After considerable delay, which was not due to any fault of the House but to the amount of public business that had to be gone through, I am now in a position to move the motion standing in my name:
"That this House requests the Government to institute an inquiry by agricultural economists and practical farmers into the present policy of closer land settlement, and that until the report of this inquiry is available a stay be placed on the further acquisition of grass-fattening lands."
I do not propose to say much on this motion. The matter is quite simple and straightforward. It really arises out of the personal experience of a certain large and practical land owner such as exists here. Land owners, of course, have changed a good deal in character in late years. He asked me if I would like to see what was really happening in relation to the division of this rich land with which I propose to deal. I said I would. I am not one of the fortunate people who possess rich land. I am rather accustomed to deal with a poor class of land—semi-mountainy land. In due course I went in to see this rich land. I spent the whole day visiting some of it which has been divided in the County Meath. I must frankly say that I was appalled at what I saw. It was because of what I saw that I took the earliest opportunity of putting down this motion on the Order Paper. What one saw was this: that what was once land of undoubted high fertility was being divided up into small areas of 15 or 20 acres. These small areas were enclosed. They were served by accommodation roads. I am only dealing with a couple of cases because, naturally, I was not in a position to travel the whole district. These areas of divided land were served by narrow accommodation roads. In many cases, the roads were not metalled. The land was fenced with sod banks. In many cases, because of our humid climate, these sod banks never become firm and were falling down. I am told that unless you plant quicks on a sod fence that the fences will not last. There are no stones in that district to face the banks with, or at any rate they are hard to get. What happened in this case was that the banks had fallen down. Ragged and imperfect wire fences had been erected on each side. That might not matter very much except at certain periods of the year. Incidentally, these wire fences destroy a very important part of the country for hunting which, apart from the employment it gives, has a distinct bearing on our great horse-breeding industry. When you came to see the land you were presented with a most pitiable state of affairs. I did not see any stock on it. What I saw had been meadowed for a considerable number of years and was growing a totally rank herbage. You had only got to compare that land with other land in the same district which had been what one might call ranched: in other words, which had been grazed by cattle. That land had a natural fertility due largely to its treatment I imagine with cattle manure. That, I imagine, has been going on from time immemorial. There were no houses on this divided land. I met one of the brave boys who owns a bit of this land. I am told that there is no great tillage tradition in that district. This brave fellow came along and I got talking to him. I asked him if he had paid his rent and annuities. He said that he had not, and I asked him what he was going to do about it. He said: "They can do nothing; there is no stock on the land." He was laughing at them. He may have been an exceptional case.
The point that I want to make to the Minister is that in that case—I do not say that it applies to all cases—the land is being absolutely destroyed. I am not referring to one holding. There are a number of holdings, a dozen in the district. There are no houses, as the owners of the land were living in a bog nearby. The land there had been from time immemorial used for a special purpose. It had been put to an economic use, the development and the fattening of live stock. Of course, the Minister will say that live stock is a thing of the past. I do not believe that any sensible body of men would believe that. Whatever the proposition may be, surely no one who looks ahead would say that these lands, of which there is very little better in the world for the fattening of stock, should be divorced from their purpose and practically turned back to rank grass. That is what it practically amounts to. I went to another place and saw very much the same thing. Senator Counihan will be more eloquent on that than I am. I saw some thin cows with long horns and second and third rate calves which would never be associated with that class of land. It is on second and third class land that that class of cattle are seen, and not on rich pasture. I am credibly informed, and I have had the opinion of experienced agriculturists, that if you stock good land with inferior cattle it injures it. In order to have good land it is necessary to have good stock upon it. There was practically no stock on the land I saw.
Moreover, it will interest the Minister, when he is dealing with the division of land, to know that I was informed that the fences would not stand up to "quicks." Apparently, if you are building a bank for quicks it is necessary to leave a sod projecting. There were no quicks on the fences. The banks had fallen down and looked derelict. As far as this class of land is concerned the Government is forming agricultural slums, just as tenement slums were formed in cities. That cannot be right. There was very little tillage to be seen. In a wet season they will not be able to grow cereal crops there. I believe that in the past they never grew cereals in the rich lands of Meath, even when we were self-supporting in the matter of wheat. I suggest that is the reason why it was not grown there. Out of my experience, limited as it is, I say that there is a case for enquiry into this whole policy. We know the difficulties that beset a Government in a matter of this kind. There are always local politicians and local clubs pulling for all they are worth to get land divided amongst the local people, irrespective of their qualifications. My information was that in many cases no respect was paid to qualifications. The persons I saw appeared to be a happy sort of Meath cattlemen. There are many more like that.
