One is precluded on a Supplementary Estimate of this kind from covering the whole policy of the Government with regard to agriculture. But here we have a Supplementary Estimate of 12 headings covering a variety of the Department's activities. One would expect the Minister for Agriculture, when introducing this Estimate, would give some explanation as to the progress of the various schemes which are being administered under these sub-heads. One would expect him to give some justification for coming to the House for more money than has already been appropriated. In fact the Minister finds himself in the deplorable position of being able to do no more than read the printed explanations. I do not blame the Minister. He has a most appalling job. His position has been made impossible by his own colleagues and everyone knows it.
We have, under the first sub-head, here an appropriation for instruction in connection with special land settlement schemes. What is the nature of these schemes to be? The mind of the Department of Agriculture, on the question as to what is the best form of agriculture for our people, changes from day to day, from week to week, and from hour to hour. We are told on Monday the cattle trade is dead, and that it is a good job it is dead. We are told on Tuesday that nobody but a fool or a knave would wish to see the cattle trade dead, and we are informed on the following Friday that a trade agreement is being entered into with Great Britain whereunder we are to get permission to ship an extra number of cattle to Great Britain in exchange for extra shipment of British coal.
I want the Minister to say, when he is sending down his instructors to the people he is putting on the land, what directions he gives the instructor. Does the instructor advise them to keep live stock, or does he tell them that it is an act of treachery to this country to go into the live stock business? Does he advise them to grow wheat, or if he does, has he any advice to give them as to the rotation of crops in the subsequent years, and in giving them advice has he any counsel to offer them as to how they are to dispose of the produce of that rotation?
Surely if we are to vote money in connection with special land settlement schemes we should know what is the nature of the instruction that is to be given. I wonder if the Minister knows. I venture to suggest that the instruction which the Minister would give to-day is something entirely different from what he will give when the necessity arises. I think the Minister might have told us what these special land settlement schemes are and what does he hope to see the people whom he puts upon them engaged on. Perhaps he will tell us before we finish.
The next interesting sub-head is M (1)—Miscellaneous Work. Under that sub-head we discover that the Minister wants £100 additional provision for advertising and publicity. I ask the Minister a question in that regard. If we are to provide money for advertising and publicity, are we to understand that that money is to be used as a blackmailing fund in order to coerce the newspapers of this country to publish only what the Minister wants the people of this country to read and only what he thinks it is proper that they should read? Are we to understand that if any newspaper in this country wishes to criticise the follies of the present Minister for Agriculture, that newspaper will be given none of the advertising for which we are providing the money? The Minister recently boasted in this House that the Department of Agriculture withdrew their advertising from a number of newspapers because their leading articles did not agree with the schemes which he desired to advertise.
If the Minister is bona fide surely he will agree that the very people he wants to read those advertisements are the people who are reading the leading articles criticising his policy. If he wants to make his case is it not in these newspapers he should publish his advertisements and give cogent reasons for the schemes he is sponsoring? Would not this be a very good explanation of the Minister's attitude: “If you are prepared to give us a leg up on the political fence we will be prepared to give you a leg up on the advertising side. I have got a very nice comfortable fund here which I can employ for the purpose of giving advertisements to well-behaved newspapers. Be careful that you are a well-behaved newspaper.”
I venture to say that if we in this House vote money for the purpose of advocating Government schemes it is not for the purpose of bringing advertisements to newspapers which state that President de Valera is the greatest man that ever yet appeared in this country. We are voting money so as to explain to the newspaper readers that the policy of the Government is so and so, that they are pursuing certain lines of action and so on. I think the Minister should assure us on this matter and he should go so far as to say that the same impartiality will be observed in the distribution of these advertisements as would be observed by a court of law or any other Government Department in giving advertisements to the Press. It is something new in my experience for public money to be used by a Government for the purpose of advertising highly controversial policies.
However, I am prepared to admit that once Dáil Eireann sets the seal of its approval upon any policy put up by Fianna Fáil, however foolish, the Government is entitled to use public money to promote it. But has it ever occurred to the Minister that advertising and publicity would be very much more advantageous to us if used for the purpose of promoting markets for our produce than in being used for the purpose of persuading the people to produce something for which there is no market? If the Minister wants to appropriate money for publicity, why does he not try to advertise what we have to sell in the market where we could sell it most advantageously? I think there is enormous scope in Great Britain for advertising the live stock and farm produce of this country. I believe that there are inherent qualities in what we have to sell in that market that are not available in any other market from which Great Britain gets its imports. The same may be true of Germany and Spain and Arabia; for all I know the Minister has gone looking there for a market. Surely he must have thought at some time that the real crux with which we are faced at present is not a production crux but a marketing crux. If the Minister will get us markets the farmers will produce the goods.
I recognise that there is a deep cleavage between our outlook and the Minister's. We believe that the people ought to turn their land to the best advantage and so to manage it as to get for the greatest number of people the highest standard of living that the land can provide. The Minister believes, on the contrary, apparently, that inside a Wall of China we are all to sink gradually down to the lowest standard of living at which the Irish people can survive. Perhaps looking for foreign markets or advertising our goods in foreign markets would not be consistent with that policy but, seeing that the Minister has proved so obliging in other ways when we asked him to change his mind about very fundamental convictions he had, he might consider changing his mind about that and he might realise that the time is ripe now for doing what he has so signally failed to do for the last three years, and that is to provide an adequate market in which to dispose of our produce and to improve the market he has got by advertising the qualities of the stuff we have to offer and so secure for our people the better price that advertised goods can get in a good market.
Sub-head M (8) deals with the butter purchase scheme. I gather this has to do with some annual arrangement he has with creameries unable to finance their own cold-stored butter. I do not know whether any of the money is going to be used for selling Irish butter on the German market. There was a time when the Minister was engaged on large scale operations exporting butter. I remember asking the Minister for Defence, then temporarily acting as Minister for Agriculture, what price he was realising for this butter on a foreign market and the Minister for Defence replied that he would inform me in confidence. I told him I did not want the information in confidence, that I wanted it in public; I considered I was entitled to it. However, it was not forthcoming on that occasion. Is the Minister now prepared to tell the House what price he got for the butter which he sold in the alternative markets about which Fianna Fáil used to be so proud in the good old days? Is he prepared to tell us the profit he made on it and why to date we have never had an Appropriation-in-Aid appearing on the Department of Agriculture Estimates in respect of the profits that the Minister for Agriculture made trading in butter in the Fianna Fáil alternative market? Surely you have been engaged in that trade under the shadow of darkness for long enough. Sooner or later you are going to render an account to someone. I suggest this is the acceptable time. There will be another laurel wreath of achievement on the brow of the Government.
In connection with the problem of butter production, I suggest to the Government that instead of spending the oceans of money which they are spending and which they have been spending in an endeavour to find markets at the other end of the world for our butter, they would be much more profitably employed spending some money courageously on the promotion of winter dairying in this country. One of the greatest hindrances to the development of the dairying industry here has been that when butter is at its cheapest we have it for export, but when it is making a good price in the markets of the world we have not got any to sell. That in itself is bad enough, but anyone familiar with the trade knows that inability to keep up a supply, winter and summer, means that you get a very much worse price when you have the butter in summer because you cannot establish the regular trade connections that you otherwise would have if you were in a position to supply the wholesale distributors with fresh churned butter consistently throughout the year.
I have seen recently several observations by the Minister in regard to winter dairying, and I should be interested to hear from him now if he sees any insurmountable difficulty in promoting winter dairying, or whether he agrees with me that it is largely a question of explaining to the butter-producing farmers the advantages of adapting their industry to an all round the year production rather than to a grass production of butter and a comparatively dry winter. I throw that suggestion out to the Minister. He might redeem his rather shattered reputation if he could go out of office saying he had established winter dairying in this country. I think I could promise him that the proverbial charity of our people would attach that to his recollection rather than his many misdeeds.
The Minister referred to sub-head M (9) for the purchase and export of eggs. In the course of his references he made a most astonishing statement. I was reading for weeks that German trade delegates had arrived in Dublin, the officials of the Department of Industry and Commerce were all gone, that the Department of Agriculture was humming with anticipation and that a great trade agreement to the advantage of our people was going to be signed with one of the alternative markets— or at least going to take shape. Our enthusiasm was somewhat damped when we discovered that the agreement took the shape of requiring the purchase of £3 worth of German goods to every £1 worth that the Germans bought from us. However, half a loaf was better than no bread. Now I learn, to my astonishment, that the quota of eggs that we have secured in the German market is being exported entirely by a Government-owned creamery. Are we to understand that none of the advantage of the price that is to be got from the German market for this quota of eggs is to be passed on to the ordinary farmers? Is it all to pass through the hands of the Government exporter? Is there no marketing board to be set up under which the sale of the eggs could be more equitably distributed amongst the various producers?
The Minister will at least agree with me that if I have been led into any misapprehension in regard to the method in which these eggs are going to be exported it is due to the fact that he has withheld all the relevant information. He told us that this token vote was in connection with an enterprise upon which the Newmarket Dairy Company, which the Government control, was engaged in, in exporting eggs to Germany. I do not really fully understand what the nature of this transaction has been to date. I know that the Minister or his colleagues have seized cattle, pigs, horses, sheep, furniture and everything movable, but I have not heard of them seizing any eggs yet in respect of land annuities. I can think of no other explanation than that in pursuit of some kind of agreement the Government are shipping eggs to fill the quota they got from the German Government. I think such an arrangement is highly unsatisfactory, and the House is entitled to some fuller explanation of what in fact they are doing.
I also want to ask the Minister in regard to the British quota on eggs, is there any understanding between the Irish Department of Agriculture and the British Department of Agriculture with regard to the British quota regulations on imports of eggs? Are we in fact shipping to Great Britain at present more eggs than our quota allows, or are we filling our quota, or has any quota been fixed in respect to this country? I would ask the Minister to give us a full account of any negotiations which may have taken place between his Department and the British Department in that regard. I suggest to the Minister that that information should have been forthcoming before now.
I raised on a previous occasion the question of the egg cases in which we were being compelled to ship our eggs. I pointed out to the Minister for Industry and Commerce that some of his regulations had resulted in making it virtually impossible to get foreign timber in the shape of battens where-with to manufacture cubicle egg cases. On that occasion the Minister for Industry and Commerce stoutly denied that the use of native timber for the manufacture of cubicle egg cases had any undesirable effect on eggs at all.
