This debate has now reached its third day. It is a debate in which, as it comes around year after year, I find myself intervening with great reluctance. I always like to hear the views of those who are much more closely attached to the land than I can claim to be. I feel inclined to apologise in expressing myself upon this subject because I am town born and city bred and it requires considerable temerity on my part to intervene at all.
From my very earliest years I have had it dinned into me that agriculture is the mainstay of this country. I was reared on the profits of a business which was acutely sensitive as to how agriculture fared. In my home life there was injected into me an interest, even though it was at one or two removes, in what happens to the farmers of the country and how they live because it impacted on my own way of life. Later on when I became associated with Government I realised the truth of various things which I had up to then accepted as beliefs. When I was associated with Government, whatever I did for industrial production in this country, I made it my business to ensure that anything I did for industry would have no bad repercussions on agriculture and would not increase the cost of living while, at the same time, keeping taxation as low as possible. In all those efforts I claim to have succeeded. During the same period agriculture, under a colleague of mine, had reached a situation which was then decried by the Fianna Fáil Party as something catastrophic—Fianna Fáil aspirants to this Parliament who now look back with a certain amount of regret at those much more prosperous days than anything they have achieved in the 15 years since they first took office.
It is accepted by everybody here that agriculture is the mainstay of the country. In recent months I got an acceptance of the view that we must export more if we are to maintain our old-time standards of living. To get our old-time standards of living we must pay for them by visible trade items and the only visible trade items we have are what we have in the way of an exportable surplus of agricultural goods. The Minister for Industry and Commerce says that we are going to have exports from our industries. So far we have not seen them. All that we have seen as far as industrial production in this country is concerned is a diminution in the industrial exports that we used to have. We are, therefore, driven back more and more upon agriculture, agriculture as the mainstay for ourselves at home, for the good life that we would like to lead and also as payment for the necessary imports which our standard of living requires.
The Minister complains that people down the country pay lip service to this view that agriculture is the great industry in the country and he, apparently, thinks that those people are sincere when they express themselves in that way. I express myself sincerely in that way. I will quote now from what I have often referred to here as the "economic Bible" of the present Fianna Fáil Government—the Report of the Banking Commission. At page 116 of the Majority Report they say:—
"The Free State is predominantly an agricultural country, which means not only that the greatest proportion of the population gains its livelihood in agriculture, but that the main exports required to pay for necessary imports are obtained from agriculture... Access to profitable export markets for agricultural products will in the future as in the past govern the prosperity and welfare of the main body of the Irish people."
Dealing with the question of whether we can get exports of any other type but agriculture, they say:—
"So far as exports are concerned, there is very little evidence of any export of products from the new industries which have been established, and there has, in fact, during recent years been a marked decrease in the export volume of the older industries other than brewing. The tendency has thus been to make agriculture increasingly responsible for the maintenance of sufficient exports."
I take it from that there would be agreement with the writer, after giving these extracts, in summing it up in this way: "The report, therefore, conceives the position of agriculture as fundamental in regard to the balance of payments, the monetary position and the possibility of economic and social development." I think all Parties in the House will agree with that. We have in agriculture all that we want for our own good life at home and from agriculture we must get the things we require for our exports if we are to maintain our old standard of living.
What is the situation in regard to agriculture? About half the occupied population of this country is occupied in agriculture. They do not even get even half the national income. They get something that fluctuates between a quarter and a third of the national income. Half of those who find employment in the country find it in agriculture. The first startling thing that one discovers when considering this situation in regard to agriculture is the revelation contained in the pamphlet recently published by the Government under the title of National Income and Expenditure. There is a thing called “personal income”, which is taken as the standard, and I want the House to understand that personal income means more than what a person gains by being gainfully occupied. It means everything. It means payments in money. It means payments in kind. It means pensions. It means doles. It means everything that a person gets. The personal incomes are divided according to certain ranges in that pamphlet.
As far as the general bulk of the community is concerned we are in the lamentable position that 166,000 of the population are in the £150 a year class, or the person equivalent to the £150 a year. There is a footnote added which says that the difficulty of enumerating the net £150 is rendered specially difficult by the fact that of the big number of farmers only a minute proportion of the large total are in the "over £150" class; and that pamphlet is talking about £150 when it was £150, and not its present purchasing power of £75. It would be a still more minute fraction of the farming population in the grade over £300 per annum—the present equivalent of £3 per week. That is the position in which our main industry is to-day. Only a minute fraction of all the people who are engaged in agriculture are in the "over £150" per annum class. That being the situation we could easily, if we had not got experience to guide us, forecast what the likely result might be. The people will fly from the countryside. They will get away as quickly as they can from farming occupations. If they cannot find employment here in industry or anything else they will fly the country. For those who remain on the farms the social conditions, the conditions under which they will rear their children and the marriage conditions will all be deplorably low.
With regard to emigration, I hope it is not necessary for me to stress this to the House at any great length, but I do wish that somebody would try to make some answer in regard to this question of emigration. I do not want the foolish answer that has been given from time to time that we are an adventurous people and that the 250,000 people who left this country in the last six or seven years left it for the sake of adventure.
Fianna Fáil has had its coming of age. It reached the adult stage, if it did not reach the age of wisdom, some time recently. There was a party and the Taoiseach said that the great aim of the Fianna Fáil Party now was to recover the Six Counties. What is the good of parading that as a slogan when in the last six years we have emptied out the population of the remaining three Ulster counties? The three Ulster counties still remaining with us have a population of somewhere over 220,000. Compare that with the 250,000 we have emigrated. If we take the population at 250,000, then we have emptied out the entire population, men, women and children, of the three remaining Ulster counties. Have we sent them abroad to get back the other six? Will some Minister tell us if it is a drain that has to go on, or is there any scheme or any kind of economic policy to hold our people with us, those of them we have left, and to make some provision for them while they stay at home?
The last census showed that we are still having a drift from the country into the cities. The last Minister for Agriculture decided at a recent meeting to remark upon this, and he explained that it is not unnatural. He said we will always have people leaving the rural areas for the cities; it is not unnatural, though statisticians may bewail it. Members of the Hierarchy say that the country life is good and that it is the real life and the Minister for Agriculture can go to all sorts of social functions and explain how good the farmers' life is; it is the best life in the end, he tells us. But his predecessor has told the populace that it is not unnatural for the people to leave the land.
When one thinks of the low income condition to which the people there have been reduced, one might well agree with the Minister in that. The Minister might have thought a little of his responsibility for bringing about the not unnatural condition of the people who are flying from their homesteads and drifting to the cities, where they delay a while before they can get from the United Kingdom authorities tickets and travel permits to go to England.
Even for those who stay on the land, what is the situation? According to the census returns of 1936, 66 per cent. of the womenfolk under 30 years of age are unmarried. Of the men under 30 years, 88 per cent. are unmarried. According to that report, this country has the unenviable distinction of less marriages and later marriages than any other country in the world. We have the number of old people in our population increasing relative to the rest, and the number of children decreasing, and decreasing at a very rapid rate. That is what, possibly, a reliance on agriculture, as it has been worked for some years, means, and yet agriculture is the mainstay of the community. When one thinks of the decline that has been revealed by every test—the flight from the land, from the country, the reluctance to get married, the reluctance to rear families on the land, the low income rate at which the people have to live on the land—one can better appreciate the injury the Government's policy is doing to the country. That is definitely a picture of decline and decay.
I turn now to the Book of Estimates. It indicates the biggest sum we have ever been asked to vote—£52,000,000— and we shall have £6,000,000 or £8,000,000 added elsewhere. The estimate for our primary industry is Vote 29, and the Minister is asking for £1,525,942. He is asking for £1,500,000 out of £52,000,000. That is the Government attitude towards agriculture, as depicted in the Book of Estimates.
There is another interesting Estimate in this Book, for Aviation and Meteorological Services. The Minister for Industry and Commerce is asking under that heading for £1,435,488, very nearly the same sum as for agriculture. Aviation and meteorological services demand from the taxpayer as much money as the Minister wants to look after our main industry. What does he say with regard to the main industry? He introduced this Estimate on Friday and he spoke about nine columns of the Official Debates. He described the sub-heads and it is rather interesting to see what increases he indicated as being of importance over the Vote his predecessor asked last year.
May I pause for a moment to speak of one of them? The cost of the personnel in Vote 29 has gone up by £28,000 on last year's figure of £271,000. That, the Minister says, represents the increased moneys paid to the civil servants—£1 in £10 of the cost-of-living figure that has even jumped ten points within the last three or four days, reaching a record high point in the history of this country. With all classes of goods, according to the index figure of wholesale prices, doubled in their cost, the civil servants who got £271,000 last year are supposed to be satisfied by getting an advance of £1 in £10 in their salaries this year.
That represents £28,000 of the Minister's increases. What is the rest of it? He wants to be allowed to spend certain moneys in connection with international organisations—a trifle of £7,000. There is a subsidy by way of fertilisers—£166,000. There is an increase in the provision made for some aid in the purchase of agricultural implements—£4,000. That is extra on last year's Vote for whatever aid was given to the getting of agricultural implements.
Finally, there is a sum that is just short of £300,000 for fertiliser credit dockets. I think we can take these two fertiliser items together. They represent £450,000 of a total increase of £500,000. What are they? They represent the Government effort to help the farmers to remake their land. The land has suffered badly through being overcropped in recent years and there will be this provision for fertilisers to repair the damage done. That is the Minister's relief to agriculture this year. It is something like the rebuilding of blitzed buildings, the replenishment of goods that should be in various outfitters' shops, but are not there because they could not be got in recent years. All this attempt to restore the capital value of the land will cost somewhere in the region of £450,000. But by way of provision for increased production, by way of any new scheme to aid the farmers, there is nothing in the main Estimate. I am not forgetting the subsidies. Subsidies mean that agriculture again has to be put on the dole but, thinking of the main Estimate, the division which I would make between the two is that subsidies are regarded as a merely temporary concession and this main Vote represents what the Minister would have to spend to bring agriculture into a proper condition.
The Minister talks of these things for four or five of the columns for which he spoke in connection with the whole Estimate. He then has two quarrels, one with the cattle traders lasting about a column, and another with the bacon curers lasting another column. He rebuked the bacon curers for having mixed politics with the very important matter of bacon. Deputies may laugh but this is not the first time that politics was mixed with bacon. The Minister then told us that he had no legislative proposals and he thinks he is justified in holding his horses because he has not had much time for the study of the various proposals and he has not got round them yet. What are those things that he has to study? There was an agricultural commission set up and they produced finally this big volume of reports on agricultural policy. They had previously produced three interim reports and when the main volume and the three interim reports had been published the Government produced three White Papers. It is interesting to note the dates. The first interim report was produced away back in August, 1943—nearly four years ago, another came in March, 1944, a third came in July, 1944. The main report came just two years ago—two years ago and about a fortnight. After pondering over these documents, some of them for two years and some of them for a year, the Minister's Department issued these White Papers. One of them came in January, 1946, and the other two came in May and June, 1946. The Minister told us that these documents have thoroughly examined the whole position of agriculture. So they have, but the Minister has no legislative proposals. That may be a good thing, but the Minister's reason as to why he thinks it proper to have no legislative proposals is that he has not time to consider these matters.
Away back in July, 1944, an appeal was made in this House, joined in by almost every Party, that the Government should at least take time by the forelock to a certain extent. The contrast was made that this country, being neutral, had not any of the immediate difficulties of the belligerent countries. The view was expressed and correctly expressed that the people engaged in the war were intent on winning the war they had got into and they had all sorts of conditions to think of with regard to money, munitions, transport, manpower and everything else. They naturally had not much time to think of three, four or five years ahead. It was explained at the time that we here had certainly plenty of time for that sort of thing. We had none of the immediate urgent problems of the belligerents and the Government were reminded of that. In July, 1944, they were asked to bend themselves to thinking of the shape of the post-war world. Even though the proposals might not be other than tentative, at least they would show some activity in the region of thought. They were asked to try to make some preparations ahead and we were told that the matter of post-war planning was being very accurately and very vigorously brought under review.
So far as the Minister for Agriculture is concerned, the Minister in charge of the chief industry of the country which occupies half the gainfully occupied people here, even though these reports go back to 1943, and his own Department have been proposing schemes and putting forward tentative proposals, he has not his mind made up yet. He does not know when it will be possible for him to make up his mind or whether he will bring in any proposals or not. I am sure the Minister must have experienced a certain shock in reading the full volume—the main report as well as the minority report. The main report signed by a very prominent supporter of the Government Party amounts to a very definite recantation of the foolish economics of which the Government Party spoke before they got into office and which they tried to operate for ten years after they got there. I am sure it came as a great shock to the Minister to find that people reared in the same school of thought, if I can call it thought, as he was, should have signed that document. If time permitted there would be great enjoyment in reading the second paragraph of this in regard to wheat and a variety of other matters.
The Minister must have also got a considerable shock when he read the special interim report that dealt with pigs. The Minister's predecessor, or the Minister's officials are to be congratulated on the delicate way in which they produced the White Paper and the delicate language they used in the White Paper on the reorganisation of the pig and bacon industry. For three pages we have sketched the history of the various boards set up to ruin the whole pig industry of the country. In any event we get a statement about the hypothetical price and the appointed price, winding up with the statement at the top of page 5:—
"As results anticipated from the price mechanism referred to in the preceding paragraph were not realised the system of specifying hypothetical prices was abandoned."
A hypothetical price presupposes a hypothetical pig of course and the pigs were no longer there. What is euphemistically called the pig population seriously declined but the curers did not decline. We have the delicate little phrase there: "The system of specifying hypothetical prices was abandoned." That covers a multitude of sins. The Minister knows to what I am referring. Deputies know too because I have tried to enlighten them on many occasions. The principle was that a certain price was fixed as a hypothetical price. If the curers had to pay more than that for pigs, they were reimbursed by the board and if they paid less they had to pay the difference to the board. The curers did not abandon that fund. They discovered £300,000 in the till on one occasion. They raided the till and they took the £300,000. The Government set up a commission to inquire what had happened the £300,000. The commission said that the curers took it. The Government apparently said that it was just too bad but took no further action and the system of hypothetical prices was thereafter abandoned.
One other thing was abandoned in connection with pig production. Deputies who were in this House when Fianna Fáil came into the House will remember that one of their pet schemes to save agriculture was the maize meal mixture. When Fianna Fáil came into office the maize meal mixture was attempted. I suppose a graph showing the success in preventing imports of maize and a graph showing the decline in pig production would very nearly correspond, one with the other.
Now, we are in the aftermath of a war, and maize cannot be got. When it was to be got we would not have it, but now that we cannot get it, having been taught by the absence of the commodity, the Minister says: "Oh, pig production will come all right if we can only get maize". Any member of the Fianna Fáil Party who ten years ago said that imported maize was required for the feeding of pigs would certainly have been put out of the Party and flung into the throng of emigrants so as to get rid of his noxious influence on the community as soon as possible. Now that the war has stopped, we are looking for maize. Somebody suggests legislation, but the Minister's excuse is "what is the good"? He says in the introduction of his Estimate:—
"I need not bring in any legislation about pigs. All the legislation in the world would not add a single pig to the numbers in the country",
and, in that, he is right.
He says "what I require is maize", and he made a rather astounding suggestion that he would himself go anywhere to get maize. That should be at the end of this document, because it shows at last a concrete realisation on the part of the Minister of all the nonsense that passed for his Party's policy on agriculture some years ago. The Minister is afraid of legislative proposals. At least he sheers off them at the moment. But his speech showed quite clearly that he has no plan; that he has not even studied his own document. One would think that as member of the Party and a prospective Minister he would have had time to make up these things, but he may be right that legislative proposals are bad.
We have had so much interference with agriculture and we have seen such deplorable results of that interference that most people would agree that the Minister was probably wise in deciding not to contemplate any more. But what does the Minister offer instead? Has he a policy? Has he any idea of future activity? Is it merely a matter that he is going around to the various associations in the country and saying that he knows that farmers have had a hard time and that he will do all he can and that farming is still the best life and things like that, but when are we going to hear his policy? Is the policy merely this Estimate and the various subheads of odd bits of money here and there to try to remake the harm and damage done to the land in recent years? Do we want to get back to the 1939 position? Are the targets, to use that expression, no higher than that? Have we no realisation of the new situation in this country that we cannot now draw on the old accumulated credits mostly accrued from farming activity, and that we will have to export visible goods in future according to the Minister's own colleague? Why are we to get only what our agricultural goods will buy for us? How does he propose to get these goods? As I said, leaving legislation outside, has he a policy at all?
I notice that the Minister and his colleagues are all going around now on the same note. They say that for years back the farmer has been getting everything in the way of bigger prices, that he has been met as far as prices go. But the volume of agricultural production has remained pretty static, and I take it that the present Minister is joining his defeatist predecessor in accepting the view that you cannot look for anything from agriculture in this country, and what whatever may be done elsewhere we can do nothing. That appears to be the line of the Minister himself, as it was of his predecessor—the acceptance of the theory that we are different from other countries and that if they can get production we cannot.
I take one article with regard to production in Studies for December, 1938. The writer of that article set out to examine the physical possibility of increasing production, and thereby increasing the exports of agriculture. He then writes this very arresting sentence:—
"There is no evidence that there has been any appreciable increase in the total production of agriculture in this country since the beginning of the century."
I have spoken with the writer of this article and he tells me it is conservative, that he should put the date as 1870 instead of 1900, so that since the days of the Franco-Prussian war there has been no appreciable increase of the production of agriculture in this country. The course zig-zagged—it went up in our time a bit, but Fianna Fáil saw that what we added went away. Is that statement accepted? It states that there has been no appreciable increase in agriculture in this country since the beginning of the century. If that is so there is an immediate problem. Here is where a big interrogation make raises its head. The writer goes on:—
"...the export of butter from Denmark has doubled from an average of 76,000 metric tons during the years 1901-1905 to a figure of 152,971 metric tons in 1937. The export of bacon and hams has more than doubled from 76,000 metric tons to 181,000 metric tons, and the export of eggs has almost quadrupled from 3,600,000 great hundreds to 13,400,000 great hundreds. The impression is sometimes given that Danish production is obtained to an overwhelming degree by the use of imported foods. The fact is that, in the years 1935-37, of the total food units used 86 per cent. were produced in the country.
"The export of butter from New Zealand to the United Kingdom increased from 12,600 tons in 1913 to 147,500 tons in 1937, and the export of cheese increased from 27,000 tons in 1913 to 86,500 tons in 1937."
I do not know whether these figures are accepted by the Department. They have been spoken of in this House. They must have been brought under review by the Minister's advisers. There may be some point of detail which may be challenged with regard to their accuracy but if the general picture is correct, what is wrong with this country? Denmark can double— more than double—her hams and bacon and quadruple her eggs. New Zealand can go along the line of increased exports, and if it can be said that the volume of production here has not advanced since the 1900's, can the Minister say what is wrong?
New Zealand and Denmark were very much in the picture when the Minister's predecessor went to Cork some time ago. He went to read a paper to the Cork students, the Agricultural Society in University College, Cork. At that time, the Minister had made a big effort to help agriculture. He had cleared off the people considered to be surplus to agricultural requirements. He had cleared between 30,000 and 40,000 people off the land in his time of office. He was talking, I think, in the year 1938 but in that time he had deprived of their position on the land somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people. I have often remarked before that this country reserves a special place in its detestation for the landlords who cleared the land, and you have various landlords in various parts of the country to-day held up to public execration because they threw off as many as 100 or 1,000 people from their holdings.
Dr. Ryan, the then Minister for Agriculture, cleared 40,000 off the land and nobody apparently thought it was worth while saying anything to him about it. In any event, they had gone, and the Minister probably felt relieved by their going. He said that even with the lowered number he was constrained to listen to a lot of talk about what was called the "back-to-the-land" policy. Of course, the main authors of the "back-to-the-land" policy were the Taoiseach and his group of Ministers. It is certainly not a year ago since the Taoiseach harped back to his old view that this country should support 8,000,000 people at a time when we had arrived at the point of having a population of only 3,000,000. Yet the then Minister for Agriculture thought there were too many people on the land, got rid of them, and protested against any "back-to-the-land" policy. He said that if any policy of that sort is permitted it can only mean a reduction in the average size of holdings followed by a smaller income per person for those engaged in agriculture. He said that if we get to a lower stage than that reached in 1938 it would mean that the farmer would be able to produce only enough for himself and his family and that he would have no surplus to sell— probably not enough for maintenance purposes. However, he did recognise that this country had to buy certain necessary imports and that the only way to get the currency to pay for them was by exporting, and he recognised that agriculture was the only export. He said that.
"when this war is over, we must continue as far as we can to export agricultural produce. We shall do so, however, in the knowledge that we cannot control the price of our exports. We must, in fact, compete against the big exporting countries all over the world. We may be compelled to discontinue some of the exports that before this war had become entirely uneconomic. The first of these, and the one that will interest the present audience most, is dairy products."
Having brought in the matter of dairy products to this Agricultural Students' Association in these gloomy terms he then steeped himself in gloom:—
"We cannot compete on equal terms with the Antipodes. The question is often asked why our farmers cannot compete with New Zealand in the production of butter. Before the war we were both on the British market, and it may appear strange that New Zealand so far away could increase her exports and evidently build up a profitable business while our exports declined, even though we helped producers through an export bounty."
That was the explanation! The then Minister went on to say:—
"The farms are bigger in New Zealand and can be more easily mechanised than ours. They have practically no winter to provide for. Their milk yields per cow are higher. They can, therefore, produce a much larger volume per person engaged in agriculture than our farmers can here."
And he continued that in all these circumstances we might look forward to the virtual elimination of our trade in dairy products and that if such a course should become necessary it would not be so disastrous to farmers as might at first sight be feared.
An Leas-Cheann Comhairle took the Chair.
