During the last three months, which was the winter, and during the remaining three months no hats will be imported at all, for the reason that you do not sell felt hats to ladies in the middle of August. Did the Minister ever hear of an article called straw? Any of the 250,000 not sold now are reduced 50 per cent., and this day 12 months will be thrown out on the ashpit. At the moment when 250,000 hats have been brought in to supply the entire requirements of Ireland, 750,000 have been assembled in Galway and the people are going to take them and like them. If they do not take them, the quota will be reduced until they must either take them or go bareheaded. Deputies, when they take their wives abroad for a Christmas holiday either to Blackpool or to Paris with Galway hats on them, two years hence, need not express any surprise if they require mounted police to get them through the streets, because the people will think that they have taken something out of Madame Tussauds. That really is ludicrous and arises from the situation of a group of wholly untrained persons romping into a highly technical trade to achieve the impossible.
You cannot make in this country or in any other country all the felt hats that the entire community want, particularly when concerned with women's wear. The very essence of the millinery trade is variety; the very essence of the trade is the pleasing of highly individualistic tastes. If you fail in that, what is going to happen is that the people will give up using the commodity altogether. They will simply wear tam-'o-shanters and they are already doing that very largely. One of the reasons why the felt millinery trade, to which I referred earlier, has diminished so much in the last ten years is that women went over very largely to wearing what are called berets. It tickles the fancy of Deputies for anybody to talk of the technical side of the millinery trade. But we are at the present moment going rigidly to fix the entire millinery trade by legislation, and every Deputy thinks that there is something incongruous and almost improper in going into the technical side of the business. I am inclined to agree with him. But, if it seems incongruous to go into the technical aspect of the business, why not leave it alone? I think we would be very well advised to leave it alone. I do not think Deputies are qualified to poke their noses into this business at all. They know nothing about it. It is a matter of grave concern materially to reduce the standard of living of the women of the country. I think women are entitled to attach considerable importance to the matter of making themselves look smart by buying the kind of hats they like to wear and by putting up a good show so far as general costume is concerned. That is an important matter which should concern the House before they adopt a resolution of this kind.
But there is another far more important matter and that is the livelihood of the people who sell good millinery. These people have built up good businesses. They are making a nice living out of them. They have families to support and they are living in a modest degree of comfort. They have created all that by their own unaided efforts in the past, and we are going to blunder into that whole business and wreck a number of these people and wipe their business out. I think that is wrong. I think you have no right to go into a person's house and wipe him clean out of existence and put him out on the road as a pauper unless some overwhelming social good requires that his individual interest should be sacrificed. Even in that event you should go to the limit to try and help him over the difficult period and get him on his feet again in a similar calling.
I have seen too much of this happening in the past five years. I have seen commercial travellers, respectable married men, who always presented a cheerful and reasonably prosperous exterior, who had families going to nice schools, and who were getting on in the world. They had no reason to believe that they were doing wrong or doing anything contrary to public policy. Yet, overnight these men were simply kicked out on the side of the road and told that the product they had been distributing could no longer be imported and their services were no longer required. I have known men who had children in good schools who are to-day literally hungry. Of course, these individual cases mean nothing because they have no one to speak for them. Nobody cares very much about them. But the suffering in these families is ghastly, to my mind. Now, I admit that you cannot hold up the whole of Government policy if you are going to incommode one individual, but you ought to have a full realisation of the measure of real suffering, distinct from inconvenience, which a resolution of this character is likely to create. This resolution is going to destroy the business of a large number of small business people in this country who have been well off in the past. It is going to create a very undesirable restriction on the standard of living of women in this country, and in exchange it is going to establish, I believe only temporarily, in Galway a factory which cannot in the nature of the trade enjoy a permanent success. I would be glad to think it would, but I am as certain as I am standing here, with the limited knowledge I have of the millinery trade, that the thing cannot possibly enjoy a permanent measure of success. Now, bear this in mind, that you are going to take the risk of establishing, by this ruthless method, an industry in Galway which I believe can serve no useful purpose to the community or the City of Galway, and in the process of establishing that you are going to wipe out a vast number of small milliners through the country, not the kind of milliner who makes her own millinery, but the kind of milliner who went to London, Paris or New York and brought home a select range of fashionable millinery. Once you have destroyed those people, broken their connection, and closed down their business, you cannot bring them back into existence overnight.
