When I moved to report progress last week, I was discussing the Minister for Agriculture's Vote— when there is a little sense of responsibility restored perhaps we will get down to considering the matter.
Committee on Finance. - Vote 27—Agriculture (Resumed).
Debate resumed on the following motion:—
That the Estimate be referred back.—(Deputy Dillon.)
Order!
To many of those legal gentleman in the Fine Gael Party, agriculture is a joke, but to the people of Ireland, the people who share in the welfare of this country, agriculture is not a joke. Agriculture is the basis of future development and expansion and even of survival. I think the fact that this debate has been carried over since last week has enabled me to have a look at the proposals put forward by Fine Gael in regard to agriculture and to examine these proposals in a fair and reasonable way.
The policy of Fine Gael as outlined by Deputy Dillon falls under two or three heads. The first step in regard to agricultural policy as outlined by Deputy Dillon was that the four sugar factories should be demolished with dynamite. It is a good thing that Deputy Dillon did not suggest an atomic explosion for the destruction of the sugar industry.
It will not require any atomic explosion to get rid of the Deputy.
You got an atomic explosion last Thursday.
Is this the Estimate for 1950 or 1953?
Suppose for a moment that the policy of abolishing the sugar beet-growing industry, and the sugar-manufacturing industry was put into operation, what would be the effect on the economy of our country? What would become of the large number of productive farmers who have acquired skill and ability in the growing of beet and are getting a fairly good return for it? The average income in a very large portion of the country particularly in the area near me, which I know well, the gross income is over £70 per statute acre. That is income that cannot be despised by any farmer and certainly not by the small farmer.
Beet growing is one of the ways in which the farmer can get the maximum income from his industry and toil and capital, and it is one of the ways in which he can get the maximum output from his land. But Deputy Dillon pursuing some obscure free-trade policy that he read about perhaps when he was a boy—a policy that was advocated by the great Liberal Party in Britain for many years—has declared that the four sugar factories should be blown up by dynamite and that the 60,000 or 70,000 acres of beet should be let down for permanent pasture. That is Fine Gael policy in regard to sugar and beet.
What is Fine Gael policy in regard to wheat? Deputy Dillon referred to it in the course of his speech last week. He said world wheat priceswere falling and, because they were falling, we should go out of wheat growing. He suggested we were paying too high a price to the Irish farmers for their wheat and that it was a serious impost on the whole community. I think—I have not the exact comparative figure—that the disparity in the price of imported wheat and the price of Irish wheat, allowing for moisture content, is slight.
I think that imported wheat has not such advantages recently over Irish wheat so far as moisture content is concerned; so that there is not a very large difference in cost between imported and home-grown wheat, and even if there was a slight margin and even if Irish wheat did cost more, is it not better to have our own people employed on the land? Or should we buy imported wheat and send our workers away to America and Australia? That is the policy advocated by Fine Gael and it requires some explanation. It certainly requires some explanation to the members of the Labour Party, who do claim they are all in favour of increased employment on the land. But wheat and beet, in the words of Deputy Dillon, must go up the spout. He considers we must have free-trade policy and I suppose it is probably logical because Deputy Dillon, being opposed to industrial development, feels that if the farmers enjoy any protection whatever they will be favourable to giving manufacturing industries a similar amount of protection. So, in order to destroy what protection there is in this country, Deputy Dillon goes out on a policy of advocating that whatever protection was enjoyed up to the present should be withdrawn. And his views in regard to wheat and beet are in full accordance with his views in the case of milk.
His policy in regard to milk when in office was to reduce the price to such a level that we would be able to compete with New Zealand and Denmark on the foreign market. He, therefore, proposed to reduce the price of milk from ½ a gallon to 1/- per gallon.
That is Fine Gael policy in regard to the dairying industry. It is a policy of refusing any help or assistance or giving any stability to the dairying industry, and the net result is not likely to be of any benefit to any section of the community because once you, with your 1/- a gallon, drive farmers out of dairying and out of milk and butter production, you create a scarcity which probably would eventually affect the consumer and make the consumers' position even more difficult than it is.
It is hard to understand how such a policy can be seriously advocated by any political Party in the State. I was glad to note the views expressed by General Costello, as reported in yesterday's papers, in which he pointed out the comparison between the number of workers employed on the land here as compared with the number in Denmark or in any of the continental countries. We here have a working population on the land of five men per 100 acres. In Denmark the figure is about three times as much, and in some of the continental countries it is five times that number. If we could so intensify agriculture as to provide a living for an increased number of people somewhat comparable to the number employed in Denmark, it would solve our entire employment problem. Because of the immense opportunities that lie in the development of the land to the utmost extent and the raising of the productive capacity of the land to the maximum, I think it is very desirable that agriculture should not be discussed in this House as a Party question.
Oh, dear!
Agriculture should be dealt with, not as Deputy Morrissey would deal with it, as something about which to score empty, silly debating points but in such a way that we would regard it as something upon which the life of the nation depends. That is why I suggested last week the setting up of a national council of agriculture, not as a merely hole-and-corner consultative council but as a body which would be representative of all farming associations in the country.
It is desirable that farmers should be organised vocationally and a national council, which should be taken into consultation, not only by the Minister for Agriculture but by the Government generally, should be set up because, in regard to land, there are wider problems than those which confront the Minister for Agriculture.
There is the problem of land tenure, of land settlement, and even of largescale development. Thinking of General Costello and the work which he has done in regard to the sugar and beet industry, I have often wondered if it would not be a desirable development to have some State body to buy up derelict and waste land here and there, reclaim it and develop it and let it out on lease to young farmers' sons so that they might eventually become farmers. One of the worst features of the agricultural industry at the present time is the fact that the third or fourth sons of farmers have very little opportunity of becoming farmers themselves. Their fathers and brothers must earn a very considerable amount of money if they are to be enabled to purchase land for themselves but if there was a certain amount of land held by a State company, it could be leased out to enterprising young men, sons of farmers. The same is true of agricultural labourers.
One thing which struck the members of Macra na Feirme travelling through Denmark recently and studying agricultural problems was the fact that a very large number of farm workers had the ambition and the very clear hope of eventually becoming farmers themselves. Their outlook on their business was that of potential farmers. Here it is very rarely that an agricultural labourer can ever hope to rise above the position which he now occupies. I think that is very undesirable. It would be an immense advantage if we could have a development whereby a State company could acquire land, reclaim it, improve it, put it under cultivation and perhaps divide it into holdings and lease it out to farm workers. I think we should not depend on State Departments as much as we do. Bord na Móna and the Irish Sugar Company have given positive examples of what can be doneby an enterprising State company. I put up this proposition because I think it desirable that hope should be offered to our young men to acquire land and to become the possessors of holdings and farms, even though it might only be on probation for a short time. We cannot depend on the Land Commission to solve all these problems. There is a considerable amount of derelict land which could be reclaimed and utilised in the way I suggest.
With regard to the whole land reclamation scheme, I think that it is a step in the right direction on the part of the Minister to increase the direct grants that are to be given to farmers rather than to concentrate entirely on work to be carried out by the Department. Under the Dillon scheme, a farmer who decided to carry out the work himself received a maximum grant of £20 per acre. In many cases it is very difficult to carry out the entire work for less than £35 or £40 or perhaps even more per acre. Under the Walsh plan, the farmer who spends perhaps £45 on draining a piece of land can get a clear grant of £30. That £30 would go a very considerable distance towards meeting the cost.
Mr. O'Higgins
The Deputy knows that the man will not get one penny more than under the Dillon scheme.
What is the average cost of doing an acre?
I am not dealing with average costs. I am dealing with the actual costs. The carrying out of a drainage scheme in many cases would cost £40 or £45. Where it costs £45— in some cases it would be up to £50— the farmer receives £30. A lawyer who studies farms only on paper or in dusty deeds should not try to dictate to those who have a practical knowledge of the work.
Mr. O'Higgins
More farmers voted for me than for the Deputy.
I know that the drainage of land can be a very big project. The tiles alone are very expensive and for that reason it is desirable that we should encourage more farmers toundertake the work themselves. There is another aspect of this scheme which I want to deal with now. That is that while farmers can expect to receive a grant of £30 there is the initial difficulty in many cases that a farmer may not have sufficient ready capital to undertake the work. There is also another difficulty that the contractor might raise and that is, that he would prefer to work under the Department rather than work for the farmer because there is the certainty of payment from the Department whereas if he worked for the farmer he might have to wait for the money.
Just as in regard to housing reconstruction grants it is possible for an applicant for a grant to sign a contract allowing the contractor to be paid out of that grant, a similar provision should be included in the land reclamation project. Where a farmer applies for a grant to carry out reclamation work and where the Department have approved of a grant of £30 under the scheme specified, it should be possible for the farmer to enter into a contract with the Department and the contractor by which the contractor would be allowed to draw upon the grant to the extent he required. The contractor could thus do the work in co-operation with the farmer and it would help to ensure that more work would be done under what is known as the A. scheme, because I think it is desirable that more work should be done as I feel it can be more efficiently and economically done under that section of the scheme than under the B. section. I should like the Government to consider that proposal.
With a view to bringing about closer co-operation between the farming community and the Department, it is desirable that, in addition to county committees of agriculture, there should be district committees established in every county, each district being a compact area operated by one agricultural instructor. Over the past couple of years, the number of agricultural instructors has been enormously increased with the result that there is only a comparatively small compact area allocated to each. Ishould like to see that agricultural instructor assisted by a district committee representative of the various farmers association in the district.
The local young farmers' club and associations of that kind should have the right to appoint representatives on that committee and that committee, acting in close co-operation with one agricultural officer in the compact area, would be able to ensure that the maximum advantage would be obtained from the services of that officer.
We have enormously increased expenditure on advisory services over the past few years and have increased enormously the number of agricultural instructors and it is desirable that we should get the maximum value out of every officer. These officers, on the average, are young men—young men with a very progressive and, if you like, idealistic outlook—who are anxious to do the best they can to help the farmers, and it is desirable that the best value should be secured from the services of these young men. The best way of doing that is to have each agricultural officer living in a small compact area and with a local committee to assist him. In that way, he will be keeping in close touch with farming opinion in his district and will be able to report periodically to the committee who will be able to see what he is doing and who will be able to give him advice and help.
Another point which strikes most people in regard to agriculture is the dullness of the literature circulated by the Department in relation to agricultural instruction. The leaflets issued on these subjects are in the main somewhat the same as, and in many cases identical with, those issued 50 years ago. They are written in the dullest and most unimaginative style, making no appeal whatever to the ordinary young person. What we want is a complete drafting of departmental literature on all the important subjects relating to agriculture. It is a step which is long overdue and one which should be taken immediately, so as to ensure that the message the Department are trying to impart to farmers will get across to them as speedily as possible.
In the Vote for the Department ofEducation I mentioned the desirability of closer cohesion between the Departments of Education and Agriculture in regard to agricultural education. I pointed out that vocational education, inasmuch as it includes rural science, which is only a high-falutin name for agriculture, is very closely bound up with agricultural advice and instruction. If we could get a system by which the work of the vocational schools would dovetail into that of the Department it would be very desirable, and to that end there should be provision for evening classes in every district outlying from the vocational schools. I mention this because it is essential that in regard to these evening classes the local agricultural officer should co-operate with the vocational rural science teacher. In that way the maximum value would be obtained and a real step taken to ensure that no boy leaving a national school and taking up agriculture as his vocation in life would be deprived of or denied an easy opportunity of acquiring an agricultural knowledge so far as theory is concerned.
It is true that, notwithstanding the number of vocational schools we have and the number of agritural instructors and rural science teachers available, a number of boys who go into farming, who become farmers or agricultural workers, never get even a good smattering of agricultural knowledge. If we had these evening classes in every district and made arrangements to ensure that they would be held in every parish it would be possible to give the maximum amount of theoretical knowledge in regard to agriculture to every young man in the district. There is a good deal of work to be done in this respect and I feel we are not doing half enough.
I am not too much of a believer in the value of agricultural colleges inasmuch as they cater only for a small proportion of those who become farmers or agricultural workers. The people who pass through these colleges may become pioneers in agriculture in their districts, but when a boy is taken away from his own home farm and district, there is always the danger that he may desire to travel further and avery great number of those who pass through the agricultural colleges eventually find their way into occupations other than agriculture. They may perhaps become agricultural officials of various kinds, but it is only a small proportion that goes back to the farms from which they came. While it may be desirable for a young farmer to break away from the farm for a short time, on the whole I do not think that is a solution for our problem. The real solution is to bring the schools as near as possible to the young farmers working on the land by having evening schools at which he and the agricultural labourer can attend after their day's work is done.
I think mechanisation of agriculture is something which, if encouraged in the right way, will lead to a very big improvement in the standard of agricultural work. It may also lead eventually to a greater desire on the part of young people to take up agriculture. In every industry to-day machinery is employed. Travel has increased and the motor car has brought a luxury within the reach of large numbers. The young man who decides to work on the land feels somewhat out of things if he is plodding along behind a pair of horses while others are driving tractors or lorries and buses on the roads. He feels his is a dull life. Every boy loves machinery and, from that point of view, it is desirable that mechanisation of agriculture should be encouraged.
A great deal has been done by the Department through the provision of credit schemes for the purchase of machinery and implements. These schemes have been widely availed of over the last couple of years. These schemes enable farmers to get a loan of anything up to £750, I think, to equip their farmers with tractors and up-to-date farming implements. The advantage of mechanisation is that it makes farming a more efficient process and, more important still, puts the young farmer on a par with the man working machinery in the factory, the man who drives a tractor on the land, and the man who drives a lorry or a bus on the roads.
The arguments against mechanisationdo not carry any weight. It is said that mechanisation depends on imported fuel and on imported parts. If mechanisation means the elimination of two or three horses on a farm more feeding stuffs will be available for other live stock. More farm produce will be available for export and that, in turn, will balance the imported fuel and the imported machinery. We are all hoping to increase exports. I think it is a reasonable hope.
There is in Wicklow and other counties a large amount of land which is not altogether suitable for mechanisation. At the moment only a horse will work satisfactorily on hilly land. Farming machinery is being improved every day and eventually even the problem of the hilly land will be solved. The question is often asked: How can the small farmer mechanise his farm? Armchair agriculturists suggest co-operation as the solution. I am not a lover of that particular solution. I do not believe it is really a solution. Small tractors are now being manufactured and the mechanisation of small farms no longer presents an insuperable difficulty. The economic holding can be mechanised by means of the present small tractor. The change over to mechanisation may involve a considerable capital outlay, but the difficulty is not insurmountable. As I have already pointed out, credit facilities are available to the farmers for that purpose.
I am a firm believer in short-term credit. The beet-growing industry is an example of the value of such credit. Through the Beet Growers' Association farmers can spend almost £20 per acre on manures, seeds and lime. On five acres of land that would amount to £100. The farmer would not be able to lay his hands on that money were it not for the credit provided by the Sugar Company. Under the scheme in operation the farmer can incur that expenditure with a reasonable hope of reaping a very substantial reward. The gross income from an acre of beet may run as high as £80 per acre. That £100 credit produces a very big return.
I am not suggesting, of course, that that is the entire cost of production. Labour must also be taken into consideration but, in the main, the farmer can nearly always manage to provide the labour. The small farmer can avail of the help of his own family.
If similar schemes were initiated in relation to other agricultural products we would quickly have an intensification of agricultural production. Limited credit facilities are provided by the merchants and millers in relation to wheat. If we had similar credit facilities in relation to potatoes and oats we would very quickly have increased production. Potatoes and oats can be grown on poor land. It is undesirable to leave large tracts of land to nature, so to speak. As a New Zealand expert said, nothing is more undesirable than to see large tracts of land producing the minimum it is possible to get from that land, having regard to our climate. By bringing the plough over the entire farm, by growing cash crops and crops to provide feeding stuffs for live stock it should be possible to produce more from the land and equally possible to increase the output on the subsequent pasture. In that way we would have nothing in the nature of permanent pasture. We would have young cattle following the tillage rotation.
In that way we would bring our agriculture more into conformity with what is practised in the more progressive nations. I have no use for those Deputies who spoke during this debate and suggested that the expression of any desire for increased agricultural production is a reflection on the present methods of the farmers. I do not think it is any reflection on the farmers to say we are not getting the maximum from our land. I think it may be likely to be a reflection upon our whole economic system and it may likely to be a reflection, even, on the Department of Agriculture itself. It is a problem the farmers alone cannot solve. It can be solved and broken by a close study and by active co-operation between the farmers, the Department and the Government generally.
The Young Farmers' movement has brought into the country, for the first time, a body of opinion that is in close touch with agriculture since the young farmers are men who are actually engaged in farming. It has brought forth a demand for the first time, perhaps, in the history of the country for improved methods in agriculture. If that demand came from the Department of Agriculture the farmers to a great extent would say: "Ah, well what is the use of officials telling us to do this or that? Those men are just sitting in armchairs reading about agriculture out of books." When the young farmers themselves and the younger generation of farmers come together and begin to devise ways and means of improving agriculture themselves and make demands for more advice and up-to-date knowledge in regard to the technique of agriculture, I think we are on the right lines. That movement should be encouraged to the fullest extent.
We ought not to be discouraged by those who say that there are problems in regard to agriculture which cannot be solved and which will never be solved. We have, for example, the people who say that our live-stock breeding policy is all wrong and that we cannot improve it. I do not accept that for one moment. I believe in the breeding of good dairy herds which are capable of producing not only progeny that will replace the existing cows but also produce live stock for the store cattle industry. I think that such a policy is the only one for this State.
We could, of course, follow the line in regard to dairying that has been followed in Denmark and concentrate entirely upon milk and butter production. In this country we can adopt a better policy since we have a live-stock trade. A better policy is to keep not only the best milking cows but at the same time cows which will produce suitable store cattle as well. In the main at the present time the dairy Shorthorn possesses those qualifications. The dairy Shorthorn has been very often condemned, not because of anything that is inherently wrong but because there have beengrave mistakes in regard to general policy on breeding. For example, a dairy Shorthorn will be passed for registration not on the milk record of his ancestors but upon the grading when examined by an inspector. If instead of that you had only Shorthorns passed who had a milk record and a beef record behind them you would have a foundation for improving our live stock. I think milk recording should be general in this country and with that the elimination, then, of the inferior type of cows and the extension of the A.I. system, which is one of the effective means of improving Shorthorn breeding.
If those steps are taken, we can look forward to an improvement. I think we ought to abandon as quickly as possible the system by which bulls are registered as Shorthorn simply be cause of their beef qualities. If you want a beef animal, you have the Hereford and the Aberdeen Angus but if you want to keep Shorthorn stock at all for breeding purposes, we ought to have the double purpose of producing milk and at the same time supplying the store cattle industry. I think that over the past two years the Minister has done a good job of work. He has not indulged in any wild boasting and he has not made exaggerated claims in regard to the work which he has been doing. During the two years he has been in office, I think we have seen a very considerable improvement in every sphere of agriculture. The prices of beef, beet, and wheat have increased. The price of milk has been very substantially increased as compared with what it was two years ago.
A little over two years ago the then Taoiseach dissolved the Dáil because he said that certain Independent farmer Deputies were asking for a higher price for milk. Immediately after the dissolution of the Dáil and when there was a new Government in office an increased price was given and that has been further supplemented over the last year. I was very glad to be one of those who met the milk producers of the strike committee when they were engaged in the strike to discuss this whole problem with them. I found them reasonable men,men who were prepared, if given co-operation by the Government, to go all out to improve their particular branch of the agricultural industry.
The Government ought not to yield to the demands which are being made by many sections of the community for a complete decontrol of milk. It is desirable, just as it was desirable in 1932, to have stability in the dairying industry and to have whatever amount of milk that is produced assured of a reasonable price. It is desirable that a large amount should be put into the purchase of dairy herds and the purchase of equipment for the dairying industry and that those engaged in that industry should be assured of a reasonable return. That is only fair and just in the main. It would be for the benefit not only of the producers but also of the consumer eventually. A sound and healthy dairying industry will ensure that no people in this State will be short of milk. It will ensure that no people in this State will be short of butter. It will also ensure that it will never again be necessary to import butter from outside. It will also ensure that our live-stock industry will be fed with an ever increasing number of young stock to provide for the meat exporting industry which is so valuable. Over the last couple of years there has been a big development in the canning and dead meat trade. That is all to the good. The greater the return we can get from our live-stock industry the more employment it can give in ancillary industries and the better it will be for everybody, not only for our farmers but for our industrial workers as well. There are immense possibilities still to be explored. I think that, with the active assistance of an organised agricultural industry, with the active assistance of a national council of agriculture, with the local committees co-operating with the Department and with real active collaboration between the farming community and the Department, it is possible to expand the volume of agricultural production, and so raise the standard of everybody who is engaged in or dependent upon agriculture for a living.
A few moments before he concluded, Deputy Cogan spoke of bulls in this country. There is no doubt but that he talked quite a lot of bull to-day and on last Thursday, with a stronger note than he talked to-day. His voice to-day was very feeble. I wonder why? I propose to start off by referring to last Thursday's debate when Deputy Cogan spoke on the Estimate for the Department of Agriculture. When he was speaking, Deputy Morrissey drew the attention of the Chair to the fact that there was not a House—that there were not 20 Deputies present. That does not surprise me because, honestly, what I find here——
On a point of order. I desire to draw the attention of the Chair to the fact that there is not a House present.
Notice taken that20Deputies were not present; House counted and20Deputies being present,
When Deputy Cogan called for a House I suppose he wanted to get an audience for me. I need not explain to Deputies the reason why there was not a House. The reason is that every time Deputy Cogan stands up they all clear out because he causes a plague in the House.
That is language that should not be used. The Deputy knows what a plague is, I assume.
I was about to associate Deputy Cogan——
The word "plague" should not be used in connection with a Deputy's contribution to debate.
What I mean is that people leave the House.
I know what you mean, but the word "plague" should not be used in connection with a Deputy's contribution to debate.
It is not very helpful, on an important Estimate like this, that hours should have been spentin making references to other Deputies and other Parties. I believe that the Estimate for the Department of Agriculture is the most important Estimate which comes before the House. Speaking on Thursday last, when his voice was much louder than it was to-day, Deputy Cogan—the reference is Volume 139, column 1626—made this contribution. I am just wondering what association it has with the Estimate. Nevertheless, I am sure the Chair will allow me to deal with it. This was his contribution:—
"Even the deputy-Leader of Clann na Talmhan has been in the last few days acting as election agent—in Wicklow—for Fine Gael."
As far as Clann na Talmhan are concerned, we were sent to this House by the agricultural community of this country from our different constituencies to represent them here. As far as our attachment to Fine Gael is concerned, there are many points on which we agree with them and many on which we differ from them. The same applies to Labour and ourselves, but there is one thing we have decided on, and one that we think is necessary in this country, and that is, a change of Government from the present Cogan-Fianna Fáil contraption, and of going back to an inter-Party Government.
If I went to Wicklow, my visit there was very successful. It showed very good results. However, I always had a certain respect for Deputy Cogan, and sympathy for him, when he stood up here to speak as a farmer, as he claimed to represent farmers, until I found out what happened in Wicklow, and until I met some of the farming community in Wicklow. I will tell the House the reason why I have solidly come to the conclusion that Deputy Cogan does not now represent anybody. It is when you find that one of the candidates that Deputy Cogan was responsible for putting up there received less than 2,000 votes, and that of that number over 1,300 or 1,400 were transferred to the inter-Party candidate. That proves that Deputy Cogan no longer represents the people of Wicklow and very few of the farming community that he still speaks about.
The by-elections are over.
I must deal with this. He spoke about it.
I have allowed the Deputy a good deal of latitude. I understood that the Deputy was going to correct the statement that he was acting as a Fine Gael agent. That is what I understood the Deputy intended to correct, and not to go back into a discussion on the by-elections.
If Deputy Cogan was allowed to fill a page of the Dáil Debates in dealing with the activities of Clann na Talmhan, the Chair will certainly give me permission to reply to him.
Deputy Cogan, as far as I heard him, dealt with the Estimate for the Department of Agriculture. Now the Deputy is speaking about votes.
And what happened to them.
How votes were transferred at a by-election does not arise on this Estimate. As I say, I have allowed the Deputy a good deal of latitude. He will now have to come back to the Estimate.
It is important thing to show how they went.
I am not going to allow the by-elections in County Wicklow and County Cork to come into this debate. I allowed the Deputy a good deal of latitude. I thought he was going to correct a statement made by Deputy Cogan as to his activities in that election. The Deputy will now please come to the Estimate.
I need not apologise to Deputy Cogan or any other Deputy or Party in this House for my activities in the elections. My activities there were the wish of the 8,000 people of North Galway who elected me.
I allowed the Deputy to make a statement if he wanted to. Apparently he had no intention of making it.
Deputy Cogan was in many Parties. There were a few he tried to get into. He was in ours and he did his damnedest to disrupt it.
Please come to the Estimate.
He failed to disrupt it inside and he will not succeed from the outside. I know it is a waste of time talking about ex-Deputy Cogan. It does not matter in the least whether this Estimate is passed or not by this House because I believe that within the near future this House will be dissolved. I appeal to the Taoiseach—I am sorry he is not in the House—to go to the country because there is no confidence in his Government at the moment. We are in the atmosphere of a general election. I said that when speaking on the Vote on Account, that it was a waste of time to hold by-elections. I tried to convince the Fianna Fáil Party that the people outside were clamouring against the present Government and the present legislation.
A Deputy
Agriculture?
I will deal with agriculture.
I am waiting patiently for the Deputy to do so.
I said it does not matter whether the Estimate is passed or not because the present Government with ex-Deputy Cogan will not be there long enough to carry it out.
Having said that, the Deputy will come to the Estimate. The Chair is likely to lose patience very soon.
It is very seldom, Sir, I disobey your orders. The Minister for Agriculture is not in the House, I regret to say, but I hope the Parliamentary Secretary will tell him this. We as farmers and the farming community generally always believed that the Minister for Agriculture is the man who should defend the farming community. Instead of that you have other Ministers, such as the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, Deputy Childers, running around thecountry at the present time telling the farming community what they should do and telling them about certain legislation that will be brought in. The man we should look to as our Minister—it makes no difference what Party he belongs to—appears to be dumb.
I also want to warn the Minister that in his Budget statement the Minister for Finance, Deputy MacEntee, said that taxation was lying lightly on the land. I want to warn the Minister for Agriculture that there may be a danger of some whispering or conniving similar to that in connection with the statement that was made by Senator Quirke in the Seanad when he let the cat out of the bag and said that something must be done to tax the farmer and the one way to do it would be to pay £5 a head on the export of cattle from this country. I want to warn the Minister for Agriculture that he is there as the defender of the agricultural community. It is his job to see that nothing like that is done to create a heavy burden on the people of the land. It is his job to see that such a step will be prevented. It may be all right for some Deputies, professional people and others in this House to say that the man on the land is well off now.
Or that they are going around in Chrysler cars.
I never joined the Guards or was thrown out like Deputy Cogan.
The Deputy will withdraw that remark.
I never joined the Guards nor was I fired out of them.
The Deputy will withdraw the remark that the Deputy was dismissed from any Government post.
At your wish, Sir. The Deputy should keep his mouth closed or I will close it for him.
Deputy Dillon said you were a loathsome creature.
Goodbye, now. He sang his swan song before he left. Iwas on the point of remarking when I was rudely interrupted by ex-Deputy Cogan——
Deputy Cogan is Deputy Cogan.
Yes, but not for long.
Please address him as "Deputy".
"Deputy Cogan," that is right. We look to the Minister for Agriculture as being the man in the Government, as being the man in the Cabinet and in this House—as Deputy Dillon was when he was Minister for Agriculture—to protect the interests of the agricultural community. Not so long ago we found out that the Minister for Agriculture of the present Government knew from 12 to 14 days of a bounty of 6d. a lb. being paid by the British as a subsidy on the export of lambs and the dealers, jobbers and racketeers that tried to suck the lifeblood out of the farming community knew that that was so and were able to purchase these lambs at 6d. per lb. less than the agricultural community knew they were worth. Our Minister did not go before the agricultural community and say that there was such a bounty or such a subsidy, and I, as one, must lose faith in a Minister who allows a thing like that to happen.
Again, we hear the old trash that I have heard in this House for the past ten years: "Increase production". It is a matter for the farmer to increase production, to work harder and longer hours—for less pay, I suppose. The farmer is supposed to increase production for the benefit of every other section of the community. At the moment he is doing his best and I would like to know what this Government has done for the past two years to help secure that increased production. Every Deputy in this House must realise that roughly 1,000,000 acres of our land are subject to flooding. The land is our only hope of increased production. What has the present Government done in the past few years so that some of that land should be relieved from flooding? During the three and a half years ofinter-Party Government three arterial drainage schemes were started, one every year. I had the honour of being the Parliamentary Secretary who took part in that. A fourth scheme was prepared and ready to be started in the county of the present Parliamentary Secretary, who is listening to me, that would give back 53,000 acres of land to the people of that area who suffered from flooding. There was another scheme for the area in County Galway that he represented for many years and that I have the pleasure of representing now, and although they are there two years not even that scheme has been started yet.
Is that not the responsibility of the Board of Works?
But it relates to production and the drainage of land in this country. It is very important.
The Minister for Agriculture is not responsible for that.
He is responsible for production.
The Minister for Agriculture is not responsible for the administration of the Board of Works.
The Government is responsible. They talk so much boloney.
You cannot discuss all the activities of every Department on a particular Vote.
Mr. O'Higgins
Would it be in order to suggest that it should be part of the policy of the Minister?
The Deputy is saying that a certain scheme has not been put into operation.
It is just one. If you will allow me, I am referring to the fact that there are over 1,000,000 acres of land subject to flooding and the Government, in their general policy and in connection with agriculture——
One could discuss every drainage scheme in the country on that basis.
And the land project.
The Deputy will have an opportunity of discussing it on the Board of Works Estimate.
I will, with the help of God, but they will not be here at that time.
I am not concerned with who will be here. I am concerned with trying to direct the Deputy not to drag in the administration of other Votes.
I am pointing out that the Government, in their general policy, are not making an attempt to reclaim the flooded land under the land reclamation scheme or the Dillon rehabilitation scheme.
The Deputy did not confine himself to that.
That matter comes under his Department. I do not think he knows whether it does or not. He does not care, anyhow.
Poor Deputy Cogan—"ex" is coming into my mind very often—referred to the fact that there would no longer be any butter imported into this country. Am I right in saying that there was more butter imported last year than during the time of the inter-Party Government? When the inter-Party Government imported butter, it was yellow, there was a smell from it, according to Fianna Fáil; it was not fit for human consumption. Butter is being imported now. It is just as yellow as ever, just as unfit for human consumption as ever. The only change is in regard to price. The price has gone from 2/10 to 4/2 per lb., thanks to Fianna Fáil. When the price was increased to 4/2 the colour and the smell and everything changed.
We hear about people who do not understand how well-off the people on the land are. We must realise that in a very short space of time 78,000 people have left the land. In my young days, the father and mother of a family selected the best son, the favouriteson, to give him the holding of land at home—"to give him a place", as they used to say. Now not a member of the family will stay. They are all gone. One would imagine there is a plague in the countryside, like some Deputies that I referred to create in this House.
The Government know very well they have lost the confidence of the people. For the past 12 months I have been trying to point that out to them. There is discontentment in every section of the community. The only way to create contentment is for the Government to go to the country. When the voice of the people is heard and when they return a Government it will be a Government of their own liking. The present Government are in office with the assistance of such Deputies as Deputy Cogan, who is going out quicker than he came in. They are in office by a few votes of that description —inter-Party Government supporters' votes. The people feel that it is not by the votes of the people the Government is in office.
I warn the Government that the people are taking note of what is happening. They are taxed on their foodstuffs, drink, cigarettes, tobacco and everything of that description. They feel that the Government that has done that is not the Government that the majority of them elected. They want that changed. I would advise the Taoiseach to give them the opportunity as soon as possible. Give it to them this week, if possible. The sooner the better. A Government will be elected which will be the best Government, the type of Government that I worked for in Wicklow, the type of Government I will work for, that is, a Government comprised of representatives of the different Parties, where the voice of representatives of every section of the community is heard. The father of this House, Deputy Davin, said some time ago in an interview that he saw different Governments in this country since 1922 but that the best Government of them all was the inter-Party Government which was in office for three and a half years.
Mr. Brennan
The previous speaker made one correct reference when he said that this was the most important Estimate that is debated in thisHouse. That was the only sensible or relevant remark he made in his entire speech. It is the most important Estimate, because agriculture is accepted by all in this country as being the fundamental and basic industry. For that reason it is of importance to every section. As we are living in a time when the question of increased employment dominates the thoughts of every political section of the community, should we not consider whether more people could be employed in the agricultural industry than there are at present? If agriculture is the basic industry, we should concentrate on putting as many as possible into employment in that industry and ancillary industries.
Every right-thinking person in this country will appreciate that the present Minister for Agriculture has approached his task in a practical, reasonable and honest manner, without flamboyance or unnecessary flourishing of any particular scheme. He has tried by solid, practical means to put the agricultural industry on a proper footing. The success of his efforts are evident in every branch of the industry.
There is not much point in a Party one day playing up to the farmer and pointing out that he is not getting sufficient for his produce, that he should get more for the milk he produces and, the next day, appealing to another section of the community by pointing out that the price of butter is too high and that the community cannot afford to purchase it. We cannot have it both ways. If the farmer is to have an economic price for his produce then somebody has to pay for it. The people who continually point to those things and try to play up to every section should elucidate their policy and point out whether they would reduce prices at the expense of the farmer or increase prices at the expense of the purchasing community. I think the Minister is doing a good job; he is proceeding on the right lines and his efforts are already bearing fruit.
In the annual debate on this important Estimate there are many matters which Deputies would like to bring tothe attention of the Minister. There are so many aspects of the important problem that it would be impossible and unwise for any Deputy to try to cover them all. There are a few points which affect some Deputies more than others. I would like, in my sphere, to refer to a few of them. In Donegal, we are not so much concerned with the rancher or the large farmer. That is non-existent in that county. We are very much concerned with the smallholder, the mountain farmer and the uneconomic holder in the congested area. The people do not fully appreciate the significance of that type of agriculturist in the scheme of affairs.
The smallholder is indispensable to the success of agriculture in this country. He is indispensable in so far as he is a producer of store cattle. He is usually a man who takes greater interest in such things as poultry and pigs, and when we take the number of our population who are employed as smallholders we find the figure is infinitely greater than the number employed in large farms and on the ranch type of farm. For that reason we believe that it is absolutely essential that any Minister for Agriculture in this country should give special attention to the smallholder and to the mountain farmer.
Regarding the mountain farmer, I should congratulate the Minister and his representatives, as well as Córas Tráchtála, on their efforts in the clean wool campaign, but I would like in that respect to mention some of the difficulties which the people who have wool to sell experience at this time of year. During the clipping season the demand it not at its height. It is not the peak period for purchasing wool, and consequently the fleece lies over until October or November and deteriorates very much in the interim. Those mountain farmers would like if the market could be so arranged that they would get rid of their wool at the clipping season, and it would be a benefit to all concerned, because it would be in a better marketable condition then. It would not suffer so much during the period when it is stored, very often in most unsuitablebuildings. Most farmers have not suitable storage accommodation for wool and they are obliged to hold it over until the prices reach their peak, with consequent loss in the meantime and with the result that inferior wool is then marketed.
Deputy Cogan referred to the important question of bulls, and to the smallholder that is growing in importance. We believe that one of the solutions which could be found for that problem is to purchase the thoroughbred stock calves when they are young and have them brought into the areas where they will eventually be inspected and passed if found suitable as the pure bred bulls in that area. Waiting until they are purchased at shows in Dublin or elsewhere is more expensive and consequently means that some areas are not properly served with an adequate supply of bulls at all. We believe one of the ways which would solve that would be to purchase the pure bred bull calves while they are young and bring them to the areas where they would be allocated to the farmers and eventually produced for inspection. No doubt 99 per cent. Would be found suitable to continue to hold registration. That would be a cheap means of overcoming this difficulty of having adequate bulls in the congested areas where I am afraid the smallholder at the moment is not perfectly satisfied with the supply of bulls available. I should say in passing that the situation has considerably improved over the last year or so.
Two years.
Mr. Brennan
One of the other points I decided to refer to is the question touched on briefly by Deputy Cogan—the question of credit to farmers.
Did you say "briefly"?
Mr. Brennan
Well, that particular point he covered as I should say, ably but briefly, and I am in agreement with him in so far as he says that suitable credit facilities are available for the purchase of machinery but thefacilities provided for credit to farmers in relation to stock and other materials pertaining to their industry are by no means adequate and are not sufficiently easily obtainable. The Agricultural Credit Corporation does not function to the satisfaction of the industry in this country. There is no Deputy in this House who has not had experience time and again of applications being refused for loans for no apparent reason, and the Minister must be aware, as every Deputy in this House who is genuinely interested in agriculture is aware, that increased credit facilities to farmers mean increased production in some respect or another. When you find an honest, genuine farmer applying for some extra money in order to avail himself of the improved markets and the better prices which now exist, to enable himself to purchase in the better conditions available, and that man is refused and no reason given though he has given, say, two solvent personal securities and offered a charge on his property, then one can realise how discouraging and humiliating it is when that type of person is refused a loan to increase production on his own holding. I believe that the Minister should examine the credit facilities which are available to farmers in this country with a view to extending them. If the farmer is, as we all claim him to be, the most important member of our community, then he should be entitled to the best credit facilities that are available to the community. I would appeal to the Minister to examine the position in regard to credit for the agricultural industry with a view to having it made more readily available to genuine applicants for credit. It is bound to represent itself in increased production.
The question of the land project has already been discussed, and it is interesting to note that this reclamation of land is forging ahead and giving, in many cases, a reasonbly good return.
Hear, hear!
Mr. Brennan
This scheme which was inaugurated by Fianna Fáil was carefully fostered by Fianna Fáil andis now being continued by them as such. There is no person who can deny that.
I will do my best to deny it.
Mr. Brennan
I can claim from the records that Deputy Dillon in this House said that he never took credit for the inauguration of the land reclamation scheme. I can quote that from his own statements and would be quoting correctly, but I think it was he who gave it that fancy name, rehabilitation. Whether a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it is hard to say.
We are spending considerable sums in reclaiming farms, but I wonder if we are making sufficient progress on the main waterways into which those farms are drained. I have in mind a case where I went to every possible authority in order to get flooding relieved—the minor employment schemes, the rural improvement schemes, the Irish Land Commission and the arterial drainage scheme—without success. If people have to drain their holdings into a main artery and that artery cannot carry off the drainage at present directed into it, those people are bound to be discouraged from attempting to drain their own land. I believe that a considerable amount of the money we are spending in this rehabilitation project or drainage scheme should be used on the main drains.
The Local Authorities (Works) Act.
Mr. Brennan
Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with it, unless it was abused. Under that Act, the drains were made along the county roads and often, I am afraid, in places where they were not so much needed.
Mr. O'Higgins
That seems to be a criticism of your county surveyor.
Mr. Brennan
I cannot see that Act solving questions of main drainage. If there is money to be spent on roads let it be spent in whatever way the engineering staff consider most useful;if there is money to be spent on drainage, let it be spent in whatever way the agricultural inspector con siders most useful. There should not be a type of scheme where one is not sure whether it is intended for land drainage or for the roads. I personally am not in favour of a type of scheme about which there is so much doubt as to its purpose. I am in favour of examining the position, not so much in the case of the large rivers, though some of them are important and require immediate attention, but in the case of the small main drains which serve a number of families or farms in a townland.
I have taken an interest in some of the schemes in my constituency. In one instance a farmer purchased a farm for £500. It was not a very good type of soil but upwards of £2,000 has been spent on the drainage of that farm. It is very questionable if that money could not be better spent in the cleaning of the main waterways in the area. It is doubtful if it ever gave an adequate or a commensurate return to this nation for the amount of money put into it. These things require careful examination and before huge sums of money are spent we should be satisfied they are likely to give a satisfactory return, even to posterity.
On agriculture in general, it is no wonder that the farmers often think that the only time they are regarded as important is when politicians speak at public meetings or in this House. In looking back, I do not think what Deputy Donnellan was saying a while ago is correct. The choice member of the family was not selected to inherit the farm. The farmer tried to press his sons into the professions and it was only the one who failed, or was found unsuitable for the professions or a business career, who eventually found himself on the farm. The farming community feel that their social standing is not what it should be, seeing that they are an indispensable section of the community. If you meet any farmer's wife to-day, she will tell you about the success of her family, about the fellow who became a doctor, the fellow who became a teacher, the fellow who became a solicitor. Notice taken that 20 Deputies were not present; House counted, and 20 Deputies being present,
Mr. Brennan
You will hear about all the different professions into which the family have succeeded but you will not hear about the one who is to remain at home on the farm. I believe an uplifting of the social standing of the agricultural community is necessary and imperative if it is eventually to be brought to the position in which everyone would like to see it. That can be done only by placing at the disposal of farmers' sons the facilities to enable them to learn as much as possible about this great industry. That applies to smallholders as much as to large farmers. The Young Farmers' clubs and the vocational schools are playing an important part in that work and should get every possible encouragement to continue it, in order to improve the standard of agricultural education and consequently uplift the social standing of those whose destiny it is to toil on the farms and contribute to what we all recognise as our most important industry.
Finally, I would appeal to the Minister to pay particular attention to the smallholdings. I would congratulate him on the success of the tomato scheme which has withstood the apathy of his predecessor, if not his deliberate effort to destroy that industry. I would appeal to him as one who knows how essential an adjunct that industry is to the small uneconomic holding, to have it extended to other areas in the Gaeltacht, and to take a particular interest in those things which are of so much importance to the smallholder and the uneconomic farmer.
The breeding of pigs and poultry is of great importance to the smallholder. They are essential to his well-being, if not to his existence in many cases. It is, therefore, important that the Minister should continue to take the special interest which he is taking, if not an even greater interest, in these matters. Many smallholders depend to a very great extent indeed on suchthings as the production of eggs, the sale of turkeys at Christmas time, the production of a few pigs, and so forth. and one does not require a large area of land in order to take part in that type of agriculture. While these things pay, the small farmer has some means of earning a few shillings even if he has not the acres to feed a large herd of cattle or to grow a big area of crop. For that reason, those of us who represent areas in which small farmers are in the majority are anxious that the Minister will take a special interest in that type of agriculture.
We are satisfied that the Minister is approaching this difficult problem in a sound, practical manner and that he has applied good sound reason and wisdom to his efforts and that, already, they are bearing fruit accordingly.
I recollect another occasion of two years ago when this Estimate was being discussed by the former House. At that time, the then Minister for Agriculture, Deputy Dillon, was able to report to the House and the country that substantial strides had been made in the building-up of agriculture and in making the utilisation of land in this country a profitable business. At that time, this Estimate was considered in the shadow of a general election and, probably for that reason, the debate then lacked, as now, some realism. Obviously, people spoke with one eye on the Estimate and the other eye on the exit from the chamber. That situation exists to-day.
I do not think that any Deputy who compares the Minister's opening statement with the speech made by Deputy Dillon, speaking for the Opposition, will find evidence of very much difference in policy. The reason for that is that, in the past five years, the entire agricultural policy of this country has been dominated by one man— Deputy Dillon. He has coloured the outlook of every Deputy in this House. He has made, for Fianna Fáil, the statement delivered last week by the present Minister for Agriculture and every Party, every Deputy and every agriculturist in this country now preaches the same views and follows the same policy that Deputy Dillonoperated when he was Minister for Agriculture. There has been a great change. If my statement is doubted, one can point to the present outlook of the Government Party and compare it with the outlook to which that same Party gave expression only five or six years ago. It would be unthinkable for the present Minister for Agriculture to say—as his predecessor in the last Fianna Fáil Government said in 1947—that, with the aid of a Guard, the bailiff and the lash he would drive the farmers into doing what he thought was the proper thing for this country. That sentiment was expressed by Deputy Smith, the present Minister for Local Government, when he was Minister for Agriculture in the last Fianna Fáil Government. That outlook has gone. To-day, the Minister for Agriculture, with sweet reasonableness, endeavours to attract our farmers to till more, to produce more and, generally, he repeats many of the statements which were made by Deputy Dillon when he was Minister for Agriculture up to two years ago. Therefore, in the discussion of this Estimate, I think that a profound difference in the policy which is being operated at present and in Deputy Dillon's policy will not be evident. The only thing that is missing is the man—and I believe that that want will shortly be filled.
In agreeing, however, with statements of policy as expressed by the Minister, there are many criticisms that we must level at the methods adopted by the present Minister in carrying out agricultural policy. For the past two years the farmers of this country have sadly missed the guiding hand of Deputy Dillon. Many of the worth-while projects and the great schemes which he initiated have been handed over to the guidance and care of a man who is, apparently, incapable of guiding them properly. Reference has been made to the land project. It was rather amusing to hear Deputy Brennan, in the nausea of impending election defeat, repeat the old Fianna Fáil canard that the land reclamation scheme had been thought of by Fianna Fáil but that they had not had time to announce it. That scheme was thefoundation-stone of the agricultural policy of the former Government. We have been extremely pleased that it has not deliberately been sabotaged by the present Government—that, within their own limitations, they are endeavouring to put it into operation though, unfortunately, perhaps not believing in it as sincerely as we believe in it. They have done some foolish things in their operation of this scheme. I think that the decision to sell the land project machinery was wrong and very unfortunate. One of the brilliant parts of the land reclamation scheme was the fact that it introduced a fair compromise between free enterprise and, if you like, State socialism with regard to the execution of necessary work. It provided an opportunity to young energetic Irishmen to operate as drainage contractors with a guarantee that the work they were doing was worth-while work and that the need for its execution would remain for a considerable length of time.
The scheme envisaged an opportunity being given to such contractors to make a living for themselves in worth-while work. At the same time care was taken deliberately to ensure that no group of contractors would have a monopoly of the service designed to be given by the land project. The previous Minister knew that once a group get control of an essential service the temptation arises unduly to value the service they give and to charge too much and, secondly, to be selective in the people for whom they work. For that reason Deputy Dillon, as Minister for Agriculture, kept available for the farmers of this country the services of the Department of Agriculture, with the trained men, the equipment and the machinery necessary to carry out land drainage work. That ensured that the drainage contractor's price for the work that he would do would be kept strictly in accord with the price charged to the scheme by the Department of Agriculture and, secondly, it ensured that the smaller farmer, who might not be as attractive a proposition to a drainage contractor, who naturally would prefer to go to the richer man and the quicker pay, would always have availablethe departmental services and the departmental machinery.
Now all that has been changed. The Minister, for reasons that he stated here and which I think could not have appeared convincing to any Deputy, has decided to sell the departmental machinery and to hand over to the drainage contractors the entire responsibility for carrying out such land reclamation work. That decision was announced in this House only a few months ago. We criticised the decision very severely at the time. In recent months I regret to have to say that my own experience in my constituency of Laois and Offaly has justified completely the fears we expressed with regard to the sale of this machinery. In West Offaly, particularly, it is impossible at the moment for farmers to obtain the services of a contractor because in many cases neither the number nor the acreage nor the purses involved are sufficiently large to attract the attention of any contractor, and in regard to these schemes progress has been considerably slowed down in recent months. That is an illustration of the bad methods employed by the present Minister in carrying out Deputy Dillon's policy. I cannot understand why, having agreed to carry out the land project, the Minister did not leave well enough alone. The scheme is a good one and if he did not interfere with it in the slightest it would have been carried on successfully.
Then there is another matter in regard to the land project. I was a bit interested some months ago when it became inevitable that sooner or later the Government Party would have to contest and fight the by-elections just concluded in Cork and Wicklow and the Minister announced that the grant for Class A schemes was being increased to a maximum of £30. The Irish Press—of course I know they have difficulty at times in printing words in theIrish Press—printed that news item without including the word “maximum”, and the readers of theIrish Press,particularly farmers in Cork and Wicklow, rejoiced to see thatthe land reclamation grant was being increased to £30 an acre. That was all very good, very nice and very suitable for the petty purpose of these two by-elections. But I do not think it is conceivable to imagine a greater hoax on the farmers of the country than was perpetrated by the Minister when he made that announcement.
The £30 maximum grant will never be paid to any farmer and the Minister knows it well. Deputies are aware that the grant payable under the scheme is three-quarters of the cost per acre of having the work done and the scheme as announced originally had a provision that it would be up to a maximum of £20. The Minister raised the ceiling to £30. That did not mean that any farmer would get an extra £10 an acre. First of all, he had to show that the cost of doing an acre of his land reached the figure of £45 before the maximum grant could be paid. In fact, we all know that the average cost of doing land under the scheme is £8 an acre. So that it does not matter a row of beans whether the maximum grant is raised to £50 or £100. It does not put one penny more in the pockets of the farmers. I think that that particular bit of little political by-play was again unfortunate because it has shaken the confidence of a lot of people in the manner in which this scheme is being administered. I know a lot of my constituents looked forward with interest to this large increase in the grants they were to obtain but when they found that in fact no increase would be payable to them, it confirmed their determination to vote against the Fianna Fáil Government next week.
Now, Sir, those are two of the criticisms I would like to apply to the operation of the land project. There are other matters that I think should engage our attention here. Reference has been made to the position with regard to butter. Surely there is obtaining in this country at the present moment a most extraordinary situation. Only a month or so ago the Minister's Department announced that the 300,000 citizens of Dublin City and the 20,000 citizens of Bray were a peculiar kind of people in this country. Theywere not to be allowed to consume Irish creamery butter and whether they liked it or not, if they wanted butter, they had to buy imported New Zealand or as they called it—yellow butter. Now what circumstances made that necessary?
Major de Valera
The same circumstances that made a similar arrangement necessary in Deputy Dillon's time. Do you remember that?
Mr. O'Higgins
No.
Major de Valera
It was a very similar situation that existed then.
Mr. O'Higgins
I am glad Deputy Vivion de Valera referred to the matter because I recollect him referring to the fact with regard to butter some two or three years ago. At that time Irish creamery butter was being sold here at 2/8 a lb. Now the situation is completely different. Creamery butter is being sold now at 4/2 a lb.
He is side-stepping.
Mr. O'Higgins
I am not. I never side-step anything, as the Deputy should be aware.
What would you do about it? Will you break the farmer's market as Deputy Dillon mentioned in Wicklow?
Mr. O'Higgins
Did you not try all that in Wicklow and you got your answer—we will get Fianna Fáil out?
The position that now obtains is quite different. Creamery butter is sold at 4/2 a lb. That price has been rendered necessary by reason of the milk strike and the Government's decision following it. The necessity for paying that price which, apparently, even at the moment, so far as dairy farmers are concerned, is described by them—and I am talking about the milk price—as not being economic. The circumstances which render necessary payment of that price for milk and corresponding prices for butter, certainly require examination here in this House because of theconsequences which flow from it. It means that Irish creamery butter has to be sold at 4/2 a lb. while imported New Zealand butter can be brought here at a price a few pence more than 3/- a lb.
3/9.
Mr. O'Higgins
We know what it is sold for. It is imported for little more than 3/- a lb., if the Deputy will bear with me. The position is that New Zealand imported butter can be, and is at the moment, brought into this country at prices substantially lower than we produce butter ourselves——
How much?
Mr. O'Higgins
——and, accordingly, in order to provide a market for creamery butter the Government has to do two things. It has to zone the sale of New Zealand butter, and it has to increase the price of New Zealand butter in order to have it retailed at the same price as Irish creamery butter, at 4/2 per lb. Incidentally, in so doing the Government benefits the Exchequer and makes a profit on the deal. Now those are facts known to all of us here.
I would have liked the Minister to have dealt with the problems flowing from these known facts. All he said with regard to that was that the production of butter in this country was reaching saturation point. By that he meant, no doubt, either that our people were consuming less butter—as undoubtedly they are because of the price—or that production of butter had considerably increased. Whatever the cause may be, production of butter for the home market is now reaching saturation point. We would have expected the Minister to go on and tell us what his policy would be when that inevitable situation arises. I would like to know what then does the Government propose to do with the butter produced here at 4/2 per lb? They cannot export it. You cannot sell to Britain Irish butter at 4/2 a lb. when they can buy Danish or New Zealand butter at 1/- per lb. less. What is to happen to the butter excess to our own requirements here? It is with regard to matters of that kindthat we are entitled to a lead from the Government. I know that a frantic effort is being made again to continue the policy of Deputy Dillon and convert milk into chocolate crumb and other processes of that kind, but that will only mitigate the problem—it will not solve it. If, as the Minister says, in the near future we shall be producing more butter than is required for home consumption, what is going to happen?
Stop imports.
Mr. O'Higgins
To stop imports will not be sufficient. If we are going to produce more butter here than the home market requires what is going to happen the excess?
What are you going to do about it?
Mr. O'Higgins
I want to know what you are going to do about it?
Is the Deputy advocating a lower price for the farmer? Come out with it. Deputy Hughes is very uneasy behind your back.
Not a bit. I am much calmer than Deputy Carter.
Deputy O'Higgins is in possession. Deputy Carter will have to cease his interruptions.
Mr. O'Higgins
Deputy Carter is a little bit nervous. I have not said a word to anger Deputy Carter or the Minister. I am merely asking for information. I think Deputy Carter and every other Deputy knows that there is a problem to be faced.
I am glad you admit it.
Mr. O'Higgins
I am endeavouring to state it. I do not know if Deputy Carter has been listening to me but I have been bursting my vocal chords in an endeavour to state the problem. With the price of butter at 4/2 per lb., a price which is much over the world price, if we produce more butter than we require, there is a very serious problem to be faced. I would haveexpected that in regard to this matter of butter production, which involves our entire agricultural industry as we know it, which involves in a very real way much of the accumulated wealth of this country, the Minister would have come in here with a detailed statement of policy to deal with this matter. He has not done so. Why? Because Deputy Carter and other Deputies behind the Government would be "yowling" if the Minister even attempted to state the problem. I know what the Minister is going to do. In a month, or certainly by August or September, when the peak period of milk production makes the problem very real, the Minister is going to announce, if he is there, the decontrol of the dairy industry. He is going to pull out of it. He is going to say: "Now, milk, butter and everything else, must find its own price by reason of the dictates of supply and demand." That may be a solution; I do not know whether it is or not. But it is certainly a solution that would be opposed by Deputy Carter and by other Deputies whose constituents may possibly feel the pinch.
It is a change from rationing, is it not?
Mr. O'Higgins
During the time we were in power we produced more milk and more butter and maintained the ration.
You rationed butter.
Mr. O'Higgins
But look at the price. There is a very real problem here that has not been even referred to by the Minister. If he does not decontrol the production of milk what alternative is open to him? He can decontrol the price of milk, and the price of butter will drop by 50 per cent. at least. Politically that would be disadvantageous to the Minister. He can of course, say: "Well I will not decontrol, I will subsidise."
Will that suit you?
Mr. O'Higgins
I want to know what suits Deputy Carter and Deputy Cunningham?
Would you not suggest something?
Mr. O'Higgins
I am not Minister for Agriculture. I am just endeavouring to suggest, through the Parliamentary Secretary, that the Minister should give us his policy.
You have our policy. You are talking about it.
Mr. O'Higgins
I am trying to find out what it is. There is no good in the Minister coming in and saying: "Look, we are going to have an excess of butter. If we have an excess of butter we can use it for cart grease." Is that how the Minister thinks it should be used or is he going to suggest to the dairy farmer: "You should go out of business because I will not permit you to produce as much milk as you are producing." What is he going to do? I may tell the House that the entire dairying industry at the moment, and the people who represent the unfortunate consumer, are extremely interested in the Minister's policy with regard to this matter. At the risk of being misunderstood or misinterpreted —I do not mind—I must say that there is obviously something wrong, when the unfortunate people of this city and elsewhere are being compelled to subsidise the production of butter as apparently they are at the moment.
So you do not stand for subsidies any longer then?
Mr. O'Higgins
I do not stand for asking the unfortunate working man and woman in this country to pay the subsidy. When we were in power, it was the person better able to pay who paid the subsidy.
If you do not stand for a subsidy, how do you propose to deal with the problem?
Mr. O'Higgins
I cannot convince Deputy Carter. Perhaps when the Minister concludes the debate, if this is one of the debates likely to be concluded, he may deal with that matter of butter production. I know, of course, that there are many problems that we on this side of the House shallhave to face when, in a short matter of weeks, we are again charged with the responsibility of Government.
The Labour Benches look very empty at the moment. I am sorry for your hopes there.
Mr. O'Higgins
I do not know if Deputy Carter ever reads his paper. These benches are stronger at the moment than they were a week ago.
At the expense of Labour.
Mr. O'Higgins
At the expense of Fianna Fáil. There are one or two other matters to which I should like to refer. I could not agree with any one more strongly than I do with Deputy Brennan when he refers to the question of credit facilities for our farmers. I have been in this House now five years representing two counties and I never knew a single man to obtain a loan from the Agricultural Credit Corporation unless he had plenty of money available behind him. I cannot understand what that corporation is there for or what it has been doing. As it was originally established, it was designed to give credit at a cheap rate of interest to the working farmer who would use that facility to increase production from his holding. As the operations of the corporation have worked out in practice, they have meant in effect that facilities, at lower than the bank rate, are made available to those who do not, in fact, require any facility at all. This is not a new problem. The matter raised by Deputy Brennan was not raised in this House for the first time. During the five debates to which I have listened, on the agricultural Estimate, the same criticism has been expressed with regard to the Agricultural Credit Corporation. It was expressed by Deputies on this side when they were on the Government side; it is expressed to-day by a Government Deputy. There has been a consistent criticism with regard to the operation of the credit corporation and that does suggest that the question of credit facilities afforded by the corporation should get immediate examination by the Minister.
We have had associated with this debate the new trade agreement. One recollects that, when the 1948 Trade Agreement was discussed in this House, it was damned with faint praise by the then Fianna Fáil Opposition. There used to be a song in those distant days: "Anything you can do I can do better", and I remember Fianna Fáil Deputies being highly critical of that trade agreement and suggesting that the provisions beneficial to this country contained therein should have been more beneficial. Indeed, the present Minister for Agriculture rather distinguished himself because he made a long speech criticising the agreement paragraph by paragraph and it was only when he was half way through his speech that it was pointed out to him that he was, in fact, criticising the Fianna Fáil agreement of a few months before. One thing, however, was clear with regard to that agreement, that a new principle was established whereby prices for our trade with Britain were linked to British domestic prices and an unlimited market was guaranteed for the things we produced.
The farmers of the country and, indeed, genuine Deputies in the Fianna Fáil Party, appreciated the significance of that trade agreement. Despite the playacting of their leaders, they knew that the inter-Party Government had made, to borrow a phrase, a damned good bargain. Now what do we find? We find that that trade agreement is freely maintained by this Government. A Schedule to it has been altered in matters of detail, but the important principle contained in it had been retained. Naturally, we are pleased with the extra benefits obtained by the revision of the Schedule in the agreement. When the 1948 Agreement was entered into, it was envisaged that the trade for which it provided would be examined from time to time and that any adjustments necessary would be made as required. The present Government have made an adjustment and we congratulate them on doing so, but do not let them parade themselves around the place as having brought back to Ireland DocumentNo. 3, because they have not. They have retained the Trade Agreement of 1948 and have adjusted it in some small respects.
Before concluding, I should like to express agreement with what has been said by Deputy Donnellan and other Deputies with regard to drainage. I do not think it is necessary to emphasise the importance of drainage and the problem it presents to the country, but, each year on this Estimate, I make a particular suggestion which I repeat now, that if the problem presented by drainage is to be tackled in a proper way, the responsibility should be taken from the Board of Works, from the Department of Local Government, from the special employment schemes office—from all these secondary offices that stud Government Buildings—and given over to the Minister for Agriculture, because it is part and parcel of agricultural policy. While we have many cooks, there is a queer old broth always brewed for our people. The great land project itself is delayed, halted and obstructed in different parts of the country because certain necessary main drainage has not been carried out. The execution of that main drainage is not the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture. They cannot do it and cannot insist upon its doing. Therefore, the neglect or omission of one Department prevents and retards the work of another. The only way in which all that red tape can be cut is to provide that the responsibility for drainage should be taken out of the hands of these various Departments and handed over to the Minister for Agriculture. Only when that is done, can real worthwhile progress be made.
As I said earlier, there has been a welcome change in the debates on agriculture in the past two years. It is not now necessary for us on this side to act as monitors for Fianna Fáil and not necessary for us to educate them as we had to do in the past. They now accept our agricultural policy and the only pity is that they are not capable of carrying it out as well perhaps as Deputy Dillon. That is a matter of detail and the responsibility for changing that detailrests outside this House. I have no doubt that this debate will not conclude until the people themselves have decided.
I was rather taken by the phrase which the previous speaker used in connection with Deputy Dillon. He told us that he coloured everything he did. I agree with that—he certainly put an amount of colouring stuff on most of the things he did. It is fairly hard for any Minister to make any changes in agricultural policy and I suppose that whatever changes we have made in it are due to a large extent to the war conditions which prevailed. In fact so far as I can remember—and I can remember a long while back—the only time during which the farmers were really prosperous was when there was a war on. The end of the last war brought misery and misfortune to the whole of the agricultural community.
At the moment we seem to be in a good bargaining position. We have trade agreements. We have had an excellent agreement recently concluded by the Minister. I will not say it is a new agreement. It amends the last agreement and, in amending it, improves it considerably. I was glad Deputy O'Higgins was prepared to admit that. I think that agreement will improve the farmer's credit position. It will make credit easier. If the dead meat trade continues, and I see no reason why it should not since the Government is giving it every encouragement, it will be an enormous asset from the industrial point of view as well as from the point of view of the farmer. We will be using the products of the land as our raw material and that is something many hold is the right and proper thing to do.
Everybody must admit that we have made rapid strides and that our farmers are very prosperous at the moment. They contributed a good deal last year towards building up our external assets. That in itself is an assurance for the future. It is an assurance to the workers employed in these industries that they will always be in a position to purchase fromabroad the raw materials required for particular industries.
I, too, am interested in the question of credit. The Cumann na nGaedheal Government established the Agricultural Credit Corporation with a great flourish of trumpets and much propaganda. Many of the farmers were induced, where they had any sort of credit, to borrow money to their ultimate misfortune. Many people come to me asking me if I would recommend them to the Agricultural Credit Corporation. I never do recommend them. I always tell them it is hopeless and that, if they have any assets, they should go to the banks and avail of overdrafts. At the moment the farmer's credit is not bad. This recent agreement will make his position even better. So long as the farmer has an assured market his credit is always good. It is only when there is no market that his credit deteriorates.
We have not the same problems in County Meath as they have in counties like Donegal and elsewhere. Farmers in Meath engage in all types of agriculture. One will find them in the cattle business, producing milk for sale in Dublin, rearing horses and sheep, producing fruit. Wheat has made its appearance in Meath this year. That is due entirely to the wisdom of the Minister in increasing the price for wheat. I hope now that the Minister will try to improve the conditions under which fruit is sold. Difficulty has been experienced during the last few years in that connection. Difficulty was experienced in finding a market for certain types of fruit. There is never any trouble in disposing of raspberries, but the price is not as good as it used to be.
The Minister referred to the cattle trade in his statement and to the production of cattle. Cattle present a problem. We have the position of Holland cited. We have the position of Denmark cited. The milk producers want high-class milk-producing cows. If we have nothing but dairying cows we will quickly find there is no need for any agreement such as that just concluded. Years ago when farmers had their own cow-testing methods the heifers produced by good cows werealways kept. The owners of bulls procured the right type of animal and the result was that almost all the cows in the district were Shorthorns. There was uniformity of type. Nowadays, with all the variety, if one goes into a fair at two o'clock one will find at least 30 per cent. of the animals offered unsold. The question arises: Are we producing a lot of mongrels? I am sure Deputy Giles will agree with me.
I will not agree with you. I will qualify it. We have the best cattle in the world in County Meath.
Mr. O'Reilly
I am not speaking of County Meath alone. I am speaking of the cattle offered in the fairs throughout the country. These cattle come from the milk-producing areas in the South. We have experienced some difficulty in trying to decide what type of cattle we should breed. One section wants milk-producing cattle and the other Shorthorn cattle. I myself think that we should rely on the Shorthorn cattle and if one wants white faces they can be crossed with Shorthorns and if one wants the other type you can cross it with the black polled Angus. However, the black polled Angus from the point of view of beef producing is quite good but the right type of Shorthorn will give almost as much as any fancy breed and will give the right type of cattle.
We have a surplus of calves now and I think this new agreement will be an incentive to produce more calves and sell them. I take it that a lot of the milk now going to the creameries will go to young calves. We have practically an unlimited market for cattle in Great Britain. We are not impeded in any way. They will take all we produce.
Land fertility is an essential thing and every effort should be made to increase fertility of the land. The Minister is making every effort. He has remodelled the method of producing ground limestone and the methods of distributing it. I think that is a great advantage. Experiments are beingcarried out with manures on plots of land in County Meath and in other counties. I believe they are giving extremely good educational results. I hope they will be able to produce grasses that will fatten cattle a bit quicker and will help them to weigh better when they are killed. I think that this is a thing which could be easily done. Manures to grow the grasses will help to do that.
I want to refer in particular to the question of out-offices for farmers' houses. There are quite a number of farmers' houses which are practically without any out-offices. They are only mud-walled and are not waterproof. The result is that the farmers have no place for storage or for rearing calves or anything else. I hope that the Minister will stimulate that as far as possible and give every facility to people to erect sheds in the vicinity of their yards.
I want to request the Minister to consider the question of drying machines for wheat. We have in the County Meath now a very large acreage of wheat and quite a number of combined harvesters. We have not enough facilities to meet the demand in regard to the drying of wheat. I noticed that our committee of agriculture has offered to subsidise the purchase of about ten machines. Whether they can or cannot be got I do not know. I hope the Minister will give every facility to farmers if they find it necessary to get their wheat dried. It is hardly possible in this country to get wheat dry enough. Few seasons are so dry as to permit of the wheat being dry enough for the mills. It is essential that wheat should not be damaged in any way and that it should be dried at once.
We are told that we have magnificent driers in the City of Dublin. Wheat comes up from the country in lorries and has to remain in the lorries until the next day. In that way the wheat is damaged very much. We should go on growing wheat. I hope we will. If there was a change of Government— I know there will not be—the growing of wheat would stop. If it stops those big mills will remain where they are —in the City of Dublin. These millsare at the portside so that the wheat can be imported cheaply and with the greatest facility. If Deputy Dillon does not get control those mills will have to close down and we will begin to decentralise and put the mills where the wheat is grown. Silos will be erected and the country will go back to where it was years ago and the old ruins on the riverside will be replaced by new mills, possibly operated by electricity. That would be one of the ways of preventing the flight from the land about which we have heard so much. Local mills gave great employment ages ago. If there should be decentralisation in that connection I think we would be a lucky nation. We should try to restrict the size of this bloated city because there are too many industries in it. If Deputy Dillon got in he would probably scratch his head and stop the growing of wheat.
It is rather amusing to listen to Deputy O'Reilly, who comes from the County Meath, talking about the growing of wheat. There has never been much wheat grown in the County Meath except when the farmers there were compelled to grow it. If Deputy O'Reilly is so concerned about the growing of wheat he ought to try to induce the farmers of Meath to grow it.
They are growing wheat this year and they have not been compelled to do so.
We grow as much wheat in a parish of the constituency from which I come than they grow in the whole of Meath.
I am glad you said that. We question that.
I challenge Deputy O'Reilly in regard to the amount of wheat he has grown. I will take on any Deputy on the opposite side of the House in that connection. I have grown a bigger acreage myself.
According to the acreage you have got.
There were discussions on the recent trade agreement. All on this side of the House are glad tosee that that agreement has been renewed. It proves at least that the 1948 Agreement, which was made by Deputy Dillon while Minister for Agriculture, was a sound agreement. There was great opposition to it from Fianna Fáil at the time. They took grave exception to giving Britain 90 per cent. of our exports. That part of the agreement stands to-day. It is the same agreement now as it was in 1948. The agreement also proved that the Fianna Fáil Party agreed that our principal market is the British market. When the present Minister for Agriculture was a Deputy and when the agreement was negotiated in 1948, he was very concerned about this 90 per cent. to the British market. He said we had alternative markets and that it was a shame we were tied up to 90 per cent. with the British. He is the very man who now comes along and agrees with that portion of the agreement.
With regard to the recent statement in connection with the bonus on spring lambs by the British Government, it is a disgraceful thing that the Minister did not make an announcement at the time the bounty was being put in force. The Minister tried to insinuate last week that the price was reflected in the fairs. In my constituency where there is quite a number of lambs, the lambs are sold on the farm and do not have to be brought to the fair. The farmers did not know about this lamb bounty. There is no doubt that the farmers lost that valuable increase. I cannot understand why the Minister did not make a pronouncement on it when it was coming along. The farmers all over the country feel very sore about it.
Deputy O'Reilly referred to the increase in the price of wheat. The price of wheat last year was 75/- per barel on a 57 lb. bushel weight. The price this year is £4—an increase of 5/- but the bushel weight has gone up to 60 lb. Actually, the increase only amounts to 2/6. We believe that there is no increase at all on last year's price having regard to the increase in the cost of production and this 2/6 does not cover the increased cost.
Personally, I believe that it was a bad move on the part of the Minister to increase the bushel weight from 57 to 60 lb. because of the tendency there is now for mechanisation as far as harvesting is concerned. If you are going to grow wheat extensively it will be harvested by the combine harvester, and, except in a very good year such as last year was, it will be difficult to get wheat to bushel 60 lb. from the combine harvester. At the time that Deputy Dillon introduced his scheme to pay from 57/- to 60/- with an extra 2/6 per barrel for wheat bushelling anything over 60 lb., the present Minister for Agriculture very strongly opposed it. He actually pointed out at that time that there was a tendency towards harvesting by means of the combine harvester. Now he has come along himself with the present proposal. I do not know who was responsible for influencing him. I think it must be the millers who were responsible for suggesting that the basis of calculation should be 60 lb.
I think that is very unfair and that it is going to do a great deal of harm as regards wheat growing. It will be difficult in a bad year to get wheat into the condition when it will bushel 60 lb. from the combine harvester. It was difficult under the old method of cutting with a binder, and of stooking it in stacks to get it to bushel 60 lb. when it was threshed. As I say, I think this is a very bad move on the part of the Minister.
I should like to refer to the price of feeding barley. Last year, there was a good quantity of it grown. The situation arose, however, that, when it came to be harvested, the bottom had fallen out of the market. The price opened at 50/-, but in a week or two there was plenty of feeding barley in my part of the country which had to be sold at 35/- a barrel. The Minister then came along and made the price 48/-. The fault I have to find with that is that it was not made in time. A good deal of feeding barley had been marketed at the time that the Minister made his price. The result was that a number of farmers lost a considerableamount of money. I know one farmer who had sold his barley at 35/- a barrel. As a matter of fact, the stores were being packed with this barley. At the time, when there was some difficulty with malting barley, the feeding barley was being pushed on to the market. Immediately the price of it dropped. I think the Minister was wrong in not fixing the price earlier in the year. There was the added difficulty of the difference between the price fixed by the Minister for the farmer and the price that was got by the corn buyers—Grain Importers. That difference amounted to 11/- per barrel. That is to say, Grain Importers were being paid 59/- per barrel. It seems to me that this difference was far too high for drying corn last year, especially when we remember that most of it did not require any drying. It was already down to the correct moisture content. Those people were paid 11/- per barrel just for taking the corn from the farmer. I hope the Minister will look into that position this year and will fix the price in time. The price of feeding barley should be announced early in the year when the farmer is sowing it. He can then decide whether the price offered suits him or not and whether he will grow it.
The Deputy is wrong in saying that the Minister fixes the price of malting barley.
I am referring to feeding barley.
Or feeding barley either.
The Minister fixed it last year.
He did not.
He fixed a minimum price of 48/- for feeding barley. Is that not so? The position as regards malting barley this year is very serious. People who had contracts last year with Messrs. Guinness find that their contracts have been halved this year. That is a very serious matter for people whose land is suitable only for the growing of barley. They had been getting a fair returnfor the malting barley which the grew. Now their acreage has been cut by half, due to Government policy of course, because Messrs. Guinness do not require the barley this year.
As I say, a large number of farmers have been hit very hard in this way. Some people may ask: "Why can they not grow wheat". I am speaking of land which is suitable only for the growing of barley. If a barley crop is sown in it will give a good return, whereas if wheat is sown it will give only a poor return. That is why I say that this matter is so serious for those people. That experience is likely to have the tendency of driving those people out of tillage.
As regards the ground limestone scheme that is in operation at present I understand that the Minister is contemplating making some change in the amount of the subsidy. I think that is very necessary. I think that a better approach would be to have more grinding plants throughout the country. The freight subsidy on lime represents a very big figure at the present time. One way of getting over that would be to have more grinding plants established. The market for the ground limestone is there. It is very difficult to get it during the spring. If you had more grinding plants, distribution costs could be reduced considerably. At present, no attempt whatever is being made to arrange the distribution so as to eliminate overlapping. I know of cases where ground limestone has been hauled a distance of over 60 miles to be delivered within half a mile of a grinding plant. That was actually done by the land reclamation section of the Minister's Department. The ground limestone was loaded from some of the grinding plants around Dublin and carried to my constituency to within half a mile of a grinding plant. I think that should not have happened. The freight subsidy that had to be paid in that case was, of course, very heavy. That is not the proper way to spend the money allocated for this scheme. That has been going on for quite a considerable time, and I think some effort should be made now to correct it. I understand that the matter is being reviewed, and I hope someimmediate change for the better will be brought about.
The Minister, in his opening statement, referred to the changes which he proposes in connection with the land reclamation scheme. As regards grants under Section A, the grant is to be increased from £20 to a maximum of £30. The Minister, however, did not refer to the position that is likely to arise as far as grants under Section B are concerned. I understand that the total amount that can be spent on land under Section B is £37 an acre. At the present time, when the land reclamation machinery is being sold, I believe that when that position becomes known to prospective purchasers of it, no one will go into this business, because the figure we have been given is too low. Intensive drainage costs anything from £25 to £30 per acre for tiles alone. Therefore, if only £7 is going to be put aside for the contractor on the work of opening up drains, laying pipes and covering in the drains, I do not see how he could carry on. He certainly could not do so if his return for that amount of work is to be between £7 and £10 an acre. That return is not going to induce him to buy plant.
The present plant, we understand, is going to be sold. My opinion is that people will no longer buy it for land drainage. It will be purchased and used for some other purpose. I wonder has the Minister at the back of his mind, in doing this, the idea of returning to the old method of doing land drainage with a hack and shovel? I suggest if he has, that such a method is too outdated now. If he thinks that the work can be done in that way, I believe it will not be done at all. If the Minister has decided on getting the farmers to do the drainage themselves and to pay them, he ought to obtain a good deal of small plant to do this work. There is quite a number of different types of small trenchers on the market that would open up those drains. If he intends to disregard the big plant, which is the proper way of doing it in order to do it completely, he ought to induce contractors to buy the small type of plant, that is, if it is hoped to carry that work out bymachinery. I do not believe it can be done extensively in any other way.
Another important item is the price of fertilisers in this country. If there is to be an increase in agricultural production a large amount of that will have to come through an increase in the use of fertilisers. For a number of years we have been the lowest consumers of fertilisers in the world. Undoubtedly farmers are using more fertilisers now than they were, and would use more except for the price. The price of fertilisers here is much higher than in Britain or in many other countries. At the present day we are paying £13 a ton for phosphates; £19 a ton for potash; and £22 a ton for nitrogen. The English farmer is paying £11 where we are paying £13; he is paying £16 where we are paying £19 and £16 10s. where we are paying £22. We have a position here where the Minister brought in fertilisers two years ago when fertilisers were at their highest price. The phosphates, for instance, cost £17 10s. at the time. A good deal of those fertilisers is still in the stores and the outside market was shut off until that is cleared. That is what has the price of fertilisers so high now. It is having a very bad effect on production because fertilisers are costing the farmer far too much.
Another situation arose here last spring as regards the compound granulated manure fertiliser which is being used extensively now in the sowing of corn. It has been developed for the last four or five years and every farmer has come to realise that it is the proper way to sow grain. The manufacturers here were not able to meet the market in that fertiliser. Right at the sowing time this year the Government were hesitating whether to impose a duty on this compound coming in or to allow it in. The result was that weeks passed by at the sowing time when every farmer in the country wanted this fertiliser. It was an early year and was an excellent time for putting in the crops. The farmers were ready but the fertilisers were not there. That was a disgraceful situation. At the end of three or four weeks the Government allowed those fertilisers in. Theyshould have been allowed in earlier so that they would have been in the hands of farmers in time for sowing. There is no doubt that this put back sowing a considerable time this year.
I understand there is a possibility that the complete market for fertilisers will be met here by a factory starting in New Ross. If that is so I hope that the price will compare favourably with the price outside. The price here is far too high and is having a very serious effect on increased production. If we are to have increased production it must come from improvement of the fertility of the soil. Our grassland all over the country is crying out for attention and the farmers cannot meet that demand. They cannot buy fertilisers if the price is going to be as high as it is.
Several Deputies have referred to mechanisation and the difficulties that arise from its cost for the small farmer. If we are to compete with the rest of the world in the British market, we will have to be more mechanised. We are competing against other countries that are highly mechanised and we must keep in step. I know this is a problem for the small farmer. If he wants to adopt mechanisation he will have to do so completely and do away with his pair of horses: otherwise it will be of no use. However, to be completely mechanised is outside his reach. It is a big problem that will have to be tackled. The bigger farmers who are mechanised are handling their crops efficiently and getting the job done much more easily than the small farmers. Whatever Government is in power will have to face up to the situation. It will have to be met in the form of a grant. There are many suggestions on this subject. Some people suggest that it should be worked on a co-operative basis. I do not think that would work very well. It is all right in theory but when you try to put it into practice it is very seldom successful.
In connection with the Estimate for Agriculture it is evident not only from listening to speeches made by Opposition Deputies in the past 12 months but from the very facts themselves that there has been verysubstantial progress in agricultural development and that the Minister for Agriculture's policy is understood. It is a stable and progressive policy. We are no longer subject to the winds and blasts that was the case during the régime of Deputy Dillon when he was Minister for Agriculture.
It is just as well, now that we face another year of expenditure and when we examine all the schemes that are in operation for the improvement of production, that there should be some casting of the mind back upon the development of policy in the course of the last five years. Agricultural prices have gone up 40 per cent. in general between 1947 and 1952. They went up in every country in the world. They continued to increase in the case of the two Governments— the Fianna Fáil Government before 1948 and the Fianna Fáil Government subsequent to June, 1951. This very substantial increase of 40 per cent. to some degree casts an air of unreality upon the agricultural problem because it is frequently the practice of a Minister for Agriculture, and certainly was that of Deputy Dillon, to boast about the increase in the values of the agricultural produce that came off the farms, instead of facing the fundamental issue of whether the quantities that were produced showed any notable increase.
I charge Deputy Dillon with having used every method of statistical deception to prove the success of his policy contrasted with that of the previous Minister. There was no limit to what he could say in order to prove his point. I am very gratified to see that the present Minister for Agriculture is very much more of a realist and he does not, like Deputy Dillon, take credit for good weather or blame the last Government for bad weather. Most of us remember the way that Deputy Dillon took advantage of two of the worst years of weather in the whole history of this country since meteorological records were taken and boasted to the country of the enormous improvement that had taken place between 1948 and 1949 as compared with the two previous years.
Those farmers who had any commonsense were of course aware that there was bound to be some recovery after two years of such disastrous weather. We all of us look back at the days when Deputy Dillon, just before he took office, damned and condemned the growing of beet, wheat and peat. We remember too that shortly before he took office he said that, after wheat and peat, please God, beet would go up the spout and God speed the day. He apparently was prevented from carrying out that policy of abolishing the growing of sugar beet but at least he did not do what we have done, which was to extend the facilities for production in the beet sugar factories.
We remember also that in 1948 a promise was made to guarantee the price of oats and potatoes. Those crops that were not used on the farm came on the market and the commencement of an era of uncertainty in regard to tillage took place in that year when only late in November a not very satisfactory scheme was introduced to carry out the promise made by the Minister earlier in the year.
Shades of Gortnahoe.
Shades of Westminister.
The uncertainty in regard to tillage production was further intensified in 1949 when it was definitely indicated to the farming community that there would be no unforeseeable increase in the price of maize although the £ had been devalued. During all that period, in spite of some guarantee for wheat, the Minister for Agriculture of the time deprecated the growing of wheat although our dollar payments were very much in adverse balance and although it became evident that we could not go on borrowing money indefinitely for the growing of our daily bread.
In April, 1951, I suppose one of the biggest tributes that could be paid to the Fianna Fáil policy was the last minute issue of advertisements for the growing of wheat by the then Minister for Agriculture, and a general appeal for tillage. When they realised the state of the balance of payments that was likely to take place, the hated wheat was put at the top of the list.
During the year 1950 to 1951 we began to see a deterioration taking place in practically every facet of agricultural production save that of certain classes of cattle. Pigs were reduced substantially in numbers due to the absence of a proper trade agreement as between bacon and pork with the British authorities.
Who made the trade agreement for bacon and pork?
Due to the absence of a proper price agreement, poultry exports went down by 2,000,000.
Who made the trade agreement for bacon and pork?
The Minister is entitled to make his statement.
I will deal with the question of pigs. They have been recovering since.
Who made the pig agreement?
There was a decline in the acreage of tillage of 54,000 acres due to the uncertainty of policy of which I have already spoken. We had the humiliation in 1951, after only six months of office during which it was impossible for us to correct the position entirely, because it is a matter of years, of seeing £20,000,000 of food that could be produced by the people at home being imported and adding to our adverse trade balance.
The policy of the new Government was immediately made known to the agricultural community. It is a stable policy, the policy which they fully understand, based on the protection of the home market and the development of the export market, based on the idea that tillage is good for fertility, for the production of grass, for the home market, for protection in war time and good for the production of live stock, that the growth of tillage is an advantage to all types of farmers producing all types of agricultural produce.
The Government also stands for the processing to the maximum degree ofanimal products, the development of the carcase trade and at the same time the preservation of the store cattle trade.
The policy of the Fianna Fáil Government has also been the granting of certain cash advantages in respect of certain crops, the provision of an adequate price for beet sugar, the production of which we are glad to see will increase this year, and a guaranteed price in respect of wheat.
The purpose of that is not only to secure employment and to ensure proper tillage; it is also to save dollars, now that we can no longer, even if we want to, borrow an indefinite quantity of dollars from the American Government—because we could only do it if we were to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. There was a very heavy adverse balance of trade in the dollar area which I think in 1951 was something in the neighbourhood of £23,000,000. One of the essential ways of reducing that deficit is in the production of wheat.
There are now, under the present Government, substantial increases in both grants and loans by the Department of Agriculture in aid of every type of improvement that the farmer can undertake in respect of his farm and buildings. Since we have taken office we have noticed an excellent recovery in the number of sheep and an improvement in the numbers of sheep exported. It is well for the House to have the figures recorded here. In 1952 we exported 18,000 fat sheep. In 1951 we exported 77,000 store sheep. In 1952 the number rose to 176,000. There was also an increase in respect of carcase beef.
When were the sheep born?
There has been an increase in the export of carcase beef from 6,300 tons to 25,000 tons in two years. There has been an increase in the export of canned meat from 9,000 tons to 18,000 tons between 1950 and 1952.
Hear, hear!
The pig populationhaving begun to decline disastrously during the last 12 months of office of the former Government, has now increased from 547,000 in June, 1952, to some 700,000, and in the first three months of this year some 200,000 pigs were sent to the curers—an increase over the corresponding period of the previous year.
Hear, hear!
The Government have been blamed for having to import butter and it is just as well to remind the House that the decline in the production of butter took place in the first year of our office largely due to the drought. The decline unfortunately was maintained in 1952. There are some signs of recovery at the present time.
In regard to eggs and poultry, there was, as I have said, a disastrous reduction in the number of poultry by about 2,000,000 in the last full year of the inter-Party Government's office. There has, I am glad to say, been some recovery in the export of eggs. The export of eggs in great hundreds in 1951 was 1,833,000. In 1952, it went up to very nearly 2,000,000, the actual figure being 1,958,000.
So you are going to drown them in eggs now.
We shall never make any foolish promises in that respect. The present Minister for Agriculture will never promise either to drown the British in eggs or to smother them in bacon.
In regard to dead poultry exports, there has been some progress. In 1951 we exported 196,000 cwt. of dead poultry and in 1952 the figure went up to 233,000.
And the price dropped to 2/8.
The total value of poultry and egg exports increased by £1,000,000 from 1951 to 1952, a recovery which we should not regard here as entirely satisfactory because we would like it to have been much more. The increase in poultry and egg productionis further exemplified by the fact that over 500,000 more day-old chicks were put into circulation in the period from November to March of this year as compared with November to March of the previous year.
With regard to various other forms of production, barley showed an improvement in acreage, and so far as potatoes are concerned the policy of encouraging the use of mobile potatocooking plants has proved successful, there being now 18 in operation. In my opinion, having seen the results of these in the Longford area, the number should be greatly increased.
So far as the aid given to the farmer for land improvement is concerned, the land reclamation scheme has been enormously expanded and speeded up. During the last full year of the inter-Party Government's office, less than £1,000,000 was spent on what was then called land rehabilitation, and nearly half of it went in administration costs. For this year, we have decided to spend in the financial year 1953-54 nearly £3,000,000, the actual figure being £2,861,000. In 1952, I understand that in respect of the scheme under which the farmer does his own work and the scheme under which the Department does it for him either directly or through contractors 100,000 acres were reclaimed. That again, is a figure we would like to see increased, but at least there has been a very substantial improvement since the last full year of the inter-Party Government's office.
There has recently, as the House knows, been an increase of some 50 per cent. in the amount made available to farmers under Section A of the scheme under which the farmer does his own work. The necessity for that was evident to us in that for the whole of the last two years there have been thousands of acres awaiting treatment in, for example, my constituency which would never have been completed till Tibb's Eve if the farmers there had had to wait for the Department to have contractors to do the work for them. The only possible way of improving the situation was to increase the grants. I may add that the land reclamation scheme was fundamentally a Fianna Fáil plan putinto operation in 1939 and greatly expanded ever since then. I am very glad to see that the Minister for Agriculture has renamed it and is using the name by which it was always called—the land reclamation scheme— because it was one of the first large-scale schemes put forward by the Fianna Fáil Government to stimulate the increase of production.
The same thing applies to the farm buildings scheme in which grants are offered for reconstruction or building of practically all types of farm out-offices and improving farmyards and concreting wherever it is desirable. The scheme was introduced just before the Government left office. In 1947 the preliminary regulations were issued by the then Minister for Agriculture. Fianna Fáil was entirely responsible for that scheme and I am glad to see this year a sum of £480,000 is being provided for the very urgent need to improve farm buildings of all descriptions.
I note also that there is provision of £200,000 for grain storage. It is quite evident that with the progress of mechanisation, farmers are more and more unprepared to face the hazards of the weather. They are mechanising the whole process of collecting the grain and also making provision for grain drying in one form or another. That is a thing I think should develop. I am very glad to see that there are more and more efficient grain-drying plants, and that the size of the unit has grown smaller with fresh technical developments; and whereas it is still a very costly thing for a small farmer, the size of the grain-drying apparatus has been constantly decreasing.
In its previous term of office Fianna Fáil believed in increasing the number of agricultural advisers, and did so. I am very glad to say that the number of advisers went up from 88 in 1951 to 115 last year showing that there is continuous progress in regard to that matter.
There has been criticism of the wheat scheme based on the idea that farmers will sometimes be tempted toranch their land if they grow wheat for which fairly high prices are offered and would not renew the fertility of the soil. It is very interesting, going around the neighbourhood of my constituency—and I am very glad to see it —that the vast majority of the farmers have taken steps, and took steps last year, to maintain the fertility of their land when they grow wheat, knowing the difference between the amount of fertility lost under wheat as compared with other crops. In that connection, the scheme for providing credit both for pedigree seed wheat and fertilisers, done in connection with the milling agents, should prove very advantageous and should not provide any excuse for misusing the growing of wheat, which was always thrown against us here, a position which was never necessary and which I believe is not the habit of the vast majority of farmers at the present time.
I am very glad to see that the artificial insemination scheme, which again was started by Fianna Fáil, has been greatly speeded up. The number of inseminations provided was 13,000 in 1950 and rose to the very high figure of 76,000 in 1952. I am glad also to see that six new stations have been provided in a very recent period.
Realising the inevitable mechanisation of farming, it is good to notice that arrangements for the provision of loans for agricultural machinery have been made by the present Minister for Agriculture, who increased the upper limit of the amount that could be loaned for the purchase of agricultural machinery to £750 per machine and also made improvements in regard to the amount of the deposit required. It is also interesting to see that that scheme now applies to milking machines. Again, it is obvious from going around the creamery areas, that with the present cost of producing milk, the smaller milking machines must come more and more into their own.
In regard to credit in general, credit is made available for land reclamation, for fertilisers and for machinery on a satisfactory basis and facilities for credit have been improved to some degree. During a recent speech Deputy Costello suggested that the Governmentshould try its hand at some form of legislation to make it possible for farmers to own agricultural machines in common or to work them in common. On reading what he said, I asked the Minister for Agriculture and he assures me that the provision of loans for agricultural machinery can apply to any group of farmers who choose to form a co-operative society for that purpose and applies also to co-operative societies. There is nothing at the present time to prevent co-operative societies from making use of the loan schemes in order to own machines in common, that cannot be bought by individual farmers, and making them available on a rotational basis.
I am quite certain that if there are any administrative defects in that scheme or any legislation is in fact required to stimulate the use in common of agricultural machinery, the Minister and the Government will be only too glad to introduce such legislation as is necessary. So far as I understand, on the very best authority, no such legislation is required. That can all be arranged in one way or another by existing co-operative societies or by societies that can be formed voluntarily by farmers for that purpose, or by arrangements made through the agricultural committees. Obviously, there is a very large field there.
I would just mention one thing I noticed in going around County Longford amongst small farmers. They are faced at a great disadvantage in that they are unable to buy combine seed drills. It is obvious that the use of that machinery will have to become widespread. Arrangements must be made, the machinery is there and I am quite certain that if the Minister thinks there is delay or if there is an insufficient number of persons applying for machines under some sort of co-operative scheme, he will be prepared to make the necessary administrative changes.
Of all the agricultural schemes that are essential at the present time, I suppose that the subsidisation of limestone is one of the most important. It is interesting to note that 500,000 tons of limestone were delivered in the year ending March, 1953, and that that was double the quantity of theprevious year and about six times the quantity of the year before that. A new scheme is under consideration which will have still further effect in stimulating the use of limestone. The Department of Agriculture reckons that we need 12,000,000 tons capital application, followed by an annual usage of 1,500,000 tons; so that even though we have multiplied by six the consumption of ground limestone in two or three years, we are still very far off the mark to be reached of putting on the land the enormous quantity of 12,000,000 tons—I assume the Department is accurate in that figure—and then establishing an annual usage of 1,500,000 tons thereafter.
It is also interesting to see that the quantity of fertilisers used this year has very greatly increased. I hope that this trend will continue. The Minister is to be commended for the nationwide manurial demonstrations that he is inaugurating. I always feel that a practical demonstration of what can be done in farming methods is better than talks or lectures, although these are very desirable also. We need both of these methods together. The huge number of visits made by Macra na Feirme groups to Johnstown Castle to see the demonstration plots there must prove of value. I should like to commend the work done by the officers there in showing the people around. I happened to call when a group was being shown around and I must say it could not have been done better or to greater advantage.
The soil analysis section of the Department also shows good progress. The first arrangements for that were made in 1946 by the Fianna Fáil Government. There has been a very great increase in the number of samples analysed and tested since that period, in fact the number of samples tested doubled between 1950 and 1952. The present Minister for Agriculture provided further facilities, staff and so on, in order to cope with that work, which is of absolutely vital significance to the future of the country.
God be with the days of the bicycle wheel and the medicine bottle.
There has been an increase in the live-stock population so far as sheep are concerned and a recovery in respect of pigs. The Minister for Agriculture was largely responsible for that, through his export policy. In 1951 the pig population, after a recovery from the period at the end of the war when foodstuffs were not available, went down to 557,000. It has recovered since then to 719,000. We still have a good way to go to reproduce the pig population as it was in 1939. With an effort that should be reached, by a good tillage policy and if we can make satisfactory arrangements so far as the British market is concerned.
They have been made. You need not worry.
They were made by the present Minister for Agriculture.
Not at all. They were made in June, 1951, by me, and bear my signature.
The arrangements for improved facilities were made by the present Minister, as Deputy Dillon knows.
There is no truth whatever in that. The trade agreement under which pigs and pork are being exported was negotiated and signed by me.
The Deputy is just dreaming.
That is the fact. It was in June, 1951.
In regard to agricultural production in general, we still face the problem of increasing quantitative production. There was a slight increase in 1952, but it was nothing about which we can boast at the present time. This year there is evidence of what might be called a great deal more intensive production, using modern scientific methods. There is evidence of an improvement in that direction. Sometimes certain Deputies in the Opposition suggest that we onthis side of the House try to bully the farmers into increasing production.
Ten fields of inspectors.
The farmers cannot be bullied——
Hear, hear!
They can only be encouraged——
Opposition Deputies
Hear, hear!
They cannot be blamed——
Hear, hear! These are sentiments I applaud. It took you a long time to learn that.
The Minister should be allowed to speak.
May we not applaud his conversion?
Members of the Opposition may talk as much as they like—I am denying that we ever bullied them. The Minister of the last Government was trying to prove the excellence of his results—when it was the Providence of God and the good weather that produced them. He was trying to confuse the people as to the difference between an increase in value of exports and an increase in volume of exports. Every efforts was made to confuse the issue and not to face up to the fact that the big problem is to increase the quantitative production, which has barely changed since 1926. Their only counter reply was to accuse us of bullying the farmers. What the farmers need more than anything is, first of all, an assured market, the giving to them of the simple facts in regard to the growth of competition all over Europe once food supplies become more readily available, together with confidence in a stable policy, to give them confidence, above all, in regard to a tillage policy, and to try to end the dispute that has been made use of for purely political purposes by the Opposition in regard to the value of tillage. Only in that way can the agricultural community be encouraged to bring about a substantial increasein quantitative production. There is no reason why we should not produce as much per acre as any of the small countries in Europe where agriculture is a speciality. For that, however, our farmers need an assured policy and a stable Administration for that policy. They need a Minister who talks common sense——
Hear, hear!
We have not seen hair or hide of him to-day.
——and does not make claims about improvements in production which have not taken place or which have taken place only when compared with the figures for a year during which the weather conditions were probably the worst in our history. Only in that way can the agricultural community be encouraged to invest the very large amount of money that will eventually be required to bring about a substantial increase in production. All that must be seen in the light of facts. It is evident from the international reports that, although there will be a further increase in agricultural prices this year, the era of rising prices is coming to an end everywhere. It may not come at the end of this year and it may not come next year but it is obvious that agricultural prices, in relation to other commodities, are finally reaching their limits. That will at least prevent a cloud of misrepresentation being created by those who are anxious to boast about their claims in so far as their capacity to direct the efforts of the farmers is concerned because, henceforward, quantities will count, rather than prices, in deciding whether progress has been made from one year to another.
Any Minister for Agriculture can boast of what he did if agricultural prices rise. Here, and in other agricultural countries, agricultural prices have risen by about 40 per cent. since 1947. That being so, it behoves any Minister for Agriculture to be extremely careful about what he says when recounting progress. He may be glad to report that the value of exports has increased and that the value of total production has gone up but thatdoes not get away from the fundamental problem of increasing quantitative production. The reason for the stagnancy is not far to see. For many years there has been a tradition of uncertainty in this and every country due to the absence of any real price support policy over the world at large. Farm prices began to go down steadily after the first World War and they went down continuously in this and other countries for a considerable number of years. During the second World War it was impossible to make any substantial progress owing to the scarcity of fertilisers and machinery and because the farmers had to engage in special forms of production to help to preserve the security of the country and to provide essential foodstuffs for the people.
The Minister omits to mention the Economic War.
These conditions are now over and, from everything we can see, this year promises to be a favourable year. I have given the House only part of the list of the panoply of services which were, in the main, started by the Fianna Fáil Government during their former period of office, and which have since been expanded and developed. They include aid for practically every form of improvement that needs to be carried out on a farm. I think we can say that Fianna Fáil can claim credit for nearly all the major forms of improvement—the greater part of which were started by the Fianna Fáil Government prior to 1948. That valuable work has been taken up again by this Government and it has reached a climax of expansion far greater than that achieved by the Coalition Government in regard to the number of acres drained, the number of farm buildings improved, and so forth. No matter what you take as an example of work done, tremendous improvement is taking place all the time. We, on this side of the House, can take responsibility for having formulated the very great majority of these special schemes for farm improvements and for helping the farmer to increase production. The Fianna Fáil Party were very glad to beable to resume office in 1951 so as to ensure a still further expansion of those schemes.
I was very glad to hear the deputy Minister for Agriculture give the House a résumé of the work of the Department of Agriculture in the past year. I regret that I was not present to hear the Minister for Agriculture make his opening speech but I read it in the Official Report. The Minister for Agriculture and I both come from Kilkenny and represent the same constituency there. I noticed, in particular, two things about his speech. There are two crops which are ideal for County Kilkenny but there is not a word about either of those two crops in the Minister's statement. He left them on one side and concentrated on wheat, beet and other matters. He did not mention barley or oats.
Last year, due to the Budget, the demand for barley was reduced considerably. This year, malting barley, as a crop, has practically disappeared from the farmers' list. As I have said, that situation is due to last year's Budget. I have a letter here from a certain malting firm which states:—
"With reference to your application to grow malting barley for us this year, we regret we are unable to pass you a contract, as we are considerably over-contracted for last season's crop, and have been obliged to cut our requirements for 1953 by 66 per cent.
This has been largely brought about by the adverse affect on trade, caused by the terms of the last Budget".
A good share of the County Kilkenny is ideal for the growing of malting barley, but the farmers there have gone out of its production. On the principle of collective responsibility, I think the Minister must accept a certain responsibility for that position. Last year, certain people were able to get in their quotas of malting barley while others were not. The normal farmer was left high and dry with a big stock of malting barley on hands and could not do anything about it.
The position in regard to oats was similar. I thought provision would have been made for storage facilities or some way of handling the crop when it came on the market. Last year, oats were sold in my county for 27/- and 28/- a barrel at the time of harvesting and, a few months later, they realised 40/-. Quite a large number of farmers are not able to store this corn and, from a financial point of view, they want their money. I thought the Minister would have dealt with it from that point of view and would have said something about the handling of the oat crop this year— but, apparently, oats and barley are to be forgotten: the Government have no time for them.
The Minister should press hard for the provision of storage facilities for grain. With the mechanisation of farming increasing each year and more combined harvesters being used, farmers are left with grain in the fields for a week after harvest time owing to the want of storage facilities. The Minister, or his successor, whoever he may be, should concentrate on the provision of storage facilities.
I notice also from the Minister's statement that the report of the Milk Costings Commission will not be ready until 1954. How well that report has been delayed. Owing to the pressure brought to bear on the inter-Party Government to have a costings commission set up I thought that within 12 months after Fianna Fáil came into office the report of a costings commission would be available. But now, two years after the Government came into office, they say it will take another 12 months before the report of the costings commission is brought in, knowing well that they will not be in office in 12 months' time. That is just bluffing the dairy farmers. After all, we had enough bluff early this year when the Minister for Agriculture told us during the milk strike that Dublin had ample supplies of Irish milk and butter, while on the very same day we were given Dutch dried milk and New Zealand butter in the Dáil Restaurant. Still the Minister had theaudacity to try to bluff the farmers by saying that there were ample supplies of Irish milk and butter in the City of Dublin. The bluff of Fianna Fáil has been definitely called in Wicklow. There was no use in the Minister getting up and stating during the milk strike that there were ample supplies of Irish milk and butter available in Dublin when we were given Dutch dried milk and New Zealand butter in the Restaurant. How the Minister could say that I do not know.
The Minister also stated that artificial fertilisers were not used to a very great extent last year due to the Korean war. I wonder was it due to the Korean war or to the disgust of the farmers at being pillaged in the price of fertilisers. The former Minister for Agriculture on leaving office left 15,000 tons of fertilisers which the cronies of Fianna Fáil cleared out at a reduced price. When the ordinary farmers came to get their supplies the price was up by £4 or £5 a ton. That is what kept them from using fertilisers last year. The Korean war had nothing to do with it. The farmers determined that they would not be bled by any Government and they would not pay £4 or £5 per ton more than the price at which those in the Fianna Fáil cumainn got their fertilisers.
The Minister also said that a little expenditure on artificial fertilisers would give a wonderful return. We appreciate that. But, is it an encouragement to the farmers to use fertilisers to put a duty of 20 per cent. on fertilisers coming into this country? Is that the way to help the farmers to use artificial manures? Instead of taxing the raw materials of the farmers, they should get them at the lowest possible cost. Instead of a duty being put on artificial manures there should be a subsidy given.
There were statements made by two Ministers recently to which I listened attentively. The Minister for Finance stated that taxation lies very lightly on the land. Following that, the Minister for Local Government said that the increase in local rates was very small as compared with the increasein central taxation; that local rates had only increased by 140 per cent, whereas central taxation had increased by 260 per cent., which means that the Government, instead of bringing in new taxes, are shifting the burden of taxation on to the farmers. They have already started that by cutting the agricultural grant as a result of which they will take £300,000 per year out of the farmers' pockets. In future, farmers will have to contribute £300,000 per year more in rates. I suppose that only for the alarm caused in the country when Senator Quirke suggested that there should be a tax on cattle, a tax would have been put on cattle. If the Government have not put a tax on cattle, they are getting at the farmers in another way by cutting down the agricultural grant. I am sure that if they get away with that it will be only the first part of the taxation which will be shifted on to the land. As I said, the Minister for Finance made that statement already. The Minister for Agriculture is the man who should uphold and defend the farmers against the incursion of the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Local Government on their finances. If that increase of £300,000 per year is imposed on the farmers it will increase the cost of production very much.
I was very glad to hear the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs talking about pig exports. I am sure Fianna Fáil Deputies remember that when the inter-Party Government came into office you could not get a rasher in any ordinary hotel in Dublin. The bigger hotels were the only ones who could supply rashers. But, thanks to Deputy Dillon's policy of growing more food and producing more on the land, we have a different position now. As a result also of Deputy Dillon's policy our cattle exports, both processed and live, have increased from 405,000 to 739,000. These cattle did not grow up overnight. Everybody realises that that is the result of the policy of the inter-Party Government and of the former Minister for Agriculture. The farmers then began increasing production and the result is that to-day the exports of cattle have increased by over 75 per cent., as compared withthe time when the inter-Party Government came into office.
Last week the farmers got "stung" in connection with the bonus on lambs. There was a fair being held in Urlingford in the County Kilkenny, and the buyers from Dublin who usually came to buy cattle came down the day before the fair with lorries and, instead of looking for cattle, they went around to every farmer in that area looking for lambs. They were prepared to pay 5/- or 7/6 or 10/- more for lambs and the farmers were delighted to sell them. They did not know that on every lamb they sold these men were getting a "rake-off" of £1; that on every 20 lambs the farmers were dropping £20. I do not put the blame on the Minister for that because I honestly believe he would not do such a thing. I believe that the Government would not allow him to announce that to the farmers. The big exporters and the meat packers and everybody else had this information but the person who produced the lambs was fooled into selling the lambs without getting this extra £1, which went to these other people. No wonder the farmers of Wicklow voted in strength against the Government at the by-election. I am sure that Deputy Deering would not have been elected there but for the fact that the farmers felt that the Government had deprived them of £1 per head on every lamb they sold. I think that if an announcement was to be made, I think it was the men who produced them that should have got the benefit. Not only were the farmers not enriched, but they were left much poorer than if the announcement was made in the normal way.
It is amusing to listen to Deputy Crotty. Of course he comes from the same constituency as the Minister for Agriculture. Deputy Crotty must think that the farmers of Urlingford and around there are very slow when people look for this thing or that thing. There are no fools around there.
No, but they were fooled. If it was not for that, they would not be in the House.
Deputy Deering was elected on the Labour vote. We listened to you and never interrupted. I listened to your colleague, Deputy Hughes, when he mentioned beet but last year he could only afford to sow one acre of beet. It was not paying, he said, but he was able to sow 20 acres this year. He tried to sabotage the beet growing but he did not succeed.
He did not try to sabotage it. He tried to get a better price for the farmers of Ireland. He is not here to defend himself.
I, as a member of the Beet Growers' Association, am fighting for the beet growers, too. Deputy Hughes also said he produced more wheat in his place. He may have. He is in the fortunate position of having plenty acres of land but I could bring him to my own parish in North Tipperary and we grow as much wheat as any farmer will produce down there. We represent the good working farmers. Deputy Mark Deering was elected on a Labour vote.
I issue this challenge— I will contest Wicklow against Mr. Brennan and Deputy Cogan on my own.
Deputy Dillon, too, went out and he quoted the late Deputy Paddy Hogan: "One more cow, one more sow and one more acre under the plough". But he went very far from the plough during his time. He never quoted wheat or beet on any of the advertisements on behalf of the Department. He could not see his way to increase the price.
That Administration is not under discussion. You may discuss what the particular Deputy referred to but what he did cannot be discussed. The late Deputy Hogan's activities cannot be discussed on this Estimate.
If Deputy Dillon had his way we would have no cows and no milk because he would be offering the farmers 1/- a gallon for milk for the last five years. Would we be verywell off now at 1/- a gallon for five years? We would not have the people of the towns crying out that butter was too dear at 4/2 a lb.
What about the 1/9 the Minister promised?
We are getting 1/8 in my area anyway.
Not quite. I only got 1/5½.
Let Deputy Crowe speak when I am finished. The price of butter according to Deputy Blowick is far too dear. Would Deputy Blowick go to the farmers and tell them to bring down the price of milk? Would Deputy Crowe advocate the price of milk being reduced?
On a point of order. Butter is 4/2 a lb.——
Will Deputy Crowe please resume his seat? He can make his own statement afterwards without interruption.
Deputy Hughes referred to Deputy Dillon with acclamation. Of course we have Mr. Walsh and he is a plain man of the people. He does not boast an Oxford brogue; he is the type of man the farmers want.
Would you say he was a good farmer?
Yes.
Then go down to Kilkenny.
You cannot discuss his personal activities. We are discussing him only as a Minister.
Of course we have had references by certain Deputies to fertilisers being brought in and being far too dear. During my time—I am chairman of the committee of agriculture in North Tipperary—even his own supporters asked Deputy Dillon for fertilisers subsidies and he did not see his way to do anything about it. He couldhave "millions to spend in an afternoon."
The Minister brought in cheap fertilisers.
I do not think he did.
£9 a ton.
Not a question about it. I am glad that some Deputies on that side of the House take this Vote some way seriously, not like Deputy Donnellan, who, to my mind, seemed to be suffering from the effects of this over-taxed commodity.
The Deputy should not make such a statement. The Deputy will have to withdraw that statement.
I am sorry, Sir, I withdraw. Some Deputies have referred to the Local Authorities (Works) Act in regard to the drainage of rivers. He could tell Deputy Crotty that the trouble was that unless a river was flooding a roadway you could not get a river done under the Local Authorities (Works) Act. There are plenty of rivers causing flooding but they could not be done under that scheme. There should be grants to clear those rivers under the land reclamation scheme, so as to help farmers to avail of the grant.
References were also made to the Agricultural Credit Corporation by some Deputies. I do not think it is of any advantage to the farming community because when you go into it you would nearly want three or four farmers along with you to get any money. If the farmer had money he would not want to go there. Land is the greatest security we have in the country at the present time and the farmer should be good enough security. The sooner this matter is looked into the better.
There is another point I would like to bring to the notice of the Minister and it was raised by my committee of agriculture. It concerns manures coming into the country. Great play was made about slag being imported but there was no brand or analysis of any kind on the sacks. I would like toknow if it has been properly tested out as I have been told it is a very inferior quality. It would be entirely wrong if manures were allowed to come in under a special brand and if no analysis were supplied with them showing exactly what the manure contained. No manure should be allowed in if an analysis is not supplied as an indication to the farmer of what he is buying.
Another matter in which farmers in my area are deeply interested, especially tillage farmers, is the rabbit pest. The question of the export of rabbits is dealt with on Page 11 of the notes on some activities of the Department. The statement is made there:-
"Despite a falling off in the demand for rabbits in Great Britain in the early months of 1952, exports during the year were only slightly below the high level attained in 1951, the figures being, 1952—132,511 cwt. and 1951, 136,699 cwt. The value of the 1952 exports, viz. £839,792, showed a decrease of £257,468 as compared with the previous year. The usual seasonal prohibition of exports is at present in force."
That cannot be avoided but I would suggest that some means should be devised to deal with this rabbit pest. In fact, a subsidy or a grant might be paid for these "blowers" or machines which would help to fumigate the rabbits. Rabbits are responsible for a considerable amount of damage not alone to grass and corn but to beet crops, as Deputies coming from areas in which beet is grown to any great extent will testify. I think this is a matter that should be looked into.
In conclusion, I think the Minister is to be congratulated on the latest agreement. Deputy Dillon claims that it is his agreement, but I think it is generally recognised that there have been a number of improvements on the agreement made by Deputy Dillon. Farmers generally are glad and very grateful to the Minister that such an improvement has been brought about.
In speaking on the Estimate for Agriculture, I try to approach the subject objectively. Wehave been told that the prosperity of any country depends on production and production comes under two categories—industrial and agricultural. Great efforts have been made, to which I take no objection, by the Fianna Fáil Government over a number of years to develop the industrial arm which was so long neglected, particularly under the despotism of a foreign régime. I am afraid, however, that the interest Fianna Fáil took in that work had prejudicial effects upon the agricultural community to whom, for a time at least, they devoted, apparently, little attention. I often thought that the fact that they were so completely city-minded was responsible for the neglect of that industry which is so essential and paramount to the economic prosperity of our country. No country in the world can continue to spend money indefinitely unless its resources are replenished from some gainful activity, otherwise, the sources of supply will be exhausted within a short time. I listened here to the Minister the other day, when he painted what appeared to be, for the community I mainly represent, the dairy farmers, a catastrophic picture, as regards the future of the industry with which they are concerned. Even at a meeting, I think in Wexford, about 12 months ago, he spoke about decontrol. That would spell ruin for the dairying industry, an industry which the Government, the Department and everybody connected with it admit is the foundation of our whole prosperity.
It is admitted, I think, that the dairying industry is the foundation of our whole economic structure, but what did we hear from the Minister last week to implement that policy and that philosophy? He told us about the dual-purpose cow and the succession from the dual-purpose proven bull. It seems to be the considered, accepted policy of the Government to develop the dairying industry with such cattle as foundation stock.
If that is so, what has he done to preserve in continuity that part of our industry? Here last year I submitted a statistical return showing the number of cows in a particular station or stations which were in calf from thewhite-headed bull. I wonder did the Minister take any particular notice of that? I devoted considerable time and attention to an examination and confirmation of these figures so that I could stand over and defend the facts which I put before the House. I stated then that 67 per cent. of 32,000 cows were being or had been inseminated from a white-headed bull and that that seemed to be in conflict and at variance with the interests of the dairying industry. The off-spring of such cattle would be mainly intended for beef. I pointed out then that no one would blame the farmer because he was conducting his business as a sensible progressive man working in the best interests of himself and his family. A calf from a whitehead, sold in the market to-day, is making from £12 to £14 and I have heard, from a very reliable authority, of one calf which went to £18. At the same time we cannot sell calves from shorthorns. It is a perfectly defensible and rational policy on the part of a farmer to ensure that his cattle will produce a strain which will add more money to his banking account and place him in a better financial position generally.
I went to the trouble for the last week to collect a little more data about what appears to be a very serious problem and I would warn the Department that unless they take very serious notice and adopt some system whereby the farmer will be reimbursed for any loss which he incurs by pursuing a certain economy, he certainly will not continue to pursue a system of economy that pays him less than a system which might be followed with much less trouble. You are compelling him to revert to a system of economy that certainly is not in the interests of the dairying industry. I wonder is any notice being taken of this warning? Is it waste of time to stand up here and to produce facts and figures which show that a policy is being pursued which is destructive of the fundamental industry of the country? The facts which I submit can be verified and confirmed and will bear the closest scrutiny and examination. The Department must not have done very much about it because it is continuing in an increasing and progressivemanner along the lines I pointed out then. In a small station in my constituency 300 shorthorns, 465 Herefords and 194 Friensians were inseminated, in the month of May. In a small sub-station last year, 5,000 cows were brought in calf by this new modern and, I believe, accepted system, but, out of that total, more than 80 per cent. are now in calf for the production of store cattle which are accepted not to be the best for the production of milk. Is that not something to think about? The Government increased the charge for insemination by the white-headed bull and specified a much lesser charge for the dairy shorthorn. What was the purpose of that? They thought the farmer would accept the cheaper of the two, but do you think a farmer cares twopence about a difference of 15/- or 35/- when the purpose it serves gives him a bountiful harvest? This is a small station and, in the months of April and May, 1,022 cows were inseminated for the production of these cattle, a policy which, if continued, will end the dairying industry, which is admittedly the basis of our whole structure.
What did the Minister tell us last week and what has he been telling us up and down the country? He said that the only solution is increased productivity. We agree, because, if you increase productivity, you reduce the cost of production, and, by reducing the cost of production, you can reduce the cost of living. He says that the farmers must increase their milk yield. That policy was enunciated here time and time again by the previous Minister, and I subscribe to it, but what steps has this Minister or his Government taken to implement that policy? He took the opposite course, by increasing the cost of the very material that would increase the grass yield and its nutritional value.
Fertilisers were increased in price by 20 per cent. which represents £4 or £5 a ton. I put out a considerable amount of fertilisers this year and, with this increase compared with last year, I had to consider my position and relate it to other administrative costs which I would be forced to meet.
The Minister imposed that increase and, at the same time, told the farmers to produce more, to use fertilisers and lime. The same applies to maize which is about 4/- dearer in price than it should be. It takes seven or eight cwt. to fatten a pig, which means £1 or so less profit to the farmer.
I am not a young man and I have lived in the clash of different Governments, foreign and domestic. I know what the farmers went through and I know the significant part they played in the history of this country. They played a glorious part in all the struggles down through the years for freedom, but I never knew them to make such a fight as they are making to-day—a fight, not for national freedom, but to keep the dairying industry alive. In the past, whenever they improved their houses or made their cattle byres more modern and hygienic, the landlord's agent imposed an increased rent and to-day they are making a desperate struggle in three counties—I represent the greater part of one—against terrible odds. Everything is going up on them. World conditions, perhaps, played their part, but what is the Government doing to reduce the ever-increasing expenses of the agricultural community?
The rates estimate passed by my council a month ago has now to be reconsidered on the basis of adding another burden to the farmer's load. We must employ an extra man. I have some men employed whole-time, but I must employ more. If I want to save £13 on the agricultural grant, I must employ a man whom I do not want, at a cost of from £180 to £200 a year. Is that not a strange economy and a strange way to help the farming community? Our budget which we will be considering anew on Saturday next, as a result of this innovation, will involve about £20,000 extra for the rate-paying community.
The Taoiseach spoke here recently about industrial development and, in a secondary place, about agricultural development.
Our country has a reasonably fertile soil. From the point of view of climate we are not subject to extreme variations.Other countries less favourably situated from the geographical point of view, less fertile, with extremes of climate, have successfully advanced. Here we are after 30 years of native Government and our agriculture has remained almost static during that 30 years. There is no real prosperity. There is no real development. The young men will not work on the land. The farmers' sons are flying to the cities and towns. Most Rev. Dr. Lucey stated publicly recently that 50,000 have left the farms of this country in a few years. The Taoiseach on one occasion told us that the race is disappearing. The only way in which we will hold the race is by having a prosperous agricultural economy, and the Taoiseach should address his remarks in that respect to the present Minister and to his Cabinet. Every step the Government takes retards the development of agriculture. Let me quote again:-
"But a bold peasantry, their nation's pride,
When once destroyed can never be supplied."
Fifty thousand skilled technicians and agricultural workers have gone. Our young people are fleeing and the foreigner is coming in.
Reference was made to the Agricultural Credit Corporation. The only farmer who gets money from the Agricultural Credit Corporation is the farmer who has behind him the bank's recommendation. It is impossible to borrow money unless one has the bank's recommendation behind one. Every Deputy knows that. We have been told that 62 per cent. of our people are engaged in agriculture. If these people are living in a state of penury, what earthly hope is there of developing a prosperous agricultural economy? They are entitled to a just reward for their labour, their toil and their sweat. Remember, they work from early morning until late at night, not for one day but for seven days in the week. If these people have not got the wherewithal to buy how can we hope to develop a prosperous agriculture? That is axiomatic.
The Minister for Industry and Commerce,and those who went before him, have done their best to get into the foreign markets. Some advance has been made. We are trying to enter into a highly specialised market against competitors who have at their disposal the best technical skill and brains they can command. We are doing our utmost to develop an industrial arm. Why not put our energies into developing the industry that God has given us? We have a fruitful soil. We have an intelligent farming community. We have a nucleus of trained agricultural workers. The agricultural industry is dying. The schools are closing for lack of pupils. Marriages are taking place too late in life. How often do we hear the old man or the mother lament: "God help us! Little Pat is getting married on Tuesday. We will be lost without him." And "little Pat" is 65 years of age.
The Government has certain obligations to the farming community and they should not disregard those obligations. If we want to save the Irish race something will have to be done quickly. From time to time, when difficult problems have arisen, the Taoiseach has appealed to us to learn the Irish language; that appears to be the panacea for all our ills. Is the preservation of the language more important than the preservation of the race? To-day it is well-nigh impossible to get a man to work on the land. "Let the farmers employ more labour" is the cry. The farmer cannot get labour. I know what I am talking about for I farm 104 acres. In another line of business I have direct contact with the agricultural community. The foreigners are pouring in. The MacCarthys and the O'Donnells are fleeing from the country. Some Government will have to grapple with this problem. Denmark invested £50,000,000 in the soil of her country. In a few years the population trebled and Denmark is recognised to-day as one of the most go-ahead agricultural communities in the world. We send delegates from here to study their technique and their methods of farming, to find out the reasons for their progressiveness.
It sickens me. We are told to increase the production of fertilisersand to fatten more pigs and then they make maize dearer. I do not think there is much more I have to say. I promised I would direct the little I have to say towards that industry which expects that I should. I have done that and I trust it will have some effect. I trust that the Minister and the Government will go along the lines suggested. If they do so the day will come when we will have a better and more prosperous Ireland and with that prosperity we will no doubt see the removal of the Border.
I do not think that things in Ireland are just as bad as the last Deputy said. He definitely made some very good points in his speech but, nevertheless, the agricultural community is reasonably well off now. I myself was brought up on the land and in my young days there was a struggle to exist. It was hard to live. People worked harder in those days and the hours were longer, but in spite of all that the people were poor. To-day, those people are reasonably well off and matters have improved considerably.
Reference was made to the decay in our rural population. I was one of a family of nine reared on the land and only one of us could stay. The same thing applies to every farm in the country. I do not know how three and four could be put on a small uneconomic holding. Years ago there was a man who had three sons and he liked them so much that he decided to divide up his farm among the three sons. Instead of doing two sons a good turn he did the three of them a bad turn. That was the usual procedure in those days and it has been the curse of Ireland. Possibly the sons of the individual to whom I have referred had other sons and the farm was still further subdivided.
The people did not live on the land in those days. They went to the United States and other countries. There is one thing in this country which has definitely changed. I do not know whether the change came about during the last 30 years or prior to the advent of native Government. The people are not getting married asyoung as they used to in our fathers' days.
This is the Estimate for the Department of Agriculture.
I am speaking on agriculture. I am endeavouring to answer the last Deputy who spoke about the decay of our agricultural population. That is something that neither the present Minister nor his predecessor is responsible for, good, bad or indifferent. The last speaker wanted to point out that all this decay among our rural population happened in our time. That is wrong and well the Deputy knows it is wrong.
I shall now return to the home front for a while. During the days of the inter-Party Government I had reason on a number of occasions to draw the attention of the then Minister for Agriculture, Deputy Dillon, to the harm he had done the tillage farmers of County Dublin. Let me show how lopsided his economy was. During his first year of office he practically destroyed our tillage farming. By that I mean he destroyed their idea of tilling their land and doing the things that tillage farmers would like to do. He first advised them not to bother about wheat but to go in for oats. The result was that he flooded the market completely with oats while the farmer had a good market for wheat. What type of policy was that on the part of a Minister for Agriculture?
The farmers changed over to oats overnight and since the market was flooded with oats they could not sell their oats. The following year they got no encouragement to carry on tillage. County Dublin, which I represent, is essentially a tillage county and all the farmers wanted was a little bit of encouragement. They would definitely do the job and wanted no compulsion, good, bad or indifferent. Deputy Dillon then began telling them about the cheap maize that he would import. He advised the importation of maize with the result that a number of farmers went completely out of tillage because they were frightened as a result of the shock they hadreceived when they took his advice to grow the oats. If a Minister destroys the confidence of a community and especially that of the tillage farmers, a Minister will not win that confidence back again. As a result of Deputy Dillon's policy a number of the tillage farmers of County Dublin reduced their tillage considerably and this had adverse affects on the agricultural worker. Hundreds of agricultural workers lost their employment.
I can cite a case of a man who had 1,500 acres of land in conacre and in 1949 he reduced that to 52 acres. That, again, shows what a Minister like the then Minister for Agriculture, Deputy Dillon, succeeded in doing. The only way in which we can progress is for the Department of Agriculture to give the farmers reasonable protection from foreign competition. They should give them encouragement in every possible way and endeavour to help to get the best possible export market for them. We, in Fianna Fáil, have consistently carried out that policy ever since the day we first succeeded in getting into office.
Our policy all the time has been to develop our agricultural industry to its full capacity. That was the task we set ourselves when we first became a Government. I do not want to be too uncharitable to the previous Minister, supported as he was by Labour, Clann na Talmhan, Fine Gael and the rest of them, but I do want to say again that during their term they succeeded in destroying the economy which we had gradually built up over the years.
To indicate how successfully they carried out their work, I shall take one point that concerns the County Dublin. We had the irrational statement made by the previous Minister that he was going to drown England in eggs. He misrepresented everything that his predecessors had done. I remember, on one occasion, complimenting him on being a past master at misrepresentation. He completely misrepresented us by taking the year 1947 and comparing it with the previous successful years during the régime of Fianna Fáil. We all know quite well that, as far as agricultureis concerned, the year 1947 was one of the worst years over a period of more than 50 years. Weather conditions were so bad in 1947 that I had the honour of getting together a force of 84,000 volunteers to help save the harvest in County Dublin and in five other counties. That was the year Deputy Dillon took as his year for making a comparison so as to try and misrepresent what we had done all over the period from 1932.
Another industry in the County Dublin that I am deeply concerned in is the tomato industry. During the days of the inter-Party Government I, as one of the Deputies for County Dublin, advised a number of our market gardeners, farmers and workers to get into the tomato industry. I had seen the potentialities of it, and I realised that, if properly developed, it could be worth something to the country. A number of our people took my advice. When the industry was gradually getting on its feet, the then Minister for Agriculture, because a few pounds of tomatoes at the beginning of the season were being sold at a somewhat high price, came along and said that he was anxious to get tomatoes to the people living in Dominick Street and Gardiner Street. He made an Order flooding the country with Dutch tomatoes.
We had that kind of misrepresentation by the then Minister, supported at the time by Labour and everybody else on that side. That is how the national issue was clouded. These men were not concerned with taking the long view in trying to make this country self-supporting. I know a number of people who, at that time, went to the banks and to credit corporations to get money to put up glass-houses for the growing of the tomatoes. When the crop came in in the months of July or August, all that they could get for the tomatoes was 3d. or 4d. a lb. Therefore, I say that the then Minister for Agriculture, and the inter-Party Government, were more concerned with supporting foreign labour in the production of tomatoes in other countries than they were in developing the industry here. The home market was flooded with foreign tomatoes.These are some of the things which it is very hard to forget, especially by any one who was deeply concerned in the development of the home industry.
The facts which I have stated cannot be denied. I pleaded at the time with the then Minister, and with those who were supporting him, to take the national view as regards the development of that side of our industry. When I did so, I was grossly misrepresented. I was told that I was concerned with vested interests. Was I concerned with vested interests when I did all I could to help the small man to put up a glass-house 50 feet long to grow tomatoes, and to put another 50 feet to it in the following year? We all know that the Dutch Government gives every encouragement to its people to grow tomatoes.
Tomato growing was a new industry here and it was our duty to support it. The inter-Party Government during their three years in office succeeded, to a great degree, in damaging the enthusiasm of the people concerned in its development. In doing so they were careful to plead with the weaker sections of our people by saying that they were concerned about the price. It was the duty of the then Minister to see that the prices charged were reasonable and not exorbitant.
We have a number of fruit growers in my constituency. Deputy Giles is as familiar with this problem as I am. We are definitely anxious to extend fruit growing in the country. A number of the growers in the County Dublin told me they were thinking of selling out in 1931, but decided not to do so when Fianna Fáil came in in 1932, because they were then given reasonable protection against the dumping of foreign fruit on the home market at that time. They were encouraged to grow more fruit and did so. In that way they were able to give a good deal of employment. We were gradually reaching the time in our economy when we could supply practically all the requirements of the home market in fruit. It was another point in our self-sufficiency campaign of producing from our own land all the essentials we require. The war came along and as a result of it we foundthat there were many things we had to do without.
During the period of the inter-Party Government, I went on deputations to the then Minister for Agriculture and pleaded with him to give reasonable protection to our fruit growers. What happened, however, during 1949 and 1950 was that our jam manufacturers were allowed to import thousands of tons of pulp. I asked a question about this five or six months ago and obtained the import figures from the Minister. I am sorry I have not got them with me, but I know that the imports of pulp ran into thousands of tons. We have now the opportunity of again developing the fruit growing industry, the growing of soft fruits and of hard fruits. It is our aim to develop it as far as possible.
A country which imports anything that its land is able to produce is going backwards and not forwards. Our aim is to create faith in our people to produce all the things we require. We should not import anything that we can produce here, and should aim at reaching the time when we will be able to export many of the commodities we produce. I admit that climatic conditions may be such at times as to prevent us from reaching that point.
The Minister has done a good deal in regard to the preserving of fruit. I hope he will continue to take a deep interest in that development. Some of our fruit growers in County Dublin have put up a number of preserving stations. I should like to see that work extended in a much bigger way. If it is, then the home market will not be flooded with foreign fruit at particular periods of the year. We will have our own supplies available all the year round. These are some developments which were pooh-poohed by the previous Minister for Agriculture and the Administration of which he was a member. Now things are going on reasonably well. I do not say that it is all due to the fact that Fianna Fáil is in office. I am not going to claim we are able to work miracles. I leave all the miracles to the people on the other side of the House. However, byhard reasoning and sound economics, we are encouraging our people: "If you do certain things we will stand behind you and see that you get reasonable protection. We do not say that you will be too hard on the consumer. We are asking you to produce goods at a reasonable cost and you will have a reasonable market. That is all we can do."
I heard the previous speaker also talking about the dairying industry. If there was ever a man who deterred the dairying people from producing more milk, it was the Minister for Agriculture who was a member of that Deputy's Party. During the term of office of the inter-Party Government the then Minister went so far as to tell them that he would give them 1/- a gallon for milk. I realise the value of the dairying industry to the country and that the by-products of the dairying industry are also very valuable. If there is any way in which we could develop it further there is no one who would like it better than I.
As far as we in Fianna Fáil are concerned we gave the dairying industry all the help and encouragement we could. In regard to the price of milk, as a national Government we must consider all sides. While I had a hand in the settling of the milk strike I want to say that at that particular period, we had to be fair to all sections of the people. I heard that one particular man, Deputy Cogan, who was helping me at that particular period, was foully misrepresented recently. There is no man who worked as hard for the farmers at that time and there is no man who made representations on behalf of the farmers more strongly than Deputy Cogan on that occasion.
Who was responsible for putting them in jail?
A Deputy
Themselves.
That was a tragedy. The dispute was almost settled the night before. I do not want to go into the pros and cons of that now. I am dealing with the economic side of the industry. Deputy Dillon said he would give 1/- a gallon for milk. The wayhe treated those people was appalling. He told them first they were part of a Fianna Fáil racket and he went all over the country misrepresenting them in that way. When they made representations to him he could not see his way to do anything only scorn them. That is a further pointer to the inconsistency of that Minister's policy during his term in office. During those three short years he contributed more than any other Minister to the destruction of the dairying industry and he contributed more than anybody else to forcing the succeeding Government to import butter. He made many uncharitable remarks about the farmers' butter and the way it was handled. Furthermore, he gradually succeeded in getting a number of farmers to sell their dairy herds. I have instances of that but I do not wish to weary the House by going into detail in that regard. The then Minister for Agriculture did his best to destroy that part of our economy.
Again in reference to a remark made by the last speaker, we have people who want a great deal and also people who obtain a certain amount; between the people who have something to give and those who want to get something, we on this side of the House as a national Government must decide what is in the best interests. We represent all sections of our people. In trying to help one section we put a burden on another section and thus create a vicious circle. Whenever we give something to one section another section is penalised. We must endeavour to be fair to all sections of our people. I am convinced that all along we were as fair as we could possibly be to the dairying industry. The man who produces milk is as much entitled to an increase as any wage-earner. While we realised that we must be impartial and try by every means in our power to be fair because we could easily destroy the industry we are trying to encourage by making things dearer. If you make things too dear people will change to something else and you will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
My latest information is that the dairying industry is doing reasonablywell. I hope we will continue with that upward trend and that we on this side of the House, if we are given an opportunity and if we overcome the misrepresentations that have been carried out against us, will succeed in having a sufficient quantity of butter for our people instead of importing it from other countries. Possibly we may reach the time when we will have butter to export as well as sufficient for ourselves.
Where will you export it?
I will ask the Deputy's advice when that time comes. I wish now to refer to the Agricultural Credit Corporation. I am not at all satisfied with this organisation with which I have been dealing quite often. I have had a number of claims from respectable farmers and others in County Dublin, and I find that it is very hard to get credit from the corporation without substantial security. It is very undesirable that when a farmer seeks a loan from the Agricultural Credit Corporation, it should be so difficult for him to obtain it. They want information on many details, and you would nearly want to give them a guarantee that you are not going to sell your land. I feel that things should be more fluid, so that the farmers will have an opportunity of getting what they require.
I want to compliment the Minister for Agriculture on giving the farmers an opportunity of buying machinery. That was a very welcome advance, and has been appreciated by a number of the farmers in my constituency. On the land reclamation issue, I congratulate the Minister on increasing the amount of money for this purpose. The first step towards land reclamation was the introduction of the Arterial Drainage Bill. The idea was to drain the major rivers that were responsible for the flooding of thousands of acres. I would appeal to farmers to take full advantage of the land reclamation scheme initiated by Fianna Fáil. Many farmers down through the years took advantage of that scheme to carry out very good work. We were never sopompous or presumptuous or so ridiculous as to tell the people, as they were told by previous Ministers, that they would remove the rocks of Connemara and put them in Killary Harbour or Galway Bay. We believe in ordinary constructive methods. We believe in carrying on slowly and surely until we reach the aim we set ourselves, that is, to improve the land, to increase fertility and thereby increase production.
The lime scheme was very badly needed. That was another of the things that Deputy Dillon as Minister for Agriculture was not so very concerned about. We introduced the lime scheme before the previous Minister went in. We have increased it and we hope to continue until the land has had all the lime it requires.
Another method by which we tried to help the agricultural community was the relief of rates on agricultural land. I heard the previous speaker talking about the changing of that scheme. That was brought about in a reasonable way. The man who gives employment helps towards the achievement of the national aspiration of creating employment for all our people. Farmers who had the privilege of getting this money and who earned it by employing people the whole year round are definitely hard hit. I am sorry for that. Anyone who is in the habit of getting relief of rates feels that his economy is changed. On the other hand the man who gives most employment gets most relief.
Bad water is responsible for disease among cattle, especially in summer, particularly the months of July and August. I would like to see good water on every farm. Nothing is so essential to the well-being of cattle. A good water supply is as essential for cattle as it is for human beings. Grants are available for the sinking of wells. Every farmer should take advantage of the grant. There was at one time a Deputy in this House, who has gone to his reward, who always emphasised the urgent necessity for having a good water supply. I would like to underline that. I hope we will reach the day when all farms will have goodwater supplies and that thus we will be able to eliminate a lot of disease among cattle.
A problem in this country arises from the fact that a great deal of grassland is completely starved. The problem does not exist to any extent in County Dublin although there is a little of it there. A system of rotational crops is operated in the greater part of County Dublin. In other counties there is a great deal of grassland that has become bitter and that is not drained. There are hundreds of acres producing nothing although the Minister for Agriculture has done a great deal to improve tillage and to encourage our people to till. Acres of land that is alleged to be arable are producing nothing. That is a national problem that must be dealt with. I would like to see the time when we would have plenty of money to put at the disposal of farmers to help them to deal with that problem. We have given them all the protection necessary and encouraged them to till their land on a rotational basis. There are thousands of acres that might be brought back to fertility. A great deal of it could not be tilled at all, but it is capable of producing more than it is at present.
Again may I answer the last speaker? Agricultural prices have increased by approximately 40 per cent. since 1947. I do not think the Deputy has any grievance on that score.
There is a big increase in the poultry industry. We have got down to hard economic facts again and have tried to encourage our people along reasonable lines. We have not told the poultry producers to build houses for hens because we were going to drown the British with eggs. We have told them to carry on with their work, to engage in tillage and to return to the economy that we had in our younger days, to feed the hens as they were fed 50 or 60 years ago. We have not tried to mislead our people.
The same applies to the pig industry. Gradually we are getting a number of people who had gone out of pig production to rear pigs. In my young days every farmer produced pigs. We are returning to that economy and we hope to improve with time. The agriculturalgrants for farm buildings are very useful for our farmers, too. The only thing I have to say about our farmers is that a number of them are not availing of that scheme. It is there for all of them and our farmers should take full advantage of the grant for the improvement of farm out-houses. It was first brought in by the Minister for Agriculture in 1947, by Deputy Smith. It was a very useful scheme and I welcomed that scheme because a number of our farmers were given by it great encouragement and great help to improve their farm out-buildings. A number of farm out-buildings still require to be improved, and while our farmers are doing reasonably well now, they should, nevertheless, take full advantage of that agricultural reconstruction grant and try to improve their farm out-buildings and do the things that help themselves in any way they can. The same, of course, applies to improving their farmyards generally and any other buildings associated with them.
Regarding the growing of wheat, I am delighted to welcome the increased price of wheat because an increased price is responsible for an increased acreage all over the country. There, again, you have reasonable encouragement by a reasonable Minister.
There may be some other points I have overlooked but I think I have bored the House for quite a long time this evening. I want to say again that I would like to compliment the Minister for Agriculture, who has taken a sane, reasonable attitude in dealing with a very important problem in our country. I think, given the opportunity, the various phases of our agricultural industry are gradually improving. We may reach the time, of course, when we may encourage our people in this country—in answer to some of the other points that have been made—in the agricultural community especially, the sons who are staying on the land, that they should marry earlier; but I leave that problem. I do not think the present Government or any other Government can succeed in doing that. It is possible that we may succeed in some years to come in appointing somespecially inspired character who will be responsible for encouraging such bachelors to marry earlier and not be denuding rural Ireland of her population.
I certainly do not wonder at the farmers of the country being puzzled over all the arguments that come from this House. I have been sitting here for days and I am bewildered myself, because although agriculture is the primary industry of this country, it is talked about and spoken of by so many different Deputies both on the Fianna Fáil side and on this side but nobody speaks about agriculture as agriculture. We should cut out what the previous Minister for Agriculture and the present Minister for Agriculture have done or are doing for Irish agriculture. These Ministers are put there to do a special job, to suit their Party, to carry out their programme. It is for the people either to keep them there or to remove them, but we should get away from that narrow, bitter, hateful position that we must see how we can down the other fellow. I generally come here as a loyal member of my Party first, but I speak as a man and I always will because I believe we should get away from all this nonsense. We hear Fianna Fáil Deputies stand up and say that the farmers are down and out.
I do not hold that the farmers are down and out. I live in the midst of them. They are fine, healthy, manly people doing reasonably well, and they would do reasonably well without any Government if they were let alone. I am satisfied that it is not the farmers who are wrong but this House that is wrong. They are getting a lot of rot from this House. Doles and sops of the last 30 years have the farmers and agricultural workers destroyed. They are people who, if left alone, could fend for themselves, and if we let them do so we would have got somewhere. Here we are saying: "I brought in the farm building scheme or the farm improvement scheme." Such damn nonsense! A farmer 40 years ago drained his own land, reclaimed his own land, worked his own land and lived reasonably comfortably and was able to give a dowry to his daughteror his sons on their marriage. What farmer can do that to-day? Damn few of them. They will try to slip their sons and daughters over to somebody else, but there is very little money going. I belive myself that what is wrong with this country is that there are too many work-shy people.
The first thing we need is a complete overhaul of our banking system. That must be done immediately, almost overnight, if you are going to get anywhere. Cheap money must be made available to Irish agriculture and the Irish farmer must be in a position of being able to go into a bank and get a loan when he needs it. Do not be talking about the Agricultural Credit Corporation. They are not a corporation. They are nothing more than a blister on the face of the people. The farmer who would look to the credit corporation for money would be a damned fool. He would want to be a rich man. It is time for some Government to tackle that position immediately, because it is starvation of capital and credit that is wrong with the farmers.
We hear a great deal about the 1938 Agreement and the 1953 Agreement and who brought it in, either Deputy Dillon or somebody else, but it does not matter who brought it in if it is a good agreement. The 1938 and the 1953 Agreements, if we carry on as we have been doing, will leave this country nothing only a ranch country, nothing more. It will strip this country of the small farmers and the country workers. We talk morning, noon and night about cattle, cattle, cattle. I live in the midst of wealth. I have not much of it myself, but I live in the midst of agriculture and I see all kinds of small struggling farmers with scraggy land, and I do not blame the small farmers in my county for selling out and getting out because when they look around them they can see a lot of wealthy men coming in and buying up the land, stocking it with huge gigantic bullocks, and they are hardly in this country when they are getting £75 to £110 for these cattle and wallowing in wealth, while the poor man on the scraggy farms of ten, 20 or 30 acres of third-grade land is tryingto live without credit facilities, and without any bank account. Then we are told that there is only one thing the small farmer will grow—wheat. The big fellow will not do it. The reason why the small farmer has to grow wheat is that he is not able to get cattle. If he goes to a fair to buy cattle, no matter what sort of scraggy beast is there, his price is £20 at least and up to £35 for a scrawny little calf and the small farmer is not going to be in a position when he can get anywhere. He has to go out and sell his land to a bigger neighbour or try to put in a bit of wheat under a credit system from the store in the area. I am satisfied that this kind of thing is not going to get us anywhere and something will have to be done about it. At the present moment it is a race for comfort and pleasure and money. Money should not be everything in this country. I am not going to say that this is a poor country and I do not agree with Fianna Fáil that this country is down and out. This country is not down and out. It is teeming with money but that money is not doing its proper duty. It is not being put where is should be put to give the people the things that are needed to make this country worthy of free men and of Irishmen.
If we go on as we are, the country will be stripped of its people. They will go to Dublin or London. The small farmer will be squeezed out, bought out and the poor little farm will be advertised on the gate or the tree for sale. It is not a small thrifty farmer who will buy it but the wealthy magnate. He will rope in the small bits. The Land Commission is dividing land into almost unecomonic plots and the big men are making gigantic estates again. Is not that stupid? There should be some means by which we would know what size a farm will be allowed. As a practical farmer, I myself believe that no man, no matter how good he is, should be allowed to hold more than 200 Irish acres. There should be a definite rule made in this House to that effect. I see chain ranches starting year after year and not a word about it. I say: "God help you, Ireland, you will get nowhere." A complete reorganisation of thewhole system is needed and also reorganisation in the minds of the whole lot of us. We are all too big for our boots. This country is flying round on rubber wheels. Every type of man, small man and big man, has a motor car. Everyone tells you he is down and out and cannot live. Is not that a puzzle? You cannot turn your car or even your push-bike at the church gate on a Sunday as there are 50 to 100 cars at the little country churches. If all these people are down and out, how can this happen? The whole of the country has gone wrong.
The 1938 Agreement was good and has been bringing some amount of prosperity, but if we follow it we will do what England tried to do for 40 or 60 years, we will make this a ranch country, a cabbage garden for England. I may be talking in a critical mood but I feel it is time to get away from narrow politics and speak facts. I do not see why every farmer Deputy here, no matter how bitter we may be to each other, should not meet in some part of this House and have a common talk on the best thing for agriculture. We are talking about agriculture for 30 years but making no headway. No man will work for a farmer at present. Down my part of the country, if you beg for a man to work you cannot get one. They are all working for the county council or going across to England and coming back with £50 or £100, which they blow in. If you ask one of them to work for a farmer, they will refuse.
What is the reason?
They are shy of the farm work. The county council can pay 6/- or 8/- more than the farmer can pay, so why should any man set his foot on the land? My own county council is offering 6/- or 8/- more, to any type of man to work on the road, scraping the road or cutting the hedges, than the farmer can give across the ditch. No man would dirty his boots doing that type of work if he could get work high and dry on the road. The agricultural worker should be the best paid man in the country. I know that at present that cannot happen, as agriculture will have to becompletely reorganised. The key man in the country's whole economy is the Irish agricultural worker, standing side by side with the farmer. Until these two men are happy and contented, working together, until the farmer can pay a decent wage on a Saturday night to a decent man for service well rendered, we will get nowhere.
This House is deliberately thwarting the country and leading it into a desperate position. The money is there. The men were there and the girls were there, but they are all going. Are we making any attempt to arrest that? I do not see any attempt. I hope that if the general election comes soon there will be a Government with reason and common sense that will face the hard stark facts, that there is a hard job to be done to put our people where they should be put, where every man will be working and working with an earnest, with his coat off, in the interests of the farmer, of the country, and of himself, where every farmer will get a fair crack of the whip and give all the employment possible and will be able to pay for it. The Government, whoever it may be, will reduce taxation as quickly as they can, because taxation is weighing very heavily on the people. Every move that can be made is made at present to find new taxes to place on the community. As a result, the people have no inclination to go forward. They see every Tom, Dick and Harry going to the labour exchange instead of to work, and then catching rabbits every day and getting so much more for that, and with the £2 or £3 from the exchange they are doing nothing. The State keeps them, while other men are working from morning to night with the farmer and get a lower wage.
We have to realise it is our job to change all this. There is no use preaching here about agriculture and saying that the farmer is the greatest man; we must do something about it and cut out the politics. If there is a general election and our side of the House wins, I believe we should ask the other side to come in with us and do a spot of work for at least ten years. I belong to the old crowd who came in seriously and honestly to do a spot of work and suffered to do it. I amglad to see that we have the finest men on all sides, good honest men, young and old, who if they got half a chance to get away from the narrow, mean, dirty, rotten, petty politics of the last 30 years, would get down to a spot of work, and forget the past and face the future. They would say: "We are going to do something for Irish agriculture, which has been neglected for 30 years." It can be done and I believe it will be done. If this House and the present people in it do not do it, they will be shoved out and the present generation will do it. After all the experience we have here, I do not see why we cannot do it.
We should put our finger on the sore point, see what is wrong with the country and why there is the drift I speak of. The little farmer is going out. Why will labour refuse to work with the farmer? Why are they going to England and America? The girls are going to England and before they are six months there they are married, but they will not marry here for 30 years. This is a country of old bachelors and old maids. Then we are told that a man cannot marry until he gets a hold of the home. I saw men who had not even tuppence in their pockets but had honesty of purpose and they got married and got through and raised themselves up to be comfortable farmers. Those men took a risk, but no one wants to take a risk nowadays. They want the big money and plenty of it. Money is the curse of the country and that other word "security". Everyone wants security, from the Taoiseach down. Who will give security, or who wants security? If they learned the Our Father and learned it well, that is all the security they want. The security is there for the working man if he looks for it. It is a materialistic madness that is gripping us, as it gripped Russia before and that is what we must overcome.
I want to see the plain, simple matter-of-fact way of dealing with this, getting work for the country, harnessing money to its task. We have hundreds of millions of pounds in this country and outside it, belonging to the country, and it should be harnessedso as to give work, in order to help the little farmers to raise homes, to give them a good chance of buying a little more land. We should see that whoever controls the banks loses that control and that it passes to an Irish Government, so that money could be lent at 2 or 2½ per cent. to Irish agriculture, as it is lent in Denmark. There they can build homes with cheap money at 2½ per cent., but here you must bow and scrape to get 6 or 7 per cent. and even then you may not get it. How can we make progress in that way?
Look at the little farmers and see the land stripped bare, with hardly an old cow on it, with a few acres of wheat and beet which is rubbish and dirt, as they are unable to buy fertilisers. They have to get a man with a tractor to come in at a high rate of pay to reap that. Then they go to the merchants and pay for the seed, then they pay the man with the tractor, then they pay for the mowing machine, and by the time they have done that there is nothing for themselves. They come to men like me and other Deputies and beg us to help them to get a stay on the rent for a few months until they sell a little bullock or a few cocks of hay. Is that not a poor position for the country? These people should be able to go with their heads up into the bank—creditworthy men—and pledge their word, and they have a word to pledge, to get money. I never knew an honest farmer who ever owed and did not pay up to the last penny. If the bank says: "You owe £200; pay it back", he wants none of that. He will pay back. If he has not got it, he cannot pay, but he will pay as soon as he can or his children after him, to the last penny. It is the same with the shopkeeper. Even if he has to wait six, eight or ten months for the farmer or labourer to pay his bills, he will wait, as he knows he will get the money— and he always gets it. But over the last 15 or 20 years, since we started squabbling, since the economic war was foisted on the people, this has become a nation of tanglers and bamboozlers of all kinds; they are springingup and destroying the manliness of our people. I see across the Border hundreds of men who were honest, decent men and now are smugglers on the Border and tanglers at fairs, robbing the poor simple country people, bamboozling them every way they can.
Is the Minister responsible for all that?
Yes, Sir. I am satisfied that a reorganisation of all our markets and fairs is needed. At present, we are in a tangled mess. Anybody can do anybody else. Those are the types of problems which a Minister for Agriculture should tackle and dispose of. We know what is wrong but the trouble is that nobody is big enough or manly enough to face it. If Deputy Dillon should become our Minister for Agriculture in a few months' time I hope he will deal with this matter. He is a strong man, a man of brains, ability, personality and courage. He will put his finger on the pulse of the country and he will give the country a programme in agriculture which will rehabilitate our farmers and enable them to pay good wages to their workers. When he was Minister for Agriculture in the inter-Party Government he certainly showed us what the country lacks and that is fertility in our soil. He showed us that the first problem we should tackle is the drainage of our country and he spent £40,000,000 on that work at the rate of £10,000,000 per annum. That work is a landmark in the history of agriculture in this country and it must follow to its logical conclusion. We should not cease in our efforts until every field in this country yields its full production whether it be of wheat, beet, grass, and so forth, so that we will not have the spectacle which we have to-day of land which could be put into useful production lying under weeds and dirt.
I hope that that programme will be carried out as vigorously as possible and that in every parish or area a project will be in operation—a project of which the farmers will be glad to avail because it will be of benefit to themselves. On occasion, I have seen reluctance on the part of some farmers to identify themselves with a projectbut, having waited and seen how the project benefited their neighbours who availed of it, they then made inquiries about it and were most eager to have their names listed and to get the work carried out on their own farms. That came as a result of example which was given in their area.
I do not hold very much grádh for our committees of agriculture. I believe they are a complete failure and a fiasco. We have not the finest type of officers there. We see four or six men in a county going here and there and doing their best, but then the committee itself is a political playground. There are certain people who have no idea in the world but to be elected to those committees for political purposes and to get anything they can out of it but to give very little in return. I want to see that type of committee wiped out. I want to see co-opted to those committees some of the key experts we have in this country and men who have made a success of their own holdings.
When a county council election is over, we very frequently find that the decent honest man who, while he was in office, tried to do some good for the ratepayers, is at the bottom of the poll, but that the hobo is at the top— and we know how he gets there. I want to see that system changed and I want to see the best type of man on our committees of agriculture—the man who is wise and honourable, who is a good employer and who has proved his worth on his own holding. From time to time in my county, we tried to get a few good men co-opted, but it was no use. The cry was: "Keep them out." What was the reason for that? The reason was that these men would stand in the way of the job-hunting that was going on. Every little job must go to a Fianna Fáil supporter. Every man who wants a position must have the proper pull. All that type of thing should have been killed years ago.
I come now to the subject of manures. I have it on good authority that at least thousands and thousands of tons of fertilisers were kept in stores in Dublin until they hardened into a rock-like condition while, all the time, ourfarmers were crying out for cheap manures. That formed some of the 25,000 tons of fertilisers which Deputy Dillon left there for the farmers when he was leaving office. I should be very interested to learn what became of those thousands of tons of fertilisers which hardened into solid rock, so that no ordinary individual could break them down. Were those fertilisers, in their rock-like condition, tossed into the sea, or were they ground down again and, if they were ground down again, are those the fertilisers which our farmers are now compelled to buy at high prices?
I heard Deputy Burke speak of tomatoes. Unfortunately, he can never get away from that subject because it is a hobby of his. I believe in an Irish tomato industry but I do not stand for the public being fleeced. Last week, I went into a shop to buy a few pounds of tomatoes. I asked for Irish ones and I was informed that they were 3/- a lb. Then I asked what was the price of the foreign tomatoes and I was told that it was 1/7. I asked the assistant to show the two kinds to me. I examined them and I can say that the foreign tomatoes are as good if not better than the Irish tomatoes. I said: "I am an Irishman and a good one but I refuse to pay 3/- a lb. for Irish tomatoes when I can get equally good tomatoes for 1/7 a lb." I appeal to Deputy Burke to open his eyes and to see what is going on. I would not allow the people of the country to be fleeced and I submit that half of those State sops and grants should be cut out.
In my own county I have seen men get big grants for building glasshouses. Some of the people who got those grants were the sons of farmers who had 2,000 acres of land. I submit that that is a disgrace. I want no grant to be given to any man, no matter who he is. Let us, instead, give him the cheapest money we can give him—at 1 per cent. or 2 per cent.—but cut out the free money because that is coming out of the taxpayer's pocket. Half of the money spent on the farm improvements scheme is wasted.
We have hundreds of officials getting50 per cent. of that money for running around the country in a motor car—and paid per mile, no doubt—to look over schemes such as a little piggery for a farmer or a cement walk to his shed. Surely the farmer could do that himself? Cut down the taxation and let them fend for themselves or, if we do not, we shall never be a nation.
The giving of sops over the past 20 or 30 years, in an effort to buy votes, is responsible for having us where we are to-day. We are over-taxed in every direction and we have inefficiency in all walks of our life. We have county managers piling up huge debts on our people to have more efficient highways and to provide more waterworks schemes for our towns and cities. But poor Paddy the farmer is getting damn all out of it all. It costs from £1,200 to £1,500 to build a labourer's cottage—and I am proud to say that we do it. Is the farmer, however, not carrying the burden of it all? We cannot increase the rent of these cottages because it would take from 15/- to £1 to bring the rent up to what it should be—so Paddy the farmer pays for it although he cannot get a house himself. The cheap money was cut out and the result is that no farmer is building his house—and more shame to Fianna Fáil for it. It is a public scandal that we have denied our farmers the opportunity to build houses for themselves while everybody else is getting a house.
It is no wonder that our farmers are sick and tired of the whole business and that they do not care two hoots who are in power. They say: "The whole lot of you up there are a bunch of crooks." Would you blame them?
I certainly would not blame them. I have been here for 17 years and I have studied the whole thing. I say that 80 per cent. of what is spoken here is nothing but high-falutin nonsense and politics. Very few men speak with sincerity and with honesty of purpose. They will not do it. All they think of is: "What will Jack So-and-so say; will it lose me a few dozen votes?" I am one who does not care tuppence whether he is thrown out ornot. I say here and I will say it at the chapel gate, and I will tell the farmers and labourers that the whole lot of them are being fooled. This country wants a shaking up and reorganising and an honest effort made to give the best return possible for the country.
The country has gone through 700 years of trials and tribulations. A few short years ago we got our freedom and an opportunity to make this country worthy of the Irish people. To-day we have an over-taxed community and our youth are flying out of the country. Beyond building a few houses, we have done nothing for the country. I challenge contradiction on that. England, Scotland and Wales are building houses; France and Germany are building houses. We are doing nothing more than building a few houses. We are not providing work for our people. We have put hundreds of millions of taxation on the shoulders of our people without any return. We are making big highways and giving employment to men who refuse to work on the land. Anyone can get anything he likes so long as he keeps away from the farmers.
The farmers should get their rightful place in the life of this country. They should be the leading men in the country and men who should be able to pay the best wages. They are the men who should be provided for. At present it makes no difference whether you are a good, a bad, or an indifferent farmer. The bad farmer will get more than the decent farmer. If you are a scrounger crawling to some political chancer, you will get somewhere. But, if you are an honest man wanting to stand on your own two feet, you will get nowhere. You will be told: "We will put taxes on you, you are too comfortable." There is the cheap Irish politics we have. That is what we have been listening to for 20 years. That is what has left us where we are. The sooner we have a general election the better. I do not care who gets in. All I want is a change of front and a change of heart and that the country will get a chance.
I was rather amused at the statements made by Deputy Giles. It is hard to know what he was drivingat. First of all, he complained of the lack of credit for the farmers.
For the good type of farmers.
Then he told us of the particular small farmers in his constituency and what they wanted credit facilities for. He said that if a farmer got credit facilities he would not be growing weeds, he would be rearing bullocks. If farmers want the facilities which Deputy Giles requires to convert their farms into the ranches he spoke about, I hope they will not get the credit facilities.
It is to do away with the ranches.
Let us examine these things along the line and see where we are and where we were a few years ago. Deputy Giles might well go back to 1951. I will go back to the position of the agricultural community then. I am sure that there is, and I am afraid will be for some time to come, people in the Department of Agriculture whose one idea is to curtail as far as possible the consumption of milk in this country. The former Minister for Agriculture made a complete idiot of himself in this House and outside it.
That word should not be used in connection with any Deputy.
There has been a scare that there is too much milk being produced in the country; that there is no market outside this country for our butter. The former Minister for Agriculture issued a public statement to the co-operative creameries offering the farmers 1/- a gallon for their milk for five years. Let us examine the result of that kind of policy and see where it has led us. Between 1950 and 1951 there was a reduction of 30,000 in the number of milch cows and a reduction in the number of in-calf heifers of 33,000, making a total reduction of 63,000,
What is the Deputy quoting from?
From the statistical return of the Department. That was the direct result of that Minister'sstatement and of the offer he made. Then you had these gentlemen over there blowing hot and cold. They said to the farmers: "You are not getting half enough for your milk", and to the housewife: "You have to pay 4/2 a lb. for your butter". I would be rather amused to see them paying an increased price to the farmers for the milk on the one hand and reducing the price of butter on the other hand. That was the first step towards the complete upsetting of the dairying industry in this country. You have in the Department officials who are fully determined that no breed of milk-yielding cows will be allowed in this country or into this country. In the Department of Agriculture they are prepared to go in for the improvement of live stock by giving premiums, paid for by the taxpayers and the ratepayers, for Hereford bulls, for Polled-Angus bulls, for the mongrel called the Shorthorn dairy bull, for anything but a pure milk breed. They refuse to give any premium for that.
We sent up an application from Cork County Committee of Agriculture a couple of years ago for a premium for Friesian bulls and we met with a blank refusal, while at the same time we had permission to give a premium for Polled-Angus or for Hereford bulls. Anything so ridiculous I never heard of before. Then, we are wondering why we have an average milk yield in this country of somewhere between 300 and 360 gallons of milk! And we are wondering why milk is so dear, whereas if you go across to any continental country—go to Denmark or Holland—you will find the average milk yield there is anything from 800 to 1,000 gallons! What is wrong? Is it the people who are wrong? Is it the cattle? Is it the climate? Or is it the Department of Agriculture that is wrong? I say it is the Department of Agriculture.
We have that condition of affairs in this country, carrying on definitely and consistently in favour of the beef breed of cattle. Then we have complaints as to the cost of milk. If any farmer has a Hereford cow yielding an average of from 300 to 360 gallons per cow, Godknows he will have to charge double or at least one and a half times as much for that as the farmer who has a Hereford cow yielding 800 or 900 gallons. If he makes any attempt to get those cows in, as I did, he is met with a blank refusal from the Department of Agriculture. They would not allow you to import them into this country, having 965 "moryah" excuses as to the reasons why you would not be allowed to import them. Anyone who knows and who has examined— and God knows it would be a bit of a job—the mentality of the dairying section of the Department of Agriculture, as I have for my 26 years here, would know very well why.
I congratulate the Minister on his courage on setting up the Costings Committee on Milk. I think it is the most courageous step taken by any Minister in this House, while I have been here anyway. I congratulate him also on seeing that these costing were put on a right basis and that into the cost will go the interest on the capital involved, and the cost of farm managing. Then, let us see who is right and what is the cost of production of milk, and when that will come out—as it will have to now—on the basis of the 360-gallon cow, we will see what the Department will then do —will they change their tune?
I heard any amount of praise here for the last few weeks, or since this thing started, of the late Minister for Agriculture, particularly as regards ground limestone. Some Deputies here have very short memories. Some Deputies here forget that it was Deputy Dillon who, when Minister, refused to pay any subsidy on ground limestone and that it was he who endeavoured to put out of business the Irish Sugar Company's ground limestone scheme, and who had the audacity in this House to give me a glaring falsehood when I mentioned it here.
We had this subsidy which Mr. Millar compelled the then Government to give, and when that subsidy came into effect I found to my amazement that any farmer in Cork, Limerick, Kerry or Tipperary who was getting ground limestone from Buttevant from the Irish Sugar Company would notget any subsidy. And what was the reason? The sole reason was that the Irish Sugar Company was spreading the lime on the farmers' land and the Minister for Agriculture wanted to keep the old farmer still in the mud and get him to shovel it.
I am making no statement I am not prepared to prove here. I raised the matter on the Vote on Agriculture, column 988 on the 18th April, 1951. I raised the fact that the farmers in my county and other counties adjoining were not getting the ground limestone subsidy to which they were entitled. I said:—
"The farmer who takes advantage of the fact that the lime will be spread on his land by the Sugar Company is being deprived of what his fellow farmers can get, namely, a subsidy of 9/- a ton. Surely it is possible to surmount this difficulty. If the Minister is not prepared to deal with a state company, which the Sugar Company is, and to give to that State company the subsidy which he is giving to others——
Mr. Dillon: Everything is working perfectly smoothly.
Mr. Corry: What about this letter I received last week from the Sugar Company? What has the Minister to say about that?
Mr. Dillon: The Deputy is out of date.
Mr. Corry: Has the Minister changed it since?
Mr. Dillon: I cannot say since the Deputy has got the letter, but it is working perfectly smoothly now—if the Deputy does not upset the applecart.
Mr. Corry: Can I get——
Mr. Dillon: ——all the lime you want.
Mr. Corry: ——and spread on my land at the subsidised price?
Mr. Dillon: Everything is now working perfectly smoothly."
That was on the 18th April, 1951. On the 2nd May, 1951, the last day on which we had the extreme pleasure of having Deputy James Dillon as Minister for Agriculture, I had to raise that matter again.
You will not have long to wait until he is there again.
Wait and see.
For what?
Until Deputy Dillon is Minister for Agriculture again.
Order!
I had to raise the matter again on the 2nd May, 1951. It was only at the last minute of Deputy Dillon's appearance as Minister for Agriculture here, when I raised the matter on the Adjournment, that he agreed to pay those men and to refund to them the money that his viciousness prevented them getting before. These facts are there in the Official Report, if Deputy Esmonde wishes to have a look at them. He can see the attitude of the benevolent Minister for Agriculture then. We found that under that Minister's rule the policy that he preached in this House previously was very rapidly being carried out.
I have given you the reduction in milch cattle. Let us take him on any other line. We had fixed up in this country one of the greatest industries that ever existed for the farming community, namely the sugar beet industry. Each year members of the committee of the Beet Growers' Association had to meet the Sugar Company in regard to price and in 1948, after we got our beloved James in as Minister, and when we met General Costello and asked an increase in price, he said: "Yes, you are entitled to 7/6 a ton increase." That was sent across to the then Government for sanction. What was the reply? "The previous Government have been far too generous with the farming community and we cannot agree to any increase." The acreage of beet in that year fell by 6,600 acres. It continued to fall every year while Deputy Dillon was Minister for Agriculture. The policy that he enunciated in this House when he proudly declared that "Beet had gone up the spout with peat and wheat and God speed the day", was his policy while he was Minister for Agriculture. As a result, he had to send £3,000,000 out to the Formosans for foreign sugar. The very self-same cry, when he wasup here last week in connection with wheat, was his cry then—that it would pay the Government to buy in foreign sugar at so many dollars or so many cents cheaper than the sugar produced in this country. Yet when he went out to buy sugar on the foreign market he paid £12 per ton more for it than was paid for Irish sugar. He paid £1,000,000 more to the Formosans for 74,000 tons of sugar than he would have paid the Irish farmer, the Irish labourer and the Irish factory worker for producing that 74,000 tons of Irish sugar at home. That was his policy and that is not so long ago. The acreage of beet has gone up since by 10,500 acres, equivalent to practically 200,000 tons of beet.
How much extra employment will that mean for the farmer and the farm worker in the field? How much extra money will go to the lorry owner? How much extra money will go to C.I.E. and how much extra employment will that mean in our four factories? Deputy Dillon would prefer to give all that money out to the Formosans. You might not mind if he had not to borrow to pay it and we have to pay back that loan now.
Let us take him along the lines he has gone. Examine each one of his manoeuvres and see what the position of Irish agriculture to-day is as compared with 1951. The acreage of wheat is up this year by 40 per cent. What has Deputy Dillon to say about that— the man who said that "Beet has gone up the spout with peat and wheat and God speed the day". Perhaps he is of the same opinion as Deputy Giles who told us that farmers would not grow beet if they had the money to buy bullocks.
And it is true. If they had the money to buy the bullocks they would not grow it. The Deputy would know that if he went round the country.
I know the big farmers too. I have travelled around a bit in my day. Deputy Dillon speaking in this House on the 16th June, 1953, told us:—
"There is a feature of the situation that lies ahead of us whichrequires consideration. I believe the whole of the people of this country depend for their survival on the land and unless that land yields a profit for those who work it, everybody in Ireland will ultimately be doomed.
I do not know what way he intended they should work it except with Deputy Giles's bullocks. The Deputy went on:—
"The Minister rightly pointed out that in our circumstances greater and greater regard must hereafter be had to our foreign markets because the capacity of our domestic market to absorb the output of agriculture is strictly limited. There are between 10,000,000 and 12,000,000 acres of arable land in this country. I do not think we can afford to leave a single rood of that land unprofitably employed. The present price payable for wheat grown in this country works out on the average of 88/6 per barrel for dry Irish wheat. Wheat of comparable quality and moisture content fell ten cents on the Chicago wheat pit yesterday and, on the basis of that price, one dollar, 88 cents a bushel, is probably purchasable delivered here in Ireland to-day at somewhere in the region of 77/- as compared with 88/6. I think we may assume that in respect of every bushel of dry Irish wheat taken into an Irish mill this year, the consumer and, in our circumstances, the Treasury, must provide a subsidy of from 15/- to £1 per barrel. Now we are planning to extend that acreage. We worked up the acreage here to 662,000 in 1945. If the present acreage should rise to 500,000, on the basis of our present yield, we might easily have 8,000,000 cwt. delivered into the mills here. Two-fifths of that would be 3,000,000 barrels. That would be approximately our entire requirements and at present prices would involve a subsidy from the Exchequer of some £4,000,000. If the standard of living of all our people depends on the profitable user of the land and if there is a market, as the Minister tells us and as I quite agree, for all the live stock and live-stock products we can produce and process in thiscountry, how long is it proposed indefinitely to expand the acreage under a crop the production of which, far from earning a profit, engenders an annual loss which grows greater with every increase in yield?"
That is Deputy James Dillon whom Deputy Esmonde is anxious to see as Minister for Agriculture again.
That is the old leopard who has not changed his spots and who got up here to declare solemnly that beet was gone up the spout, after wheat and peat. I feel very proud that we have at present a Minister who has succeeded, despite the dissemination of that poison right through the agricultural community, this year, in increasing the wheat acreage by 40 per cent. over last year. I have heard from all the Front Benches in this House the one cry: the farmer should increase production. Are we or are we not increasing production in agriculture under the present Government? Is an increase of 10,500 acres of beet an increase in production or not? I remember the vicious campaign of sabotage carried on against the beet industry last year, and it reminded me of the Blueshirt team that went out in 1933 asking the farmers not to sign contracts for beet.
That does not arise on the Estimate.
The very same team—the leopard did not change his spots in the least. These 10,000 acres of beet are being grown this year on the same terms, and, in fact, not quite as good terms, as those against which the campaign was waged last year. Last year, when we had fixed the price of beet, when everything with regard to it had been completed, General Costello said: "In order to encourage you, I will put the farmer who is 50 or 60 miles from the factory in as good a position as the farmer beside the factory," with the result that when the beet was delivered at the railway station, the farmer got free freight over and above the cost. That was the situation with regard to cost, price and conditions in which certain gentlemen went out last year in an endeavour to sabotage the beet crop and to forcethe people to go again to the foreigner to purchase sugar. Have Deputies any realisation at all of their responsibilities? Do they know what they are doing? Is their blind viciousness going to stop anywhere?
The next point we come to is the position with regard to feeding barley, and, in that connection again, I can give a very glaring example of the manoeuvres of the former Minister for Agriculture. In 1948, when the grain committee of the Beet Growers' Association succeeded in getting 7/6 a barrel more for malting barley from Messrs. Arthur Guinness than the Minister had fixed, what was the Minister's attitude? He dumped into this country that year £1,200,000 worth of foreign malting barley—shoved it in here and glutted the market, so that when the farmers went to sell their barley they had no market for it. It was the very same game as the former Minister tried not two months ago in this House. As soon as he realised that the acreage of feeding barley had been increased by something like 22 per cent. he got up and attacked the Minister in order to get him to allow in foreign maize so as to glut the market again. Surely, this country has suffered enough during the régime of a crazy Minister for Agriculture without having to suffer any further infliction.
When we asked the farmers for increased production, we gave them an incentive, and they increased production, with the result that we are able to hold and distribute this year amongst our farm workers, our farmers, C.I.E. workers, factory workers and mill workers, something like £10,000,000 which had to go abroad in 1951 for foreign sugar, foreign wheat and foreign maize. Is that increasing production? Is that making the position of the agricultural community better than it was previously?
I do not propose to worry about going into trade agreements, but, in my own small way, I made an agreement better than any agreement that any Minister for Agriculture of any Government made in his lifetime. There is, and there has been, a 5/- differential between the price of Irish cattle and British cattle.
We succeeded as one small farmersorganisation in getting for our malting barley this year 3/9 more than will be paid to any English farmer. There is very little use in asking farmers to grow crops unless we are prepared to provide them with a market for those crops when they are grown. I have bitter recollections of Deputy Dillon's attitude in that respect. I will never forget the big posters emanating from the Department of Agriculture: Grow more oats; Grow more potatoes; A sure market for both. They were grown. The harvest was a good one. Lo and behold there was no market. I remember being sent on a deputation with Deputy Lehane and others to Deputy Dillon, Minister for Agriculture, to appeal to him to get that sure market that he and his Department had guaranteed. What was the answer? "I do not give a fiddle-de-dee if they do not get a £1 for it". That was the attitude of the then Minister for Agriculture, a Minister who was paid to protect the farmers. Subsequently he told the farmers to walk it off the land and that harvest walked off the land in the biggest and fattest rats that ever lived in any farmyard. Eventually the Minister was sent on a holiday to America whilst another Minister came in at the end of November to give the farmers some kind of price for the wheat grown under Government guarantee.
There is no daft idea of Deputy Dillon the reason for which I cannot spot the day after he gets it. Have I not heard him on maize? Have I not heard him advocating importing maize a fortnight ago? I immediately went to the Minister and asked him what will be the position as regards feeding barley; has the acreage increased? He told me it has. I said: "Now I know why Jamsey wanted to bring in foreign maize. It was so that the unfortunate Irish farmer when he came to sell his harvest in two months time would find every store glutted with foreign maize". The farmer would be told, just as we were told in 1948 in relation to our malting barley, that they had plenty of it; that we could take it back. No maltster in 1948 remained open for longer than five days. Withthe exception of a few very large groups who came along and bought at 7/6 less than the fixed price the Minister was very far away from helping the farmers involved in that transaction and eventually we ourselves had to come to their assistance.
If we appeal to our farmers to produce more we must make it clear to them that the market is there for anything they produce and that the crops will not be left on their hands. The first Minister who ever guaranteed a market was Deputy Tom Walsh, the present Minister for Agriculture, when he told us that if we grew sufficient feeding barley he would not let a lb. of maize into the country. That is very different from the crazy attitude adopted by Deputy Dillon as Minister for Agriculture. That is why I am thankful we have the present Minister for Agriculture and on behalf of the tillage farmers of East Cork I wish to thank him for his attitude and his work and the way in which he is helping out the tillage farmers all over the country. I have no room for Deputy Giles' ranchers. I never had and I never will have. Farmers with long memories are still fearful because of what Deputy James Dillon did to them in relation to oats. With terror in their hearts they are coming to me every day asking me is there any danger that the maltsters will refuse to take the barley. There was no danger last year and every lb. of feeding barley produced by the agricultural community was sold, bought, used and fed. The same position will prevail this year in relation to feeding barley. There is no doubt about that.
This Party has always stood and always will stand for the working farmer, the tillage farmer and the farmer who employs labour as against the type of farmer that Deputy Giles described a while ago. That is the difference between the agricultural policy of Fianna Fáil and the agricultural policy as laid down by the Fine Gael Party—I suppose I will have to put them all together—the mixum gatherum Party that was in office here during the Coalition régime.
They are gathering strength.
I have seen the Fine Gael Party swallow in its time five Farmers' Parties, one after the other.
That does not arise on the Estimate for the Department of Agriculture.
They swallowed Deputy MacBride's Party and now they have started to swallow Labour. There will be nothing left after the next election.
Deputy Corry must come to the Estimate.
They are like the young lady from Riga, who went for a ride on a tiger.
"They came back from the ride With the lady inside And a smile on the face of the tiger."
Would Deputy Corry please come to the Estimate?
There were plenty of smiles over there to-day but there were very few smiles from the Labour Benches. I did not see Deputy Norton smiling.
That is the difference in policy. We have the policy of the Party which put in as a Minister a man who laid down the dictum that any farmer growing wheat should be ostracised, that the beet factories were to be blown up and that the proper thing for agriculture was ranching and the rearing of the big bullock about which Deputy Giles complained and the fattening of the Irish pig on the maize grown in America. There is a definite fundamental result—an increase of 10,500 acres of beet, an extra 100,000 acres of wheat and a 22 per cent. increase in the acreage of feeding barley. That is the increase in the tillage acreage. That is the increase in work on the land. We heard the Labour Party complaining about unemployment while we had to go to the County Mayo this year in order to bring 100 workers down to single beet in Cork County. These workers earned from £10 to £15 per week singling beet. Yet we have the Labour Party telling us about unemployment. On the one hand complaints are heard about unemploymentwhile on the other better terms are offered to the men who are leaving the County Mayo to go to England. We offered them better terms than they would get in England. We also offered them far better conditions.
Deputy Giles talks about the tough bullock but the tough horse they eat over there is much worse. That is the fundamental difference in policy. Deputy Giles appeals to all Parties in the House to help to get better agriculture and assist agriculture. I would like to appeal to Deputy Giles as an Old I.R.A. man to throw in his lot and help to get our tillage policy carried out in this country.
What policy?
The Deputy should help us to carry out our tillage policy.
You stripped the land of its people.
A moment ago the Deputy was wailing and complaining that facilities were not given to the farmers.
They were not.
The reason they required the credit facilities, according to Deputy Giles, was because they wanted to go in for ranching and that they had no money to buy the bullocks to fatten on the land. They wanted to do that instead of growing wheat. Please God, we will always keep them growing wheat. If they want credit for ranching and the bullock they just will not get it. I have no intention of holding up the House. I give the facts as I see them. I do not know whether appeals are of any use, but I would again appeal to the Department of Agriculture to give up the kind of bluff that Deputy James Dillon tried to work in this country, that there is the danger of a surplus of milk. That is a cod. Nobody knows that better than the Department of Agriculture. They know that they have to prevent milk being used for purposes other than butter-making. They had to prevent it being used so that there would be sufficient milk and butter in this country for the people.
They know that that outlet is still there for all the milk we produce. Why carry on a bluffing game of that kind? I would like if the Department of Agriculture would change its tune in regard to our dairying herds and our dairying stock. Only six out of the Twenty-Six Counties produce the butter for the whole of the Twenty-Six Counties. Are those six counties to be victimised? They are being victimised by the Department of Agriculture for the past 30 years. When I was a young lad there was very little difficulty getting a 500 gallon cow at least. Why is the average down to 300 or 360 gallons? How many millions of pounds have been spent during the past 30 years by the Department of Agriculture on improving the dairy herds? Where are the dairy herds that were improved? If the improvement in the dairy herds consists in reducing the average milk production of the herds from 500 gallons to 300 or 360 gallons then, in the name of goodness, let this Dáil take that money and use it for some other purpose.
I can assure the Minister for Agriculture that the dairy people in the South will not stand for it. We are caught between two millstones. On the one hand we have the people looking for a reasonable price and on the other hand the Department of Agriculture will not allow us to keep a cow that will give milk to the people at a reasonable price. I can assure the Department that the biggest drop they will ever get in their natural lives will occur when the milk costings are finished and the price published. I can promise them that if butter is then going to be sold at an economic price it will not be 4/2 but 7/2 a lb.
I have studied this business. I have acted on costing boards already. In 1946 we dealt with the cost of production of milk under Professor Murphy. I know what the milk cost then. I know what it will cost when the two items that were then excluded are put in now. When you value the farm of a farmer whose farm carries 12 cows and when you pay him the present cost of money in the bank which is 6 or7 per cent. and add to that management costs, I know what the price of milk will be. I have examined this thing and I would suggest to the Department that it is not yet too late for them to change their tune as regards the dairy farmers. I think their attitude is an outrage on the hardworking farmer.
The Minister is responsible for the policy of the Department.
I suggest to the Minister that he should have no hesitation in doing it. I say that this thing has gone entirely too far. If a farmer looks for a premium for a decent Friesian bull in order to increase his milk yield, he is told that the county committee of agriculture for his county dare not give him a premium for that bull. He is told he must take one for a polled Angus or a Hereford. How in the name of goodness that is going to improve the dairy herds of this country I do not know. I suggest to the Minister that this is something he should get after and settle once and for all. The Minister has shown his courage and his foresight in other ways. I hope that he will do so in this case also.
A number of the speeches I have listened to this evening on this Estimate have not, in my opinion, been very helpful so far as agriculture is concerned. I do not see what good is going to accrue to it by speakers getting up and talking about the previous Minister and his faults. There is no use in talking about the faults of the previous Minister or the present Minister. The fact is that things have been made easy for the present Minister by the trade agreement of 1948 which was negotiated by the previous Minister. The terms of that agreement were such as this country never expected to obtain. They have made trade between the two countries very easy.
As Deputy Giles has pointed out, the big prices we are getting for our cattle to-day are due to the operation of that agreement. Under it our farmers arenow entitled to get the same price for the cattle they export to England as that which is paid by the British Government to their own producers. There may be the differential of 5/- per cwt., but despite that it is now easier to arrive at an agreement with the British than it was in 1948. The fact is that the prosperity we are now enjoying as far as the disposal of our surplus stock in Britain is concerned, is due to the trade agreement of 1948.
The ration of eggs is now off in England, and there is a market there for all the eggs we can send. The eggs produced here are of a very superior quality, as good as anything they can produce in Britain. Therefore, there should be a good market for them in Britain if the people there can afford to buy them.
As regards beef prices, it is expected that beef will be decontrolled in Britain this year. The beef that we send to England is superior in quality to anything which the Government there can import from other countries. The fact, at any rate, is that under the agreement, we will now have to get from Britain for our beef the same price as that which is paid to the British producer. That gives a guarantee of security to our people who are living on the land. People say, of course, that we should grow more oats, more wheat and more barley. Mixed farming is necessary before one can make farming pay. Unless a man is able to rear a certain number of cattle he will not have any farm yard manure to fertilise his land and unless the land is well manured no man can expect to get a profitable return from the crops he grows. These crops cannot be grown at a profit in small, poor, isolated areas in the country where it is not possible for farmers to rear cattle. Unless the land is well manured, you cannot expect to get good crops of potatoes, oats, barley or wheat. The rearing of cattle is necessary to enable a man to make mixed farming a success.
A lot has been said about grants for farm buildings, for poultry houses, for hatcheries, for piggeries and about subsidies for day-old chicks. I suggest to the House that all these schemes were put into operation by DeputyDillon when he was Minister for Agriculture. I do not think anyone could deny that. These schemes of his laid the foundation for the building up of a prosperous agricultural industry. Without those grants, and the other facilities he provided, a big percentage of our farmers would not have been able to carry on at all. All those schemes are now in operation and are, as I say, of an enormous assistance to our farmers. The 1948 agreement made it easy for the present Minister. The fact that all those facilities were there by legislation of this House made it easy for the present Minister to make a success of his work so far as his Department is concerned.
In regard to the land project, I have no hesitation in saying—I leave it to the people who live on the land to say whether I am right or wrong—that it was the greatest scheme that this country has ever had or ever will have, especially from the point of view of the people living in the poorer areas where they had a very small percentage of arable land, where there was a big population, where people were in need of a week's work and where they were obliged to produce as much food as possible on their own land; if they were not able to produce it they would have to import it from the bigger counties, perhaps at a price in excess of what they could afford. The land project gave those people an opportunity of adding anything up to eight or nine acres to an old holding of land that had previously only about four or five acres of middling arable land. In my county to-day I see good crops growing on land that had the benefit of the land project three years ago.
As far as these counties with big populations and small holdings are concerned, I am perfectly satisfied there is not enough land for all the people who need or expect land. However, the fact that you have some alternative offers some hope to people living in these poorer areas of being able to get something at their own door, something they can say is their own property, and in relation to which they can say they are their own landlord and nobody has a right to it but themselves. I believe in that scheme and it would be appalling if anythinghappened to cause an alteration in the original terms of the scheme. In some cases I have seen that water-logged land that at one time would not feed a snipe has been developed into the best of land to-day. In connection with that scheme, the farmer got a guarantee that his valuation would not be increased by reason of the fact that land has been added to his holding.
There is another matter in connection with which I cannot say much on this Vote. I ask you, Sir, to allow me to make a passing reference to it because a few Deputies have already spoken of it. I refer to the local drainage works which are excellent schemes as far as areas requiring land reclaimed are concerned. There is land of all kinds in relation to which no Department inspector will ever agree to the land project being operated there unless the head drains are constructed at once to take away the water. Both schemes must work hand in hand. No Department inspector would permit the laying of expensive piping unless there was an outlet to take away the water from that drain. Money spent on draining the land is money well spent. This is a scheme which will pay for itself inside a period of five years. That money is worth spending because it is spent in such a way that the people get a return for it. In some cases in my area they are getting back what they spent in the second year and all of them will have a return on what they spent inside five years.
Under the old reclamation scheme as it was operated in my county—I do not know how it worked in other counties—a small farmer, a big farmer, or a farmer with a woody or a boggy piece of land, got a grant. He got a small subsidy for the first year and perhaps for the second or third year and got the ordinary lime that was taken from the kiln. That was the old reclamation system. If the present scheme is going to be on those lines, I can see it reaching the stage when it will be of no benefit except in a very small way. I can go back 40 years to the time when fathers of families drained and reclaimed their own land and did it at their own expense. But those times were different from whatthey are to-day. You will not get people to go out and do the same things as they did 35 or 40 years ago. Big changes have taken place in the method of working as far as the ordinary people on the land are concerned. There is only one way it can be done. I can see no way that can improve on the method adopted by the previous Minister, by which the small or big farmer could have his land reclaimed under the land project. If he made his application and if he was prepared to put down £12 for every statute acre and if the statute acre cost £50, he got the difference between what it was going to cost and the amount he was going to pay. If he intended to do the work himself, he had not to make the contribution. If he had not the money and wished to have the work done by direct labour, through a Government contractor or private contractor, he could have the cost added to his rent. I speak subject to correction, but it is my recollection that the all-in cost repayable over a number of years would only work out at about 9/- per statute acre. If you take the value of live stock to-day and take the value of land even by public auction standards, whether it is for sowing or grazing, or whatever other use you could make of it, you will realise how valuable this work was. Every acre of land reclaimed. Piped and drained, left what you could term almost the best of arable land. It was a small rent per statute acre and he would be getting good value for an extra 9/- a week over a period of years until he would have it paid off.
Next I want to deal with the system of allocation of bulls. I believe that system is altogether wrong. The system must be changed to suit all sections of the people and the various counties. The present system, where the allocation is based on two-fifths dairy and beef bulls and three-fifths Aberdeen-Angus bulls, is not suitable for a county such as Mayo. Neither is it suitable for Donegal, Galway or Kerry. The Aberdeen-Angus is the bull that is wanted in those areas. The land is not good enough, the shelter does not exist, the method of feeding is not suitable for bulls other than Aberdeen Angus.
I would not object to there being a percentage of dairy bulls. I would like to see a fair proportion of dairy bulls in all those counties so that those counties would have the advantage at all times of dairy breed stock.
I am sure the Department are well aware of the views of the various county committees of agriculture. I am a member of the county committee of agriculture. The Department are represented there every year when the annual estimate is being discussed. We have made representations time after time and we have got nowhere. We have to accept the Department's decision—two-fifths dairy and shorthorn and three-fifths Aberdeen-Angus. In the counties that I have mentioned that system should be changed to give us a higher percentage of Aberdeen-Angus. We will always be prepared to take a fairly reasonable percentage of dairy bulls but the Shorthorn is not a suitable breed. Whiteheads would be suitable to a certain extent but the Whitehead is the same breed as the Aberdeen-Angus.
The Shorthorn is quite suitable for Meath, Kildare, Westmeath, Dublin. The land is available there. They have the shelter. They have everything that is necessary. They have the foundations for that breed. It is a better breed for them than the Aberdeen-Angus. That is the animal they want in the dairying areas. Provision can be made for Limerick, Clare and other dairying counties. I do not know how you are to satisfy the people in those areas. I have been listening to Deputy Madden and other Deputies this evening. People are inclined to go in for the calf that will bring the highest money. If the dairy bull is kept in those areas and those people were limited to a heavy percentage of dairy bulls, they would be at the disadvantage that the calf would not be so valuable. That would reduce the income of the dairy farmer. Nobody would like to say to any farmer that he must do this whether he likes it or not. That is the difficulty. If the dairy farmer says that he wants a Shorthorn or a Whitehead simply because he will get £5 or £10 more for the calf thanhe will get for a calf of a dairy bull, there is a case to be argued. The Department and the dairymen will have to come to some decision to solve that problem as far as the dairying area is concerned. I repeat that in Mayo the two-fifths dairy and Shorthorn and the three-fifths Aberdeen-Angus is wrong and is not working out in practice. It is a disadvantage to the cattle industry and a disadvantage to the people in the county.
This year in the district in which I live there were two premium owners in whose case the premium had lapsed and we could not replace them, with the result that those two areas were short of a premium bull for this year. I do not know whether the persons concerned bought one of their own or not. Under the Department's regulation we were not allowed, or had not got, a premium bull to pass over to those people. It could happen that there would be no bulls in those areas. The people there are at a disadvantage. As far as I know, they were not qualified for a special-term bull. The danger is that if they cannot get a special-term bull and do not buy a bull, there will be scrub bulls in the district. I would ask the Department to bear in mind the point I am making and to be lenient in the matter of distribution when the matter comes up again from Mayo. Everything possible should be done to change the system of allocation—three-fifths Aberdeen Angus and two-fifths Shorthorn or dairy.
The next matter I want to deal with arises from remarks made from the other side of the House. There is no doubt about it, the cattle population has increased. Everybody knows that. Anybody living on the land or who has any connection with farming realises that you cannot increase the cattle population in one, two or three years. It takes three or four or perhaps five years to increase the cattle population even by a small percentage. I move to report progress.
Progress reported; the Committee to sit again.
The Dáil adjourned at 10.30 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Wednesday, 24th June.