Vol. 63 No. 13
I move:—
That it is expedient to authorise the payment from moneys provided by the Oireachtas of such expenses and grants as are necessary to give effect to any Act of the present session to amend and extend the Land Purchase Acts in divers respects.
Sir, I oppose this Money Resolution. In the last 50 years of the history of this country many Land Bills have been introduced in the Parliament of Westminster and in the Parliament of Saorstát Eireann, and up until a very few years ago the introduction of a Land Bill was identified in the minds of the Irish people with recognisable progress on the part of the small farmers of this country to the three things for which the Land League was founded 50 years ago: fair rent, free sale, and fixity of tenure. It was not until Fianna Fáil came into office that Land Bills have come to be identified in the public mind with the destruction of these things, and it was not until 1936 that a Land Purchase Bill was introduced into this House to facilitate the sheriff and the bailiff to evict from their holdings farmers who could not pay their rents and to imprison those from whom the ordinary methods of distress could extract no money.
This Financial Resolution that we consider here to-day provides the machinery whereby the sheriff's bailiff can go into a tenant purchaser in the country and, if that tenant purchaser is unable to pay his rent, he can have him removed to jail indefinitely until such time as the rent is paid. Does any Deputy in this House remember to have read of any Land Bill which contained such a provision in the past? Balfour never tried it. Forster never tried it. Nobody who ever pretended, either on behalf of England or on behalf of Ireland, to be charged with the responsibility for the tenant farmers of this country ever sought powers from Parliament to jail a man who is unable to pay his rent. I want to know if the Deputies of the Fianna Fáil Party stand for that policy or if they do not; and, if they do not stand for it, have they the courage to get up here and say and do the things that they would say and do in the country if their own constituents asked them the meaning of the section of the Land Bill, 1936, to which I refer?
Now, I want to put this matter in issue also: either our fathers were right in 1880, when they fought for fixity of tenure and free sale, and we are wrong now, or else we are right now and they were wrong then. Fixity of tenure is ultimately and finally destroyed by the provisions of the Land Bill of 1936. It is now open to the Government, if this Bill becomes law, to go in upon the holding of any man, whether he owns ten acres or 1,000 acres, and take that land from him and give it to his neighbours. I ask the Deputies of this House, do they stand for a policy which gives the Government that right? Because, if they do, fixity of tenure is gone for all time, and the land settlement of this country is back in the melting-pot; and this time it is not being put into the melting-pot for the purpose of establishing the people on the land; it is being put back into the melting-pot for the purpose of taking one set of people off the land to put their neighbours on in their places. Heretofore a Land Bill was a Land Bill for the tenant farmers.
The Land Bill of 1936 is a grabbers' Bill and it is being passed in the interests of land grabbers who are covetous of their neighbours' land and who want to take it from them. The remedy we had for land grabbers in the past was to boycott them, and that remained the method of dealing with land grabbers in this country until Fianna Fáil came into office. Under the new dispensation the land grabber has become the protected favourite of the Government and the tenant farmer is to be thrown on the roadside in order to accommodate the grabber. Do the members of the Fianna Fáil Party stand for that? If they do, then the Land League was a fraud.
The Minister for Lands, in answering to the debate on the Second Stage of this Bill, said:
"I do not believe in the philosophy that a man's property is his own to do just whatever he likes with it. He is bound by certain moral conventions and he should be bound also by certain legal conventions, to use that land in the best interest of the entire community."
That quotation is in column 1425, Volume 63, No. 4. Now let us examine the Minister's philosophy. I accept the words that a man who owns land or any other property is bound by moral obligations in the sight of God to use it in accordance with the laws of God. I do not accept the doctrine that the State has any right to come in on my land or into my home and tell me how to run it. The State has no right to do that. If I own my land, if I live upon it and rear my family on it, the Minister for Lands has no right to come in and tell me how to run my own, and I tell you this: that if that right is once admitted here, the logical conclusion of that philosophy is to take over all the land of this country and let the Government run it and make the farmers in this land tenants of the Government. There is no other way of running it. If you once assert the right of the Government to go in and direct the farmers of this country as to how they are to farm their land in all the details of that operation, the logical conclusion of that doctrine is that the land should be transferred to the Government and that the farmers of this country should occupy the same position as the farmers of Russia occupy on the collective farms in Russia. Now, the difference between the system in this country and the system in Russia has been that we believe in private ownership in the land and that in Russia they believe in State ownership. Which is it going to be in this country? Is it to be a private ownership or ownership on sufferance of the Minister for Lands?
I hold land and I use no single acre of it in accordance with any of the policies of the Fianna Fáil Government, and I would regard it as a scandalous misuse of my land to use it in accordance with the tomfool fallacies of the Fianna Fáil Government. Does that entitle the Minister for Lands to take my land from me? I regard him as an incompetent. I regard the Minister for Agriculture as an incompetent. I regard him as entirely unfit to advise any single tenant farmer in this country as to how land should be used. I do not believe there is a single responsible agriculturist in this country who believes in the policy of either the Minister for Lands or the Minister for Agriculture.
Does that give them the right to come in and take my land from me, and, if it does, if the Fine Gael Party should form a Government to-morrow, will that Government have the right to take Deputy Aiken's land, as he then will be, from him because he is not prepared to farm it in accordancee with what we think to be the right way to do it? I say no. So long as he is living on his land, and farming his land conscientiously to the best of his ability, no Fine Gael Government, or any other Government, has the right to put him off it.
Deputies of this House may allow themselves to be dragged along paths the end of which they do not fully understand, but I invite Deputies who are living in the country to ask themselves this question: going about amongst their own neighbours, do their own neighbours living on the land feel that they have fixity of tenure? Do they not all live in a constant state of anxiety that they will get a notice from the Land Commission that inspectors are going down to inspect the land with a view to acquisition? I challenge the Minister for Lands to deny that his Department at present is greatly embarrassed by the fact that his inspectors are wasting a great deal of their time in having to go around examining people's land, with a view to acquisition, which the Land Commission should never have been asked to examine at all. I appreciate that the Land Commission is endeavouring to examine every application that reaches it impartially and fully, but I say that, as a result of the Fianna Fáil policy since they took over the Land Commission, men are writing to them continually, asking them to send inspectors to inspect farms with a view to acquisition that ought never to have been inspected, and I say that the mental anguish and misery which is caused to small farmers by having these inspections carried out is an outrage on our people.
It may be that owing to the fact that there is a shortage of land in this island for the population, this Legislature should make up its mind that no individual citizen will be allowed to retain in his ownership more than a given acreage of land. Very well, let the Legislature make up its mind to that fact, and, having made up its mind, let there be fixity of tenure on the basis of that maximum ownership of land. Let the landlord have fixity on his demesne; let the farmer have fixity on his farm; and let the tenant purchaser have fixity on his holding. All I ask is that this House shall say: "There is a certain maximum quantity of land beyond which we will allow no individual proprietor to go; any individual proprietor holding that quantity or less who lives upon his land and who works his land conscientiously, according to his own conscience, is guaranteed from interference in the enjoyment of that land for all time." That is what I mean by fixity of tenure, and I say that the people of this country are entitled to demand that. What Deputy is there sitting in this House, whose father and grandfather, and his father before him, lived on the holding where he now lives, would admit the right of the Land Commission to come into that land now, order him off it and tell him that they are going to give that land away to his neighbours and that he must migrate to another part of the country? What is the use of telling me that you will give me land of equal value in County Louth, when I was born and reared in County Mayo? I do not want to go and live in County Louth. What Deputy here whose father and grandfather before him lived in the West of Ireland wants to migrate to the south-east? What consolation is it to me to be told that I can have a farm at the other end of the country?
How can you expect any farmer in this country to put his heart and his mind into building-up and improving the conditions of his land if he knows that the minute he makes it any better than the land of his neighbours he is going to be the object of the envy and covetousness of every unscrupulous neighbour of his, and that he will have an inspector inspecting the land with a view to distributing it amongst his neighbours? I say that if this goes on, we are going to have precisely the same condition developing in this country as precipitated the famine of 1879. No farmer in this country will dare improve his land because he will know that the moment it stands out from amongst his neighbours' land, his neighbours will covet it and he will be in danger of having it taken from him and of being asked to migrate to the other end of the country. So, you will get every farmer vying with his neighbour in allowing his land to become more disreputable and impoverished. He wants to stay there because people love the land they were born on and they do not want to be migrated. If you are going to make the penalty of improving their land compulsory acquisition and migration to another part of the country there is going to be no improvement of land in this country.
The Minister for Lands says that a man is not only bound by moral obligations before God to administer his property in a conscientious way, but should also be bound by legal conventions to use that land in the best interests of the entire community. Is not the logical conclusion of that thesis that the Government should take over the land and that the farmer should run it in accordance with the Government's instructions? I tell you that if you start along those lines, if this country is going to advance along those lines, you are going to advance to a civil war. There are a lot of people anxious to say: "Do not be saying nasty things; do not be creating alarms." Now is the time to create alarms before damage is done. If you are going to destroy the fixity of tenure of every tenant farmer in this country, there is going to come a point when there will be an uprising by the tenant farmers in defence of their holdings, and this time it will not be an uprising against the British Government, but against an Irish Government. What I put to Deputies is that nothing ought to be done by any Party in this House which would give the colour of justification to any body of persons in this country to take up arms against the established Government of the country. I heard from the Labour Benches yesterday approval of violent action by farmers in overturning milk cans. I know these farmers are supporters of the Fine Gael Party, and I say here in public they did wrong. I admit that they had, provocation; I admit that they were exasperated; I admit that the Minister for Agriculture was behaving badly in regard to their particular claim; but whatever the provocation was, to take action of that kind against the established Government of this country is wrong.
I say that if the farmers of this country are driven to defend their holdings by force, they will be driven to a course which is wrong, and which will do inestimable damage to this country, but how can any body of men who have grown up in this country during the last 30 or 40 years not realise that if you reopen the whole agrarian struggle in this country, you are going to have the farmers banding themselves together to defend their legitimate interests? How can Deputies be so blind as not to see that and, seeing it now, why can you not face it? There is only one way of facing it and that is to fix a maximum acreage of land which any man may hold and to say: "Once you are below that acreage, you are there until you want to go, and no Government or anybody else will attempt to disturb you." Fixity of tenure is gone. I want it back, and, so far as this Party is concerned, if and when we take power in this country, I say that fixity of tenure will be restored to the tenant farmers, whatever legislative steps may be necessary to achieve that end, and I say with the fullest sense of responsibility that any failure to do that will drag this country into appalling disaster. Free sale is gone. I put this to Deputies here: Suppose a small tenant farmer in this country wants to sell his land to-morrow, does not every Deputy here know that in seven cases out of ten—and I am deliberately understating the case because I believe it to be unanswerable—the moment the auction is announced, or the desire to sell the land expressed, there is a notice in from the Land Commission that they are going to inspect the land with a view to compulsory acquisition? If all deeds and all agreements to sell are drawn up and awaiting signature, the moment that notice issues the agreements can be thrown into the waste-paper basket, and the vendor told that no further action will be taken until he gets an undertaking that the Land Commission will go no further.
Have we all forgotten the fight made for free sale? Is it because we have enjoyed free sale so long that we have forgotten what an important thing it is? Do you not know that if a man puts all his savings and all his money into land, he does so because he believes that it is the best security he could possibly get? He is willing to take out of land a much smaller return on his money than he would get on stocks or shares, and so instead of constituting himself a rentier he accepts the lesser return which he secures in a much more arduous way, because he believes that land is a better security than any security he could buy. The belief that land is a better security is founded in the confidence that there is free sale, that if he wants to move away from the homestead he has his savings to get by putting the land on the market and realising those savings. If a man puts money into land, and takes a lesser return on the money than he could have got by putting it into stocks and becoming a rentier, once you make it clear that he will not be able to sell the land, or to get his capital out of it, then no man of foresight, of prudence, or good citizenship who saved money will ever put it into land. The only person you are going to get to take land is the man who has nothing to lose, the man who is prepared to go into land without capital, the man without anything who can pull up the stumps any time and move on. The man I want to get on the land is that member of the community who, given a chance, is prepared to build up a home and to establish a homestead— the prudent hard-working man. You cannot get that kind of man to buy land if he knows that if he spends £1,000 on a little farm, when he comes to sell it, the Land Commission will not give him more than £400 or £500 for it. That is why we want fixity of tenure.
It astonishes me that Deputies seem to forget what happened in the past. What happened was that if an existing tenant wanted to sell his tenant right to an incoming tenant, the landlord intervened and said that he had to be dealt with. He might ask the incoming tenant for a line, or specify certain things which made the incoming tenant, when the landlords were on the rampage, draw back from the deal and the tenant could not sell his tenant right. That became so great an abuse that it was put in the front platform of the Land League. One of the things pointed to was the Ulster custom and a demand was made that it should be available for all farmers. Can it be that Deputies have forgotten all that? I think they have forgotten the evils that obtained in the absence of fixity of tenure. They have disappeared so completely that people have become as much accustomed to that position as the air they breathe. If you want to re-establish the evils that obtained before we got fixity of tenure, if you want to fix in the minds of the people, that having put money into land they cannot get it out of it again, all the old evils which the Land League fought against are going to manifest themselves, and to be aggravated. The evils now will have their root, not in the British landlord system but in an Irish Land Commission, with the added evil that it will not be done by the landlord system but by an institution set up by this Parliament. That is what I want to avoid. The Minister may say in reply, to meet Deputies' points of view, that land purchase will have to cease. Land purchase, as we understand it, must cease some time, when all the land of this country has been sub-divided. That may not be in our day or in our children's day, but some day the job must be done.
In the meantime, all I ask is that this House will fix some condition of tenure which will give fixity to the tenant purchaser. Let there be a limit as to its area. Let there be an obligation on a tenant to live on the land and to work it, but let there be an assurance that no one will have the right to take the land from him. At present nobody knows from hour to hour or from day to day how long the land is going to be left to him. There is no use in my trying to drive home to the minds of Deputies who are born in Dublin what that means. There is no use in my trying to persuade people who have never lived on the land what that means, but any Deputy who is the son of a small farmer must know what it would mean to his father if, at any moment, he might have got notice requiring him to move off to the other end of the country, to leave neighbours and friends, and break up the homestead and to set up one somewhere he was never before. When you think of an individual case, it is unthinkable that any Irish Parliament would conceive such powers being given in a Land Act. I do not believe that one-half of the Fianna Fáil Party believe in the propriety of this proposal. We want to help in the work of the Land Commission. Many of us here have perhaps what might be described as a sentimental feeling that the Land Commission is something outside Government, that the Land Commission used to be something identified in the minds of our people with deliverance from landlords. I want that identity to be maintained. I was brought up to believe that the Land Commission was the friend of the people, that the small farmer had the Land Commission behind him as against the landlord who tried to deprive him of his rights.
I do not want a situation to develop in which the Land Commission, instead of being the friend of the small farmer, becomes a substitute for the landlord that used to oppress him. I ask this House to take counsel with all sides so as to devise a scheme which will secure a settlement of the maximum number of our people on the land, and will at the same time ensure that fixity of tenure and free sale will be inviolate from any interference by any authority, no matter whence it comes. I believe that if Deputies on the Fianna Fáil Party felt themselves free to speak their minds they would make the same appeal that I am making. I believe that this matter of land purchase and land tenure is something about which we can get agreement, if we only sit down to it, and I most strongly urge the Government not to go blindly ahead in a policy which may secure passing popularity amongst those who will get land, but which, in the long run, is going to undermine the entire stability of the State. We are all agreed on fundamental principles in this matter; we are all anxious to help in disposing of it, but remember that if a Fianna Fáil Government destroys fixity of tenure and free sale, there is no stability in that settlement. Let the Fianna Fáil Government remember that if in their time fixity of tenure and free sale are destroyed, then their successors will re-establish these two things. I want no revolutionary changes in the land policy of this country with change of Government. I believe we can find a common platform upon which this problem could be solved, without violent changes with every change of Government, and I earnestly appeal to the present Government to consider whether ways and means could not be devised to reach that end. I ask them to reconsider the Bill before the House, and to bear in mind that many believe it strikes a mortal blow at two things that we consider to be absolutely vital to a satisfactory land settlement, these two things being fixity of tenure and free sale.
I only intervene in this debate at the moment to bring before the Minister and the House an incident which came to my notice very recently—an incident which occurred within the last three weeks or a month. I was informed by a farmer living not very far distant from my place, a man who farms 60 acres of land and who has four sons, that an inspector went down to examine his farm with a view either to its acquisition or division, I cannot say which. Does anybody in the country imagine that action like that on behalf of the Government is justifiable? Although that farm may not be farmed in accordance with Government policy, just like the case Deputy Dillon mentioned a moment ago, I defy any Deputy in this House to point out a better-managed farm from here to the place where the farm is situated. That man has four sons.
Would the Deputy give me the name of the man?
I certainly shall not give the name publicly here in the House, but I shall give it to the Minister privately if he wants it.
Send it across to me.
I shall. I said to that man that I thought it was disgraceful. I say now that I can only come to the conclusion that action in that case must have been taken as a result of notice from some Fianna Fáil club. Is that what we are coming to here, that because some Fianna Fáil supporter has some grudge against a man, who has only 60 acres, the Land Commission will be put to the expense of sending down an inspector to view that man's farm?
Hear, hear. That is the situation.
That is the situation, and the law which tolerates that or expects that is good for nobody. It is only for that reason, and to bring that matter before the Minister, that I have intervened in the debate. I know where small farms have been put up for sale, and I know that certain people interfere with these sales because of this policy of "I can get a piece of somebody else's holding". I know where the Government have had to send down some of their armed detectives to keep order and to ensure that, to a certain extent, there would be free sale in connection with such farms. It is time the people knew where they stood in connection with land purchase and land policy in this country. If I bought land and acquired it honestly I have a right to hold it and sell it in the open market when I wish. That is not the situation at the present time. I merely avail of this occasion to put these few remarks before the House. I shall send across the name of the owner of the farm I mentioned to the Minister.
If Deputy Curran had been very anxious about this farm to which he has referred, I suppose he would have communicated with the Land Commission before now.
Do you mean that I should have communicated with them?
Yes.
I only heard of it a few days ago—about a week ago.
I should like to have the name of the farmer and a statement of the circumstances until we see whether it is acquisition or purchase that is in question.
If the Minister will allow me, the only information I can give the Minister is the name of the farmer and particulars as to the farm.
That will do me.
Anything more I do not know. The inspector came there, but when the circumstances were explained to him he was perfectly satisfied that the whole thing was a fraud.
I do not approve of the Deputy's policy of just getting up in the House, mentioning an unnamed case across the floor to me, and stating that he is very upset about it when he has not taken the trouble of previously advising the Land Commission about the case. We shall leave it at that. As for Deputy Dillon, I am not going to attempt to reply to his ranting at the moment. I suppose he felt on the Second Stage that he could not get himself sufficiently worked up. He did not remain to speak then. He went off to take a few days or a week to try to work himself up.
On a point of order, if the Minister considers it proper to jeer at me for leaving the House on last Wednesday to attend the funeral of the late Deputy Patrick Hogan, I can only leave that to his sense of good taste, but the Minister knows that I fixed the Chair and the Minister with notice of the reason I left the House on that day.
I got no notice of that, but I accept what the Deputy says. Fixity of tenure and free sale must have as many lives as a cat, because Deputy Dillon asserted that they were both killed many times in the past. He said that they were as dead as Alexander under the Act of 1933. According to him also, they were as dead as Alexander under the Act of 1923. I do not believe that Deputy Dillon expresses either the policy of the Front Bench opposite or of Fine Gael as a whole in regard to land purchase. I heard the speech he made to-day and I heard him make a similar speech in 1933. According to him then, every farmer in the country was to be on the road in 12 months. The Act of 1933 has been in operation for three years and nothing serious has happened.
I deny that.
The Deputy can hardly prove his denials. The Deputy worked himself up to a fever pitch on the Land Bill of 1933. I was disappointed that he did not work himself to a greater pitch to-day. After all, it was a very poor show for Deputy Dillon. He did not get half excited. The tears should have been streaming out of his eyes and his hair should have been flying about the place.
Talk about the Land Bill, if you know anything about it.
If Deputy Dillon knew something about the Land Bill, it would be all right. I made up my mind in 1933 that he did not know what the Land Bill of 1933 meant. He did not even know what the Land Act of 1923 meant. He did not know what was contained in the Land Bill of 1933, and I am sure he does not know what is contained in this Bill. Deputies who knew something about land law discussed the Bill here on the last day, and they were able to discuss it intelligently. I do not intend to take up the time of the House in replying to the ranting of Deputy Dillon. I know there are people in Fine Gael who must know something more about land law and about what is contained in the Bill, and we can debate these matters on the Committee Stage.
