The Oireachtas is about to adjourn for a period of four months, I think the longest adjournment in its history. The members of the other House, at all events, have earned their rest. They have had a very strenuous time and a lot of legislation was passed, some of it important and a good deal of it, I think, quite the reverse. It seems to me to be a pity that after all this legislation and in spite of the work put in the Oireachtas should now decide to adjourn for four months leaving the question of unemployment in an exceedingly unsettled and dangerous position. The only one of the Bills passed during the present session that holds out any hope of giving material employment during the present year is the Shannon Electricity Bill and that will not give any employment of any consequence before November. The Drainage Bill will hardly fructify this year. It will never fructify unless the county councils are determined to utilise it, and new councils have been elected very largely on a plea of low rates and hang the consequence. In these circumstances it is hardly likely that they will reverse engines so suddenly and embark on any scheme that is likely to put new burdens upon the ratepayers. The drainage of the Barrow has been talked of for a decade, but I am afraid it is still an ideal. There is no definite scheme as far as I am aware yet decided upon in regard to the construction of the suggested new trunk roads, and the position in respect to the addition to the Vote of £135,000 for giving employment is vague in the extreme. I do not think the Minister was able to tell the other House how the money was going to be spent, under what auspices or what bodies would be responsible for seeing that it is properly spent. The position, therefore, is that from the point of view of passing legislation with the view of relieving unemployment to get over this difficult period between now and the harvest very little has been done that will give relief this year. The number of unemployed entitled to benefit at present is, according to the Minister, about 22,000, while there are 13,000 not entitled to unemployment benefit who would come within the ambit of the Act.
It is well known that once the July benefit period is over the number of 22,000 will be considerably reduced and the number not entitled to unemployment benefit will be much greater than it is. After the October period the position will be infinitely worse, and the Dáil will not then have met. In addition to those registered as unemployed there are tens of thousands of other workless men who are not on any register. The Minister was unable to say what the numbers were, but they must be considerable, because they embrace agricultural labourers and a lot of casual labour which is never registered. To put the total at 50,000 would be a very conservative estimate. It could hardly be less, and it certainly might be very much more.
The great complaint against the Government in this matter is the dilatory manner in which they have proceeded with their measures for the relief of unemployment. They have had this question brought often enough to their notice to prevent their forgetting it. We have all realised that it is too great and important and vital a question to make it one of party politics, or of mere propaganda, and consequently it has been our object throughout to try and not embarrass the Government in any way, if we thought we could induce them to take vigorous and rapid steps to deal with the question. We met them on more than one occasion by deputation. As long ago as last November we had a very serious conference with the Government, and they seemed to appreciate fully the seriousness of the position and their desire seemed to be one with which we were in hearty agreement. That was, above all, to try and give work rather than unemployment benefit. All these months have passed since that time, and at the very end of the session we are only just enacting the measures that might be calculated to give employment, while thousands are running out of employment benefit, and the position, after October at all events, is going to be one which one does not like to contemplate.
A good harvest might make a world of difference. It might give employment to agricultural labourers for a period, and it might tend to increase the general prosperity of the country. But, in the meantime, there are thousands of people without the means of existence who have got to get bread in order to live. What is to become of them? Are they to beg, borrow or steal? I do not see any alternative, and I think it was the bounden duty of the Government, as the measures which they believed would give employment will not be capable of giving employment for several months, not to allow the Oireachtas to adjourn until it had brought in an amending Bill. It would carry the unemployed who are out of benefit over that very perilous period. It is just a question of connecting up what has been an exceedingly bad and critical period with what, I hope, will be a period of very much improved conditions. If there is no provision made for covering that gap, then the good work of the past two or three years may have been all in vain. We are very apprehensive as to the failure to take these obviously necessary steps in order to cover that very critical period. The Shannon scheme will, I believe, give employment to about 3,000 men, and it will also, I hope, help to give more employment elsewhere. But a long time will elapse before this state of affairs can come to pass. It is to make provision for that period that we are anxious, and I am very sorry that the Government have not done anything in the matter. I believe it will be necessary for the Dáil to assemble before November, but it would have been far better if the obviously necessary steps had been taken, instead of waiting for upheavals of one kind or another that may force the hands of the Oireachtas.
There is another question that I should like to touch on briefly. I do not want to trench on the ground of those representing the farming community who can speak with authority on the matter. But, as one who comes from the West, from a very congested area, and who has had numerous representations made to him in regard to the division of land, I should like to say a few words in respect of the administration of the Land Act of 1923. If we were within reasonable distance of giving full effect to that Act, we might hope very considerably to improve the economic conditions of the country as a whole, and of the congested districts in particular. Farmers in many of the congested districts are, at the best of times, just living above the border line of actual starvation, but in bad seasons such as that which we have just passed through, their condition is pitiable in the extreme. They are almost as bad as the unemployed worker who is not insured; they are certainly worse than the unemployed man who is covered by insurance. If it were not for the money sent home by Irish emigrants from the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere, the population of large parts of the congested districts would have been eliminated by poverty and starvation long ago. It is a misnomer to call many of them farmers. They are more like famished birds scraping for a miserable existence on barren unsympathetic soil.
It was no wonder, therefore, that the unsettled state of affairs immediately before and after the Truce caused a land war to break out with great intensity. The Government quickly saw the position and they took the necessary steps to deal with it by introducing the Land Bill. That Bill was, one might say, rushed through this House on the plea of urgency. We facilitated its passage at a very rapid rate, and I think we were justified in doing so, because we felt that the position was a very serious one, that the provision of land for the congests was of paramount importance, and that in order to prevent an agrarian revolution of a violent character, it was necessary to take rapid legislative steps to deal with the position. Two years have now passed, and it is amusing to hear the Minister for Lands and Agriculture announcing in the Dáil that after that period only 10,000 acres have yet been actually divided. Taking tenanted and untenanted land, he estimates that there are available for the relief of congestion and for landless men 1,200,000 acres net, allowing for all deductions. Out of that, after two years, only 10,000 acres have been distributed, notwithstanding the fiery agitation which the Bill was introduced to allay. Another 17,000 acres, he says, are vested in the Land Commission, and the remainder, or less than half the land available, is in various stages of negotiation, and a long way from being divided up.
There are undoubtedly difficulties in the way, but even allowing for these difficulties one might reasonably hope that there would be very much more progress made than has been the case. The Minister estimates that there are about 80,000 congests and that the land available will only relieve from 40,000 to 56,000, according to different estimates. These perhaps would be half congests and half landless men. Obviously, if only congests are dealt with, the number relieved will be considerably greater. But one of the reasons assigned by the Minister for the delay is the lack of a policy in regard to the division of the land. He asks: "Are we going to give it altogether for the relief of congestion, or are we to give part of it to landless men?" Obviously, the question of policy is one primarily for the Minister. If he has no policy surely to goodness it is time for him to come to the Oireachtas and ask them to define a policy for him. There is little use in telling landless men or congests who are clamouring for sufficient land to enable them to live, that the land is not going to be divided because the Government have not made up their minds how it is going to be divided, unless they show the country that they are making some attempt to evolve a policy in connection with it. The Minister actually gave it as his opinion that the Land Commission has been moving too fast, and that it would be better to go a little more slowly, perhaps, lest in eight or ten or twenty years, when the land is all divided, we may be sorry. I do not know how it could go much slower without coming to a dead stop. At the present snail's rate of progress it will be about twenty years before the land is divided, and all that time you are going to have absolute stagnation. There will be these periodical bad seasons in which large sums of money will have to be spent for the relief of the inhabitants of the congested areas. There will be no progress in regard to better systems of agriculture, better live stock breeding, dairying or poultry breeding. The Bill introduced during the last session and the previous session for the improvement of agriculture will lie dormant, as far as those areas are concerned. The question as to whether the land available should be used for the relief of congestion only, or for the purpose of creating more uneconomic farms, is a very big one and one that should receive very careful consideration, but it is time that it was considered and a policy decided upon. If I were a landless man I should go to the ends of the earth rather than accept an uneconomic farm and have to try and eke out the miserable existence that is derivable from it, such as that experienced by farmers in the West.
There are also mysteries surrounding the delay in the dividing up of land that was in the hands of the Congested Districts Board or the Land Commission for a long period of years. I do not know if there is very much land involved, but I do know in the county I come from of ranches being in the hands of the Congested Districts Board or Land Commission for years. They set the land for grazing purposes. In fact, they have turned into huge graziers, and there is no prospect of their dividing the land, although there are farmers all round with very uneconomic holdings. Then again, when a congest removes somewhere else and his land is divided up, the rent of the land is raised. The total rent paid by the people who get it is larger always than was paid by the one farmer when he had the lot himself. That is hardly the way to relieve congestion. This is one of the biggest problems of the day. It is one that is linked up with unemployment and one which affects the whole economic conditions of the country—this question of the failure to divide up land at a more rapid rate. We are told that the outdoor staff of the Land Commission spent a good part of their time last year dealing with the relief of distress. I suggest that a lot of that work would have been quite unnecessary if the congestion in these districts had been relieved by the division of the lands as provided by the Land Act. These are questions with which the Farmers' representatives can deal with very much more authority than I can. I am merely speaking from the personal experience of my native district. I sincerely hope that these Senators will, so far as they can, bring home to the Government the absolute necessity of speeding up the division of land and, above all, relieving congestion in the western areas.
