I read with very considerable care the speech which the Minister made in introducing this Bill. While I do not share all the conclusions which he has drawn from the problems which confront him, I am forced to the conclusion that the Bill is a regrettable necessity in view of the facts as revealed by the inquiries conducted by the Land Commission. The Minister painted for us what I think he and every member of the House must regard as a very bleak picture indeed. Faced with a situation of that kind, I think the House has no alternative, if it is going to maintain the original purpose of land division in this country, to voting for a Bill of this character. The primary purpose of land division was to acquire land for the relief of congestion, not merely in the congested areas, but in areas which were not specially indicated as congested areas. Whatever the method of administering Land Acts has been, that, at all events, has continued to be the viewpoint of those responsible for the introduction of land legislation in Ireland. The primary purpose of land division was to break up the large ranches and to give holdings and houses to those who were living in congested areas or who were in the category of landless men, and who were anxious to secure land which they would exploit to their own personal advantage and the nation's welfare. If that is the primary and the main purpose of land acquisition and division in Ireland, then quite obviously we have to deal with every problem which challenges the continuance of that policy. Neglecting to utilise land to the fullest, declining to occupy houses provided by the State, are surely a challenge to the whole policy, and to the wisdom of the policy, of acquiring and dividing land in this country.
I read with interest the Minister's review of the inspection carried out by his Department, and let me say that I do not think the review was a very creditable one to the Minister's Department because it reveals quite clearly that, whatever method of selection was employed by the Land Commission, those responsible for making the selections and the recommendations were quite obviously not agricultural psychologists, because many of the people who were recommended as the best allottees in the view of those making the recommendations have turned out to be gentlemen who will not use land and who will not occupy houses, with the result that in a country where there is virtually a land hunger, you have persons installed on land who will not work the land and, in a country where there are still too many rural slums and rain-soaked mud-cabins, you have persons who will not go into the decent houses that have been provided for them by the Land Commission. It would be bad enough if we had a small number of cases of that kind, because instances of that kind provide extremely bad example in the matter of the best utilisation of land, but when we get the very substantial problem revealed by the Minister's figures, it is quite clear that those responsible for the selection of allottees which produce a result of this kind were quite unfit for the performance of these duties in a manner calculated to yield satisfactory results to the nation. If this Bill discloses anything, it discloses the necessity for a different method of selection of allottees, different methods of investigation, and the production of more evidence than has been required in the past that persons who are being given land will utilise the land and occupy the houses that the State is providing for them.
Allegations have been made on both sides of the House regarding the use of political influence in the allocation of land. The Fine Gael Party charges the Government Party that it has used political influence in the allocation of land to its Party supporters and the Government Party retort: "Ah, yes, but nothing at all like what you did during your nine merry years in office." One gets the impression that there was an American spoil system between both Governments. Whatever the methods employed, and I do not make an assertion one way or the other, the results indicated in the Minister's examination of the problem are not too creditable to either Government because they disclose a state of affairs which quite clearly indicates that persons were put into land, whether through political influence or otherwise, who quite clearly were never intended to be farmers, and quite clearly never wanted the land if it meant that they had to use their energies upon it.
Now that this whole question of the value of political pull in getting land has been raised—and it is well that the issue should be dragged out into the open—I think the Minister should make it clear beyond all doubt that, so far as he is concerned—I am the last in this House to accuse the Minister of any political manipulation in land, from what I know of the Minister's attitude in the matter—and so far as the Land Commission is concerned, political influence will not be permitted to play any part in the selection of allottees so far as the future allocation of land is concerned. It may have played a part in the past —I make no allegations in that respect—but if it did play a part in the past, I think it is time now that the Minister should make it clear that, so far as he is concerned and so far as the Land Commission and Land Commission officials are concerned, the test of entitlement to land will be ability to work the land to the fullest, to practise good methods of husbandry, and that the political badge which the person wears will not be allowed to make up for his deficiencies as an agriculturist in respect of land allocated to him at considerable expense to the masses of the people.
Deputy O'Donnell said he was opposed to this Bill and was going to fight the thing strenuously, almost to the point of bloodshed. If the Deputy examines the matter calmly and remembers that nobody is going to take his personal holding from him, I think he will find that he can scarcely justify that whole-hog attitude towards the Bill. I had considerable misgivings about the introduction of it at this late stage. I had misgivings about the manner in which it will be administered but in that respect I have been somewhat consoled by the assurance of the Minister that it will not be administered in any brusque way but that it will be administered with sympathy and understanding. The net position with which we are confronted is: According to the Minister's statement, based on his investigations, there are empty houses in this country which have been erected by the Land Commission for allottees, and there are in the country a considerable number of holdings which are either entirely unused or badly used. What we have to ask ourselves in connection with this Bill is: Are we going to sit here in this Legislature, knowing that there are empty houses around the country, knowing that, in this time of crisis, there is unused or badly used land, and refuse to deal with a situation of that kind? I do not think we can refuse to deal with it. I think we must deal with it. It seems to me to be nothing short of a shame that, in areas where men are clamouring for houses and for land, through a mistake on the part of the Land Commission, you should have people having title deeds under the Land Acts to that empty house, having title deeds under the Land Acts to that unused or badly used land, whilst those willing to live in the house and to work the land are denied, because of the methods practised by the Land Commission in the past, an opportunity of occupying the house and of utilising the land.
If we proposed to erect houses in various places throughout the country and said to citizens: "Whether you like it or not, you have to get into that house," one could understand a man's objection to occupying the house. But in all these cases, the original allottee was usually keen to get both the house and the land. He got both the house and the land and usually got them in the area in which he lived and where he probably had a keen desire to get them. Having got the State to provide him with house property worth, in present circumstances, close on £1,000, having got a holding of land from the Land Commission, are we to say that it is a hardship on him to occupy a house valued to-day at almost £1,000 and a holding of land at the price at which land is fetching to-day? Frankly, I do not see how we can say that. I think, quite clearly, that the situation has to be dealt with. I regard it as no hardship whatever to say to a man: "If the Land Commission, build a house for you and give you 25 acres of land, the least you ought to do is to live in the house and to work the land for the national advantage." In other words, what we have to say in tabloid form to the man is: "Either live in the house, or vacate it; either work the land, or give it back to us and let it be reallocated to somebody who is prepared to use the land."
Some of the cases of abuse of land by allottees, in my opinion, produced some startling results that will be known when the Land Commission try to reallocate some of the land possession of which may be resumed under this Bill. But it is a well-known fact—it happened in my own constituency—that when substantial farms are acquired and divided the original owner takes the land over from the allottees. So that when you have broken up the main farm and given it to allottees in the hope that they will work it to their personal advantage, the original landowner is, nevertheless, able to secure letting agreements for the land and to utilise the land virtually with as little restriction as before and, in many respects, to use it with considerable advantages which were not previously available to him. It is well known that, in many cases, the land which is sublet by allottees is not farmed at all. It is not even grazed in an agricultural sense. The land is simply mined and quarried to such an extent that, after a few years, its fertility is exhausted, and whoever gets the land in future has considerable sympathy from me if he imagines that he will get a crop out of it without the expenditure of a considerable sum of money on manures and the utilisation of very considerable reserves of energy.
That vice of subletting has, in my opinion, exhausted the fertility of a very large acreage of land. It is one of the vices of land allocation which ought to be grappled with. I know, of course, that not every person who is not able to utilise the land to the fullest extent, not every person whose land was the subject of investigation by the Minister, is a defaulter so far as land utilisation is concerned. I am driven to the conclusion that the whole method of allocating land and the manner in which we approach the allocation of land begets the condition of affairs which the Minister found in the course of his recent inquiry. It is a well-known fact that the Land Commission allots land to persons who have very little capital and very little stock, because their economic position as agricultural workers is such that they are not able to accumulate any capital or to aggregate any quantity of stock. These people, so handicapped for want of capital resources, are put into holdings of 20 or 25 acres. They have no agricultural equipment and are depending on a friend for the loan of a plough or a couple of horses. Perhaps they have a few head of cattle. It is in circumstances such as these that they set out on the task of exploiting to the fullest 20 or 25 acres of land. That problem is one which has been responsible for more headaches on the part of small farmers than probably any other problem with which they could be confronted. Deprived of capital resources, deprived of agricultural equipment, deprived of that measure of family help which is so essential in embarking on a task of that kind, in many cases they find themselves financially crippled in a short time.
If you take a man who has been an agricultural worker and tell him: "There is your land and your house; get in and look after the fencing of it and clean it up and till it"; if you give him a job which will take two or three months and which often necessitates the employment at his expense of additional labour, if you tell him that there will be no income from that land until the fall of the year, and then a rather haphazard one, you will find that that man is not in a financial position to stand out of the money until whatever harvest he reaps comes in. The result is that many of them revert to the device of subletting the land for grazing or cropping. In that way, many of these people in the beginning follow the path which ultimately leads to their abandoning the land except as a means of subletting for grazing or cropping.
I think one of the most useful experiments undertaken by the Land Commission was the method of land allocation adopted in the County Meath. In that case, the Land Commission did something which was notable for its intelligence. I pay that tribute to the Land Commission in that respect, and in that respect only. In that instance, they brought people from the West to lands in Meath. They gave them the land, they gave them houses, they tilled the land for them. They gave them stock and they gave them an allowance until such time as they could acclimatise themselves to Meath conditions. At all events, they said: "There is your ship fully equipped; off you go, make a success of the voyage". I think it will not be denied by anybody who has seen these holdings and the way they are utilised that the experiment has been a success. It may have been a costly experiment, but it certainly justified itself, and it has certainly proved to be the only way in which you can satisfactorily establish men on land in circumstances which will enable them to make good, instead of having this downward drift which shows itself in the unoccupied houses the Minister refers to, and in the unused and badly used land.
This is probably neither the Bill nor the occasion on which to develop at any great length an advocacy of new methods of land allocation, such as were practised in the case of the allottees in Meath; but the Minister, who has a fairly fresh mind in this matter, might very well give further consideration to it, with a view to seeing whether that policy cannot be extended, if not on the Meath scale at least on a scale calculated to give these people a very much better start than that which they got by saying to them: "There is your house, there is your land, sign the letting agreement here; do the best you can, how you can; and, so far as the State is concerned, beyond inquiring occasionally as to how you are getting on, we have no further interest in your activities of any material value to you". As I said, in some respects I have some misgivings about the Bill, misgivings that it might possibly lead to cases of hardship, though here I must say that my experience of the Land Commission in the matter of treating sympathetically the case of a person not able to utilise land in the way the Land Commission required, has been a favourable one, indeed.
I want to put this consideration to the Minister, in conclusion. He has already indicated that this Bill will be administered in a sympathetic way, and that it is his desire to avoid any harshness. Many of the people who are not able to utilise land on the Land Commission standards have got themselves into that position because of some domestic adversity or some agricultural adversity. Cattle die, horses die, or they find themselves unable to meet bank bills or grocers' bills, because of some adversity in the family. Where that happens, I suggest to the Minister that he should give an assurance—and I feel he could give it—that the matter will be examined sympathetically. If an allottee has not been able in the past, or even if he has not, for peculiar reasons of his own, been willing to utilise land to the fullest, he ought even now be given an opportunity to make good. I suggest to the Minister that, no matter what he may have thought in the past about allottees who might be stigmatised as unsatisfactory allottees, if they are prepared in the future to give a guarantee that they will utilise land to the fullest, and if, by their own activities, they demonstrate on the face of the land their willingness to comply with that undertaking, their assurance should be accepted, and they should be allowed to remain on the land. The test should be that, once they promise to utilise the land, they fulfil that promise without question. If, in other cases, through illness or any other cause, the person puts up a case that has considerable merit in it, that there is a reason for his not utilising the land to the fullest, the Minister should give a person of that kind some opportunity of making good.
If this Bill is administered sympathetically, and the House can be assured of that fact, I do not think there will be very strong objection to its enactment. Therefore I would ask the Minister to give the House an assurance that, in any case where there is an element of merit of reasonable proportions, the allottee will be dealt with on the basis that, no matter what his faults were in the past, he will get an opportunity of making good in the future. I make that suggestion to the Minister because I do not want to see the situation arise in which there may be evictions by the Land Commission in respect of badly used houses. The whole country will sympathise with the man who was unable to utilise land for reasons outside his control. If he gets a chance to make good, I think the country will feel satisfied, and his neighbours will feel satisfied, that he is getting that chance. No one will stand for the policy of houses remaining idle and land remaining unused.
If, notwithstanding the Land Commission's warning, after the enactment of this Bill, houses continue to be unoccupied and land remains either unused or badly used, then the Minister and his officials will find all the moral endorsement they require for taking steps to give the unoccupied houses to people who want them and the unused land to people who will utilise it. If the Minister embarks on the administration of this Bill in a manner guided by that prudence and sagacity of which he is capable, he may find that the mere introduction of the Bill and the discussion on the problem in this House, publicised as it will be through the country, may well help to cure the problem without resort to any drastic methods.
