I am glad to have the opportunity of saying a few words about agriculture. I tried to say something about it this evening on the Budget, but I was ruled out of order, so I hope I am in order now. A Deputy over there was talking some time ago about pigs. It is evidently a kind of treason for the price of bacon to rise. I cannot find any Fianna Fáil Deputy who will tell me straight out that he wants the price of pigs to go down. It went up substantially in the Dublin market last Wednesday and will go up substantially there again to-morrow, thanks be to God. What I would like to say to the Minister about the pig trade is that there has been so much said to him about the wonderful policy of Fianna Fáil that I am afraid he might go back to that policy, that regrettable and terrible policy of Fianna Fáil. There are such things as treasured wrongs, and I intend to speak about them here to-day in reference to the pig trade.
I come from the constituency of Waterford. Waterford has always been a great centre of bacon curing and the home of the Waterford pig buyers. The former Minister for Agriculture, Deputy Dr. Ryan, found himself in a mess through his policy and he brought in the Pigs and Bacon Bill of 1937. I would like to speak about that and about its ramifications and effects. The people and the pig producers of Ireland were told that this Bill was being brought in for their benefit and their benefit alone and that when it became an Act all would be well. The Bill was brought before the House and discussed. Two members of the Fianna Fáil Party—and no small fry in the Party—one of whom happened to be a Deputy for Waterford—welcomed the Bill—not, mark you, because it would do the Irish pig producers any good or do the bacon curers or the Irish pig trade as a whole any good, or do the Irish consumers of bacon any good—they welcomed the Bill wholly and solely because it would eliminate pig buyers.
Those were their very words and if anyone doubts that it is a treasured wrong, I refer them to the speeches of Deputy Seán Goulding in Volume 67, column 505, and Deputy Seán Gibbons in Volume 67, column 535—two fine Christian gentlemen. This Christian Government passed this Bill and went into the lobby to destroy the homes and the fortunes and the futures of a lot of decent men. It was all for the good of the country. Only 14 months passed by and pigs were getting scarce and the Irish bacon curers started to bring pigs down from Northern Ireland. The reason pigs were scarce here was that the Irish pig producers got such a trimming they were getting out of the business. Let anyone tell me that that statement is wrong—I paid my price, I was a producer, and no mean one at that time.
This was the Bill that introduced grading—now you have it, now you see it, now you don't. It introduced the three card trick into pig buying. The position got so alarming that a very prominent firm of bacon curers was hauled before the Prices Commission. It was discovered and admitted before the commission that they got £800,000 in excess profits. The year was 1938— mark you, at a time when the Irish farmer was recovering from the wound of the economic war. He was being bled white again by the bacon curers, with the power that was given under this Pigs and Bacon Act.
There was a Pigs Marketing Board set up under this. I criticised this board out in the open and a gentleman on the board sent me a solicitor's letter. He thought I was some cábóg and that I would have to give him a public apology. My answer to him is the same now as then, that if the Pigs Marketing Board or any member of it wanted to take action against me, the courts were-open to them and I would welcome them. I would be prepared to stake every penny I had to go into court and drag those pirates and bandits out into the open. There is the story of pigs for you.
The poor unfortunate pig producers continued on that battle alone, the few of us who were left. On the day that war broke out the price of pigs was 80/- a cwt., the top price; and the price of maize was £6 a ton. There was a speech then by Deputy Lemass that put confidence into the pig producers. He said that the prices would remain at the levels of August 24th. There was not a spoonful of maize to be bought in the week following the declaration of war to feed a pig, and by ten days afterwards the price of maize had gone up to £15 a ton, while the pig producers still had to take 80/-.
We went through the period of the black market. We were told that people would pay fantastic prices for bacon. All we could get for it was 120/- and 130/- per cwt. As I mentioned to-day in the House, Fianna Fáil went out to the smell of Monaghan bacon. This is 1955, and next year we will be in competition with the world in selling bacon. We will not sell the bacon we are curing at present anywhere in competition. I can remember when Irish bacon was the best on the markets of England, and could be sold when there were salesmen there to sell it, and who knew how. I say to the bacon curers now: "Go back to the dry curing, get away from tank curing, and pickled pork disguised as bacon."
I was amazed at the ignorance of Deputies talking about fat pigs, overweight, and what should be done. I, being a Waterford man, knew what was the right thing to do, and what can be done with them. What was done for that great bacon trade? Where was the fat bacon going? It was being walked out to Birmingham. We have been told that people in England will not eat fat bacon, that the majority of them will not eat it. People sweating all day in industries in Coventry and Birmingham and the steel mills of Sheffield will want fat pork and heavy pigs. What was done with those pigs weighing 1¾ cwt. and 2 cwt.? They were killed, the hams were cured and the rest of the pig was sold as fresh pork. That outlet will be available again, and I know there is a move on at present to ensure that this trade will be handed over as a monopoly to the bacon curers.
I say to the Minister there is only one way to have competition in this country, and that is, making the pig trade what it is to-day, small curers, small shippers up against big bacon curers, up against the big co-ops. When it comes to the day when live pigs will walk out again, probably next year, and when heavy pigs are to be shipped, that should not be the monopoly of any group of people in this country. It should be open to any man who has initiative, the know how or where to send them and where to send them from.
I must say that in spite of all this pressure, in spite of the big battalions having been put against them, in spite of the fearful casualties, in spite of degradation for many of them, there is a staunch remnant of the Waterford pig buyers left. It was said by a man the other day that a day might come when we would not have a pig, or we would only have one pig left. I know this man well because he is my dear friend. I am quite sure that if that sorry day ever arrives, and there was one pig left, there would be a pig buyer left to buy it.
I heard talk last week about cattle. I find it very hard to bear with many of the Deputies on the other side because I know what was done with the cattle trade, and with dairying. I heard Deputy Allen talk about the great service he did—I am sorry he is not in the House now—20 years ago when he had the foresight to go down to the committee of agriculture and tell them that they should withdraw all premiums to blacks and white faces, and should only give premiums to the Shorthorns. That was all right 20 years ago, in 1935. I am sure Wexford farmers were delighted that in 1936 they were going to have Shorthorn calves to kill instead of white faces and blacks. It did not matter very much in those years what you bred. As a matter of fact, you did not know, and in some cases did not care.
I heard Deputy Moher, for whom I have great admiration, and who has a good grasp of cattle breeding, talking about judging at English shows. I think he was right off the line. The squires were good stock men. I saw judging at some of the big shows by men who knew as much about animals as could be known. Some of our men go over to England to judge, and we bring some of their men over here.
There have been too many mistakes made over the years in stock judging. This is a matter which must be dealt with drastically. There has been too much of what I call continuity of bad judging. I knew of a very bad judge of cattle who was kept on by the Department until he nearly destroyed a breed of cattle. That must never happen again. I say to Deputies on all sides of the House that this is one of the things which we must remedy. We must bring pressure on the Minister and on the Department to see that the judging will be improved, and that where judges are not what they should be, they should be hammered out.
I agree with the Minister about the dairy Shorthorn. I think that if we breed away our dairy Shorthorns, our foundation stock, we will find ourselves with a hybrid collection of Aberdeen Angus, Whitehead, Friesian, Ayrshire and Jersey crosses. We will not know what we will have. There will be difficulty here. I know a man who has fine herds of what you call non-pedigree Shorthorns. He is now breeding crosses. A good deal of this is due to the big prices to be got for Whitehead calves and black calves and getting them to Whitehead bulls. No Shorthorn is being bred from this good Shorthorn stock. I know there is great difficulty. I hate the idea of subsidies, but I would rather give a subsidy for Shorthorns than to see them dying away as they are doing. I should like to have the opinion of Deputies on both sides of the House on that point.
Then there is a question of the cattle trade. I have known this trade for a longer number of years than anybody here could guess. I have known one thing about it: that people in official positions are hostile to it, and have always been hostile. This trade is a dirty business: it dirties the streets and holds up traffic.
I read in the papers the other day where the Dublin Port and Docks Board was going to take over some of the cattle lairages, and use them for other purposes. I do not care for what purpose they are going to use them. They could not be used for a more important purpose than the purpose for which they are being used, the export of cattle. If they do away with these, it will mean that cattle coming from down the country to Dublin will have to walk very long distances, especially here in Dublin, and I would ask the Minister to intervene and to see to it that these lairages are not interfered with.
There is another matter in connection with the export of cattle—the matter of freights. The carrying companies are mainly English companies and the comparison can be made with another type of freight-carrying business—the Dublin buses. These buses are carrying many of the buses all over the country, because the Dublin buses pay very well, while the buses down the country do not. There are a great number of sections of the British railways not paying and the cattle trade is being made to pay for it all. The Minister should pay special attention to that and especially now as British railways are about to raise their freights again. It is one of the things in which we should intervene and one of the things on which the Minister should support the members of the cattle trade and farmers' organisations here which are exporting cattle.
There are many people in this country who say—it has been said to myself in public and in private—that we should have no export of live cattle but should kill all the cattle at home and have the benefit of the processing. That would be very good, I am sure, but I do not think it would be very good for the Irish farmer, because whenever I saw cattle left to the mercy —and I say "mercy"—of the abattoirs here, a good time was had by all except the farmer. When, after the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, the ports were opened again, cattle could go up £8 a beast, but the meat factories were able to buy just as many of them. I think there is a livelihood for the meat factories here — and I have great respect for them—and that there is a livelihood for the cattle dealer here. Both of them should be encouraged and not one side only. That leads to monopoly and what the Irish farmer wants and must have when he has a beast to sell is the exporter bidding against the abattoir. That is the ideal position for the Irish farmer.
There has been talk of the establishment of an agricultural institute here and I would say to the Minister that if such an institute is to be established, it should be under the control of, and its policy should be directed by, the universities, the scientists and the young farmers of the country. I will not elaborate on that because I think the Minister will understand what I am at, but I would not like to see this institute shackled.
There is, then, the matter of wheat. Wheat should not be made a political crop and a political issue here to be slashed around the House as if it were a sacred bull of Fianna Fáil. The time to grow wheat is when you want it. We can do with it now—it saves us dollars—and, in spite of what everybody is saying, I am quite sure and I am content that we will have sufficient for our needs. I should like to answer, after all the years, the people who went around the country saying: "Our policy of wheat growing saved you; only for our policy of wheat growing, this country would have starved to death." When the war broke out, I realised, coming from a port and knowing my way about the port, that the policy of wheat growing which Fianna Fáil initiated just before the war had started, stopped the free importation of wheat. When the war broke out we were caught with our pants down— with no wheat in the pockets.
Where we missed the tide in the matter of what would have been a magnificent investment for the State was in failing to store wheat in 1938 when the price of wheat landed on the quays in this country was 8/- a barrel, the lowest price in the world's history since coinage came into use. It was a pity that somebody did not hand a copy of the Bible in that year to the Fianna Fáil Front Bench and did not get them to read the part in Genesis about the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine and how, through the wisdom and the divine inspiration of Joseph, wheat, when it was plentiful, was stored up against the famine years. If we had stored up a couple of years' supply of wheat, some people might say: "It might have gone off by the time we wanted to use it after four or five years." If wheat is put clean and dry into silos and kept dry, it is practically indestructible. This is no joke, though it sounds like drawing the long bow. When the Egyptologists dug up Tuten-Khamen, they found a jar of wheat in the tomb which had been there for 2,000 years.
