asked the Minister for Agriculture if he will give favourable consideration to the question of providing to farmers a guaranteed price for oats for the coming season.
Ceisteanna—Questions. Oral Answers. - Guaranteed Price for Oats.
34.
The vast bulk of the oats crop is grown for use on the farms where it is produced, and the proportion that other users require to purchase is relatively very small. I do not consider that it would be desirable or practicable to fix a guaranteed price for this crop.
Can I take it that it is the Minister's intention to allow in foreign oats again this year?
It is my belief I will have to.
It is not surprising that the Minister must allow in foreign oats when he will not give a guaranteed price to the farmers who grow it here. There are people in this country who will buy oats or anything else when its origin is not in this country.
Some of those who require oats for the carrying on of their business, like the oatmeal millers, attempted some years ago to devise a contract system with the growers, but, as the Deputy will realise from experience in regard to the oats crop, it is very difficult and those who attempted it found it impossible to implement.
I am sure the Minister, and all the members of the House, are aware that we can produce very good oats in this country but there are people who will not use anything produced here while they can get Ministers in a Government——
This is becoming an argument.
Is it not correct that certain manufacturers in Waterford were refused a permit to import oats and that they had to use Irish oats, with the result that their merchandise was returned to them as unsuitable?
No.
There is always a reluctance on the part of a Minister for Agriculture to license the importation of oats and, as I stated here last year when this matter was discussed on a number of occasions, I, too, follow that policy. It is only when a Minister is satisfied that he is fully justified in so doing that he will take that course.
It is the Minister's belief, then, that we cannot grow Irish oats in this country?
Is the Minister aware that the expectation of an early issue of import licences is keeping the price of oats depressed?
The Minister is aware that he has an application from an oatmeal miller in Donegal for a licence because of his inability to purchase his requirements there.
Does the Minister realise this is an annual dilemna in which oatmeal millers will not buy oats in order to force the Minister to give licences, and that those who grow the oats are unwilling to sell at the depressed prices available? Is there not a way out of the dilemna by asking An Bord Gráin to act as an arbitrator between the millers and the growers? The Board could act for the millers to get oats of a suitable quality for them and at the same time ask the growers, over a limited period, to make oats available to the Board for sale to the millers. In such a situation, the millers cannot blackmail the growers or the growers the millers.
There is always this allegation of blackmail in a year like this. I feel that with the limited and shrinking market for oats, our requirement in that respect is a very hard one to satisfy. The acreage of oats is going down and it has been customary always that the great bulk of the oats grown in this country has been used in the farms where it is grown. With the declining market for oats outside that it is not difficult to see how easily that market is supplied. I know that what I said last year and this year on the subject will continue to be the practice. The Minister will examine every application very diligently before he makes a decision to give an import licence but a time is reached when you can no longer resist.
Is it not true that the oats in Donegal is not marketed until the following May from Scotch stacks?