I desire to draw the Minister's attention to what occurred in the City of Dublin a few years ago when the cattle trade might have been destroyed. We all remember when the foot-and-mouth disease attacked this country. It was a member of my union, an ordinary semi-illiterate workman, who discovered the particular beast that was suffering from the disease. The cattle had been going up and down the quays five days, and the experts and veterinary officers never noticed that this animal was suffering from the disease. When the outbreak of the disease was notified, immediately everybody turned in to grapple with this fearful crisis that threatened the entire cattle trade. I and the members of my union practically lived in the abattoir where the cattle had to be slaughtered.
This is where I suggest the Minister failed on the administrative side. He appointed five of the biggest men in the cattle trade to handle all the cattle, but there was almost a revolution, by the people who owned the cattle, against control. Those five men brought the cattle to the abattoir. That was all they did. They had a very large sum of money at their disposal. They were given unlimited credit. The Minister knows that I and the men I represent lived in the abattoir. We were there for 24 hours of the day on seven days a week. When we approached these five men with a view to being paid a reasonable wage, as well as overtime rates for Sunday work and St. Patrick's Day, we were told by them that they had lost money and were losing money. These working-class men responded as patriots to the appeal made to them and decided to work the overtime as well as on Sundays and on St. Patrick's Day without anything extra. What did we find the other day? That the five gentlemen who held up that money handed back a surplus of £5,000 to the Minister. I suggest to the Minister that he has a duty to perform to the men who were engaged on that work, and should pay to them out of that £5,000 the money that is lawfully due to them.
We had an alleged potato shortage in the City of Dublin last year. One gentleman said that there were no queues for potatoes in this city. What are you to think of an intelligent human being wlio would come into a city and tell a deliberate lie reflecting on the honesty of the people? We know that there were queues composed of 100 persons in poor areas of the city standing there waiting to get even half a stone of potatoes. How did the Minister for Agriculture deal with that problem? He appointed a number of men to exercise control, one of them being a gentleman who had only been in the potato racket for less than 18 months. He had never been known in the potato market before. They were given power to control potatoes from the sources of supply. How did they do it? The early market gardeners in North County Dublin stripped the vines, took up the tubers and for these early potatoes they were enabled to get from £1 to 30/- a cwt.
I saw them in some shops charging 5/- a stone for potatoes. After a time, they found out that these gentlemen said there were no potatoes, while, in the City of Dublin, the 1942 crop was still lying in certain stores. Potatoes which are normally sold at 10d. to 1/- a stone were lying available, but these gentlemen could not put their hands on them. They went and got the potatoes which are generally shipped, and why they should be shipped at all when people want food I do not know.
One Deputy said that nothing less than £25 a ton would pay the growers of early potatoes. I wonder do Deputies ever work out figures for themselves? I grew potatoes in North County Dublin, in the area of Deputy P.J. Fogarty, who is now engaged in another occupation and reaping profits from the unsuspecting and susceptible, and I sold them at 5d. a stone, making a profit. I grew them from Tipperary bog seed, working a plot of 50 Irish acres myself and I made a profit. That cannot be challenged. While you have the system of dealing with food which we have in Dublin, when food is grown and brought into Dublin by low-paid labour, which works sometimes 20 hours in the 24, sold on the stall and while you are looking at it the price increases 400 per cent.—you bring in cabbages and sell them at 15/- a 1,000 and before you move away, they are being sold at £5—so long as you permit that kind of graft to be carried on all over the country there is no way for the farmer to get a fair return for his labour nor for the labourer to get payment for the hours he works. It is going on all over the country in the cattle trade, the corn trade and the potato trade.
I remember the Minister for Industry and Commerce being attacked here for buying potatoes for the alcohol factory near Dundalk at £2 per ton. It was said that he was giving a fair price and Deputies heard him saying that. Anybody who knows that area knows that it was a scheduled area at that time, but the potato grown in that area was the finest potato I ever ate, and yet it was sold at only £2 per ton. I remember these potatoes being shipped to England at £2 and £2 10s. 0d. per ton, but here we have a gentleman who gets £9 subsidy, plus £16 cash on the market, and now when we balance the books and find that he incurred a loss on shipping these early potatoes, we are going to make it good. Is there any man in the country or outside it who can get £25 a ton for potatoes who would not turn his activities solely to growing potatoes?
A Deputy made a very interesting speech here yesterday—what one could hear of it—and said that he would be satisfied in Westmeath with £10 per ton. I do not know whether he meant a subsidy of £10 plus the market price, but supposing he got £20 per ton or 2/6 per stone, would that pay him to grow potatoes? He would be a millionaire in a short time if he had sufficient acreage.
We have the same position with regard to bacon. A few weeks ago, before the Minister corrected his mistake and removed the grip which the Bacon Board had on the trade, I went to some of my colleagues and told them we could not get any bacon or any pork in Dublin. Yet the stuff was available. I asked: "Why do you not have the sense to lift this fixed price restriction? If it is to be a free market, let it be a free market for everybody and not one in which one crowd is at liberty to charge what they like, while the man who produces is limited to a particular price." The price was 125/- per cwt., while, in the same market, the black market gang were paying up to 160/-, before the inspector himself. While the Department's inspectors stood there, they were paying 160/- and 165/- and taking the pigs away from the fair, while the other gentlemen who wanted to pay were not allowed to do so. The Government removed the fixed price restriction and what did the price rise to? It rose to 180/- in one week. I wonder are pig producers making any money at 180/- per cwt?
It is said that there is no food for the pigs, but I suggest to the Minister that we could get any amount of feeding provided in and around Dublin. The Minister was astounded—and he will have to admit that he did not know that the information was available in statistics published by his own Department—when I told him the statistics regarding the swine population. I told him there were only 41,000 breeding sows in the country last year. I told him how many registered boars there were. It was information which he did not know and I have witnesses in the House who can prove it. Four years ago, we had 100,000 breeding sows and now we have 41,000. But, of course, we who have nothing to do with agriculture know nothing about these things.
Think of a country like Ireland with only 41,000 breeding sows and no feeding for them, when all around the City of Dublin you cannot find an exit because of the golf links. I will feed the pig population of the whole of Ireland on the barley I will produce in and around the City of Dublin. I understand that one of my colleagues suggested that we ought to have a municipal golf course. Some other gentleman told him how much it would cost and said that if he had the money, had paid his subscription and got his bag and clubs, he would possibly be blackballed. I would blackball everybody who has land lying idle in and about a city such as Dublin, which was held up to the point of starvation and in which little children were going without food last winter, when women had to stand with very little clothing in bitterly cold weather, to beg a half-stone of potatoes. But, of course, the Minister and his colleagues with their salaries, and I enjoying a similarly well-paid job—what do we care?
Hundreds of children died last winter, in my opinion, because of lack of proper food. It was not merely a matter of the potatoes; the same applied to milk. We could not get milk for children in the schools. One eminent amateur theologian told us that if we gave children a hot meal, we would endanger their immortal souls but his children were well-fed and he was well-fed, while the poor children in the schools developed all kinds of skin diseases—scrofula, dermatitis and scabies—because of lack of food and nutriment last winter, due to the greed and rapacity of these gentlemen who held us up charging all kinds of prices for milk, when it could be got. We were told there was a fixed price but you could get milk in the black market and not in any other. You could get all the potatoes you wanted, or at least the bourgeoisie of Ballsbridge could get all the potatoes they wanted. There was no difficulty about it. There was no difficulty. It was only in the working class districts that they had to queue for potatoes.
There was another astonishing thing in regard to the killing of pigs. I told the Minister of it and I said: "Why do not you carry out the law?" There is a number of men interned in the Curragh for thinking, never mind acting. But in the City of Dublin there was a man killing pigs in a tenement house. We gave the Minister the case of a gentleman—he has since been prosecuted—who actually killed 25 pigs in his own house in Dun Laoghaire in one week, while we have adequate slaughter houses and pork establishments. We had an abattoir lacking supplies of pigs, while these gentlemen were killing them in the cellars. There was a prosecution a year ago against one man, which failed on a technical point. That man was charging what he liked for the bacon. There is another feature of the case. Deputies who know how to make even country bacon know that there is not a more dangerous thing in the world than diseased pork It is a fearful thing. Badly cured pork that has been a day or two in hot weather would destroy a nation. I understand that the Minister admits that what we said to him is proof that even the best hotels had bacon that was not fit for human consumption.
The Minister has many sins to answer for in addition to those to which he has confessed. I believe he will get forgiveness because we realise his many difficulties but I would suggest that he should turn his attention to the things he has not done. I would suggest to him that when he gets men who know something about the subject, it would be well to take them into counsel. Deputies referred yesterday to advisory committees and consultative committees. I wonder do these Deputies know that an advisory committee is totally different from a consultative committee. There is no use consulting people if you do not take some advice from them. If their advice seems to be in the interests of the country, it should be taken no matter what their politics are and no matter what report is sent up from some little group alleged to be an organisation of Fianna Fáil or of the Labour Party or of Fine Gael. Do not mind that kind of thing. Half the letters written in the Dublin papers are either written in the office or by interested persons. When you are dealing with men who are engaged in day-to-day problems, try to appreciate them, whether they come from one Party or another. If we take that approach and try to get a common denominator, we can solve many of our difficulties. It is possible to work together, even in a stupid way, making, mistakes and correcting mistakes. Nobody ever lived who did not make mistakes. Even I do at times. Deputy Dillon does not make mistakes but, of course, he is an exceptional person. Even Deputy Dillon at times has a deep sense of responsibility, and I have heard him contributing some very useful information to this House. There are other men who have done the same.
Outside the House there are men who are deeply interested in this country. I never thought I would hear it said in this House that people do not work for patriotism in this country, that it is purely a business matter. There is a great deal of truth in that, but no people ever proved their patriotism as did the men and women of this country. Even during the past four years men have stood in the first line trenches in this country and have carried on the work against all kinds of moral suasions, financial stress, and every pressure that could be brought to bear upon them. Do you think the 160,000 men who have joined the British, armed forces did that for love of the British Empire? The men who left their homes to seek work in England did not do it for a joke, but because they were driven out by hard brutal hunger and the denial of a right to live in their own country. The 110,000 men and women who left this country to work for £4 a week in Birmingham, or Coventry, Norwich or any other town did not do that for a joke. The 60,000 merchant seamen of the Twenty-Six Counties who are going overseas and carrying the necessary foods and ammunition to keep the Empire safe and secure did not do that for a joke.
What attempt have we made to give them a chance to live at home? Examine your conscience. I would suggest that the Minister for Agriculture is the one man in the Government who could do most to prevent that loss of the vital blood of this nation. I suggest he ought to consult anybody who can give him ideas that will help to close the ports against that flow of the best blood of the nation. It is going on and it will continue to go on. I was in Norfolk a few weeks ago and men who have been working in the fields there for less than a week have now £21. I wonder how long a man would be in Carlow or the adjacent counties before he would have £21? Would he have it in a month or three months? Yet, surely they work just as hard in Carlow, Kilkenny, or any other county as they do in Norfolk. Do you think a man would be satisfied with a wage of 35/- or with a wage of 41/- in the County of Dublin? The fanners are very generous in Dublin. They are the most generous souls in the world. Paddy Belton is one of them. He gives away money. He even gives away his ideas. When we ask for sound boots for them we are told that it is not possible to get boots of the kind they require. They have to buy boots out of 35/- a week and feed a woman and five children.
The Minister for Industry and Commerce took some action in that respect. He allowed his friend, Woolfson, to import 215,000 pairs of discarded boots of the British Army. Disease is transmitted by the use of second-hand boots which have been worn by people suffering, possibly, from all sorts of disease. Any person or any Government that allows people to use second-hand boots is committing an offence against ordinary decency and humanity and is bringing disease, possibly, into this country. Remember, disease is coming into this country. There are 30,000 cases of scabies in the City of Dublin at the present time. If that is allowed to continue we, a clean-skin nation, will be destroyed. However, that is not the particular province of the Minister for Agriculture.
Is it fair that the Minister for Agriculture should allow this racket in the bacon and pork trade to continue? I can tell the House what the wages of these men are. It is a fixed wage in the bacon trade and a fixed wage in the pork trade. Does the Minister want to drive these skilled men out of the country? A man who can cure bacon is a man worthy of being retained. He is worth his wages. Do not drive them out. Within the last year 35 highly-skilled pork butchers have left Dublin alone. I would draw attention to the ineptitude of the Minister in enforcing the law. During the crisis created by the foot-and-mouth disease, we were killing 1,400 cattle a week in the abattoir. I hope that some day in Dublin, with the help of the Government, we will have a proper abattoir. The bulk of these cattle were for the canning trade. I do not want to go into the question of the canning trade now. In my time at school in England when we came out into the street there would be a sang outside who would shout: "Hit up these Irish." They would be waiting in hundreds to beat us up before we could get home. Incidentally I might mention that I saw a woman and her daughter stripped naked outside that school in Liverpool and their furniture burned in the street. There was a great deal of hatred throughout England for the Irish. Those who had to travel in England and Wales organising in connection with the trade union movement know that what they had principally to contend with was their Irish faces. They do not hate us any more in England. There is no more of that fanatical hatred of the Irish people, but there is what is even worse, contempt for them.
You could not get anybody to discuss anything in connection with these problems now. They do not bother with you any more. They look upon you as something outside the ordinary pale of humanity. That is the position we have brought ourselves into because we have not the ability to bargain. We give them the best food we can produce at their price, under their dictation. They treat you the same as they treated the plenipotentiaries who went over to meet Lloyd George and Bertie Smith and the rest of the gang who caused the fratricidal strife to start in this country. In the same way as you met them then and cowered before them you are cowering before them to-day. You have no need to be frightened of them. When you go into the ordinary market you have something to sell and to bargain with and you ought to insist on being treated with respect. The dago from the Argentine can get his price, or the individual from any other country. Surely we have men of ability in this country who know their subject who could go over and ask our friends across the water to give us a quid pro quo for what we provide them with.
To return to the abattoir business, as I say, 1,400 cattle per week were being killed for the canning trade. Do Deputies know that the bone matter in an ordinary old cow would weigh 3 or 4 or 5 cwts., and in a heavy bull it would run up to 8 or 9 cwts.? That bone matter will give the best fatty matter you could produce. That bone matter is cast aside and allowed to lie about until it rots. Then it is carted away to the manure merchant and the rats have three or four weeks' nibbling at the flesh on it before it is put into the bone mill to make bone manure. The Minister for Local Government on two occasions was approached by me on that matter and there were deputations of women interested in the poor who asked him to insist upon these bones being taken away and rendered down in order to get fatty matter from them. But the Minister did nothing. He would not allow these bones to be rendered down in order to get fatty matter which the people of Dublin wanted badly. Dripping in Dublin is 2/- a lb., when it can be got. Yet that is allowed to go on still. If any Deputy comes with me to the abattoir I can show him hundreds of lbs. of bone matter which is allowed to rot before it is taken away to the manure manufacturers.
