Adjournment Debate—Potato Order.

Mr. Baxter

I now move the adjournment of the House until 3 p.m. to-morrow. The matter of which I have given notice may seem a small one, but I regard it as a serious one. The Minister, I suppose, is conscious that there is, to put it mildly, a considerable amount of confusion with regard to the purchase and sale of potatoes. I am not going to discuss it in its wider implications but I am going to raise a point because I feel that it is of considerable importance. I will just tell the Minister what is taking place and what I saw happening in the market-place of Cavan. Something ought to be done to rectify the situation. The Potato Order obliges a farmer who brings potatoes to market for sale, if he is selling as a retailer, not to charge more than ? per stone. I suppose conditions differ in different counties and even in different towns in the same county, but few of the farmers who take the potatoes into the town of Cavan take the equivalent of a ton. Some of them may take half a ton, some seven or eight cwts., and some take a few sacks. The Gárdaí intervened in every case yesterday where potatoes were being sold higher than the price fixed. There was considerable annoyance and disappointment. I went up to people who had sold and to others who had bought. I think some three sacks had been sold at 1/9 per stone and they were taken away and paid for. The man was buying seed potatoes at 1/9 to take home to his field to set. I feel that what is going to result from this is that in considerable areas where the potato crop is not fully in the ground, the restrictions that the Minister has imposed will have the result that on the next market day there will not be a stone of potatoes for sale in the town. A number of poor people, labouring men and farmers, are purchasing seed potatoes now.

If the farmers are confronted with that situation I think it may be in a limited way disastrous. Quite a number of people who have the soil ready for seed may not be able to get it. I felt that this was a matter of such urgency that I had to draw the Minister's attention to it. In this city people could not get potatoes for 2/- and 2/6 a stone for seed. There is no provision in the Order for regulating the price of seed potatoes or for allowing seed potatoes to be sold by one farmer to another for seed purposes. The situation is such that there ought to be some change or relaxation of the Order. The farmers who go into town to buy potatoes for seed will find that they will not be there. The net result will be that many a cottier who ought to have potatoes set will not be able to have them. That is the problem. I do not want to exaggerate it unduly, but it is of such an acute nature that the Minister had better look into it. It seems to me the Minister ought to have made provision which would have enabled a man who is selling for seed purposes to be able to get a higher price. I am suggesting that without thinking of all the implications of it. Be that as it may, people who are purchasing potatoes for table purposes need not be hungry for a week or so. There are ample supplies of bread, and with potatoes at ? a stone I do not know that any advantage is secured. I feel that if we had not had these Orders and if the price had gone up the supplies we have would have made the price go down. The situation as it seems to me is such that many a man will not be able to get potatoes for seed purposes, and whatever the Minister is able to do to rectify that it requires to be done now, as it is really an urgent matter.

Dr. Ryan

In order to deal with this matter in the most intelligent way I am afraid that I will have to go into the whole question as briefly as possible. We were getting reports from time to time from our inspectors throughout the country and reports from representative farmers and so on, and it did look, I must say, from January to March and April, that we might just have enough potatoes, but they began to disappear a little more rapidly than was anticipated about the month of March. We saw there was going to be a shortage, but it may be regarded as inexplicable, and many explanations have been attempted. One explanation was that in some cases more potatoes have gone bad in the pits this year than usual, and another was that more potatoes were fed to animals, because they were not able to get other food.

Various other reasons might be given. I would like to mention also that they had the same experience in the North of Ireland and in Great Britain that potatoes disappeared rather unexpectedly about that time. They are facing not as an acute shortage as we are, but they are facing a shortage. We saw that we had to face the shortage somehow or other, but I would like to explain to Senator Baxter and other Senators that it is not true that very little consideration was given to the matter. A great deal of consideration was given to it for a long time. The reason the Order was delayed is because we were certain that if once we started making the Order the price would go up. We have experience that if you fix a price of a thing people who have that thing think it is of more value and that they ought to get more than the fixed price. That is exactly what happened. People who had potatoes thought that they should get more than the fixed price, and those who wanted to buy potatoes were prepared to pay more. The wholesalers could not do it, but institutions and certain retailers could. After a few days it was apparent that any potatoes that were coming to Dublin would not go through the wholesalers but through other sources of supply, and the only thing to be done was to make the whole thing a matter of fixed distribution. That is the background of the Orders that have been made.

The question of seed potatoes arose, and whether, as Senator Baxter has suggested, we should leave seed potatoes out or not. It is very hard, however, to fix a price for seed potatoes. For instance, there are certain rare varieties of certified seed potatoes, which would fetch a high price, and it might not be advisable to fix a price for seed potatoes generally. On the whole, we thought it better to leave seed potatoes out. If, for instance, people want to buy certain rare varieties of seed potatoes, such as Golden Wonders, and if they are prepared to pay a high price for those seeds, well, then, let them pay that price, whereas, if they want to buy some of the more common varieties, such as Kerr's Pinks and so on, which they can get at a lower price, then let them do so. I do not know what Senator Baxter had in mind when he spoke of a farmer bringing in seed potatoes to Cavan market and being held up by the Guards for selling potatoes at 1/9 or 2/- a stone. After all, if the potatoes are available at all, they can be sold.

Mr. Baxter

The fact is that the farmer does not know how he stands, and in the case I mentioned the Guards did not ask either the buyer or the seller about that.

Dr. Ryan

Well, it is a very curious fact that the people in Dublin here knew about it, and they sold them in Marlborough Street and Moore Street at so much a stone.

Mr. Baxter

What I have in mind is that in my part of the country there was this particular case of one man who lived about ten miles on one side of Cavan town, and the other man about five or six miles on the other side of the town—a distance of about 15 miles apart—and when one man bought the seed potatoes at 1/9, the Guard came along and took the names of the buyer and the seller. It seems to me that the situation should be clarified in that respect, because the result will be that potatoes which could be sold for seed will not be brought into the towns at all now. I think that such people should be allowed to sell seed potatoes at a higher price than ? a stone. In fact, I think that in a time like this, people should be allowed to pay even 2/6 a stone for seed potatoes, because the usual experience is that if there is a shortage in one year there will be a more serious shortage the next year. It must be remembered that in about three weeks from now it will be too late, and I think that anything a man could pay for seed potatoes now would not be too much, in view of the emergency. I think it should be made clear that farmers can get more than the fixed price for their seed potatoes, and I should like the Minister to clarify that position.

The Seanad adjourned at 8.50 p.m. until Thursday, 13th May, at 3 p.m.

Seanad Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 12 May 1943