In very few budget debates do we omit to refer to the relatively higher level of expenditure in Northern Ireland on social welfare compared with the Republic and this year's debate is no exception. In the last three to four years this matter has become one of immense significance in relation to our belief that all Irishmen and women would be happier in the long run if this country was to be united. There are, however, a number of misconceptions about the position and I think it would be very proper that at least some of them should be removed.
The gap in nominal social welfare payments has been closing and it is very proper that this should be recognised. Nevertheless, the overall expenditure on what might be called welfare matters, including social welfare relief, education, health and housing is double per head of the population in the North compared with what it is in the South. This is attributable to a number of causes and they should not always be regarded as to the discredit of this Republic. For instance, where you have, as you have in the North of Ireland, some areas of male unemployment reaching as high as 45 per cent of the local males you must inevitably have a massive contribution in respect of unemployment benefit. This occurs, of course, in those areas of the North which have been deliberately discriminated against on religious and political grounds.
I am not for one moment suggesting that we do not need to have a massive improvement in our whole welfare code, that we do not need to have here a more just distribution of wealth. I have always argued for that. The Fine Gael Party is entirely committed to it and we would wish to be in Government for the purpose of bringing about this much needed social reform. However, we will only be misleading our people in all parts of this island if we do not properly identify at least some of the reasons why we have what seems to be such a much greater expenditure on social matters in the North of Ireland. It is not entirely due to the perhaps relatively greater difficulty which we may have as a society to fund social benefits compared with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland which has behind it all the massive wealth of her old Empire, much of it perhaps improperly accumulated, and also has the massive technological and productive capacity particularly as we know concentrated in the south and south east of England itself. It is nevertheless there as a reality which we must face. There must, therefore, be a fundamental shift in our social and economic thinking. There is very little evidence of that in this year's budget.
I do not join with some people in quoting a statistic which has been misused recently and that is the statistic that has been produced by Dr. Lyons of Trinity College where he has suggested that 5 per cent of the people of this State own 71 per cent of the wealth. Wealth ownership is a rather negative way of assessing the welfare of a community. What does matter is the relative expenditure of different sections of the community. Ultimately it does not matter who owns wealth, what does matter is who distributes it, how is it distributed and whether everybody has a fair amount of wealth in order to obtain for himself and his dependents a decent living. When people in this country laud the socialist governments of Scandinavia they seem to omit, perhaps through ignorance but I would on some occasions believe through deliberate intention to deceive, an essential truth of the Scandinavian countries and that is that they value this right to wealth and they value the incentive which mankind, from earliest days, because of his nature, gets from the right to possess wealth. What they do insist upon and what our society must insist upon and what our society is failing to do and what our political institutions are so far failing to do is to discharge the obligation of controlling wealth in such a way that nobody can acquire an improper amount of it and by so doing deprive others of sufficient wealth to give them an adequate living. By an adequate living I mean a right to all that this world has to offer in what is worthwhile and that includes not merely the essentials of food, shelter and clothing but also a right to an education and to equality of opportunity and a decent standard of living.
One very significant statement has been made by the British Prime Minister since the political initiatives were introduced last month which I think must be taken up by our Government, immediately challenged not merely on the plane of Anglo-Irish relations but, if necessary, before some international tribunal. Mr. Heath has gone on record in a statement which he made to some group of Young Conservatives as saying that he did not think it likely in the foreseeable future that the North of Ireland would in a plebiscite unite with the South because, he said, the level of the financial contribution from Britain was such that the people of the North of Ireland would not give up the subvention which they were getting from Britain. I regard this as a statement, an unabashed confession, by the British Prime Minister that the North of Ireland is today being bought by the deliberate subvention which is being paid for by British taxpayers, although most of them are unaware of it.
So let us not have a feeling of inferiority when we come to compare the amount which the State is spending upon social matters in the North and in the South. What is being spent on social matters in the North is not coming from within the North, it is coming because Britain has wrongly orientated her social, economic and military thinking and because she continues to support what she knows is insupportable. The payment of this massive subsidy, now running economically and socially at a rate of £160 million a year, is a significant factor in maintaining the will of some people in the North to stay apart from the South.
This matter, which is costing Britain in military involvement and more, over £30 million a year, which is costing us in the repercussions from the travail there anything in the region of £40 million to £50 million if you are to calculate not merely the loss of tourism but other disadvantages as well, is all caused by reason of this artificial subvention. One wonders whether or not it is ethical internationally for any entity to make such a financial contribution to another area, to maintain that area more in its grip than it would if it tried to enforce a military discipline upon it.
I do not think the British Government or the British people want, in fact, to impose a military discipline up on the North of Ireland. They do not want to retain it by force. They want, in fact, to get rid of it. It is high time they got their social and economic thinking correct. The way to do it is for our Government to make very effective representations direct to Britain and, we also believe, on a world plain, so that the world's conscience and Britain's conscience may be adequately disturbed in this matter so that the situation may be rectified.
Having said that, I also want to say that Ireland, and the North of Ireland in particular, will need that economic and social subvention for many years to come. So much harm has been done to the North of Ireland by these wrong policies that it will need the crutch to lean upon before it can walk again. What must be changed is the purpose for which the money is paid and it must be paid, not as Mr. Heath smugly boasted to the Young Conservatives recently, to keep people within the United Kingdom; it must be paid for the good of the people of the North of Ireland themselves and that can only be through a system of the government of Ireland by the Irish people which would give fair rights to all communities without discrimination and which would also ensure that the burden of supporting the North of Ireland at the level to which it has been accustomed would not fall on the South of Ireland which is blameless for the condition of affairs which exists there at present.
This is terribly relevant to our budgetary outlook because it is an essential part of the burden which we will have to undertake in order to bring happiness to the people of this island in the years that are ahead. But, let Britain, that did so much harm, perhaps not internationally, contribute her share. There are a very large number of public representatives in Britain who acknowledge this and who would much prefer to see Britain subsidising a united Ireland to the tune of £150 million a year for a decade or longer rather than have the openended commitment to an impossible situation, which it has at the present time. At present, the subvention which it gives on social and economic grounds may get the people to vote against their own interests in a plebiscite in the North of Ireland. Let the money be more productively used and let us not feel in any way inferior by urging Britain to make this social and economic subvention to the North. It would save her immediately, I believe, if it had the consequences which I believe it would have, embarrassment and expense in relation to military involvement and it would bring about a lasting cure to the stresses and strains in the communities in this island and in these islands on the western fringe of Europe.
Briefly I should like to return to a few specific matters in this year's budget. The Minister has increased the death duties exemption which formerly applied to estates of £5,000 to estates of £7,500. This is totally inadequate. The level of £5,000 was fixed in 1962, ten years ago, and now the Minister makes an increase of only 50 per cent to bring it up to £7,500. In the intervening ten years the price of house property has increased by 125 to 130 per cent. That is house property. What has been the increase in the value of agricultural land? It has increased enormously and is continuing to increase in anticipation of the EEC and is likely to increase again within the EEC. In many cases a different assessment of values applies to agricultural land, if it is Land Registry land but speaking within the domain of my own constituency I know that the slight alteration which has been made in estates exempted from estate duty is totally inadequate to meet the increase in property values.
Some of the newspapers from time to time publish what they call wills of persons and give the names and addresses of persons and set out the property they leave after them. I would urge quite sincerely that this practice cease. It is as unfair to give details in papers of the small estates left by some people as it would be to proceed to give details in newspapers of people's current incomes. It give a wrong sense of values to many people.
Many people, partly due to their family circumstances, sometimes due to their social background, do not acquire property during their lifetime. They do not save; they do not reinvest; but many of them spend as much, and indeed more than people who may acquire a home and thereby leave an estate which requires a grant of administration and processing through the Estate Duty Office.
In heaven's name, is a person today who dies leaving an estate of £10,000 a rich person? I think not. In most cases such an estate represents a house the market value of which may be £5,000 to £6,000 and that would not be a sumptuous house. It would represent, perhaps, an insurance policy of £2,000 or £2,500. It would represent furniture, a car and a few other bits and pieces. I have known of cases where people deemed others to be extremely wealthy and to be beyond need of assistance because they were seen to have their estates published in the newspapers. It is this kind of thing which leads to unnecessary discontent, to an unnecessary sense of deprivation by people who have not in fact saved.
A community is a healthier community if people are encouraged to save. I do not see any grounds for the lines of attack on private property which some people seem inclined to make in these modern days. Private property as such has no intrinsic value. There is no intrinsic right attaching to private property but there is an intrinsic right for an individual to save to keep his own property and if the person desires to keep it instead of spending it he is deserving of praise and not condemnation.
The attitude of the State, I am afraid, in recent times is such as to suggest the giving in to the noisy minority, most of whom have, perhaps, spending power far beyond what they require and darn few of them are disposed to spend it on any dependents because they do not have them. As a society we need to encourage people to save, to invest, to acquire a reasonable amount of property and as a society we must do what we significantly fail to do and that is, ensure an adequate distribution of property, universal equality of opportunity and adequate control of wealth so that nobody suffers because of improper and undue and unnecessary acquisition of excessive wealth by any particular people.
I hope that if there be now a relaxation of the purse strings the Government will give priority to the building of schools. I know schools are badly needed throughout Ireland and I know that Deputies in the different areas will be able to make their local cases. I want to make mine about Dublin Central.
It is a constituency of which a large part is in the southern and south western suburbs. I had the privilege to represent this area for many years with Deputy Lemass, the Parliamentary Secretary, who knows the area intimately. I know that his old area of Dublin south west suffers from the kind of problems that are now afflicting all of the suburbs of Dublin, areas in which new housing is being built, in which there are large numbers of young people and in which the number of available schools is totally and sinfully inadequate.
The population of Dublin is increasing on a massive scale and it is unfortunate that you have a kind of what I would term fire brigade relief being offered as a solution to the need for additional educational facilities, the kind of assistance the Leader of the Opposition referred to earlier today. It is not sufficient to be putting up mobile classrooms, temporary structures, glorified caravans, and calling them schools. We seem to be believing that the provision of them for a decade or 20 years is socially and morally justifiable. What do we do when we do that? We condemn at least one, if not two, generations of schoolchildren to be educated in buildings which would not have been acceptable 50 years ago, and we are also building up a massive need to replace these structures with potentially more expensive structures in a few decades.
We have an appalling accumulation of temporary schools in the Dublin area and throughout the country. If there is a desire now on the part of the State to release more money for capital works, then it should be done with speed and we should get many of the long-delayed schools under way. Even as the State has after years of delay given the green light and has promised capital in recent times, it has only done it in stages so that we often end up with the position that the estimated cost of the building multiplies by more than 70 or 80 per cent before a school is built. By this the State is multiplying the difficulties in the educational sphere and I would hope there would be a very rapid improvement. If our children are to be educated to the standards required and to which they are entitled and if the country is to have sufficient skills available to profit by the increased investment and expansion which will flow from the EEC, we will need to be a great deal more radical and courageous in our school-building programme.
Finally, I wish to say a few words on horticulture. I do not know why the Minister bothered to contribute a mere £100,000 to horticulture. Horticulture will suffer considerable competition in the EEC. It will suffer even greater difficulties if we stay outside the EEC and a once only grant of £100,000 to give benefits to some particular horticulturists is not the kind of assistance the industry needs. We have every reason to be proud that there are many people in the horticulture industry who are already competing in the EEC countries even with tariffs and barriers against them but there are also some who are suffering difficulties.
I have been at some loss to understand why the Minister for Finance has not made available to the horticulture industry remissions on oil and other fuels which are made available in some of the EEC countries. There has been a suggestion in Government sources that international obligations and pending responsibilities in the EEC would not permit of such remissions and incentives being given, but the EEC countries are doing this. I know there has been a complaint about Holland in respect of assistance they are giving. We think the Government should be more courageous in this field. It is one which provides considerable employment, which is going through temporary difficulties, but unless the aid is given now it will be impossible to resurrect the industry or the victims in the industry when the opportunities of the EEC come their way. I would, therefore, urge the Minister to take another look at the matter and give more substantial, significant and long-term assistance to this important industry if he can.