Maybe the Deputy did not join it, but he wants the rest of mankind to join it.
Nobody from Fianna Fáil will get up and say: "Are you going to meet the creamery milk suppliers?" They are not a bit interested when I say I am going to meet the I.A.O.S. to-morrow morning and that we are going to have a full discussion. They say: "We don't care about that, are you going to meet the new association?" The answer is: "I am not; I would not be seen dead with them, I do not believe it is a genuine body concerned with the best interests of the creamery industry." I am going to meet the I.A.O.S., a deputation of their choosing. I shall meet them as often as they want me to meet them and I shall discuss any topic they want me to discuss with them because I believe they represent the real milk suppliers of the creameries of this country. When they cease to represent them, they will disappear and make way for some other body that will do their job and I shall meet them, but I am not going to meet a jumped-up body, the sources of which I know too blooming well, which wants to supplant a body that has done its work, so far as I know, conscientiously and well for the last 50 years. If Deputies on the far side want me to repudiate the chairman, secretary and the executive of the I.A.O.S., and throw them overboard in order to supplant them with the tulips who are stumping round the country collecting money to run their great publicity campaign, my answer is "no". If they do not like that, let them take their £30,000 and plaster it where they want. I am not a bit scared and their names will be forgotten very shortly after the £30,000 is gone. They would be a damn sight better employed raising £30,000 for doing useful work, instead of announcing their intention to run a publicity campaign calculated to supplant Fr. Coyne and Harry Kennedy with Fletcher and the rest of them.
Let me come now peacefully to wheat. My advice to every farmer in this country is to grow more of every cereal crop his land is capable of producing, to grow more of every other tillage crop from which he can get for himself, his wife and family, a good profit, always provided that he leaves his land a little better in the autumn than he found it in the spring. I solemnly warn every farmer in this country that every acre he is in a position to cultivate this year under cereal crops it is his solemn duty to cultivate. I now announce that if the farmers of this country are not prepared to do voluntarily better than compulsion can ever make them do, once they are fully seized with the gravity of the situation, I shall cheerfully get out of office and make way for somebody who will approach them with a whip to flog them into doing that which intelligent request failed to persuade them to do. If the farmers in this country have to be flogged into doing their work, as Fianna Fáil apparently thinks necessary, I am not fit to be Minister for Agriculture and I shall get out and make way for another man.
I think, however, the farmers of this country should be notified, as I most solemnly notify them now, that every acre of land they have, which is suitable for the production of tillage crops, should be most fully employed this year more than any other year, owing to the situation rapidly developing as a result of the concatenation of circumstances arising from the Korean war, the Indian famine and the bad prospects of the winter wheat crop on the American continent. All these circumstances combine to give one identical warning, and that is, that every acre of tillage land in this country should be used to the best possible advantage for the farmer who owns it. He is the judge. I can claim for myself the credit that I brought in 100,000 tons of superphosphate of lime in the course of the last three months, cheaper than any other "super" sold in Europe this year and added it to the total supply available from our domestic resources. The fertilisers are there, the seed is there. There were more tractors purchased in the last three months than the entire number of tractors in this country in the year 1939. There are more tractors in use to-day than ever there were in Ireland before and we are trying to get as many more as money will buy abroad. The means are there, the seed is there, the fertilisers are there, the land is there, the farmers are there and I tell them now the need is there. If that does not produce results next autumn, I will most willingly make way for a better man for my policy will have failed and the policy of coercion should begin. If that be necessary in Ireland I have misjudged the Irish farmer and I would be ashamed to be his servant. To be the servant of a free man is to be glorious but to be the servant of a whipped slave is a degradation which I would not wish to experience.
People are worried about what the supplementary sum is required for. It is really quite simple. We are paying the subsidy in respect of flour to the millers quarterly. In 1948, when we came into office we had to meet the charge that came in course of payment for the purchase of the now-famous Argentine wheat by Deputy Lemass, the night before he went out of office, in respect of which wheat he paid £50 a ton which was, at that time, about £20 a ton above the world price. God knows why he did it. I have never found out and I do not think anybody else has, but he did it and we had to foot the bill. The Minister for Finance announced in his Budget that he proposed to spread the cost of the flour wheat subsidy over five years and to pay an average sum in each of the five years, not directly related to the demand in any one given year or the liability of that year. In the course of the last three years, we met the full charge which came in course of payment for the 1948-49 period, which was £9,000,000, out of current revenue; but between 1948 and now, we fell one quarter behind, that is to say, we paid the subsidy in respect of the period up to 28th February only up to 1st January. All that this Supplementary Estimate means is that, in this financial year, circumstances are such that we can pay five quarters instead of four quarters of subsidy, thus catching up on the quarter we fell behind on in the past three years. That, in substance, is what the whole business means.
What hare Deputy Aiken was chasing, I do not know, but if Deputy Aiken wants to make headlines in the Irish Times and in his own kept newspaper, he ought to have some regard to the significance of the language he is using. If Deputy Aiken wants to get up here and talk nonsense about subsidising wheat for animal feeding, he ought to realise that he was for a long time a Minister of this State, and that, when people abroad read that he has made up his mind from a study of the accounts that we are subsidising wheat to be used as animal feeding, it evokes a query from certain international authorities, and it is extremely difficult to convince them that Deputy Aiken is talking through his hat, because they say that he was Minister for Finance and studied these accounts and should know.
There is not a scintilla of truth in the suggestion that we are subsidising wheat for animal feeding. The wheat feed at present being sold in this country is being sold for its full value and, as we draw low-grade wheat from our accumulated stocks, we buy replacements. There are three cargoes of Manitoba No. 5 at present approaching this country. Nobody but a lunatic would sit on top of considerable accumulated stores of wheat of suitable quality for use in wheat feed and wait till the three cargoes of Manitoba No. 5 reached him from Vancouver, when, by a simple process of exchange, he could maintain continuity of supply.
May I remind the House that last September the welkin was made to ring in this House about the prospect of all the live stock of the country lying down and dying of starvation because there would be no feeding stuffs? Deputy Cogan was clapping his hands and saying that the cattle were being brought out and sold for half nothing, while other Deputies were telling me that you could not sell them at all, that people would not take a present of them for fear they would eat them out of house and home. The very self-same Deputies are now up clapping their hands, crying panic and saying that the mills are all packed with feeding stuffs they cannot sell.
Is there any shame in some people? There is none. The number of seedy politicians in this country who survive on their confidence in the shortness of public memory is always a source of admiring amazement to me. They can sing that black is white most melodiously in October and then get up and curse us solemnly, with bell, book and candle, for suggesting that black is not black the following March and shroud themselves in a mantle of outraged virtue because you find fault with them for being the hypocritical frauds you know them to be. I am a long time on the road now and I ought not to worry about that kind of thing—it is just that I feel amazed. It is like going up to look at the red-bottomed orang-outang, or whatever you call it, in the zoo. It does not matter how often you go up there, you are astonished by the blueness of its countenance and the redness of its posterior. I cannot remember exactly the name of the beast, but for years I never went to the zoo without going in to see whether its countenance could be as blue as I remembered it and its other end as red as it is. There are politicians in this country who fill me with a sentiment for which awe is not too strong a word by the courage they have—and they are right, because, if their faces are brazen enough and their hides tough enough, you can quote them from the printed word and it does not knock a feather out of them. They shake their heads and say: "Oh, nobody will read it".
I would rebuke myself if I failed to reply to the only decent reasonable intervention in this debate made from the Fianna Fáil Benches. Deputy Major de Valera had representations made to him and he raised them in a decent, civil way and asked for an explanation. I should be lacking in duty and in courtesy if I did not try to answer him in the same spirit. He gathered that a certain group of traders known as wholesalers had been ruthlessly deprived of certain trading profits to which they were normally entitled. I should like the Deputy to know what the facts are. In these trades—the milling trade and other monopolies and quasi-monopolies—a practice grew up at the time when the monopoly crystallised of a number of individuals enjoying certain privileges. Their identity is determined, and, as from the date of monopoly, everything becomes rigid, and it just so happened that there were, I think, 261 persons who managed to persuade the mills with which they deal to allow a wholesale discount of 10/- per ton on flour and offals, or flour or offals. In any case, there was this list of persons who enjoyed what they were pleased to describe as a wholesale discount of 10/- per ton. As from 1939, the door slammed. There were no additions to and no subtractions from that list. Membership of that list became a valuable asset and you would nearly dower your daughter with the right to be known as a member of that list. It was worth 10/- per ton on every ton of cereal products you handled.
Comes 1950, and I inquire why there are 261 people with this privilege and I am told: "That is the list we got when controls came into force". "Is there anybody else trading in these commodities on lines similar to these gentlemen?" I asked, and was told: "Oh, yes, plenty, but they are not on the list". I asked if this constituted the sole occupation of these gentlemen and was told: "No; they are all trading in a variety of things and they happen to be what are called flour wholesalers". Here is the evil of the system.
If you once acknowledge, in building up the price of a controlled commodity, that there is the cost of production, plus the wholesalers' allowance, plus the wholesalers' retailers' allowance, plus the retailers' allowance, plus the retailers' profit, you build up a price structure about five feet high. But when you go to one of the stages and ask: "What is this wholesalers' allowance?" you are told: "It is 10/- and they always got it." When you ask what they do for it you are told: "Nothing"—what heaps of other people do, nothing. Why did they get it? They managed to wangle it and they were there in 1939 and we have not changed anything since then. Some people think it is a terrible hardship on them but I do not think they should wangle it any more because, in order to accommodate them, you have got to put 10/- into the price structure which would not be there if they did not get it. So, I said, simply, close the melodeon; take out the 10/-, and let them work for the same margin of profit as all the other people who do the same thing work for. I was a shopkeeper all my life. I was as anxious to get discount as my neighbour. I was as anxious to get in on any softness or advantage that could be got. If I wangled something, I would feel grievously aggrieved to see the wangle fold up on me, but I did not go forth to protest that divine justice had been violated. I simply shrugged my shoulders and said that it was grand while we had it but now that we have not got it, we will have to do without it.
If Deputy de Valera investigates this matter, he will find that a group of perfectly respectable citizens had managed to get themselves weighed in with the flour and wheat offal costings to the tune of 10/- a ton; that we took out that; that we closed the melodeon that much, with the result that the instrument's notes got that much sweeter for the consumer and, I suppose, that much less euphonious to the 261 gentlemen who heretofore have been known as flour wholesalers.
That is the story, as I know it. I can imagine all sorts of disturbed public servants, with their heart missing three beats at my general description of the general circumstances surrounding that situation, saying: "He has left out some vital aspect of this problem." All I can say to Deputy de Valera, in that event, is that any time, without exposing himself to the embarrassment of calling personally upon his humble servant, the Minister, my Department is open and available to him. Here is Deputy de Valera now. If, on perusing the explanation that I have been trying to provide him with in reply to his polite and gracious inquiry made during this debate, he finds that I have not covered the points fully, I will be most grateful to him if he would get in touch with the flour and cereals section of my Department directly for any further information he requires. I venture to prophesy that, when fully seized of the facts, his judgment in this matter will approximate more closely to mine than it has done heretofore. If at any time he would wish to discuss the merits of the matter with me, in the light of that information, I shall be most happy to do so. I am only trying to do what is fair, just and reasonable but, if it is carried home to me that I have done anything wrong, I will be most happy to put it right.