I was reading what Deputy Costello said in his speech on this Bill on the 27th June. He points out that, in accordance with the terms of the Bill as at present drafted, the board it is proposed to set up seems to be responsible to nobody. I should like to see a national stud in this country, for two reasons—one, because the average small breeder in this country has not access to the best sires because very often he is not able to afford the fee when the sire is in private ownership, and, secondly, because some of the biggest and wealthiest breeders in this country, who have brought into this country some of the finest brood mares in the world, have not access to some of the best sires in England because those sires are owned by syndicates of owners who divide up amongst the members of the syndicate the services of the sire concerned and nobody outside the syndicate is allowed to have access to it.
In the old days, a man like Lord Derby or one of the great patrons of racing in England, such as the Aga Khan, might own a great sire and, after his own mares had been served, the other owners in the country would probably be given facilities, in accordance with the quality of the mare they had for service. It is only a comparatively recent development that these very valuable sires have become the property of syndicates, and that no matter how high a quality brood mare an independent owner has, he will not be allowed, on any terms, to have the service of the really ideal sire. Therefore, I think we should face the fact clearly that in establishing a national stud in this country we are not thinking exclusively of the small owner and breeder who is excluded from access to the best sires by purely financial considerations. We should also have our eyes wide open to the fact that very wealthy owners and breeders in this country would be facilitated by our national stud. At first glance it may seem odd that we should consider it expedient to think of such persons in connection with a national service of this kind; but, of course, the fact is that the reputation of Irish bloodstock is very largely conditioned in the world by the news that an Irish-bred horse has won the Derby, the Grand National, the Grand Prix at Longchamps, or some other internationally famous race. If our bloodstock were to disappear altogether out of the first rank in such races, the injury to the good name of that class of bloodstock all over the world would be very great.
If, then, our main purpose in establishing Tully Stud is to place at the disposal of private owners in this country the kind of sires to which they cannot have access owing to the syndicate system and the high fees charged for sires in Great Britain, what should we envisage this stud as doing? I do not know enough about horse-breeding to offer any very exhaustive opinion as to how a stud should be run and there is no use in my pretending that I do. I know that it is a very useful thing to have the stud, but the principal reason why I want to have it is in order to have some person—in this case, the national stud at Tully—wealthy enough to go into the market and purchase expensive sires. Now, I beg this House to remember that as much as £100,000 has been bid for one sire horse —and that is a very substantial sum. I do not say that that is a very common occurrence, but I think I am right in saying that the price of first-class blood has gone up to that figure. We would make an egregious mistake if, when we are setting Tully Stud on foot, we excluded from our minds the possibility of going to the very top price necessary in order to get the very best blood that could be purchased.
I know this much about horse breeding. Sometimes, a man may pay £70,000 or £80,000 for an untried sire, believing that on its breeding and performance its progeny ought to be superb, only to discover that, in fact, its progency is practically worthless. That is one of the risks of breeding. There is the great danger that, in a State-controlled or State-managed institution of that kind, its director will not dare take that kind of risk, lest furious criticism, founded on false ideas, should assail him. Therefore, in passing a Bill of this kind we should boldly face the fact that if a stud of this character is to be operated successfully at all the director of it should have the assurance that, provided he uses reasonable prudence, fault will never be found with him for making the kind of mistake that no man conceivably could have avoided making when he bought a sire horse in the hope that he was securing for the breeders of this country quite exceptional blood.
I want the Tully Stud to buy that kind of horse. If the Tully Stud were in the market, I would have it buy for us, say, Hyperion, Bahram and others of that kind—one of which I believe has gone to the United States of America and another of which is in the hands of a syndicate in Great Britain. If we are not going to buy that type of horse at Tully, then it would be very much better if we had not any stud at all. If the Tully Stud were to be used for the production of medicore sires, far from doing good it would do harm. Now, possibly the Minister will toss his head when I express such apprehension, but I do not think the Minister realises how difficult it may be to carry conviction to everybody's mind that it was no crime to have misspent £70,000 on a sire which turned out, in fact, to be virtually useless. Running the stud on the right lines as I see it is a very difficult thing to do, if you have to answer to Parliament for every year's crop of foals dropped as a result of your activities. Therefore, I want to go on record clearly that, in so far as I understand stud management at all, I want to see the Tully Stud having the finest sires that money can buy. It does not follow from that that they all must cost £100,000. Some of the finest sires have been bought for a £10 note. That is a matter which ought to be left in the hands of the discerning management with which we should furnish the stud.
The next point is as to how the stud should be run. I have strongly objected to the placing of public moneys in the hands of persons who are not answerable to this House and I object to all expedients designed to divert public moneys round this House into the pockets of persons not responsible to this House. Deputies will remember that in the Racing and Racecourses Bill we gave the Racing Board power to levy taxes, to levy a commission on every bookmaker's bet. It simply meant that instead of pursuing the normal practice of allowing the Revenue Commissioners to levy the tariff on the bookmaker's bet and then pass it on through the Exchequer to the Racing Board, we cut out the Revenue Commissioners, our representatives, altogether, and we allowed the Racing Board to go around Dáil Eireann and levy taxes on bookmakers, for which, as far as I know, they have to account to nobody. That is a rotten principle. But another variety of that principle it to set up a semi-autonomous company, empower it to spend public money and so constitute it that, if any Deputy wants to raise a question in Dáil Eireann regarding the administration of this body, the Minister can say: "I have no responsibility at all; my responsibility ends the moment I pass the public money to it and then it has absolute discretion to do what it likes."
Nor does it stop there—and this, Sir, is a matter which few Deputies realise: when the Estimate comes before the Committee of Public Accounts, the chairman of that body, representing the Dáil, is bound to determine whether any given matter is a matter of account or not. The transactions of the kind of company envisaged in this Bill are not a matter of account, and no Deputy on the committee can ask the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture a single question about them, as he is in a position to say: "The day I passed over the funds to that company my responsibility ended, and my only obligation is to produce to the Committee of Public Accounts a voucher showing that this independent company has received the amount." We have in existence already many bodies of that kind, and again and again the committee has come up against that stone wall, that the accounting officer has made that reply to an inquiry; and while I was chairman of that committee I was bound to say: "Any further question in regard to that matter is irrelevant, as the accounting officer has produced his voucher and there the responsibility ends; if you wish to bring this matter further, raise it in Dáil Eireann and, if the Ceann Comhairle lets you get away with it, more power to your elbow." Invariably, when the matter was so raised, the Minister replied that it was a matter in which he had no responsibility and the Ceann Comhairle was constrained to say that, inasmuch as the Minister was not responsible, the matter was not relevant to the proceedings of this House. That is a very bad system, and I urge most strenuously on the Minister that, instead of having recourse to this extraordinary device, he should appoint as director of the Tully Stud a servant of his own Department and he should invite a certain number of persons to act in an advisory capacity to that director.
I do not think Deputy Cosgrave faced the difficulty of a proposition which he seemed to favour. Public life is a rough arena, and only a certain type of man has the moral courage to enter into it. There are a lot of fellows in this country getting fat on profits because they take damn good care to get adequately paid for every hour of work they do. People of that type are very eloquent in their condemnation of politicians, for whom they have a great contempt. When you ask the same tulips to come down and do the work we do, you would not see them for the dust of the road, because they are flabby, they are timorous, they are cowardly and they would be afraid to get up in any arena where another man had the right to tell them what he thought of them. Their sole occupation is sitting in well-padded chairs in offices where everybody is obsequious, deferential and admiring.
You have to face the fact, when you are undertaking highly technical enterprises of this kind, that there may be occasions when you may have to avail of these flabby creatures' technical knowledge, but the moment you tell them their appointment to the executive of a body of this kind leaves them open to criticism in Dáil Eireann, they are gone like a flash. That is not their idea of fun at all and they will not work.
Now, I think it is necessary, in operating a body of this kind, to get some of these jelly fish and extract from them such technical knowledge as they have, but the only way to do that is to give them the cloak of anonymity, without which they cannot comfortably live, and appoint a director who will be a public servant, acting within the usual limits of the public service and answerable to this House, through the Minister. The choice of such a person will present great difficulty and we can only trust that the Minister will get the best man. To give the devil his due, I was not at all optimistic about the personnel of the racing board under the Bookmakers Bill. When I saw the personnel that was selected, I thought it was as good a board as anyone could pick. I am prepared to take the risk in this instance of letting the Minister pick the board and be responsible for the members. I am prepared to let him choose the directorate of the Tully Stud—somebody has to choose it—and if he uses the same goodwill in choosing these persons, I would be quite prepared to leave the choice to him.
