I am glad to hear the Minister correcting me on that. I took it that the positive statement was that if England would not go in, we would not, and that we would not apply for membership. I am glad that the Minister has said that because he is really conceding the second part of my motion, that the Government should make application for membership and should not depend on England's attitude.
Undoubtedly the European Economic Community would like to know England's attitude before making final arrangements with us, but we should be well on the way with negotiations before England's attitude is known. I take it that it is almost 90 per cent. certain that England will go in, but yet let us have a look at the two possibilities. Supposing Britain remains out, then we can take it that Denmark and the other E.F.T.A. partners will remain out. At present Denmark supplies a considerable portion of the German market with agricultural produce. That is a very expanding market. Hence, if England and Denmark do not join EEC, is the external tariff going to act then against Denmark, and if we are accepted into the Community is it not obvious that a share of the German market would then be a prize worth getting?
It may be objected that the EEC are almost self-sufficient in agricultural produce and their increasing production suggests that in future they may be self-sufficient. But then if we are in, I take it that any reading of the Treaty of Rome suggests that once the internal tariffs have been lowered, we will be in free competition with the other agricultural producers in the E.E.C., and consequently we would get our share of the market. There are means incorporated in the Treaty by which a fair return is guaranteed since imports coming from non-member countries are regulated or alternatively means are provided for selling the surplus to outside countries and using a stabilising fund to adjust returns.
One point that seems to have been missed completely in the debate to date is that in the coming decade, will western Europe play its part in the campaign for alleviating world hunger, will it answer the call of His Holiness Pope John in his recent Encyclical, a call that has been re-echoed in all the world capitals, a call that has been advanced again and again by our very progressive National Farmers' Association? Undoubtedly it will, and then there will not be the slightest likelihood of any surplus of agricultural goods in western Europe, because these surpluses will be usefully employed in feeding the weak and the hungry. If therefore we join the E.E.C., we just have nothing to fear from surpluses in agriculture within the community.
Let us now consider our trade with England, the hundred million pounds that we export. I have made the case that we should be able to sell most of these goods in Western Europe under acceptable conditions. I am fully conscious in saying this of our bad trading record in Western Europe in the past. The figures speak for themselves, that for every pound they bought from us, we have bought anything between £4 and £10 from them, so that our experience in negotiating and selling has not been happy in the past. I doubt if our experience will be any happier in the future in dealing with the same group of countries if their sole consideration is merely economic. It is because I believe that this is not so that I believe that our failure in past negotiations in Europe should in no way discourage us in the future, as we will then be negotiating on a higher and nobler ideological basis. The building up of our economy will then appear as a contribution to the development and strength of Western Europe and will accordingly be as prized by the other nations as it will be by ourselves.
Even if we still had some agricultural produce unsold in the E.E.C.— and that is very hypothetical because it does not seem to fit in with the Treaty of Rome—if the surplus that had to be exported out of the European Economic Community were ours and we had to export it to England, what then? The idea has grown up that this Community is going to erect huge customs trade barriers around itself, with very high taxes or levies on imports. That is a complete fallacy. It was very fully dealt with at the conference in Dublin two years ago. Perhaps I could just give one or two points from the President of the Commission himself, Professor Halstein, when he said: "I am convinced that the European Economic Community will have to tend towards increasing liberalisation of trade"—that is, trade in its widest sense, both external and internal. And he gave his reasons: "It is unthinkable that the training of an economy to free trade within a community should stop short at its frontiers and should have no effect on people's views as to what is the right or wrong way to treat commercially the rest of the world."
Again, he says that the area is "the largest transforming and processing area in the world, and differs from the other great economic areas or units in that we do not have at our disposal resources of raw materials comparable to those of the United States or the Soviet Union. Therefore we must import in order to be able to process, and we must export in order to pay for our imports." In other words, high tariff barriers would be detrimental to the development of Western Europe itself.
Once the barriers have been lowered within, there will be a gradual lowering of barriers to the rest of the world, and that must begin with the areas that are most in harmony with the spirit of the European Economic Community, and I take it that these would include Britain—in the very unlikely event of her remaining out. It would not certainly include the United States. The United States at official Government level have accepted the fact that there may be more discrimination in the immediate future against American products in Europe, due to the external customs barrier around the E.E.C., and is prepared to accept this, if the discrimination contributes to the development of Western Europe and to its unity. The United States is not prepared to accept discrimination if the arrangements carry no political advantage leading to the strengthening of the defences of Western Europe. I do not think there is any necessity to follow this line of reasoning too far, because it is almost certain that Britain will go in. If Britain goes in, I think we could all agree with the Taoiseach's summing up of the situation when he says that all the advantages would be on the side of agriculture and all the difficulties in industry. To begin with, it means that if Britain is in, we would have access to the largest consumer market in the world. At that stage, it would number 220 million people, with an average national income almost double ours. Provided we can get our share of that trade, we should be enthusiastic in joining.
We find in the Rome Treaty that the provisions for agriculture are very much acceptable to us in their present form because they lay great stress on the fact that agricultural workers should enjoy the comparable remuneration to workers in other industries. More important still, on Page 20 of the White Paper, a paragraph dealing with the proposed agricultural policy states:
In view of the importance of family farms in European agriculture and the unanimous determination to preserve that family character, every means should be used to strengthen the economic and competitive capacity of family undertakings.
In other words, the emphasis is back on the family farms. A phrase that has created a certain amount of difficulty is that referring to the improvement of the agricultural pattern. Some may be rather worried about this in that it seemed to call for consolidation of holdings leading to larger farms. It does in some parts of Europe but by European standards, we are a nation of ranchers. The average sized farm in Norway is 12 acres; in Belgium, it is 17 acres; in Holland, it is 25 acres; and in Denmark, it is 38 acres.
In fact, we are second on the list with an average farm size of 44 acres, the highest in the list being England with 69 acres. Consequently, what appears to be a small farm here, by European standards is capable of being developed into a family farm. I take it then that in this adjustment as interpreted by us it should not in any way lead to an increase in the size of farms. Rather will it mean that the comparable labour returns to our farmers will be provided by increasing production on existing farms, since the aim of the Community is the maximum utilisation of resources and as long as our lands are not producing to their maximum our resources are not being used to the full.
There are historical reasons for our failure to increase agricultural production, coupled with violent fluctuations in market prices. Often when a farmer thought a line of agricultural production looked like paying, a slight surplus appeared that had a disastrous effect on prices. The whole machinery of the Treaty of Rome and of its suggested agricultural policy is to prevent that type of price fluctuation. Accordingly it would appear to be the answer to the farmers' prayer in this country; that they can go ahead and produce as much as possible and still get a reasonable return.
We applaud the emphasis on family farms, in happy contrast to the very materialistic concept that is frequently bandied around of farming being a business and not a way of life. It is the farming way of life that gives and has given the character and strength to a rural people. It is to the credit of those Christian thinkers in Western Europe that they fully recognise this. You cannot go through Western Europe without being aware of the sturdy farm families and communities, even in its most industrialised sections.
I should like to quote the words of Pope Pius XII when addressing the Italian farmers in 1956. He said:
Accordingly every care should be taken to preserve for the nation the essential elements of what may be termed genuine rural civilisation. These are: love of work, simplicity and uprightness of life, respect for authority, especially of parents; love of country and fidelity to traditions that have proved fruitful for good down the centuries;
So we find ourselves then very much in agreement with the proposed agricultural policy of EEC. In the developments ahead, the outstanding fact is that, by European standards, we have not got nearly enough workers on our land. Denmark has almost 50 per cent. more workers per 100 acres than we have. A comparison with Holland— she has three or four times as many workers per thousand acres—is not quite fair because Holland relies so much on horticulture with much of the country under glass. But any comparison with Denmark shows that for full development we will need many more workers on the land.
That is something that will be difficult to achieve unless we approach the problem from a new angle in accepting this challenge of the Common Market. The challenge to us is to increase the numbers on the land and provide them with better facilities and, above all, better education and better training so that they can get from the land of Ireland the wealth it holds.
As a pre-condition, we must remove the stigma that is attached to work on the land. In Western Europe, we are about the only place where a young man cannot work his way up to become an owner of land unless he was born into the land. In other words, we have no farming ladder as a path to ownership and that will have to be provided. We must appeal to the 12, 13 and 14 year olds in our schools to-day and show them the future that awaits them on the land of Ireland, first, as the scientific workers of the new and revived agriculture of our country and later, in their late twenties, as farmers, if they are good enough.
I believe that can be done and it is one of my greatest disappointments with the work of the Government that the promises made by Deputy Childers, when Minister for Lands, have not been fulfilled. In Killiney, three years ago, he addressed a meeting of Macra na Feirme, Muintir na Tíre, the Irish Countrywomen's Association and the National Farmers Association, arranged by Tuairim. The question of farm apprenticeship and the necessity of getting young men back on the land was discussed at length for two days and the Minister was one of the most enthusiastic of those present. I thought action would surely follow but I regret to say that three years afterwards, still nothing has happened. I would like the Minister in his reply to give us some hope that the Government will give some help to those who are making efforts to develop a dynamic farm apprenticeship scheme.
The statistics show that there are something like 15 men per 600 acres in Denmark compared with ten here. In other words, they have 50 per cent. more manpower per acre than we have. Added to this the figure of 400,000 people on the land of Ireland is a totally inflated figure. First of all, one-third of the farmers in the country are over 65 and in any normal industry including modern agriculture in Denmark, such people would be in retirement. In any case, the physical contribution they make at this stage is, as one might expect, relatively little, so we might reduce the figure of 400,000 by at least 70,000.
Again we have many relatives of farmers working on the land who contribute very little and are far from being units of agricultural production. Frequently, in travelling through some of the parishes I know best I look at the farms and say: "Three units of agricultural production." But those three would give the equivalent of one, sometimes, because they have not got the training; other times, because they are not physically capable; and other times because they are just not suited to work in modern agriculture. We will find that those people, whom we might call home assistance cases, add up to another 30,000 or 40,000. Hence we have scarcely 300,000 people by European standards working on the land to-day. If the land were developed to the extent it is developed in Denmark we would require almost double that number.
We may have some difficulties in entering the Common Market in some of our industries but I think that these are greatly exaggerated. Many of our main industries are capable of surviving under any conditions. As a friend of mine, a manufacturer in Cork, has put it, his factory at the moment in catering for the home market has 60 or 80 different lines and it is simply impossible to do a top-class management job with that diversity of production. He feels, however, if he had an expanding market and could cut down those lines to five, six or seven and concentrate completely on these, part of which he would sell at home and part on the export market, he could do a far more efficient job and his costs of production would go down considerably.
That applies to many of our industries. In trying to cater for a small home market of three million people, the management job presented is almost insuperable. We have industries that have built up a large export trade, like Guinness's and I do not see why others cannot do likewise. It certainly will not be because our Irish people are not prepared to work as hard as their brothers in other countries. I think we should not over-estimate our difficulties.
Again an increase in agricultural production will necessarily create employment in the processing industries as we hope that a good deal of the increased agricultural production will be processed at home. It is found in the United States that for every 100 people on the land in primary industry, 140 are required in processing industries. We may not go as high but if in the next 15 or 20 years we succeed in putting an additional 200,000 effective workers on the land thereby raising our numbers from an effective 300,000 to 500,000, those additional 200,000 will create industrial employment for 100,000 to 150,000 in industry. In other words, these additional jobs in agricultural processing should more than absorb any who may be displaced from existing industries.
We should not over-estimate the difficulties to the extent of being unduly concerned about the length of the transition period. What is the difference, after all, between ten years and 15 years? If the conversion of our economy, from its present state to the contemplated state is to take place, then it would be as well to do it in the minimum time. You may keep the national effort at boiling point for five or ten years but if you give it 15 years, there may be a feeling that the thing is not urgent. Above all, we should not seek an extension of the transition period at the expense of concessions in other fields.
Our capacity for increased production in agriculture has been attested to by all who have examined the question. Three years ago the O.E.E.C. examined the grassland potential of Western Europe, to find out what would be possible under ordinary standards of efficient management.
The percentage increases, as given in the OEEC report on Pasture and Fodder Production, are: Norway, 12; Denmark, 24; United Kingdom, 27; Ireland, 60; Netherlands, 17; Belgium, 40; France, 50; Western Germany, 30; Austria, 35. So they have attested to our capacity to increase production.
We were honoured to have Mr. Cahan, the Deputy Secretary General of OEEC at the previously mentioned conference in Dublin in 1959. His views are most encouraging:
It seemed to me that if you set yourselves the task not of increasing production by 1 or 2 per cent. per annum but of increasing it by 6, or 7 or 8 per cent. you could achieve it. I believe that the basic fundamental infra-structure on which a very considerable increase in agricultural production and efficiency could take place exists in Ireland. All our experts tell me I am right.
That is, all the experts of OEEC.
The Six despite their common agricultural policy, are simply not going to be able to feed the Germans and they realise that. The Germans are going to have to import food in very considerable quantities beyond the borders of the Six. There is no doubt about this. Ireland is a natural supplier just as Denmark is. You have nothing to fear but you have to prepare yourselves for it.
What are our goals for the future? Or what do we hope to get from joining EEC? The first goal is undoubtedly peace. The threat that hangs over the world today is present to each and every one of us. It matters little if we increase production, or what wonderful plans we dream, if a world war breaks out. The situation is brought home to us by the seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1948, and the crushing of Hungary in 1956. The coming together of Western Europe and the development of its military might in NATO has halted, temporarily at any rate, the Soviet threat to Western Europe. We have much to be thankful for in the development that has taken place in NATO and it is our only shield against the future. We hope and expect that the views expressed by Professor Hogan which I have quoted will ensure that the terrible power of weapons that are available today, super atomic weapons, including the hydrogen bomb, will mutually cancel out and remove the danger of world wars on the scale of the last two. If we achieve that, we shall have progressed a very long way.
Our second goal should be increased employment for our people. It is sad to look back over ten years and to find that we have 150,000 persons fewer in employment today than we had in 1950. It is sad also to realise that our population is dwindling at the rate of 20,000 a year—comparable to having the population of England dwindling by some 350,000 per annum or the population of the United States dwindling at the rate of 1,000,000 per annum.
These are the hard facts of our situation. I do not attribute blame to any of our Governments. All have endeavoured to do the best possible but their best has not been good enough, as the results attest. Could anybody fighting in the War of Independence have pictured such dire happenings in Ireland, for which they were prepared to shed their blood, the Ireland that would have full employment and work for all?
It simply all adds up to the fact that in the modern world it is exceedingly difficult for a small economic unit to exist, especially a small unit that came so late to its development stage. Now, a ray of hope appears— that this small economic unit can work out its future in harmony with others who hold the same ideological and the same Christian view of life; that we can sell our products in a large market and that in union with Western Europe, we can increase our agricultural production to its maximum to relieve a world in hunger. That is our fond hope and in realising it we must ensure that it is compatable with our national sovereignty.
Again, this is a major challenge. It is a challenge to us to enrich and develop our national sovereignty and those characteristics which make us a nation. It is a challenge to us to develop those as passionately as the French, the Germans, the Dutch develop theirs. We cannot say that we are satisfied with our progress in meeting this challenge in the past 40 years. We cannot say that today Irish culture, Irish games, Irish music, Irish dancing, the Irish language itself, have made the strides that the patriots of 1916 hoped they would make. But I believe in accepting the challenge presented by joining Western Europe. We can make another, and more successful, effort to develop our culture and our heritage, this time as an appeal to our national pride, to be worthy to rank as a nation before our European allies. I hope that the end result will be that we shall have here an expanding population, an expanding employment and above all that we shall hold fast to our Irish Christian heritage.
There is just one real danger in joining with Western Europe, a major one that I have left to the last. It is the fact that our area here is double the area of Holland, double the area of Belgium. Holland has 12,000,000 people where we have 3,000,000 people. We are the only place in Western Europe that has free space and, with Western Europe's population increasing as it is, and with free movement of men and materials, we may find it difficult not to have a considerable immigration of Europeans to here. It could well happen that at the end of this century our population will have gone to 6,000,000 or 7,000,000—and even that would still leave our country sparsely populated by European standards—of which 3,000,000 would be immigrants from Europe.
The key to retaining our national identity against such a possible influx is to be found in the advice of Michael Davitt and the Land League: "Hold on to your holdings." In short, we may give many things in uniting with Western Europe, and for the defence of freedom, but we should be very careful not to give the land of Ireland. But we cannot hold on to it, if it is not being used. We can only use it by making every endeavour to secure our young men on the land where they can carve careers that will preserve for us a genuine rural Irish civilisation. If we can do that, we can weather the storm. If we drift along and do not take adequate steps in regard to farm apprenticeship, and do not act in time to prevent a flow of outsiders on to our land, then I am afraid it may happen that our ancient nation might become submerged in the E.E.C.
By world standards, we are well off, as far as our standard of living is concerned. We are in the top 20 per cent. of humanity. I would much prefer that, in ten years' time, we could record that no appreciable increase had taken place in our standard of living but that we had full employment for everyone who wanted to work and live here. That would be a far better position be to in at the end of the 1960s. The only difficulty is that if other countries are increasing their standard of living, there is the urge to follow suit. My hope is that Western Europe will show its greatness in the coming decade by voluntarily sacrificing all this unnecessary increase in present living standards and contribute it to the welfare of the under-privileged nations.
