We have given this Bill very careful consideration. We are utterly opposed to it. From our experience, particularly over the last ten years, we regard this as a Bill designed to secure for our people poor tea at high prices, as opposed to free trade in tea which I believe would secure for our people, as it did in the past, good tea at relatively low prices. I listened carefully to the Minister's speech and I wondered why are we departing from the well-established practice that has obtained in this country for over a century—that if a grocer set up in business in town or city, he could buy for his customers the best tea at the lowest price that he could get anywhere. He was free to buy his tea in Calcutta, or in London, in Amsterdam, Dublin or Cork.
Speaking from my own experience, I have bought tea and blended tea, some of which was bought in London, some in Dublin and some in Cork. I have never bought tea in Calcutta. Why did I not buy tea in Calcutta? Because I could not afford it and that goes for 90 per cent. of the people engaged in the tea trade in this country. To buy in Calcutta, you must buy in quantity, which no ordinary tea wholesaler in this country would contemplate because of the warehousing and financing. Let us pause for a moment and think what we are doing.
The Minister tells me that at present there are 90 members of the Wholesale Tea Dealers' Association. There is no reason why others should not join, but, presumably, anybody eligible to join has joined already. I want to tell the House that of those 90 members of the wholesalers' association, I do not believe 20 would be in a position to import tea direct from Calcutta, Djakarta or Colombo. What is ultimately going to happen? The Bill does not provide this, but I am not interested in theoretical speculation of what the Bill hopes to achieve. I am interested in the pragmatic considerations of what my experience teaches me is going to happen under the Bill, or any other Bill designed to achieve the purpose which the Minister has in mind.
Not more than 20 will engage in this operation of direct importation from the Orient. Pause and think what that means. There are 24,000,000 lb. of tea on an average coming into this country. When you have been 25 years in the trade you may aspire to value any sample of tea down to 1d. per lb.; but, no matter how skilled you are, it is a pretty skilful operator who will value tea accurately to within 2d. per lb. The average customer, buying tea per lb., will find it very difficult to differentiate between two samples offered to him at a difference of 4d. per lb. Every 1d. per lb. means £100,000.
The Minister spoke of the average cost of tea landed in Ireland and said it compared favourably with the average cost of tea landed in Great Britain. Anybody who knows anything about the tea trade knows that figure is utterly illusory because it has no significance if you do not know the quality of the tea delivered to Great Britain and Ireland, and every penny that is charged for tea in excess of its true value represents £100,000. You are going to commit into the hands of a body of persons of less than 20, in my judgement, the possibility of handling excess profits of anything from £100,000 to £400,000 per annum, levied on the tea of this country.
How are you going to avoid that? There is only one way to avoid it. This group of gentlemen wants to buy tea from Calcutta. Certainly, let them have every facility they want, but let the rest of us buy our tea from them or from anybody else we choose. The only way we can ensure that the consuming public in Ireland will get value for their money in tea is to ensure that the enterprising tea retailers of this country can apply to Dublin, Cork or London wholesalers, or any other source, for samples and use their own judgement to choose from those samples those which will result in the best value in blend that can be offered to their customers—the best value that their money is fit to buy. Unless we do that we are simply going to levy on the people of this country what, in the old days, used to be described in this House as a hard tax.
The Minister will remember that in pre-war days we used to look on the taxation of tea and sugar, which in those days were a favourite source of raising revenue, as hard taxes, as opposed to the taxes levied on spirits and beer which were not regarded as essential commodities. In Ireland we always regarded a tax on tea as a hard tax because it was a tax on the poor. Everybody in the country drinks tea and every penny that goes on the price of tea is paid by the people, irrespective of whether they are well-to-do or poor. Therefore, I submit to the House that, in respect of a commodity like tea, we must do everything we can to ensure that the people will get the best value for their money. What is the best that Dáil Éireann can undertake in that regard? Nothing. The best Dáil Éireann can do to that end is to get out of the business altogether and let every man operate it as he thinks best, as we have done for a century.
The Minister says there are various advantages to be derived from this centralisation of tea purchasing. To set against the primary advantages to which he referred, I instanced bad tea at high prices. I ask Deputies, whatever side they may sit upon, what have they heard from their own neighbours of the class of tea we have been called upon to drink over the past ten years? Nobody will complain of the kind of tea we had to drink during the war. The British gave us about 7,000,000 lbs. a year during the war years and we had to get the balance where we could. We had to take what we could get, what we could fetch and carry ourselves, but since the war was over, what have Deputies heard from their neighbours? Is it that tea was never worse in quality and the price was never as high?
I do not expect there is much we could do about the price but we could do a great deal about the quality. The only way we could have got something done about the quality was to let experienced merchants compete with one another to draw custom. The sole test of every customer housewife is in the teapot. She cannot judge it as some of us might by looking at the leaf, smelling the aroma, or applying the test of the tea tasters. All she can do is go to McInerney's shop on Monday and see afterwards, in the teapot, if she gets good value. If she does not she will go into Kilduff's and buy there. It is the best judgment in the whole world, that of the experienced housewife brewing tea for her own family in her own teapot. This Bill stops that because the man who seeks to suit his customers' tastes by searching the wide variety of markets available to him can no longer do so. He is constrained to deal with this group of importers because there is nobody else with whom he can deal.
The Minister has told us that there are 50 to 100 persons employed in warehousing of tea according to the season. I do not know what he means. There come in annually 200,000 to 240,000 chests of tea. In the name of Providence, what would 100 men be doing operating on 240,000 chests of tea? Wherever the tea comes from, whether it comes here through London or direct from Djakarta, Colombo, Calcutta or Bombay, it comes in chests and somebody has to handle them.
It is true it all comes in to 18 or 20 wholesalers located in Belfast, Cork, Dublin and Limerick and it is warehoused there. It used to be warehoused on my premises. It used to be warehoused in the large tea emporiums in a variety of rural towns. Is there any special reason why it is advantageous to take what employment there is involved in that away from the country towns and put it in Dublin, when you remember that under the old dispensation the entire financing of £4,000,000 to £6,000,000 involved in the purchase of that tea was provided by the tea merchants of London who gave us four months' credit for tea?
Now we are all talking about the difficulty of raising finances for urgent and necessary enterprises here. There is a means by which we got, gladly, an interest free, permanent standing loan from the tea traders of London of from £4,000,000 to £6,000,000. Just to satisfy this daft desire to deal directly with the Indians, the Ceylonese and the Indonesians, we seem to say we do not want that; that we will finance it, and that that £4,000,000 or £6,000,000 will come out of the Irish banks, who have plenty of useful employment for that money without taking that burden of credit off the back of the tea trade in London and elsewhere.
The Minister speaks of foreign agents handling tea. Who will Tea Importers employ in Calcutta to buy for them? Will they not have agents in Calcutta? Who will those agents be? I venture to say that every agent employed to purchase tea in Calcutta, Djakarta and Colombo will be agents whose head offices are in Mincing Lane. There is nobody else. The men who have been doing this trade down the ages are the agents who operate in these centres, 90 per cent. of whom are British agents. They are the kind of men who understand the tea trade in these two islands.
I have great affection for the Indian people and for the Indian State, but let nobody rest under the illusion that our zeal to buy direct from Calcutta evoked any corresponding gesture from the Indian Government, because the Indian Government put a substantial export tax on tea. Nobody ever suggested that they should forgo a couple of pence per lb. of their tax because of our buying of tea direct from Calcutta. We paid the last farthing the same as everybody else.
I am concerned with one thing only, that is, to ensure that the average woman—down the country particularly, because those are the conditions I best understand—will get the best tea for the least money. I am certain that this Bill will result in her getting relatively bad tea for dear money. Secondly, I see no reason for taking away the employment that was available in the handling of tea in rural areas and concentrating that employment in Dublin, Cork and Limerick. Thirdly, I am utterly at a loss to understand how anyone believes it is to our advantage to give up the £4,000,000 to £6,000,000 worth of free credit that we enjoyed from the tea market in London and require our own banks to provide it, bearing especially in mind that, under the Minister's plan, we will have to carry the tea for 12 months and finance it for all the time it is lying in our warehouses. As the Minister rightly said, the bulk of tea is bought between September and January and is warehoused here for the remainder of the year until it passes into consumption.
These things are extremely difficult adequately to debate in Dáil Éireann because those of us who are intimately familiar with them are inclined to forget that some of our colleagues do not know how the business operates at all. I make no apology for explaining my opposition and our opposition to this Bill, and for recapitulating shortly to the House what the system of purchasing tea was prior to the emergency scheme brought in and which is to be given permanent form under this Bill. I refer to the centralisation of buying through Tea Importers, Ltd.
Prior to 1939, any grocer in rural Ireland of good credit standing received on his premises from 24th August to the end of the year two or three travellers per week who came in with their cases of samples of the new season's tea. They submitted those samples and were further eager to receive an invitation to send on samples from London of the stocks they were in a position to offer. Every experienced tea buyer in rural Ireland would have five or six tea merchants with whom he habitually dealt. It might be that there would be a couple in Dublin, a couple in Cork and four or six in London. He knew what he wanted whether it was Assam, Darjeeling, Ceylon or Southern Indian tea. He knew the variety of tea he wanted; he knew approximately the quality of tea he wanted; and he would send a postcard to various suppliers asking them to submit samples of a certain kind within a certain price range. The subdivisions were innumerable. In Indian tea you had Pekoe, Orange Pekoe, Broken Orange Pekoe, Golden Pekoe, Fannings, and there were three or four other varieties of tea. Remember that was in respect of each district.
Those samples were submitted. I have often had 200 samples set out on my table, and I was dealing with a microscopic business compared with other businesses. I then proceeded to eliminate the manifestly least satisfactory samples. When you had reduced the samples to manageable proportions, you took each section and you spent one day tasting to the best of your ability the samples in that section, comparing one with the other. You might buy 20 chests in London. On the next day, in the next section, you might find yourself buying 30 chests in Dublin. The following day, if you were dealing with Darjeeling, you might buy in London again. You bought wherever you got the best value, both in quality and in cost. In due course, that tea was delivered to you from wherever it was warehoused. If it was delivered to you on 1st April, you were not asked to pay for it until 1st October. Those were the terms of the trade.
Under this arrangement, every tea buyer in Ireland will have 90 per cent. of that discretion withdrawn from him. Instead of examining the values of 200 samples, he will find himself comparing the values of perhaps ten or 11. Why? What is the object of this procedure? I cannot too strongly emphasise this and it must be borne in mind. I am not making the case that a group of wholesalers should be prevented from combining to import from Calcutta. Let them; I have no desire to interfere with them. All I am asking is that those of us who cannot afford to participate in the import from Calcutta will be allowed to import from wherever else we can get the best value for the least money.
Why are we trying to restrict everybody else? I do not believe that a single one of the benefits which the Minister has read out as justification for this is really sustainable on close examination. I do not know what he means when he says that considerable revenue can be derived from handling this tea in Ireland. Will not 24 million lbs. of tea be handled whatever way it comes in? You cannot distribute it if you do not handle it.
I am sometimes bewildered by the way men's minds work. I have been a free trader all my life and there was many a day when I felt I was the only free trader in Dáil Éireann. Now everbody is talking about galloping into the Free Trade Area without even knowing what it is all about. It is the red herring of public life to-day. If you meet an unemployed man, you say to him: Think of the Free Trade Area; if you meet a man emigrating to Nagasaki, New York or Peru, you tell him we are going into the Free Trade Area. It is the universal alibi which Fianna Fáil has evolved. At the same moment as we are being exhorted to romp into the Free Trade Area, where there will be a free for all, we are introducing a Bill where there will be no free trade in tea.
How do you reconcile these things? If the whole future of Ireland is bound up with the success with which we enter into the Free Trade Area, what is the meaning of bringing in a Bill to withdraw freedom of trade in tea, which is a very modest and restricted claim? Why are we legislating to prohibit any shopkeeper in Ireland from buying tea where he can get it cheapest and best? Is there anyone who can tell me why? What are we going to get out of it? The Minister is human. None of us will expect him to be angelic, although he claims to have become angelic recently, but one can sympathise with him to a certain extent. When you think of the circumstances in which the British found themselves during the war, it must be admitted they did not do too badly to send us 7,000,000 lbs. of tea per annum every year of the war. They carted that half way round the world for us when we were neutral and they were fighting for their lives. That was not so dusty. I can sympathise with the Minister's feeling that if we did not have a stock on hands here, we would be dependent on them.