There were no pigs and no bonhams then. Now the whole market is of intense and competitive interest, bonhams making £5 to £7 a piece, giving a remunerative market for fat pigs at 200/- a cwt. The Minister is being attacked right, left and centre. He had to smash the cartels. He found even an illegal bacon factory here in a Dublin cellar and it was smashed. He introduced a system of land rehabilitation but it is being criticised. Yet there is no more convincing appreciation of it than the fact reported in the papers yesterday that 44,640 farmers have already applied for the beneficial advantages which that particular scheme has for farmers.
Deputy Corry, who is always entertaining, often interesting and rarely informative, although he is sometimes factual, said yesterday that there is no use in exporting butter to people who do not want it. He spoke much about getting maize from the Argentine but he forgot—and it might be judicious for him to forget and very politically unwise to state — that when we came in here there was £150,000 worth of oatmeal from that country and when it was medically examined it was found to be unfit for human use and infested with creeping bacteria called weevils. If it had not been got out by the Government it would have walked out. He was forgetting when speaking of wheat that 24 hours before we came into office Deputy Lemass for some inexplicable reason — it seemed to me quite indefensible—bought 150,000 tons of wheat at £50 a ton when better wheat was available at £30 a ton with a net loss to the community of £2,600,000. He did not mention that yesterday, but these were some of the things that hampered the wise and progressive policy of the Minister for Agriculture and the Government as a whole.
We had a rather instructive address from Deputy Moylan. It has been stated here to-day, it has been the philosophy of all Governments here over a number of years, it is an admitted fact in economics and it is axiomatic that the basis of the whole economy of this country is agriculture and if agriculture is not prosperous it reacts on every section of the community. We have had the experience of the past; in the first world war when agriculture was prosperous that prosperity was reflected through the towns and villages and it was particularly noticeable in the form of better and more continuous employment of the working classes. Then it was admitted that unless that industry is prosperous your economy will be affected. The dairying industry, it is admitted, is the basis of our whole economy and it is to this point that I would like to draw the attention of the Minister for Agriculture — I am glad he is here.
Perhaps there was good and sufficient reason for the Minister to leave to the farmers of the country a few months ago to decide whether to accept 1/- a gallon for a period of five years, but I would draw Deputies' attention to the international position of milk. In the United States of America £1,000,000,000 sterling of milk has been converted into food and in that same country there has been converted or manufactured into food — and this is rather staggering — nine years of the United States egg supply ready if you like to be released on the world market. England and Wales — and it was known to the Minister, I presume — have since the last war intensified their efforts to meet their own demands and in the month of January 1950, England and Wales produced 132,000,000 gallons of milk which was 15,000,000 gallons more than they produced in January 1948, and 53,000,000 gallons more than they produced in January 1947. New Zealand offered England a cheaper butter than we could supply and, although there was no compulsion on them to do so as they had a guaranteed price for butter supplied to England until I think 1951, Denmark was prepared to say to John Bull: "We will give you cheaper butter now if you give us a fixed minimum price for five years." Our own country, too, according to statistics given by the Department, has increased milk yield by 100 per cent. in 1949 — I speak subject to correction. Look with the long view and vision at that international competitive market, each fighting for a market, each fighting for supremacy. The Minister, I presume looking out into the future with vision and with interest in the farming community, thought it would be good to suggest to farmers the consideration of that fact. The farmers at the moment have turned it down and it is here I come in. We are a most important dairying county. According to statistical returns, the three counties in the south, Cork, Limerick and Tipperary with little bits of Kilkenny and Kerry thrown in, manufacture 63 per cent. of all the butter manufactured in this country. We have in my county 44 proprietary creameries built by farmers on their own initiative, with their own money, and it is a highly skilled, prosperous and successful industry. They are up against the problem of increasing costs. The workers have got at least two, if not three, increases in the past couple of years. Rates are going higher and higher, due mainly to the increased social services and to increased remuneration to the staff employed.
These are hard facts which operate — I will not say unequally — severely against the farmer. The cost of production of everything he produces is going up, and, if a cow aborts or some such loss arises, the cost of replacement runs to a very considerable sum. We are told that 65 per cent. of the people living in this country derive their living mainly from the land, that is, the farmer, his family and those employed by him. If 65 per cent. of the community are in the state of penury or want, or are struggling in any way, or if the industry to which they have given their lives is not prosperous, how will that react on the remainder? I suggest it will have a very prejudicial effect. I, therefore, appeal to the Minister, on behalf of the industry which, in the main, I represent, that he should make the price of milk static for five years at the price payable to-day, that is, 1/2 per gallon.
The farmers are extremely pleased with the work of the Minister, and I have even met Fianna Fáil farmers who hold that view. I have been asked by a few farmers for whom I filled forms whether it is true that, if they apply under one of these schemes and get their land made more productive, their lands thereafter will be re-valued, so that they will then be increasing the value and productivity of their land but concurrently increasing their valuation. I said that it was not true and Deputy Smith, if he wishes, can call that sabotage. Since this Government came in, the land has been drained and considerable improvements effected, and this scheme, together with the other schemes adumbrated by the Minister and the Government, will in time bring into fertility 2,000,000 acres of land which are unproductive to-day.
There is one other matter to which I want to refer and at which I shall keep hammering while I am in the flesh, on the basis of the dictum of Harry Lauder: "We will march along to the end of the road." In 1936, the then Government got a statistical return the authenticity of which cannot be questioned. It was a return by the Registrar-General and it disclosed a tragedy in our history, a disappearing rural population — 60,000 fewer children in rural schools as between 1926 and 1936 and about 200 rural schools closed. Did any of us ever think we would see realised in our day the dictum of our Irish poet, Goldsmith: "A bold peasantry their country's pride, when once destroyed, can never be supplied." They are rapidly disappearing and that has not taken place since we came in. It is a cancer from which we have suffered for a long time. I do not know whether Fianna Fáil did much in this regard, but I suppose the industrial revival initiated very considerably by Fianna Fáil must have done much, but last year the position was that not a man was available. They seemed to get a new outlook on life, but the building of houses which is now in progress has created new hope and the land reclamation scheme is keeping them here. According to the Minister for Local Government, some 6,000 or 7,000 have come back, and these are encouraging signs.
If we could have a little more of the spirit of co-operation and less wrangling and bitterness and fewer attacks on the personality of a great Irishman, the Minister, we would be able to go ahead more quickly. The Minister had the interests of the farmer at heart and that fact is appreciated by the farmers, but we have had concerted attacks on the personality and work of the Minister just because he is Deputy Dillon. The Minister is a man with vision and progressive outlook who sees in the world of to-day a new competition which we have to face. When he spoke of doing away with horses, we had it written up in the Press: "Dillon wants to do away with horses — what will he do away with next?" But if we are to hold our place in competition with the world, with Germany, New Zealand and other countries, we must adopt scientific methods which will enable us to go into competition with them. The Minister is a man who has the necessary vision and I suggest that we should try to bury a lot of the bitterness which we have here. I often thought, when I heard Deputies attacking each other bitterly, that it would be a happy thing, were it not for the strangers in the Gallery, if an atomic bomb were to fall and get rid of the lot of us, so that we might get a new Parliament, with new decencies, new patriotism and leading to a new prosperity.
