This Bill is not as complicated as it appears to be. The purpose of the Bill is to regulate the quality of exported dead meat. It has nothing to do with live stock or with meat consumed at home. The title sets out its purpose:—
"To make provision for the regulation of the export of fresh meat and offals with a view to improving the general standard thereof, and for that purpose to make provision for the registration and control of premises used for the slaughter of animals or for the preparation and packing of fresh meat and offals intended for export, the licensing of persons engaged in exporting fresh meat and offals and the examination and certification of fresh meat and offals intended for export, to make provision for the proper packing of dead rabbits and dead poultry intended for export, and for other matters incidental to the matters aforesaid."
The first part of the Bill, which is the most important, deals with the registration of premises and the licensing of exporters. This part of the Bill provides that animals may only be slaughtered in registered premises. The dead meat referred to is beef, mutton and pork. The Bill also refers to and deal with goat flesh and horses, but they are of no importance. We can consider the Bill in regard to beef, mutton and pork. All premises where cattle, sheep or pigs are slaughtered must be registered in a register kept by the Minister. Provision is also made that before premises are registered they must be certified to be structurally suitable, suitable so far as equipment and plant are concerned, they must be clean and not in danger of contamination from drains, etc. The premises must also have an adequate supply of fresh water. Proper facilities must also be provided for dealing with offals, and so on.
The first part of the Bill also provides that a registration fee of £1 shall be paid in respect of the registration of each premises, or for the registration of any premises for any one purpose. For instance, if premises are registered for the purpose of dealing with beef, a fee of £1 must be paid by the registered proprietor. Equally, if in the same premises pigs are killed and turned into pork, another £1 has to be paid for that. The Minister may refuse to register premises for definite reasons set out in the Bill. If he is dissatisfied with the water supply on the premises, that the premises are not structurally suitable, or that the plant is not suitable, or for any other reason set out in the Bill, he can refuse a certificate of registration.
In addition to the fees that I have mentioned there are other fees which are payable. There is the exporter's fee. Every exporter must be licensed. As a rule, the exporter will be the registered proprietor. There will, of course, be exceptional cases where the exporter is other than the registered proprietor. For instance, the registered proprietor may be the Dublin Corporation. They may have certain abattoirs and may give licences to people to use them. Of course, that is the very exceptional case, but generally the exporter will be the registered proprietor. He must apply to the Minister for a licence, and satisfy him in regard to certain things, failing which the Minister may refuse him a licence. Sections 11 and 12 deal with that. When making his application the exporter must pay a deposit of £12 10s. If an exporter is exporting beef and pork he must pay a deposit of £12 10s. in respect of each, even though his export trade is carried on from the same registered premises. The deposit is of very little importance. It is simply evidence of good faith. The annual fees are what really count. They are referred to in Section 12, and they are dealt with in the Schedule. They are a per capita fee. So far as beef is concerned, there is a charge of 1/- for every beast slaughtered; in the case of pigs the charge is 3d.; mutton or lamb, 1½d. It is also 1½d. for goats, and for horses 1/-. These are the annual fees. The deposit that is paid goes as a payment on account of the annual fees.
I now come to the question of minimum fees. These are dealt with in Rule 3 of the Schedule. Obviously, it is necessary to have minimum fees. We want to obviate a situation arising such as existed in the year 1927. In the years 1926 and 1927 because of the prohibition of Dutch pork into the English market—a prohibition which was made about the year 1925—there was suddenly established all over this country small premises where pork was slaughtered. It is literally true to say that in many backyards in a great many towns all over the country pigs were slaughtered under insanitary conditions by men who had no real technical skill and who were without proper equipment and plant. At the moment, I should say that there are hundreds of places in the country where dead meat is being prepared and exported. We expect that under any circumstances there will always be over a hundred such places in the country, but at the same time it is perfectly clear, both from the point of view of the farmers and of the State as a whole, that it is uneconomic to have this trade handled in too many small places. It is certainly entirely uneconomic from the point of view of the taxpayer, because if the trade were handled in places that were extremely small then, apart altogether from the likelihood that the work would be done inefficiently, by unskilled labour and without efficient plant, there is this point to be considered: that with such a state of affairs existing the Department of Agriculture would be under the necessity of appointing inspectors to inspect and to certify all meat exported from hundreds of small centres all over the country. For that reason we provide for a minimum fee.
The maximum fee, of course, is the total of all the annual fees. The maximum fee, in the case of any of the big firms like Dennys, Shaws, or O'Maras, is simply this, that so far as pork is concerned you multiply the killings by 3d. For instance, suppose that there is only one business carried on in an establishment, that business being in pork, there shall be a minimum fee paid by the exporter carrying on that business of £50, even though the annual fee does not come to £50. I think it is correct to say that 3d. a head on 4,000 porkers amounts to £50. Suppose that he only exported 3,000 porkers, he would have to pay less than £50 on a per capita basis. But when there is a minimum fee of £50 he will have to pay that fee even though he exports only 3,000. The fee in the case of lamb is £25. For beef and mutton together the same exporter will pay a minimum fee of £75. The minimum fee in respect of either a beef exporter's licence or a pork exporter's licence is £50. The collective minimum fee in respect of two or more licences collectively is £75 where such licences include a beef exporter's licence or a pork exporter's licence, or both, such licences and in every other case shall be the sum of £50. What that means is, that for beef alone the fee is £50, for mutton alone it is £50, and for lamb £25. For beef and mutton, from the same premises, the fee is £75; for beef and pork treated on the same premises it is £75; for beef and lamb £50, and for pork and lamb £50.
Before leaving this part of the Bill I should say that we provide in Section 5 that the same premises may be registered for beef, mutton or pork, but that they shall not be registered as crating premises. It is laid down in paragraph (f) Sub-section (1) of Section 5, Part 1 of the Bill, that "a register (to be called and known as the register of crating premises) of premises in Saorstát Eireann in which the business of crating for export pork, mutton and lamb or any of them and no other business is carried on." That is to say, that where crating alone is carried on it must be registered on a separate register. That paragraph, it should be noted, does not apply to ordinary premises where not only are animals slaughtered but where crating is carried on. The paragraph only deals with premises where crating, and no other business, is carried on. There is nothing in the Bill to stop anyone from not only slaughtering and preparing, say, pork, but from crating it on his own premises. Such a person need not have the premises registered as a crating premises. That is only necessary in cases where crating and no other business is carried on.
Part 2 of the Bill sets out the regulations as to the slaughtering of animals and the preparation, etc., of fresh meat and offals. Regulations are laid down as to the manner in which animals, the meat of which is intended for export, are to be assembled and penned for slaughter; the manner of slaughtering such animals; the times at which slaughter may take place; the manner of dressing, cleaning, hanging, cooling and weighing of fresh meat and offals intended for export; and the preservatives (if any) which may be used in fresh meat or offals intended for export. Regulations are also made for the marking of fresh meat and for the packing of it at the time of export.
Part 3 of the Bill deals with the veterinary examination and certification of fresh meat. The Minister shall have power to appoint veterinary surgeons for the purpose of examining all animals ante-mortem and post-mortem. The Bill provides that no dead meat shall be allowed to leave this country without a certificate from a veterinary surgeon as to its soundness and quality and without having the appropriate mark on it.
These are, generally speaking, the provisions of the Bill. The necessity for the Bill is quite clear. First of all, I may say that we have almost given an undertaking to the British Government to introduce and pass a Bill like this. That is the sort of undertaking that one must honour. They, in fact, are the people who buy. They can buy on their own conditions. As I stated earlier, in the year 1925, for reasons mainly connected with foot and mouth disease, the British Government decided to prohibit the import into Great Britain of fresh meat from the Netherlands. At that time the trade of the Netherlands with Great Britain in pork alone amounted to something like £5,000,000. They did far and away the greater portion of that trade with Great Britain. The balance was done, to a great extent, by the British farmers themselves. The Free State had only a small proportion of it—some thousands of pounds. When that prohibition was suddenly imposed the result of it was that the English market was left unsupplied by far the biggest supplier.
That, of course, afforded a great chance to the Irish farmer and to the Irish business man generally. Taking everything into account, they took their chance fairly well. It is a fact that the Irish farmer and the business man reacts very quickly to market conditions. They saw at the time that there was an extremely good market for fresh meat on the English market. They saw, now that the Netherlands was out of the business, that, with the exception of Great Britain itself, Ireland was the only country that could supply that trade. The result was that the exports of fresh meat from Ireland, which in 1925 were only value for a couple of hundred thousands, increased to between £200,000 and £300,000 in the year 1928. That was a very big increase in the course of a couple of years. During that period all sorts of factories were established and methods had to be improvised. People were doing a good business and making a certain amount of money owing to the dislocation of trade caused by stoppage of the Dutch supplies. To some extent in the North, but particularly in the South, small dead meat factories appeared here, there, and elsewhere. The British had to take our dead meat, for they could not get it elsewhere. What we forgot was that we were not the only possible suppliers. There were the British farmers.
What happened was that factories were established here quickly, under insanitary conditions by small men who had neither capital nor skill. These were found to be inefficient. In 1927 the British could afford to be a bit stiffer and make representations to the Department of Agriculture and say that they would not take our dead meat, or they would give it the same treatment as they gave the Dutch, and which they are entitled to do. We take a threat of that sort seriously in the Department of Agriculture. We conceive it is our duty to make certain that the article we send to Britain is acceptable to our customers. In the negotiations I have had with them I have given what amounts to an undertaking to the English Ministry that so far as legislation can do it we will see that as regards the quality of the meat that goes to England they will not have any excuse for stopping the meat. Hence this Bill. There are great possibilities in the matter. As I pointed out, the imports of fresh meat from Holland alone amount to £5,000,000. There are other imports, such as imports of New Zealand and Argentine lamb, into England, and there are also supplies from the English and Scottish farmers. There is a big market there for us which we should be able to supply and with profit. We should be able to get the advantage of the trade which the Dutch used to have there and to hold our own in the English market. We are nearer that market than the Scottish farmer, or, to a great extent, than the North of England farmer, and we ought to be able to get a great proportion of the Dutch trade and prevent the English farmer encroaching too much on our trade in these markets.
I have every confidence that this Bill will give a good return to the farmer. It is modelled more or less on the lines of the Dairy Produce Act and the Agricultural Produce (Eggs) Act. There is no question about it but that all the fresh meat exported from this country must be killed under suitable conditions and where there is proper equipment and plant. The work must be done properly and it must not be done according to haphazard methods. If all the meat exported to England is examined and certified by veterinary surgeons there is every chance we will be sending better meat to England and more regular supplies than in the past. If that is so it will show itself in the prices. I have every confidence that whatever the administrative cost of this measure will be it will be money well invested, and will give a return to the farmer in the way of better prices.