Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Wednesday, 5 Jul 1950

Vol. 122 No. 4

Committee on Finance. - Vote 28—Fisheries (Resumed).

Mr. Dillon

It is an odd thing, in connection with this Fishery Estimate, that Deputy Little should depart from what has been on the whole a constructive and helpful discussion to denigrate the work that has been done because a great deal of the work that has been done, has been done by the Sea Fisheries Association during the years of the Fianna Fáil Administration. But this queer corroding hate which the Fianna Fáil Party has allowed to bedevil its members drives Deputy Little into the pretence that no progress has been made, in the hope thereby to discredit me. I have not the slightest hesitation in directing the attention of the House to the very material progress that was made not only in the past two years, but in the previous ten years. In 1935 the Sea Fisheries Association had four depots in this country—Dublin, Arklow, Cork, Galway. That is all the immediate contact they had with the fishermen. To-day, the Sea Fisheries Association has depots, that is, either a boatyard or a centre such as Killybegs or a fully-authorised agent permanently resident, at Clogherhead, Loughshinny, Rush, Howth, Wicklow, Arklow, Wexford, Kilmore Quay, Passage East, Dunmore East, Helvick, Ballycotton, Cork, Castletownsend, Baltimore, Schull, Bantry, Caherciveen, Cromane, Dingle, Quilty, Aran, Galway, Roundstone, Cleggan, Murrisk, Achill Sound, Killybegs, Rossbeg, Burtonport, Kincasslagh, Bunbeg, Magheroarty, Port-na-Blagh, Downings, Meevagh, Portaleen. Does that suggest no effort to meet the problem of reorganising the fisheries of this country? And now, on next Tuesday, please God, a Bill will be introduced into this House asking the Oireachtas to reorganise the industry on the basis of that framework from the bottom up so as to try out to the limit of the resources of this State the ability of the inshore fishermen alone, furnished with every instrument that modernity can provide and every facility that prudent outlay of money can purchase, to supply adequately the domestic market at a price which the domestic consumer can reasonably be asked to pay. That experiment will not be abandoned in a year or two years. It will be carried on permanently should the evidence of eventual success emerge and, in any case, for a sufficiently long time to convince everyone who is honestly interested in the welfare of the inshore fishermen whether, in fact, under any circumstances, they can be so organised as effectively to provide for this market. Does that suggest that the Department of Fisheries is the step-child of the Department of Agriculture, that it is treated as an insignificant branch of agriculture and that it is forbidden to come in contact with the outside world? I am authorised by the Government to say that no accommodation required at any port in Ireland which it is decided by those competent to decide is necessary to provide fishermen with adequate facilities will be held up for 24 hours by the want of money. There are no strings to that and there are no qualifications, but there will be no pier building where the sea does not roll-because there are a lot of people in this country who would like to build piers in their own backyards. That day is done. What port facilities are necessary for use for the convenience of genuine fishermen will be provided the moment competent expert opinion certifies that they would be useful and practical.

While I desire to reiterate that I appreciate the spirit in which the apprehension was expressed that pressure of work might relegate the interests of the Fisheries Department to a secondary place, I have a duty to inform the House that I am not aware of any such relegation and if it exists I want to know of it. I do not think there is upon me a duty to apologise to the House for the volume of work done by the Fisheries Department in the past 12 months. Three Inland Fishery Bills have been passed, and a Sea Fisheries Bill has been drafted for submission to the House. There are more boats issued, more building and more on order than ever before in the history of the Sea Fisheries Association. Two new boatyards are building, one at Dingle and one at Meevagh. There are two more in contemplation, one on the west coast and one at Baltimore. There has been the greatest quantity of prime fish landed by the inshore fishermen in recorded time. More fishermen are being employed than at any previous date, and there are more boats working with Irish crews than at any previous date.

Will any Deputy suggest to me what more can be put in hand because, if he can, I want to put it in hand, and we have the means and the resources to put it in hand? There is nothing requiring to be done that is not being done for the want of the will or the way. If there is something requiring to be done which is not in hand, it is due to nothing but the ignorance of the Minister for Fisheries, and I am asking Deputies to repair that ignorance if they can and, presumably, Deputies of this House are as competent a body to correct any lacuna in the information requisite adequately to deal with this problem as any other body in Ireland.

Deputy Palmer mentioned a pier in Kerry. The general undertaking I have given applies to that. Deputy Breslin stated that we were not sufficiently sympathetic about grants for small slips and piers. I want to be clear on this. The smallest pier in Ireland or the most insignificant slip is just as important in the eyes of the Department of Fisheries as is Killybegs, Arklow or Galway, provided that it corresponds to this test: if constructed does it genuinely serve the interests of fishermen, does it provide safe accommodation for them and, when it is constructed, will the local authority undertake to maintain it? There is no use in my asking this House to provide money to build a pier or a slip if I am fixed with notice that when it has been made safe and sound the local authority intends to let the sea sweep it away. I have no power to maintain piers or slips. It is the statutory duty of the local authority, and I cannot use fisheries money for that purpose.

Let nobody be backward in coming forward to bespeak a pier or a slip because at the moment there are not boats in sufficient number prima facie to justify it. The Department of Fisheries will be glad to help in building up the number of boats and to make a pier in anticipation of building up that number where the slightest rational prospect of doing so exists. But there is no use in asking the Department to lay out a capital sum, the annual charges upon which will be twice as great as the maximum quantity of fish that ever has been landed at that place within the past 120 years, because that calls for a degree of optimism which even I am not able to ask the House to join in.

Deputy Breslin complains that Donegal hotel owners and retailers must order their fish from Dublin. Let it be understood that the Sea Fisheries Association will be glad to supply orders for any area of the County Donegal from Killybegs. It is a free country, and if somebody wants, in the exercise of the prerogative of a free man or woman, to order fish from Ballycotton, surely the House does not expect me to issue a prohibition? If they want to get supplies of fish from Killybegs, we will be glad and happy to supply them, and I would be grateful to Deputy Breslin, who is now present, if he would make that widely known.

Deputy O'Sullivan apprehended that the question of increased demand might wait on increased landings and that the Department and the Sea Fisheries Association might recoil from the risk of creating greater landings in the absence of demand. There is no need for apprehension on that score. We propose to proceed on the basis that there will be a demand for the largest quantity of prime fish that the inshore fishermen can be equipped and induced to bring there, and we accept the assignment of creating a market for any quantity, however great, that they land.

I would remind Deputies that those inshore men who elected to become members of the Sea Fisheries Association are, for almost every category of prime fish, entitled to deliver it to the Sea Fisheries Association for a guaranteed price, and they can leave the problem of marketing to us. They do not have to worry. If they do not want to, as some of them have not wanted heretofore, join the Sea Fisheries Association and so create marketing problems for themselves, this is a free country; but I am going to ask the Oireachtas to provide that hereafter no one but members of the Sea Fisheries Association will be allowed to land fish for sale on the shores of this country. That is an arrangement which we can more properly discuss when it comes before the House by way of legislative proposals.

Now, those who know this trade will not, I hope, subscribe to the usual fraud about whiting. Muintir na Mara is very strong on the subject of whiting. There are seasons of the year when whiting shoal like herring or mackerel, and it is not an uncommon practice with some of the more obscurantist of the fishermen to go and scope little whiting as you would herring or mackerel, and then make the welkin ring when they do not get a guaranteed price thereafter. There are seasons in this country when small whiting are about as saleable as a fish's tail, and nobody knows that better than the minority of chancers who scoop them out of the harbours and dump them on the piers. Let us fix the chancers with notice now that, little and all as they got in the past for this kind of activity, they will get nothing at all for it in the future. The Sea Fisheries Association has been designed for honest fishermen, and they constitute the vast majority of the men.

There are two Deputies, and when they speak on the Fisheries Vote—God forgive me—my hackles begin to rise. One is Deputy Corry on account of his brazen face, and the other Deputy Little on account of his oleaginous hypocrisy. Imagine Deputy Corry waltzing in here to make a bitter complaint, a raucous complaint, about Ballycotton, and of how the suffering citizens of Ballycotton are oppressed by the Department of Fisheries when the Department of Fisheries has been waiting 18 months for the Cork County Council to make up its mind as to what it wanted to do at Ballycotton. In December, 1946, the Cork County Council was asked to submit proposals for Ballycotton, and were told that the Department of Fisheries was sympathetic. We have written and written and written, but they are still shaking like a jelly on the plate down in Cork. Deputy Corry, like the young Lochinvar who comes out of the west, why did he not go down to the Cork County Council, of which he is a member, in the last four years and throw his handspring there?

Mr. McGrath

He did, but he is in a minority there.

Mr. Dillon

He is in a minority in Dáil Éireann, too. Let him go and roar at the Cork County Council, and if he can get the Cork County Council to make any rational recommendation in respect of facilities at Ballycotton, I want the Cork County Council to know that the Department of Fisheries is ready, willing and anxious to get on with the job, and that nothing is going to stop the Department of Fisheries except the vacillation of the Cork County Council.

Deputy T. Brennan raised one point which I am grateful to him for bringing under public attention, and that is, that the allegation is not infrequently made by the retailers and wholesalers of fish that they are obliged to charge the prices prescribed by the Government for fish. But they never feel themselves under the same compelling obligation to pay the prices prescribed by the Government for fish —and that is the maximum price. The fact is that the retail and wholesale prices are maximum prices, and if there are any who have had any doubt about it heretofore, let them know now that, provided they do not charge more than those prices for fish to the consumers, they can charge as little as they like and, the lower they go, the more praiseworthy citizens they are.

I grieve for their anxious scruples lest they cut across the fundamental policy of this State by charging less than the maximum prices for fish. I rejoice in this opportunity of providing an anodyne for their delicate consciences. They are as free as air to charge as much less than those maximum prices as their public-spirited solicitude suggests they will wish to do.

Deputy T. Brennan spoke of nonnationals coming here and fishing. That always makes me shudder. There are 20,000,000 of our people scattered over the world in the greatest spiritual empire this world has ever seen, and we are the only imperial power in the world whose people have never been asked to get out. Wherever the Irish have conquered for themselves a home they are welcome citizens, and it ill becomes us, I think, with thousands of our people working in England, in America, in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and in almost every country of the world, to go on record as saying "though we have sought a welcome in every hemisphere, no one is welcome in Ireland." It is a poor guest who never has the kettle boiling on his own hob. What Deputy Brennan is really referring to is a recent development within the past two years in which enterprising persons have equipped themselves with splendid fishing boats and Scotch crews. The boats are registered in Ireland and the proprietor is a citizen of this State; he is engaged in perfectly legal trading activities, but he belongs to that category of persons, to which I referred in opening this Estimate, who bought these boats and hired these crews in the full knowledge that the policy of this Government had been declared before these boats were bought and these crews were hired. That policy was that, so soon as legislation was ready, the complete monopoly of the domestic market would be conferred upon the inshore fishermen, and that anyone who was not in that category was fixed with notice that if he chose to go to expense, subsequent to that declaration of policy, no question of compensation would arise for any vested interest that he had created for himself as a result of his subsequent activities. The boats referred to by Deputy T. Brennan are splendid boats, and the crews who man them are splendid crews. I hope that the crews of our boats will be as good as those Scotch crews. If they are, we shall have no need to worry about the future capacity of the inshore fishermen to fill the home market. If they are as good, I hope the Sea Fisheries Association will provide for them as good boats as the Irish citizen referred to has provided for his Scotch crews. If we do that, I think we shall have reached a very creditable standard.

Deputy Brennan dealt at some length with the bar at Arklow Harbour where one would imagine the ships of five continents swept in and out quite freely until this Government came into office and that towards the removal of that bar this Government is now only prepared to make provision for two-thirds. It is a permanent danger to the mariners of Arklow and I said I thought I would surprise Deputy Brennan. Let me summarise it in this way: all the ports of our shores are subject to the harassment of a current which flows there, carrying with it sand, from Waterford right away up to Belfast. It was met in the case of Dublin Port by the construction of the Bull Wall which was designed to have an effect upon the current calculated to prevent it depositing sand across the Port of Dublin. The great volume of traffic passing there justified the immense capital outlay that was required. Precisely the same problem presents itself at Wicklow, Arklow, Wexford, and, I think, even at Waterford. It is the intention of the Government not to spend decadally a larger and larger sum pushing the piers further and further out towards the English coast. It does not matter how far one pushes them out, the current will come around the end of the pier and deposit its sand in the mouth of the harbour. Recognising the inevitability of that— it is the case in hundreds of other ports all over the world—the Government decided there is a permanent dredging problem in the east coast ports of Ireland and provision will be made permanently and perennially to get that dredging done. It will cost money, but, in the heel of the hunt, it will cost less than building another 100 yards on to the end of the pier every ten years.

We asked the Galway Chamber of Commerce to make its suggestions about boat building and repair accommodation on the west coast long ago. We are still waiting for a reply. Now, I am going to wait until August when, with the help of God, I will be in Carna on my holidays and if the Galway Chamber of Commerce has not made up its mind by then I will start round the west coast of Ireland and I will make up my own mind. I will wait a certain time for advice from the local authority. But I will not sit on my sash indefinitely and then have the Deputy Corry of that particular area throwing handsprings here in Dáil Éireann in an effort to discover why I did not do something when, for four years, I have been sitting on my sash waiting for the Deputy Corry of Galway County to do something. I have waited long enough. I would like Dáil Éireann to be fixed fully with notice that at the present moment my mind is as open as a double door and that I have been waiting for a considerable time for the Galway Chamber of Commerce to close it. It is still open, but it will not stay open much longer.

With regard to the Murrisk fishermen, I would like to give them the kind of boats they deserve. They are the kind of fishermen for whom proper equipment is long overdue. If they were not good fishermen they would never have fished this length of time with the accommodation with which they have had to put up. But if I am to give them the best equipment, and that is what I would like to give them, they will have to fish into Cleggan because there is nothing I can do at Murrisk that will enable them to use the best equipment there. If they insist on fishing into Murrisk—I think 35-foot boats can go in there—steps will be taken to clear the channel to make that possible; but, before we do that, I would like to provide 50-foot boats for them, if they will use them, for the purpose of fishing into Cleggan. They must make up their minds about that and, when they do, I will do my best to expedite a decision in the matter.

Mr. P.J. Burke

Murrisk?

Mr. Dillon

God knows, the Deputy, who was born in County Mayo, ought to know it.

Mr. C. Lehane

He only thinks about Balbriggan now.

Mr. Dillon

I was glad to hear a more reasonable note sounded to-day about the fishing limits, though some gay cavaleiro of the Fianna Fáil Party recently upbraided me for not insisting on the 12-mile limit. If he can enrol the services of the sixth, seventh and eighth fleets of the United States of America for the defence of the 12-mile limit, we will consider asserting our sovereignty over it. But up to date, small countries can only assert their sovereignty over those territorial waters about which all nations agree, and the widest area to which we can get all nations to agree is three miles. Some nations powerful enough to assert dominion over six miles have done so. Russia has done so over 12 miles. The way that nation does it is, she tells you to get out of her waters or she will blow the bottom out of your boat. I have neither the inclination nor the means to blow the bottom out of anyone's boat.

The return of Deputy Little to the House assuages my wrath. He referred to Newfoundland as an example which we might follow. It brought to my mind a wicked aphorism which I was sorely tempted to employ. I dismiss it. I must say that if the activities of the Government of Newfoundland on their cod fisheries are to be judged by the results, they are a poor example for this country because the net result of Newfoundland's activities was that they lost the cod, the fishing and their independence and survived as an organised community only to be incorporated in the Canadian Federation. God forbid that we should emulate that example. Many a time and oft in the last 15 years I warned Deputy Little that if he wanted to model his agricultural policy on the fishery policy of Newfoundland, that this country would go down and cease to be the property of the Irish people. By the mercy of God's providence we had an election here in 1948.

Mr. MacEntee

One of the Minister's cods.

Mr. Dillon

I did not talk about Deputy Little's association with the home of cod. I urge Deputy MacEntee not to draw from me the aphorism from which I have wisely forborne. Just imagine Deputy Little rambling in here virtuously and saying he wants to know what protection is being provided and asking that, if promises were made, where were the performances. He was trotting round this country for 20 years announcing that he was going to do the devil in a bag when he got the chance, but he was 15 years in office in this country as a Minister of this State and never even spat on a foreign trawler. Yet he is not two years out of office until his heart is bleeding all over Dáil Éireann about them, suggesting that promises were made and asking where are the performances. I shall tell the Deputy where are the performances. I am authorised by the Minister for Defence to say that two corvettes are permanently charged with the protection of our fishery waters and will have permanently the co-operation of the Air Force in directing them to any occasion of trespass in so far as that can be effectively done.

Mr. MacEntee

Are these the corvettes the Minister for Defence used to refer to as rubber ducks?

Mr. Dillon

They are the corvettes that can get into only four ports in Ireland and they were bought by Deputy MacEntee without adverting to the fact that a boat should be considered from the point of view of its draught before it can be considered suitable. These corvettes can get into Killary Bay, Bantry, Dublin and Cork harbours. If they cannot get in there they cannot get in anywhere else. They will have to remain at sea permanently. We can also get them into Killybegs now. That difficulty notwithstanding, we have been able to arrange for their use as patrol boats. The Leader of the Opposition and I on one notable occasion sped across Cork Harbour in a motor torpedo-boat christened, I think, the Sam Adams. We discovered, as we sped along, that we were using more petrol than any other known internal combustion engine and that if we made the boat travel for any appreciable time at the pace at which it could travel, the pair of us would be sitting on the propeller because the superstructure of the whole boat would fall away. We have four of these vessels in our service. Two of the corvettes can travel and remain afloat. Their difficulty is ever to get home. Once they get to sea, it is quite a business to get them back into their domicile. That difficulty notwithstanding, they will be maintained in constant patrol. As regards canning——

Mr. Little

May I ask——

Mr. Dillon

The Deputy will sit down. Deputy Little is all of a "do-dah" as to what we have been doing about canning. He knows as well as he knows his own name the story about canning. Messrs. Denny of Waterford City, for which the Deputy is supposed to be one of the representatives, came to me and complained that their canning unit in Waterford was embarrassed, in that it had been unable to get regular supplies of fish. It was very difficult to keep a canning unit going when they did not have regular supplies. I said to the then general manager of Denny's: "I acknowledge that is a difficulty with which I think you should not have to contend." I asked him to come back and see me in a week's time. I had a conference with the officers of my Department and I said: "Listen, this may not be a remunerative business in its initial stages, but we must mobilise the resources of the Sea Fisheries Association and of this Department and whatever the cost we must undertake to deliver into Denny's factory every day five crans of herring. We have to charge them a basic price of £5 per cran on the understanding that if they cost more than that, we shall defray the surplus charge and if they cost less, we shall give them a rebate as soon as our costings have been worked out. We shall deliver them every morning whatever the cost, for five months"— because there are only five months in which you can give that undertaking with any prospect of fulfilling it in respect to herring.

I must say the general manager of Denny's said: "That is a fair offer; nobody could wish for fairer." A week later the board of Dennys met, the cannery was closed down, its equipment dispersed, the canning of fish and vegetables ceased, and the new plant was permanently done away with. If I could have put my claws on that unit before they had dismantled it, I would have asked Dáil Éireann for authority to sequester it, fix a suitable compensation for the firm afterwards, and give it on lease to some other firm who would have carried on the canning business there. That set me back; I do not mind admitting it. I am now seeking if I can find an established firm of fish canners who will, in co-operation with the Sea Fisheries Association, undertake the canning of fish. It is a very highly technical business and I am extremely reluctant to undertake it myself or through the Sea Fisheries Association because when you have canned the fish you have got to sell it. There is no use in piling up the canned fish a mile high. You must sell it, and to sell it you have to have an established sales organisation. I would much sooner have a firm like Angus Watson or some established firm in Great Britain or the United States, who would have an established market and who would work in collaboration with us to set up canneries and set out to can fish, sprats, herring or any other variety of fish they can retail, which are to be found anywhere along our coasts. If such a firm is prepared to make a venture with us, everything we can do to help and facilitate them we will be glad to do, and we would like to see them make a good profit. Provided they pay our fishermen a fair price for the fish, we are in no way desirous of grudging them a fair reward for the work they do. If we cannot get some firm to collaborate with us on that basis, I am prepared to look into the question of trying to do it ourselves, but I hate embarking on an enterprise the technical administration of which I do not understand myself. Let us never forget that the canning of fish is not the end of our problem. When you can it, you have to sell it. You cannot go out to Piccadilly and shake a basket of canned herring and say "fresh herrings for sale" because they are not fresh herrings and the average purchaser will not buy a pig in a poke. Unless there is a name on it that has a reputation for quality and excellence there is a difficulty in breaking a way into the trade for canned fish. As to a plan for insuring fishermen, I am precluded from dealing with that because it will more properly arise when the Bill which I spoke of is before the House.

I think I have covered every point raised. I am grateful to the Leader of the Opposition for his constructive contribution to this debate, as I was grateful to Deputy Major de Valera for his constructive contribution in the debate on the Estimate for the Department of Agriculture. I do not know if it is correct protocol for so dreadful a person as myself to say in all sincerity to the Leader of the Opposition and every member of it that I want any advice they can give me, and I am quite prepared to try out any proposal responsibly sponsored by any bona fide Deputy. If there is any suggestion from either side of the House for a committee of members to help and advise me in these matters I am eager and willing to collaborate with them. I did ask on the occasion of the last Estimate if we could not sufficiently lay political trenchancy aside to permit of those who are devoted to the sport of rod and line fishing to constitute a small fishermen's committee drawn from all sides of the House which would combine with me in improving sporting amenities in the country. I renew that offer now.

In connection with the establishment of a fishing trusteeship for the holding in its hands of such riparian fishing rights as are bestowed upon it, I should like the House to know that there is no question of purchasing private fisheries and fishing rights like salmon fisheries and very valuable preserved fishings which are at present in the hands and are the property of individual citizens of the State. The proposal simply is this: there are well-established fishing amenities available on rivers in this country which are not being preserved because they have been divided up into tiny fractions in the course of the division of estates by the Land Commission or something of that kind. Our experience is that local angling associations have in many cases persuaded 20 or 30 farmers to give the local associations the exclusive fishery rights, the consideration being that the local angling association will keep the fences in repair, see that fishermen passing up and down will not smash fences or break down drains and make themselves responsible for seeing that people fishing do not chase cattle or engage in damaging trespass of any kind. It is in an analogous situation that we propose to preserve such stretches of water and out of the revenue derived from the licences paid by our own people and by tourists improve the spawning beds and to do such other maintenance work as will increase the value of the fishery and maintain and develop it in the future. It is not a revolutionary development, but I am advised by angling associations that it is one which could result in much good.

I should tell the House before I conclude that we have in hands experimental work on eight trout lakes. One group of experiments is designed to determine what proportion of coarse fish can most profitably be withdrawn from a trout lake without upsetting the balance of nature and, at the same time, permit the trout to increase and to grow in size. If you get rid of all coarse fish, in some instances the numbers of trout multiply, but they finally balance at about 2½ ozs. and you get a multitude of small fish. We are also trying an experiment to change the P.H. content of the waters of other lakes for the purpose of determining whether that will result in a greater growth of fish. That is a complicated way of saying that we are trying to turn acid water alkaline. We are also carrying out certain entomological work where we have reason to believe that the variety of fly which habituated certain trout lakes has through some undiscerned accident disappeared. There is a theory that our lake trout for the want of surface feed acquire the habit and custom of bottom feeding and cease to rise to the fly. These are experiments in the pragmatical sphere. We are doing our best to carry out all that science and discovery have established, but in this sphere described we are nothing better than pragmatists, but we are resolved to try out anything which is proposed to us by a responsible, prudent and experienced person who we believe to be in good faith and desirous of serving the best interests of the fishing sport in our rivers.

We have distributed a greater number of trout ova from hatcheries this year than has ever been done before. Our purpose is to double and quadruple that. We have not done as much in the sphere of white trout as I would like to do, but there are special technical difficulties about transferring the ova or the sprats of white trout from one fishery to another. They do not travel well and it is not every fishery that relishes the prospect of the Minister for Fisheries coming into their river and taking fry out of it and depositing it in some other river. However, we have some of our own rivers and we are not without hope that we will be able to do more than has been done heretofore in the matter of white trout.

I do not think I need go into the question of salmon beyond saying that when the concept of our fishing trust is grasped by the people—that they are going to be bought and maintained for our own people—the enforcement of the law against poachers will become easier by virtue of the willingness of our own people to sustain the law.

I want to make this clear; it is fair and right that I should: where authorised officers of the State detect persons injuring salmon or trout fisheries in the country they will be prosecuted to the limit of the law and, so far as the Minister for Fisheries is concerned, no application for the remission of penalty has the slightest prospect of success—not the slightest. It was otherwise when the tendency was for our people to be excluded from access to their own rivers, when any act of preservation was designed to improve the amenities available to strangers at the cost of our own people. Now that these amenities belong to our own people and are going to be preserved for our own people nobody from at home or abroad will be allowed to plunder them. I would be ashamed of our own country if our people extended to the robbery of their own neighbours the undoubted toleration deep planted in the hearts of every one of us for illegal acts aimed against the attempt of strangers to usurp what we never admitted they had any right to. I am quite certain that if we get the help of responsible people in the country in explaining the difference between the guerilla warfare on usurpation in which most of us and our families took part at some time or another, and which was justified and approved of by most right-minded men of the country, and now, when the rights are our own and it becomes a question of the rule of law in our own community and whether our people will respect it or not, our work will prosper.

In the name, then, not of usurping owners, but of the rule of law enacted by this Oireachtas, I am asking the people to collaborate with me in the enforcement of the fishery laws, and I am saying that the first duty of a faithful servant is faithfully to carry out the instructions of his employer. I get the instructions of my employer, who is the Irish people, through their Oireachtas and I am assuring the Irish people who employ me that in this respect in any case they may expect me to be a very faithful servant.

Mr. Little

Might I ask the Minister a question? In the debate in the Seanad he spoke of the sale of the corvettes and the other ships and of the purchase of ships which he would consider more adaptable to the purpose of protecting our sea fisheries. Has he made any progress?

Mr. Dillon

The corvettes are within the jurisdiction of my colleague, the Minister for Defence, God help him.

Vote put and agreed to.