There is a second remarkable and, to my mind, shattering piece of news in today's paper, to which I refer again. It appears under the headings "The Livestock Trade", "Fall in Prices is Disastrous". It is as follows:
There is bewilderment among cattle producers at present. Everybody, including the Department of Agriculture and I, have told them that the right time to sell cattle was in the first half of the year. A favourable winter made this possible and now they are faced with the worst May trade in memory.
At any time, a farmer can expect that weight gains will counterbalance the fall in price per cwt. during the months of May and June and even up to mid July. This year the price per cwt. has fallen so fast that bullocks are losing anything from 10s. to £3 a head for a month's grazing.
This week last year, farmers were complaining about a bad trade, but they were getting 20s. a cwt. more for fat bullocks then, and 22s. 6d. a cwt. more for fat heifers. Supplies coming into the Dublin market were bigger then, and we had no subsidy from Britain.
On the other hand we did have buying for the Continent, and in fact at this particular period we were in the middle of the British seamen's strike. Now the only people buying cattle are factory operators. They claim that the new grading system is ruining the business, but there is no official statement from the Government on the subject.
Listen to this—I continue my quotation——
No-one can say this time that the drop in prices is due to a bad trade in Britain, because, in fact, there is a scarcity of beef there and prices are rising rapidly. Many markets quoted live weight prices up by 10s. a cwt. yesterday, and wholesale prices for carcase beef were up 1d to 1½d a lb.
I have heard a great deal of talk in the course of this debate about the mind and feelings of the farmers in rural Ireland and about the resentment begotten by the dispute with the NFA and the treatment the farmers have had at the hands of the Minister for Agriculture. I have heard the case put with unparalleled eloquence, force and logic by Deputy T.F. O'Higgins last night when he pointed out how gravely wrong it was to break the law but how heavy was the responsibility of the man, not to speak of the Minister, who provoked his neighbour into breaking the law. But, bearing all those things in mind, I am thinking of my own neighbours, small farmers, men who are farming ten, 20, 30 and up to 40 acres of land. They do resent being spoken of with contempt; they do resent the feeling that they are almost pariahs in their own country.
In all my long contact with country people—and I have lived amongst them and served them from behind my counter 40 years and I have represented them in County Monaghan for 30 years and in Donegal before that for five years—I never remember a time in which an atmosphere of such utter despair descended on the small farmer as has descended now and the reason is the collapse in the price of store cattle.
The plain truth is that even the Deputies representative of the agricultural interest in the south-east of Ireland and the midlands of Ireland do not understand the position of the really small farmer, the sheet anchor of whose life is store cattle. There has been a great deal of rubbish talked by pseudo-experts that rearing store cattle was the least economic activity a farmer could engage in. That is all eyewash and cod. I have lived all my life amongst small farmers who have reared doctors and priests and bishops and engineers and accountants on farms of 20 to 40 acres which were devoted entirely to the breeding and rearing of store cattle. That is why I was so happy about the 1948 agreement, that it was into their pockets that the agreement poured the gold, derived from their store cattle that were firmly linked to the guaranteed prices obtainable by British farmers for their cattle in Great Britain. All the benefit flowed back to the small farmer to the point that the big graziers and other wealthy farmers complained that stores were becoming too dear in Ireland. They could be no longer fed profitably on the fat lands of Meath, Kildare, Westmeath or in the stalls of the well-to-do farmers in the better-off counties. But they had alternatives to which to turn. They had tillage, grain, crops, and diversification of a hundred kinds available to them if that form of trade did not yield a profit. The small farmer had not got that. Without the young cattle he was utterly destroyed. From 1948 to 1963 there were ups and downs but steadily young cattle paid for their keep and left a profit sufficient to pay the rates, to pay the bills and even to pay for a week by the sea.
Then came catastrophe. I remember saying last July 12 months: "You are on the eve of the greatest catastrophe that has ever struck the congested areas of this country." Nobody believed me then, but by autumn the catastrophe had come. I want to warn the House that there is spreading now over the congested areas an atmosphere which if it is allowed to continue for another year will be absolutly irreversible. I have stood beside a boy on a platform at Boyle station who told me he was the last son on a 45-acre holding. He was going to Birmingham because he would not take a present of the place. That derives from the fact, admittedly, that wages in the English industrial cities are substantial, but what has finally spread this impenetrable pall of gloom is the fact that a small farmer is going out with young cattle and he cannot find anyone to ask him where he is going. It is not a question of taking a lower price. It is a question of being unable to sell. I know this from personal experience. I went out a fortnight ago to buy a Friesian bull calf and I paid £8 for the calf; eighteen months ago it would have cost me £80. Farmers will tell you that in the south west of the country calves are selling for substantially less.
Farmers getting 2d. a gallon extra on their milk feel in some measure compensated for the loss. The man on the small holding in Monaghan, Cavan, Donegal, Sligo, Mayo and Galway has no corresponding compensation. I know they have the creamery in Lough Egish, the creamery in Monaghan, and the creameries all over County Cavan, and in so far as creamery facilities are available to the farmers in those counties the burden they have to bear is far less than that borne by those in Leitrim, North Roscommon, Mayo, Sligo and Donegal.
Frankly, I cannot fully understand what has happened. I believe when Deputy Haughey, the then Minister for Agriculture, came home with the trade agreement he thought he had achieved something. When he came home and told the people he expected this trade agreement to increase the price of store cattle by £6 or £7 a head. I think he believed it. I think he believed that, in spite of the advice he got from his own experts, because I do not believe anybody in the Department of Agriculture believed it. I know them too well, their skill and experience and their anxiety to give the Minister their honest advice whether it is accepted or not.
I have been thinking over and wondering what actually happened, and I am forced to the inescapable conclusion that it was this accursed heifer scheme. We made the ghastly mistake, without any realistic calculation or without giving due weight to the experienced advisers in the Department of Agriculture, of allowing the so-called technocrats, the boys who formulate the Programmes for Economic Expansion and the programmes for this and that, to tell us that the thing was to increase the number of cattle. I remember saying that if these figures were to be realised every cow would have to start farrowing, but they did not start farrowing. What happened was that the increase that took place had two effects: (1) having taken 40 years to eliminate the scrub bull, we brought back in two years the scrub heifer; and (2) we have done what I did not believe it was possible for human folly to do: because we did not organise a market related to our intended output, we have got an artificial surplus. What nobody seems to have thought of is: if you create a surplus of a commodity like livestock, then the lowest price payable for the first surplus beast will control the price of the entire livestock output of the country.
I remember saying in this House: "You are boasting of unlimited access for store cattle to the British market." When were we ever restricted before except by one consideration, the readiness of the British farmer to buy our store cattle? Why do you want unlimited access to the British market for our cattle when there is no one to buy them? Are you going to race them around Aintree or Ascot?"
That is the situation we have created. We have created an absolute surplus and it is the price available in Great Britain for that surplus that tends to control the whole price level of the store cattle trade in this country, with the consequent ruin of the most vulnerable section of our community. It appals me that over the next 20 years there is the prospect of the disappearance of the entire population of the congested areas. Do I exaggerate when I say that Michael Davitt must be turning in his grave. The people were hanging on desperately with bare hands and in their bare feet to the holding their fathers had passed down to them, and it took, not a British Government, not a foreign power, but an Irish Government to create a situation in which they cannot survive anymore. That is a dreadful indictment to have to make of a Government chosen by the Irish people.
