I know them well; I know them in a county where a man who owns a farm of £35 valuation would be considered a big farmer and where people with that valuation do not think themselves poor. The general argument seems to be very confused. I have heard some of the most extraordinary statements made in support of the amendment. We were told that we ought to abolish this means test. I think it was Deputy MacEoin who first advanced that argument—I hope my recollection is not doing the Deputy any injustice. He said that this was a means test and it ought to be abolished. He said then that his general attitude would be this, that he thought that any man who owned a farm, and of course a farmhouse, and who was too poor to reconstruct it, should get a grant. How are we to ascertain whether a man is too poor to reconstruct or not unless we apply a means test? The Deputy who, at the beginning of his speech, wanted us to abolish the means test, came round at the end to a position in which he wants us to give the grants entirely on the basis of a means test.
Then we had Deputy Coburn. He being a townsman is apparently more generous than anyone else. He was arguing and drawing a false analogy between the circumstances with which the proposals in the Housing Act, 1932, are intended to deal, and the position under the Farm Improvements Scheme. He said he did not see why the big man ought not to be helped as well as the small man, and he instanced the case of a large farmer in his constituency who employed 11 or 12 men. If this farmer, employing 11 or 12 men, wanted to reconstruct or to improve his house, he was to get a grant of £45. It seems to me that if a farmer who is in such a position that he can with profit to himself—and I am perfectly certain that he would not employ them otherwise—employ 11 or 12 men wants to make his house more comfortable, he ought to make it more comfortable at his own expense and not at the expense of the rest of the community.
The Deputy then went on to say, in trying to justify the proposal that the limit of valuation should be increased from £25 to £35, that a man who owned a farm with a valuation of £35 might be worse off than a man who owned a farm with a valuation of £25, because the man with the larger farm might have a larger family. If we are to give the grants on that basis, well and good. I do not think that you, Sir, would allow me or any other Deputy to put down an amendment to this Bill which would change the whole basis of the grant, and instead of having entitlement to the grant based on the valuation of the house, it would be based on the size of the farmer's family in proportion to the valuation of the holding. That might be a very logical way of dealing with it, but I do not think it would deal with the other man. I do not think it could be applied fairly to the other man about whom Deputy Cogan was concerned, or to the man who owns a farm so large and of such a high valuation that he is in a position to employ ten or 12 men about whom, as I have said, Deputy Coburn was equally concerned.
Then we have Deputy Corry's argument. Deputy Corry said that in one district in his constituency or in his county he knew farms with a valuation of £35 which would carry only about seven cows, while, at the other end of his county or constituency, he knew farms with valuations of only £20 which were at least twice as good. His method of curing that anomaly is to raise the limit to £35 to bring in the farm with a valuation of £35 in the overvalued end of his constituency, and, if his figures still hold good, to bring in, at the other end of his constituency, the farm which, if it had been valued on the basis of the first farm, would carry a valuation of at least £70. It seems to me that that is not a reasonable or logical position, bearing in mind that all these grants have to be paid out of taxation and that you are taking, in the main, the moneys required to do this work from the pockets of people who do not own farms or houses at all.
