So far as I know, this project for the provision of insurance facilities is a matter of common ground between us. No matter of controversy arises in regard to exports to foreign markets and the practice is pretty general in exporting countries everywhere. I detect, however, a note in discussions relating to foreign trade, not only here in Ireland but abroad, which I regard as savouring of economic heresy. I want to suggest to the Dáil that the idea in foreign trade is multilateral trade and thatit is very much of a second best to be thinking in terms of quasi-barter when dealing with foreign trade. The ideal thing is that we should sell our merchandise to the most willing buyer, wherever he may live, getting from him the best price we can for it, accepting his currency and converting it into the currency we want to use for the purposes of our requirements from the most willing seller we can find—buying to our best advantage wherever the goods we want are available, while we sell at the highest possible price we can get, to our best advantage, in whatever market most wants what we have to dispose of.
All this business of battering at the doors of a dollar market, a rupee market or a thaler market, is part of a thoroughly evil post-war situation which has grown up as a result of the inconvertibility of currency. Money should not dominate the foreign trade of this or any other country. The only thing that should affect the flow of international trade is the desire of people abroad for our produce and our desire for the produce of foreigners wherever they may be.
I should like Deputies to make up their minds to this—and I do not doubt but that the Minister for Industry and Commerce will agree with me—that we would much prefer to be trading in a world where we traded with anybody who was prepared to trade with us both as sellers and as buyers. I have no doubt that the Minister's insurance scheme is not primarily designed for exports to one country in preference to another. The insurance scheme he has in mind is to create machinery whereby a man who wants to sell merchandise in Persia, in Afghanistan, in India, America or South America, if he can find a market in these comparatively remote areas, will have insurance machinery here to share with him the risk of venturing out into a new field where trade conditions may not be familiar to our exporters and where, indeed, trading conditions may not have that atmosphere of stability and security to which we are accustomed in European countries. But I urge on the Dáil, as indeed I would urge on a great many other legislatures in theworld, to get it out of our mind that bilateral trade to the exclusion of multilateral trade is a good thing. It is not. It is not a good thing for us to brood on the fact that we cannot procure extensive dollar exports. The ideal thing is that we should be able to procure profitable exports anywhere in the certainty that the currency earned thereby can be converted into dollars or into any other currency which we require to purchase what we want to provide either amenities for our people or raw materials for our industry or our agriculture.
I think the Minister in introducing this Bill if he were in a generous mood might have gone into the story of the efforts of the Department of Agriculture in opening up a carcase meat trade in the U.S.A. That is a story in which I think we are entitled to take a certain amount of pride. Talk of carrying coals to Newcastle! When we were faced with the task of carrying meat to Chicago, I must say the assignment was one calculated to daunt the most valiant heart. As I have no doubt the Minister knows, the officers of the Department of Agriculture were able to secure the very valuable help of a good friend in Mr. Stanley McClean of the Chicago packing industry. With his co-operation and the assistance of many good friends in the U.S.A., we tapped a very valuable trade in boxed meat as the raw material of the open packed food and soup industry of the U.S.A.
I think in this experience there is a valuable lesson for us because a great many people were dazzled by the temporarily attractive price available in America for prime carcase meat. We in the Department of Agriculture, right from the beginning, tried to warn people that we could see no permanent future for a profitable market for prime carcase beef in the U.S.A. and that those engaged in it should walk warily, lest they make an investment out of all proportion to the prospect of an enduring and permanent market for that commodity whereas for boxed frozen manufacturing beef we felt there might probably be a permanent profitable market. I think the event has proved us right.
I read with amusement Mr. Stacey May's report reminding us that we might develop more rapidly a market for prime carcase beef. Before that report was published, the market had become utterly unprofitable which shows how much value we should place on Mr. Stacey May's opinion in regard to the export market for beef about which he knows as much as my foot or rather less. There is that danger to be faced in a foreign market unless it is very carefully studied. You are likely to find a temporarily vigorous demand for a particular commodity but you have got to investigate seriously in that situation, whether the demand is going to be of a permanent character. It is not fair to urge people to invest large sums of capital to supply a market which more careful investigation would reveal to have no enduring permanence.
We had no hesitation in the Department of Agriculture in recommending people to equip themselves to engage in the carcase meat trade for prime beef because we were certain, as a result of trade negotiations with other countries, which we had carried to a successful conclusion, that even should the U.S.A. market collapse, we had other alternative markets where the product could be profitably disposed of.
I should like the Minister sometime to explain to me this dilemma which I have never been able to solve and which has worried me. When my colleague Deputy MacBride was Minister for External Affairs, he was always zealous to establish in every embassy in other countries trade attachés to promote foreign trade. Some of his colleagues did not take such an enthusiastic view about it but let it be said to his credit that his views prevailed. He seemed to stock the whole face of the earth with trade attachés who are concerned to push our foreign trade. But the Department of Industry and Commerce or nobody else was able to explain to me how it could be that an industry which demanded a 75 per cent. tariff on the ground that if it did not get a tariff of that size it would collapse overnightand would be unable to sell its products at its own backdoor, could sell its products in San Francisco where it had no tariff to protect it but, on the contrary, where it had to get over a tariff to enter the United States, and furthermore where this product had to travel not from Dublin to Mullingar for distribution but from Dublin to San Francisco. Would anybody resolve that problem for me? Is there a single industry operating in Ireland to-day which has not the protection of a tariff or quota? Am I right in saying that the reason it gets that tariff and quota protection is because it has satisfied the Department of Industry and Commerce that without that protection it could not reasonably be expected to survive or prosper? If that has been proved to the satisfaction of the Trade and Industries branch of the Department of Industry and Commerce how could you prove to the Foreign Trade section that you not only want a tariff for the goods you are going to export from the same factory but are prepared to jump another tariff and transport those goods 50 times as far and still sell them at a profit?
This is not the case at all in regard to agriculture. I have often pointed out in this House that the unfortunate farmer has always faced the fact that his surplus production must be sold in conditions of furious competition from the four corners of the earth. If he is not prepared to meet that competition he has no prospects of disposing of his surplus production. He has always done that and has always paid the tariffs which are levied in order to protect the domestic industries. Surely to God, it is time we asked ourselves, if it is necessary to levy the cost of tariffs and quotas on our agricultural community who are selling their output in the furious competition of an entirely free trade market, how do those industries which claim as an indispensable perquisite tariffs and quotas for their own protection make the case that they can profitably sell their products in foreign markets where they themselves have to climb over tariff walls and transport their goods the great distances contemplated?
I wish every branch of our foreign trade success but I do not think we do anything to help it by minimising the technical difficulties that every person engaged in foreign trade has to grapple with and try to overcome. I do not think we do our prospects any service by talking—as it is on the eve of the Lenten season I will be charitable—glibly like Deputy O'Reilly. There are difficulties in foreign trade but the difficulties are no greater for us than for any other people. They can be overcome provided we have the right goods to sell.
The practice of protective tariffs which we have here has created a mentality amongst our industrial producers very unsuited to foreign trade because almost every industry in this country is concerned with equipping itself to supply the protected market available and when they reach the limit of that market they do not want to produce any more.
I told the House before the story of the paper bags when I actually got a customer to get an offer for 2,000,000 paper bags for an Irish manufacturer for the packing of Dutch superphosphates. At first the Irish manufacturer said he did not want the business because he had an agreement with the Dutch firm that he would not trespass on the Dutch firm's preserves nor the Dutch firm trespass on his preserves. The superphosphate manufacturer went to the Dutch people and asked whether it would waive the arrangement, that they were going to sell 100,000 tons of superphosphate in Ireland. The Dutch firm wrote to the Irish firm and said:—
"We deeply appreciate your honourable observance of the understanding between us but in this case we are quite free to regard it as suspended and you can handle this order".
The Irish firm wrote and said they would not take the offer.
The Minister has full particulars of that in his office. I said to my colleague the Minister for Industry and Commerce and to the Taoiseach that there seemed to be evidence of a refusal by industrial interests toexpand production. One of the principal difficulties under which our export trade labours at the moment is that people do not appear to want to expand production. They are doing very nicely as they are and they do not want to do any more. I think they would want to know what inducement would be held out to them as they were making a comfortable living on the protection they were enjoying and if they expanded production any more the Government might take 19/6 in the £ off them. That is one of the primary difficulties which confront the whole development of our foreign trade.
I intervened mainly for the purpose of suggesting that it might be expedient for the Minister for Industry and Commerce to go on record and say that he does not agree with me on this whole question of bilateral quasimultilateral trade but so long as we have to proceed on that basis we must do the best we can. The desire on the part of every Government is to turn to multilateral trade and the convertibility of currency. The Minister for Industry and Commerce cannot do much about the convertibility of currency but I want to suggest that our influence should be thrown on the side of the convertibility of currency as the most constructive method that could be taken in the world for the promotion of international trade.
Deputies of this sovereign Republic of Ireland ought to face up to the fact that trade cannot flow in one direction if they say in the one breath that we must put our shoulders to the wheel, and open the doors of every foreign country so that our goods may flow in, while the Minister for Industry and Commerce bars and bolts every door more effectivly than they have been barred and bolted heretofore so that the import of goods from outside may be further restricted. To do or say that is just talking nonsense.
If you want to sell you have got to buy and, in the name of Providence, what is the purpose of selling if you are not going to buy? What is the use of everybody in this country sweating to send meat, boots, clothes and wool to the ends of the earth if we do notwant to get from the ends of the earth the things we have not got here? I often feel that there is an idea in the minds of some people that there is a virtue in sending our goods to foreign countries and getting an entry put in a book in Nagasaki, New York and Calcutta crediting Ireland with £2,000,346 and saying, "Look what we have," but if anybody wants to bring a chest of tea or a bale of goods from these quarters there will be a revolution. Eventually we will reach the stage when, like the miser in the Dickens novel, we will be sitting shivering beside one diminishing coal fire or a cold blast glorying in the fact that we have a growing credit balance here, there and elsewhere—but let nobody bring anything into the country because the less we bring in the better off we will be. The only object I know that we could conceivably have to export is to enable us to import more.
My suggestion to the House is that the very essence of a successful export programme is that our imports should grow proportionately. I should like to see all the produce of our own land— that is the only natural asset we have —exploited to the full, our domestic requirements satisfied and a growing surplus accumulated for export. When the resources of our land have been taxed to capacity to produce, we should not hesitate to bring raw materials from the four corners of the earth and set our own people in their own country to process these raw materials so that they can be exported in a finished condition at greater profit. In that way, more and more of our people would enjoy a higher standard of living in their own country.
When I hear some members of this House talk of the folly of bringing in raw materials wherewith to produce bacon or to increase our live-stock population, I often wonder if they realise that—would I be wrong in saying?—Great Britain imports 60 per cent. of the raw material for her entire output from the other ends of the earth. Do Deputies realise that significant fact? Nobody demurs at bringing in cotton from Carolina and processing it here into thread andcotton textiles for sale at home or for export abroad: on the contrary, everybody is clamouring that we should do that. Is there any reason on God's earth why, if we can increase the production of live stock beyond the capacity of our land to produce feeding stuffs for them, we should not bring in maize from the same State of Carolina and, instead of converting it into textiles, convert it into leather, pigs' bristles, bacon, pork and even the hair of cows' tails of which we heard Deputy O'Reilly speak? Process them not only on our farms but in our meat processing plants, in our brush factories, leather factories, tanneries and so forth, and every-where else. Having consumed all of that produce that we want for our people, we can then export the rest. If we export a pig or a bullock or a brush, or the hair of a cow's tail with which to plaster a wall, which has been produced with imported maize, and if we make a profit out of it and keep more of our people in profitable employment in their own country, is there anything to be deprecated there? The Minister for Industry and Commerce should try to preach to his own supporters a little elementary economics on these matters so that we would find some common ground for common effort in this connection.
I think the Bill can be made a very useful adjunct to the promotion of foreign trade. No scheme can be brought forward to promote foreign trade if, at the back of the mind of the Minister's supporters, there is the rooted belief that, while it is evidently meritorious to export, it is crazy and criminal to import. The policy of the Fine Gael Party is that there is no future for Irish trade on the basis of the restriction of imports. The economic future of this country is bound up with the expansion of exports and we would export whatever our people are competent to produce profitably to whatever market is prepared to purchase it at a fair price. Our idea would be to send merchandise to the most willing buyer who is prepared to pay the best price under a system which will enable us to get for it a medium of exchange which will enableus, in our turn, to go to the most willing seller who will provide the best materials of the kind we require at the lowest possible price. I cannot but believe that, fundamentally, the present Minister for Industry and Commerce shares that view. He would do a service to the country if he availed of this occasion to state that view in the presence of his own supporters so that a little economic light might illumine the perennial gloom in which they ordinarily live.