I have to express my amazement that the Minister for Agriculture has the hardihood to come to the Oireachtas with a measure of this sort. I suppose the House itself will express its amazement that anyone has the hardihood to stand up here or in the other House and express dissent from the concepts indicated in this particular piece of legislation. The Minister for Agriculture has a great responsibility to the country and he ought to take that responsibility seriously. It is vitally essential for the welfare of the whole community that nothing will be done that will hamper agriculture in the task that it has before it. As I have said, this House will probably express amazement that anyone should disagree with the philosophy embodied in a measure of this sort. Of course, in this pleasure-loving, leisure-loving city with its extremes of great wealth and great poverty on the part of the many, with its laziness and great industry on the part of a small section of the community, I know it is not easy to stand out and say that I believe that this is an entirely wrong approach to the solution of our national problems as we see them to-day. I would have thought that the purpose of any Minister for Agriculture in this country was first to stand over a policy which he was convinced was going to increase agricultural production, but how did the Minister think that this piece of legislation was going to make for increased productivity to-day?
I have not taken the time to look up the statistics of how many agricultural workers we employ but it is perhaps in the region of 140,000 or 150,000. I may be wrong but I have heard some such figure as that mentioned. This half-holiday which is provided for in this measure means that for every one of those workers we are giving them at least one month's holidays in the year by providing for them a half-holiday per week. That is 140,000 workers in the country will be taken away from agricultural production for one month in the year. Does the Minister think that this is going to increase agricultural production in this country to-day and is that not the major problem before the people engaged in the agricultural industry? I suggest that as far as the agricultural workers of the country are concerned there was no demand whatever for this legislation. It is a politically inspired Bill from the very beginning and I am sorry that the Minister for Agriculture has allowed himself to be drawn into this conspiracy against agriculture, for that is what it is meant to be.
We know it is easy to label anyone speaking as I do as somebody backward, an obscurantist not prepared to face the present-day world and the tendency of the times. I was amazed to hear my colleague Senator Hayes suggest that where you have a half-holiday for industrial workers and a half-holiday for agricultural workers England and the Six Counties it was inevitable that you should have a half-holiday for agricultural workers here. As I say I do not believe there was any demand from the agricultural workers here for this legislation whatever. Is it to be suggested that because you have a certain type of social-legislation—I presume this will be called social legislation—in the Six Counties and in Britain we must follow suit and implement here legislation with the same concept or philosophy? I wonder what some of my colleagues would say if we had a Bill introduced here on the lines of the White Paper on health when that comes around. It would be easy to see what surprise it would cause if we were to have a Bill embodying some of the things from England in such legislation and that we should be expected to implement them in toto.
A vital fact is that agricultural production in this country is not increasing. It is not as high to-day as it was in 1939 and is not any greater than it was 50 years ago. In face of such a situation, when, according to the Minister for Finance, we are unable to pay for all that we require to purchase abroad, there is enshrined in this measure the idea that the main producers of the commodities that have to be sold abroad and exchanged for the things that we require are to do less work than they have been doing. The sooner the people face up to the realities of that situation the better.
I feel as if I were standing on a mountain path in Spring with the melting snows coming down on top of me. The whole tendency is to drift along, accepting this idea as the right one, the best idea for society, for the human personality and the nation as a whole. I do not believe it; I do not accept it and I shall express my opinion about it as strongly as I can to-day.
I cannot see progress or success for the people unless they are all prepared to work harder and longer than they are doing. That goes for every field of activity, for agriculture as well as industry, professions, transport services and all the rest. What is wrong with the country? The people in this House and the other House are afraid of their lives—Ministers and others—to say that. Occasionally you will get one Minister who will stand up and say that the people have to work harder and longer hours. There is no city in Europe to-day where the unit of labour is producing less in the day than it is in the capital of our country.
I have no doubt whatever that when I sit down there will be others who will tell us how well the farmers are doing, of the high prices they are getting for all their produce, and who will bemoan the price the city person has to pay for it. I wonder if any of them has tried to estimate how much more this type of legislation would cost them in their food. If 140,000 people or 150,000 people on the land are to be idle, what about the eggs, butter, turkeys and pigs of which we are not producing enough to-day? Are we to adopt the policy of buying more from New Zealand, Canada and other countries? When the city person tells us that butter is too dear he never dreams that he is raising the price by the philosophy he supports in legislation of this kind.
We are drifting away completely from fundamentals. It may be that there were some of the Minister's colleagues who pushed him into this position but, frankly, I find it difficult to comprehend how a man who is charged with the responsibility of getting more from the land than we have been getting can stand over this type of legislation.
Productivity of farms is not increasing. The number of people working on the land and continuing on the land is not increasing. People are leaving the land of their own free will. We cannot hold them. We are going a step further. We are legislating so that those who remain will work shorter hours than they have been working. Is that the road to greater production, to a lowering of cost, to improved capacity to export in the years ahead? I would like some of the people who are skilled in the handling of figures and who have a knowledge of economics to explain how it is going to be done.
There is great tragedy behind all this. I am at least as much concerned about the well-being of the agricultural labourer as anyone in this House. I understand his plight, difficulties and problems as well as anyone in this House or in the Dáil. I have spent too many days of my life beside him not to know what his life is like, what his work is like and the worth of his work both to the farmer who employs him and to the nation as a whole. I appreciate his skill and understanding. Although perhaps he may not have got an opportunity for education, he managed to extract from nature an immense store of knowledge that would be of great value to many of the people who pass for being very well educated in our country to-day.
In my judgement, what the agricultural labourer wants is more wages, and what the country ought to be able to achieve for the agricultural labourer is a higher standard of living by paying him more wages. Can that be done by reducing productivity on the farm where the labourer is employed? I do not think it can. It can be done in another way. If we make these other people pay much more for their food than they are paying to-day, there will be more money in our pockets, and we will be able to share our store with the labourer. But, if you ask the people to pay more than they are paying, they are all against it.
The country cannot have it both ways. It does not matter whether it is in agriculture or industry that our people are employed. The truth is that at this moment our people are not working as hard as they require to work if the country is to be built up. We are not a patch on people in other countries in Europe. That is all wrong. I do not think our economy can stand it. It is a tragic confession of failure on the part of all the Ministers for Agriculture and on the part of the people that, even now, we have not raised agricultural production to the level of 1939 and that, in 50 years, we have done nothing to increase it.
What are we going to do about it? This scheme is all against increasing agricultural production. The people in the country know that very well. The people in the country have adopted an almost fatalistic attitude about all this type of legislation. They feel quite powerless. They feel there is nothing they can do about it, that their leaders and many of their legislators have gone mad and that something will have to happen with regard to them before there is a change of policy or better understanding of the real problems of the country.
That is not my view alone. It is the view of people who understand what is going on in the country. I could appreciate this if we had reached maximum output, if we had more people on the land than were actually necessary for the type of work to be done, but that is not the position. The Minister knows as well as I know that there is immense work to be done on every farm, that our potential production cannot be reached for very many years and can only be reached after long and arduous toil and good management on the part of the people who own the land and that it requires immense capital investment. Despite that, the Minister brings in this Bill to cut the number of hours that men are expected to work in the week.
I will make this concession, that there are farms where this provision need not make any great difference. Take the 300-acre farm or the 200-acre farm where the farmer would be paying income-tax. He has six or seven men, and he has two or three cows to supply his needs in fresh milk. He is highly mechanised, and if one man goes off on Wednesday, two on Thursday and two on Friday, he can carry on and this Bill will create no big problem for him. On the other hand, take the thousands of small farms where there is only the owner and one man, with 12 or 13 cows, as in the case of neighbours on either side of my own farm. I would like the Minister to tell me what is going to happen on those farms when the 13 cows have to be milked on a summer's evening, with hay down that should be put up into cocks or trams, when the farmer's man has gone off under the law and can tell the farmer to go to the dickens, that if he is not satisfied the man will not come back the next day. The farmer trudges in at 8.30 at night to milk 12 cows. How long will he carry on doing that?
There is a way out and farmers will be compelled to find it. If you reach the stage where the prices of certain products make them a luxury, as the turkeys were last year—they are not so much of a luxury this year—people will begin to complain. There are others in the House, including men on the other side, who know well that what I say is true.
A higher authority, who can be much more objective than any of us, addressed himself to this problem recently. Most Reverend Dr. Kinane, Archbishop of Cashel, speaking at a Muintir na Tíre gathering in Thurles about the disinclination of people to remain on the land, went on to say:—
"As a result of this disinclination, life on the farm now is beset with difficulties, and that is accentuated in dairying districts by the unsuitable working hours, which have resulted from State interference in this matter."
Is not that true? Does not the Minister himself know that in his own constituency it is true? Of course it is.
I regard this decision of the Minister as a very grave one. He has introduced this Bill as the instrument of the Government, and that indicates a concept in his mind and in the Department which, in my judgement, is altogether foreign to the point of view that ought to be held by a responsible Minister charged with getting the most out of agriculture by placing at the disposal of those engaged in that industry the facilities which they expect to get from him.
I am always puzzled when I hear talk about holidays and leisure, when I read the views of people who plan how leisure should be spent—in a world where there is not half enough to eat or drink, where so many millions of hours are spent day after day in the production of means of destruction, that have to be stored away, that no one can eat or drink. One would imagine it would be our policy to plan to keep our people working in those other fields and occupations which will provide the necessities for the people. We are following the stream, and I think it is wrong.
We have this claim that because industrial workers have a half-holiday farm workers must have it also. I wish the Minister could make some plan to enable farmers themselves to get one. He knows and I know farmers who have never had a holiday, weekday or Sunday. There is nothing done about that. In a country where those are the conditions of life, can you wonder if the owners of the land, feeling that things are coming to such a pass, that ownership imposes such obligations and responsibilities, are swiftly developing a frame of mind where they would regard ownership no longer as an asset but as a liability, and where many would be pleased to get out of it and let everything be passed into the common pool.
I warn that we have our feet firmly planted on that path, and this type of legislation will push us forward. The factory worker may be deprived of the benefit of fresh air, and it may be essential for him to have a half-day, but those on the land are living and working with nature, which is always turning and never sleeps throughout the whole 24 hours. We will not reap if we do not sow, and if we separate ourselves from our work and disregard our responsibility, the community as a whole will inevitably suffer.
This type of legislation will make life on the land, from the owner's point of view, more difficult and distasteful day by day. Life in the cities and towns is too easy and too simple. We have it so well regulated with so much pleasure and enjoyment that it is pulling the people from the country. That is happening, not alone here, but in many other countries. In the Argentine and in Canada, in the case of every rural community I read of, it is the same problem the wide world over. We are marching on to disaster, which is definitely ahead, and people will not recognise it. All the time it is the people in the urban areas who are attempting to apply conditions to nature and to life on the land that cannot be so adapted. That is making a big contribution to the disturbance in the social life of the world to-day.
There was a half-day for the miners in Britain, under legislation I suppose, and then they started calling them back to the mines week after week and one of the big announcements of the B.B.C. each week gave the number of men at work in the mines on that Saturday. I suppose it will be the same here. After a while, when the potatoes, rashers, eggs and butter become dearer, some of the people in towns and cities who do not appreciate now the problems connected with the production of these things, will begin to look back again.
I listened yesterday to the discussion here on the Bill to confirm certain tariff Orders. I felt disposed to take part in the discussion.
I would have got up and said how much of a burden that was imposing on the farmers. I did not say anything about it. I let it pass. This will be a much greater burden on the agricultural community as a whole and on the whole community in the industrial and urban centres than any of them realise. They will march on. It is the history of the world that urban civilisations have marched to their deaths. I suppose there were lone voices crying out trying to warn them, but they did not take any heed. The forces of nature are stronger than any of us. The land will not produce its food if people will not labour. The Creator meant that men would live by the sweat of their brow. He gave us one day to rest and He meant us to work the other six.
We are changing all that. We are changing it despite the demands of nature, and despite the necessities of our own people. I do not believe that we will rejoice in what we are doing. I know it is alleged that farmers are doing very well, that they can afford this type of legislation, that incomes are high. I have been looking over some returns that have been made by men who examined this situation in regard to agriculture very critically. In some of our southern counties, and in Roscommon as well, men have gone amongst the farming community, examined all their figures, incomes and salaries, purchases and everything they did. The estimate which these men arrived at indicates that our farmers are earning about £200 per year on a number of holdings in Cork, Limerick and Roscommon.
I ought to have examined our figures of national income and the distribution of national income and brought them here to indicate what exactly the farmer's share is. If I could have got further how that income was distributed between farmers and workers the House would see some of the disadvantages under which our farmers are labouring to-day. All that should have been carefully studied by the Minister for Agriculture no matter what pressure was brought upon him before he came to the Seanad with this measure.
It is the wrong turning for us. I know quite well that on many farms in this country it just will not work at all. If the illustration I gave a moment ago is typical—and I think it is fairly typical of the conditions on thousands of farms in this country—it is a clear demonstration that this will not work. If the farmer who employs labour is put into the position of having to do far more than he himself is able to do he must readjust his whole economy. I would ask that the consequences of that readjustment for the whole community should be carefully studied before we would put such an imposition upon the farmers.
There is a lot more one might say about this matter, but I have expressed how I felt. I do not think it is necessary at all. I repeat again that I do not believe the agricultural workers in the country are demanding it. If this were to be operated in accordance with the spirit of the law it would create a spirit of disaffection and dissatisfaction between the farmer and the labourer that has not existed in the past. There was a basis of human relationship but when the law enters in to determine how I am to behave to my men and how they are to behave to me it is unnatural and impossible for agriculture in this country or in any other country to be carried on successfully on that basis.
I would remind the Seanad again of the opinion of His Grace the Archbishop of Cashel on the policy that is being advanced in this State especially in relation to certain types of farming which are vital to the country's economy. I know that I cannot halt the progress of this measure. I believe our people refuse to think sufficiently seriously about the country's problems. Only a few people do and that is what has the world as it is. We want to be like the rest of the world, just as unhappy as they are, making life as impossible for ourselves as we can make it. We are going the wrong road in passing legislation like this.
