The United Irishmen were in favour of industrial expansion and development in this country. The Young Irelanders were in favour of industrial development in this country. The Irish Nationalist Party was in favour of industrial expansion in this country. I, in the fourth generation, am also in favour of industrial expansion. But this is the first generation in over a century when tariff racketeers have been able to impose themselves on our people as the only method of industrial expansion in Ireland. The great confidence trick has been put over on our people that without tariffs and quotas there can be no industrial development, and the people who have been seduced into that illusion all pass every day the firm of Arthur Guinness, Son and Company, and the vast majority of them consume its products. They see one of the greatest biscuit factories in the world which carried the name of Irish industry into five continents and across seven seas—Messrs. W.R. Jacob and Co. They know that all the greatest liners the world has ever seen carry on their foredecks the plate of Irish shipbuilders. They hear in any country they travel into Irish linen spoken of as the criterion by which all other linen from all other parts of the world is judged. Every one of those industries was built up under absolutely fanatical free trade, and any one of those industries is worth more to this country than all the industries that have been established under tariffs.
Now, I ask this House, suppose any Deputy were looking for a job and he was offered a permanent job in Guinness's or Jacob's or one of the great linen industries or the shipyards or he was offered a job by one of the tariff racketeers in this city, and he was contemplating marrying and setting up a family, which employer would he opt for? The Industry that was built up by free trade or the bloated tariff racket which depends for its existence on a licence with which to rob our people? Will Deputies reflect on that and, if they have some sons who want jobs and they can get good jobs for them in Arthur Guinness, Son & Co. or in a tariff racketeer's backyard, which will they take? If they send their son to Guinness & Co. let them not come into this House again and say that Irish industry depends on tariffs and quotas and the attendant racketeers.
All of us want to see every branch of Irish life thrive and prosper, but we do not want to see Irish industry for ever carrying on its purse the parasites that have attached themselves to it in the last ten years. I pray for an economic D.D.T. with which we can spray Irish industry and watch the vermin that infests it to-day falling off. The particularly poisonous quality of these racketeers is the detestable notoriety which tarnishes the good name of the honest Irish industrialists, of whom there were many before Fianna Fáil was ever heard of and of whom, please God, there will be many long after Fianna Fáil is forgotten. I know that trick of the tariff racketeer when he is exposed to the odium he deserves. He claims that the same censure which falls upon him is falling upon everyone in Irish industry. That is not true. There were always enterprising men in this country engaged in Irish industry who were prepared to put their fortunes to the touch and serve the people as best they could and take such legitimate profits as the enterprise would give. They are with us now and, please God, they will be for ever with us. But there is the other class, too. So long as I can get 8,000 voters to send me to this House I will follow those parasites until we have cleansed the industrial life of this country and have Irish industry operated as it was in the past and will in the future by the same decent type of men, who manned the industrial branch of our activities.
One of the ugliest activities of these parasites who shelter in the shade of quotas and 75 per cent. tariffs is their love of monopolies. One hears of groups trotting up to the Department of Industry and Commerce and representing that the several members of this group want a quota and a tariff so that under its protection they can enter into healthy competition one with the other to provide the most efficiently-produced articles it is possible to produce for the benefit of the downtrodden Irish people. On this representation they get the class of protection they seek. How long are there several individuals in the group? Very shortly there are agreements and, as soon as decency will permit, there is a monopoly. First there is a little office called the trade protection association of the particular business in which they are interested; then the acquisition of an adjoining office; ultimately the whole floor; and then, to your astonishment, when you order merchandise from one unit of that group, every other unit in the group knows all about it and is in a position to tell you precisely what particular purchases have been made, the price paid, the terms you got, and when you paid your bill. Suddenly you realise that you are dealing with our old friend the monopoly. The boys have got together and it is all one shop now and the only competition that survives in the trade is a competition in ingenuity for devising methods of plundering their customers and through their customers, the public, and concealing from the Revenue Commissioners the unjust profits they have been making in their trade.
I put it to this House that, if there is to be a policy of protection in this country and if that policy creates monopolies in essential commodities that people must buy, these monopolies should be operated by the State for the people. I believe in free trade and free enterprise. So long as we have free trade we need never fear monopolies. We demonstrated that in connection with the cement industry. When the Danish cement cartel put up the price, we brought in Spanish and Polish cement and the price of cement was lower than it was in any other country in Europe, because we strongly and resolutely fought the cartel and were able to fight it, as we had access to all the markets of the world. But when we got a monopoly established in this country in cement, or flour, or artificial manures, or a ring established, which is only a more polite word for the same thing, I claimed, on behalf of the people, that this Oireachtas should intervene and take over that monopoly on behalf of the people and operate it for the benefit of the people. There is no civilised country in the world to-day which permits rings or monopolies, within tariff protection, to exploit their own people. This is the last country in the world in which that fatuity is allowed to continue.
Mind you, I advocate taking from no man his property. The right to own property is sacrosanct and superior to any right vested in this House or in this Parliament, but I do not believe in giving a gentleman a tariff or a quota on Monday morning and buying it back from him on the following Saturday. Once I had made up my mind that there was a monopoly in this country, established by the gentlemen who had benefited under a tariff or a quota, I would take that tariff or quota off, and, having taken it off, I would tell them to carry on and compete with the world if they wanted to, but that if there was any question of closing down, if there was any question of holding up the Government of our country to ransom by saying "we will throw our employees on the economic scrap-heap", I would say to them: "Well now, boys, we will take over your buildings, your machinery and your business at a fair price, and, if it is the national policy to operate that enterprise in this country behind protection, the State will operate it for the profit of the community and not for the profit of a corrupt gang whose purpose is to rob the people."
Sooner or later the people of this country will awake to the confidence trick that is being played upon them. I trust that, when they do awake to that, they will not be forced to the conclusion that this Parliament was an accessory to the fraud. It is because I want to protect our people from any such appalling disillusion that I ask this Parliament now to say that while "we are not prepared to accept Deputy Dillon's view that free trade should be the rule, and while we adhere to our protectionist policy, we are agreed that we will allow no ring or monopoly to use that policy for the purpose of robbing our people." The only means of preventing that is to ensure that, if a monopoly or ring be formed, it will be taken over by the State for the people.
You remember, Sir, the day when the doctrine of Fianna Fáil was economic self-sufficiency, but hardened old politicians like yourself and myself have watched them beat a strategic retreat from that fraud. The Irish Press has been working overtime to cover it with a smoke screen and to explain that the proud galleon of self-sufficiency that went into the smoke screen is the same as the rowing boat that has come out again. There are poor Fianna Fáil T.D.s in this House who, like the child looking upon the naked Chinese Emperor, are prepared to say: “Oh, mammy, what beautiful clothes”, and there is not a rag on the rowing boat, not to speak of a mast. But there are lots of Deputies in this House who still believe that, when the war is over, the chimera of national self-sufficiency will return. They do not realise, when they get up in this House and prate about the blessing Fianna Fáil policy was during the war —that it enabled us to maintain essential supplies—that we could not have maintained essential supplies for one month if Great Britain and the United States of America had not sent us our supplies of raw materials regularly and punctually, very often when they were short themselves. Is there, a single commodity, is there a single industrial product that was produced in this country during the past five years, that did not depend from month to month for its continued production on the supplies that came to us from abroad? Take cement. How long would we have kept the cement factories going if Great Britain had not supplied us with coal, and, remember, that coal was not always burned as coal in the cement factories. It was frequently burned in them in the shape of electricity. We all remember that, when British coal supplies dwindled almost to nothing, the cement factories were closed instantly. Every industrial user in this country who was using electric power was rationed, albeit not as swiftly as the domestic user, but the domestic user had to sit in the dark in order to reserve that shrinking residue for the industrial processes which were absolutely essential. How long would the transport industry of this country have operated if we had not got that coal from Great Britain? Let us assume that every railway engine in the country had been converted to the use of turf and that we did not burn one lb. of coal on the whole railway system of Ireland, how long would the trains have run? God help the poor “goms” of Fianna Fáil who used to urge on the Government to convert railway engines to the use of turf so that we would be independent of outside supplies. They forgot that wheels do not go round without lubrication.
They forgot the gentleman with the long hammer who walks along the train and makes odd noises on the wheels. Did they ever ask themselves "what is he doing?" Did they think he was trying to amuse the engine driver's daughter? He was trying to find out if there were hot boxes on the wheels, and the only means of preventing that was to provide additional lubrication. Have the Fianna Fáil Deputies ever asked themselves "where do the lubricants come from," and how long would the wheels of industry, transport or anything else that depends on wheels—how long would the very bicycle have stayed on the road—if they had not got lubricants? Economic self-sufficiency! I could go on with the story all day long—rubber, steel and the rest—and at every stage the policy of Fianna Fáil would make a cat laugh, except in one particular thing, that they have discovered that it does not work and that they are trying to throw it overboard.
Having exposed the utter absurdity and the ballyhoo about economic self-sufficiency, I beg Deputies to look about the world and realise the way the wind is blowing. The tariff racketeers in America gloried in the fact that, though the Finance Committee of the House of Representatives might pass a Tariff and Reciprocal Act, the Senate of the United States would strangle it. That is where they, had their big battalions. It withstood the big battalions, and they fought their last fight on the floor of the Senate of the United States of America. They called to their aid every vested interest which, for generations, had prevailed there, and they received on that measure the greatest defeat that ever was sustained by the vested interests on the floor of the United States Senate.
What does that Act empower the President of the United States of America to do? It entitles him to reduce every tariff imposed by the accursed Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act which brought the economic forces of the world crashing to the ground in the twenties. It empowers him, without further recourse to the courts, to whittle down, by a reciprocal arrangement with any other country in the world, every single tariff. I think it entitles him to reduce tariffs up to 50 per cent., without prejudice to his right to return to Congress to reduce individual tariffs further. Surely the dupes of the tariff racket in this country are sufficiently conscious, and still sufficiently independent, to look beyond the vested interests that menance them here, to realise the trend of the world and what might constitute a terrible peril to our whole economic life. Surely Deputies who developed a taste for pasteurised cheese realised the meaning of economic self-sufficiency when they received notices from Mitchelstown Creamery stating that, in the absence of important raw materials, it was no longer possible to make that kind of cheese.
Was it not a revelation to this House when it was stated that cowhides were being shifted out of the country, to discover that no cowhides were going out, even when boots were most keenly required by our people, but that in the absence of important supplies, which could not be produced here, we could not make boots in sufficient quantity, and that those which were being made were, on the Minister's own admission, of inferior quality; and that, not by any laches on the part of those responsible for making them. Because they could not get materials with which to combine their skill they could not make the kind of boots which they were always able to make, of the best quality in their class, before tariffs of any kind were there? As Deputies are aware before there were any tariffs there, Irish boots, Governey's and others, were made in this country. Do they innocently imagine there was never such an industry in this country until a tariff was imposed for the making of an Irish pair of boots? So long as our manufacturers had free access to the best raw materials the world could afford, and so long as they had not only Irish but foreign markets, we were able to build up industries that served the nation well. When they were put into the strait jacket of economic self sufficiency, Irish industrialists lost most of their foreign markets and the tariff racketeers here made the pretence that they could protect us from any economic disturbance that might affect the world if we paid them handsomely. We had that fantastic argument year after year, but when the peril came upon us they went bankrupt on every guarantee, except in so far as some of them were kept in being as contractors to the British Government, which gave them the raw material, and permitted them to retain perhaps 20 per cent of the finished product, always on condition that the balance was returned to the British. Our lips were sealed during the war period. We were implored not to mention that fact lest it might embarrass the Minister in the delicate negotiations which he was constrained to undertake. If the Minister is honest, I think he will admit that the cement industry, like the rubber industry and others depended for their maintenance on the understanding that the British would give the raw materials provided we returned to them the greater part of the products.