The general principle of protecting farmers from impure and unsatisfactory seeds is, of course, something in which we would all wish to co-operate and the important thing in carrying out a reform of this kind is, one, to be practical, and the other, not to be too radical, lest popular opinion be raised against your well-intentioned efforts to protect the people from fraud of any kind. The first question that arises in my mind is this. Section 1 purports to define agricultural seeds. It is elaborated by Section 2, which says that for the purposes of this Act the Minister may from time to time prescribe, by order, the classes of seeds which shall be agricultural seeds. The Minister ought to tell us what class of seed he has in mind, because it is not easy to envisage clearly what is going to be prescribed as agricultural seeds when you read the rest of the Bill. Do bulbs come under the heading of seeds? Does the Minister intend to include seed potatoes? Has he principally in mind agricultural or horticultural seeds? Does he consider that the Bill covers tubers, such as are popularly sown for the production of certain types of vegetables—seakale, rhubarb, and plants of that character?
The practice heretofore in Bills of this kind has been to annex to the Bill a schedule setting out at least the types of seed which the Minister proposes to deal with. That practice is here departed from. We are introduced to the sound old bureaucratic practice: "Give us the power and we will do the job." Section 2 says, in effect: "Give us the power to say what things this Bill will deal with and we will inform the public what is best." I think it is a pity, because it makes it more difficult to offer helpful suggestions of one kind or another.
The seed cleaning provisos, I assume, are really in effect going to create a privileged class of importers, because we are going to have a register of persons engaged in the business of cleaning agricultural seeds. We are going to have powers to prohibit and to restrict imports of agricultural seeds. Sooner or later the Minister will want to admit a certain quantity of agricultural seeds, and he will have to admit that quantity of seeds through some roster of merchants. I take it that is going to be the seed cleaners. The Minister ought to let us know what he has in mind in that connection.
Section 9 deals with the sale of seeds, retail, in packets. I have a good deal of experience of this trading in agricultural seeds and my experience of it is that you have three types of person engaged in the distribution of agricultural seeds in this country. You have the seed importer, the man who is doing seeds in a big way, probably packaging a large quantity of vegetable and root seeds under proprietary names and selling, wholesale, large quantities of seed oats and seed grasses. These people are mostly to be found in Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Dublin and the ports. They would do a considerable retail trade and they would also send wholesale supplies to rural distributors—I want rural distributors to mean the shopkeepers in the larger centres, in the more considerable towns. They are the second string in the business of seed distribution. In addition to these, you have the smaller shopkeeper, whose place of business is at the country cross-roads and who is doing a small business in seeds. You want to ensure that all these three types of seed merchants will sell to the farmers seeds which are accurately described for what they are and which have not deteriorated as a result of being kept too long, from year to year, or deteriorated from damp or some other condition that obtains in the places where they have been stored.
I have often thought of how best that problem could be surmounted and it is very difficult to make suggestions unless one knows what the Minister has in mind. When you are dealing with grass seeds, perennial and Italian, it is very difficult to sell them in sealed packets, for this reason, that the average small farmer who comes in will tell you how much land he wants to sow and he wants the supplier to weigh and mix for him a perennial rye grass that he will use on that piece of land. One man will have a rood, another man will have an Irish rood, another man will have two statute roods, and you never can tell from customer to customer what quantity you will have to supply. So it is very difficult to arrive at a standard package that will fit into everybody's requirements.
No such difficulty exists in respect to turnips or root seeds, but the difficulty does exist in a very acute form in respect to grass seeds other than Italian and perennial. I have always believed that one of the great necessities of the seed trade was to introduce Irish farmers, who are sowing grass seeds, to a better variety and a better assortment of grass seeds than they have been in the practice of sowing. In large parts of this country men will buy Italian, perennial and English red clover. Well, that is an extremely bad assortment of seeds, but it is very difficult to introduce them to Manifesto and Timothy and the other varieties of meadow grasses that ought to form part of any grass-seed mixture. It would be almost impossible if you were selling any of these minor grass seeds in sealed packages, but there is a great range of seeds that can conveniently be sold in packages.
I should like to provide that all retailers—all distributors—of agricultural seeds should be licensed, and that any person who wished to sell agricultural seeds without taking out a licence would be precluded from selling them except in packages which had been sealed by a licensed seed dealer. Now, that means that you would have licensed seed dealers in Dublin. Go down to a town like Mullingar and there might be three merchants there who would apply for licences to be seed dealers and they might get their licences and they might sell agricultural seeds in the package of another licensed dealer, or they might buy agricultural seeds in bulk and package them themselves putting their own name on the packet and the statutory information that all packeted seeds would be required to bear. Then you would have the small cross-roads shopkeeper who, for the convenience of his neighbours, might also wish to sell seed. I would let him sell them on condition that he sold them in the sealed package of a licensed seed dealer. He could buy that from the local seed dealer or get his supply direct from a Dublin seed dealer, but you would ensure that no one would be authorised to offer to a farmer any agricultural seeds which did not bear upon the package the date, the quality, and the guaranteed germination. I do not believe that such a condition is going to be onerous or impossible, and I believe it would be an enormous improvement on the existing arrangement.
Now, however, when you come to the question of seed oats and grass seed, I should very much like to hear from some other Deputies whether they think it would be practicable to provide that seed oats should only be sold by seedsmen who are holding themselves out as giving a certain high-grade commodity in sealed bags. At present, I have had more than one case brought under my notice in which merchants who had little or no knowledge of agricultural matters offered and actually sold kiln dried oats for seed oats, and men have gone out and prepared their land, sowed their crop, and of course not a grain ever came to germination at all. I am afraid that there is very grave danger that an unscrupulous merchant, if he had some feeding oats on his hands—kiln dried oats that he could not get rid of—and if he had a considerable trade in seed oats, could very easily mix the kiln dried oats in with the seed oats and sell them. Mind you, at present the inspectors come in and take a sample of your seeds and send them away. I grant you that, but there is nothing to prevent any man, after the oats have been tested in the bin, or wherever he is exposing them for sale, once the inspector has gone and the merchant feels pretty sure that he will not be coming back for a certain time—there is nothing to prevent that merchant introducing some of these kiln dried oats into the seed oats that he has for sale. I think it should be possible to prescribe that seed oats offered for sale by a seed merchant must be offered in a bag bearing particulars just as a bag of Indian meal at the present time bears certain particulars. When you come to grass seeds, however, I do not see how it could be done, with the exception of clover which, at present, is sold in almost all cases in sealed bags with a full description of its origin and other relevant facts.
I cannot quite understand whether this Bill would interfere with the ordinary course of trade that proceeds in our markets. The present practice is that the farmer brings in oats to the market and offers them for sale as seed, or for food purposes, and so on. I do not think the Minister ought to interfere with that practice, at present at any rate, because it would be a very great nuisance and would cause very great loss to many farmers. The sound general rule of a purchaser going into a market is caveat emptor. He knows when he is going into the open market that he is buying something that he cannot expect to be of as high a quality or as scrupulously guaranteed as something that he would buy in a sealed bag with a written guarantee, and, to interfere with that well-established practice at the present juncture would be to do something much more radical than the situation would justify.
The Minister, under Sections 11 and 12, deals with the problem he foresees may arise when we are producing original seeds in this country. Now, to tell the truth, all this talk about producing original agricultural seeds in this country for the requirements of Irish farmers is moonshine, because so long as we want the right strains of whatever crops we are going to produce, a large part of the agricultural and even of the horticultural seeds we use must be imported. Take, for instance, onions and carrots. The Minister contemplates urging a wider cultivation of onions as a semi-agricultural market-garden crop in this country. You cannot grow onion seed in this country. You have got to import it from abroad— either from South Italy or, I think, from Northern Africa. Onion seed will not grow here. Then take carrot seeds. You cannot grow carrot seeds here.
