Deputy Harte gave notice that he wished to raise the subject matter of Question No. 9 on yesterday's Order Paper.
Adjournment Debate. - County Donegal Potato Surplus.
I raise this matter as a Deputy representing the constituency of North-East Donegal and as a county councillor representing part of the constituency of South-West Donegal, for areas that produce potatoes, in the knowledge that the farmers in Donegal are going through a very difficult period. I do not wish to capitalise on it or to throw any political charges at the Minister for Agriculture. The Minister in certain ways is doing something to help but is not doing enough.
The farmers in Donegal specialise in the export of seed potatoes. In that industry we export £1,250,000 worth per year and of that figure, £240,000 is paid to potato workers. We read in the paper that the Potato Marketing Board propose to pay a 30/- per ton transport subsidy in respect of ware potatoes for Louth and Monaghan. Unless my figures are incorrect, 80 per cent of the Potato Marketing Board's exports come from Donegal. Therefore, 80 per cent of the assets accumulated by the Board belong to the Donegal growers. The only subsidy being paid to the Donegal farmers is that on the Up-to-Date brand and that is only in respect of seed.
Dr. D. G. Hessagon and Mr. P. G. Fenemore in their Handbook for Potato Growers, based on facts found in the 1961 season, reckon that it costs from £80 to £110 per acre to grow and harvest potatoes. At the moment potatoes are being dumped in the alcohol factories at a cost of £5.10 per ton. Not alone are they being dumped in the alcohol factories but the alcohol factories are being overtaxed by the amount of potatoes going in there. This gives a return of £55 per acre for the potatoes the farmers are glad to get into the alcohol factory at uneconomic prices. As the Minister for Agriculture has in the past paid subsidies to the wheat farmers in the South of Ireland, I do not think he should think badly of me for coming in here on the Adjournment and asking him to consider sympathetically the case of the potato growers in Donegal.
During Question Time yesterday, the Minister informed us that a subsidy was being paid to the farmers by the Potato Marketing Board. As I have already pointed out, this subsidy is only in respect of Up-to-Date seed potatoes. We must ask ourselves where this money comes from for the subsidy. The Potato Marketing Board was formed and the Minister for Agriculture appointed a civil servant as Chairman. They are doing an exceptionally good job but it is common rumour that the Board have accumulated over a number of years something in excess of £250,000 in profits and during roughly the same period they have paid out in subsidy to the farmers approximately half of that. These are the figures that would apply prior to this potato harvest year. I reckon that 80 per cent of the total fund now accumulated belongs to the potato growers in Donegal.
The Minister in his reply will probably tell us that 10,000 tons of potatoes have been exported this year more than last year and to a degree we must appreciate that was a help. However, I do not think it would be impertinent of me to say the Minister should not take any great pride in this achievement. If there is any credit due, it is due to the Potato Marketing Board. The Minister was warned by members of the NFA that a potato crisis must occur during 1963. He was warned to take steps but he ignored this warning. This was a warning from people who had definite authority to speak, people who were receiving their information from their members, people who grow potatoes. Had the Minister taken appropriate steps at that time, perhaps the surplus of potatoes in Donegal would be much less at the moment and I would not be standing here appealing to the Minister to help these farmers who in this very severe year, find it very difficult to make ends meet. Some farmers have confided to me that if their auctioneers pushed them for money this year, they would be bankrupt. Their only hope of salvation is to get a good price for potatoes next year or to get some other crop to take its place, but they must get time to pay their debts. I cannot over-emphasise the hardship the Donegal farmers are experiencing at the moment.
I do not want to set the Donegal farmers against the farmers in other parts of the country but it is a fact that the Donegal farmer has never received any help from the Department of Agriculture in respect to marketing or in respect to guaranteed prices. The only help they have received is from the Potato Marketing Board. The sugar beet growers in the south of Ireland have been facilitated with the sugar beet factories built by State grant, a development for which the present Government can take very little credit, and potato growers in the south of Ireland thus have an alternative root crop to potatoes. They have guaranteed prices, possibly on a quota basis. It is a cash crop. There is nothing comparable in Donegal.
The Minister has Donegal connections. I do not want to go into too much detail about the county I represent, but the Minister is familiar with the geographical set-up in Donegal, and he knows that in the areas which are potato-growing areas, the people depend completely on that crop for a living. When a year such as this occurs, there is trouble. I have had numerous requests from constituents to try to get markets in Dublin, and to try to get their potatoes into the alcohol factory. When I speak to any officials of the alcohol factory, they assure me the potatoes will be taken—but when? This is a most difficult time.
I appeal to the Minister to do everything in his power to help the farmers in their present plight. Donegal is not a milk-producing county. I agree a certain amount of milk is produced in the county, but not to the same degree as in the Golden Vale. Therefore, we can claim no great benefits from the Budget. I hope I have appealed sufficiently to the Minister, and that in his reply he will be able to tell me he and his Department will at last do something to help the Donegal potato growers. I want to make it abundantly clear that any money that is being paid to the farmers of Donegal to help them this year is being paid by the Potato Marketing Board from money which I claim belongs to the Donegal farmers. In my reckoning, it is not a decent thing to give a man a drink from his own bottle.
I should like to support Deputy Harte in his plea for some support for the farmers of Donegal in the plight in which they find themselves this year. He has made a very strong case, and he has approached the problem in a very reasonable way. He admits the Potato Marketing Board have done a good job for the potato growers of Donegal, and that the job has been organised so far as one could expect it to be organised in the circumstances. He admits, too, that an increase of 10,000 tons in the present year in the export of potatoes is quite a sizeable advance and improvement, but, at the same time, a sizeable number of farmers in Donegal are in a serious position because they cannot market what is, in fact, their harvest. It is the same to them as grain is to us in this part of the country.
On occasion when, through no fault of their own, the grain growers found themselves in a similar position, the Minister and the Department came to their aid and helped them out in order to encourage them to continue producing the crop. I should imagine the Department would be extremely anxious to see the farmers of Donegal continuing their efforts and improving their output for the seed potato industry. I am sure if it is at all possible for the Minister to assist, even in a small way, the remaining number of farmers who have large quantities on their hands, he will be only too anxious to do so.
In discussing this with Deputy Harte privately, I asked him about the increased output and whether the potatoes are taken in a balanced way from the various farmers. He said that while some of them got away most of their crop, there are others who still have it, that it has not been evenly divided, and that some farmers are in worse circumstances than others.
I found it somewhat difficult to understand the purpose of raising this question on the Adjournment. I now discover the proposition is that the growing of potatoes should be subsidised here.
This year.
I said the growing of potatoes should be subsidised here.
This year.
Let us examine what that means. Last year we had, I think, 204,000 acres under potatoes. That would represent 2,000,000 tons of potatoes. Most of those 2,000,000 tons would be of the ware variety. Thinking in terms of introducing a subsidy, that would affect 2,000,000 tons of potatoes, 75 per cent of which are used on the farms on which they are produced.
Not in Donegal. I dispute that.
We will not partition the country again. It has been partitioned once. I have to deal with the problem of potatoes as a crop. How would you introduce a subsidy in face of that situation? I admit Donegal has a very special claim, in the sense that it has been a potato growing county over the years, but there are other counties. They may not have grown seed potatoes to the same extent as Donegal, but we have Louth, Monaghan and a substantial portion of my own county, too.
The counties nearest to Dublin grow ware potatoes for their own use, for feeding on the farm, and, when the market is reasonably attractive, for sale in built-up centres in Dublin, Dundalk, Drogheda, and so on. It is not a feasible proposition to suggest that the business of potato growing could be supported in the way Deputy Harte suggests. Deputy Harte has made— and he is not the first—the charge, if you like, that I was made aware by the NFA, or some other farming organisation, of the problem at an early stage.
I am only taking what I saw in the Irish Press. They could be wrong.
I knew the problems of the potato growers. I knew them just as well as those who now claim to have warned me. Whatever I could do about the warning is another matter. The Deputy himself has admitted that this year the Potato Marketing Board succeeded in exporting only 8,200 tons of ware potatoes as against 32,000 tons last year. In succeeding even to the extent of that small quantity, the potatoes were shipped to six countries. They were active in trying to secure a market for ware potatoes and for seed potatoes.
Somebody told me two or three months ago something that I knew myself, something the Potato Marketing Board knew. Was that to mean that I could find a solution or that the Potato Marketing Board could find a solution for the problem that we all knew existed? It is foolish and unwise to exaggerate a position such as this.
There is nothing very unusual about what has taken place this year. The surplus, of which we are aware, is not very large. In the seed potato trade, the Board did very well this year. I think I have already given the figures to the House. This year, the Board succeeded in exporting 52,000 tons of seed potatoes which was much more than they exported last year. The total amount exported last year was 39,000 tons and, of those 39,000 tons, 33,000 tons came from Donegal. Of the 53,000 tons exported this year, 43,000 tons came from Donegal.
Roughly 80 per cent.
There is a problem in so far as seed potatoes are concerned but it is not by any means as great as some people would represent it to be. In the case of ware potatoes, the surplus we have been able to locate up to say, the 11th or 12th of this month is roughly 9,000 tons. Last year, at this time, it was about 3,000 tons. Two factories are open at Labbadish and Carndonagh. One has been going since November and the other since January. These two factories are handling 5,000 tons a month so there is scarcely any doubt that if whatever surplus ware potatoes in Donegal are not sold in the ordinary way for human consumption, they will obviously be handled by these two concerns.
There is a further consideration in all this. I understand that the policy of the Board, for reasons that are good and sound, is to induce growers of seed potatoes to grow a variety that has ceased to be popular in this country but is apparently popular in some of the countries with which they trade. They encourage the growing of the Up to Date variety. The Board have come to the rescue—because I suppose they felt morally bound to do what they could in that particular case —by paying out of their own funds——
Out of the farmers' funds.
Well, they are their funds, by whatever process or method they built up these funds. They are built up by the Board for the advantage of the farmers. They have helped the Donegal growers of seed of the Up to Date variety by giving them £6 a ton. I think 4,000 tons are surplus.
There is still left in Donegal a quantity of different varieties of seed potatoes. There was some prospect up to now that these might be disposed of. The Board therefore did not consider these until such time as they were satisfied that the prospects of sale for the purpose for which they were grown were not bright.
The Board gave me to understand that it was their intention—in relation to these different varieties which would amount, I think, roughly to 4,000 tons —to give consideration to what they might be able to do for the growers and owners of these varieties that were grown for export purposes. There is nothing fearsome in that picture.
The disposal of ware potatoes, even in the Six-County area, even in Britain, has been a problem this year. Of course, for them, it is a different matter entirely. All the potatoes, one might say, grown there are for table use. It is not so here. From 75 to 80 per cent of the potatoes grown here never leave the farm.
That is not a fair thing to say about the potatoes grown in Donegal.
I have said that of the two million tons of potatoes grown in this country, some 75 to 80 per cent never leave the land on which they are grown but are consumed in one form or another.
That may apply in Monaghan and Louth and——
I shall not partition the country again.
That is a red herring.
In so far as the Deputy is advocating a subsidy for the growing of potatoes, I would say this. The potato crop is one the importance of which I know very well. It has played a very important part, if not to the same extent as in County Donegal, in my county and generally in the part of the country which I know best of all. But, however important that crop, the introduction here of a subsidy for the growers of potatoes is something which I certainly do not foresee happening in our time.
It has always been the case that the growing of potatoes for sale—what we call ware potatoes—has been uncertain from the price point of view. I remember that some two or three years ago, prices had risen, for one reason or another, in the ware potato trade in Dublin and elsewhere to 30/- cwt. At the same time, when the end of the season was approaching, people were hoping and expecting that prices might rise still higher. I knew of several cases at the time where they just held on in the hope of getting these further high prices they expected. They ended up by not being able to sell them at all and the factories had closed down and there was no outlet for them.
Does the Minister propose to help the farmers in Donegal—yes or no? Give me a short answer.
I do not expect to see in my time the introduction of a subsidy here for the growing of potatoes. I think the Donegal farmers have been doing fairly well on this crop and I hope they will continue to do so in the future.
The Dail adjourned at 5.30 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Tuesday, 21st April, 1964.