I shall leave the matter now except that I wish to emphasise the institute's first task is to get increased production and increased production calls for sending the information down to the farmers through the advisory services. That is the first priority. We find, of course, we cannot have effective advisory service to the advisers without having some concomitant research so that we must have the fundamental research which, it is the intention of the Government as conveyed in the debates, should be largely carried out in the existing institutions. Then we have the routine research which might be set down to specialist advisory work. We can see there a field in which we are very deficient at present.
Speaking on advisory services, many feel that the institute should control them but I think the approach to these services is rather that they should be decentralised. It is the local control that we want and the institute if it fulfils its function, of channelling down scientific information, will be playing a major part, if at the other end of the pile we have developed local advisory committees and ensured that there is effective co-operation and liaison between the advisers and their farmers, the only type of effective and supervision that can get the best from the adviser and get the farmer to avail of that.
One real bottleneck here at present is our scarcity of agricultural graduates. It may sound strange to speak of such a scarcity when we read in some of the farming papers that there are at least 20 of last June's graduates walking the streets without employment and thinking very much about emigrating. That is just a paradox. We have not yet got the machinery to absorb these graduates but if we are to develop as a real live scientific agricultural country, and if the country is to develop to what we expect it will, we need many many graduates. In fact, a study that I made some few years back with Professor Boyle of U.C.C. shows we need an output of 110 graduates in agriculture each year, for the next 20 years, so that in 20 years' time we can guarantee giving to our farmers the scientific services that are now available in countries such as Denmark and Holland. The task is big and there is an obvious necessity for many graduates in agricultural.
On the task of co-ordination, which is a main function of this institute, it is not sufficient to co-ordinate research alone. The institute most also act as a co-ordinating body, as I have said, to the advisory services and to the agricultural scientists and the teachers in the vocational and agricultural schools, because we must place the agricultural teachers in the vocational schools on the same level as the advisers in the field. We must provide for them the same opportunities, because in the last analysis, the teacher is every bit as important as, or even more important than, the advisory officer. I hope, therefore, that in its development he will be able to ensure that the information is passed down to the teachers in the vocational schools and that they are made to feel in that way part and parcel of the agricultural family.
It is vitally essential that our agricultural schools should keep themselves abreast of modern development. That is evident to all. The farms attached to these agricultural schools might well be used by the institute as demonstration farms, or the institute might get the authorities in the schools to carry out a good deal of demonstration work. These are all problems we shall have to study very carefully. Perhaps it is just as well not to overload the new institute at the outset. In a few years' time, when it has been working, we will be able to review more fully its association with our agricultural schools, our vocational schools, our universities and all the other interested bodies. We should approach this in a spirit of experiment. We must have machinery for periodic review and we must not be afraid, as a result of such reviews, to make adjustments, if and when necessary.
Many of the points I have to make can perhaps be made more appropriately on Committee Stage. There is just one point upon which I feel very strongly. I refer to the constitution of the council. One fact emerges very clearly as a result of the working of many of our present committees, from the universities right down to the creameries. Once a man gets dug in, we do not like to displace him. We should consider here incorporating a provision that one-third of the council should retire every two years and be ineligible for immediate re-election. I have no objection to a man, who has stepped down for one period, coming back again on to the council, if his nominating body feels they should be represented by him. Let us have, however, a certain element of change. Changing one-third of the council every two years would not prove in any way harmful, in my opinion. Indeed, it would give us the new blood which is so vitally essential in such bodies.
The Government might consider nominating some distinguished leaders of agricultural from England or America. There are such excellent people as Professor Cooper, Colin Clarke and many of the Americans who were with us in the early stages. It would be a good thing to know that we had on that council a man who could say: "This is how we are doing it in England and it works in this fashion." As the Taoiseach has rightly stressed, this institute is modelled rather closely on the Agricultural Research Council in England. It would be of great benefit to us to have somebody on the council who knows both the strength and the weakness of the Agricultural Research Council in England.
There will, of course, be a large number of committees operating under this council. One might wish that the Bill had gone in greater detail into the setting up of such committees, explaining where the advisory service will be represented on them and where other interested bodies will be represented. Some ideas along those lines might profitably have been incorporated in the Bill.
With regard to the director, we are all agreed that the institute will stand or fall by the man who is picked. We are all agreed, too, that the task will be a very onerous one. It will certainly not be a 40-hour week job. We will expect a great deal and, for that reason, I think we should look more upon it as a tour of duty: a man will be honoured to come and accept such a tour, knowing quite well that there is very hard work ahead and that he is not excepted to stay in the job very long. He might be elected for five years and re-elected for another five, but, at the end of that period, he should retire to some quieter position rather than continue in the hectic post of director. Being a research man, it might be possible for him to go as a research professor into one of our universities or institutions directly connected with the agricultural institute. The more new blood we can transfuse in the way of appointing directors, the better it will be. Even at the risk of losing a good man, we should ensure that there will be a change, because many an institution here has failed not because of the inexperience of the man in charge but because the man in charge has been too long in the post.
There is just one other point in relation to financing. Here, the stakes are very high. Our present production is £118,000,000. Even if one envisages only a 10 per cent. or 20 per cent. increase, one is playing around with something like £20,000,000 to £30,000,000 per year. If science and research are to play a considerable part in getting that increase, then we must be prepared to spend. In England, at the moment, they are spending 3 per cent. of the total production on research, and that is considered to be very low. It is, in fact, far lower than they are spending in Holland and some other countries. Now .3 per cent. for us would mean something of the order of £500,000.
According to the 1953 Report issued by F.A.O. on the organisation of agricultural research in Europe, we were spending in 1953, £69,000, plus the research done in the universities; in other words, we were spending something of the order of £100,000 to £120,000. We shall have to step that up considerably. England at the moment is spending £6,000,000 on research. We are, of course, faced with one bottleneck when it comes to spending on research; we have not got the men to carry out the work. Granted that we can get some to come from other countries but these will be only a minority. The work that has to be done must be done by ourselves. We cannot buy people to do it for us.
I should like to conclude by saying how satisfactory it is to see again this note of confidence and hope in other institutions, that we can delegate responsibility, that we can get lesser institutions, to do the work for us. Here we are applying the very well known principle of decentralisation of what one might call subsidiary functions. I notice the Minister for Industry and Commerce is striking the self-same note in his programme for industry, putting it up to private enterprise to carry the main portion. Likewise here, it is up to the universities, the technical schools, the agricultural schools, all to pull their weight in a free community, not under dictatorship bossed by an almighty institute, but as partners in that institute in fulfilment of true democratic principle.
That is a very good augury for the future and I have very great pleasure in pledging the full co-operation of our university, especially University College, Cork, and also of the Association of the Graduates of the National University, who again asked me to convey their sincere appreciation of this Bill, and their offer of every co-operation in making it a success. In concluding, I might say that our greatest guarantee for the future is that our scientists who are with us now, those who qualified since the war, are still in the country because they believe in the country. If it was money they wanted, they would be elsewhere.