There is a very odd item here under sub-head I (4). The Minister explains that the expenditure of £2,000 — I direct the special attention of the Labour Party to this — on land reclamation schemes will be recouped to him out of the Unemployment Grant. We always had land reclamation schemes. We always had appropriations under the Land Commission Vote for those land reclamation schemes, but under the new dispensation you make a great hub-bub about all the money you are providing for the relief of the unemployed, and then you proceed to go around from one Vote to the other and pay for the normal expenditure that ought to be undertaken on those Votes out of the unemployment relief grant. That means either of two things; either you dislodge the normal worker who would get employment under those Votes at the ordinary rate of wages, by employing relief workers at 24/- a week to do the same work, or else you simply take from the Relief Vote the money that was ordinarily voted in the ordinary way for the maintenance of the public services. Would I be right in saying that this £2,000 is recouped from the Unemployment Relief Fund, and that in regard to the persons employed on those reclamation schemes, their work is valued on the basis of a 24/- a week wage? I should be glad if the Minister would tell us that.
Now, in regard to G (1), I want to direct the attention of the Minister to sub-head D. That, I understand, has to deal with the special-term bull, and I want to ask the Minister this question: Is it true that the Minister is making a profit out of these special-term bull transactions? My reason for asking that is that I suspect the Minister is going around the country with an air of benevolence bestowing special-term bulls on selected farmers as a bounty from the Government, when, in fact, what is happening is that the Minister's inspectors go to a show and, after all the good bulls, the expensive bulls, have been bought either by private persons or the Department for the purpose of distributing under the premium bull schemes, the Minister then buys all the left-over bulls which are adjudged by his inspectors to be fit for service at all at knock-down prices, and, having bought them at knock-down prices, he then proceeds to distribute them to farmers throughout the country as special-term bulls, and gets from the farmer who buys the special-term bull £6 or £10 more than he, the Minister, paid for the bull when he bought it. If that is true, I think it is an indefensible operation and highly undesirable, and I seriously doubt the prudence of this special-term bull system at all. We all know the difficulties that lay in the way of raising the standard of live stock in this country. The average small farmer was inclined to say: "Ah, the ould bulls were the best ones, and these Department bulls are not much good." Now, the only way to overcome that natural prejudice, the existence of which it is only common prudence to recognise, was to allow no bull to go out to the country as a Department bull, except a really tip-top animal, so that gradually all would come to realise that, if a bull was a Department bull, it was as good an animal as could be got. It is a mistake, in my judgment, to send out as a Department bull what is only a medium-class animal, and we have got to remember that when you call an animal a special-term bull, or a premium bull, or whatever else you call it, the country people lump them all together as Department bulls. I think that, on the whole, the Minister would be well advised to reconsider that business and to withdraw from the system of sending out special-term bulls altogether, and confine himself to sending out to the country nothing but the really choice bulls which have been associated with the premium standard over a long time.
Now, the Minister has described to us an item of expenditure here, which he undertook, under M (5), for the development of the creamery business in the County of Kerry. He says that it may prove to be uneconomic, but that no one will grudge the £1,000 or so that the scheme will cost, even if it is uneconomic, owing to the special circumstances obtaining in Kerry. I think the time has come when we ought to ask ourselves a question here, and that is, how much would it cost to supply milk; free of charge, generally, to the necessitous population of the cities of this country? I wonder if you paid the farmers of this country five pence a gallon for milk and, instead of trying to convert that milk into butter, brought it into the large centres of population and distributed it free, or at a nominal sum — and I would prefer to distribute it free — what would it involve the public purse? I think many people would be astonished at how little it would cost. It is pretty generally admitted that the most perfect foodstuff you can possibly get for young people is milk. I am convinced that, if you proposed to distribute it generally, it would have to be on the basis of pasteurising it all. Some people would say "How would you bring the milk all the way from Kerry to Dublin?" Well, that is nonsense, because all the milk that goes into London comes from greater distances than from Kerry to Dublin, and in many parts of America the milk is carried hundreds of miles to the centre of population where it is consumed, and the question of distance presents no difficulty. I suppose that, 100 years ago, if a man got up and suggested that you ought to bring water into every house in Dublin, and not only into every house, but into every tenement and every room in which people live, prudent financiers would have laughed at such a suggestion and said that the cost of pipes would be ruinous and that the cost of the maintenance of such a system of water supply would be prohibitive. We have now changed our minds in that regard, and I say that the idea of bringing milk into the centres of population in the same way is no more ludicrous than the idea of bringing water into the cities was 100 or so years ago. Can any individual walk through the streets of Dublin and see children literally starving—because an under-nourished child is a starved child—and say to themselves, quite blandly, that it is unthinkable to provide that child with the food requisite to give it enough? I feel the exact opposite. I feel that, so long as you have children living in an urban or indeed in any other centre, about whom you are bound to admit that they are not getting enough food, far from saying that it is grotesque to insist, without counting the cost, that they must get it, it is insane not to say that the thing is to give them food and count the cost afterwards.