We have all kinds of roads built all over the country. There are roads running through bogs which no human foot will ever tread, but it appears that nobody thought to build a road in Clare. There are thousands of unemployed men in County Clare, drawing the dole every week, and every one of them could be employed to make a road there, and I mean a real road that would carry heavy traffic to the railhead. This is the winter of 1942, and we are starting the fourth year of the war, but we did nothing to build a road there, and I suppose that if the war goes on for another 50 years the Minister will start to think of building a road there, and by that time, I suppose, there will be no explosives with which to blast the rock. I suppose we would all die at the thoughts of the Minister for Agriculture going into the Clare phosphate deposits with explosives. This is the man who has had the effrontery to get up here to-day and assail the Fine Gael Party as the greatest Party for ex-post facto statements that he has ever met. When I look back on all the abuse that I heaped on that poor man's head for his catastrophic bungling of the whole agricultural situation of this country, and especially with regard to artificial manures, which did not seem to make the slightest impression on him, I begin to wonder if representations made in Dáil Eireann are of any use at all. Has the Minister referred this question of phosphate rock and superphosphate to the Taoiseach's emergency Research Bureau? I understand that the iron pyrites system is the one that is universally practised, and doubtless the most economic process of reducing this rock to a soluble manure.
But I wonder is there no other chemical process, albeit it is more expensive, than the iron pyrites, sulphuric acid process to achieve this purpose. As iron pyrites have now reached the level of £15 a ton delivered here, that makes it one of the most expensive methods for the reduction of phosphate rock, and it brings under consideration alternative chemical methods that nobody might have bothered about when iron pyrites were available at £3 a ton. Does anybody seriously believe that if the iron pyrites deposits in the world were suddenly exhausted, humanity would get on without sulphuric acid? I do not believe it would. They would simply cast around and find some other method of procuring this essential commodity. It may be a great deal dearer than it used to be but they would get it. We have as good scientists on this Industrial Research Council as there are anywhere. Have they been consulted, or, when we learned that supplies of sulphuric acid were not available from the common source of supply, have we all sat back and said: "That's that, and there is no more we can do about it"? I believe at this moment that if adequate quantities of rock phosphates could be got out of the deposits in County Clare, ways and means could be found, albeit expensive, of reducing it to the condition of the superphosphate supplied for use on the land. I believe that the reason why more energetic measures are not taken by the Government is that they know they cannot get the deposits out because they were too lazy during the last five years to take the necessary preliminary steps to provide transport.
They do not want to get the phosphate rock in quantities in excess of what they can handle, and for that reason they are not going to get it— because they did not take time by the forelock and make the provision necessary for its reduction into a suitable form independent of the pyrites supplied from abroad. I venture to swear that, if that problem were put up to the council, we would get the answer that there is another chemical method of dealing with rock phosphate, a chemical method that would be within reach of our resources at the present time.
Let me pass on to potash. I used to be a member for Donegal, and I well remember that, at the very beginning of this war, when potash manure became hard to come by, my instinctive interest in my old friends of the west coast of Donegal who used to make an income out of kelp, and who lost that market, induced me to raise a question in Dáil Eireann as to whether seaweed should not be used on an unprecedented scale as manure in view of its potash content. Deputy Joseph Mongan and Deputy T.J. O'Donovan have both raised that question time and time again in this House. Deputy Mongan was able to point out that during the last war Mr. Martin McDonagh, of Galway, without any subsidy or anything else, bought the seaweed and converted it himself into some dehydrated commodity which was used as potash manure in the west of Ireland. The Minister for Agriculture informed us that his information was that it would be cheaper to cart it in a wet condition than to carry out any dehydration process upon it, but it is pure nonsense to suggest that it would be cheaper to cart seaweed from the Galway coast to the County Carlow in a wet condition, in the present state of our transport system, than to dehydrate it in Galway and ship it from Galway in a dehydrated condition to the centre where it is really required. At the present time we have to consider not only the matter of pounds, shillings and pence for freight charges; we have got to consider the capacity of the railway wagons. Seaweed consists of about 90 per cent. water. Does any man seriously suggest to me, in the present state of our transport, that we are to cart 9 parts of water and one part of weed, when, by dehydrating it on the Galway coast, we can ensure that we will be carrying nothing but pure potash seaweed?
We all know that the potash content of seaweed bears little relation to the potash content of sulphate of potash, but it would be something. The manure which the Minister provides for the country contains only about 1 per cent., and you might as well leave that out, because it is so microscopic that, by the time it is distributed over the soil, it will have no effect at all. If we initiated a big drive to employ some of those agricultural labourers that we are going to prevent from going to England on gathering seaweed during those periods of the year when they are not actively engaged upon the land, dehydrate that seaweed, and then distribute in the beet growing area the potash manure obtained from it, and reserve it for that area—I understand that potash is one of the most urgently necessary manures for the beet sugar crop—we would be doing something useful. It might very well be that, at the conclusion of the emergency, we would have to scrap the machinery and wipe the whole thing off, but at least at this time when turnips and mangels and beet are badly required for human and animal food we would be able to keep the wheel turning. It may be very much more difficult to do that now than it would have been two or three years ago, because to get any kind of machinery now is an extremely difficult business, but, if we can convert turf into charcoal, and can artificially dry turf, I suppose we should be able artificially to dry seaweed, and once you have got the seaweed dried I suppose the same machinery that would cut phosphate rock would cut seaweed.
