In accordance with notice given, I move the adjournment of the Dáil. I considered it proper to-day to ask if we agreed that the bread situation, caused by the recent action of restricting the amount of bread and of flour available, should have been dealt with in the sudden and unprepared way in which it was done, producing a situation here that calls for review and urgent action on the part of the Minister for Supplies, and to see that bread distribution is ordered in a more satisfactory way, and that those classes of the population that have no reasonable alternative to bread to keep themselves and their families alive, will get particular consideration. I put down certain questions to the Minister to-day, and I think it would have been much more satisfactory if the House, in approaching a discussion of the situation now, could have the answers before it. We had a statement to-day, for well over an hour, about turf. I have no objection to that, but I think questions about turf had none of the elements of urgency that questions about bread have.
Instead of coming before this House and making a statement analogous to that made about turf, the Minister for Supplies on last Thursday week left this House and broadcast a general statement suggesting that the consumption of bread and flour would have to be cut down by one-fifth as from Friday, February 27th. He gave no reasonable details that would suggest how distribution was to be safeguarded, and, particularly, how the poorer classes of people were to be safeguarded in their requirements. I suggest that it would have been more helpful, and that the Minister would have been warned of the difficulties and of the kind of situation he would have to meet if he had made his statement in this House and given Deputies from the various constituencies a chance of discussing it. I do not want to take up time dealing with that now.
I want to state what the position is, as I found it in the city, in a family consisting of father, mother, grandmother and eight children living in the workers' area on the north side. Normally they would get, on Monday, five loaves, but actually got two. They were people who dealt with and were known to a baker. On Tuesday, they would get six loaves, but only got three; on Wednesday, they would get five loaves, but only got three; on Thursday they would get six loaves but got three, and on Friday they would get five loaves but got only three. On Saturday they would get 11 loaves to bring them over the week-end, but up to 3 o'clock on that day they got only three loaves, and those were got by going into a queue. They had that amount to bring them over the week-end, but by some of the children getting into a queue and waiting from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. they got two additional loaves. There you had a family of 11 persons, who normally consumed 38 2-lb. loaves in the week, succeeding in getting 19 loaves with a considerable amount of difficulty. According to a statement that was issued by the Department of Supplies, the situation was investigated, and it was understood that the panic that occurred during the week arose from over-anxiety on the part of customers of bakers' shops, and that arrangements were being made on March 2nd, so that the public who normally purchased bread in bakers' shops should have no difficulty in getting supplies any time during shopping hours. On Monday, March 2nd, when that family would normally get five loaves they got two, and got two small pans in another shop. On Tuesday, when they would have got six loaves they got two.
That was the position of one worker's family known to the baker, where there were no great complications about being the type of person who shopped here, there and elsewhere. In another better-class house on the North side, consisting of a father, mother, three children and a maid they would get on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, four loaves daily, and on Saturdays when they expected eight, they got five loaves. For the full week instead of getting 28 loaves they got only 11. The five loaves they got on Saturday were only got by going into a queue in the morning and in the evening. On the other side of the city a family consisting of a man and his wife and seven children normally got four loaves at a baker's shop and one loaf at a neighbouring dairy daily. They would get that amount on five days of the week. They actually got two every day at the bakery and they were able to get three in other places. Therefore, since the Order was issued, instead of 25 loaves, they got 13. On Saturdays they would normally get seven plus some flour to do some baking at home, but on last Saturday they got only four as a great compliment. On Monday when the situation was supposed to have changed and when they should have got four plus one, they got only two and a small brown square. On Tuesday they got three. In order to get the two, a boy of 13 had to be kept at home from school and had to go into a queue. These are examples, showing in a purely statistical way how families were affected.
Anybody who has experience of the home life of these people and of the circumstances in which they live generally, will have some kind of an impression of what it means to be deprived of 50 per cent. of the normal bread requirements of the home. Added to that there was the anxiety of not knowing whether they were going to get any bread and the fact that children had to be kept at home from school to take their place in queues.
The confusion and the scenes that took place in some of the queues accentuated the hardship of these people in the last week. This was entirely a result of the shortness of notice and the absence of any systematic arrangement to deal with the situation. The situation was made worse for some people towards the end of last week and the police in the city got the idea of removing the younger people from the queues and not allowing young people into the queues. The result was that many older people without families who could not leave their homes and who were depending on neighbours' children to get supplies for them, were disappointed by reason of the fact that after they had spent some time in the queues, the children were sent home by the police without any bread. It seems to me astonishing, that, knowing the importance of bread to the working class here in the City of Dublin, the most careful examination of what was likely to be the result of any action by the Minister was not made beforehand.
The Minister, apparently, appreciates that there are some classes of people to whom alternative varieties of food are available. He suggested in his broadcast that retailers should be able to distinguish between various classes of people, that they should be able to know the people who are likely to have alternative foods and that, in the rationing of the bread, they should take that into consideration. The Minister, having that appreciation of the situation in the city, surely ought to have remembered that there are certain districts in the city which should be particularly catered for in the distribution of bread and that in a rushed action of this kind the working class areas should have been catered for by instructions to the distributors to see that the full complement of bread was allowed into these areas until his Department was able to work out a system by which the definite amount that could be allocated to those areas was arrived at. There have been many families who formerly received three or four loaves daily who were able to get only one.
There are many families who get little or no bakers' bread and who buy flour. There are very few families using bakers' bread almost entirely who do not get, over the week-end, a small quantity of flour to do some home baking on Saturday or Sunday. The Minister no doubt has heard the very caustic comments on the announcement of his Department that over-anxiety on the part of the public to get bread caused the present situation, but the suggestion I heard most frequently was that the difficulties could have been lessened considerably if the Department of Supplies allowed the bakers and the bread distributors to formulate their own schemes. It seems to me that the Minister in a rushed and panicky way issued an Order without any plans or arrangements behind it. The reason that he would not answer the questions to-day is, I think, that he was not prepared to answer them because he could not hope to persuade the House that he had taken reasonable precautions to obviate the calamitous situation in which a large number of people found themselves during the past week.
I do not want to read all the communications I have received on this matter. I have had them from places as far apart as Donegal and Cashel. The position in Donegal is as bad as it is in Dublin but in a different kind of way. The position in Cashel, to quote only one phrase from a letter that reached me this morning, is that "the poor are like hunted rats looking for bread." I raise this question principally to ask the Minister does he realise what the situation here in the city is? Does he know no more about it than is indicated in the statement issued from the Department of Supplies? I ask him to tell us here what he proposes to do so that we may be able to help him by suggestions. If he is not able to do any better than he has done up to the present, then I think the bakers and the retailers should be brought into consultation with no officialdom near them. The problem should be put to them as business people in touch with consumers and the responsibility might be put on them to outline how they are going to serve the people of the city with 80 per cent. of the bread they got previously. The problem is not a big one, but in the actual working out of the Minister's plan up to the present, it is the poor only who have really suffered. Other people have been inconvenienced. The greatest amount of hardship and the greatest amount of misery has been caused to the people who can least afford it while the least amount of disturbance has been brought about amongst those who can get us much bread as they like in hotels and restaurants if they are not able to get it in their homes.