I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that they are on offer at 25/- a head. I know a man who offered them and could not get 25/- for them. Am I exaggerating if I say that Galway sheep are down from £1 to 30/- compared with what they were last year? I know I am not exaggerating because I am speaking from personal experience.
I stood in the fair of Ballaghaderreen last Monday week and I sold there a black Aberdeen Angus Shorthorn cross heifer for £47. A conservative valuation for the same heifer this day 12 months would be £65. I got £47 after a fight that 40 could take part in, and I did not get paid until half-past one because the man did not mark her until one o'clock, although I had been selling her since eight o'clock in the morning. She was a suckled calf. I sold her twin, a bullock, for £53 at the same hour after standing in the fair for 4½ hours. I would have had men running after me offering me £70 for him a year ago and I would not have sold him for less than £72. I have a Parliamentary salary and a Ministerial pension to go home to. I have a shop to go home to and selling a couple bullocks off my farm, which is only 50 acres, will not make or break me, but coming from that fair I passed neighbours who were born and reared and are today rearing families on farms of ten, 15 or 20 acres, and I assure the Minister that I saw them standing there with cattle of less than one year of age. They were not what you would call forward cattle: they were average cattle off poorish land. It was not a question of getting a bad price; it was a question of not getting anyone to bid for them.
I saw a woman go to a fair at Frenchpark—ask Deputy Dr. Gibbons —to get the money to pay her rates. She brought a cow to the fair. I do not know how much she got for the cow but when she had paid her rates, all she had left was 50/-. This day 12 months I sold suck calves for between £20 and £25 a piece. A good whitehead at the time was going £26. I assure the Minister that those calves are worth between £5 and £12 for a choice one today.
I am not exaggerating. I am speaking from my own experience when I say that a yearling, a calf which has not shown a permanent tooth, this day 12 months was selling at £30 to £40. The price of the same beast is anything from £17 to £30, and hard to find a buyer. I am not here to lambast the Minister for Agriculture. I was Minister for Agriculture for a long time and if things have not greatly changed, whether one was born in the city of Dublin or in County Mayo or County Monaghan, one is not long in contact with one's responsibilities in that Department without beginning to bear compassion for the people who live on the land. I know the endless strife and struggle the Minister has to get something extra for the farmers and damn little thanks he gets for it.
I am not making the case to the House, I do not attempt to make it, that the Minister for Agriculture is indifferent and callous, but I do make the case that he has proved himself egregiously lacking in foresight and I charge against him to his face if he were concerned to promote the interests of the small farmers, he would be doing a much better job by stopping this galloping around the country to parties and publicity stunts.
The Minister may find the burden of his Department a heavy and a thankless one. It has been that for anybody who ever took it on. There is relatively little glamour about it: it is all hard work and damn little thanks for it. However, it is work in which a man may take a pride, work through which he feels he will leave something after him. Above all, he will feel he is working for one of the most defenceless elements in the community, the small farmers. This is not to say that I do not sympathise with my colleagues Deputies Farrelly, Sweetman, Hogan of South Tipperary who represent the wealthier farmers in the country. I sympathise with them because I know men in Limerick and in Cork, in areas east of the Shannon, who suffered heavy losses this year, who kept cattle who were nothing but guests on their lands and not even paying guests during the past 12 months.
It is a hard thing. I shall be quite frank about it. A man who has sustained a loss this year keeping 200 cattle and getting nothing for them can, however, go down the country to replace them, paying very little for the replacements, and if he loses this year, he will get it back next year. I do not think the Minister understands the other side, the problem that hits me and other representatives of the congested areas. I have spoken about farmers north of the Boyne and west of the Shannon. I do not think the Minister for Agriculture understands the despair, the absolute desolation that strikes those farmers when they bring out their yearlings, offer them for sale and cannot find a buyer at any price.
One may speak to a young fellow contemplating emigration to Manchester or Birmingham. One may ask him has not his father got a good holding of 40 or 50 acres. He will laugh in one's face and say: "Do you think I want to stand from 8 o'clock in the morning until 2 p.m. at a fair in Ballaghaderreen with my hat in my hand to everybody who passes up the road and who will not even speak to me? Do you think it is a pleasure on the way home to find the neighbours leaning over their gates saying how sorry they are that I am bringing my cattle home again? I would sooner work in the tunnels."
It is a heartbreaking experience. However, it is useless our coming in here to tear strips off the Minister. That is too easy. We all agree there is a crisis and what people want to know is what are we to do to meet it. I shall tell the Minister what he should do and if I were Minister for Agriculture in the morning, I should do it or resign. I always say it is foolish to look backwards except when one looks back to learn. I spoke on matters of finance today and my mind went back to 1929, 1930 and 1931, which I remember vividly.
I was in America when I was a boy and at that time there was full employment. When I went back, I saw men standing on the street corners in New York saying: "Brother, can you spare a dime"? I saw a great nation brought to its knees, an atmosphere of black despair spreading all over the country with the fearful tragedy of the banks closing. It was the practice then to put savings in small local banks. Then Roosevelt was elected. Mind you, Hoover was no fool: he was an able man but he was "a lame duck", and there were the three awful months from November to March when Hoover was "a lame duck" and Roosevelt was too cute to do much about it. He wanted Hoover's memory to stink in the nostrils of all Americans. I never forgave him for that. However, when Roosevelt came in, he grasped the nettle and saw the root, but he promptly closed every bank, big and little, for a week. He said: "Stop, boys; let us get our breaths. We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
Now there is panic spreading among the small farmers of this country. We must arrest this panic and there is only one way to do it; that is to convince them that we have the power and the will. If I were Minister for Agriculture tomorrow, I would insist that every acre of land in the possession of the Land Commission would be placed at my disposal for conacre. I would insist on being given authority to take as much conacre as I deemed it expedient to take, and I would insist on co-operation from every institution associated with the Department, including the Faculty of Agriculture in the University and the Agricultural Institute. I would mobilise all our resources and send out the buyers of the Department of Agriculture to every fair in the north, the north-west and the west of Ireland to buy up all the cattle that had as yet no permanent teeth at £8 per cwt.
That is the only way you will stop it. If you do that now, you will restore confidence. People will believe the Minister when he says: "Hold on; there are better times coming". The Minister was furious with Telefís Éireann when they ventured to publish a statement by the leader of the NFA that the NFA doubted the Minister in advocating that small farmers should hold on. He said: "So solemn was my advice, so great was my position and prestige, I felt justified in saying to Telefís Éireann: `Take any qualification of my recommendation off the air. You are helping to demoralise the people' ".
Very well. If what the Minister said was true, let him prove it. Let him go out and buy the cattle. He cannot lose. He said himself that every small farmer with ten, 15 or 20 acres should hold them and things would come right. If the Minister loses 10/- or even £1 a head in buying 500,000 of them, it is less than could be lost in the Potez aeroplane factory and he would restore confidence in every small holding. For all we know, if the Minister's prognostications come true, he might not have to buy any cattle at all.
I do not underestimate the Minister's difficulty, and I do not want to ask him to do the impossible, but I ask him to believe with me that it was not necessary for Roosevelt to close all the banks in the United States. He could have let all the weak ones go to the wall and the more of them that went to the wall, the stronger the strong ones became. He knew that. What he wanted to do was to restore confidence, to get the people facing the right way again.
I want to warn the Minister that this is one of the most revolutionary moments in the history of rural Ireland. He could start, and he is in great danger of starting, an exodus from the land. I know the Minister's difficulties. He was reared in and around Dublin, and it is intensely difficult for a man who was born and reared in and around Dublin to understand what farming in the west of Ireland, in Monaghan, Cavan or Donegal means. I want him to understand that if those people suddenly became persuaded that it never can work, the whole area will become denuded and they will abandon the land. That would be a fearful catastrophe for our people and for the country.
Some people here will say: "Were things not just as bad during the Economic War?" They were, but there was this difference: we sold cattle during the Economic War for much less than what they are selling at now, but there was always a feeling at the back of your head that if this old gentleman would only get sense, go to London and do what we told him to do three years ago, the whole business would be over. Ultimately he did, and the nightmare was over. We knew the cause of it and we knew that all that was necessary was a political decision and the whole horror was over. What is wrong now is that the people are beginning to wonder has the whole livestock trade collapsed. I cannot answer that. I do not know. If you had asked me 12 months ago was it possible for any political authority in this country to destroy the livestock trade, I would have said: "No. The 1948 Trade Agreement hitched us firmly to the guaranteed price in Great Britain and nobody can break us." The astonishing thing is the present Government seem to have done it and by a series, I think, of fallacious decisions and misfortunes for which they were not entirely responsible, with special reference to the adverse weather conditions last year.
The Government can retrieve in some measure the disaster which has come upon us, but it requires courage, imagination and resolution, and they can do not only that useful service but they can do more. They can restore to the minds of our farmers the knowledge as well as the belief that the Department of Agriculture is their Department, that the Department of Agriculture is their servant, and once that is achieved, he could open a whole vista for the pilot schemes and the parish plan, and create new confidence and hope among the small farmers related to practical reality and not to fantasy and dreams.
A great old bishop of this country compared the destitution of our people as my father, Lord have mercy on him, looked down upon them in the Square of Ennis in 1881, with the prosperity that had dawned upon them when I looked on them in 1951, and he said to me: "What do you think brought that change?" And I said: "My lord, I think it was the Land League and the shorthorn cow." If I had to answer him today, I do not know what I would answer, but tomorrow I would like to add: "The Department of Agriculture, whoever the Minister may be."
