I move:—
That a sum not exceeding £151,900 be granted to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending the 31st day of March, 1950, for Salaries and Expenses in connection with Sea and Inland Fisheries, including a Grant-in-Aid.
The House will note that this Estimate represents an increase of £87,355 on the sum asked for last year. I have no doubt the House will also note with satisfaction that part of this increase is accounted for under sub-heads G (2) and G (3), which represent the repayable advances to the Sea Fisheries Association. G (2) speaks of repayable advances for boats and gear and G (3) speaks of repayable advances for general development. Deputies will recall that for the last few years, despite everybody's best effort, we have been unable to secure for the fishermen that supply of boats and gear which we would have wished to make available. The problem very largely arose out of the difficulty of getting engines. That problem is by no means wholly resolved as yet, but the supply position continues to improve and we feel we may legitimately hope to appropriate this substantial sum this year, in the confident expectation of spending it all in loans to fishermen for the supply of boats and gear.
The sub-head relating to development envisages the work we intend to pursue, increasing our capacity to produce boats and other services for the fishermen for whom the Sea Fisheries Association caters. In that connection, I desire to direct the attention of the House particularly to a project which is peculiarly dear to my heart, that is, the decision to restore the boatyard at Meevagh, locally known as Fanny's Bay. This was a small boatyard on the north shore of County Donegal which had been there for very many years. Through it many boys from Downings and that area have passed in the course of time as apprentices. Having learned their trade, some of them have subsequently served in other boatyards here in Ireland, while others have earned distinction abroad, by use of the skill that they acquired in Meevagh boatyard. When the Killybegs boatyard was developed in Donegal, it was at first thought that its resources would be ample to cater for the requirements of the Donegal area. Experience, however, has suggested that the small boatyard of Meevagh, capable not only of carrying out repairs of the boats domiciled from Moville round to Middletown but also equipped to produce at least two boats of its own every year, would be a welcome addition to the facilities available in Donegal. In contemplation of its abandonment, the yard was allowed to fall into a state of considerable disrepair, which was prudent and sensible, inasmuch as the intention then was to abandon it altogether. I am glad to inform the House that the Sea Fisheries Association, in deciding to re-establish Meevagh, have resolved to make of it, albeit a small yard, a yard which will be perfect in every particular. I cannot too highly commend that decision on the part of the Sea Fisheries Association, for I feel it to be a matter of very real importance that, whether an enterprise sponsored by a body of the standing of the Sea Fisheries Association be large or small, of its size and capacity, it ought to come as near perfection as it is humanly possible to bring it, and that is what I look forward to having at Meevagh.
Nor has the association forgotten its duty to provide analogous facilities for the Kerry area, and we hope to develop at Dingle a growing capacity for the building of boats suited to the requirements of the fishermen in that area. We have a long waiting list of fishermen who want boats and gear. I must not over-indulge my constitutional inclination to optimism, but I shall be much disappointed if a great part of that waiting list is not eliminated by the end of this financial year. That certainly is the intention of the association.
We are also planning this year to embark upon something which I trust will prove to be merely the forerunner of a very much larger development. A pilot plant for the quick-freeze process is to be established and it will be used with a view to determining on what lines of production we can most profitably and advantageously develop the quick-freeze and attendant services. I do not pretend, and I do not think anyone can pretend, to know with certainty in advance what branches of production can most profitably be associated with the quick-freeze process in our special circumstances. We propose to learn by experience, and I want to warn the House that we shall not be afraid to run the risk of loss, in order to establish to the point of certainty whether a fair capital investment in some particular line of business would yield permanent returns where an imprudent parsimony might make the venture a failure.
Before departing from sea fisheries— and of course I anticipate that many specific questions will be raised in the course of the discussion which Deputies will want me to answer categorically—I want to deal with one point. It has long been a matter of argument and contention why in this country we do not have a deep-sea trawling fleet. We do not have it and we will not have it, for one reason only, that the best information I can get is that you must choose between the inshore fishermen and the deep-sea trawler. If we are to have deep-sea trawling, then we must do it right. We must do it on the most efficient basis, by the most economic methods and with the best equipment that money can buy. So to operate, a deep-sea trawling fleet must provide a supply of fish more than adequate for the home market in Ireland and a surplus for sale abroad.
For the moment, I ask Deputies to forget the surplus problem. If the employment of trawlers regularly delivers at our ports a supply of fish amply adequate to cater for all the domestic demands, every inshore fisherman in Ireland is thereupon disemployed, because let none of us forget that it is no solution to say that you will transfer the inshore fisherman from his present occupation to the trawlers. They will not go, and they ought not to go. That is not their line. Their life, their culture, the social pattern they have woven for themselves is one of part-time farmer and part-time fisherman. It is not a system founded on the rock of perfect efficiency and absolute economic law, but, in my judgment, it is founded on something infinitely more precious—an Irish way of life which is the way of life obtaining along our west coast from Donegal to Cork.
I fully understand that the opposite view can legitimately be held, that, in this modern world in which we live, all that sentimentality and nostalgic looking back on the past must go, that the right course is to sweep all that away and to base upon this country a deep-sea trawling fleet which will enter into competition with Grimsby and Glasgow and all the great trawling ports of the world. That is a legitimate view. I reject it but, "you pays your money and you takes your choice". I can quite understand somebody who feels himself at home in the modern tempo who has no patience with the kind of people I represented in this House when I stood for Donegal or the kind of people of West Mayo with whom I have been brought in fairly intimate contact all my life. It is not that I know them better than other Deputies do that convinces me that theirs is a way of life we should preserve but it is because of my profound certainty that that way of life is part of our social pattern, a way of fishing that belongs to our people and in which it is now natural for our people to engage and the sordid industrial horror of the modern trawler trade is a servitude to which some people who value money more than life are entitled to subject themselves but which I would be long sorry to inflict on our people to the exclusion of a very much more gracious way of living which can be made to serve the requirements of our domestic market just as well.
So that the policy I commend to this House is founded on the inshore fisherman and on him alone and my aim is to make of the Sea Fisheries Association a co-operative body representative of the inshore fishermen and of them alone and to give to them through their co-operative the exclusive right of furnishing the domestic market with fish. There will be lacunæ when the weather is peculiarly turbulent or some other unforeseen circumstances arise when, for a week or ten days, perhaps, our inshore fishermen will not be able to meet the domestic demand. In that event, their co-operative, acting on their behalf, will bring in fish from abroad to fill the need of one or two or three days until the normal landings of our own men pick up the task of furnishing this market.
That deals with demersal fish. There remains, of course, the constant problem of providing for landings of pelagic fish. Sometimes one is inclined almost to the view that we are presented with insoluble problems. I am glad to tell the House that these problems are beginning to look less insoluble than they used to do and I am not without hope that, by carefully organising supplies of herring, we may establish a canning industry here which will provide a profitable commercial outlet for a very considerable volume of fish. As Deputies know, mackerel is very much a seasonal market and herring often presents a serious problem. Recently, I think, our experience with mackerel has not been as difficult as it often was before. I do not see my way through the problem of a regular and adequate market for mackerel as clearly as I think I see it for herring, but all that I know of as possible is being done and will continue to be done to seek a market and I would hope that, in time, the guarantee which is at present available to fishermen for their landings of demersal fish will be practicable for pelagic fish as well.
May I refer to one small detail? Our practice has been to provide a guaranteed price for landings of demersal fish, the marketing problem being one for the association itself. There are certain seasons in the year when the abundance of Providence speeds whiting towards our shore and fishermen in certain parts of the country can either go out and sit in the middle of the whiting and bring in boats loaded to the gunwale or go a little further and bring in choicer varieties of fish. This is true for two or three months of the summer season and, accordingly, I have advised the Sea Fisheries Association that, during these months, when these alternatives are available to fishermen they must, for their own protection, be advised that if they elect to confine their attention to whiting they must be prepared to have them sold on consigment on the market when they sometimes fetch a very dismal price, because they always have the option of going out beyond the whiting and bringing in these varieties of demersal fish for which there is a guaranteed price, the size of which they know before they put to sea. If they want to spare themselves the extra effort and confine their attention to whiting, they must face the peril of a market which they themselves elect to overload.
The Department of Fisheries is, of course, also concerned with inland fisheries. Perhaps I should tell the House that the age old battle goes on to define precisely the territorial limits, the three-mile limit or the nine-mile limit; how these limits should be drawn and whether international law prescribes that the three-mile limit in a bay that is six miles wide leaves a neutral hole in the middle of the bay. That still jogs cheerfully on and international lawyers exchange long queries and rejoinders. It is not the intention of your Government, now or in any foreseeable time, to send the fleet to sea for the purpose of challenging rival navies on the interpretation of obscure points of international law. The three-mile limit is universally acknowledged. In so far as we can hunt the offending trawlers out of those areas we intend to continue doing so. I have been listening to strong reprobation delivered against the Government of this country for 20 years for its failure to dismiss the foreign trawlers. Many is the powerful speech I have made in Deputy Brian Brady's constituency upon that very subject. It seems always a simple thing to do and, during the last 12 months, it is a matter to which I have turned my attention not infrequently. It seems to me that, to protect a coast line even of such modest length as our own, one would want to dispose practically the whole British Navy in order to have posted at the point of vantage an appropriate vessel to deal with every errant poacher. It occurred to me at one time that our air force might contribute by doing an occasional patrol. I do not dismiss that entirely from the sphere of possibilities and it is a matter which I intend to take up with the Minister for Defence in the hope that even though it might not produce the prompt arrest by service vessels on wireless notification from aircraft at least it would be in terrorem and might discourage skippers——