I agree with Deputy Brennan when he says it behoves every Deputy and every citizen to appreciate the fact that the Minister for Supplies has one of the most difficult tasks of any Minister of State at present. I do not think there are many people in the country who are under any illusion about that fact. They all recognise his difficulties, and they all recognise that, do his best, he is not in a position to provide everybody with 100 per cent. of what they want, or of what they were getting pre-war. Nobody expects that he should, but I think that, if we understand his position, and endeavour to make allowances for the difficulties with which he is confronted, he on his side should realise that nobody in the country is asking for miracles or hoping for miracles. All they are asking for is commonsense, and it is when commonsense is not displayed that the people evince irritation and exasperation, as they very frequently have done and as each one of us in this House must have at one time or another experienced ourselves.
It is true that the censorship has operated to make a very large number of our people, and indeed a large number of Deputies, labour under the delusion that the war is being fought on some distant planet, and that really this country should not experience any serious repercussions from what is going on in the world; but I think that at least one ray of light is beginning to shine in the Stygian darkness of the Fianna Fáil mind, that is, that the national self-sufficiency they were so fond of in their salad days is not as happy a state of affairs as they thought it was going to be. They are now experiencing about 50 per cent. national self-sufficiency, and their lamentations are heard upon the breeze. They are hellbent for 90 per cent. national self-sufficiency in the course of the next 12 months, and, judging by appearances, they will make the welkin ring when they get it. But for what we are getting from Great Britain at present— carried to Britain in British ships by British sailors, and convoyed by British warships, and then forwarded to us— we would be experiencing 85 per cent. national self-sufficiency at this moment, and the boys would not like it, although they have been clamouring for it for the last 15 years. I wonder do the Fianna Fáil Party realise that this is national self-sufficiency? This is a handsome instalment, delivered to them by the Government of the Third Reich, of national self-sufficiency. Hitler has got for them what they could not get for themselves, and they do not like it. Will they preserve this wisdom that they have acquired, because if they do it will be a very small patch of silver lining on the dark clouds that are hanging over this country at the present time?
I hear a number of comments and criticisms in respect of the individual follies of the Minister at the present time. Has it not occurred to this House that the common source of most of these follies is that the Minister's familiarity, in the last ten years, with the tariff racketeers has persuaded him that everybody who goes into his Department is a rogue? The Minister has met so many rogues and done business with so many rogues during the past ten years, he has found out that so many people who went to him with glib professions of enthusiastic patriotism, were thinking only of their own interests, were simply bent on lining their own pockets, and were nothing more or less than rogues, that every genuine person now is received in the Department of Supplies as if he were a rogue. Now, honest men do not like to be treated as if they are rogues. When they go to the Department of Supplies in connection with a licence, or some such matter, and state their business, they do not like to have it said to them: "What you are saying is one thing, but what you mean is another." That is good enough for the tariff racketeers, and it is probably true of the tariff racketeers, but it is time that the Minister for Supplies woke up to the fact that he is no longer the Minister for Industry and Commerce dealing with racketeers— racketeers of his own making, racketeers of his own political household. The Department of Supplies has brought him into contact with the honest men of this country, and they are entitled to be treated as honest men. They do not want to be lumped together with the racketeers. They do not want to be treated with the cynical tolerance which the Minister has shown to the racketeers. They want to be treated with the common respect that is due to decent men, who come of decent people, and who are not afraid to have their lineage investigated.
That is one of the Minister's great difficulties. He is suspicious of everyone. He thinks that everyone is trying to double-cross him. He will not take advice from anybody giving him disinterested advice any longer, and, signs on it, he stumbles into the most egregious errors. Just imagine a Minister of State, in the present condition of the world, addressing letters to the doctors in this city, one of whom is resident in 13 Parnell Square, and who was asked what was his car doing outside 12 Parnell Square Would anyone outside of Bedlam believe that the Minister for Supplies, who is supposed to be working 14 hours a day, could find the time and the staff to conduct correspondence of that kind? And he conducts it because the fact that that doctor holds a permit from him leads the Minister to believe, from his own experience of the racketeers, that coming into contact with him implied that the doctor is a rogue, must be treated as a rogue, and checked up on as if he were a rogue. These doctors are not tariff racketeers. They are honest, professional men, getting on with their job, trying to serve their patients to the best of their ability, and as to 99 per cent. of them, if they say: "Whatever instructions you may give us, with regard to permits or anything else, those instructions will be carried out in the spirit", that is very much more important than the mere observance of such instructions in the letter, when every possible opportunity is taken to drive a coach and four through these regulations by those who would cheerfully ignore the spirit of whatever undertaking they have given.
The Minister has got into the habit here in the House of getting up quite blandly and saying: "I will take the licence off anybody that I suspect." Now, let us pause here for a moment. If this doctrine is to remain unchallenged, I say, most deliberately, that the principles of the secret police of Europe are being carried into this State. The whole basis of the operations of the Ogpu in Russia, of the Gestapo in Germany, of the secret police in Italy, is that a man is not afforded an opportunity of standing his trial in open court. He is dragged in on suspicion, and condemned without being afforded any opportunity of knowing the actual charge that is made against him and defending himself before an impartial judge against that charge. Now, some of the Fianna Fáil Deputies are going to say: "Have we not the I.R.A. locked up in Arbour Hill?" Yes, we have members of the I.R.A. locked up in Arbour Hill, but the reason is that they refused to recognise the courts of this country. If these gentlemen, whom it has become necessary to lock up under the various Public Safety Acts that were passed in this country, had gone before the courts, honestly stood their trial, and let it be known that they were prepared to accept the verdict of a jury of their fellow-countrymen and the sentence of a judge properly constituted by law, there would have been no necessity to lock them up in Arbour Hill in that way. These people, however, denied the authority of the courts, refused to plead, threatened the juries, and said that they would murder the judges. In face of that conspiracy, this House consented to the suspension of the ordinary common law with profound reluctance, and on that precedent the Minister for Supplies comes along and says:
"I am entitled to go to any law-abiding citizen and say: ‘You have done something which gives me ground for suspicion, and, therefore, I will take your means of livelihood away from you, and you may be very grateful that I accord you the privilege of having an interview with a junior civil servant, who will hear you, weigh your evidence, prosecute you, and then condemn you."'
Now, why should an ordinary, honest businessman in this country be put in that position? Why should he have to go before some little jumped-up junior civil servant in Earlsfort Terrace or Ballsbridge, and what right has such a person to pass judgment on the simplest country publican in this country? The courts are there. They were established to protect him and the likes of him—simple people from down the country—against the tyranny of an Executive. The courts were designed in order to provide, in the majesty of the law, a deterrent to the power of an Executive which sought to oppress the humble citizen, and the only chance that the ordinary citizen in the street has against the power of the Executive is to invoke the courts of law which have an equal power, majesty and strength. It is all very well: if the bureaucrats attack a member of this House, he can fight; but take the case of the ordinary citizen down the country, who gets a manifesto telling him to appear before the Department of Supplies, what recourse has he? He has to go, in fear and trembling, and submit his whole means of livelihood to the scrutiny and judgment of one civil servant, who can then issue a fiat wiping him out, putting him out of business, not on the reasonable grounds of knowing that he had broken the law, but because he has given some ground to some member of the Department of Supplies to suspect that he departed in some particular from the conditions of some licence that had been given to him by the Department of Supplies.
Now, does Dáil Éireann approve of that doctrine? I do not, and I want to make this perfectly clear. I do not under-estimate the Minister's difficulty in the present situation, but unless he is prepared to disown the principle that he has enunciated: that he is entitled to withdraw from men their means of livelihood merely on suspicion, I intend to challenge a vote on this Estimate, and let every Deputy here realise that if he goes into the Lobby to vote on this Estimate, he goes in in defence of a proposition that the ordinary citizen of this country can be stripped of his livelihood because he has given a civil servant reasonable grounds for suspecting that he has committed a breach of some particular regulation.
Now, mind you, I do not want to lay that exclusively on the motor car. The practice has grown up here of going down the country and taking a licence from a miller. Somebody goes into a mill and finds a state of affairs obtaining there which leads him to suspect that, within the course of the last week, some cereal was ground there that should not have been ground there. No prosecution is started, and no effort is made to bring this man before the courts of law and adduce evidence to satisfy the court that he has been guilty of committing some breach of the law. Instead, he finds on the following morning that his milling licence is withdrawn. Do the members of this House realise what that means? Do they realise that the miller is not only constrained to conform to written conditions but that an authorised officer of the Department can go down and amplify the written conditions imposed upon the miller by verbal instructions? If the Minister then is given reasonable grounds for suspecting that there has been a breach by the miller of the verbal instructions given him by an authorised officer of the Department, the Minister may take away his licence, put his mill out of business, deprive that man of his livelihood and, so far as I know, that man has no recourse whatever. That is fantastic and ought to be stopped. The Minister ought to answer to this House for that state of affairs.
Nothing is more vile than the tyranny imposed upon people by their own neighbours. Any of us can bear oppression if it is the oppression of a foreigner, because that is all you expect from a foreigner. You can fight him with a full heart, but if you have got to fight your own neighbours for the right to live, then life ceases to be worth living, and national independence becomes a sham. I would sooner have a German, a Russian, or any other tyrant in this country than have an Irish Government playing the part of a tyrant here. If I could make Deputies realise that liberties have been lost in nearly every country in the world by a slow decline of this character, by failing to note the first encroachment on that fundamental principle, I would have served some useful purpose in speaking in Dáil Eireann to-day, but what terrifies me is that so few seem to realise it. There is no difference in the world between taking a licence from a miller in that manner and making serious inroads on individual liberty. The humblest citizen of this State is as much entitled to the protection of the courts as the biggest shot in Ireland, and the proceedings of the Minister for Supplies are directed towards denying a humble citizen of this State the protection which, under the Constitution, he is entitled to. The cruel thing is that the Minister cannot do that kind of thing to a member of Dáil Eireann because we have got this public forum from which to speak.
We have got the experience and would know how to tackle him if he attempted such outrages on our individual liberty, but an individual down the country, threatened with an attempt of that character, is constrained to say to himself: "I must cave in because if I fight he will simply crush me, and it is within his power to do so, because the power of the courts to intervene in my defence has been abrogated with the consent and approval of Oireachtas Eireann." I beg and implore the members of this House to make it quite clear that that abrogation will not take place with our consent, and that whatever orders, rules and regulations are made must be enforced through the instrumentality of the courts so long as the citizens against whom they are directed are prepared, loyally, to accept the verdict of the courts, and to say that the only grounds upon which we will withdraw from any citizen, great or humble, the fullest recourse to the courts are when that citizen challenges the authority of the courts or denies the validity of the lawfully-established Government of this country.
I want now to approach another aspect of the situation. I deliberately say that the operations of the Department of Supplies are having the effect of forcing thousands of men, to whom the idea of breaking the law is nauseating, into the position of law-breakers for two reasons. The first is that you cannot find out what the law is because the Minister for Supplies publishes such a multiplicity of Orders that you cannot ascertain with precision on any given day what the existing state of the law is. It has become the practice of the Department to publish in the newspapers a résumé of the Orders and then to say that these Orders will be available shortly at the Stationery Office. An Order, commonly, is not available at the Stationery Office for a month or six weeks after it has been made. The average citizen knows the general tenor of the Order but, in regard to its details, they are not to be found in the published notice, and are only to be found in the official Order published by the Stationery Office. That is peculiarly true of price Orders.
You will frequently have a price Order made in which a retail price per stone is fixed—the price of the wholesaler to the retailer and of the importer to the wholesaler. These prices are fixed, but sometimes the problem arises at once—what are you to charge per lb. for that commodity? You find that the price per lb., calculated at the stone rate, does not work out in any mensuration of the coinage, and you do not know whether you are bound to charge a farthing per lb. more or less. For five or six weeks you are left waiting to find out what the true state of the law is. Again, you will get a case in which provision is made for a wholesaler to charge so much per cwt. for a special commodity. Of course, the bureaucrats in Earlsfort Terrace quite forget that, in rural Ireland, the bulk of the wholesale trade is done in stones and half-stones between the small roadside shop and the comparatively large wholesaler in the country towns. There is no means of determining what the price is to be per stone, and eventually, when you ask the Minister in this House what is the price to be per stone, you discover that it bears no relation whatever to the fixed price per cwt.
I recognise the Minister's difficulties, but I imagine that he could find a group of men who would advise him in regard to the conditions of trade obtaining in rural Ireland. They are far different from the conditions obtaining in Dublin and Cork. The Minister would find in his own Party men like Senator McEllin, as well as several Deputies here present, who have some experience of business in rural Ireland and who could tell him in a thrice how these things are done in rural Ireland. If he wants help from me, or from any member of the House who has experience in these things, I am perfectly sure that all he has to do is to ask that a Parliamentary Committee be set up to review these Orders and point out to him any obvious discrepancies in them. But his failure to have any discussion of that kind has resulted in men, who have taken pride in the fact that they would sooner see their premises burned to the ground than that a black market price should be charged by them, waking up one morning to discover that they have not only charged a black market price themselves, but constrained their employees to do the same thing. To me that is one of the most undesirable and regrettable developments which has confronted us so far, because, as Deputy Brennan said, if that practice becomes widespread, and if decent men through the country are commonly known to their neighbours to be engaged in blackmarket activities, they will not get the charitable benefit of the doubt, but their neighbours will say that they took a chance, and thus the whole standard of conduct which should rule a community is proportionately lowered. It is easy to lower standards of conduct, but it is difficult to raise them up again.
A second source of great hardship to law-abiding members of the community throughout the country is the imposition by the Department of Supplies of impossible conditions. Take the case of an old-established firm in a country town. The proprietors of that firm, if they ever considered their position, said to themselves sometime: "The only justification for our existence is that we provide the community in which we are living with amenities that the community would not have if we were not here. We are doing this distributing job a bit better than anybody else and it is for that reason that our customers are paying us a profit." Therefore such an establishment prides itself on making available to customers at all times all available commodities which would be useful to them. Comes the time when that establishment finds itself without oatmeal. It cannot get oatmeal to be sold at 4/2 a stone. It will not go on the black market, because that is against the law, and it says to its customers: "There is no oatmeal." But there is no oatmeal because no oatmeal miller can get oats at the fixed price of 10/8 per cwt. The miller who is a licensed miller dare not pay more than 10/8 a cwt. lest he should lose his licence. The miller comes to the shopkeeper and says: "We have no oatmeal because we cannot get oats at the fixed price. We cannot get oats and therefore we cannot mill oatmeal." The responsible merchant says to his customer: "I am sorry we cannot give you any oatmeal. There is no oatmeal to be got." Then a neochán sets up in a shop across the street and hangs out a big notice: "Oatmeal for sale," and the person who has the old-established house and has prided himself upon supplying everything reasonably demanded of him for 100 years, has to send his customers over to the neochán to buy oatmeal from him at a black market price in the certain knowledge that when the black market is stopped the neochán will fold up and disappear and send all the customers back to buy oatmeal at the regulated price from the old-established merchant who must forever after hang his head, because now instead of being a useful member of his community who discharged a useful service, he has become a kind of parasite who only has supplies when everybody else has them, and which, in a time of difficulty and stress, but for the neochán, we would have to go without.
Is not that exasperating? Can you blame a responsible businessman who says in face of that situation: "Life ceases to be worth living? What is the use of talking of a Minister for Supplies when the neochán is allowed to carry on his black market operations without any interference whatever? The Guards, the inspectors, and everybody else see the big placard: "Oatmeal for sale"; they know he is charging 7/6 a stone for it, but nobody interferes. I do not blame him because it is much better to get oatmeal even at 7/6 a stone for the people than not to have oatmeal at all. The man who will not break the law is held up to public odium as a common parasite because he cannot deliver the goods. Is that right? I suggest to the Minister that he ought to insist on either of two things: If oatmeal is to be sold at 4/2 per stone that it will not be sold by anybody, neochán or merchant, at any other price; if he once makes up his mind that it is no longer possible to get oatmeal at 4/2 a stone, he should take the control off oats and let us all get into the oatmeal business so that competition may provide for the people oatmeal at the lowest price at which it is possible to get it.
I can tell exactly the same story about barley meal for pig feeding and about cotton thread. I know a case of a firm which prided itself on never having sold anything relating to the black market which found itself confronted with a situation that it had not a reel of thread in the place, but a few hucksters, who never sold cotton thread before, were charging 1/2 and 1/4 a reel for cotton thread they bought from the smugglers. Finally, in despair, that responsible merchant was obliged to have recourse to the smuggler and buy cotton thread and put it up for sale at 1/- and 10d., because that represented a fair profit on the price that had to be paid to the smugglers.
The moral I want to draw is this: It is lawful for the merchant to go to the smuggler in order to bring down the price of the reel of thread to the public. But it is not lawful for the merchant to go to the black market for oats. I am suggesting to the Minister that restrictions of that kind, which make the conduct of honest business virtually impossible, ought to be reviewed and abolished so that those who are trying to serve their communities as merchants will be allowed to give their communities good value for the profits they earn out of them, and not allow a situation to develop in which honest men, who are attempting to abide by the law and maintain a decent standard of conduct, will be forced into becoming law-breakers before their own neighbours and employees, thus putting a patina of respectability on that which ought to stink in the nostrils of every decent man.
