If I were the organising secretary for Fine Gael—Lord save us from any such fate—I would apply myself to the task of trying to enlist the support of the farmers of Ireland for my Party. Since 1932, they failed to get it and, with their present attitude of duplicity, they will be farther than ever from getting it in the future than ever they were. I should like to remind Fine Gael that this Party have never had to resort to duplicity in their dealings with the farmers, for many reasons, but most importantly because this Party consists in great measure of people who either come directly from the land as farmers or who have a distinctly agricultural background.
There are undoubtedly many serious problems to be tackled in this matter of improving Irish agriculture. That, I suppose, is the understatement of the year. It is a massive and a serious task. I must confess that the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary have my sympathy in dealing with a problem of such massive proportions, because in the particular marketing climate in which we find ourselves, it is an extremely difficult task so to organise our agricultural undertakings as to give our farmers a respectable living. Difficult and all as it is, it is our intention as the Party in Government to achieve it. I suppose we must confess that there are as many views upon how best to tackle this problem as there are facets to the problem itself.
When I hear Fine Gael statisticians talking about the precise number of farmers and classifying them into different degrees of smallness and largeness, I often think that statistics give a somewhat false picture because I think we would all agree that while the Abstract of Statistics may give a certain number of hundreds of thousands of land holders in the country, it does not necessarily follow—in fact, it does not follow at all—that the owners of all these pieces of land make their living even in part from farming. I do not know whether this has ever been done and, if it has not, I think it should be done. An effort should be made to determine the number, approximately at any rate, of people who live on the land and derive their living from it exclusively in the first place, and then those who derive their living in part from it. Until we do that, we will not be able to get the true picture of the actual dimensions of the agricultural problem. It is no harm to call it a problem because it is a problem that could well become more acute in the coming time.
There are some optimistic people who feel that, if and when this country enters the European Economic Community, all our agricultural troubles will be over. It is certain that we will have new opportunities and that certain drawbacks which we labour under now will be removed, but we must also remember that we will enter an era of pretty sharp competition. In order to face that situation properly and with confidence, we certainly must face it with our ranks closed and with some form of united agreed policy on how we are to proceed in it. I apologise to the House for talking about the small farmers because I feel that many sincere people have an instinctive revulsion when they hear politicians speaking about them and see so many insincere people shedding crocodile tears on the subject. In spite of that, there appears to be an acute problem with regard to the living conditions of tens of thousands of our small farmers.
Before we attempt an examination of his position in general, we should ask ourselves what does the small farmer want. The quick answer is that he wants a better income and more money. Having said that, we should ask ourselves by what means this can best be provided. I suggest that the first thing we should consider is increasing the efficiency of production on farms of all sizes, but particularly on the small farms, and then more efficient marketing. There should be better planning of production, better planning of husbandry, better stock breeding, better management and lower overheads. This can be achieved but, as well, the farmer should have cheaper materials, cheaper fodder and cheaper fertilisers.
There are some who would believe that all that is necessary to achieve these things is to kick up a row and ask the Government to provide them, but I believe, being a farmer, that most sensible people will agree that the best way to achieve the objectives I have mentioned is by assisting the farmer to help himself. At present anything the farmer produces is not, on a national scale anyway, produced on any planned pattern, but haphazardly. These tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people make their own plans for their cropping programme every year and they buy and sell on the completely open market without any assistance from anybody, good, bad or indifferent except whatever assistance the Government provides in support of their products, their cattle and other things.
If we depend on Government assistance, and on Government assistance alone, to solve the farming problem, we will see that he markets his produce as best he can. Whether he has pigs to sell or barley, or whatever product he has, he goes on the completely competitive market all on his own and sometimes has to sell in competition with his neighbour. He arranges his own crop rotation and his own stock breeding but he does those things largely without the assistance of anybody else or any agency and certainly without the benefit of any existing plan of marketing.
Again, the farmer is always handicapped in these markets because of the high cost of materials, the high cost of fodder and the high cost of fertilisers. True enough, the Government have heavily subsidised the purchase of superphosphates and potash but sometimes, when I see these very colourful television advertisements by fertiliser companies and the enormously expensive campaigns they mount, I ask myself who is paying for all this and the answer obviously, in the long run, is our friend the small farmer.
With regard to the farmers about whom we are talking, there is a very serious need for specialised training of young farmers. I do not think that we are taking a sufficiently serious view of this. The Department, as one of its activities, is providing assistance along this line but we will have to tackle the problem in a more radical way in order to get the more realistic results we wish to achieve.
I have often said in this House—I keep plugging it and shall continue to plug it—that I believe our best bet for the prosperity of the Irish farmer lies in the creation of a truly operative system of co-operatives, perhaps approached from a psychological point of view or something like that, a system of co-operation that actually works in effect and that covers all the aspects of farming work—farm production and marketing.
Many decades have passed since Horace Plunkett and his friends started out on their great campaign to establish co-operatives in this country. The co-operatives they established reached a certain primitive stage but that movement has been arrested for several decades now. Possibly that is a result of our history as an agricultural country in our grandfather's time when we had to fight a long and bitter war for the possession of the land we now own. During all that long and bitter campaign our dearest aspiration and our dearest wish was to own the land, to manage the land and farm the land on which we live. After the many vicissitudes, trials and sufferings of our forefathers, we achieved this object and I suppose that now in every sense the Irish farmer is the freest man in the world. It may well be that, in order to improve our standards of living, we should possibly relinquish some of this fierce spirit of independence that was imbued in us in our forefathers' time. Instead of insisting on being, and living totally as, individuals, we must realise that our own future wellbeing as farmers will depend, in the ultimate, not only on ourselves but on our neighbours and our efforts and our neighbours' efforts must be welded together to give a real co-operative movement, before the Minister or the Department or anybody else can do anything really worthwhile for the great mass of people about whom our friends at the far side of the House have been talking.
I have spoken about the stunting of the development of the co-operative movement. I see my colleague, Deputy Crotty, sitting opposite. He and I share a constituency where there are 22 small co-operative units. Some of them are highly efficient and others are not quite so efficient. Some of them are probably a bit too small for separate existence, but it is my contention—and I have often aired this view before—that no matter how big they are, they are still too small to continue, as I have said before, little republics, living completely detached from other co-operatives.
Another serious drawback about most of them is that efficient though they may be in the handling of farmers' milk, their activity ends there. In general, what the co-operatives have developed into are little butter factories. In some cases they produce other things, like powdered milk. There are one or two who increase the depth of their interest in their shareholders and in the farmers in their areas, but, in general, it is fair and true to say they show little or no interest in the basic raw material of milk in the first place, which is grass. They show no interest that I have ever noticed on a general scale in the other goods the farmer produces; they are strictly little milk factories and, probably, the structure of the apparatus they have for conducting their business is a little out-dated and capable of improvement.
We all know creamery societies where the men who are now members of the committees are the sons or even the grandsons of the men who founded the societies. It becomes like a little title or an honour conferred upon people: when one is a member of the creamery committee, one has a certain status. But a co-operative undertaking conducted by people who have nothing else to recommend them except that they are their fathers' sons is destined not to prosper. Their activities will be isolated and circumscribed. We have seen this situation time and time again, two neighbouring creameries competing, and competing with great ferocity, over milk suppliers in some border area. They will compete with each other and with private enterprise in the sale of all sorts of things.
The former Deputy Moher, who is no longer in this House, used to refer with some facetiousness to a creamery down in Cork which dealt with ladies' foundation garments, handles on buckets, plastic clothes pegs, and the most extraordinary things and, at the same time, the standard of cattle breeding in that creamery area might be pathetically bad. The production of grass might be as low as you could get and this is, I am afraid, still the case in many parts of Munster I have seen. I am glad to say that in this part of the country, in the province of Leinster, grass is becoming more and more a carefully husbanded crop. But in some parts of the country it is regarded as something which just grows and the co-operatives in the areas do not take the slightest interest in it. When a farmer brings in his milk, they measure it and pay him for what he has delivered, and that is the end of it.
Indeed, there are so many things that could be done by a truly organised and united co-operative movement. We have long since entered into an age where things such as milk quality are absolutely essential. You cannot have good milk quality without good buildings. If it were not for the assistance given by the Department of Agriculture alone in this matter, our buildings would still be completely unsuitable: good byres that may have done well enough in their day will not be suitable for the type of market we will be getting. Even in dairy areas, all these commodities one could call secondary production, production of commodities such as wheat and barley are very important. It is, I am afraid, completely unsystematic and unregulated and as far as the creameries go, they have no interest in cattle breeding. I know there are exceptional societies. In my own constituency, there is one which takes a great interest in cattle breeding and has a scheme for the provision of highly selected heifers for their members. This is an isolated attempt on the part of the enterprising committee and manager to help their members but the trouble and the tragedy of it is that it is isolated. Somebody else may have big projects, excellent in their own way, but the trouble is that each society is completely isolated from every other society. If we want to get a really concrete effect, we will have to overcome this bottleneck which has persisted for decades, and will continue to persist unless this extremely formidable problem is tackled radically.
I have faith in the Minister. He is a man of great energy, great resource and great persistence. I feel sure he recognises what I say. Anyway, the problem is there to be tackled. Until we do tackle it and overcome it, everything our friends opposite say, everything anybody else says—the wringing of hands and the shedding of crocodile tears—will all be in vain. If we could weld all these small co-operatives into one, or possibly a small number of really large combines, I am certain these elementary problems such as the high cost of machinery hireage or machinery ownership on the part of farmers would be solved.
I do not suppose Fine Gael would know, because there are very few farmers in Fine Gael, but certainly my own colleagues in this Party know, how extremely difficult it is for a farmer of a limited acreage to own a tractor to do his tillage operations, indeed to do any kind of mechanised operations on his land. Sometimes the ownership of such a tractor can be prohibitively expensive. There are in the country isolated examples. My friend, the former Deputy Moher, whose contribution to this debate is always sadly missed, used to tell of a machinery undertaking in Mitchelstown where the farmers in that locality might have five acres of wheat and five acres of barley to cut. First of all, of course, before they cut it, they would have to sow it. They acquainted their creamery manager and he made the necessary arrangements for ploughing, harrowing, sowing and reaping. The operation was economic but the individual farmer did not have a tractor, a disc harrow, a corn driller, combine harvester or any of these things, and he had no expensive, uneconomic tractor sitting in his shed for six months of the year. If one relatively small co-operative enterprise, on its own resources, could provide a service of this kind, think how much bigger a service a thoroughly united and coherent co-operative system could provide in that one respect alone.
In another way a new system is developing in the broadcasting of fertilisers. In the old days, as I and many of my colleagues know, when fertilisers were sold in two-cwt jute bags, the way to get that stuff on the grass was to collect it from the railway, load it on to the trailer, with a couple of handlings, and sometimes spread it by hand. I did that myself, too. Sometimes if you were lucky to live near a fellow who had a fertiliser distributor or if you were luckier still and had one yourself, you spread it that way. Now, however, a new system is coming into operation: the person from whom you buy your fertiliser will now spread it for you at what I suppose is a competitive enough price. This type of operation, in my opinion, is one which lends itself ideally to its undertaking by a co-operative, a co-operative even of a small size. I could go on for hours reciting the various things that could be undertaken but I do not want to delay the House unduly. I have said most of this before, although I do not apologise for repeating it. Dr. Knapp has come and gone and told us nothing at all that we did not know already. He made his report and passed on his way but we have got no nearer to the solution of this problem.
All the time we have side by side with the creamery co-operatives, a number of co-operative meat processing plants. I am a member of a co-operative meat processing undertaking and I never hear from them from one end of the year to the other, except once a year when they send me a small dividend, small because my investment was small, necessarily. However, I believe that if that undertaking were running properly, it would be running in conjunction with the other co-operative undertakings in my part of the country.
I do not limit myself to my constituency or to any particular area at all but at present as far as I know this very large undertaking draws its supplies of cattle, sheep and pigs from dealing men and agents and fellows who are "in". Whether they are members of the society or not, I do not know. Certainly this project is not a co-operative undertaking although it derives benefits and very important benefits from calling itself a co-operative. There is no doubt at all that if this enterprise were welded to others and the whole thing brought together, it would change the face of Irish agriculture. I am confident that this is beginning to happen.
A new type of co-operative enterprise came into being some time ago in the form of co-operative marts. Again, I am afraid that although they provide a very fine service, it is a truncated operation, an ad hoc system of selling livestock. I would think that with the development of livestock marts, they would not only buy live animals but sell processed meat. I do not think it is an insuperable task to weld these two activities together because the people who built the marts are, by and large, also the people who built the processing plant. Even if they were not, it is to their benefit that these projects should be linked.
Again I go back to the theme of what I say: if we do not co-operate, if farmers do not unite and help themselves, all the help the Government can give them will not do the trick. This is a place where a real and effective farming organisation could do a wonderful job. I think it is necessary to have farming organisations to do this job but how on earth are they to tackle it while they are divided among themselves and how are they to tackle it when one of the biggest of the organisations—at least, one that is said to be one of the biggest— is in a state of undeclared war with the Government?
Here is a task worthy of the best of Irish farmers. This is a challenge worthy of the best of those who come from the Irish countryside, and I think we have the men to do it, but we are frittering away our time in stupidities and talk about jackboots and Savile Row suits, and we have important vice-presidents of this organisation in this year of grace, 1967, advising farmers to ram other farmers' products down their throats. This is the lowest low that we ever struck in Irish farming and I hope Deputy Clinton is listening to me now because I want him to know where I stand. This is where I stand: I say that when the representative, who is incidentally a farmer himself, said this idiotic thing, he did a great deal of harm. He struck a very serious blow at this one thing that we must have before we can get the co-operation of which I speak.
We must get unity. It is not a question of saving people's faces, whoever may own the faces. People's faces are not important in a problem as important as this. What is at stake is the future of Irish farming, and probably in the long run the future of our country as a free, independent nation, but the only thing we get is talk about jackboots and accusations by ill-advised and foolish people who did the most outrageous damage to the future of the country by idiotic talk about an alleged desire on the part of the Minister and the Government to crush the National Farmers Association.
The Minister is a politician, as are the other members of the Government. It is the business of a good politician to produce results: the better results he produces, the better his electorate will like it. I am a politician, too, and I know this. We do not want to have any dead bodies in our back garden. The idiotic and unfounded accusation that the Government have any intention of crushing any farming organisation will not stand up to examination in the light of this. It simply is not good politics. If you examine it in the light of the way this question has been treated by the Government, in the light of the fact that the people who were sentenced to various forms of punishment for an outrageous breach of the law that was condemned by every sensible person in the country, in the light of that action and the way in which the people who were jailed for participation in this outrageous thing were treated, you will see no effort to crush the NFA.
If the Government really wished to crush the NFA and produce bitterness, they would proscribe the NFA. I congratulate them on their wisdom and forbearance in not doing this, because my belief—I hope Deputy Clinton will take note of this carefully so that he may analyse it properly in his own time and determine precisely where I stand —is that the great mass of members of the NFA are sensible farmers. I believe the great mass of people in the NFA want this unity which I say is absolutely vital to my future as a farmer and to their future as farmers.
Possibly it would be difficult for a Fine Gael man to appreciate this because there are not any farmers to advise him about this truth, but that is so. As I have said, most NFA people are moderate, sensible, hardworking men but there seems to have developed, since the NFA embarked on what they declared to be a policy of militancy, a passage of power, a passage of authority to people who do not want concord or unity, who have insultingly and indignantly repelled the offers of other farming organisations to co-operate and assist in the common work of putting Irish agriculture really moving.
There is this other aspect of which we must all be conscious. The Party of my colleaque, Deputy Crotty, have a document circulating in my constituency at present which is a disgraceful attempt by the Fine Gael Party to cash in on this affair. It is so disgraceful and so miserably contemptible that the Fine Gael people did not put the name of their Party on it. There it is. The only help the farmers are getting from Fine Gael at present is help to get out this contemptible, miserable handbill which goes all over the alleged wrongs that have been done to the farmers by the Fianna Fáil Party and urges them now, for the first time, to strike, to give their answers in the ballot box.
This is the best Fine Gael can do in my constituency and it is a very poor best. Are they ever conscious of the fact that—probably not, because they have no farmers to advise them— farmers are a community of canny fellows who can see through this contemptible effort to cash in on the most important political, the most important social problem we have in this country? The best Fine Gael can do is to mount this alleged attempt to establish peace negotiations in order to embarrass a colleague of mine, with the co-operation of Labour, to try to commit the Fianna Fáil Party to something that would be less than allegiance to their own Party. How stupid can they be. Needless to say, they have failed in this attempt but it reveals the venal, cynical attitude they have got to the whole problem.
They ask: "How can we get this to pay politically? It does not matter if the ICMSA and the NFA get together so long as we can benefit politically by it." If that is all Fine Gael can offer they should be ashamed of themselves. Earlier in the debate I was invited by Deputy Clinton to say where I stood in these matters.
