We can find a great deal of humour in this—a great deal of humour, indeed, because the Minister's proposal is not only audacious but ridiculous. It provokes laughter in the House when one sees what the Minister is trying to do. He may "by regulations provide that empty butter boxes of a specified description shall not be sold save to specified persons and at specified prices". That is to say, he could, if he wished. I am not suggesting the present Minister would do it but, with Deputy Major de Valera, I think that if a Fianna Fáil Minister were to come into this House with a proposal of that sort we should hear from these benches the suggestion that he was taking the power in order to confer a monopoly upon some political henchman. I am not making that suggestion. I am perfectly certain that is not the purpose behind this proposal.
The proposal may have its origin in the well-known desire of the Minister to control everything that will add, he thinks, to his prestige and stature as a public man but are we justified in giving this power on the basis of the argument which the Minister recommended to the House? He said that the reason for all this is that there is an element of subsidy in it. Has the Minister considered how large that element of subsidy is, having regard to the present price of butter, the present manufacturing cost of butter and the present price which the creamery gets for the butter, even though that price is a subsidised price and related to the cost of the butter box?
I think all of us will recognise, even if we do not express our verbal agreement, that the proposition—and I am not putting it to the House—that the element of subsidy represented by the subsidy on the butter box is infinitesimal in relation to the price of butter. Yet, that is the argument upon which the Minister submitted this to the House. It may be that, in some Order made under the Emergency Powers Act in the circumstances in which the country found itself during the last Great War, there was a proposal of this sort. But the war is ten years over. I hope even the Minister recognises that. There is no difficulty, I think, in procuring butter boxes at the present moment, nor is there likely to be in the immediate future. Therefore, why, if a person wishes to dispose of a butter box to another in exchange for coin, should he be prohibited from doing it? I say "in exchange for coin" because, so far as I can see, if the person wishes to dispose of the butter boxes not by selling them for legal tender but by barter or exchange, then it would appear to me that the Minister cannot catch him at all.
This is typical of the sort of thing the House has been getting from the Minister for Agriculture over the past two years. We have these half-baked proposals submitted to the House. The Minister makes an eloquent speech, and, hypnotised by his oratory, the House is supposed to accept his proposals without giving them any consideration whatever. The Minister ought to treat the Legislature with more respect. When he comes here and submits a proposal, he should at least demonstrate to the House that he has thought out its implications. He should be able to prove to the House that a power of that sort—which is in restriction of the right of the individual, about which the Minister used to be so eloquent—is fully justified by the circumstances of our time. I do not think that is the case with this regulation. Again, I think it is one of these proposals which has been inspired by the greed of the Minister for authority.
There was a time when the Minister was on these benches. When the Government of the day was using every effort to ensure that the nation would not starve, the Minister used to wax eloquent about the arbitrary powers which the Government of the day were taking in those circumstances. However, those circumstances do not any longer exist. It appears to me that, since the circumstances are nonexistent, the Minister ought not to seek power to prohibit the sale of an old butter box to an old woman who may need it because she has not any other fuel and that when the Minister comes to the House with a proposal to restrict the rights of the individual, he ought to be in a position to make a better case for that proposal than the one he has made for Section 6 of this Bill to-night.
