When I spoke earlier on the Bill I said we on this side were opposing it for many reasons. Since then there has been no indication from the general public, particularly from the farming organisations and those involved in the advisory services, that they are in favour of the Bill. Indeed, many of them have come out against it. For instance, The Farmers' Journal for 19th February referred to it in its editorial. It is a paper in which I place great credence because it has the ears of the farmers. The editorial stated:
The Agricultural Institute has served the Irish farming industry well for the past 18 years. Committed research workers have operated with considerable academic freedom. They have identified themselves with farming and with the problems of farming. They have worked early and late with very little regard for civil service hours. Individual members of the staff have become household names in speaking for their specialised branch of agriculture.
The article goes on:
There is now strong feeling among the Institute staff that this sense of identity and commitment will be lost under the new Bill. They feel that the civil service intrusion into a body that is at present working satisfactorily will produce a mongrel new authority.
That, coming from The Farmers' Journal, is something the Minister should take note of. The article continues:
It is very much in the interests of farming that the Minister for Agriculture should give reassurance to the Institute and allay any fears that may exist.
I hope the Minister will give this assurance when he is replying and I hope that, on Committee Stage, he will make the necessary amendments to ensure this new authority will be free of Civil Service control and the institute and the advisory service will have the necessary freedom to work and act on behalf of the farmers in the same way as they have done in the past. With the help of this side of the House I hope we will have a Bill which will serve the farming community and also those involved in research and advice in the interests of farming in the years ahead in the same way as the Agricultural Advisory Service of the Department and the Agricultural Institute have served the farming community in the past.
I say this because the Minister will have sufficient strength and support from this side of the House to push his Bill through. As a party, we are against this Bill for many reasons. There is, in fact, no need for the proposed authority. The Minister gave as the basic reasons for restructuring this service divided control, lack of overall leadership and direction, unsatisfactory career structure, excessive movement of staff and the absence of specialist and support services among other things. I want to examine these reasons and point out to the Minister that there is no need to change the system in order to resolve whatever problems may exist.
Being a member of the Limerick County Committee of Agriculture and its chairman for a number of years I would be the first to admit the present system is not without its faults but these faults can be remedied without the suggested structure proposed here by the Minister. The system is not perfect. One has to admire the way in which some of the faults in the system have been singled out by the Department. The question is how can these faults be remedied. There are faults but they are not of such a character as to justify a radical rearrangement of the advisory services. I believe the proposed reorganisation will have adverse effects on the people operating the advisory service and, more important, on the farmers themselves. The present system enables a very free flow of information between the county committee staffs and the advisory service at local level and the free exchange of information with the Agricultural Institute. Furthermore, and this is important, the system enables the institute to be autonomous. They will not have autonomy under the new authority.
The institute has never been tied up in red tape from the point of view of contact and liaison. It has worked extremely well. There is considerable unease amongst the members and the staff because of the proposed changes. In an article in The Irish Times of 7th February a representative of the Agricultural Institute stated, among other things:
With regard to the research programme to be carried out by the Authority, this would have to be approved by the Minister and it could be amended by him as he considers necessary. This paves the way for Civil Service interference and control at every level of research. Up to now the Institute decided the openings for its research work. Now it can be someone in Kildare Street who would decide when, how and what research would be done and by whom.
This has been spelled out by the editorial in The Farmers' Journal last week and in that article. The proposed new authority will become more and more of a bureaucracy and, therefore, more and more under the control of the civil service. The result will be that the advisory and research sections will lose out in a big way. This unease has been expressed in two papers. The people concerned quite rightly consider they will be subject to delay because of bureaucracy and red tape and, as a result, it will adversely affect their work. At the moment the contact between the Agricultural Institute and the local committees is excellent and it should not be changed drastically. The independence of the research section should be maintained. The local advisers are nervous of a system that reduces the efficiency of the liaison with the Agricultural Institute and, secondly, which causes a lack of trust on the part of the farmers with whom they deal.
The local advisers have built up a strong feeling of trust with the farmers but this confidence and trust may be lost because of the setting up of the new authority and, in particular, because it is becoming more and more under the control of the civil service. The Minister should realise the dangers of disturbing this deep confidence because this would attack the foundation and efficiency of the advisory service. The new system would do away with the informal contact between the local advisers and the farmers, whether by telephone, by visits to farms or to the Agricultural Institute centres throughout the country. In future the approach will be much more formal.
There is close contact between the Agricultural Institute and the Department's advisory service and there are several publications issued which outline clearly the developments taking place in all aspects of farming. All this information is provided in the bulletins issued by the Agricultural Institute. Perhaps the new authority may rule out this easy flow of information from the research officer to the adviser. The farmers will have far less confidence in the advisory service if it is totally under the control of the civil service. It has been stated by the Minister, and it is provided for in the Bill, that any information required by other Departments will be available to them from this new service.
