The changes in the situation from day to day are of such a microscopic character that, for the first time, I am not prepared to find grave fault with any error into which the Minister may fall. I think that it is virtually impossible to keep track of the situation from week to week or intelligently to anticipate what is going to happen. However, there are certain over-riding activities that, I think, we should maintain here—sometimes losing money and sometimes making money on them—in order to ensure the maintenance of pig production. I think that these measures are requisite during the period of adjustment which must be lived through until forces outside this country which we cannot control shall have stabilised themselves. The first consideration is to keep the people in the production of pigs because, taking the long view, that is the right thing for the people in their own interests to do. It is very easy, if you have ample capital, to take a long view in your business but the man whose capital will permit him to buy only two pairs of pigs is very frequently not able to carry a transient loss in order to reap the profit which he may reasonably expect to get in the distant future One of the things that will drive our people out of pigs more quickly than anything else is the experience, when the pigs are ready for sale, that they cannot be readily cashed. There is no use at this stage in going back on the old controversy as to whether or not it was wise to break up our fairs and markets. I do not want to do that but the effect of our factory purchasing has been to destroy the fairs and markets in a great many centres and to facilitate every kind of abuse in that connection.
I think that the Minister is right in ensuring that buyers will be sent to every centre where he anticipates a surplus and that he is right in taking these pigs and exporting them himself or exporting them through the Pigs and Bacon Marketing Board. I think that he ought to go a little further. He ought to take the almanac and study the list of fairs. There are certain districts which are pig-producing districts. West Cork is one. Donegal ought to be another. North-west Cavan is a third. Mayo and, I think, parts of north Galway would be readily recognised as a fourth. Monaghan—my own constituency— would be a fifth. Parts of Louth might also be properly described as preeminently pig-producing areas. I should like the Minister, for a while in any case, to provide that in each of these fairs, as a precautionary measure, he would have a buyer. That would mean that there would have to be five or six fairs attended every day of the week. You would want five or six men on the road all the time. I do not think that that will be necessary for long. But take the case of the town of Roscommon. At the last fair in Roscommon, there was no buyer at all and the whole fair of pigs went home. That has a deplorable effect. The Minister may find that his buyers are standing at fairs day after day at which their intervention is unnecessary but I think that the expense would be amply justified by the certainly that, if an emergency arose, there would be a ready vent through which it could be liquidated. I deliberately urge on the Minister the desirability of doing that now—promptly, without protracted investigation or excogitation. Try it and, if it proves hopelessly impracticable, you can drop it. These are times of quick decisions. Quick decisions can occasionally prevent great losses, even if you have to amend your decisions after experience. You cannot deal with this matter as you would deal with it a few years ago—by examination, excogitation and providing against all possible contingencies. You must deal with the matter at once and, if something unexpected arises, you can mend your hand to meet the new contingency.
There is another matter to which I wish to refer. Perhaps my daring in this matter will give the Minister courage. There was no more zealous critic of the maize-meal admixture scheme than I, and I pride myself that I killed it. I am going to ask the Minister to embark on a maize-meal admixture scheme now on the right lines. This matter is obviously tied up with the maintenance of pig supplies. It is vital to the maintenance of pig supplies and I think the Chair has indicated that it is prepared to allow a general discussion on the pig question on this occasion. We must face the fact that although Indian corn is getting cheaper every day and although there is a glut in the Argentine as a result of Denmark and Holland and other European countries being excluded from the markets, freight rates are still high—not as high as they were, taking war risks into account, but bottoms are scarce and may be more scarce. We may be confronted with a situation next autumn in which there will be virtually no maize meal at all. When you see ahead of you a situation such as that, two things must occur to you at once. In the first place, it is very difficult to get people to change the ration they are accustomed to give to their live stock and, secondly, it is very difficult to get the pig to adjust his digestion to the new type of food. We have got to make a change next autumn whether we like it or not and we ought to put our hands to it now. The way to run a maize-meal admixture scheme is not to bring your materials together and then go through the expensive process of mixing them but to notify every retail distributor that he cannot buy from a mill a measure of maize meal without accepting in the same delivery a proportionate measure of barley meal or Sussex ground oats. If that regulation is made, every retail distributor in this country will raise a frantic clamour that it is impossible, impracticable, tyrannical—in fact, that it is all cod.
If I order a ton of Indian meal and I am offered a ton of Sussex ground oats and barley I will make the welkin ring, but I will sell the ground oats and the barley meal rather than burn it; I will sell it if I have to sell it. Instead of handing a man out one cwt. of meal when he asks for it, I will give him a sales talk on the food value of Sussex ground oats and barley meal and, if I am not fit to do that, the sooner I am out of business as a retail distributor the better it will be for myself and for the country. It involves no extra expense whatever; there is no additional expense. The barley meal will have to be sold at an economic price; Sussex ground oats will have to be sold at an economic price. The oats may be prepared in some other form. Sussex ground oats is probably the most acceptable form in which to offer oats as an animal foodstuff because, though you could incorporate the hull in oatmeal for many types of live stock, there are other types of live stock that it will not suit. Sussex ground oats will suit a fattening fowl or a milch cow. There are certain forms in which you could give oats to a milch cow and it will do her a considerable amount of good, but you could not offer them in that form to a pig. Sussex ground oats is good for live stock in the due proportion that is suitable for the particular animal. You cannot give a pig more than a certain quantity of oats, but that is not true of a cow or a fowl. These are things to be borne in mind by those actually raising the stock.
My point is that that ought to be done now, because at this stage we can make it incumbent on the shopkeeper to impose on his customers a very small proportion of their orders in the form of barley, meal and oats and so they can slowly adjust themselves to the new mixture which they will have to use next autumn. We can increase the proportion of barley and oats in July and again in August and again in September until we are able to keep a proper balance between the domestically-produced foodstuff and the imported article. Furthermore, to take that step now will relieve the situation that has arisen in regard to the oat crop.
For some strange reason, the nature of which I do not quite understand, no farmer bought seed oats this year. The Government did not foresee that contingency, with the result that they permitted the oat meal manufacturers to import about 5,000 tons of Canadian oats last April, thinking the Irish oats would all be consumed as seed. The Irish oats were not consumed as seed and there is an immense carry-over of the oats from last harvest. If that carry-over is allowed to remain there until the new oats come in, there may be a collapse in the price of oats. It would be purely artificial and transient, but it would be very undesirable, because it would hit the smallest man, the man who has to sell his oats as a cash crop. He is the man who will be forced out into the market when the market is smashed by the carry-over from last year, and the "wise guy" who can carry his oats over until the spring and finance that operation will get the higher price that will obtain when the carry-over surplus has been absorbed in the normal course. I want to absorb that surplus now before it becomes a carry-over. I think a substantial part of it could be so absorbed if the feeding value of oats was exploited and if oats were made a compulsory part of every diet for live stock between now and the next harvest.
Subject to those two suggestions, my advice to the Minister is to do the best he can. If any of us can fly a kite for him or help him in any way to improve business relations with the British Government, he should let us know, and, in any way we can do it, we will be glad to assist.
