CLAUSE 15.—(Application to Ireland.) (Hansard, 15 December 1911)

§ Mr. GLYN-JONES
This is so important an omission that I do not think the House ought to pass it without some explanation as to why it is necessary. 2807 Section 2 of the Act provides that all shops shall be closed on one half-day a week except as is otherwise provided in the Bill. Then you have a number of exemptions to these provisions including the sale of intoxicating liquors. In Section 5 as applied to Great Britain, you have a provision that where several trades or businesses are carried on in the same shop the exemption should apply, so far as the principal trade or business is concerned subject to such conditions as may be prescribed. That means if a grocer has a licensed trade he cannot close his shop for the purposes of his licensed trade, but if the grocery trade got a closing order it can be closed for the purposes of his grocery business. You differentiate between the businesses when you deal with Ireland. In Ireland all the shopkeeper has to do to get out of the whole provisions relating to early closing is to have a licence, and once he has got a licence he may carry out all the trades under the sun and no closing order can affect him. You get no early closing order in Ireland, and why should a grocer get an early closing order if none of his competitors with a licence are to be closed for the purposes of grocery. What I want to draw attention to is that this Amendment never appeared on the Paper upstairs, and it was not moved on Report stage at all. It has come down from the House of Lords at the last moment, and I think the provisions are so extraordinary that some explanation of them should be forthcoming before we agree to them.

§ Mr. MASTERMAN
My hon. Friend is not quite right in saying that this is a new thing. It was proposed on the Report stage as an alternative to Clauses which were going to be cut out, namely, Subsections (11) and (12) of the Irish Clause. If my hon. Friend recollects what happened was we found that there was universal agreement amongst the Irish Members, and they arrived at an agreement as to what they thought was good for Ireland. All the hon. Members of both parties from Ireland desired it, and the House agreed that on the Report stage the Irish agreement should not be excluded from the Bill. Clause 11, Sub-clauses 11 and 12 are the alternatives to the original Clause. Owing to the special and peculiar conditions of the liquor trade conducted in Ireland it was agreed that the shops which had licences for the sale of liquor should be exempted from the general closing provisions because it was impossible under 2808 the conditions which prevail in Ireland to separate the liquor trade from the other parts of the trade. The conditions are not parallel. It was pointed out by the hon. Member for Rutland that the conditions in Ireland are not at all parallel, and that the conditions in England were quite inapplicable in the case of Ireland. It is not the case that we are putting in a new provision because this provision was in the Bill before.

§ Mr. GRETTON
I cannot agree with the description of the hon. Gentleman who has just spoken. This Clause was moved by the First Lord of the Admiralty in a slightly different form on Report, and I pointed out that, if it were proposed for any other part of the United Kingdom than Ireland the temperance or teetotal advocates in the House would have raised an uproarious clamour. The First Lord of the Admiralty then said that, as I took objection to the Clause, he would withdraw it, and he substituted a long Clause, which had been agreed to between the Members from Ireland and the Government in the Committee upstairs. Apparently that does not suit hon. Members from Ireland. They now want to have their cake and to eat it too, and they are going to have this Clause and their long arrangement as well. If this Clause is passed, practically more than half the shops in Ireland will escape any control under this Bill. This was never explained in another place. It was passed under the plea that it was an agreed Amendment carrying out a pledge already given, when, so far from that being the case, it is going back upon what this House did. I do not desire to press my opinion on this point, but I think the House ought to know what they are doing. They are importing into this Bill an entirely new development.