I move:—
Go ndeontar suim ná raghaidh thar £410,585 chun slánuithe na suime is gá chun íoctha an Mhuirir a thiocfaidh chun bheith iníoctha i rith na bliana dar críoch an 31adh lá de Mhárta, 1935, chun Tuarastail agus Costaisí Oifig an Aire Talmhaíochta agus seirbhísí áirithe atá fé riaradh na hOifige sin, maraon le hIldeontaisí-i-gCabhair.
That a sum not exceeding £410,585 be granted to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1935, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Office of the Minister for Agriculture and of certain services administered by that Office, including sundry Grants-in-Aid.
The gross total less Appropriations in Aid, for the year 1934-35 amounts to £615,885 as compared with £488,889 for the year 1933-34, which means a net increase of £126,996. There are three rather large items of increase on the Vote this year which I would like to mention. The first one is the Wheat Subsidy which amounts to £70,007, the second is the Oats Purchase scheme which amounts to £90,000, and the third is in connection with the improvement of the Creamery Industry which amounts to £23,885. Those three items make an increase of £183,000 odd which more than accounts for the net increase I have already mentioned of £126,000. There is only one big item of decrease, £10,300 under the heading of Loans for Agricultural Purposes. The principal reason for the reduction in these loans is the fact that since the Credit Corporation reduced their limit the Department of Agriculture have reduced their top limit from £50 to £30. In other words, loans which the farmers might require ranging between £30 and £50, which hitherto were considered by the Department, are now not considered by the Department but referred to the Credit Corporation for reconsideration. There are certain new sub-heads since last year. There is only one new sub-head appearing in the Estimate in addition to the sum that appeared during the year on Supplementary Estimates. It is a new sub-head, Special Agricultural Schemes in Congested Areas in North-West Cavan. That means that these certain areas in North-West Cavan are brought under the congested district schemes. The Department of Agriculture will pay for these schemes half the cost in addition to providing the expenses of an agricultural overseer.
The sub-heads which were provided last year but which did not appear on the original Estimate were M (6), Scheme of Loans for the purchase of Heifers, £1,184; and a contribution of £1,000 to the Credit Corporation for administrative expenses representing 2 per cent. on the amount which it is estimated the Credit Corporation will advance for these loans. That will enable the Credit Corporation to make such loans at 4 per cent. instead of the usual charge of 6 per cent. charged to the ordinary borrowers. These loans are repayable if under £30 in three annual instalments; if between £30 and £50 they are repayable in four annual instalments, and if over £50, in five annual instalments. Borrowers under the Heifer Loan Scheme are required to make a deposit of 10 per cent. of the cost of the cattle.
Another new sub-head is M (7), Oat Purchase Scheme. The oat purchase scheme provides that the Department will take over on the 30th June all stocks in excess of 50 barrels in the merchants' stores at 10/6 per barrel. That is to say, from those merchants who participated in the scheme of last October by which merchants undertook to pay 9/- a barrel for white oats bushelling 40 lbs. There was provided in the Estimate £90,000 for this oats scheme of which it was expected £57,000 would be unexpended. In other words, it was contemplated that we would lose under this scheme £33,000. This is, of course, absolutely improbable now. In fact it is impossible to contemplate now that there will be any loss because it is not likely that any merchant will offer us good white oats bushelling 40 lbs. at the end of June seeing that at the present price it is worth 16/- a barrel.
M (8) is the next sub-head. It is a token provision of £5 for the Butter Purchase Scheme. It is not possible yet to say what the loss on this will be. In this case the Dairy Disposals Board took over a certain amount of butter during the winter from the holders who were not able to hold all the butter owing to financial difficulties; and there was a possibility that they might break the market and reduce the price if somebody did not come to their aid. The Dairy Disposals Board took over this butter and relieved the price. I am not sure yet what loss they may have sustained in keeping this butter on during the winter without having a possibility of making any profit on it but they had to hold it at any rate.
The next sub-head is O (9), Agricultural Produce (Cereals) Acts, 1933. The principal item is the bounty of £120,000 on wheat. The Estimate is based on a crop of 60,000 tons of which about two-thirds will be sold by December 15th. That will be entitled to a bounty of £3 a ton roughly. That is, of course, only an estimate. Possibly it is an underestimate and I think it is more likely to be an underestimate than an overestimate. Then there is a further item of £3,500 advance to seed merchants who sold seeds to farmers on credit under this scheme. If a merchant sells wheat on credit to the farmer the Department will advance him half of the price of the seed sold to the farmer on the production of a form authorising the farmer to pay. The Department will pay the merchant on a similar authorisation the other 50 per cent. out of the bounty to which the farmer is entitled.
There is another sub-head, O (10), Agricultural Products (Regulation of Export) Act, £18,065. Last autumn there was a considerable amount of bacon in the country and we had a certain quota to fill which we could get easily filled at that time during the months of September, October and November. But we foresaw that we would have considerable difficulty in filling the quota allotted to us during the months of February and March. We asked the bacon curers to keep over a certain amount in cold storage so as to be able to supply the home market and to fill our quota. The bacon curers were rather reluctant to fall in with the scheme, being somewhat dubious of the result. We induced them to do so by guaranteeing them that if they suffered any loss under the scheme we would make up the loss. Now the maximum which we were asked to make up by way of loss was 10/- a cwt. It was expected at that time by those who would be regarded as experts in the bacon market that the Department would have to bear this loss of 10/- a cwt. We find now that there will be no such loss—that the loss will be nothing like £18,000 but that it will be much nearer to £2,000 or £3,000.
The next sub-head is O (11), £3,086, Musk Rats Act. The officer in charge has made a survey recently of the district from Limerick City to Banagher and extending five miles inland from each side of the Shannon. He considers that the menace has been largely checked.
O (12), Acquisition of Land (Allotments) (Amendment) Act, 1934-£4,000. Under the Act which was recently passed by the Oireachtas it was estimated that about 2,800 allotments with one-eighth of an acre would be provided for persons who are anxious to take these allotments. A grant is to be made to the local authorities to cover the cost of providing seeds, manures and instruments to work the plots.
Apart from these new sub-heads, the ordinary sub-heads, which have appeared in the Estimates from year to year, will not, I think, give any great trouble to Deputies. The only thing about which I want to draw attention is sub-head (A)—Salaries, £123,885. That does not include all the salaries paid by the Department. For that the total provision is £228,229. There are, for instance, salaries paid to the technical and outdoor staff which is employed more particularly for special branches of the work. They are provided for on the sub-heads relating to those branches. The same thing would apply to sub-head (B).—Travelling Expenses, £11,500. The total travelling expenses incurred by the officers is £31,225. I do not think it is necessary for me to draw attention to the other sub-head at the moment. If any Deputy has any difficulty at a later stage I can deal with it.
Deputies will probably expect to hear something more about agricultural policy, as I incurred severe censure last year for not giving a review of agriculture when introducing the Estimate, and I should like to speak of some particular aspects of agriculture, and especially with regard to the prices of commodities. Firstly, taking the tillage side of agriculture, we have provided, as Deputies are aware, a price for wheat of 23/6 to 25/- per barrel, according to the time of the year at which it is sold, and as a result of this wheat policy we increased our wheat acreage from 22,000 acres in 1932 to 52,000 acres in 1933, and I think there is very little doubt that the acreage in 1934 will exceed 100,000 acres. There is one really significant thing about this wheat policy, and that is that we have demonstrated, once and for all, to a very doubting public and, I may say, to a very doubting Opposition, that wheat can and has been grown in this country.
We spent very valuable time in this House for many years on this very question of whether wheat could be grown or not, and we have proved that wheat can be grown to advantage and with profit to those who have undertaken it under this scheme. The fact that after one year's trial of the scheme we have at least doubled our acreage is sufficient to show that the farming community, at any rate, believe in this scheme of wheat growing. If this policy had been adopted when it was first advocated, say, six years ago, it is quite possible that we might now have reached the growing of practically our full requirements, and by their obstinacy and ignorance in regard to this policy the Opposition, who were the Government at the time, might very well be accused of having deprived the farmers of an income of about £5,000,000 a year at the present time. The Opposition, however, have now, I understand, adopted the wheat growing policy in their greed to swallow the whole Fianna Fáil programme, so that the farmers, who have set themselves out to operate that policy, part of which is the growing of wheat, can be assured that, whatever Government may come into office in this country in the years to come, the wheat policy will be continued.
The world price of wheat during the last year would probably average 14/- a barrel when the Irish farmers were getting a price of 23/6 to 25/- a barrel. The other cereals, barley and oats, were dealt with in a different way under the legislation that was introduced here in 1932. At that time we considered that if we were to provide a market for barley and oats, we would have done all that was necessary to deal with these two commodities. We found, however, that last autumn a crisis arose here with regard to prices, and oats were sold at 6/6 and 7/- a barrel in many cases, and in some cases perhaps lower, whereas I saw a quotation yesterday, which had been accepted, of 17/6 a barrel. Barley was somewhat better; it did not slump as badly as oats, but I am quite sure that a good lot of oats was bought last autumn at a price as low as 12/- or 12/6 a barrel. Barley is being bought fairly freely now at 22/6 a barrel, and I have been told by one buyer that he had to pay as much as 25/-. That is a state of affairs that should not be allowed to continue because it would be impossible to administer this cereals scheme if that were to continue over another year, and a Bill is in preparation to ensure that the grower, at any rate, will get his fair share of the price of these cereals in years to come.
That terrible slump in oats and barley would not have been necessary if the propaganda which was carried on had not been carried on. Every day during those months of October and November I read, when coming into town, on the posters of the Independent and the Irish Times such things as “The Oats Muddle” and “Dr. Ryan's Dilemma.” Those papers appeared day after day pointing out that we had lost the English market for oats and barley and that there was no other market for it, and commiserating with the poor farmers who had to get rid of their oats and barley at any price. I called meetings of the maize millers and merchants on several occasions, and I asked them to arrange to give a fair price for oats and barley at that time. The maize millers said they had no storage, and my Department put up a solution for that problem by asking them to give contracts for a year's supply to the merchants who had stores, and giving the merchants an order for a certain quantity to be delivered monthly throughout the year, and stating the price they were prepared to pay. The merchants said if that was done by the maize millers they could get the corn and store it and would carry out agreed contracts on that basis. The maize millers, however, refused to do it because they had no faith in the scheme and throught that the amount of oats and barley in the country could not be absorbed under the scheme. Having failed with the maize millers, we asked the merchants to adopt a scheme of paying a fixed price for all oats, and some adopted the scheme and some did not. On the whole, it was rather unsatisfactory so far as the farmers were concerned.
However, things were not as unsatisfactory as they might have been if we had this world market about which these papers were talking at that time, because the farmers were probably getting a better average than 12/- per barrel for barley while the price of barley landed in Great Britain, on a free market, was about 10/6 per barrel, so that if there was a free market here for barley, and if there was a free market for our barley in Great Britain, we would not have done as well as we did last autumn, although we did badly. In the same way the price of oats landed in England was lower than it was here, so that, in the first place, there was no foundation whatever for the terrible propaganda that was carried on, and, in the second place, instead of embarrassing the Government, which, of course, was the object of the propaganda—and it may be that it did have that effect, to some extent, but the Government, at any rate, got over it—the net effect was to deprive the farmers who had grain to sell of a very considerable amount of money and much more than would pay the outstanding rates all over the country at present. The farmers, therefore, ought to beware in future of these Press propagandists and Opposition speakers when they speak of the hard lines of the farmers and of alternative markets.
On account of the protection in the market, potatoes have considerably increased in price, but only of course, during the last few weeks, and at a time when the big majority of those who had potatoes for sale had disposed of them. To such an extent indeed has this price gone up that there is great difficulty in preventing the smuggling of potatoes from across the Border. It is rather a commentary on the contention by some people that there are such great prices to be got for farm produce in the British market, that we have the Six-County farmers trying to smuggle potatoes, butter and other things across the Border into the Free State.
