The most amazing feature of the entire discussion on this Bill is the fact that there was unanimous agreement on all sides of the House that it was a very good thing that the system which has operated for the past five years was abolished, and, so far as I can see, the Bill has been regarded by practically everybody who spoke on it as a definite improvement on the existing situation because it was doing away with the existing situation. The only real welcome the Bill got, however, was that many people hoped that it would lead to better and brighter things in the future, because of verbal statements made by the Minister that certain things might not take place, or certain things would take place. What strikes me about the Bill, and the reaction of the House to it, is that there seems to be a definite air of suspicion that, even though we appear to have improved our position by wiping out what has happened in the last four or five years, we cannot say that we definitely have improved our position because we are not sure what will happen under this Bill.
The Minister will have realised by now that one of the greatest objections to the Bill is to the commission which he sets up in the Bill and, apart altogether from any question of personnel, I have a definite objection to this type of commission being put in charge of any kind of industry, or anything else in the country, with practically complete powers. When the Agricultural Commission reported to the Minister, they suggested in an interim report that the Pigs and Bacon Marketing Boards be amalgamated and a new board substituted therefor. It was suggested that that board should consist of two members elected by the bacon curers, three members representative of the pig producers and two members, who may be civil servants, nominated by the Minister. Even though I dislike boards of that type being in the control of any kind of industry, I am surprised that the Minister would not agree that that would have been a better type of board, and more satisfactory in the eyes of the public than the board he proposes in the Bill, consisting of three people nominated by himself and with absolute powers. I believe that the experience of the country of legislation which gives boards of this nature complete powers over whatever matter they are dealing with has not been good, and I believe this Bill goes a long way, as do a number of other Bills introduced by the present Government, to carry that type of legislation too far. One might say that it is a very common occurrence, but take Section 17, which says:—
"The commission may make regulations in relation to any matter or thing referred to in this Act as prescribed."
That is not to be wondered at nowadays because several boards and commissions have power to make regulations, but still it is rather serious when one realises that in every type of legislation which we are getting here, legislative powers are being handed over to some commission or other, to some subsidiary body or practically to a Department. While the Minister may say that this has been in half a dozen other Bills, I take the strongest objection to a section of this nature which sets out that a commission nominated by the Minister, which may or may not be directly responsible to the House, and which may or may not be directly criticised by the House, shall have power to make regulations for any prescribed matter, or, in other words, shall have power to legislate, because their regulations will have the force of law.
I believe that if this Bill is to improve the position of the pig trade of the country, we would be far better off without this commission at all, and without a commission which is to be given the wide powers it is getting, that this Bill could be operated by the Minister and his Department and that the Minister and his Department should be directly answerable to the House for its operation, just as is the case in regard to any other portion of Departmental work, or any other line of activity which the Minister must carry out as Minister for Agriculture. I do not see the value of a commission of this nature. It is plain to everybody who has listened to the debate that the one thing about which the House was satisfied was that the board now being replaced was bad, and that it had led to a position which everybody was delighted to see was gone. I do not think, however, that you are improving the position by merely setting up another board, calling it something else, handing the entire management of the pig trade over to it and putting it in the position in which it can legislate under the terms of the Act and possibly in a position in which it can never be effectively criticised in the House, just as other boards, as we know from experience, cannot be criticised.
Again, there is another very objectionable feature and it is about time that its appearance in legislation in this country stopped. I do not care if the Minister says it is in a dozen other Acts, whether of the present Government or of the last Government, but the sooner we stop the type of legislation in Section 18 the better. It says:
The production of a document purporting to be a copy of an instrument ... or an extract of an instrument ... or resolution shall be sufficient evidence of such instrument, extract, minutes or part of minutes and no proof shall be required of the handwriting or official position of the person certifying the same.
That is another rotten type of legislation which has grown up in the country. It is set down in the Bill that the production of a typewritten or written document purporting to come from some board, from some Department of State, or from some official, shall be regarded by the courts of this country as absolute, final and conclusive evidence, as irrebuttable, without any proof whatever of the contents, without proof as to whether the contents were made in accordance with law, without proof, in the case of a resolution, as to whether that resolution was within the powers of the board or the person who made that resolution.
I can quite see that the Minister could justify that particular section by saying that it is already enshrined in the legislation of this country but I say that the sooner the type of legislation we have been getting in this country, which hands over legislative power to persons and bodies outside the House and which makes notes sent out by a Department to the court, absolute and irrebuttable evidence the better. The Minister may feel it is necessary to have these powers and necessary to preserve these sections but I say it is bad legislation, rotten legislation. It would be no wonder if a day came in this country when the ordinary citizen began to lose his regard for the values of the courts on finding that, in innumerable prosecutions every day, the only evidence presented against people who are charged with an offence is a document posted down to the State Solicitor or the Superintendent of the Civic Guards from some Department or Departmental office and put on the table of the court without any further evidence for the prosecution. That is to be treated as absolutely final and irrebuttable because it is enshrined in some section of the Bill that that evidence cannot be questioned. It does not matter that the actual document is merely a half sheet of paper typed out by some typist in a Government office; it is good law. The sooner the Minister gets it into his head that we ought to make some attempt to preserve the ordinary rights of the people and the sooner we drop this type of legislation, the better. The sooner we stop giving to bodies outside this House power to make regulations which have the force of law, the sooner we stop giving these bodies power to institute or to defend legal proceedings without going into court, where they can get away with anything by the mere production of a document, the better.
I cannot understand why the Minister, if he is going to have a board at all, would not have some representation from the people who are directly interested in his particular trade. I do not agree that the recommendation of the Agricultural Commission went far enough at all. On the outgoing board you certainly had people interested in the trade. If you are going to establish a board at all, and create the idea, as was created by the Agricultural Commission's report, that it is representative of the people interested, you would have to go a lot further than merely picking out two persons who are said to represent the bacon curers or the pig producers. There are many more people interested in these things than the Minister or the Department imagines. Very often, for instance, everybody is represented on boards of this kind except the fellow who pays the piper. Everybody is represented except the consumer. It would have been to the interests of the consumer for the past four or five years if consumers were represented on the board. That representative would have asked the board or the Minister to explain as to why the farmer was getting what he considered a very bad price for his pigs and the consumer was paying a very excessive price for his bacon, so excessive that a great number of people dropped buying bacon altogether and consumption decreased in this country.
I want to put one thing to the Minister which is dealt with in the interim report of the Agricultural Commission. At the moment this Bill is supposed to tackle the problem of pig production and pig marketing in this country. The first thing that is necessary for the profitable carrying on of the pig-rearing industry is to have pigs. I wonder does the Minister realise that, if the state of affairs which has existed for the past two months continues, the Minister is going to face a very serious decline in the pig population. Can the Minister say, if he wants to improve our pig trade and to maintain or increase the pig population, that the ordinary farmer down the country who is not in a position to put his hand into his pocket and hoard feeding stuffs, will be able to say to himself: "If I buy store pigs now I will be able to get feeding stuffs for them for the next three months?" The attitude of the small pig producers is this: "The next chance we get, we are getting out of pigs because, first of all, we cannot pay the price we have to pay for feeding stuffs and, secondly, if we can afford to pay that price, we are not sure that we can get the feeding stuffs." The Minister knows perfectly well—and I am sure many other southern Deputies will agree with me— that during the past three months, in Cork and Kerry, there were periods of a week and a fortnight when it was absolutely impossible to get any maize meal at all. Again, the price of maize meal has risen to such a height that it would not pay any small farmer who cannot afford to go in for pig rearing on such a scale that he would be able to spread his overhead expenses over a great number of them, to run the risk of not being able to get feeding stuffs for them.
I wonder if the Minister can give any indication as to whether the Government have taken any steps, or are likely to take any steps, to ensure that there will be at least an adequate supply of maize meal for the future? Have the Government any idea as to whether they will be able to get something approaching an adequate supply of maize meal for the country? I can assure the Minister, and I believe any other Co. Cork Deputy will agree with me, that unless he can say to the small farmers, who form the main bulk of the pig producers of the country, that they are going to get a sufficient supply of maize, these people are going to get out of pig production and you cannot blame them. Unless also you can give them a guarantee that the business in future is going to be managed a little better than it was in the past, that they will not be faced with the position which they had to face for the past four or five years when they were getting an unjust price for their pigs while they saw the bacon curers getting what everybody knew was an excessive price for the retail article: unless you can assure them that there is going to be some relation between the price of the finished article and the price they have now to pay for their feeding stuffs or that they will have to pay for them, the Minister will be facing a far more serious situation than was created by the scandals which were referred to by the Prices Commission. He will be facing a position where the smaller pig producers will be going out of pig production, firstly, because of the price of feeding stuffs, and, secondly, because they fear that, no matter what price they are prepared to pay, they will not be able to get feeding stuffs.
I welcome this Bill for one reason. The Minister in his opening statement told us that there were many things provided for in the Bill that might not happen and that there were many things not provided for in the Bill that he hoped would happen. Deputy O'Reilly and Deputy Brasier referred last night to the effect which the Minister's policy had on small country towns and on farmers living in the vicinity of these towns for the past five years. If this Bill is going to do away with two or three things which were customary in the past four or five years then I welcome it—firstly, if it is going to do away, as I believe it will, with the scandalous system whereby people put say 20 pigs into a lorry, took them 40 miles to a factory and were then told by the factory "We will take five of these pigs but not the other fifteen". Deputy Hickey referred last night to the case where farmers were met in the streets afterwards by buyers who bought the pigs. I can tell the Minister of a case in which pigs were taken 40 miles to a factory and the farmer was told they were not wanted. The same pigs were bought at a market another 40 miles away on the following day by a representative of the factory which had refused them on the previous day.
If that situation is gone I welcome the Bill for that reason. With regard to the case of farmers supplying pigs to the bacon factories, if this Bill is going to do away with the iniquitous system whereby a farmer got a sheet of paper about two feet long setting out what he was going to get for the pigs he supplied and indicating that there were to be deductions, descriptions and grades with the result that, by the time the various cuts were deducted from the gross price, the net price that he got for every pig he supplied was far different from the net price he hoped he would get when he took the pigs to the factory and very different from the net price that he saw quoted in that morning's newspaper—if all that is going to be done away with, then, in my opinion, it is another good thing.
I wonder has the Minister ever realised the effect, apart entirely from the inconvenience of having to take your pigs to the bacon factory on the chance of their being taken from you, that the dwindling away of the local pig markets has had on business people and others in our country towns and villages. I can well remember what used to happen not very long ago in three or four small towns not far away from where I live. The pig market day in one of these towns meant that the town was black with people from one end to the other. On that day one would find it almost impossible to drive a car through the town. All that is gone. These market days meant, first of all, that the farmers brought their pigs into the towns. You had open competition by the pig buyers, and, as a Deputy said last night, if there was open competition the farmers sold their pigs, and when they did that one may take it that they were fairly well satisfied with the price. On those pig market days considerable employment was given in all the small towns. People were employed by the buyers and by the sellers. You had people employed to take charge of the delivery of the pigs at the railway station. All sorts of jobs were to be had by people on those market days. The townspeople earned money by letting yards and stores for the keeping of pigs overnight. By reason of the system introduced under the recent legislation, all those people have lost a lot of the money that used to pour into the town, and money that provided casual employment and casual earnings for those who could ill-afford to lose it.
Another effect that the disappearance of the pig market day in our small towns and villages had was that it rapidly took away business from the small merchants. I wonder has the Minister ever realised that, whatever be thought of the policy, the very fact that that policy turned over the sale of pigs into the cities and the big towns, meant that it automatically took away business as well from our small towns and villages. It did that directly, because we all know that when the farmer sold his pigs in the small town or village he bought his feeding stuffs from the local merchant. The local merchant had been supplying him for two months with feeding stuffs, and as soon as he sold the finished pig on the market he paid the shopkeeper for the feeding stuffs he had been supplying him with. Under the changed system what happened? The farmer had to hire a lorry and take his pigs to Tralee or Cork. The pigs were delivered at the factory and, naturally, the farmer did not bring the lorry home empty. He bought his supplies of feeding stuffs in Cork or Tralee. That resulted in an immense loss to the shopkeepers in the small towns and villages. I doubt very much if the Minister has ever realised the terrible effect on business and employment that the breakdown of the market day system in the small towns and villages had on the people in these centres. If we are going to get back to the position where the farmer will have open competition for his finished products, I do not believe there is a farmer in the country but will welcome that and will be satisfied with it. If we are going to get back to the position in which we will have the pig markets re-established in the small towns and villages, then I think for that alone we should welcome this Bill.
I want to say in all seriousness to the Minister that, unless he wakes up, and wakes up quickly, to the position that is being created for the farmers and small pig producers by the price of feeding stuffs and the possible scarcity of them, and indicates that something is going to be done in the way of establishing some relation between the price of the finished product and the price of feeding stuffs: unless the Minister can assure the House and the small pig producers that something will be done to enable them to get adequate supplies of maize, then I fear that in six months' time he will be faced with a situation in which he will find that people in a small way will have to get out of pig production altogether. They will have to do that because they will find that they cannot afford to remain in it.