I pointed out last night that this, in my opinion, is one of the most important, if not the most important, item to be discussed in the House this session. I also remarked that I considered it was very surprising, in view of the uproar and upset in Irish agriculture, that we should have it discussed here in such an air of calm.
There are a number of individual matters with which I should like to deal and I propose to do so now, having expressed my views on the agricultural dispute last night. I have nothing more to say on the agricultural dispute except this: for goodness sake, would the NFA and the Government not have a bit of sense? Can they both not realise that every dispute that ever took place, even the battles now taking place in the Middle East, must be settled round the table? Is it too much to ask grown adults in responsible positions to get down and discuss matters which are of vital importance not alone to themselves but to the whole community? If they do that, they will get the respect of the community at large. If they do not, they will be held responsible for the mess into which Irish agriculture must of necessity go because of the way matters are being handled.
With reference to the farmers who are still in jail, might I appeal to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Taoiseach in this case to allow these people out? There is no point whatever in looking for a pound of flesh. I cannot understand why it was necessary to bring in the farmers who had not signed bonds or who had not paid fines up to £10, or why it was necessary to pick them up immediately, in view of the fact that there are numerous people who have committed serious breaches of the law, both civil and criminal, against whom warrants have been issued and who are knocking around this country for a considerable time, and no attempt has been made to bring them in either to serve a sentence or pay their fine. That being so, farmers cannot be blamed if they claim that there has been discrimination against them. They cannot be blamed if they say they were picked out for special treatment because the Government want, for some peculiar reason I cannot understand, to punish them.
I know that like the fellow whistling in the dark passing the graveyard, there are a number of Government supporters in this House who will get up here and say that the Government were right, that we must maintain the law. I am in favour of upholding the law, as is any right-minded person in any country, but if we get down to commonsense, we must agree that the whole approach from the Government side to this problem has been wrong. The NFA have made mistakes— tactical errors would be a better way of saying it—and I am not sure that they would not be prepared at this stage to go half way to try to get the matter cleared up.
The Government should not pooh-pooh attempts by anybody to mediate. I believe most people are doing this with the interests of the country at heart. If the 28th June were over, the whole problem might be approached in a saner way by the Government. They look with suspicion at anybody who tries to mediate now—this is an election stunt. People do not change their political views overnight and the Irish are a conservative people, they say. The one thing I would be afraid of is that the farming community would lose patience and confidence in the public representatives and they are likely to do that because they feel they are being singled out for special treatment, not very favourable treatment. In addition to that, they are getting very little support from those whom they elected to this House to represent them.
The question of the derating of agricultural land was mentioned. I quite agree with those who made the comment that it is complete nonsense to expect any farmer to dance a jig because one-fifth of the rates he had been paying on his under £20 valuation land has been removed: a matter of a couple of bob a week, which means very little difference. The farmers of Ireland will not be pulled out of the mess they are in by a hand-out of a couple of bob a week. That is what it amounts to. It was entirely stupid of anybody to suggest that this was the answer to the farmers' problem. If we cannot do a lot more than that, we had better review the situation again.
With regard to derating, surely it must be realised that since derating takes place only on land, there are very many people who recently tried to help themselves by building houses and that the rates on the houses, when the ten years are up, will be much more than what they are paying on agricultural land. Let us have a sane approach to this and not be telling the farmers that a lot has been done for them just because derating has taken place. That is all nonsense. I asked a supplementary question of the Minister for Local Government the other day about a man with a £35 valuation. I was told he gets £20 derating; but all he gets is the agricultural employment remission for the other £15. Did anybody ever hear of an ordinary farmer with £35 valuation being able to employ labour? He gets it awfully difficult to live on it himself. If he can do it, he is a fairly good farmer.
There are a number of irritations which have occurred. Because of the alleged no rates campaign of the NFA, the Department clamped down on the payment of grants. The clamp down took place last fall, somewhere before Christmas, right up to the present time. I am quite sure there must be a very big backlog but would everybody not agree that it seems rather unfortunate that somebody who had completed repairs to, or the erection of, a house in January or February, 1966, had not received his grant in June, 1967, not because of the fact that the work has not been done but because of the fact that when the Department were able to carry out an inspection in the fall of 1966, there was a ban on payment of the grant until rates were cleared. I know a number of people who paid out of their own meagre resources for the repairs, under the impression that the Department of Local Government would honour their promise to pay the grants. The result was they were caught in a cleft stick. I appeal to the Parliamentary Secretary to make a special effort to try to impress both on the Department of Local Government —who are tied up in this because Agriculture told them to do this—and on the Department of Agriculture to have these grants cleared.
Another matter which is causing a lot of annoyance in rural Ireland is the fact that if a man decides to implement a water scheme for a house and farm, he has some chance if he plans it with the Department of Local Government but, if he is foolish enough to try to bring water to his stables, he finds that the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Local Government do not seem to have any way of clearing the small issues between them. I can give instances to the Parliamentary Secretary of dozens of cases which have been passing backward and forward between the two Departments over a period of seven or eight months. If the Department can give a good reason for this, I should like to hear it, but, for the life of me, I cannot understand why, if there is a common source of supply, it should not be possible for somebody to say: "On the source of water the grant is being paid by one Department, and the other Department will be responsible only from where the connection of the supply branches". It seems to be quite a simple matter but yet completely beyond the two Departments to reach common ground on this, and it is very annoying, particularly to people who have spent money, which they needed for something else, on modernising both house and farm.
Another matter which is causing a good deal of annoyance is the matter of land reclamation grants. Surely it is ridiculous that, when under the present system, according to the Minister for Local Government, in reply to a question by me, the average time between the date of application for a grant in County Meath and the time the inspector gets out to examine the land to ascertain whether or not a grant is available is 11 months, a warning should be given that any work done in advance of inspection will not qualify. Again, it appears as if it is either awfully unreasonable or the Department just do not want to pay the money—one or the other.
I heard of a number of cases of people who had tillage land flooded, and who, in an effort to relieve the situation, spent a considerable amount of money putting in drains to take the water from the tillage land. Before doing so, they applied for a land reclamation grant. That was done in May last year. An inspector could not get out until April, 1967 and, when he did get out, he said he was very sorry but the portion of the work done did not qualify for the grant, and the Minister confirmed this in the House. Surely extra inspectors should be employed to ensure that the inspection is carried out in time, or, alternatively, an arrangement made by which if it is evident the work has been done well, the grant will apply once the application has been made. The same applies to glasshouses. We had a situation a few weeks ago where the Minister very kindly agreed to bend the regulations slightly so that those who had applied after, I think, February of this year, would be paid the grant, even if some of the work was done before the inspection was carried out.
These are the sort of niggling irritating things which in normal times are the bugbear, particularly of the small farmer. You have the same thing in the payment for calved heifers. I quite agree with those who say here that much of our trouble in agriculture with regard to livestock was caused by the calved heifer subsidy, which was misconceived—to make a pun— and was in fact introduced here for the purpose of trying to please somebody. As we know, it did put into the pockets of a certain number of individuals a considerable amount of money, but it put on the farms of this country a considerable number of substandard cattle. Let us have no doubt about that. I saw farmers here bristling with anger when I made that comment before but when the general use of scrub bulls, which was banned here 30 years ago, was re-introduced, what can we expect but a considerable number of scrub cattle? When we cannot even sell top class beef how the dickens can we expect to compete with anybody with that sort of thing?
In addition, the amount of money made available for the calved heifer subsidy was too small the first year. It was estimated and, to show how badly it was planned, the Minister estimated it would take £300,000 the first year, and he put £2,500,000 in last year; it took £1,500,000, and he has as much in this year. We know that the amount of money which can be collected in the calved heifer subsidy this year will be comparatively small because the stock must be dropping again. The small farmer getting a calf, selling the calf as quickly as he could, fattening the heifers and trying to sell them and then going out of it again, is bound to affect the national herd. That did not seem to have been evident to the people who planned this if any planning was done with regard to it at all.
Even with that, we find a situation where people who applied for the calved heifer subsidy are finding it extremely difficult in many cases to get payments. The man who finds it more difficult than anybody else is the landless man, the man who takes grazing for one, two or three cows. It is a really extraordinary thing that if he succeeds in finding a neighbour— mind you, there are not many of them —who will give him the grass of a cow, the cow will be counted in with the herd of the man who owns the land and he as an individual does not count at all. The result is that poor unfortunate devils who are scrimping and scraping, trying to get a few pounds together, are being caught up by this sort of thing and prevented from getting the money which they are rightly due, simply because someone will not bend regulations.
I have an example where an inspector from Dublin visited three times a farm 45 miles from here for the purpose of examining and inspecting. Eventually he tried to bring it about that if the man could, by some magic way, own a piece of land for one day on which he would have his own cows, he then could qualify; otherwise, he would have to depend on the whims of the man who owned the herd with which his cows were running. The fact that all the other cattle in the field were bullocks and his was a cow did not seem to strike the gentleman who visited the herd at all. He still insisted on the regulations being adhered to. We hear a lot of talk in this House from Ministers about the interpretation of regulations and how the Minister gives a wide interpretation and does not intend that these things should happen. However, they do happen and the fact that they continue to happen is evidence that the whole thing needs to be changed.
We also have the question of payment for TB cattle. The number involved is pretty small but there is an inordinate delay in having payments made. I do not know why that should be. I do not know whether civil servants or the Minister appreciate the fact that if a man has a cow which turns out to have TB and he has to get rid of it, until he gets the price of that cow she cannot be replaced. That is ordinary economics and easy enough to understand. That being so, I fail to see how a man who has to sell a cow because she has TB in November could come to me in the month of May and say: "I never got paid for that cow. We have young children and we want the milk but we have not the price of a cow." Surely there is no reason at all for these things. A little bit of humanity should enter into it.
I am not saying the officials of the Department are going out of their way to be awkward but there is something wrong with the regulations which allow this sort of thing to happen. I do not have very much to do with the Department's officials. Any time I get in contact with them I find them most courteous and helpful but courtesy and being helpful is not the same as having the job done. I believe that it is actually the way the regulations are written which is causing the trouble and not the people who are interpreting them.
There is another matter which I raised in this House by way of question and it did not seem to be accepted by the Minister. I should like to get some further information on it, the eight grades of inspector employed by the Department. As far as I can find out there are in general two grades, supervisory and others, and they require to have mainly the same type or standard of education, experience and everything else. Despite that, the Department have broken them up into eight grades and there is a wide disparity between the wages being paid to the first and to the man on top, leaving supervisory people out of it.
In addition, there seem to be some peculiar arrangements about promotion. If promotion within the grade is allowed, how can it happen that on the Minister's admission, two people at least in those grades with 25 years' service have not got promotion? Either they are suitable for the job or they are not, and if they are suitable, surely they should get promotion in the normal way? I was told there was a system by which their salaries were being fixed, that they were being fixed in accordance with the regulations made under the conciliation and arbitration schemes. I asked at the time if it was true that in one of the grades there was nobody at all employed and I was corrected by the Minister who said that was not true, that there was in fact one man employed.
My information is that on this conciliation and arbitration board, each grade is entitled to two representatives. Can that man in whose grade there is only one man bring somebody else along to help him or does he have two votes? How does it work or is it true that a bad old system, which has been working in other places—and I would not be surprised if it is being operated by the Department—operates whereby when questions of wages or hours or conditions are being considered, the simple way to get over them is to give something reasonably substantial to those with a small number of people in the grade and their two votes will then have it carried against the votes of people in whose grade there may be up to 600 as against the one, two or four in the other grades? This is a very old trick which the trade unions kicked out of court long ago. If it is still operating in the Department, it should be changed as quickly as possible. The Parliamentary Secretary shakes his head.