A Chinn Chomhairle, the Government, I think I may say, have no reason to be displeased with the debate which is just now about to conclude. We have had some criticism of the agreement. We have had some comments on details of its provisions. But, when all the pin pricking has been done, when all the pointing has been made, and when all the probing has been effected, the Opposition are going to vote for this agreement, which Deputy MacEntee said is a bad agreement, which Deputy Lemass said is a poor agreement, and which Deputy de Valera, the Leader of the Opposition, declared unambiguously was a proper agreement for which this House should vote.
This agreement has been endorsed by the industrialists. It has been received with satisfaction by the farmers. It has been received by the public generally as an effective contribution to the well-being of the country. Everything that has been said during the course of this debate by Opposition speakers merely underlines the value of this agreement and emphasises its importance to our agricultural and manufacturing economy.
In the course of my remarks yesterday, when opening the case for the agreement—if I may be permitted to put it that way—I endeavoured to show the House that it was neither my intention nor the object of my colleagues to exaggerate the benefits of the agreement or to overstate what we thought were the advances that were made under it. At the same time it is proper that the advantages and benefits resulting from the agreement should not be underestimated or understated.
Deputy de Valera, in his speech last night, adopted a reasonable and proper tone. He set the headline on which a debate of this kind should proceed. I am sorry his example has not been followed by some of those who subsequently took part in the debate. I had hoped, and express the hope again here to-day, that the attitude which Deputy de Valera adopted last night and the headline he set will be followed by speakers who in the period of the adjournment of this Dáil may discuss this agreement. I hope that Deputy de Valera's headline will be followed by them and that the misrepresentation and lies which have been disseminated in reference to my colleagues and myself, and the misrepresentations and false interpretations put upon this agreement will not be further disseminated for the purpose of misleading the people as to the effect of this agreement. Deputy de Valera very properly said that the agreement should be judged, not in reference to its context with the 1938 agreement, or by what the 1938 agreement did do or did not do, but on its own merits. I am prepared to accept that very proper test put by the Leader of the Opposition. All I and my colleagues ask from Deputies and from the people of the country in regard to this agreement is that the agreement be judged on its merits and on its results; and, judged by that test, we are prepared to receive a very satisfactory verdict from this House and from the people.
Deputy Lemass, in his speech, when he opened the case for the Opposition, expressed his personal view that we would be better off without any trade agreement with Great Britain.
The Leader of the Opposition took a different view, a different personal view, from that taken by Deputy Lemass. I suppose both points of view can be legitimately held and reasons can be stated for them, but, unfortunately, so far as we are concerned, and I think so far as any Government that had to undertake the task we had to undertake shortly after assuming office, would be concerned, it was not a question of whether there would or would not be an agreement; it was not a question, as Deputy Lemass said, of whether we could have negotiated a temporary agreement or whether we should have opened up negotiations and then come home from the atmosphere of Great Britain and absorbed some of the atmosphere of our native land; it was really a question of facing realities, and we faced them. We had to face a situation in which some Government had to make an agreement with Great Britain. During the first ten years of this State the Government found no necessity for any trade agreement with Great Britain. Our agricultural produce had free entry into the British market, without tariffs, restrictions or quotas. Our industrial products had free entry into the British market, without tariffs, or practically without them. But, in 1938, at the conclusion of the economic war, existing conditions forced the then Government to make a trade agreement with Great Britain, and any Government such as we were when we came into office last February would have had to take note of the situation confronting them and the facts which existed at the time.
The 1938 agreement had to some extent run its course and the conditions of world trade had so altered that something had to be done to put into some sort of order our trade relations with Great Britain. An agreement had to be made, would have had to be made, if this country's vital interests were to be safeguarded. It was not, therefore, a question of any choice whether there should or could not have been an agreement. There had to be an agreement, in my view. We faced the realities and we believe we have got an agreement which is beneficial to our farmers and industrialists, and which has been endorsed by our farmers and industrialists and the public generally. We make no exaggerated claims for it. We had a tough fight to get what we got. One Deputy —I do not know whether it was Deputy Allen in the bitter speech he made— said this agreement represented for us a disappointment of our hopes. It represents nothing of the sort. We were extremely glad to get this agreement and its provisions, with all their limitations—with what is in the agreement and with what is not in the agreement.
The conditions that we had to face were those that I outlined yesterday— world conditions. In addition, we had to face the circumstances and the conditions created by the 1938 agreement. It is very easy for Deputy Lemass now to express his personal view that we would be better off without an agreement. He had to make the agreement in 1938 and when he was recommending it warmly to the House, recommending its provisions in such terms that one of the Deputies said it seemed to him, according to the speech of the then Minister for Industry and Commerce, as if all those clauses in the agreement which are now regarded as so objectionable, even by Deputy Lemass, had been imposed upon the British and not imposed upon the Irish by the British negotiators. That was the way Deputy Lemass recommended the 1938 agreement to this House. At all events, whether it was good or bad, it was an agreement that had to be made at that time.
It was suggested, in the course of the 1938 agreement discussions, that the trade agreement of 1938 had no relationship with the other two agreements negotiated at that time, one about the ports and the other about setting up financial disputes between the two Governments. It was endeavoured to put the trade agreement into an entirely separtate category. I have no desire to enter into any controversy about that, but I must say that the 1938 agreement had this relationship to the conditions existing in 1938: the negotiators who then went to Britain had their hands tied and their bargaining power lessened by the events of the six years that preceded 1938, and that trade agreement which, according to the then Minister for Industry and Commerce, was a trade agreement of the same type as would have been entered into by any other country, was less beneficial to this country by virtue of the circumstances in which it came into existence, by virtue of the fact that we were exhausted as a country by the six years of the economic war and our bargaining hands were tied by the economic conditions it produced.
We are still suffering from the results of the conditions in which the negotiators of the 1938 agreement negotiated that agreement. That was one of the things which tied our hands when negotiating the present agreement. Deputy Lemass can now say airily that he would have liked and would, in fact, have thrown aside altogether the 1938 agreement. He said he would have liked to abrogate completely the agreement. There was nothing to stop the last Government from giving the requisite notice and doing so. The 1938 agreement could at any time have been denounced or abrogated, or whatever is the technical term by giving six months' notice. There was nothing on any document that we were able to discover to indicate what Deputy Lemass said yesterday he favoured—the complete abrogation of the 1938 agreement. On the basis of any indications we could get from documents, the view of the last Government was to the effect that it was not in our interests, in the particular circumstances, to denounce the 1938 agreement. We had to face that situation. I and my colleagues would have liked to scrap the entire 1938 agreement.
I gave an indication yesterday of that agreement, and the balance of the agreement, so far as what the British undertook to give this country and so far as what we undertook to give to Great Britain, was very heavily weighted against this country. I do not blame the last Government for it, because of the conditions in which they negotiated it, conditions arising at the end of the economic war. There are only two articles in that long agreement in which the British undertook to do anything. In Article 1 they undertook, in accordance with what Deputy Lemass said yesterday, that certain produce of ours, agricultural and industrial, should enjoy entry free of customs duty into the United Kingdom. But that agreement, which on its face appeared to give free entry of our goods to the British market, did not, in fact, do so.
I do not want to go through every one of the other articles in this agreement, but if Deputies will look at it they will see that almost every one of the articles comprises an undertaking by the Government of Eire—"The Government of Eire undertake..." That goes on right down to the end of Article V which, as the Minister for Finance stated yesterday, was the article that caused the greatest trouble to the Minister for Industry and Commerce in the last Government. The provisions of it impelled him to state the desire he stated yesterday, that he would wish to denounce the entire agreement.
Article 5 gave free entry into this country to a vast variety of goods from Great Britain—free of quantitative restrictions and free of customs duties. We were faced with a particular situation when we argued before the British Government negotiators— clever, able and experienced negotiators—that no Irish Parliament would have approved, as the Oireachtas did approve, of the 1938 agreement, had it been known that Article 1 had the interpretation which the British Government were placing upon it. We argued that, but I was faced with this argument, having very carefully stated that I was not there as a lawyer and was not going to agrue as a lawyer; that the wording of clause 1 of Article 1 which was the vital article from our point of view, and I want Deputies to remember that—it was the vital article because it gave us free entry for our produce into the British market, or we thought it did; all the other article were in favour of Great Britain, were giving something to Great Britain— was different from that in Article 5.
When Great Britain was getting the very substantial benefits of the free list comprised in Article 5, what did the draftsman say? He said:—
"The Government of Eire undertake that the goods... which are not now liable to customs duty or quantitative regulation shall continue to enjoy entry into Eire, free of customs duty and quantitative regulation."
It was put to me why, if the interpretation for which we were arguing was the correct one and the interpretation intended by agreement, did we allow in Article 1 the phrase to be merely: "shall enjoy entry free of customs duty", when, in Article 5, where it was intended to be made absolutely clear on the part of the British Government, where the British were getting free entry for larger quantities of their own produce without customs duty or quantitative regulation, those words "or quantitative regulation" were specifically stated. It was very difficult to answer that. We, or whoever were responsible at the time for Article 1 ought to have been astute in wathing the difference between the wordings of Article 1 and Article 5.
Deputy Lemass said he objected to this agreement and the actual phrase he used was that his main objection to it was that the 1938 agreement is a bad basis on which to build a new agreement. I think it is a very bad basis, and neither I nor my colleagues wanted to have it as a basis. We would have liked to scrap the whole of the 1938 agreement from the very beginning to the very end, but we were tied to it. We were tied to its provisions and had to take what we could out of it and try to eat into it as best we could. The first thing we did was to try to preserve the status quo, so far as our interpretation of Article 1 was concerned. Had we had a new agreement, instead of this graft, as I called it yesterday, on the old agreement, we would have abandoned our right to interpret Article 1 as we wished. It may be that, if our interests require it, we may have to submit Article 1 to an international tribunal for its interpretation. The British were perfectly prepared to give us any formula which would give us a wide range of our manufactured goods for free entry into the British market but had we agreed to any such formula, or the abandonment of Article 1, we would have had to cut down our rights.
There was another reason, and perhaps the principal reason, why we could not scrap the entire of this 1938 agreement. The general trend of international relations, so far as trade matters are concerned at the present moment, is towards freedom of trade. It is in the general direction of getting the nations to abandon the practice of giving preferential treatment, one to the other, at the expense of other nations. In particular, the nations which form the British Commonwealth of Nations have been in the habit of giving preferential treatment to each other for many years past. That is a very valuable right. The right of preferential treatment in the matter of trade with Great Britain and the other nations of the Commonwealth is one which we enjoy, so long as we are associated with that league of nations known as the British Commonwealth of Nations. We have enjoyed that since 1922, and we are still enjoying it by virtue of our free association with that league of nations known as the British Commonwealth of Nations. It is a valuable right from the point of view of our people.
I referred yesterday to the provisions of the Geneva agreement, the provisions of the general agreement on trade and tariffs and to the Havana charter. These international documents provide for a position in which parties to these agreements will not be entitled to increase existing preferences or create new preferences. We wanted to be in a position to assert our right to existing preferences under our relationship with the members of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and if we can say that these preferences existed by virtue of the 1938 document, we were in a position to have those preferences continued and to get the benefit of them for our people. If we scrapped the 1938 agreement we might have been deprived of that argument.
I do not think it is necessary for me to state any further reasons why we adopted the device of having an agreement supplemental to, a graft upon or a modification of the 1938 agreement. In effect, it is a new agreement, and, as Deputy de Valera suggested, I am prepared to have the provisions of this agreement tested on their merits, as if in fact it were a new agreement. We would, of course, had we negotiated for a new agreement, have had to put in these articles of the 1938 agreement which we have allowed to remain in. Deputy Lemass, in the course of a long speech, never gave one single concrete example of any article of the 1938 agreement that we ought to have got rid of and did not get rid of. He never suggested that the provisions of this 1938 agreement, which contemplated the examination by our Prices Commission of our tariffs on British goods coming into the country, or the machinery provided for our tariff system should be scrapped—we never made that suggestion nor did any other Deputy in this House in the course of the entire discussion. I listened carefully to it in order to see whether any such suggestion would be made. A single suggestion was not made by any deputy that we failed in any way in our duty by leaving in, as we have left, some of the 1938 clauses. I think that is a tribute to the fact that we have negotiated a good agreement. Deputy Lemass himself, when he was recommending the 1938 agreement to the Dáil, justified all those provisions as good provisions, necessary provisions and provisions that would be found in any international agreement. I did not like them and I still do not like them. We did not like to have our tariff system examined even by our own Prices Commission, but Deputy Lemass, when he was Minister for Industry and Commerce, not merely agreed with the inclusion of that type of machinery in the 1938 agreement, but justified it very eloquently and very cogently in the speech which he delivered in 1938 when recommending that agreement to this House.
The position is this therefore: we have not been criticised in one single particular for any clause of the 1938 agreement which we have left in. We have not been criticised for the extension we have got of the free list. There could not, of course, be any criticism of this because it is a distinct advance. We have not been criticised for the clause referring to Article 2, our balance of payments, the provision in reference to our powers to deal with the disequilibrium in our balance of payments. May I say in parenthesis, in answer to Deputy Larkin who put a question to me this morning regarding Article 2, that Article 2 in no way fetters, hinders, hampers, clogs or affects in any way our right to put on tariffs, quotas, quantitative restrictions or any other tariff device we wish. We are fully empowered to use our protective machinery, our tariff "gear" if you wish to call it that. Deputy Lemass, who is regarded as the apotheosis in this country of Irish industry, supported what is comprised in Article 5, and Article 10 of the agreement which was agreed to by him when he was Minister for Industry and Commerce. Article 2, which refers to our balance of payments, gives us additional power to deal with articles in the free list for the purpose of rectifying our disorderly balance of payments. It in no way affects our rights in other directions. It gives us something additional and takes nothing from us. Regarding the question about which Deputy Larkin wished to be assured, we have the fullest rights save in respect of the goods in Article 5 and certain classes of goods in Article 10 where the rate of duty is frozen in one of the schedules. With regard to every other article which comes into this country we have the fullest freedom. We have increased the scope of our powers with reference to the goods on the free list, to the extent of 40 per cent. of the value of our 1938 trade in those goods. In practice and in fact that means that the free list is practically gone. We can do that without consulting the British Government or even without giving notice to the British Government. Deputy Lemass said that we had only put it in writing what he had already done before.
When I tried to use the document signed by the President of the British Board of Trade as a result of some negotiations with the British Government in which I thought there was agreement by the British authorities to restrict this free list and to allow the Irish Government increased powers to impose restrictions on goods coming in under Article 5 of the 1938 agreement, I was faced with the position that I was met by Sir Stafford Cripps, who is a very eminent lawyer, with the unanswerable argument that there was in fact no agreement at all. I could not answer that. There was an agreement to consider a restriction of the British rights regarding the free list under the agreement of 1938, but there had been absolutely no agreement as to the percentage. It was put to me, "when one of the vital terms was not agreed upon, how can that be an agreement?" and that is unanswerable. It had been agreed in principle in the discussions which had taken place between Irish and British officials prior to our taking office that the free list which had hitherto been allowed to the British under Article 5 should be restricted to a certain percentage of the value of the trade. That principle was accepted, but the highest percentage that we were informed had been even discussed by the British was 25 per cent. We succeeded in extracting from the British a percentage of 40. We got that in this agreement and we have contractual rights for it. We have also got, under the balance of payments provisions in Article 2 which Deputy Larkin referred to, additional powers which, inferentially, impliably or consequentially may be used to assist our own industries. We have got rid of the objectionable provisions in the 1938 agreement which provided for the power of the British Government to order the priority in which the Prices Commission would consider and examine into tariffs or the variety of British goods coming into this country that would be scheduled on consultation between the two Governments. That is what was in the agreement signed by the then Minister for Industry and Commerce.
I do not think I am overstating the case when I say that this agreement represents a considerable advance. We should have liked to have got more. We did, in fact, fight for more. I argued for quite a long time on the lines along which Deputy de Valera said we should have argued. We wanted capital goods in return for our agricultural produce, in return for giving them, as the Leader of the Opposition put it, the vital food which they require for their production. Deputy de Valera was quite right when he said that one of the things we should have bargained for was to get our capital requirements and raw materials at some sort of reasonable price. As I think Deputy Davin said a few minutes ago, and as I think Deputy Aiken sneeringly said yesterday, we should have asked for coal at a cheaper price. We did all these things. I think I have had fair experience of negotiating with the British Government. The Minister for Finance and myself have more experience than any other two persons in this House of negotiating with the British Government and I think that the Minister for Finance is the only person in this House who has as much experience as I have of negotiating with the British Government and we know the way it has to be done. We conducted our negotiation in the way experience has taught us that such negotiations should be conducted, and we got results. We could not get results, however, where no results could be procured such as in regard to coal. We are charged more per ton than the domestic consumers of Britain are charged. I raised this point. I pointed out how much this meant to the electricity consumers, the consumers of gas and the domestic consumers of coal in this country generally and I was met with an absolutely unanswerable case. We are on the foreign market at our own choice. The foreign market prices happen at the moment to be against us. These prices were formerly in our favour. Coal was cheaper on the foreign market before and we got it cheaper in the old days, because we were on the foreign market, than the British consumer. Now we are still on the foreign market and it so happens that conditions have altered, and the price to-day on the foreign market is dearer than the price in the home market. I was asked: "How can you have it both ways? Get off the foreign market, if you like." We did not want to get off the foreign market because it is believed that the price of those commodities in the foreign market in the future will fall and that we will again get the benefit of the decrease in price later on. At all events, I had no answer to that. I want Deputies to understand that that point was not overlooked. I had no answer to the arguments and my hands and the hands of my colleagues were tied by the fact that we did not want to get off the foreign market.
As regards capital equipment and goods, we tried to get these vital supplies from the British, either as a contractual right or as a business proposition or as an act of grace. We tried every trick in the bag. We tried argument; we tried blandishments; we tried everything that human ingenuity could devise. Deputy Allen talked about foundry coke. The Minister for Industry and Commerce told the House yesterday that they would have given us the foundry coke if they had it and that they did the next best thing: they offered to put us in possession of all the results of their scientific investigation into substitutes. These considerations applied to every other single matter that we asked for. If they had it, they would have given it to us and when they have it I believe they will give it to us. We could not ask them for things they have not got. We asked for steel and they had not got enough steel for themselves. It was the same with every other type of capital equipment. That was the situation we were up against.
I think it is only just and right to say on behalf of the British negotiators and the British Government generally that they approached our problems with goodwill, with a desire to meet us in so far as they could and to the extent to which their own conditions permitted them. There is no doubt that the British nation at the present time is in a very serious economic and financial position. There is no use in Deputy Allen saying, as he said here to-day, that he is not satisfied that the British are not deliberately trying to ruin our manufacturing industries by withholding essential supplies. That is the kind of thing that does damage to our people. We have to approach negotiations in international matters on the basis that we have grown up as a nation. We should not be suffering from an inferiority complex. We are as good as ever the British were and our negotiators who went over there to negotiate on behalf of the Irish people were as good a crowd, even though it included myself, as ever faced a British delegation across a conference table. That sort of thing and the suggestion of Deputy Lemass yesterday, that British Ministers were guilty of some dishonest conduct or some mean motives in their dealings with us, is the kind of thing that does us harm. I do think it is right for us to say here and to acknowledge that while we fought and fought hard over the conference table in connection with every item of this agreement—we fought it the same way as I would fight a case in court with a doughty opponent—they were trying to do their best for their clients; I was trying to do the best for mine.
Every agreement, whether it is made between individuals or between nations, ultimately represents a series of compromises. This agreement represents a series of compromises and we both got something out of it and, both getting something out of it, leaves no hard feelings behind on either side. The very fact that we have been able to negotiate an agreement which left us in a position of being friends with our neighbour opposite, and of not having given anything away, or having felt we were suffering from any inferiority complex, augurs well for this country's future. I believe that, as time goes on, because of the conditions that we created over there in negotiating this agreement and the atmosphere of goodwill that emerged in the course of the negotiations, we can go and our representatives, our Ministers or officials can go from time to time to Great Britain and, as supplies of essential commodities become available I believe they will give us at least our fair share and probably more than our fair share.
That, I think, answers the suggestion of those Deputies who said that we ought to have bargained our food supplies for essential and vital machinery. We tried it. They had not got this machinery or those supplies but I do believe that, in consequence of the atmosphere that we created, in consequence of this agreement, and in consequence of hard business considerations—because the British are hard business people—good business people; they know we are a good customer of theirs and know we have something to sell them that will pay them to keep us on their hands—from sheer business considerations and reasons, we will get from them, as and when they can give it to us, our fair share of our essential requirements.
We have, as the Minister for Industry and Commerce told you, eaten into Article 1 of the agreement and we have obtained, as a result of their investigation and examination of the list of goods that we wish to export to them, agreement upon that list—a good list. Deputy MacEntee a few moments ago came in here and sneered at it and selected a few little items such as seaweed meal. Again I think the sort of speech that Deputy MacEntee has made does not help either himself, his Party or his country.
