I want to make a few comments with regard to reference No. 2, the amendment of the duty on wallpaper. I understand that the present mill for the production of wallpaper is well advanced and will be in production shortly. At present wallpaper is being brought in under licence, and for the moment the position of the trade is very much as it was in the past. At the same time, I should like to suggest that in connection with this duty a state of affairs might very well be brought about in which the employment given in one direction might be more than offset in another. The position in the wallpaper trade is rather peculiar. In the middle of the last century there were a number of firms making wallpaper here by the wood block process and by hand. The machine-made wallpaper from abroad put an end to this industry, but a number of these firms have survived in the decorating and distributing end of the business. While it is not safe to prophesy what is going to happen, there is a selection being issued by the present mill which contains roughly 360 patterns. That compares with a previous choice of about 12,000. The duty is from 50 to 500 per cent., and while the position has not exactly arisen at the moment, because, as I say, importations are being carried on under licence, it seems likely to arise at any moment when the mill will have come into production and imports will be cut off.
I am not in any sense throwing any stones at the output of the present factory. I wish rather to sound a note of warning to the Minister. It will not be an easy task for him to decide between the interests involved—the company manufacturing the wallpaper, the distributors who are distributing it, the decorators who have to hang that paper, and the public who have to look at the paper hung by the decorator. I mentioned that there was probably a world-wide selection of something like 12,000 patterns available to any merchant making up a wallpaper book. One manufacturer would not deal with a particular firm, and in other cases the firm did not deal with the manufacturer, so that the range of selection did not extend over the 12,000 patterns. At the same time, however, it extended over a very wide range, and there are a large number of firms distributing wallpaper with a selection of 600 patterns. There would probably be half a dozen of those firms in Ireland, and a considerable number of merchants in England send over wallpaper books, the result being that the general public had a selection in this country of roughly 8,000 patterns. There was a very wide selection of wallpapers available, and the decorators in turn selected patterns which in one way or another they confined to themselves and put up in their showrooms "exclusive designs" of certain wallpapers.
The position in the past was that the really critical person who was on the look out for a particular type of wallpaper could get possibly half-a-dozen books and not one in 100 of the patterns would he find common to a number of books. The position now apparently is that the people who use wallpaper, or the public who pay for paper put on, will be confined to 350 patterns, and instead of everybody selecting a pattern according to his taste, the merchant's pattern books here will all exhibit an extraordinary similarity. The position in future will probably be that a person going down the road will find that eight of the diningroom papers in the houses are the same. That, according to the trade, is calculated to have a very adverse effect on the use of wallpaper. Behind the people who sell wallpaper are the decorators who put up the paper and the painters who work for them, and they feel that the selection is not nearly wide enough. As I say, I am not throwing any aspersions on the present production. It is in some respects a very creditable production. At the same time, it is the product of one mill. In the past the citizens here were used to having a selection from the output of 40 mills. I do not see how the Minister is going to increase the selection very largely because, quite obviously, the duty was imposed with the intention of getting the public to use Irish wallpapers, but if their selection is cut down from 40 to 1, I am afraid somebody is going to suffer. I do not know whether people will postpone decoration or adopt alternative means of decoration, but there is a general feeling that nothing like the previous business in wallpaper can hope to be done on the selection at present envisaged.
As I said before, I can quite see the Minister's difficulty in opening the door to a very much wider selection. I do not want to stress this matter too much because the situation has not arisen at the moment and possibly the Minister may have plans for dealing fairly with the various conflicting interests from all angles. I take it that the Minister would not think that he had done any good for employment in this country if he secured that a percentage or even the whole of the wallpaper we require should be manufactured in this country, if the volume of painting work were reduced by a very considerable extent. I should like the Minister, in replying, to deal with that question. There are other questions which possibly may arise later and which I suppose can be brought to the Minister's attention. That is the one major point that I think should be touched upon and about which some members of the trade—painters, decorators and various other people—feel rather nervous. I can, of course, at another date, bring to the Minister's attention any other matters that may arise but this is a major problem that, to my mind, requires to be looked into at the earliest possible moment.
