I have listened carefully to what the Minister had to say about it in the discussions on the various stages of the Bill and the only arguments that I have heard him advance for it are: one, he wants, to put it bluntly, to wreak vengeance on the tea traders in London because the Ministry of Food is no longer there to wreak vengeance upon. It has disappeared. The second reason he advances is that it seems to him manifest that it must be more economical to import tea direct from the country of origin to the city of consumption rather than allow it to pass through an intermediate market and, therefore, he is going to say to every tea merchant in Ireland, many of whom have spent their whole lives in the business: "Whatever your experience suggests to you, I, Seán Lemass, Minister for Industry and Commerce, sustained by the advice of my staff, no one of whom has ever handled a lb. of tea except to go out and buy it for his wife to put in his respective teapot, have made up my mind that, though you, the merchants, who have been handling tea all your lives consider it most expedient to buy it sometimes in Mincing Lane and sometimes in Djakarta, as your own discretion may direct you, you are all wrong and, fortified by that conviction, we are going to enact a statute of the Oireachtas to make your practice conform to our theory."
I have been myself 35 years in the tea trade and I want to tell the House, with the fullest deliberation, that this Bill is a Bill which will impose on our people relatively bad tea at relatively high prices. That is one ground upon which I object to it.
I want to make this point clear: if the Minister is concerned to set up an organisation or to facilitate others to set up an organisation, to buy tea in Calcutta or Djakarta for direct importation here, I have no objection to that at all. All I am objecting to is that, having set up that machinery, he forbids, by Act of this Oireachtas, ordinary merchants in the ordinary course of business doing that business as they think best in their own interests and in the interests of their customers, who are the tea consumers of this country.
There is no justification for an interference of that kind and it is fantastic to listen to the Minister for Finance thundering here last night about the devotion of the Government to the principle of individual enterprise and private enterprise in industry and business and find oneself the following morning engaged on legislation to prevent a merchant procuring his merchandise in the market where he knows he can get it cheapest and best. I want to recall to the House that every penny on a lb. of tea represents £100,000 per annum here. I want to remind the House that it is only a pretty experienced tea buyer who will detect a differential of 4d. per lb. in the quality of teas submitted to him for comparison.
We are, therefore, putting in the hands of a strictly limited number of persons, because it is only a very limited number of dealers who will be so circumstanced as to be able to import tea direct from Colombo, Calcutta or Djakarta, a power to levy on the consumers a charge of up to £400,000 per annum without any conceivable means of anybody checking upon them. Remember, whatever expert opinion there is available in this country to undertake a check of that kind will be within the ring constituted under this Bill as a monopoly for importing tea from the country of origin.
The Minister has stated that this proposal has met with the general approbation of the tea dealers of this country. That is a fantastic misrepresentation of the facts, and if that view has been made to prevail on the Minister's mind, the Minister has been most gravely misled. If he is prepared to submit to being so deceived, he should take very special precautions not to relay his affliction on to this House. There may be a limited number of large tea wholesalers, who have been having a nice time already under the Tea Importers set-up, who do not want to let go and who see in this permanent arrangement an opportunity of retaining their previous position.
I am putting it to the Deputies, of their own personal knowledge, is it not true that over the past ten years, it is the universal experience of us all that we have been consuming poor quality tea at unprecedentedly high prices? Why can anybody believe that it corresponds to the public interest that we should make that a permanency? Far from the Minister's belief that the majority of tea merchants in this country approve the principle of this Bill, I venture to suggest that from 85 per cent. to 90 per cent. of the tea merchants—by whom I mean those who deal in tea—object most strenuously to this Bill. But if you determine there are only 90 tea merchants in the whole of Ireland, as defined for the purpose of the Minister's contention as registered tea merchants on some register of wholesalers he maintains in the Department of Industry and Commence, I want to make this prophecy. If you accept that as the total number of merchants, not one quarter even of that number will in fact import tea directly under this organisation.
I want to deny most categorically that the 90 persons registered with the Minister represents the tea merchants of Ireland. Ninety per cent. of the tea distributed in this country prior to 1939 was purchased by wholesaler/retailers scattered all over the country. Some of the most discriminating tea buyers in this country were to be found in towns with a population of not more than 1,500 persons. One of the most effective methods of building up a remunerative grocery trade in rural Ireland was to acquire the reputation in the area in which you lived of being a discriminating tea buyer. All that is to be swept away now. The Individual who trusts to his skill to build up his business is now to be delivered into the hands of, I believe, not more than 15 to 20 persons who will become in practice the sole importers of tea.
Here is where the Minister immediately challenges me and says there is nothing in the Bill to prevent anybody being an importer of tea. I am not interested in theoretical calculations of that character. I mean no personal disrespect to the Minister when I say he is not capable of making other than theoretical, speculative calculations of that character. He has not the advice available to him drawn from the pragmatic angle from which I speak. I know that theoretically under the Bill anybody can import tea from Colombo or Calcutta. The only stipulation is that they bring it in through this company. But, in practice, that means that 90 per cent. of the persons who heretofore had effectively operated as tea merchants cannot effectively operate as such hereafter. I ventilated that point before, but I cannot allow this occasion pass without reaffirming the fundamental principle on which I am and our Party are opposed to this legislation.
The Minister on a previous occasion appeared to get indignant when I directed his attention to another aspect of this problem which is of fundamental importance. There is no use pretending that outside parties are so stupid and so blind as not to see aspects of this problem which jump to the eye. On yesterday, the officers of the Department of Agriculture appeared at the British Board of Trade to make the case that it would be unfair discrimination against this country, if Great Britain levied discriminatory duties on our butter.
Mark you where the representations had to be made, at the British Board of Trade. The basis of our argument to the British Board of Trade is that we have been dealing with one another on the widest possible front and with the minimum of discrimination or interference with the free passage of trade between us. We can prove in regard to butter that that has been going on between ourselves and Great Britain longer than between Great Britain and any other supplier. On that ground, we claim we are still entitled to trade in this market as freely as we did in the past.