Deputy O'Reilly states that this motion falls broadly into two sections. One is the general question of the desirability of farm costings and the other is the most effective method whereby to ascertain farm costings. I think there is, really, a third section, because I infer from the paragraph "that the efficient farmer will get his costs of production and a reasonable profit" that the issue is raised as to how far Parliament, on behalf of the community, should pledge the resources of the State to see that, whatever the state of the world markets may be, a farmer in Ireland who has worked conscientiously and energetically will get a price for what he produces sufficient to leave him a profit for his year's labour.
I want to take these three issues seriatim. Many people will advise the Minister for Agriculture to avoid, if he could, the seeming dilemma that is created for him when he is asked: "Are you prepared to ensure that a farmer who works conscientiously and well during the 12 months will get not an extravagant profit or riches, but a reasonable reward for his year's work," and to that, I believe, any honest Minister for Agriculture must reply: "I believe I am paid to do my best to ensure that a farmer will get an adequate reward for his year's work, but neither I nor any other Minister for Agriculture in the world who is a Minister of the Government in a country primarily agricultural can honestly give any such guarantee to every farmer." Many farmers, seeing the Government of the United States, seeing the Government of Great Britain, guaranteeing prices not unnaturally incline to ask themselves: "Why cannot our Government do for our farmers what the Government of the United States and the Government of Great Britain can do for their farmers?" The reason our Government cannot do for the farmers of Ireland what the Government of Great Britain and the Government of the United States can do for their farmers is that in Ireland everybody, in the last analysis, is getting his living out of the farmer. Doctors, lawyers, merchants, manufacturers, labourers, all ultimately derive their living out of the wealth created by those who live upon the land and get their living out of the land. In America, in Great Britain, the exact reverse obtains. The main source of the wealth of those two nations is their mineral resources and their industrial capacity. It does, from time to time, suit their general political set up deliberately to tie the income of their industrial wealth with a sum adequate to guarantee to those who live upon the land fixed prices for the produce of the land—well knowing that world prices may so fluctuate as to create an immense liability for them but well knowing that, if they do, the Treasury is so enriched by industrial and mineral wealth that it can afford to carry the charge.
Here in Ireland, suppose we undertake to guarantee the price of a commodity of which our people are readily capable of producing a substantial surplus over and above the capacity of our people to consume, when a surplus is produced, the Irish Treasury must find the money to make up the difference between world prices and the price which has been guaranteed. Where must they go for that? Where have they to go to? Whatever tax they level, whatever source they tap for revenue —follow it to its ultimate end and you will find the source of the wealth is the land. You will find that, directly or indirectly, the money used to subsidise that particular crop has been, in the last analysis, extracted from the agricultural community itself until, ultimately, the situation is created which has repeatedly caused me irritation and disgust in which the farmers of this country are expected to say "Thank you" to the Government which puts their hand in the farmer's left-hand pocket, takes out his money, and, to the strains of a brass band and loud declaration, gives him back his own to put it into his right-hand pocket. If that were the only danger that beset us in pursuing such a policy, it would be relatively small. But it is not. Fix the price of any particular crop in this country, the production of which comes natural to our economy, and, if the trend of world prices is generally lower —as it most undoubtedly is going to be over the next decade—if you leave that one particular crop fixed at a rigid point, while the rest of the economy drops away and there is no natural tendency for the crop to disappear from our rotation, there will happen precisely what happened in France—more and more of the subsidised crop is produced and the liability on the central Treasury becomes heavier and heavier. Ultimately the astonishing situation emerges that the Government finds itself the possessor of a vast surplus of some particular cereal or other product for which it is bound to pay the farmer the price stipulated for and which it has to get rid of by exporting it and selling it at what it will fetch.
Deputies will remember that, before the war, for purely ulterior political reasons succeeding French Governments subsidised the growing of wheat in France until the stage was reached at which the French Government were paying for wheat in France a price which would have justified 30/-a cwt. for flour and were yet obliged to export flour to London where they sold it for 17/-. At the beginning of 1938 or 1939, many of the agricultural economists of the world, contemplating that spectacle, began to ask themselves: When is there going to emerge in France a Government which will break this vicious circle because if it goes on forever France is increasing the volume of flour which she has to export; her own people are unable to consume it, and are we going to see the glorious day when the French people are growing a crop on their own land and, in substance, giving it away to the British people, not for any economic or international political reason but just because it has become so important in domestic policy to maintain this particular price level that no Government dares change it?
Therefore, when we talk of fixing prices, I beg this House to remember that, in so far as we are producing a crop the total produce of which has to be consumed in Ireland by our own people, it becomes purely a matter for this House to decide, as representing all sections of the people, whether the price is to be fixed or not and how and on whom that price is to be levied, whether it be the consumer or the taxpayer in general. But, where you are dealing with a crop which manifestly may easily and rapidly attain an acreage or a volume which produces year after year a growing surplus over and above our own requirements, face the fact that, though you may pretend to subsidise it, the consumer will not, because we cannot compel him, inasmuch as he lives outside our dominion. Therefore, we must bridge the gap between what the foreign consumer will pay and what the farmer is to receive. We must find the money to bridge that gap, and if my study of the economics of this country is correct, no matter what abracadabra is employed in the process of raising the money to bridge that gap to ensure the farmer a fixed price, in the last analysis it will boil down to the Government putting its hand in the farmer's left-hand pocket and, having extracted his money silently and covertly, handing it back to him to put in his right-hand pocket with a great fanfare of trumpets and the constant reminder of how deeply beholden the farmer is to the community for all the largesse that is bestowed on him. If any farmers dare afterwards call it a slice of their own, is it to be suggested that they are parasites in the body politic living on the community?
I do not believe in putting the farmers of this country in the position where those concerned to belittle them can suggest that they are living on something approximating to charity when, in fact, no matter what way the cat jumps in Ireland, if the people in Ireland are to live at all it is the farmers they must live out of, and if they had not the farmers to live out of then no one in this country would live at all. All the wealth that we have comes out of the 10,000,000 or 12,000,000 acres of arable land that we have, and it comes out of that through the work of our farmers and farm labourers. Do not ever let us forget that, and do not let us ever mislead the, farmers of this country into permitting anybody to blind their eyes to that fact, or create a situation in which they can propound, with many similitudes, the proposition that the farmers of this country are living on their neighbours.
I want to deal with each of the three propositions that this resolution proposes. The only crop that interests me is the crop or produce of which I believe the competent farmer in this country can produce in evergrowing abundance. That means a crop of which we must anticipate, at some stage, an exportable surplus. Now, that is where I deem the duty of a Minister for Agriculture comes in. His duty is to impress on the Government to which he belongs that, in any trade agreement entered into by this country with another country, the potentialities of the market of that country for the profitable disposal of agricultural produce must be the first concern of our Government. The duty of the Minister for Agriculture is to persuade, and to assist, the Government in which he takes part to capture for our people as many and as great outlets for as great a variety of products capable of production by our people as he possibly can, so that by securing a profitable market for such things as cattle, sheep, pigs, bacon, eggs and fowl, he will be in a position to say to the farmers of this country: "Now, you can produce confidently to the limit of your capacity because if, in regard to any particular crop you grow, a cash market is not readily available, we have secured an outlet at your disposal for a term, a sure market, at a remunerative price, for a finished product in the production of which you can employ the crop which, when you sow it, you hope to sell for cash, but which, in the harvest conditions in which you have been called to reap it, is no longer readily saleable as a cash crop."
Far from lamenting and deploring that situation, he must recognise that the state of the cereal market of the world is for us in Ireland no worse than in any other country. Unlike most of the great cereal-producing countries of the world, we can change our policy from cereals to meat or meat to cereals. If the cereal price be high and farmers want to avail of it, they can. If the world cereal price goes against cereals, our farmers, instead of having to lament their losses, should seize the opportunity to recompense themselves for the loss of their anticipated profits by feeding, not only the cereals they have produced upon their own land, but going on to the market in which the price of cereals had catastrophically fallen and buying cheap cereals to double their potential production—feed pigs, fowl, cattle, sheep, to be disposed of in the guaranteed market secured for them as their insurance against the unexpected fluctuations of a cereal market which this country is no more able to control than we can control the ebbing and the flowing of the tide.
How can a rational body like this House seriously exhort the Minister for Agriculture to control the price of surplus cereals in a time when the entire resources of the United States Treasury, thrown into their own market, is utterly powerless to stem the flood? You may see the cereals market of Chicago, before Mayday, suffer an earthquake and instead of sitting down here and wringing our hands and making silly speeches for silly, unworthy, little political ends, we should be hoping that neither our friends in America nor elsewhere will unduly suffer as a result of a fall in the price of cereals and we should seize the golden opportunity to double and treble our production by using up all the cereals of our own production and buying as much as we can lay hands on to put it through the same process of conversion.
It is right that I should say to every Deputy now, most explicitly, that in my judgment no Minister for Agriculture in the world can undertake to provide a profitable cash market for every cereal crop that the farmers of this country, in their wisdom, choose to produce. If that is the criterion set for me, the sooner I am dismissed the better. I cannot do it, I do not believe any living man can do it, and I am not going to concede that, for £1,525 a year, I can do it, when I know full well I cannot. What I do concede to be the duty of the Minister for Agriculture is to get a secure market for what the farmers for whom he stands trustee are capable of producing. I have got that, and I intend to continue with that, and when I can no longer get it, I will make place for someone who can.
There are two other topics that I shall deal with in a moment. I understood Deputy O'Reilly to say that he welcomed the restoration of freedom, but he thought it a hardship that farmers, having to see the fertility of their soil decline and having had to bear the rigours of the past ten or 15 years unaided, should be thrown out on the waves of freedom and expect to be profoundly grateful. He said they were now placed on land that is capable of producing relatively little. I agree with Deputy O'Reilly, and I think it would be a great disservice to the farmers in this country, large or small, knowing the deplorable devastation which has been wrought upon the agricultural land here, if the Government of to-day were to pretend to ignore that and to tell the farmers: "Now you are free to run your own place in your own way", and then upbraid them if they do not produce the stuff, pretending that we did not know the land that had been left to them would not respond to their efforts.
But we have not done that. What we have done is to get the markets, to affirm the principle that the best people to operate the land of this country are the people who live on that land and who get their living on it. So long as it is not legal in this country to break the lock on a doctor's door, or a lawyer's door, or a shopkeeper's door, it is not legal to break the lock on a farmer's gate. That has been our undertaking. Fixed with the knowledge that the land he is left with has substantially lost heart, we are starting out to put back out of the common purse of our people fertility into the land of Ireland; not as a relief work, not as a device primarily to employ labour, not as a bounty for this farmer or that farmer, but in the profound conviction that the source of all wealth in this country ultimately is the land. The best economy that any Government in Ireland can follow is to make the land as productive as it is possible to make it, whoever owns it and without regard to the fact as to whether he is a big farmer, or a little farmer, or a middling farmer; not because of who owns the land, but because it is Ireland. Then the corollary of that decision must be that we do not accept the proposition that the bulk of Irish farmers are lazy, ignorant, incompetent goms who ought not to be allowed to run their places except under control and direction and inspection. If that is true we are throwing away a great part of this nation's wealth and saving. If that is true everything I have stood for in public life is so much sound and fury signifying naught. If that is true the last three generations of our people have spent their lives in vain. If it is true, then the landlords should never have been put out of the land. If it is true, then it was a good thing to have the bailiffs and the agents to manage the land. But the fathers of most of us believed that that was not true and believed that the land would never yield what it could be made to yield until the landlords, the agents and the bailiffs were cleared out and the men who lived upon the land were given a chance to work it. They are going to get that chance now. They are going to get a chance to work the land not as the residue of a century of landlords' mismanagement and not as the residue of 15 years of folly through which we have just passed. They are going to get the land as perfect as it is possible for us to make it. They are going to get land, some of which, as has been described in the report of Professor Holmes circulated to-day, he believes to be the finest in the world. They are going to get land which some of the greatest authorities in the world have said is capable of a higher production than any equal acreage in any quarter of the globe.
No matter what section of our people contributes to that, I think they will get the best value they ever got for money laid out; if they disagree with me, then the sooner they shift me the better. That is what their money will be spent on—the safest investment in the world to-day, the land of Ireland and the people who live on it. A great part of our savings will be put into the land in the confident anticipation that ultimately they will come back to our people ten and twenty-fold.
I sympathise with Deputy O'Reilly's apprehension when he talks of our asking the farmers to perform miracles on land which was run down. We have not done that and we do not intend to do it. Deputy O'Reilly envisaged a three-year period for costings. I find it hard to understand how a three-year period could work. I know that in countries like Great Britain, where the farms are large and the farmers are accustomed to keeping accounts for their own information, and similarly in the United States of America, farm costings have been done with varying degrees of success. I am constantly conscious of this shortcoming on my own part. I was reared amongst ten and 15-acre farms. When I think of agricultural problems, I am conscious of the fact that my mind is perhaps in some degree clouded by the intimacy of my family with the ten-acre man and the 15-acre man. When I am asked to consider costings, or some other development of that statistical type, I think of them in relation to the people amongst whom I was brought up. Naturally, that is an error which it is my duty to correct. It is an error which I am trying to correct. When I first thought of costings in relation to the small farmers, it did not seem to me to come within the sphere of practical politics; because my neighbours kept a pig at one time and they thought it was going to pay to keep a pig, but the next time one called, they were no longer keeping a pig; they had gone into something else.
I discovered, however, that Dr. Murphy's results, through the limited surveys he took, were of such a character that no rational person, having perused them, could maintain the position that costings were impossible in this country. I suppose the best sign of a powerful intellect is that a man is not afraid to change his mind; and I am glad to inform the House that my mind has been coerced by the work done by Dr. Murphy. Certainly within a certain sphere it is possible to get useful costings in this country. Accordingly, I am going to do what I believe to be the rational thing; I am going to ask Dr. Murphy's opinion, and the opinion of any other well-informed person with whom I can discuss the matter, as to what is the most effective method of designing a costings' survey system for the Department of Agriculture. Personally, I shall proceed with caution from one sphere of agriculture to another. Unless I am greatly mistaken Professor Murphy has established that it is possible in respect of the dairying industry, taking a wide enough sample, to get a reasonably reliable service. It can never be conclusive. I am not prepared to admit that any statistical operation is a conclusive proof because no matter what statistical operation one engages in, unless it is on a quasi-universal scale, there still remains the human element.
