissey cannot deny it. The position of the railways is to-day far different from the position in 1932. I am very glad Deputy Broderick spoke to-night, because he had at least a bit of honesty. He admitted that any farmer in our constituency who carried out the Fianna Fáil policy was all right. But he said that any farmer who carried out that policy was adopting a purely selfish policy. Ploughing the land, employing labour and working the land, was adopting a selfish attitude. Apparently, it is an unselfish policy to fatten bullocks. That is the difference between the two policies and that is what has left Deputies over there as they are. They are becoming fewer in number, older and more miserable every time I look at them. I really do not know what will be the position here as far as the Opposition are concerned after the next General Election. I am afraid there will not be anyone left over there with enough strength to call a division. That is my opinion. We hear this trash brought up here and thrashed out day after day and week after week. We had Deputy Dillon here to-night and I must honestly say whenever I see him coming into the House I just think that nothing less than a big towel would be sufficient to wipe away his tears. We had his mournful voice this evening. He spoke about wrapping the green flag round us. I was rather amazed to hear the Deputy talking about the green flag of the Irish Party. I thought the only flag to which the Deputy had any objection was the tri-colour. He told us once he would never kow tow to it. We have had many changes on those benches opposite. I am glad that Deputy Belton has departed from the fold and I am glad that Deputy Dillon has joined them, because he makes confusion worse confounded. That Party were bad enough before, but then you could make out in some way what their policy was; now since Deputy Dillon joined them one does not know where they are. One finds Deputy O'Leary and Deputy Dillon standing up and telling how the farmers are ruined. It is seldom Deputy Broderick speaks but on the last occasion he spoke on the Budget he told us that the farmers who are following the Fianna Fáil policy were all right but that they were selfish. They were working their lands. I have hopes that some other Deputy over there will stand up and speak the truth once again, but I am afraid any one of them cannot do so.

Mr. Fitzgerald-Kenney

Owing to the fact that so little time is left I do not intend to speak at any great length upon the facts of Fianna Fáil policy in this country. Because of pressure of time I must confine myself to one aspect of Government policy, that is the administration of justice. I would like to know from any member of the Executive Council who replies in this debate as to whether it is the policy of the Government to carry out what the Attorney-General is responsible for—that is the administration of the criminal law in this country. I want to know from whomsoever replies whether they approve of the policy of men being put to prison and being kept in prison—men against whom there was not one scintilla of legal evidence. They are keeping men in prison against whom no legal evidence has been produced. Will the Government say that they will exercise their powers as an Executive Council and see that men who have been convicted on illegal and improper evidence will be immediately released? I stated here in the course of the Estimate for Law Charges that the Attorney-General was endeavouring to obtain convictions before the Military Tribunal by fair means or by foul. The Attorney-General endeavoured to answer that charge, but he failed to answer it. All he did was to make some sort of an attempt or excuse as to his action. I pointed out to him that admissions made by an accused person are never evidence against that accused person unless they are made freely and voluntarily. That is a proposition of law which is so elementary that the Attorney-General cannot contradict it. I said further that a statement cannot be voluntary and forced at the same time, and if a man is compelled under threat of imprisonment to make a statement of that kind, not being a voluntary statement, that that is not legal evidence. The Attorney-General did not attempt to answer those propositions. He put forward not a plea that he was acting rightly, but he put forward the most wretched and futile of pleas, the most wretched and futile of all arguments, the tu quoque argument. The Attorney-General attempted a defence that was not right. His defence was that when I was Minister for Justice illegal evidence had been brought before the tribunal. I pointed out to the Attorney-General, as must be clear to the whole House, that the Minister for Justice does not investigate the kind of offence charged against any individual. Before the Minister gives a certificate he simply has to decide, not the guilt or innocence of the man, not the weight of evidence against him, but, whatever the particular offence is shown to be, whether that offence was committed for the purpose of interfering with the machinery of government or the course of justice. Therefore, as far as the Attorney-General's reply is tu quoque to me, it was perfectly beside the point. I will assume for the sake of argument that that is correct and assume further for the sake of argument-though it is not true—that I went down myself before the Military Tribunal and induced the Military Tribunal to accept illegal evidence and that I did that not once but 100 times, 1,000 times or even 1,000,000 times if you like. What answer is that, what excuse is that for the Attorney-General to offer now? If one has been improperly convicted under the late Government, which I do not admit-but for the sake of argument let us assume that not one but 100,000 were convicted—that is no excuse why the Attorney-General should do what he is doing now. There is absolutely no excuse for the Attorney-General who is convicted of putting before the Military Tribunal, on their trial, men against whom he knows there is no evidence. The Attorney-General's counsel has tendered in evidence what every lawyer knows is not evidence. If somebody complains to me that his house was burgled, what use is it to him to be told that somebody else's house was burgled also? Assume that one individual has been wrongly convicted, what answer is that to another person? These propositions which I have put forward cannot be denied by the Attorney-General. I say that men are being tried before the Military Tribunal and that the Attorney-General has put in evidence against them what he knows is not evidence. I am glad to see the Attorney-General in the House. If he has thought out any better reply or any reply at all, I will be glad to hear it. I am cutting my remarks very short to give him every possible opportunity of making a reply. When I spoke the other day about the non-trial of the Gárda who shot the young Cork man in Marsh's yard this time last year, the Attorney-General endeavoured most unfairly to put before the House what happened on the occasion of that shooting. But in his defence he did not attempt to deal with what happened inside the yard. He did not contradict, and could not contradict, the statement that I made, because it is admitted, even by the Guards, that inside the yard there were two Guards for every single person who came in; that the persons who came into the yard were completely trapped there; that when the firing was going on the police within half a minute had drawn a cordon outside; that the men were confined in the lorry when they were being shot at; that there was no possibility of their getting out of the yard, and no possibility of their escaping from that murderous fire. That is the evidence even of the police witnesses, so what is the use of the Attorney-General getting up in this House, as he did on that occasion, and telling us what happened ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, or an hour afterwards, on the streets?

The Attorney-General wanted a precedent. I gave him a precedent. I told him how, when the R.I.C. had fired on a crowd, two members were tried and a bill was sent up before the Grand Jury against Captain Dobbyn who read the Riot Act. The Attorney-General says that case is 100 years old. What if it is 100 years old. Has the law changed in 100 years? Has the right of man become less precious in 100 years? Has the duty of the police to the public altered within 100 years? Has the duty of man to his fellow-man altered within 100 years? What was the law 100 years ago, and what was the right course to pursue 100 years ago, is precisely the right course to pursue at the present moment. I asked the Attorney-General to let the House know if there were any examples— except under the régime of Mr. Forster, with the unenviable epithet of "buckshot," or under Mr. Balfour —of Irishmen being shot down by the police without any criminal proceedings following. I am anxious to hear his answer to-night. I want to deal with one other thing, and that is the certificate which the Minister for Justice gave. I mentioned that on the Minister's own Vote, and I want to show the ingenousness of the defence which was put forward. There was a case in which a person who was being dismissed from the office of water bailiff was accused and convicted of shooting into the house of his successor. The Minister gave a certificate that that was interference with the machinery of government. I say that is absolutely absurd, but the Attorney-General comes to his assistance, and the defence which the Attorney-General put forward was that the Minister gave a certificate that that was interference with the course of justice. That was the defence. As a matter of fact neither could be right, because I understood the Attorney-General on that particular occasion—as a matter of fact I have not looked up the report-to make the statement that water bailiffs were appointed by the Minister for Justice, and therefore it was an interference with the course of justice. Everybody knows that water bailiffs are not appointed by the Minister for Justice, so the Attorney-General was entirely wrong in that. Water bailiffs are appointed by the conservators of fisheries for the safeguarding of the rights of private individuals who own fisheries.

With regard to matters which happened, in the memory of any Deputy here in this House, on a recent occasion, I think Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney ought at least attempt to be accurate. He came in here this afternoon with his mind made up as to the topics on which he was going to address the House and he said he would deal with my answer to him on the last occasion when, by reason of the fact that I followed him, he had not an opportunity of replying to me. He interrupted me on that occasion and attempted to make in sections another political speech while I was attempting to make a reply to him. This evening, although he should have the report of what I said on that occasion, he gave a completely inaccurate picture of what I said about the Marsh's yard incident. He charged me with describing incidents which occurred outside the yard, which occurred far away from the yard, and he said that what I described as taking place in the yard, took place in the streets ten minutes afterwards.

On the last occasion the Deputy apparently fell asleep while I was alluding to the Marsh's yard incident and quoting the account given by an eye-witness, an unprejudiced eye-witness as far as we are concerned, a reporter of the Cork Examiner. I proceeded here in the House on the last occasion to read the account of the Cork Examiner reporter, who was outside the yard. I never said that he was inside the yard. I did not attempt to suggest to the House for one moment that he was inside the yard. I read the report which, as well as I recollect, started to describe the incidents, commencing at about 12.5. It went on to describe the incidents outside the yard when a struggling mass of 2,000 or 3,000 people struggled with the police, sweeping the police before them, and tried to get through the gates and the police with a lorry which was described—although it was denied here on the last occasion—in the proceedings in court as being half a lorry and half a tank. The eye-witness of the Cork Examiner described how the lorry suddenly appeared, charged through the crowd, how a wild cheer went up, sticks were waved in the air, the police were swept aside, and the lorry charged the heavy wooden gate which barred the entrance to Marsh's yard. Shots then rang out, and an eye-witness of the occurrence described what effect these shots had upon the crowd. It was simply electric, and gave the police some opportunity of controlling the surging mass of humanity that was attempting to charge into the yard in a lorry. As everybody, who understands about an affair of that kind, must realise, the intention of the huge mob was to get into the yard, and to get to the man who was annoying the people inside in preventing the sheriff's sale being effected. The Deputy then charged me with what occurred ten months later. I read the account of the effect of the shots, and of the gradual success of the police in getting some control, and how even after the shots a full-blooded row went on outside the yard. I give all the facts because I charged Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney on another occasion with painting an unfair picture, and with refusing to refer to what occurred outside the yard. When the Deputy interrupted me, and threw out the interjection that I was describing something that occurred after the incident, and that had no relation to the shots, I drew his attention to the fact that I was reading from the description by a reporter of the effect of the firing of the shots. What I was reading, at the time that I was charged with misleading the House, was a description by an eye-witness, a reporter of the Cork Examiner, written that afternoon and published the following day, and who was giving his impression of the action of a very excited and almost uncontrolled crowd, which took place outside the yard. After what was said by that eye-witness about the firing of the shots, and their effects as described, upon the crowd—a much better description than could be given by anyone inside the yard—I am asked to say that the firing of the shots inside the yard was completely unjustifiable. I am asked to say that in face of the fact that a mob of 2,000 people might have got into grips with the police and got them completely under their control, and might have swept into the yard but for the firing of the shots. Still, I am asked to say that the firing of these shots was unjustifiable.

I am also asked to charge these men and put them on trial, notwithstanding that Superintendent Fitzgerald, a uniformed Guard, in charge of the men inside the yard, described how he was there waiting inside with Guards in uniform when he was suddenly warned by one Guard who was on the look-out. Although he thought all was quiet something absolutely unexpected in the dreams of the police had happened. A very carefully-planned attack by a lorry filled with men, having in their possession sticks and clubs loaded with lead and iron was about to take place. The Guard on the look-out saw this lorry charging through a crowd, which produced the wild excitement the effect of which was described by the Cork Examiner man. He saw this lorry was heading for the heavy barred wooden gate and, but for the fact that he called out and warned the Guards inside, they would all have been killed by this lorry which was charging heedless and regardless of danger to the people inside. I described all that and it is a true picture of what happened. It was described by Superintendent Fitzgerald, who was inside the yard. He was himself overthrown and knocked down, and it was very lucky that he was not killed. If he had been in control of the men inside the yard he would have given the order to fire.

The Deputy always seeks, in these matters, to try and draw a distinction between the uniformed Guards and the non-uniformed Guards, and to overwhelm Colonel Broy's recruits with opprobrium and abuse. Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney wanted me to put these men in the dock. When I asked for a precedent he referred me back to something that occurred 100 years ago. He asked has the law changed in 100 years? He knows himself that it has changed and that there have been changes quite recently. He did not refer any longer to murder. He did so on other occasions. But I would remind the Deputy that it is not right to abuse the privileges of this House to use such words about these men, especially knowing the effect such words would have on excitable people like his own followers in the country. He asked that I should put these men in the dock on a charge of murder. If the Deputy refers to the matter again perhaps he can answer this question. Does he know of any single instance where police officers or military men who fired for the purposes of suppressing a riot and killed a man—does he know any case where that particular person, whether he was a soldier or a policeman, was put in the dock? Does anyone know of such a case in the last 100 years? There have been many instances in England. Let us leave Ireland out of it for the moment. Let us exclude these terrible things that occurred in a previous régime. We can leave them out for the purpose of discussion. Does Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney suggest that in every case in England where the police and military used arms for the suppression of riot or unlawful assembly they should be put in the dock? That is his argument. He says: "If a man fired to kill another man and that death resulted and if that could be brought home to one Guard or a group of Guards that the man or men who fired the shot are guilty of murder." And then he made his charge and described these people as murderers. It is quite unnecessary to give details and mention incidents. These cases have occurred on more than one occasion. Are they described as murder? Are these people put into the dock? Am I not to use my judgment and to interpret the evidence in the way that I think it ought to be interpreted, and come to a conclusion if there is evidence that the police did not fire unnecessarily, having regard to what occurred that day? In my opinion the Deputy in the manner in which he uses the privileges of this House is guilty of grave abuse of these privileges of the House. As to the attacks he made upon me and which were of a very provocative character I have dealt with them at considerable length already.

He flung abuse around him at the inquest in Cork. He had a whole week there on that platform and he had plenty of opportunity to orate about this matter and say everything he wished to say against these Guards. He is not content with that. He comes back here and on every occasion he attempts to arouse feeling by the pretence of working himself up to a state of righteous indignation against me. It is obvious to the people outside that a great deal of the nonsense that is talked in this House arises from simulated indignation. I think in matters of this kind, which are pregnant with danger, Deputies should be careful about their statements. Somebody said that words are often more explosive than bullets. In dealing with matters of this kind, Deputies should be careful, where hasty, hot words are used, that they have not repercussions which it might be very difficult to foresee and which might impose a great strain on people in order to control themselves. Deputies really ought to be more careful in regard to the words they use.

If the Deputy is right in what he said about me, then every Attorney-General in office, including the Attorney-General who was in office when the incident to which he referred occurred, the Howth gun-running, could be assailed. The Deputy glanced at that incident on the last occasion. Does he say that the members of the Scotch Borderers who fired on the crowd in Bachelor's Walk were all murderers? Did he use that word at that time? What was his attitude to that incident at that time? Is he prepared to say that the Attorney-General who was in office on that occasion has a stain upon his honour which he can never wipe out because he did not put the Scotch Borderers in the dock? What reasoning does he apply to it, if there is any parallel between the two incidents? Does the abuse he showered on me apply with equal force to the Attorney-General then in office? I do not think there is any more I have got to say on this matter.

Dr. O'Higgins

We have just listened to a charge of simulated indignation and we have just witnessed an exhibition of it. It is an extraordinary thing, and it must be fresh in the mind of every Deputy—it may be a coincidence or it may mean something more —that two out of three times when the Attorney-General stands up in this House he does so for the purpose of indulging in a heated apologia for some act of omission or commission or some alleged irregularity on behalf of his Department or himself. I am not going to be led into a legal discussion as to the propriety or otherwise of using as evidence against an individual statements made under Article 2A of the Constitution, but I think the latter portion of the Attorney-General's speech should get full and ample consideration from every member of this House. It amounted, in fact, to a rather emphatic and unambiguous assertion on behalf of the Government that men were to be shot down in this country with impunity any time a police cordon was in danger of breaking; that the days of the Riot Act being read or any prior notice or warning being given to the people are a thing of the past; that any time that a police cordon is pressed, those men can be shot down with impunity and when that is done, and when a life is lost or lives are lost, that there is to be no inquiry whatsoever by the State on behalf of the person or persons killed. I think that is a very serious departure from every precedent established in relation to the protection of the life of a citizen, whether that citizen supported or opposed the Government.

The penalty for a breach of the law, the penalty for obstruction of the police, the penality for endeavouring to force your way into a public auction in spite of a police cordon, was never laid down by this Parliament as being death, and the Attorney-General is the last man who should stand up in this or any other Parliament to justify the killing of a citizen because he endeavoured to force his way in spite of the police into a public auction. Not only to justify that act, but to put his foot down as a responsible law officer on any idea of an investigation or an inquiry is, I think, appalling. He stands behind the statement of a police officer that the cordon was being hard pressed, that it was in danger of breaking, and remember, he is dealing with political opponents. Has he any recollection of a statement by a police officer in connection with the Kilrush inquiry? There the victim was a political supporter and the statement of the responsible police officer was torn up as so much worthless trash because the victim, the sufferer, was a political supporter of the Fianna Fáil Government. There we had police authority, the statement of a responsible officer, overruled and overridden and over their heads and in spite of all we had a searching public inquiry on oath, and definite drastic disciplinary action taken as a result of it. There were no lives lost there. A man or two happened to be injured. A very searching inquiry was held and very drastic action was taken, but the people injured were political supporters. Now when a life is lost and when the person killed is a political opponent, the certificate of a responsible police officer in uniform is sufficient to obliterate any necessity or desire in the eyes of the Attorney-General for any inquiry, either to investigate the circumstances of that death or to safeguard the public from such deaths occurring in the future.

Let me take another incident. In the town of Kilmallock we have impartial, unprejudiced Press correspondents who placed on record exactly what happened there. There we had a police cordon in danger of breaking. There we had a mob charging the police cordon. There we had a very critical situation, where a life, or indeed lives, were in danger had that mob broken through. The attempt to break through was made by political supporters of the Government. There was no funeral, no corpse after that. The only result of that was that one or two or three of the men who came heroically to the defence of the battered police cordon were brought up in court. Here we have a responsible law officer trying to stir up indignation at the suggestion that there is any prejudice in the direction of his office. He waxes indignant at the suggestion that there is any discrimination between the penalties or the treatment meted out to different people.

I put it to the Attorney-General that within a matter of a couple of weeks, or at most a month, there were two political supporters of this Party found with arms. There was no suggestion made by anybody that those arms had ever been used, were about to be used, or were ever likely to be used against the State. There was evidence accepted that those men had received their arms semi-officially from the State.

These men were sentenced to six months' imprisonment because they broke the law in having possession of arms. Nobody complained about that. They were political opponents of the Government. They broke the law and they were sentenced to six months. But on or about the same time we had political supporters of the Government caught with arms, brought along before the Military Tribunal and the attitude of those men was to tell the Tribunal to their faces that they had committed no crime against the State, that those arms were the property of the Irish Republican Army and that they refused to recognise the right of the State to interfere with them or their arms. The representative of the Attorney-General, who had got our supporters sentenced to six months for the mere possession of arms, in the case of these political supporters of the Government put in the plea that he was seeking no punishment for those men but he wanted it to be known that arms should not be carried about in that indiscriminate manner, and if in future they wanted arms for such purposes as paying a tribute to the dead they would get them by requisitioning them from the State. The two cases were similar, the only offence being, apparently, the possession of arms. But look at the different treatment meted cut. The political opponent does his six months and the political supporter goes scot free.

The person that I take to be primarily responsible for that type of discrimination between individual and individual gets up here and waxes indignant at the mere suggestion that there is partiality in the legal administration for which he is responsible. The thing is hypocritical on the very face of it and it is mere nonsense, in view of the experience we have ourselves and what we read day by day of the type of prosecution that is put up against one of us. Note the way the case is pressed against any supporter of our Party who happens to put a foot astray or happens to be charged with an offence. Such a case is pressed to the very last inch. But where the political supporters are up under serious charges we have the case handled in a very different way. We have the prosecution acting, I would say, the part of counsel for the defence. We have every possible loophole pointed out and we have every endeavour made that the political supporters will go scot free. That is not just a matter of opinion, but it is a matter on record in the papers day by day. It gives me no pleasure, nor, I am sure, does it give anybody else pleasure, to recite this kind of thing. I had no idea when coming to speak on this debate of touching on these things. They are nationally humiliating and they are doing no good to that side of the House or to this side. They are doing harm to a great Department. They are sapping morally any sense of decency in responsible State officers. They are bringing the courts of the country into discredit and they are training people, who know they have been victimised, to despise, not only the law makers and the administrators of the law, but the laws of the country.

Were it not for the political attitude taken up by the Attorney-General, I had no intention of referring to such matters. It would be better and more in keeping with what one is entitled to expect from a man holding such a high and responsible office that he would have an impartial inquiry and investigation, not only into the inequality of sentences for similar crimes, but as a responsible officer he would get up in this House and when any man lost his life in this country, whether he lost it at the hands of or by the action of a civilian, or whether he lost it by the action of an officer of the State, the Attorney-General would get up here and show the people the value he placed on human life by having a searching public inquiry into these cases because of that loss of life. It is necessary when passions have been stirred up in the country to protect the lives of the people, the lives of the citizens of the State. That is all the more necessary after hurried recruiting of officers of the State. We are approaching the situation when the ordinary non-combatant is between both fires. It is a dangerous and difficult position. The higher the office a man holds the greater is his responsibility, the more by word of mouth and public utterance should he try to bring about a state of affairs where minds will be at ease. His utterance if it has one effect more than another should be to bring about a condition of security by pointing out to everybody, law officers and the ordinary civilians, what an awfully serious thing it is to take human life. Instead of that we have a jaunty piece of humbug. We listened to the Attorney-General telling us because a Press man wrote up and said that the police cordon was in danger of being broken, it was justifiable to send a man before his Creator. The Attorney-General said that the only thing in addition to that was to ask the responsible police office for a report, and to substantiate that fact he suggests now that the police cordon was in danger of breaking. The people were in danger of getting out of hands. And because of that a young man is sent to his death. I think it is just scandalous that these things should happen.

Laws should be sacred, but laws should be designed in such a way as to command respect in themselves; and the administration of laws should be carried out in such a way as to command respect in itself. We argued in the past, and we justified our arguments in the past, that laws were defied and laws were strained and laws were broken because they were harsh and unjust laws. Although the writ that ran in this land in the past was a writ which entitled the landlord to certain dues from the people, it was considered that these dues were harsh and excessive, but that there was no discrimination for the individual in a bad year, and that he had to pay good or bad, profit or loss. Landlordism was smashed in this country because of that.

My view is that there was nothing necessarily evil in landlordism in itself. In Great Britain there is no such thing as land purchase yet. In Scotland, I think, there is an ideal system of land tenure under landlordism. Landlordism did not go in this country because it was evil in itself. The masses of the people, irrespective of class or creed, got together and smashed landlordism, because here and there there was a bad, harsh, tyrannical landlord. It may be said that the majority were bad or that a small minority or a big minority were bad. There were good, bad, and middling landlords, but because of the bad, the whole structure was defied and broken in this country. Why were certain landlords regarded as bad, and why did the whole national agitation direct itself towards smashing landlordism? Because a rent in excess of the value of the farm was fixed and because that rent was collected by callous, heartless agents, irrespective of whether the year was a profitable one or not. It was because of the injustice of the administration that landlordism went smash in this country.

It is no gain for the people or no victory over landlordism to get rid of a multitude of landlords and to replace them by one. It is a loss to the people if you get rid of a multitude of mixed landlords—good, bad and middling—and replace them by one bad landlord. What we have done within the last three years is that we have given legal existence to the worst, the most unjust, and the harshest landlord that ever cursed the farmers of this country. We heard about Balfour and his battering ram but we can see the counterpart of that in County Cork any one of these days. If Balfour and his battering ram had sucked £21,000,000 a year out of the Irish agricultural industry and that same year used armoured cars to get the landlords' rent collected, landlordism would not have lived even as long as it did live. We have got to remember that there were Nationalists in this country before any of us were born. There were people in this country before even there were Nationalist leaders. The idea of the Nationalist leaders of the past was to lead on behalf of the people and not on behalf of the pet hobbies of any political theorist. If the political theories of the political theorist interfered with the progress, the happiness, or the comfort of the masses of the people, then either the political theorist went out of existence or he changed his political theories, and he ruled for and on behalf of the people and in the interests of the people.

The agitation of greatest duration, of the most continuous duration, in our history was the Nationalist movement to place the farmer in ownership of the land. That agitation was carried on with the banner inscribed with the three "F's." The three "F's" stood for fixity of tenure, free sale, and fair rent. How many of the "F's" are left? We must take it that the Cork campaign is merely a try-on, that it is going to extend, that irrespective of justice or injustice, of profits or loss, the farmer has got to pay his rent across the water and pay it here at home also. Fair rent and fixity of tenure! What fixity of tenure is there when we have one Minister after another utilising public platforms and the public Press to say that any farmer who does not pay what he has to pay, that political Minister will take his land off him and divide it amongst the camp followers of the political Minister? Is not that a grand thought for any of the patriots?

Mr. Donnelly

Where was that said?

Dr. O'Higgins

It was said in your own constituency. It was stated in the town of Tullamore that if the farmers were finding agriculture unprofitable and did not farm their land according to the directions given to them by the Government, there were plenty of suitable people to get the land. It was stated in the last five weeks. There should be a way, even in an indecent army, of placating the camp followers out of the army commissariat and not out of the property of the people who live around the camp. Security of tenure is only a memory, all the more valuable and all the more to be revered because it appears to be so totally gone. Fixity of tenure, that is that.

Fair rent, free sale! Is there free sale, can there be free sale, when the tenure is not fixed? What value does land hold as property to-day? Is there any man with any kind of holding, any size of holding, who could realise that in the same way as any other type of property? You may say the Land Commission. We shall not just go into that. The Land Commission is not so keen on taking over land as politicians would have their followers believe. I should like some assurance with regard to these activities against farmers. We are told now and then by Ministers that each case is judged on its merits. There is a certain responsibility on the Government opposite, more directly than on any other Government that might sit there, because the farmers are not very well educated into seeing the difference between a deliberate lie and a statement calcuated to deceive. Their whole campaign for ten long years was a campaign, up and down this country, for the non-payment of land annuities. The President or anybody else may get up here and quibble and say that what he meant was non-payment to England. What he meant does not matter. What the lad in the crowd thought he meant is what matters and that particular loose phraseology was used time and again by everybody over there. It was used by the President himself.

President

That is not true. It is absolutely false.

Mr. O'Leary

Mr. Belton

That is untrue. The President knows it is untrue.

Order! Surely the President is entitled to make his statement on behalf of the Government.

The President

I have said that the annuities were reduced to one-half. The sum that is payable to the community was reduced in the case of every single annuitant to one half. He pays to the community one-half of the amount he paid previously. The community remitted one-half of the annuities to him and the result is that a sum comes to him from the community of £2,000,000 a year, to last, not for one year or two years or three years, but to last for the whole period over which the annuities were to be paid. We told the people of Ireland what the policy we proposed was. We told them that of the sum, £3,000,000 roughly, paid in annuities at least one-half would go back to the agricultural community from the community as a whole. We more than kept our word in that regard, because we give back to the agricultural community in regard to this remission of annuities £2,000,000 a year and not £1,500,000, and we deliberately substituted that instead of derating. Derating would have cost, roughly, the same sum, but that was given in preference because we believed it was a better method, a better way generally for the country that that sum of money should be given back.

There has been no deception practised on any individual in that regard. If there has been deception, it has been deception brought about not by any statement of ours, but by the misrepresentation of our attitude by gentlemen on the opposite benches. Throughout the whole of the campaign—it is a campaign—there has been on the part of the Opposition the meanest form of political effort that I have, at any rate, witnessed in my time. There has been an effort to make use of the difficulties of a certain section of the community to sabotage the nation as a whole—I use the word again.

Mr. O'Leary

You are the man who tried to smash the Treaty and you put people to death for accepting it. You then came into this House and said that more progress was made under the Treaty than you ever expected. You may laugh, but you know that is the truth. But you are not going to get away with it.

Mr. Boland

I remember that on a former occasion the President was prevented from speaking on an adjournment debate and apparently the same campaign is on again.

Mr. O'Leary

I could not wait here to listen to his damned nonsense.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

So far as the Chair is concerned, the President will get every opportunity to make his case. As I have already pointed out to the Opposition, the object of their discussion was to find out what is the Government policy. Surely the President ought to be allowed to state it.

Mr. Holohan

But we have to pay it.

The President

We, as representing the community——

The people in Britain put on tariffs. These tariffs affected, in particular, the agricultural community but, as I have pointed out time after time, the rest of the community did not allow the farming community to suffer alone. It is wrong to pretend to the farming community that the rest of the community have allowed them to suffer and have left them in the lurch. That is not true. I have pointed out that the payment of the land annuities and those other payments to Britain would in 1931, the year before we got into office, have taken all the fat cattle that we sent to England and would have left us only 8d. or 9d. a head for them. That is the amount so far as the fat cattle are concerned. Speaking of the community as a whole, where is the value of your cattle trade if it is going to give you back for your fat cattle only 8d. or 9d. a head? You will say the individual farmer did not get 8d. or 9d. a head? I agree. The British have admitted, and we agree that they have taken, by way of these tariffs, from the farming community a little over £4,500,000. But the rest of the community have come again to the aid of the farmers and they have made that up.

Deputies opposite very quickly followed Deputy Morrissey into the lobby when he brought in a motion here to the effect that there should be work found or else that maintenance should be provided. Very well. We are doing the one thing that can be done at the moment, anyhow, to find a profitable employment, and that is to give sections of our community who would otherwise be unemployed an opportunity of giving service in the making of boots or clothes to provide for the daily needs of the other members of the community. That is one method of finding work for them. It is about the only method of finding work for them at the moment. There is another method of finding work for them, but it is not a direct method such as that is. I might put it generally as improving the national estate; in other words, if there is land which can be reclaimed and made more profitable, we can put them at that; if there are roads to be made, we can put them at that. But if we do that we cannot object to finding the money for doing it. There is no use in talking and grumbling about increased taxation if, at the same time, we want that work to be done. There is one thing which every modern community will have to make up their minds about, and that is that every individual citizen is entitled to be given an opportunity of earning a livelihood. He has the right to live. He should be able to secure that right in the ordinary way of commerce, in the ordinary way of giving services to other sections of the community in return for what he gets, or if he cannot do it in that particular way, he must get it as a gift—or as a right; I do not care how you put it— from the rest of the community.

How can it be done? It has to be done by the provision of money by the rest of the community. How are they to do it? They can do it in one of two ways—either out of their own earnings, and out of their own income supply him with cash which will enable him to go and get the equivalent in goods or service; or if it is not done by that direct method they have to do it indirectly by finding occupation for him in reclaiming lands, in improving roads, in building houses, in doing works which are generally called public works. The point is that, in my opinion, we will have to go much more rapidly on that line than we have been going. If I were a member of the Opposition, and were attacking the Government, the line of attack I would take would be to point out that they have still members of the community who are not getting an opportunity of getting a decent living. That is the line I would take, and I suggest that it would be a much more effective line than is being adopted at present, which is purely, miserably, and shabbily political. This is a problem which is exercising the minds of everybody who has got the responsibility of government in every part of the world. It is a problem which is extremely difficult to solve, because of the fact that members of the community have not yet got accustomed to thinking in terms of the community as a whole, as well as in terms of their own individual selves. We have got to learn to think in that way. Each one of us has got to think that we are helping ourselves in the best possible way when we are helping our neighbours. If we are too selfish about it, and think narrowly only about ourselves and our own well-being, forgetting about our neighbours, our own well-being will not be served either. You may be perfectly certain of that. What we have got to do here and elsewhere, in the first instance, is to accustom ourselves to bearing the burdens that may be necessary to bear in order that our neighbours may have what they are entitled to—an opportunity to live.

That is the reason for the extra taxation here. That is what you are grumbling about. That is what the leader of the Opposition has been speaking about in the earlier part of this debate. He speaks of the price of sugar, and asks us in a general way to tell them the price of sugar here compared with the price at which we could get it in. I have seen the prices compared many a time, and I am sure he is just as conversant with them as I am. We know that the price to our people here is two or three times as much as the price at which they could get the sugar at the port, but if they get it at the port you are going to have a different policy. The farmers' lands will then have to be devoted to cattle. Cattle for where? For a market in which they cannot get a decent price. Undoubtedly we could at the moment get wheat from outside cheaper than we can produce it, but the price we are going to pay for it is to have those lands which would be producing wheat for the rest of the community turned over to producing cattle for a market in which we cannot sell. Therefore, if we are paying more for our sugar, if we are paying more for our bread, we are paying it in order that our own resources may be used, and in order that our citizens may live here and be able to give services one to the other. That is the price. We cannot have those things without paying a price for them. We do not pretend that there is not another type of economy which has been favoured in the past, and it is possible in the case of the larger countries, which had an external trade and can recover some of it, that there will be a swing back of the pendulum. Very often you get a middle position by a swing too far in one direction, and a partial swing back again. It is possible that the greater countries in the world will try to find a solution of their problems, and a remedy for their present evils, by a little swing back to the free trade position, but I say that whatever may happen in the case of other countries, it is going to happen at the price that I have mentioned. It is only reasonable to expect that in those days when trade secrets are much more difficult to keep, and when most countries in the world can manufacture, those countries are not, in future, going to be dependent on foreign countries for the supply of goods that they themselves can manufacture, even though they have to pay somewhat more. Therefore, you are in my opinion never going to get back to the position where you had certain countries like Great Britain manufacturing for a large external market, and profiting thereby, and getting the primary products of those other countries in exchange. I do not think you will ever have that as it was before, but even if you did have it in other countries, I still say that for us here in our position the Sinn Féin policy which we preached from 1919 to 1921 as the way to restore this nation to something like its former position, would be the best national policy. Notwithstanding all the faults which have been found with the existing position, I for one have become steadily more and more convinced every day that the policy which we have conducted is the best policy for this nation.

I believe that the Deputies on the opposite benches, if the wheel of fortune should turn and they were to become the Government, would not become the Government except they made it quite clear to the people that the major points of that policy would be retained. I am perfectly certain that is so. While that big change, that policy, which was the ideal of the main members of the Opposition 17 or 18 years ago, is being put into operation, why should we have these underground and open attacks that we have had here? The people who do it are not blind. They know the results. When we have the present Government regarded as a tyrannical landlord, we know that the worst type of appeal is being made. Why? Because the suggestion is that this Government are animated with the same sort of ideas as the absentee landlords had—that we only want to squeeze and sweat the unfortunate people of the country.

Mr. Holohan

They are doing what is worse now with the seizures.

The President

The people of this country are not likely to believe that, and all the attempts of Opposition Deputies to get the Irish people to believe it will not succeed.

Mr. Holohan

They know it.

The President

They know perfectly well that this Government put a policy in an explicit manner before the people, that they have lived up to that policy, and that when they go before the people again they will go on the same policy.

Mr. Holohan

On a policy of ruin.

Mr. Smith

And will come back.

The President

The main thing I want to speak of here is the fact that this extra taxation was necessary, because otherwise we would have to abandon the idea which I took to be the unanimous idea here—certainly there was no opposition to the motion —the idea that every citizen in this country is entitled, either directly or indirectly, to get a living here, either directly by having an opportunity of earning his daily bread in productive enterprise, or indirectly by having the rest of the community, out of the income of the community, providing for him. We in this nation must regard ourselves as a family in that regard. There is no other way in which we can succeed. The trouble with the world largely to-day is that while the nations keep themselves apart from other nations, and insist, from one point of view, on not being regarded as a family of nations, they are not prepared to go the whole way and to think of the various members of their community as members of an individual family. They are not prepared to say that the sacrifices which one member of a family will make in order that another may live must be made by members of the community; and, if it is necessary to make provision for those who cannot otherwise be provided for than by extra taxation, by social services and so on, that that extra provision will be made. We stand for that at any rate.

There is a sum in one way or another provided from the Exchequer of about £7,000,000 odd in addition to what was provided when our predecessors were in office for what you might call general social services; sums, in other words, provided from the Exchequer and made available for the individuals of the community. That accounts for the greater part of the extra taxation. We cannot have it both ways. There is no use in saying to us: "You said you would cut down taxation by this or that amount." There is no use in saying that, because that is incompatible with the position. If any people said that in that precise way, and said, at the same time, that they were going to do the other thing, they would be undertaking to do two things which are impossible, and which everybody knows are impossible.

Mr. Dillon

It has taken a long time to knock that out of you.

The President

There is no question of getting it out of me. I have said it thousands of times. What was said was this. I remember speaking at one time as to certain savings. I happened the other day to come across the figures. I was speaking at a time when £3,000,000 was being spent on the Army. I said that we could cut that down by half. That has been done. I am not sure of the exact figures, but I think they are roughly about half of that. We said that with peace and ordered conditions here, we would be able to cut down the police force probably to one half. That is an ideal of which I still have a hope. But we have Opposition Deputies going round helping to incite and organise people to resist paying their debts, the sort of thing which they abhorred so much that they made it a crime for which a person could be brought before the Military Tribunal and get any sentence that the Tribunal thought fit. That is one of the crimes they brought in that Act to deal with. Now they are deliberately inciting the people, by references to landlordism and the rest of it, not to pay their debts.

There are people who are hard up. There are people who find it hard in these times to pay. But there are other elements in the country to whom that debt is paid and who are still worse off. Is that injustice to be tolerated? These annuities are moneys due to the community as a whole, and the farmer with his land, no matter how hard he may find it to make ends meet, is certainly in a far better position than the unfortunate out-of-work person who has to live on the miserable pittance given to him as unemployment assistance. Is not that a fact? While that prevails, our whole efforts should be concentrated on trying to get for these unfortunate people either the opportunity to work or a reasonable allowance. Why should people, who at least have food that they can depend upon, and who are not absolutely below the level of subsistence, organise themselves? Who are the leaders of that organisation? Not the people who are really in difficulties and who could be helped if it were not for this organised campaign which, if it succeeded, was going to bring the whole State toppling down. It is not the unfortunate people who possibly could be assisted if they could be segregated, but it is the people who, as everybody knows, are in the position to pay. We have had examples given of people who could bet £50 on a horse, and these are the people who led the campaign of the "poor and impoverished farmers."

It is because of that campaign, led in that manner, incited for political motives, that the Government and the community as a whole are largely impotent to deal with the hard cases. We know there are hard cases. There have been hard cases in the past. I remember very well when sitting on these benches listening to the then Minister for Agriculture, and he did not have much sympathy with what he called "the down-and-outs." It is extraordinary how people can change when they pass from these benches to the benches over there.

Mr. Dillon

And vice versa.

The President

Perhaps. At any rate, if there is a change on our side, most people would be inclined to say that in the nature of things it ought to be for the better, because the responsibility is placed upon us at the moment. But the other people, who have had it and who know what it means, forgot it overnight the moment they got what you might call a free leg. The people, I think, understand that. They know perfectly well that the efforts of the Government are designed for one purpose only, and that is to try to secure for this nation that which belongs to the nation and nothing more.

Perhaps before I close I should say there is a matter that I have refrained from speaking about up to the present, because I was very anxious that anything I might say could not be used by people who might have an interest in making things worse. I refer to the unfortunate happenings in another part of our country. It is not necessary for me to say to Deputies here that we have seen with pain and sorrow the condition to which certain of our countrymen have been reduced in another city—in Belfast. It is not necessary to tell our people that this Parliament is grieved at the conditions up there. We know what has been the fundamental cause of this whole trouble. We know that, left to themselves, our fellow-countrymen in every part of this country could live with one another on terms of reasonable friendship and reasonably as fellow-citizens of the same country. Nothing is further from the average Irishman's mind than the desire to injure his neighbour because of his political faith or belief. I believe that all sections of our people believe far too sincerely to think that the things they hold sacred from a religious point of view could be served by interfering with their neighbours because they hold a different view.

Deputies

Hear, hear.

The President

I think everyone will realise that, in our history as a nation in the past, that is true, and that if things are happening in another part of our country which bring sadness to the minds of everybody in this country, these things are happening, no matter what cloak may be put on them, not really from the motive of religion, that religion is being used as a cloak, as noble things have often in the history of mankind been used as a cloak for things that are mean and shabby. There is nothing that so seeks cloaks of that kind as political motives. Mean and shabby political motives are ever ready to use noble things to cover their own meanness and their own shabbiness. I am perfectly certain that what is happening in the North, what pretends to be happening in the name of religion, is not happening in the name of religion, because nothing that could be termed religion would be guilty of the things that are happening up there.

Unfortunately, we are not able to do anything at the moment that can remedy that situation. It was a power outside this country that created that situation. That power cannot escape responsibility in the eyes of all sections of the Irish people, in the eyes of the Irish race throughout the world and in the eyes of humanity as a whole. These things are happening because the Irish people are to be exploited in the interests of another people and so that the state craft of a foreign nation might have its way. Our people could not be allowed to settle their own differences in the way that political differences are settled in other countries. A foreign power comes along, breaks up our country and tries to keep alive the very animosities that were originally produced by the action of that same foreign country. I hope that when feelings of bitterness come into the hearts of the people here in this part of Ireland at what is happening in the North, these feelings of bitterness will be directed to the proper quarter and that anyone in this part of Ireland will not be betrayed into venting any resentment he might feel in regard to these matters upon people who are in no way responsible for them and who cannot end them.

I am sure I am also expressing the views and feelings of every Deputy in the House when I say that we deplore the actions that have been taken down here. If an enemy of this country sought the most direct way of doing damage to us here and of doing damage to the people in the North who are suffering, he could not choose a better method than the methods used by the few misguided people who, for instance, burned the church in Kilmallock and who have been guilty of actions of that sort in other places. There is not anybody, either in this country or anywhere else, who believes that these actions represent anything like the views of our people. The Government will see to it, so far as it has the power, that those who are guilty of them will be apprehended and, when they are apprehended, that the full rigour of the law will be brought to bear against them. They are disgracing our people here. They are doing the worst possible thing for our people in the North, who are already suffering enough without having to bear the shame that will come to them from these actions down here. In the past Nationalist Ireland has had a glorious record, a glorious record which is in accord with its deep spiritual feeling, a glorious record of allowing other people freedom of conscience and of the practice of religion.

I have often spoken about the Constitution which has been imposed upon us. I have spoken of Articles in it which would remain if we were completely and absolutely free in the matter. If we were framing a new Constitution, these same principles would be enshrined in it, because they represent the philosophy and the attitude of the Irish people—that is, freedom of conscience for everybody and freedom of practice of religion, provided they are not contrary to public order and morality. I am glad to say that the madness by which the people can be exploited, that madness which is capable of being exploited for political motives, is ceasing. I am sure that here a strong public feeling would be quite sufficient to end it in this part of Ireland without any direct action on the part of the Government. The Government will, of course, do its duty in the matter. I am perfectly certain the feelings of our people, the natural good thought of our people, will be sufficient to right matters here. I hope we shall see no more incidents of the kind which have brought sorrow to us in the past few days. We also hope that our people in the North, the misguided people in the North who allow themselves to be exploited for political and economic purposes, as far as we can see here, will all wake up to the fact that they are being exploited and that they will regard their fellow-citizens of different religions as brother-Irishmen, so that the great ideal for which everybody who wished well to this nation has striven in the past—the ideal by which the people in all parts of Ireland can live together in amity and allow one another full religious liberty—may soon be realised for us all.

Motion put and agreed to.

Dáil Éireann debate - Thursday, 25 Jul 1935