There is no necessity to conceal anything about the Gaeltacht industries, but there is a necessity to face the fact that the Department at present is being run on lines that can do nothing but injure the good men working at the looms, and the good women working on the knitting in the Gaeltacht industries and elsewhere, and it is injuring them because there is not the capacity in the Department to do the job as it ought to be done. What is wrong with the Gaeltacht industries? What is wrong with the Gaeltacht industries is that we are producing what we want to produce, and not what our customers want to buy. Is that for want of the will or for want of the way? It is not for want of the will. If the people who are working on the Gaeltacht industries got information of what potential customers of the industry wanted to buy they could produce that stuff, just as well as Harris tweed is produced for every market in the world. Instead of prancing in here, and denouncing those who are trying to put what is wrong right, it would suit Deputy Childers much better to go to those who know something about Gaeltacht industries, and find out what the real difficulties are, and not come hedging for civil servants who, through no fault of their own, are falling down on the job. How can men or women who have chosen as their career in life that of the Civil Service be qualified to gauge the fashion market in London, Paris and New York; determine the fashion trade and forecast designs and type of texture best calculated to capture the most elusive market in the world? They know nothing about it. If they did they would not be in the Civil Service. The man who understands the fashion market, the man who deals with that type of trade is, from temperament, entirely unsuited to occupy a position in the Civil Service of this or any other country. He could not do it.
Take the point made to-day by Deputy Dockrell and most reasonably made. There was mention of a loss on buttons. I know well that the man, wherever he is, responsible for that loss on buttons is sweating, because he thinks the loss he made is going to embarrass the Parliamentary Secretary in Dáil Eireann, and he is perfectly right. It is. When that man is asked. on the next occasion, to take a chance on something attractive, something that might capture the market, with the knowledge that it might not capture the market, he will say: "No, if I get the market I will get no thanks for it —it is all part of the day's work—but if I miss the market there will be three hours' debate in Dáil Eireann because of the fact that I paid so much for these goods originally and sold them for one-third of their value." And there must be, and there will be, that debate so long as you run this thing by a Government Department under the direction of the Department of Finance. Just imagine the Department of Finance, with their rules and with their requirements, surveying every transaction entered into by the sales branch of the Gaeltacht industries! Is there a business man in Europe or in the United States of America who would attempt to carry on his business for one week under the conditions imposed by the regulations of the Department of Finance? Is there a single firm in Europe or America that would not go bankrupt in one month if they had to carry on within the strait jacket of Department of Finance regulations? Of course there is not. The thing is quite impossible, and unless and until you get free from that, no progress at all can be made. If you do get free from it, let us not close our eyes to the facts.
Deputy McMenamin brought into this House a bunch of patterns and I saw them. It was not the first time I saw them, because, the week before, I had that bunch of patterns and four other bunches of patterns before me, and I was buying the stuff for my own trade. Now, the patterns that Deputy McMenamin produced in this House reflected no credit on anybody. They are poor, indifferent, unexciting, pedestrian kinds of cloth. There are people in Donegal producing home spuns, without any Government assistance and without any Government help, and they compare more than favourably with the best the Gaeltacht Department have to offer. Deputy McMenamin made it clear that in what the Gaeltacht Department has to offer there are many attractive cloths, good cloths, and he emphasised that it was unjust to those weavers who are producing good cloths to incorporate with their work inferior cloths. Deputy McMenamin is perfectly right. I adopt every word he said. It is a grave injustice to the workers in Donegal who are producing good stuff to bind up their stuff with the inferior products of other looms. Why are the products inferior? They are inferior because they are designed to meet a trade that does not exist. If you want to capture the trade to which Deputy Childers referred, that of ladies who are prepared to wear a light tweed, the most important thing in it is, first, to secure the correct design, and secondly, to secure distinctive dyes. Now, the design that Deputy McMenamin laid before us here is a pale and ghostly herringbone. There is not a cotton shoddy manufacturer out of Lancashire that could not copy it. I think I have it here. Yes, here it is. Just look at that—a dreary, unadventurous kind of herringbone.
Now, that is one range of samples. I think that is bad. If you want that class of stuff to take, you have got to have, first, a distinctive design that is not going to be reproduced readily by any shoddy manufacturer, and, secondly, you want dyes, if possible, other than aniline dyes. You want the old vegetable dyes of the people, not because, from an industrialist's point of view, they are the most efficient or the most economical—as a matter of fact, they are the most expensive—but because they are dyes that no shoddy manufacturer in Germany, Great Britain or American can copy, because he does not know the secret of their composition and, even if he did, he would not have the patience or the character to sit down and compound them by the traditional method of the people of Connemara or Donegal. It is that air of distinction, that air of uniqueness, that air of peculiarity, that sells that stuff on the New York market and the Paris market and the London market. I know that that is true because I myself have sold them across the counter on the New York and London markets. I have worked in a shop and offered them across the counter. I have spoken on behalf of the Donegal industry to the fashion experts of New York and have got them to come to Donegal.
Remember this: When you offer a material of that kind to the average American purchaser, a fine material of the kind referred to by Deputy Childers, you are not dealing with a textile expert but with a rich woman who wants something exclusive and who is no judge of quality at all. She wants something of outstanding appearance. She does not care what she pays for it so long as it is not going to be an article of common use. If you do not get patterns and dyes that cannot be reproduced by the mass production manufacturer, when you show Gaeltacht tweeds in Altman's window in New York or in Bergdorff Goodman's window, or in the Rue de la Paix in Paris, or in Regent Street or Bond Street in London, within three weeks the shoddy manufacturers' agents will have got patterns and they will have manufactured shoddy copies, and what began its history in Regent Street ends it in Whitechapel, or what began on Fifth Avenue is available at First Avenue or Tenth Avenue; and the day that it appears there it does not matter how much you may have sold to Bergdorff Goodman's or to Altman's, it goes down the chute and is sold for rags, because the moment it has been copied by the shoddy manufacturers no seller of exclusive goods will allow it to remain upon his premises.
Now, with regard to this pattern that I have here, who could not copy that? I could copy it myself. What is there distinctive, exclusive or striking about the pattern that Deputy McMenamin brought before this House? Do we do any service to the Gaeltacht industries by forbearing to warn them now that that kind of material is not designed to capture the market that they must capture if they are to survive? There is no market for that material except the luxury market: there is no market for it except the exciusive market, the fashionable market. I know that in the case of some of the plain people over on the far benches their blood runs cold when you suggest that the products of the Gaeltacht industries should be sold to anybody but the plain people. Deputy Brady, I suppose, is shattered for fear the aldermen of the Londonderry Corporation will be discouraged from purchasing Gaeltacht materials. Well, now, monumental as their figures may be, the amount of materials that they will buy from the Gaeltacht to cover their persons would not keep the looms of the Gaeltacht busy for three days.
What we have got to capture is not the home market—it does not matter two straws to the Gaeltacht industry— what we have got to capture is the market of the wealthy, luxurious, exclusive fashion trade of the great cities of the world. There are many Deputies in this House who have no great affection or regard for the ladies who move in those circles or for their manner of life, but it is not for love of them that we are selling this stuff. It is because they are the only people who, under the system of economy that rules the world at the present time, have enough money to pay for that kind of stuff. There is no use reading them lectures on morality, or on how they ought to live. The only thing that will provide an economic market for the Gaeltacht is a lecture to the people who are producing this stuff on what those ladies want to buy. I am concerned, as Deputy McMenamin is concerned, to get employment for the people who are working in the Gaeltacht. I want to get for people whom I know intimately work, because that is what they want. I want to get them deliverance from the necessity of the dole and of relief work. I want to restore their traditional dignity and their independence for which the people of Donegal have a proud record the world over. I want them to feel, as I know they ought to be able to feel if they only get the help they are entitled to get, that the things they are producing are not only economic but that they are objects of beauty, and a contribution to the artistic life of this country. They have the ability —they have the sensibility for beauty— to produce those things if there is only a market in which they can profitably sell them. Their circumstances preclude them from securing that market, and it is that gap in their capacity that the Department of the Gaeltacht ought to be able to fill, and it is because they are not going about that job in the right way that they are letting down the Gaeltacht workers: that they are presenting their work in the wrong way to the markets of the world with resulting disaster for the workers. The courageous, straightforward, honest position taken up by Deputy McMenamin in this House is, of course, capable of misrepresentation by gentlemen like Deputy Brian Brady.