I would like to get the Fifth Stage to-morrow, if not to-day. Deputy Belton has threatened to repeat on the Fifth Stage a number of speeches he has already made.
Pigs and Bacon Bill, 1934—Money Resolution. - Milk and Dairies Bill, 1934—Fifth Stage.
That is the one point that would make the Bill effective.
If Deputy Belton would not undertake to delay the House too long, perhaps we could take the Fifth Stage now.
Deputy Belton will agree if the Parliamentary Secretary shows a disposition that he will see that this Bill will be administered uniformly, but he has told this House that all he wants is half-boiled milk. Then we will have half-boiled milk produced in the County Dublin.
The Deputy might inform us as to what stage of the Bill he is speaking on now?
I was answering the Parliamentary Secretary.
Is it agreed to take the Fifth Stage to-morrow?
I should like the House to take it now. Perhaps there is no objection. Deputy Belton has made a speech now.
What about the new amendments?
Question proposed: "That the Bill do now pass."
I understood that the Bill would have to be printed and that the last stage would be taken later on. On the Second Reading of this Bill the case was made that there would be assistance from State funds to finance it. I should like to draw the attention of the House to that and to other very important matters bearing on a serious flaw that the Parliamentary Secretary admitted is in the Bill. In paragraph 143, page 146, of the Report of the Reorganisation Commission for Milk—that is the British Commission—we have these words:—
"It is essential to the well-being of the milk industry that the public in general, and the medical profession in particular, should have assurance that the supply of ordinary milk is produced under reasonably clean conditions, and is as far as possible free from infection. The encouragement of confidence in the quality of the milk supply is one of the best means of stimulating demand. To these ends, steps should be taken to secure—(a) the effective and uniform administration of the Milk and Dairies Order."
When I raised that matter on the Second Reading debate I was not then even aware of the existence of this recommendation but I knew from experience, and particularly from the disclosures, that there was no uniformity in the administration of the Dairies and Cowsheds Order and public health law. As a matter of fact, I was amazed when I found Deputy after Deputy complaining of the cost of the things provided by this Bill that we have been doing for years here:—"The effective and uniform administration of The Milk and Dairies Order; the compulsory routine clinical inspection of all dairy cattle; the institution of a roll of Accredited Producers; County and County Borough Councils should have power to take over the responsibility for the administration of the Milk and Dairies Order in those cases where uniform and more effective administration is likely in that way to be secured; the routine clinical examination of all dairy cattle is of as much importance from the standpoint of establishing the confidence of the public as it is an indispensable part of any scheme of milk grading and the compulsory routine clinical examination of all dairy cows for evidence of tuberculosis should therefore be introduced with the least possible delay."
I would like to know from the Parliamentary Secretary how he proposes to grade milk if he has not those examinations, or if he gets around them. I am afraid his knowledge of the very Bill he is piloting was very seriously at fault when he contradicted my statement that it was possible for creameries to sell no other specially designated milk than pasteurised milk. "For the efficient operation of the Milk and Dairies Bill and the Tuberculosis Order, whole-time veterinary service is essential"—we have it that the Minister wants to dispense with it even in this Bill. "Provision of adequate veterinary service should be encouraged by substantial assistance from State funds"—no State funds are given now nor are State funds proposed to be given, under this Bill. In those counties where efforts have been made to produce the proper article it would cause a curious feeling to arise among the people who are blaming the local authority for being so severe in administering the regulations, and, after all, an order made by the Ministry of Local Government is supposed to be carried out. We have carried it out. It is not proposed to be carried out in this Bill. We have a cow population of 8,000 with four inspections by veterinary surgeons in the year. We have 40 tubercle-free herds, some of them having as many as 160 cows—are we going to let all these scatter? We must, because we produce the article and place it on the Dublin market and if producers in other counties are not made toe the line and produce under the same conditions this Act is supposed to secure, we must fall back to their level——
Surely you are getting 8d. a gallon more for it.
Where?
A penny a pint extra.
The Deputy knows nothing about handling milk.
But I am paying for it and I know.
I would like to know how he pays 3d. a pint?
I pay 3d. per pint for tubercle-free milk, delivered at the door. It is 2d. for others, so that I pay 8d. a gallon extra. It would certainly pay a man to do that.
I wonder the Deputy does not try it ?
I am not saying whether it is paying or not, but I know that the man who supplies tubercle-free milk gets a 1d. a pint extra.
I am talking of the ordinary commercial article which goes into competition in the Dublin Union and in the dairy shops with milk coming from outside.
I am talking of the tubercle-free stuff.
It is the ordinary commercial article that we are concerned with in this Bill. That commercial article is crushed out of the institutions in Dublin. It is all railway milk that is coming in, collected in depôts and creameries down the country. All this Act and the previous Dairies and Cowsheds Order will be evaded, and the Parliamentary Secretary has admitted it, by half-boiling the milk and keeping it at that heat for half an hour and then letting it cool down. I do not see how that is going to help the health of the community. I am certainly against the interpretation put on this by the Parliamentary Secretary. It is a very serious interpretation for him to put on it, seeing that he is a medical doctor and knows exactly what he is talking about, and it will be a statement of which in Dublin and in the neighbouring counties very serious notice will be taken.
The only objection I have to the Bill is that the cost of it is being apportioned to local authorities. I think that is not fair in face of the recommendations of the report just quoted by Deputy Belton, but it is not fair to hang on to the statement about pasteurisation as the Deputy has done. I would be extremely glad to think that all the milk for children would be at least pasteurised, but there is no use in playing on that word. We know in the main that it will destroy all the germs. except tuberculosis. That is a very big achievement. I do not want to use strong language about some of the other milk, but I often feel I would like to. This Bill will eliminate it, and it puts an end to a kind of shop which should be closed. This country and this city in particular have been very neglectful in looking after its milk supplies, particularly of the supplies intended for children. Pasteurisation will do two things: it will give us first, clean milk——
How?
It may be said that the pasteurisation system is all wrong and that the founder was a person utterly ignorant, but nobody is going to debate that here because we are not big enough or competent to discuss it.
I have quoted the report that you must produce clean milk under clean conditions.
Secondly, pasteurisation will take out all the solid dirt from milk and a good deal of the fine stuff. In the main it must improve the milk supply. The next thing that is required to give us a good supply of milk, is the elimination of bovine tuberculosis. That cannot be done in this Bill, but it can be done by the Minister for Agriculture, by eliminating tubercular cows. Unless that is done in conjunction with this Bill it cannot be as effective as it should be.
My main objection to this thing is that where all this machinery is going to be set up if the Bill is going to be worked effectively I think the Minister ought to be asked to make some contribution towards its cost. The Parliamentary Secretary is wrong in refusing to seek it. It is unwise. It is very bad statesmanship, because where the interests of the community and the community of the future are concerned the cost should be divided in at least equal shares from the Central Fund and the local authorities.
Does the Deputy argue that all you have to do is to produce milk under any conditions and then make it pure by pasteurisation?
Absurd!
That is the effect of what the Deputy said.
Utter nonsense!
The Deputy does not know what he is talking about.
I can quite agree that this Bill makes considerable advance on previous legislation and all that remains to be done is to see that it will be properly administered. Its administration will be very much more effective and the local authorities would co-operate more closely if the Government had put this Bill on the same financial lines as some of their other legislation dealing with public health welfare and if half of the cost were borne by the local authorities and half came out of the Central Fund. That would be a considerable advance in the working of this Bill, but I want to congratulate the Parliamentary Secretary and his Department for the work they are doing. I am drawing attention to the faults of the Bill only because I want to put them on record, because I believe that in some future years another Bill will have to be introduced eliminating some of the faults which, to my mind, tend to spoil the efficiency of this Bill. Again, on the point of view of public health administration we cannot overlook the fact that we have almost an entirely new service and that they are inexperienced in public health administration in the greater part of the country. I congratulate the Department on its efforts to secure that every county in the area of the Irish Free State shall have a county medical officer of health and I congratulate the Parliamentary Secretary on the success which has met the efforts of his Department and which has resulted in the appointment of a county medical officer of health in almost every county. But we must take into account that many of them are new to the work and that we have a great deal of distance to make up, because public health administration has, up to very recent years, been very backward in this country; in fact it has been almost entirely absent and we cannot hope for the best results from officers newly appointed to the work.
It will take a few years to get them up to full efficiency. A great deal of the efficiency in the working of the machinery will depend upon the local authorities and I hope and trust that full co-operation will be given. I wish to make particular reference to one of the faults in the Bill, the absence of the power of the health authority of urban areas to travel outside to the rural areas in the inspection of the sources of milk which reaches their towns. I refer to what has been spoken of conveniently as extra-territorial power. It was suggested I think by the Parliamentary Secretary that the exercising of such power would confuse the working of the rural authorities. I think it would work quite the other way if the authorities of a city such as Dublin or Cork could make occasional visits to dairies outside their own district which supply the milk to these districts and I think that the medical officers of health in the rural district would welcome such visits from their city colleagues. It would lessen the county medical officer's work. I think he will resent what will happen in this Bill as it stands; getting a message from a city colleague ordering him to make a report upon some milk perhaps in an out-of-the-way district. He has his own work to do. His programme is mapped out for the week and suddenly it is upset by getting a message to visit some dairy. I do not think that the coming in in cases of that sort of the city authorities would be resented by the county medical officer. It would be very much against human nature if it did. That I think was the main argument that the Parliamentary Secretary put up that if he was going to have the Act efficiently administered he could not have the local inspectors going into the sources of supply in the rural areas. I think he will see that his argument is wrong and he should give consideration to the point of view we are putting forward. If he does not do it now he will have to do it later on, or some other Government will have to do it in the course of a few years. The Deputy who has just spoken referred to the failure in this Bill to deal with the question of the milk that leaves the creameries. The Parliamentary Secretary has not given any assurance that the separated milk would be pasteurised. That is a very grave danger to the stock of the country fed upon that milk and also to the population of the country which feed on that stock. I draw particular attention of the House to a report of the Pig Industries Tribunal which sat in 1933 dealing with the question of tuberculosis in pigs. The Parliamentary Secretary will find on page 38:
"We had evidence suggesting that in certain districts in the Saorstát where separated milk from creameries is largely used for the feeding of pigs the incidence of tuberculosis is considerably higher than in non-dairying districts. One witness who had extensive experience of veterinary inspection of pigs in bacon factories deposed that he had observed that the percentage of tuberculous infection in pigs increased each year soon after the start of the seasonal increase in milk production, the percentage being always greater in summer and autumn and during winter months when milk is scarce. He handed in figures which showed the percentage of affected carcases in the six weeks ending 4th July, 1931, to be double the percentage in the six weeks ending 20th December, 1930. The same witness informed us that he observed that pigs coming from farms where he knew large quantities of skim milk to be used were affected by tuberculosis to a greater extent than pigs coming from farms where skim milk was not so largely used."
Is this relevant to the Bill, a Chinn Comhairle ?
The Chair does not quite see the relevancy of the Deputy's present line of argument since the measure deals with the production of milk for human consumption. Strictly, debate on the Fifth Stage should be confined to the measure as it has emerged and may not, as is legitimate on the Second Stage, extend to provisions that Deputies would desire to have embodied in the Bill.
I see. I was endeavouring to point out what the Bill is very deficient in in a matter dealing with the health of the population which is dependent on the calves and pigs fed by the creameries to each section of the community.
That is rather wide for a Fifth Stage debate.
I wish to point out to the House that on some occasions separated milk is used as part of human food. I was informed to-day by a Deputy with a close knowledge of the country districts that separated milk from the creameries is largely used for the making of bread. I do not say that that is a grave danger to the health of the community but we should see that clean milk is used. I would suggest to the Parliamentary Secretary that in his spare time he ought to read the report of the Pig Industries Tribunal, pages 38 and 39. My fault with the Bill is on those points and also about the non-granting of the extra-territorial powers which we seek, and in regard to the financial arrangements. I believe that the present Government or some future Government in the next few years will bring in an amending Bill, and I think that the present Bill's faults ought to be considered by the Parliamentary Secretary, who has sympathetically received some of the amendments which were put forward.
As far as we could we tried to help to make this Bill as good as possible. While we welcome it I believe that the Parliamentary Secretary ought to seek some of the cost of the administration of this Bill out of the Central Fund.
It would be very regrettable if this experiment to provide supplies of clean milk were not worked in the spirit in which it ought to be worked. If that is not done, it would be better it were not attempted at all. There is no use in tinkering with a question like this. We should either do the thing well or not do it. Even at this stage, the Parliamentary Secretary should make an effort to get the Government to subsidise this scheme in some shape or form. If they do not, I cannot foresee in the immediate future any real effort being made by the local authorities to incur further expenditure in this regard, because that is what it means. Local authorities are being heavily taxed at the present time. Their position is far from satisfactory and it is very regrettable that the wherewithal to bring a measure of this kind into operation—a measure of national importance—should have to be raised entirely and exclusively by the local authorities. That is, I think, a great mistake. In the Bill an honest effort to deal with the situation has been made. I hope that the points which Deputy Belton has raised with regard to pasteurisation are not as serious as he appears to think they are. If creameries and dairy societies can jump the regulations to the extent Deputy Belton alleges, it will be a very serious matter. With the exception of these two points, I think that the Bill is quite a good one. Because the Bill is supplying such a long-felt want, even though it embodies this very grave defect which I have mentioned—that local authorities must raise the funds for its operation—I do not feel disposed to vote against it.
Question put and agreed to.