The Minister charged certain individuals outside this House with bringing potatoes into Dublin and regarded them as racketeers. These people are not members of this House, nor are they in a position to challenge the Minister in the House. The Minister is allowed to use such terms regarding traders legitimately trading in potatoes from Donegal to Dublin, bringing them into Dublin when they were scarce. They are described as racketeers. Then we have Deputies taking sides with the Minister and abusing the Opposition for vilifying, they say, the Minister. If there is one member, one Minister in particular, who gives vent to all sorts of personal spleen, and in no uncertain terms, it is the Minister for Agriculture; and anything which he may get from this side of the House, or outside the House, he very well deserves. The terms which are used in relation to him are very mild in comparison with those which he himself uses to others.
In regard to the £5,000 loss incurred by the Department last year, the Minister tries to give the impression that he came to the rescue of the people of Dublin. His main idea was to excuse the expenditure and make the public believe it was well spent money. He did not go so far as to indicate to the House or to the public that the main reason and the true cause of the scarcity of potatoes in Dublin last year was the reckless bargaining he carried on earlier in the season, when he oversold the crop, with the result that there was a definite scarcity, which did exist and existed purely as a result of his not having true recourse to the facts at his disposal, that sufficient potatoes would not be grown to meet the English contract of 50,000 tons. Therefore, the £5,000 in this Supplementary Estimate is something which the Minister has imposed on the country through his own incompetence earlier on.
Had he risen in the House and told us that that £5,000 was expenditure as the result of a mistake on his part earlier in the season, we could have understood him; but in his true style, his style best known in this House, when there is a mistake made—and God knows there have been many mistakes made by this Minister for Agriculture—he does not try to give us a reasonable explanation as to why those mistakes were made. Rather does he stand up and abuse people who cannot defend themselves, in the House or elsewhere. That is a wellknown fact, both here and outside, yet we find there are Deputies who feel so sorely for the Minister, when he is being duly and deservedly criticised, that they must rise to take his part and abuse the Opposition for making criticism of things which they see to be wrongly done during the past year.
There is also the question, discussed here at great length on both sides of the House, as to the price of hides and how the fixed price adversely affects the amounts which the people get for their cattle. The Minister makes a song about the situation, and holds out to the House and to the public that if there were a free market for hides it would mean £5 per head more per beast to the producer. In doing that, he does not refer to the fact that the prices to be paid for our cattle are governed by that agreement made in 1948 by the Minister and by the Government, which they then described as a very good bargain. That agreement leaves us in the position that 90 per cent. of our cattle must, perforce, be sold to the British market, with the result that we are not now able to sell our cattle in a free market, and the buyers are not in free competition with each other. Britain holds the monopoly, and very recently the Minister himself stated that we were actually losing £4 per beast to Britain as a result of that agreement. Yet, while admitting the loss of £4 per beast sold to Britain, in other words, £4 per head for 90 per cent. of our exports of cattle, he will come into this House and tell us about the ring which exists in the hide trade, at the moment resulting in a loss of £5 per beast to the farmer. He will talk about £5 more which the farmers would get if there were a free market for hides when, as a result of the restricted market imposed on the farmers by the Minister in the 1948 agreement, we are now receiving £4 per head less for 90 per cent. of our cattle. We could get that £4 per head more if we had an open and free market where the buyers would be free to buy what they wanted at whatever price they wished to pay.