I move:—
That Emergency Powers (No. 73) Order, 1941, tabled on the 27th March, 1941, be and is hereby annulled.
I should like, at the outset, to assure the Minister and the House that I am not full of malice in moving this motion. I have a point of view about the efficacy of the methods which the Minister is adopting to achieve a certain end, and I had no other method open to me but to put the motion down in the form in which it is. If it were possible to put down a motion to amend the order in a particular way, giving certain powers to local authorities, I should have preferred to do that.
To begin with, this order sets out that local authorities, urban councils, corporations, and county councils will have power to go in and acquire by agreement or compulsorily any bog land. They may acquire it on behalf of the State. Many of the difficulties which I foresee in this are of such a character that it would be unwise to permit these powers to be operated by local authorities without full examination of all the implications of the order. It was never my point of view, and I am not going to suggest, that our local authorities generally are not competent. In fact, I have always maintained in this House, and elsewhere, that local authorities do tolerably well the work for which they are elected. Some do it magnificently, others are not just so successful; but, taking it on the whole, regarding the people elected to discharge certain obligations to the ratepayers and the poor of their county, I think we can say that they do us credit. They are unpaid, and most of the public representatives are very busy men. Members of the county councils are usually individuals who live far from the county centres. They come to the meeting once a month, but their activities are not finished there. The problem, as I see it, is of such a magnitude that, in my judgment, it cannot be tackled and solved by merely issuing this Emergency Order and passing the burden and the responsibility over to local authorities to provide fuel for the people of this State for the coming 12 months.
What is the problem? An Taoiseach, speaking in Limerick on Saturday last, told us that last year we imported 2,750,000 tons of coal, and last year we cut 3,800,000 tons of turf, and also had 1,700,000 tons of mechanically won turf. He goes on to warn us that this year we must prepare for a situation when we may have to provide all our fuel requirements from our own bogs, and that that means, with one ton of coal equalling two tons of turf, we must this year provide 8,000,000 tons of turf. I have gone into this because I am trying to get at the back of the mind of the Ministry on this question. The Taoiseach told us that every available man from now on should be employed cutting turf. He suggested that every idle man in the rural parts of Ireland who is able to use a spade, or able or willing to learn the use of a sleán, should be put to work at once. The first point that strikes me about it is this: last year we cut 3,800,000 tons of hand won turf, but last year was a very remarkable year. We would want to have this year just as good—we pray to God it may be—because not for a great many years have we been as fortunate in getting so dry a season. If we cut turf or won it last year, it was, in fact, due to the wonderful weather we had, and we had 3,800,000 tons to show for our efforts.
In my opinion, there are not very many bogs in the country that are not being worked. I am speaking of bogs that are well drained, with faces ready for cutting, and I am afraid there are very few of them, and that the area of bog ready to cut is very limited indeed. I suggest that the 3,800,000 tons of turf we got last year came from bogs which had been in use for a long time. Perhaps we have some other bogs in a usable condition, but they are in remote districts. So far as I see, we cannot provide 8,000,000 tons of turf off the bogs that were in use last year. It is a physical impossibility, in my opinion, to get two crops of turf off these bogs this year. Of course, the Minister may have information of a character that is not available to me, but, so far as I know the country, and I have been over a fair amount of it and know what bogs are like, we cannot provide 8,000,000 tons of turf from existing bogs. That is because we cannot do what the Taoiseach suggested—namely, take two crops off the bogs this season. To begin with, people are fortunate enough on the whole to get one crop of turf off the bog. The weather has everything to do with it, and the heart of man cannot prevail against a day like yesterday. Weather has to be taken into account, and I believe it would be very unwise to bank on getting our full requirements from the bogs we have been accustomed to use.
But there is another consideration. The Taoiseach says that we should put to work every idle man in the rural parts who is able to use a spade or able and willing to use a sleán. Take the situation of the bogs— some of them are in the centre of fairly thickly populated areas but others are more remote, up in the hills or on the tops of mountains. So far as I see the situation in the country—anyhow in the rural parts of Ireland of which the Taoiseach spoke—I do not see so many people unemployed as would make it possible for us to turn such a number out on the bogs as would rear two crops of turf in one year. I do not think the men are there; they are not in close proximity to the bogs. To rear two crops of turf in one year means that you have got to have a number of men ready to go into the bogs now, or as soon as the water disappears, and that will take some time. As soon as they start work they must continue at the job of cutting, turning, clamping, saving and starting at the next crop immediately that is done.
The situation in rural Ireland is not such that will enable us to get the numbers of people to do that work throughout the year, and, at the same time, to carry on the ordinary work of attending to all the tillage which we have in hands. Days like those we have been experiencing have thrown us back for weeks and the net result will be that tillage operations are going to be more difficult than if the weather had not been what it was during the past ten days. I am convinced that because of physical limitations, the number of people available, the limitation of the area of banks available for cutting and the fact that you have to take the weather into account in the winning of turf, you cannot possibly face up to a possibility of taking two crops of turf off the banks cut on last year. I do not think that there is the smallest chance of getting 8,000,000 tons of turf through the sort of action which it is Suggested we should take under the ægis of local authorities.
Local authorities are being given powers to enter bogs, compulsorily if necessary. I am not going to suggest that local authorities generally will be so foolish or so stupid as to acquire bogs where they are being worked. But, mind you, this question of interpretation, of whether or not the bogs are being worked to their full capacity, is a rather difficult one. There are few counties where the usable bogs are not being worked. They are owned by people who have them attached to their farms, who got them when the purchase of their lands was going through, perhaps bought them outright just as men buy farms outright, but taking the position with regard to bogs generally, they are owned by people who have them drained and who have worked them for a number of years. It is true that they may have one face from which turf is being cut and turf may not be cut on the other side. If you proceed to acquire and cut the side that is not in use, you may upset the economy of the holding. The economy of thousands of our small farms is contingent on the possession of a certain area of bog which regulates whether the holding is economic or not. In suggesting that we may now acquire bog compulsorily, we may upset the economy of many farms in the rural areas which would not be economic but for the possession of bog. That might have rather serious consequences.
You have just decided on action that will give local authorities power to exercise functions which will upset the ordinary economy of holdings. I suggest that we ought to make ourselves aware of the implications of that. I am not suggesting that local authorities would use their powers in this fashion, but I do not think it is wise to suggest that they should do so, even in present circumstances. There is another way. If there was a suggestion that you were going to utilise bogs this year in the rural areas, or in areas where they are being cut year after year in a different manner from that in which they have been utilised in the past, you may in fact, instead of getting more turf, actually get less turf from the same bank. You can upset the conditions of the people who have been taking turf off these bogs for their own use and for sale in towns. It may upset the whole working and planning of those bogs. That is not a good thing to do, but you can do something more. I have known some of the most bitter quarrels we have had in the country to take place over the possession of bogs and the right to use them. These are considerations present in my mind when I see what local authorities are expected to do and the powers which you are giving them to exercise.
At this stage I would like to say that I am in favour of local authorities like county councils, in a limited way, taking upon themselves the responsibility of providing from bogs within their domain a quantity of fuel that will be sufficient, say, for their machinery or even for their instituttions. If they can do that, it is all to the good. In attempting to carry out even a scheme like that there are certain limitations. You cannot send anybody at all into a bog and be satisfied that he is going to give a good return for his time there. Quite the contrary. I am not quite clear how many of our county or assistant engineers are competent to plan and to carry out the kind of work required in bogs. I am quite satisfied some of them are not competent to do so because while a person may be a very good engineer, there is special engineering skill required in a bog that can only be acquired by spending days and weeks and months in the bogs. In fact, you can make such a mess of a boghole that you are going to have much more water in the hole than turf on the bank.
This problem of getting sufficient work done and getting it done economically is not going to be solved for the asking. Nevertheless, I am quite satisfied that in a number of counties anyway you could give power to local authorities to go into bogs which are in accessible places and where they can be acquired in a reasonable manner to be worked for certain limited purposes. But if we are to take the problem as it was represented to us by An Taoiseach, if we are to take it seriously, we have to face up to a situation where we have this year to provide the equivalent of 2,750,000 tons of coal, which is reckoned to be 8,000,000 tons of turf. If we accept the situation that we are not going to get any imported fuel into this country at all, and that we have got to provide it for ourselves, and if the people of Dublin, Limerick, Cork and Galway are going to have fuel to cook the food which we hope they will have next year, I do not think we can meet it by passing on to the county councils the powers which you are passing on under this order and merely leaving things there.
It is important to consider the magnitude of this problem. If the Government are really serious about it, they will realise the problem is of unusual magnitude. We have got either to accent the Government's word on these things, or to be sceptical and doubtful about it, and suggest that although they say such a thing they do not really mean it. I prefer to take it on the basis which was enunciated by the Taoiseach, that it is a major problem which ought to be tackled in a big, broad way. What is the magnitude of the problem? Let us consider it in terms of cash. Last year 2,750.000 tons of coal were imported at £3 a ton, apparently, according to a question and answer in the Dáil yesterday. This £3 a ton is under the current price, but at £3 a ton the amount of money involved would be £8,250,000. The value of the 3,800,000 tons of turf we produced last year, at the present price of coal, would have represented £4,000,000 of coal, which means that if you want 8,000,000 tons of turf this year you have to produce this year an extra £4,000,000 of turf, taking the current price of coal, out of our own resources.
I want to urge and argue seriously that that is completely beyond the financial ability and outside the responsibilities, from the point of view of finance, which should be put upon county councils. It is also beyond the competence of their staffs and of county councils themselves as men elected to do a certain work. If we expect them to do that, we are not going to get it. I am one of those who believe that we can do things in this country if we go about them in the right way, if we go about them with courage. I have urged on this Minister in another capacity that people may find fault with the Government for going too far in doing the right thing, but that is not half as bad as people finding fault with you for not attempting to do anything, right or wrong. In my view, the fault that will be found with the Government this time twelve months, if we have a shortage of fuel, is that they did not face up to the problem of providing fuel in the way they should.
I have tried to argue already—I may not have made myself clear—that from the existing bogs which we are working it is a physical impossibility to get the amount of fuel which the Government say they require. It is physically impossible because of the limited area of bog; because of atmospheric and weather conditions, which are always an incalculable quantity, and because of the limited number of people who are suitable for the work of cutting turf. I want again to repeat that every man in the country cannot cut the turf. I am prepared to take Senator Quirke down for a week to any bog he likes in the country and test what we can do, but he knows as well as I do that while some men may he very good with their slean their next door neighbour may not be half so good, or, in fact, he may not be any good at all. If you are going to get turf produced, just like anything else, you must get efficient people at the work. I do not know what the people who come from bogs calculate as a good day's work for a man, but in my day, in the lowland bogs, we thought that when a man cut what we called five crates of turf in a day he was a good man. He was a very good man. He would not smoke an ounce of tobacco or 20 cigarettes in the day and do it.
I am convinced the Minister ought not to pass this baby on to the local authorities. I think it is too big for them to carry. The Minister should not create in the minds of the people of this country the impression that they are going to be all right and that because certain powers have been passed on to local authorities and because parish councils are going to get to work, everything is going to be safe and well, that we are going to have plenty of fuel this winter. I say now, as I said about tillage some time ago in this House, that we are going to he hungry for turf just as we are going to be hungry in other things because we are not going the right way about it. I do not think the obligation ought to be put upon local authorities to go to their ratepayers in the counties to raise money for the purpose of paying men to cut turf which is going to be stored up for six or nine months before it can be turned into cash. I suggest that £4,000,000 extra over and above what the value of our turf was last year is involved in this, and that you are expecting local authorities to find the money to do that. I think that is not the way to do it. I think it is beyond their capacity to do it, and it ought not to be expected of them. I suggest they are not competent to do it and cannot deliver the goods.
Let us assume that you could get local authorities to go into this matter of providing fuel by direct labour in their respective counties, not only for the use of the people of their own counties, but also for the use of people in densely-populated urban centres, such as the City of Dublin and its vicinity. Look at the problem of marketing. Who is going to do the job of marketing the fuel after it has been won? Here is my point of view: We have been passing many Acts in the Oireachtas to provide a better system of management in connection with local authorities, generally, and we are told repeatedly that the staffs are being overworked and have not the time to look after the details, and that there is not the necessary machinery for a proper supervision of staffs. It has been pointed out that a lot of the work these staffs are asked to do is beyond their competence, and the Ministry have acquiesced in that view. Now, in my opinion, nothing that local authorities have been asked to do up to the present would be so far removed from a proper conception of what their duties and responsibilities are than this matter of winning and saving turf and also its marketing.
The staffs of local authorities, such as the surveyors and the assistant surveyors, have their days fairly full in connection with their other duties. As a matter of fact, if we are to judge by their petrol allowances, as compared with the petrol allowances to other people, these county surveyors and assistant surveyors must be amongst the busiest people in this country. Now, if these engineers, surveyors and assistant surveyors are going to be drawn from their ordinary work in connection with roads and so on, and put on such work as the development of our bogs, I do not know how they stand. It is possible that quite a number of these engineers would not be familiar with the particular type of work to be done on the bogs, but I am satisfied that the staffs of local authorities will not be able to undertake this task because of its magnitude. The winning of the turf that is required would provide work for thousands and thousands of men, but it is a task that will be beyond the competence of the local authorities unless they are given very material assistance.
Now, we have become, in this country, much more land-minded than we were in former years. I am not speaking of the land mines that explode, but, at any rate, we are much more concerned about what we can dig out of our own fields than we were in September, 1939, or even before that. I think that we are now going to be more turf-minded, if I may use the phrase, and I do not think it is a bad thing that we should become more turf-minded. Some people, I understand, do not like the smell of turf—although I do not object to the smell of turf—and I believe that some housewives do not like the ash of turf, but there is an easy way of getting rid of the ash. Anyhow, I do not think that any people in this country should be above burning turf if no other fuel is available, and I am all in favour of having our people supplied with as much turf as our bogs can produce, and now is the time to set about the task, but I should like the matter to be approached in a proper manner. We should not go about this in any petty way, but should try to secure sufficient turf for all the people in the country. Senator Quirke may think that this is one up for him, but actually it is not. We cannot afford to wait for machines for the winning of the turf, as things are at the moment. We have the human machines, and I should like to use these human machines for the winning, saving and marketing of the turf.
What I want to put to the Minister is this: we have got to face up to the situation that the Coal-Cattle Pact may not be just so important in the future as it has been up to the present, and that we shall have to provide more fuel from our own resources than we have been accustomed to produce in the past. It is possible that, as a result both of what is happening here at home and in other countries, you may have to consider altering the policy that has been pursued in the past here with regard to the exchange of our cattle for coal supplies—and a very good policy it was. If, however, such a disease as the foot-and-mouth disease should become endemic here, we may have to depart from the policy of exchanging certain commodities of ours for imported commodities such as coal, and my view is that we must face up to that possibility now. We have countless thousands of acres of bogs, and we have very many unemployed people in the cities. Many of these unemployed people came originally from bog areas into the cities in their search for work, and I believe they would be very glad to go back and work on the bogs if the work was to be had there. I think the Government should set themselves the task of bringing these people back from the cities and putting them to work on the bogs. In my opinion, the way to do that is for the Government to set themselves the task of going into the bogs. Some of the larger bogs have been drained in part, but there are others which have not been drained and which could be made available for use in the future.
I do not think that anything we can do would make it possible for us to supply our entire fuel requirements this year, but we can do something at least, particularly with regard to the supply of turf, and I should like to see our Government setting about the matter in the right way. It must be remembered, in connection with this matter, that these bogs very often stretch across great areas of the country. The authority of the parish council ends at the border of the parish, and even in the case of a county council, the authority of that county council will stop at its border; but there are bogs that stretch across many counties, and so I urge that now is the time for the Government to get into these bogs. There is no use in waiting for machines to be brought into the country. Failing the importation of machines, we have a sufficient number of human machines, as I have said, who would be quite willing to do the work. There are so many people unemployed that it should be quite possible tor the Government to put them to work on these bogs. The Minister should not expect the local authorities to do impossible things. It is necessary to provide fuel for all the people of the country, but let the responsibility for providing that fuel rest on the people who have some authority to organise the work.
Senator Hawkins, for instance, the other day, threw out a suggestion— obviously not very well thought out, but with a certain amount of originality behind it—to the effect that county directors should be given authority to go in and do such work, and the Senator also urged that there should be some authority or body to deal with the work of marketing. That is the sort of problem that has to be faced, and I believe that now is the time to face up to it. The Ministry deplore the fact that there are so many people in the city unemployed. A number of these unemployed people in the cities are people who came from bog areas in the country—people who could handle a sleán—and I think that these people. if they were satisfied that they could get a full day's work at a full day's pay, would be glad to go back and work on the bogs.
I think that, apart from the fact that you want to do this thing in a really effective way, from the point of view of the provision of fuel for our people, you should look at it also from the point of view of the number of people who could be put into employment. In that regard, also, you must not look at this matter in a petty way, and the Government should bear in mind what was done in connection with the workers on the Shannon Scheme. You cannot expect men to travel ten and 20 miles to the bog every day. If they were to do that, they would be worth nothing when they came to work on the bogs. You will have to deal with the matter in the same way as your predecessors did in connection with the Shannon Scheme, and that is to bring these men into a camp at the bog site, be prepared to feed them, and so on, while the work lasted. If you do not arrange for some such scheme as that, the cost of the production of the turf would be twice as much as coal is at the moment, and that is a thing that will have to be avoided.
In this connection, it would be well worth while to examine the possibilities of putting men who are serving in the Army on this job. There are many men in the Army who could cut turf. I know of some of them, from my own native parish, who could do it; and there are also some officers in the Army, I am sure, who could do better work, from the engineering point of view, in the laying out of bogs, than some other engineers could do. You have had the Army doing some rather distasteful work for some weeks past. It does not make any of us happy to see them employed at that work but it has to be faced.
I think there is a very good case for considering that, in a time of emergency, there is a big problem here to be tackled. You have got to convince the people and to assure them, because their state of mind at present is that they want assurance. You want to assure the people that you see that the task is a big one, that it, is going to be tackled with vigour and imagination, that you are not going to stop at small fences and that you are not going to be afraid to take risks. Then when you get that sort of quiet confidence restored to the minds of the people you will get the backing and support from them you want. I think that is the atmosphere you want to create in regard to this question.
I do not want to be misunderstood by anybody in what I say on this motion. Far be it from me to have any purpose whatever other than to make my contribution towards getting the 8,000,000 tons of turf which the Taoiseach said we needed. I have good reason for thinking that that cannot be done by the methods which the Ministry have been pursuing up to the present. I have made suggestions as to how the efforts of the people locally can be supplemented by the policy of the Government. I think there should be a proper turf policy enunciated, and it is up to the Minister for Industry and Commerce to enunciate it. Then if he fails here and there, we shall know the reasons for his failing. The bog banks will slip at times, no doubt, no matter how valiant your efforts may be to prevent their slipping. Those who know much about bogs will know how easy it is for a bank to slip at times, but that should not prevent you from going ahead with the work or from going on to the next farm and opening another bank. It is better that a bank should slip here and there than that you should cease from going on with the work at all.
I move the annulment of the order in the hope that the Minister will amend it and in doing so enunciate a policy with regard to bogs that would have the support of all of us. We shall go out and support him if he enunciates such a policy, and if there are failures we shall stand behind him because we feel that risks have to be taken. I think it would be much better to take these risks than to sit down and believe that we are going to get turf produced by the plan which it, is hoped to operate under the order as it now stands.
