Nearly everybody who has spoken to-day introduced his remarks by explaining that he did not intend to make a speech. I might make the same remark, because I thought I had said everything necessary on this subject in the two very detailed statements I made in the Dáil and in the correspondingly detailed statements I made in this House. If Senators had read those statements or if they had been present when they were made, a great deal of the discussion we have had on the Fifth Stage would not have been necessary. I do not say that in any complaining spirit, but I do not intend to go over the matters which I have already treated in very considerable detail. Some points were raised to-day, however, which call for further elucidation.
Reference was made to the question of a tuberculosis settlement on the lines of the Papworth Settlement in Britain. The House, apparently, concluded from my treatment of a suggestion by Senator Duffy, that I was radically opposed to any such development here. I rather think, from the tone of the discussion here, that I must have created the impression that I was opposed to the idea of occupational therapy. It is well we should get our minds cleared about both these matters. I have no fundamental objection to the Papworth Scheme or to the establishment of a corresponding scheme in this country, except the objection that is rooted in the belief that such a scheme would not succeed here. As I said on one of the many occasions on which I have been speaking on this subject recently, I do not believe that our people will ever take kindly to the settlement idea. I may be wrong in that but it is my firm conviction that the settlement idea would not work successfully except, perhaps, in large centres of population, such as the City of Dublin, and we have not many such centres. We hope to bring to our regional sanatoria patients requiring institutional treatment from very large areas, and I cannot picture the possibility of inducing those people to settle for ever in the sanatorium, or its neighbourhood—and not only to stay there themselves, but to bring up their families and make their homes in an area isolated from the rest of the community and looked upon as a tuberculosis colony. The time may be reached when that system will operate here but I do not believe that we shall see that time. Possibly, it would be a good thing if people could get over that type of prejudice but what we have to deal with in our plans is the probability of the people affected cooperating with us so that those plans may be successful.
Senator Duffy precipitated this discussion by suggesting that in connection with each sanatorium we should acquire land for the purpose of engaging patients in the sanatorium in farm work. I indicated to the House that I did not approve of that, or that I did not believe that medical opinion would approve of it, because during the treatment stage, farm work is much too heavy for the average patient, and it entails exposure to weather, etc. Occupational therapy is a different matter. Patients who would be in a comparatively good state of health prior to their discharge would certainly find some difficulty in occupying their bodies or their minds during that time. I should like to suggest—again, this is a personal idea that will have to be subjected to the criticism of other people who are better equipped than I am to determine what is the best line of treatment in the matter of occupational therapy—that it would be a good idea, particularly in regard to patients whom we take up from the provinces, if we trained the men, say, in such useful accomplishments or arts as the soleing of a pair of shoes, the making of a wheelbarrow, or the mixing of paints, so that if possible we would send them home to their families more useful members of the community than we got them. That is my idea of the type of occupational therapy we should adopt, not the idea of mass production of anything, not the idea of entering into close competition with people who are legitimately engaged in the production of certain classes of goods, but the idea of training these people, in fact, of putting them through a system of vocational education.
Similarly, in the case of the female patients, I think we should be doing very useful work if we taught young girls how to turn the heel of a sock, if they did not know how to do so already, and how to cook, or taught them something about food values, something about domestic economy, personal hygiene and domestic hygiene. If, for example, we also were able to send them home with more than an ordinary knowledge, if not an expert knowledge, of poultry keeping, I think we would be doing really good work. These are my ideas, and these are the ideas I propose to submit to and urge upon the people who will be administering these schemes.
They are not ideas that have been formed on the spur of the moment. They are ideas that have worn themselves into me after a considerable amount of thought on every aspect of the problem. If it can be shown that these ideas are not sound or that there are any dangers in them to the success of the scheme, that is another question. All I can say at the moment is that I believe they are practicable and that it would be a good thing for the people concerned to put them into operation.
I think it was Senator Baxter—I am not quite sure; if I attribute it to Senator Baxter and that he did not emphasise this point but that other Senators did, he will understand—who made the point to-day that we should emphasise, and continue to emphasise through propaganda, that the disease is curable. That is one of the things that I have been harping on for quite a long time. There are three points to be considered, and I think Senator Mrs. Concannon emphasised them too. We cannot repeat them too often and we shall have to keep repeating them until certain classes of our people listen. The first is that nobody is born with the disease, that it is not hereditary. The second is that it is curable, much more curable than a very big number of diseases that, as I have often said before, always have been looked upon as curable, and that in fact 90 per cent. of the people who contract tuberculosis get better without knowing that they have ever had it. That is a staggering but a scientific fact.