I come from an area generally regarded as a dairying centre. Therefore, I will not discuss the problems of the tillage and dry-stock farming areas. I have dealt in the past with the problem of overproduction of milk and I have made suggestions for the processing of milk into products other than butter. But I am afraid my suggestions have fallen on barren ground. It was a revelation to me this morning to hear that the Minister had granted two licences for the processing of milk in Cavan. Nothing could be further from sanity than the location of milk processing factories where milk is not produced. The sensible place to look for milk is where you have it readily available. That is the position in my county.
I want to refer to a situation in regard to agriculture which has arisen in the past couple of months but which has been forecast for many a long day. Last week I put down a question to the Minister. I asked him if he was aware of the present scarcity of bacon and the consequent steep increase in prices of these commodities to the consumer and if he would state the reason for the scarcity and the consequent price increases.
In reply, the Minister said he had received some representations but he was not aware of any general scarcity of bacon and hams. The Pigs and Bacon Commission had informed him that the position was constantly being kept under close review by them and that they were taking steps to prevent the possibility of a scarcity of gammons for the pre-Christmas trade. When he was asked about the steep increase in prices, he said he had no information on that. I wish to present my case as a result of the Minister's reply. I have proof of what I said, I have a notification from the Evergreen Bacon Factory, Cork, to customers which says:
We are grateful for your instruction to reserve 200 gammons for you but we regret we are completely sold out for Christmas.
Here is a reply from Edmund Burke and Sons, Ltd. bacon curers, Clonmel:
We thank you for your kind inquiry regarding 500 gammons for your pre-Christmas trade but regret that owing to short supplies we are already oversold. We have pleasure in enclosing a copy of our price list and have placed your name on our mailing list.
Claremorris Bacon Factory wrote:
We acknowledge yours of the 16th inst. and regret we are unable to let you have any gammons as our stocks are not sufficient to supply anything like the full requirements of our regular customers. Again thanking you for your inquiry and regretting any inconvenience caused which, we assure you, is a matter entirely beyond our control.
The Cooperative Wholesale Society, Rock St., Tralee, wrote on Nov. 18:
We thank you for yours of 16th inst. but regret we cannot offer you any gammons.
Clonmel Bacon Factory wrote:
Gammons are going to be scarce, very scarce at Christmas. Last year we were in a position to put some aside beforehand to help us fulfil our orders. This year, due to different trading conditions existing, we have been unable to carry out a similar programme. Therefore, we think it only fair to advise you of the position at this early date—
that was on Nov. 13—
We shall be reluctantly obliged to ration quantities available and consequently we shall be glad to know your requirements of gammon before Nov. 27. We shall reply by Nov. 30 letting you know the exact quantities we can supply you. This position has arisen through circumstances outside our control.
Messrs. O'Mara, Limerick, wrote on Nov. 12 saying:
We wish to acknowledge with thanks your booking for Christmas gammons and your order for same. However, owing to limited supplies at present, we regret we are unable to guarantee the full amount ordered but we will confirm same, together with prices, early in December.
There is the scarcity of gammons of which the Minister was not aware. There is the written word of the factories I have mentioned. I am not here to take part in this debate with acrimony but to put my view of this side of the industry in order to help the Minister and the people trying to live out of it and for no other reason.
I now want to put before the Minister the second part of my question in regard to the steep increase in prices. I have positive proof in price lists from bacon factories. I come from the greatest bacon-curing area in the country, an area where the Danes had to come to learn something about the trade. They went back with the knowledge they got from the people of Limerick and we can see the result in their position today.
Regarding the steep increase in prices of which the Minister says he is not aware, I shall first deal with the ordinary food which the poorer classes mostly indulge in, pig meat, the ordinary pig's head or, as the more refined people in Dublin say, pig's cheek. In Limerick up to a short time ago, pig's heads were being sold at 16/- a cwt. from the bacon factory. An average of 10 heads go to a cwt. These were retailed at anything from 2/- to 2/6 a head. There is a fair meal to be got from a pig's head, especially about 11 o'clock at night when it tastes sweetest. Today, the price of the pig's head to the people is 8/- and it has jumped from 16/- to 60/- per cwt. Yet, the Minister tells us there is no steep increase in the price of bacon.
Back rashers today cost 7d. each. Cooked ham wholesaled in April last at 4/10 a lb. During the August weekend, the peak season for cooked ham, as may easily be understood, cooked ham was sold from bacon factories in Limerick at 5/8 a lb. Today, in what might be described as a slump period, the price of a lb. of cooked ham from the factory is 7/-. Yet the Minister told me last evening that there was no steep increase in the price of bacon, but that is the position with regard to cooked hams.
I come now to Wiltshire sides. Wiltshires were sold in the month of August, 1963, at 330/- a cwt. In April, 1963, the price of the leanest Wiltshire was 350/- a cwt. The long clear for the same month, that is, the fat 12st. pig, the fellow nobody wants, was 260/- a cwt. from the factory. In November, 1963, the leanest Wiltshire bacon sold at 350/- a cwt. and the fat fellow that was 260/- a cwt. in April is now 356/- a cwt—the fat fellow, the grade C, or whatever he is, the fellow nobody wanted. He is now dearer than the Grade A, or the leanest Wiltshire. Yet, the Minister tells me there is no steep increase in the price of bacon.
On 1st April, 1963, those are the prices that prevailed and, if the Minister is unaware of the situation, I have here evidence and figures from bacon factories to prove my statements. Had these increases been evenly distributed, no one would have groused. If the supplier got his share, the curer his, and the unfortunate woman who stands outside the counter to buy a half head, or a half lb. of rashers, or a quarter lb. of cooked ham, got her share, no one would quibble. Yet, the Minister comes in here and tells us that he is unaware of the steep increase in the price of bacon. It is time someone intervened to put the facts of the situation before him. That is what I am doing now.
I come now to another situation. We return to the TV, but without Professor Williams this time, and we find that practically every week there is an advertisement on behalf of the Pigs and Bacon Commission. The Bacon Marketing Board has gone out of existence, thanks be to God. The Pigs and Bacon Commission come along and they tell the viewer: "I go for bacon" and they give recipes and expatiate on all the ways and means in which bacon can be served up on the plate—if you can get it and if you can pay for it.
Now, I have no objection to advertising.That is good business. I would prefer to see that programme handed over to English TV, or even places farther than the British market; let our bacon be advertised in these places and let the people there say they go for bacon. The present farcical situation is like looking at meat in another man's window, telling the people "I go for bacon", when the people who want that bacon badly can hardly go for a crubeen which is 2d. at the factory. You would get half a hundredweight two months ago for £2.
I have described the situation today. There must be some good reason for this position obtaining. I venture to suggest that in the dash and the rush for export markets and the hurry to get into the newspapers to tell the people we are exporting here, there, and everywhere, we should exert a little caution. Lately there were three shipments of pork to Norway, running into 15,000 carcases. Each carcase consisted of the whole pig, with the exception of the offal. We retained the offal. Everything else went—the kidneys, the liver, the head and the feet. While it was en route to Norway, in another post to the same country, there was a subsidy of 70/- per cwt. being sent after it to help the people of Norway to eat it, and our 70/- with it, while here at home unfortunate people cannot buy a rasher. Yet, the Minister tells us there is no steep increase in the price of bacon.
The bacon industry seems to me to be in a very critical condition. The fault must be laid somewhere. We appear to have taken the shirt off our own back and we are giving it away to a neighbour while we ourselves run around half naked. That is the picture as I see it. The Chairman of the Pigs and Bacon Commission may be a very energetic man; he is completely lacking in experience. He gave up the running of the city of Cork and its public representatives, and all the problems that appertain to local government, and he is now Chairman of the Pigs and Bacon Commission. Perhaps he has done some good things, but we all do a great many damn bad things, and maybe this man in his flurry and his haste has oversold to Norway. That is my contention.
There is a move now to centralise the buying of pigs. That suggestion is not new. It has been made already. It means that the farmer has to bring his pig a mile or ten miles into the central area and has to take whatever price is arranged by the ring who present themselves as buyers that morning. This will mean the complete wiping out of the ordinary dealers who go around from fair to fair and who are at the moment practically completely wiped out by the policy of the Fianna Fáil Government in the past. Whatever few of them remain today are the only means of competition the farmer has now as against the bacon curer.
It would be a sad day for the country and for the industry if the pig dealer were completely wiped out. He deals in a competitive market. He has, first of all, the supplier to deal with at the fair. Then he has to fight with the curer with regard to the grading of the pig. The pig dealers are a section of the community for whom I have great admiration because they are men who live on their ability and their brains, who pay on their judgment. At a glance, they judge the grade of the pig in the morning and take their chance when they come to the bacon curer in the evening. They are men for whom we should have the greatest respect and who deserve every consideration from the Department.
Central buying is a problem that could lead the whole bacon industry into chaos. It would mean that the producer would no longer be a human being; he would be a cipher. He must bring his 20, 30 or 40 pigs to the factory and take whatever price the factory pay. He cannot question it. The grade is decided by the factory and must be accepted. On many occasions I have seen producers question the price and the grade in the factories in Limerick. They got no satisfaction. As a result, I have seen people who rear pigs weighing pigs in their own yards before bringing them to the factory because they could not depend on the weights they got from the factory.
I am not 100 per cent against the bacon curer because I know well, and have had experience of it in Limerick, that this industry has been left to jog along in a lackadaisical fashion, particularly insofar as curers are concerned. While they did make handsome profits for many a long day, they did not put their profits into the development of their industry. They invested it elsewhere, mostly in their own enjoyment and high living. The result is that they are today faced with a situation where they have to bring their factories up to standard.
I can say, from my experience of bacon factories—I have been in most of them all over the country; I am not confining myself to Limerick — that the standard all over the country is very poor and the conditions under which workers are obliged to work are absolutely scandalous. One sees unfortunate girls with old wooden boots on them and an oilcloth apron on them, standing in half an inch or an inch of water in winter and summer, with the wind blowing through the factory and no protection. They are standing at an old bench, scraping the guts of pigs and cleaning them as sausage casings. I am not confining myself to Limerick; this is more or less general. I cannot see what the factory inspectors are doing about this. If they had a prowl through the factory and came through the backgate instead of through the office they might have a different picture to present. I would ask the Minister and his advisers to take particular cognisance of this.
Some of these factories are going through a critical period because of the misdeeds of the people who went before them and they are now faced with a tremendous financial burden in getting their factories — I would not say up to first-class standard—but to ordinary standards by the introduction of new machinery and new methods. These people have been jogging along as if everything was going to be all right forever and a day.
I would advise the Minister that where a case is made, instead of doing what the Pigs and Bacon Commissioners are suggesting, namely to buy them out and close them up—that is their policy—these factories should be allowed to remain open, particularly the smaller type of factory that caters for nearly 100 pigs a day, that gives employment to perhaps 50 or 60 people. In Limerick the bacon factories have a big employment content. They kill an enormous number of pigs every week. There are other small factories all over the country trying to survive and they should be given loans to bring their factories up to a standard to enable them to compete with the bigger people. At present the inclination is for the creameries and the farmers to come in and some of these factories are being run on a co-operative basis, which is not a very healthy thing, particularly as working conditions and labour conditions are not understood as well in the co-operative factory as they are in the factory run by private enterprise. I hope the Minister will take cognisance of what I have said with regard to the bacon industry.
I shall conclude by asking the Minister to put a fixed selling price on the parts of the pig that are saleable. I know you cannot put a general price on bacon but there are cuts of bacon that could be controlled. The Wiltshire is cut into different parts and if the price were controlled at retail level, everything will be controlled from that back to the wholesaler, to the curer, and to the supplier. But, as it is, nobody knows what he is paying for bacon. The woman standing at the counter does not know what she will pay for a pound of bacon. The only figure that is given is the figure from the factory. I quote from a price list of 11th November, 1963. Mild-cured Wiltshires leanest: None; Select lean: None; Middles leanest: None; Lean when ready: 408/-; Long clears: 360/-; Gammons: None. That was last week. If you can get gammons this week they will be 448/-. Cooked ham is 7/- a pound. That is the situation in the bacon trade and I would ask the Minister to start immediately to control the price to the woman at the counter.
If he does that he will regularise the trade and we will not have the position in which one day there is a plentiful supply and that in three weeks' time that particular commodity will be gone off the price list altogether. That is no way to treat an industry. If there is not fixity of price we will have nothing but chaos. In the interests of the country and of the working man and the woman who has to rear a family the Minister should step in for the purpose of controlling the price of the different parts of the side of bacon. Then you will have a free market, free competition and equality of price.
