I move:—
That a sum not exceeding £4,937,260 be granted to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1956, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Office of the Minister for Agriculture, including certain Services administered by that Office, and for payment of certain subsidies and sundry Grants-in-Aid.
The House will observe that a motion has been set down to refer back this Estimate. That is a motion which I welcome, because I think it gives us a somewhat wider scope for our discussion and permits of general questions of policy being raised and discussed which otherwise would not be accessible to us. I, therefore, propose in my introductory remarks to look at certain questions of broad policy in order that I may have the benefit of views of Deputies upon them.
Firstly, I would like to say categorically that I grow a little weary of the people who consider themselves qualified and called upon to tell every Minister for Agriculture, whatever Party he belongs to, what should not be done. What I long to hear from the critics is what they think ought to be done.
It has become a popular pastime with certain elements of our community to promulgate the proposition that stagnation characterises the agricultural industry of this country. The implication of that kind of talk is that the farmers are constitutionally lazy and that the Irish Department of Agriculture is no damn good. Both propositions are false, as I hope to demonstrate conclusively in introducing this Estimate.
We have in this country an annual average rainfall of approximately 40 to 42 inches. That is an inescapable fact and if we face it and welcome it and mould our agricultural policy to use it. we can realise that it is a great blessing that many other countries covet but do not enjoy. There is no use people blandly comparing our system of agriculture—which is conditioned by that annual rainfall of 40 to 42 inches—with the system obtaining in countries where the average annual rainfall is in the order of 21 inches and repeating the parrot cry: "Why don't you do in Ireland what they do elsewhere?" The answer is: "Because our conditions are fundamentally different and because we know how to use our own land according to our own methods and the circumstances which surround them."
One of those circumstances appears to me to be of dominant importance, that is, that we have at our door a virtually inexhaustible market for live stock and live-stock products which for veterinary reasons no other country in the world has access to on the same terms as we enjoy. If we fail to exploit that advantage to the limit of our capacity, I think we are guilty of supreme folly. That we should seek every other outlet is also certain, but it would be great folly to ignore the proximate and readily accessible market, in the search for the more remote and competitive markets that may exist elsewhere.
Those of us who are concerned to consider agricultural policy should bear this also in mind. It is not only the farmers who depend on the capacity of our farmers to export profitably: everybody in this country, whether he lives in town, city or country, depends in the last analysis for his standard of living on the capacity of our farmers to export profitably.
It is no harm to emphasise again that if a situation ever arises in which our farmers are unable to export profitably, the first people who will feel the blast of adversity are the industrial and distributive workers of this country for whose employment the importation of raw materials is essential. Let us remember that the raw materials of every industrial process in this country that have to be imported are paid for, as to over 80 per cent., by agricultural exports. If the export of agricultural produce ceases to pay & profit to the farmers, exports of agricultural produce will stop. If that should ever happen, the farmer can have recourse to his traditional remedy—a return to subsistence farming. He goes back, at least, to a home where he will find eggs, milk, oatmeal and the essentials for maintaining existence. The industrial and the distributive worker, however, who depend for their employment on the availability of raw materials, once that supply ceases for the want of capacity to pay for them, have nothing to go home to but the dole or the search for accommodation on an emigrant ship to seek employment elsewhere that is no longer available to them in Ireland.
The operative word in all I have said up to now is "profitably". I would invite Deputies to note that we have before us an example of what happens when a particular branch of agriculture becomes unprofitable to the producer: I refer to eggs. We had vast exports of eggs so long as the price obtainable for them yielded a profit to the producer. When the price available for eggs fell below the level at which the producer could earn a profit on them, the export of eggs virtually melted away. I think I can show the House that where, under the terms of the 1948 Trade Agreement, we were able to establish the principle of the rigid link between prices payable in Great Britain for British live stock and prices payable in Great Britain for Irish live stock, thus preserving the profitability of exports of live stock, we have had a dramatic expansion, unrivallsd in Europe, in that branch of agriculture; that it is on that expansion that the economic life of this country at the present moment depends and that, but for it, we would be confronted to-day with an economic crisis of the first magnitude.
Before I turn to the figures to demonstrate the truth of that proposition, I want to direct the attention of Deputies on all sides of the House to this inescapable fact: it may not be popular but it is the truth and so long as I am Minister for Agriculture I will tell the farmers of this country the truth because they are entitled to hear it from me, and I must abide the consequences of discharging my duty in telling it to them. We are rapidly passing out of a sellers' market, to which we have become familiar in the past 16 years. The time of world scarcities has gone and the theme at international congresses, wherever they are held, is to-day not an increase of production to meet urgent and clamant needs but the marketing of surpluses to avoid hopeless disruption of world markets. In that situation, we still enjoy great advantages if we have the prudence to exploit them—and here is the unpopular fact that must be faced.
If we are going to grasp our share of the available world market, the objective we must set before ourselves is to reduce our own costs of production. If we do not, once we have arrived at the point of saturating the domestic capacity to consume—and we have arrived at that point—we have to face the fact that all increased production must be undertaken on terms which will enable us to earn a profit in the export markets available to us.
I invite the House to survey the international market for agricultural produce at the present moment. We have priced ourselves out of the market for eggs. We have priced ourselves out of the market for butter. We have priced ourselves out of the market for cheese. We are in grave danger of pricing ourselves out of the market for bacon. There remains to us cattle, beef, sheep and mutton. The desperate danger is that we should not face in time the fact that unless we retain our competitive position in these commodities we might unconsciously stumble into catastrophe. I am as certain as I am standing here that, by the exercise of common prudence, we have available to us an unlimited market for cattle, sheep, pigs and butter.
It will be a great catastrophe if all those interested in agriculture, no matter on what side of this House they sit, will not combine in persuading our farmers to do what is eminently possible—to march out and capture their share of that market; to take the lid off potential production and expand production indefinitely—for it is through increased production that we can raise the standard of living of our people and, what is infinitely more important, enable them to stay in their own country and earn their living working for their own people.
Let there be no illusion about it. The ability of this or any other Government to provide employment for our people in their own country depends on whether the farmers are prepared to undertake the maximum production of which the land of Ireland is capable, at a cost which will leave them a fair margin of profit when they sell their produce at the best prices available in the world to-day. Do not let us embark upon that project with any inferiority complex. At the present moment, Irish butter is earning a premium on quality above any other butter going into the British market. We are getting more on a free market in competition with all comers because the people want our butter. If that butter were being exported, on a basis which earned a profit for this country, and we could all really put our backs into expanding the volume of that production indefinitely, in the knowledge that every extra pound produced earned more profit for the man who produced it and for the nation to which he belonged, and we had before us the prospect of expanding indefinitely the numbers of our live stock, I do not think any of us would need to fear the future.
I earnestly hope that we may get from all sides of the House the cooperation that is necessary to persuade our farmers of the truth of these vast potentialities and to induce our farmers to believe that the Oireachtas and everybody else appreciates that the future of our people and the nation is dependent on the measure of the farmers' effort to get from the land of Ireland for himself and his family the best living that land is capable of yielding, always provided that he leaves his land in autumn a little better than he foond it in the spring.
Now let me turn for a moment to lay before the House the picture of what happens when you procure for the farmers of Ireland a market in which they can sell their produce at a price which leaves them a fair margin of profit. I want to compare the year 1948 with the year 1954, so that I may compare the circumstances that obtained before there was a guaranteed market at a fair price for our cattle and the situation that obtained after our farmers had known six years of such security. I know that some Fianna Fáil controversialists say that it is unfair to quote figures relating to 1947 or 1948 because they were very wet years.
