It is on pages 185-6. The reason why I think it would be illegitimate to borrow for that particular item of subsidy is this. As a by-product of the rent restrictions code, the private owners of houses let to statutory tenants are quite unable to maintain those houses in a proper state of repair. In fact, many of them are being slowly bankrupted by the whole situation that exists between them and their tenants. Consequently, it is a question as to what is the relevant proportion of old houses let on statutory rents which are rapidly falling into decay to the number of new houses being built with the help of subsidies from the public purse.
I suspect that the depreciation in capital value of the many houses let to statutory tenants far exceeds the value of the net addition to housing created by heavily subsidised housing in accordance with the various schemes with which we are familiar. If that be so, the money spent on subsidising new building of dwelling-houses is not a net addition to the capital assets of the country at all but only a slight off-set to the serious depreciation in the capital value of the existing houses, many of which are let to statutory tenants. I think it would be agreed by the Minister that there is no justification for borrowing at all, except with a view to creating a permanent net addition to the capital assets of the nation in some form or another.
One of the results of that curious relationship between subsidised new housing and old houses let to statutory tenants is that employment—especially employment in the building trades— depends too much on the rate at which new housing is being pressed forward, very often with the help of borrowed money. In the ordinary way, in a free enterprise market, and in the absence of an artificial restriction of the rents of old houses, the principal demand for the services of carpenters, decorators, painters, plumbers and the rest would proceed from the owners of houses let to tenants at an economic rent and you could count on their demand to create a normal state of reasonably full employment for all that category of workers. But because of the semi-bankrupt position to which the State has reduced the owners of houses let to statutory tenants, they are not in a position to repair and maintain their houses. Consequently, the whole demand for the services of the craftsmen engaged in building houses devolves on the special schemes that we call housing schemes and, therefore, is apt to fluctuate widely according to the extent to which the Minister is in a position to provide money for such purposes.
There are other social and economic consequences of the contrast between old houses and new. I think I mentioned in my former remarks that the rent restriction code has operated to transfer a substantial part of the capital value of old houses let to statutory tenants from the owners to the statutory tenants. Now, that is a kind of confiscation of a capital value. If the confiscation of capital value took place in the interest of the community as a whole it would be intelligible and from the point of view of a communist ideology it would be even defensible; but this is worse than communism, for the confiscation that is taking place by the operation of State legislation is transferring capital values from one section of the community to another section of the community, impoverishing one lot of people in the interests of the other lot, while that other lot my have done little or nothing to deserve such treatment.
In fact, the kind of confiscation involved is the use of the power of the State to transfer wealth from one section of the people to another exactly analogous in principle to the great confiscations of Irish history when the State used its power to rob one section of the people in favour of another.
Not only are the economic consequences of this whole situation one of the perennial causes of periodic unemployment in the building trade but they have also worked grave social injustice to a very worthy and deserving section of the community who unfortunately are unorganised and largely inarticulate and do not command very many votes. I have a letter which is a regular cry from the heart from a victim of the rent restrictions legislation and I would like to put at least part of it on the records of the House. This poor woman is trying to live by letting to tenants a house which she bought for over £1,000 about 20 years ago. Among other things she says:—
"The law was all in favour of tenants. I worked and saved for my old age. I am 71 years of age and it is misery. The value of my property has gone in the market. No one wants to take on tenants. With the control tenants go to the corporation with their petty complaints. It is just legalised robbery. Give me back my own. I have no strike weapon, doles or old age pension. I saved for my old age and men with £10 to £15 a week are getting the benefit. They get social services. I prefer to work if I am let. I have good health but there are other women and the hardship on them is terrible, to stand the impudence and abuse from tenants, the dilapidation, scarred walls and dirt, plumbing bills, choked lavatories and sinks."
I hope that will in due course go on the records of the House.
I think we really have only two alternatives in this matter, either as rapidly as may be to abolish the rent restrictions code and let the rents of old houses rise to something approximating to the real economic cost of housing under modern conditions, in which case you will get a normal, permanent demand for the services of craftsmen to keep all houses in repair; or we can continue our present illogical and inconsistent policy of trying to ride the two horses, the capitalist horse and the communist horse, and the final result will be that we will go from bad to worse and keep piling up the deadweight debt.
What is the ultimate cause of this housing shortage in Dublin? Ever since the industrial drive began about 20 years ago there has been a terrific exodus of people from the rural areas and a correspondingly terrific influx of people into all the larger towns, and especially into Dublin. Therefore, we have really created this problem of the housing shortage, in the cities at any rate, as a by-product of the over-hasty industrial drive we pursued for 20 years on a rather shaky agricultural foundation. For fear of stimulating Senator Summerfield to excessive eloquence I am not going to deal with that line of thought now, but I am going to suggest that it is a pity we were not able to increase our agricultural output in the course of the last 20 years in anything like the proportion that we have increased our industrial output. Had we been able to do so we probably would have a better distribution of population, less congestion in the cities and towns, less of this kind of housing problem and more real production and real wealth in the nation as a whole.
Senator Baxter made reference to some of the facts about the static character of our agricultural output, in general, but also from even painful, personal experience. However, I would like to put the matter in a slightly more statistical way. I do not know whether other Senators recently acquired a valuable report of the F.A.O. entitled "Output and Expenses of Agriculture" published in 1953. From that report it is possible for us to see ourselves in the European setting as regards our agricultural effort in the last 20 years. The result, I am sorry to add, is not very flattering.
There are 14 Western European countries in this comparison, many of them countries that were overrun and disorganised in the course of the Second World War. In these 14 countries as a whole the volume of agricultural output—I am speaking about volume, not prices—has increased by 10 per cent. since 1938. We have barely got back to the level of 1938 thought I am glad to note in the last year there is evidence of a slight increase in the physical volume of output in agriculture.
There are two comparisons which it is usual to make in regard to these matters. One is output per acre and the other is output per person in active agricultural employment. In order to put the output per hectare—we speak about hectares in this report—on a comparable basis the report uses an expression "hectare of arable equivalent". That makes allowance for the fact that an acre of rough mountain grazing is not the same as an acre of good arable land in a good pasture area. Consequently it squeezes down the acreage of rough mountain pasture to get a comparable amount of typical arable acreage. By making that allowance it compares as regards the different countries, the net output per hectare of "arable equivalent" and in that comparison among the 14 countries I regret to say Ireland comes 14th.
You may be interested to have a record of the figures given on page 18 of that report. In 1950 the value of net output per hectare in U.S. dollars was as following for the countries concerned: Netherlands, $377; United Kingdom, $156; Denmark, $226; Finland, $130; Ireland $85. Of course statistics can be very misleading and there may be qualifications and modifications that ought to be made but there they are on record and they are certainly a challenge to us.
The other comparison is the net output per head of active agricultural population. In this comparison we come out rather better because it is characteristic of our whole history in the last 50 or 100 years that we seem to have the same physical output of agricultural produce with a gradually diminishing man-power employed in obtaining it, with the result that the output per man continues to increase whereas the output per acre remains painfully and continuously static. The recent increase in the output per head of active agricultural population is in the main the result of the reduction in the number of persons employed in agriculture.
Here are the figures for net output per head of active agricultural population in 1950:—United Kingdom, $1,550; Denmark, $1,200; Netherlands, $850; Ireland, $550; Italy, $350. So you see we are well above Italy, but we are only little more than half the Netherlands achievement and about half the Danish achievement and about one-third of the United Kingdom achievement, so as Senator Baxter argues there is room for considerable improvement of our output per head in agriculture as well as in our output per acre.
The British, in the course of the last 15 years, since 1938, appear to have increased the volume of their agricultural output up to 1950 by some 41 per cent., and I think in recent years the increase is of the order of 50 per cent. I am not saying that there are not certain excuses for our failure to increase the volume of output, and I am quite aware of the fact that there were high and very attractive prices paid to British farmers and every possible facility given to them which enabled them and encouraged them to achieve that remarkably high output; but all the same I do say that if we could have increased the volume of agricultural output by anything like the percentage that was achieved in the United Kingdom there would now be less rural depopulation to deplore in our country, and I think less housing congestion in Dublin and in the larger cities, and less of a transport problem, because transport capacity would have been used more up to its maximum possible amount instead of the present situation where we have far more transport than things to carry in it.
Now, if you ask me why we did not manage to increase agricultural output in the course of the last 15 years, various answers could be given, and I am not going to commit myself to any one answer rather than another. Some people say lack of capital on the part of the farmers of the country generally. Well, if what our agriculture primarily needs is fresh capital, was it not a pity that when there was an influx of fresh capital coming in in the form of Britons and North of Ireland people buying Irish farms and settling over here that that influx of fresh capital was stopped by the imposition of a 25 per cent. tax on property acquired by non-Irish citizens? I think it was really a sign of lack of national self-confidence that we stopped that influx in the way we did when in accordance with our finest historical traditions we should have made it our business to absorb those people and make them more Irish than the Irish themselves.
Further, if you want fresh capital in the form which could not possibly give rise to any balance of payments difficulties you can get it by abolishing that 25 per cent. tax and giving citizens of the neighbouring island exactly the same right to buy property over here that we enjoy if we want to go to buy property in Britain.
Others might say lack of enterprise, other people might say lack of markets or proper marketing organisation, or the absence of sufficiently attractive prices, and so on. Other people might say maldistribution of population with reference to agricultural resources—in other words, the old problem of agricultural congestion in the West, and the problem we have intensified ourselves, lack of adequate manpower for agriculture in the best agricultural districts in the centre of the country. Again, other people might say that the principal sinner is the wrong-headed policies pursued and administered by the Department of Agriculture. The principal advocate of that theory is a writer in the pages of the Irish Times, Mr. P.F. Quinlan, who happens to be president of the Young Farmers' Club movement and in some ways he is a pretty important factor in what I might call agricultural politics.
I am not going to say which of these various theories is right, but I do suggest that, sooner or later, the Department of Agriculture will have to face the problem of the dual-purpose cow. On the face of it, it is absurd that the dairying industry should be expected to produce the raw material of the beef cattle industry of the rest of the country and in the process of doing so be content with cows which give an average of 200 to 300 gallons a year less than they could get if they went in for a pure bred dairy breed. That is a matter which requires further looking into and further justification, and I am not saying that I side with either one side or the other, but I do think that the time has come when the matter will have to be inquired into very seriously and very objectively.
Most of all, I would suggest that we need a kind of agricultural survey, not only of our agricultural land but of our farmers, the people who own the land; and I would like that survey to be carried out by the Department of Agriculture, under whose auspices, I suppose, it should be carried out, with the fullest co-operation of such bodies as the co-operative movement, the young farmers' clubs and the local county agricultural committees with their expert personnel; the final result of that survey should be to grade the farmers of Ireland into at least three classes— Grade A, Grade B and Grade C. Now, I do not know in the least what area of land or what proportion of farmers would qualify for the Grade A category, but I suspect that it would be something of a shock to public opinion to find how large a proportion of our farmers of every size of farm and how much acreage of land was owned and exploited or misused by farmers of the C grade or even the C 3 grade. It is a question of ascertaining the facts in a perfectly judicial and objective way, putting that on record with a view to creating a more healthy public opinion about the responsibility of every kind of farmer for making the best use of his land in the national interest as well as in his own.
Now, if the survey did that—grading every one of our farmers into one or other of these three classes—and you could go further if you like and have A1, A2, A3, and down to C1, C2 and C3 —having got that I would then lay down as an absolute principle that any farmer of the Grade A and Grade B classes had an absolute right of security of tenure and under no circumstances could he be deprived of his land by the operation of any of the powers possessed by the Land Commission. On the other hand the Grade C farmers, whether they had 1,000 acres or ten acres, should be absolutely subject to the powers of the Land Commission and even to increased powers which should be used with reference to their land with a view to bringing about a more efficient use of the national agricultural resources.
In fact, the power of the Land Commission to expropriate land should be confined to the Grade C farmers, and while still retaining such provision as may be necessary in order to relieve congestion I would like to see recognised a new category of claimants for land that is taken up by the Land Commission with, of course, adequate compensation even to the C3 farmers. I should like to see new categories of landless men recognised as worthy claimants for farms of that kind thus made available by the Land Commission. I am thinking especially of what I might call surplus sons of efficient successful farmers who have not got enough land of their own to provide an adequate outlet for the energies of all their sons and who have not got capital enough to buy land for these surplus sons.
One of the qualifications for acquiring these new holdings made available by the Land Commission should be that the landless man in question, the surplus son of a hard-working farmer, should, if possible, be a diligent and successful student of an agricultural college. That should be one of the principal qualifications for obtaining access to one of these new farms. I am not suggesting that the Land Commission should transfer that new farm to him on the usual terms. I should like to see the Land Commission remain the owner on behalf of the State of these ex-C grade farms that have been expropriated—the Land Commission, in fact, entering into the position of a landlord with reference to all that land and performing all the functions that, under a good landlord system, a landlord has performed with great success in other countries. Consequently, the land would be made available to the new type of landless man at a rent which would cover the actual cost of making that land available so that no burden whatever would fall on the general taxpayer.
An important principle is involved here. If we must use the powers of the State to expropriate land or anything else, let us expropriate that land in the interests of the community as a whole and not use the powers of the State in order to rob Peter to pay Paul —to plunder one section of the population in order to enrich another. I suspect that some of the operations of the Land Commission in the past have had the effect of robbing Peter to pay Paul and have not made any positive contributions to the welfare of the State as a whole. However, we will let that pass: it is ancient history. I should like to say that any further increase in the value of the land that might arise from economic circumstances should redound to the advantage of the State as a whole rather than go into the pockets of the private proprietors of that land which had been made available to them by the Land Commission.
Under present conditions, if a farmer gets land on the annuity principle of gradually purchasing it, he profits by the unearned increment of the land and the State is making a present to him of an unearned capital increment. But, by the State becoming the landlord of this C grade land and letting it on a lease to desirable tenants, the State would retain ultimate ownership and would profit by any change in the value of land which, unfortunately, now goes solely into the pockets of the fortunate private owner. There is here an interesting application of the principles advocated by Michael Davitt. Mostly, we regard Michael Davitt as the spiritual father of the whole present system of land tenure which, according to Senator O'Brien, has successfully solved the problem of land tenure in Ireland. I do not, however, agree with him in that regard.
I have in my hand a paper on "Michael Davitt and the British Labour Movement" published by Professor T.W. Moody F.T.C.D., in the Journal of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, Volume 3, 1953. Michael Davitt is called “father of the Land League”, but by no means have his ideals triumphed in the solution of the land tenure problem. Let me quote a sentence from this paper which gives a general idea of Michael Davitt's concept of what the State should be in its economic relationships:—
"No one can say absolutely what is and what is not the duty of the State. It is for every successive generation in any given community to say what duties shall be discharged independently by individuals or collectively by the State."
That quotation is taken from one of Davitt's works—Leaves from a Prison Diary, ii. 128. Dr. Moody goes on:—
"The battle-cry of the Land League, ‘the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland', meant to Irish farmers their own conversion into owners, and this was in fact what the land war eventually brought about. But Davitt was in passionate revolt against the whole institution of private property in land."
Then he continued:—
"....Davitt argued that the mere multiplication of landowners through State-aided land-purchase would not remove the evils inherent in the private ownership of land, and in particular that it would help neither the agricultural labourers nor the industrial workers. ‘By what right are the public funds to be utilised for the benefit of a section of the community merely?'"
The above question which is quoted by Professor Moody is also taken from Davitt's Leaves from a Prison Diary, ii. 99. I should like to echo that cry not only with reference to housing but also with reference to Land Commission policy. However, we must be realistic. We must admit that the principle of private property in land and the ownership of it by hundreds of thousands of individual Irish farmers has triumphed and is now part and parcel of the set-up that we must be content to carry on.
I realise, so far as A and B grade farms are concerned, that that principle must be fully respected. But the other farmers—especially the C 3 grade of farmers—whatever size of farm they possess should be liable to expropriation with compensation and the State should retain the ultimate ownership of this land thus capturing the increment of value, if any should occur, after the State had acquired it.
As I said before it should be let on a long lease at an economic rent that would fully cover the annual cost of providing that land to new categories of landless men. I have in mind especially what I have called surplus sons of successful farmers—preferably those who have gone to an agricultural college and done well at an agricultural college. It is one of the characteristics of our agricultural education that not all the places in agricultural colleges are filled: not enough farmers think it worth their while to go there. There ought to be some encouragement, some reward to those farmers' sons who are willing to undertake the exertions and the study involved in going to one of these agricultural colleges.
I think a willingness to get married would also be an important qualication for these future farmer-tenants of the Land Commission. Also, of course, the type of person I have in mind would be a farmer's son who had capital enough to stock a farm but had not capital enough to buy land. As a matter of fact with the present extraordinarily high price of farm land, any farmer who buys land is incurring a very serious risk—the risk that the capital value of that land may fall very considerably in the course of the next ten years. That is a reason which would deter any cautious-minded young farmer from buying land if he could possibly avoid it and a reason why he should welcome the possibility of acquiring land from the State on a lease of a sufficiently long tenure.
Another suggestion I will make is derived from Danish experience. Apparently, in Denmark, the custom is for the sons of farmers to work as farm labourers on farms other than the farms their fathers own. The farmer therefore has to pay the full usual agricultural wage to the workers whom he employs, who are simply the sons of neighbouring farmers, and there is a kind of interchange between the families in the different farming districts. Our custom is completely different. The farmer with numerous sons expects these sons to work for him for nothing, or perhaps for a half-crown given occasionally to go to the pictures or go to a football match. That is a very demoralising situation for both the farmer and the farmer's sons and may be one of the reasons why emigration from the land is so prominent a feature of our present social circumstances.
I am not foolish enough to imagine that you can revolutionise the social customs of the Irish rural scene overnight, but I suggest that if we could bring about any such fluidity of the working population as between different farmers, it would have a very healthy social effect and, in particular, might help to solve the late marriage problem, because farmers' sons, work ing on the farms of neighbouring farmers, would be brought into close association with the daughters of that neighbouring farm which would be a very good idea.
