BEEF AT THE BACK DOOR
By RAWLE KNOX
MR. JAMES DILLON is a man unafraid of making enemies. This is as well, since he delights in provoking his opponents with most outrageous taunts about their policies. It was he, for instance, who, in an attack on the previous Eire Government's defence estimates two years ago, remarked that only two countries in the world at the time had larger armies than in
1939—Soviet Russia and Eire. Now, as Minister of Agriculture in Mr. Costello's Government, he is treading among the farmers about as delicately as one of the bulls he so dearly wishes them to produce. This is not to say that his agricultural policy is wrong. It is as sensibly bold as most of the ideas of Mr. Dillon on politics and economics.
He believes that the Argentine, apart from proving itself a country
difficult to trade with, will, in fact, have precious little meat to export at all by 196o. While it is hard to agree with him that the Argentine " has always been a great meat-eating country," it is true that Senor Peron's effort to industrialise his country is increasing the number of wage-earners able to buy meat. With this assump- tion as a basis Mr. Dillon reckons that Great Britain, after taking the largest possible deliveries from all her other suppliers, will be left with an annual shortage of 400,000 tons of meat, representing about 2,000,000 beasts. He hopes that, if Irish farmers will carry out his wishes, Eire will be able to export three-quarters of that number every year. A country so pathetically short of meat as is Great Britain today must look at such a proposition with the eye of hope.
Nevertheless, despite Mr. Dillon's energy and optimism, there are a number of reasons for doubting whether Eire's cattle industry can make so exhaustive an effort. In the first place the economic policy of Mr. de Valera's Government, which happened to be justi- fied by the misfortune of war, dies hard and mulishly. Eire in the nineteen-thirties was designed to be self-sufficient agriculturally as well as industrially. During the war, still referred to by the stiffer isolationists as the " emergency," this policy was naturally intensified. Tillage of a proportion of every man's land was compulsory, and a guaranteed price was given for wheat and other cereal crops. The result, apart from the eruption of strange industries like the Connemara tomato scheme, which has never yet produced tomatoes at less than double the price of the imported Dutch product, was that the farmer became used to the certainty of selling specified produce at a known price. Mr. Dillon is now telling him that, if he cannot sell his oats or his potatoes, he should feed them to his cattle and pigs and so strengthen the true heart of the country—its livestock. Not unnaturally the farmer, who has for years been budgeting for certain sales of such produce, considers Mr. Dillon little more than daft.
The apparent curiosities of the economic war of the 'thirties appear less abnormal when one remembers that Eire believed she was fighting for her life as a nation. This may explain a further blow— namely that Mr. de Valera's Government was offering a bonus for every calf killed. It has been estimated that in a single year some 350,000 bonuses were paid, and the legacy is a savage depletion in Eire's stock-cattle today.
Later, during the Second World War, British farmers, who saw their stock dwindling, were willing to pay huge prices for milch-cows, of which so many left Eire for British markets that the Irish farms themselves soon began to suffer from understocking. To add to this tale of wastage, there was a widespread and devastating out- break of foot-and-mouth disease in the south in the early years of the war.
Irish farmers have a number of grievances about the cattle-trade with Britain today, the most important of which is the price paid for their beasts in the trade agreement signed at the end of last July. Eire agreed to limit her exports of cattle to countries other than Britain to 5o,000 for that season, and for the future to let Britain have 90 per cent. of these exports. Yet since that agreement was made the shipment of cattle has been farcically small in the three months immediately following the signing ; sixteen and a half thousand fewer fat cattle were delivered than in the similar period of the preceding year, while the Continental trade has thrived, for the Dutch and Belgians are willing to pay while the British Ministry of Food is not.
However, it was announced last week-end that the new prices for Britain's fat cattle will also apply to Irish beasts, which will therefore bring to the farmer about fifty shillings more per head— an arrangement which must do something to revive the dwindling supply. Yet here again all will not be smiles and sunshine, for by the same trade agreement Eire must export 75 per cent. store cattle and only 25 per cent. fats. There is also a difference of five shillings per hundredweight in favour of the British in the price paid to Irish and British farmers in the British market. This minor form of pro- tection causes an unending grumble in Eire, where farmers believe that their opposite numbers are not only getting a better price but benefiting from food subsidies. Indeed, Mr. Dillon had to answer a question in the Dail recently upon this subject and put British agricultural subsidies at three million pounds a year.
As always in Eire, persons and politics have to be placed before the simplest economics. That is why the character of the ebullient, didactic Mr. Dillon is important. Recently, when he was asked if he would not control the price of phosphate manures, he answered typically that, if farmers were paying uneconomic prices for these manures, it was their own fault, and, he added, that of their Deputies, for not discovering which firms were selling at the correct price. All this was laudably true, but the truth from Mr. Dillon is some- times harder to bear than a soft evasion from a lesser man.
It should be added that much of the strength of Mr. de Valera's party lies in the agricultural districts, where local politicians are furiously deriding Mr. Dillon's call for " a return to grass." Doubt- less the Irish farmer could prosper greatly if his country could prove to the British that it was almost able to fill that gap in the meat ration. However, he has for the past ten years already been prosper- ing not a little, and it is going to be difficult to make him favour the light of change. Also your " average Irishman," who in 1939 was only eating 221 pounds of meat a year, is now eating over fifty-four. When Britain raises her cattle prices, up goes the price of meat in Eire, accompanieid by loud outcries from the despairing housewife and righteous butcher. Yet those prices must go up if the Irish farmer is ever to find any virtue in raising beasts to " feed the foreigner." It is a little sad to conclude that Mr. Dillon is trying to feed Britain, and Senor Peron is not. Yet even so there is some doubt as to which is the safer bet.
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