If the Minister will take it from me, let me assure him that we, too, recognise the delicacy of the situation so far as the railways are concerned. So far as the Ministry is concerned, I do not think that the report of the Railway Commission will be shelved. I fancy the report is haunting them by night as well as by day rather than that it is shelved. Now, we have always recognised the difficulty in which the Government is. Nobody has been more ready to make allowance for the Government than we on these benches here. If the times were normal and this Dáil were normal, you may take it we would be much more severe in our criticisms, and would take much greater pains in our attacks in certain directions upon the Government. But even the abnormality of the times is not, to some of us, sufficient excuse for all the things that are being done and all the things that are not being done. As I listened to the Minister speaking about the difficulty and the abnormality of the times and the particular task upon which the Government was engaged—the task of restoring order and orderly government throughout the country—it occurred to me again, as it occurred to us frequently within the last month or two, and particularly in the last week or two, that it might be well worth the Government's time to see if they could not devise some means of using what I may call the ordinary governmental functions of Governments different from those functions which they are at present required to carry out in the conduct of the war. I think, if we had some kind of separation of functions like that, perhaps even the war might get a chance of being carried on better, not to speak about the better carrying on of the ordinary civil functions of the Government of the country. I think if the Government to any extent devoted less of their attention to the military—I am not making a concrete suggestion upon that because I am a little out of order—but if they consider that aspect of things, perhaps it would be better. The Minister says a Commission has been set up. I hope his last reference to it more accurately describes what it is going to do than his first reference; but while that Commission is being set up, and pursuing all the investigations he has been speaking about, he knows perfectly well there will be people dying who are now on the verge of starvation, and he knows that there are people now on the verge of starvation. I came across a case last night of two such people, both of them adults, but one considerably up in years, and they have got to exist on about 22s. a week, for the two of them. That cannot go on for very long, and while this Commission is probing, rooting and investigating the whole situation is getting worse, and worse. Has the Government in the meanwhile anything at all to offer to the unemployed beyond the Unemployment Insurance? Can it do anything in the way of making a stop-gap. I notice that the British Government and the Belfast Government are making some little effort in this direction. I think the effort is altogether insufficient, but they are making a little effort. There is something that they define as loans granted to meet not the whole situation that has been created by the tremendous unemployment, but temporarily to bring in to employment certain people not presently in employment, and will it be only until such time as this Commission places its investigations before the Ministry that any scheme to meet the unemployment existing can be carried out by legislation? Now, in this amendment we are making objection that the Government does not apparently contemplate legislation on these things. In the Government's programme here is laid down nine or ten measures that are to be proposed. I heard Deputy Cole say yesterday evening that one would think from Deputy Johnson's speech that the thirty or forty millions we have passed were going to be spent upon administration and not on reconstruction. Now, if the Deputy will look over the list of legislation specified he will find that 9/10ths of it is administration and war legislation of one kind or another. I agree that in order that you may have reconstruction you will have to complete some kind of framework first, and that a good deal of money will have to be spent upon that. The Government did not meet fairly and squarely, with few exceptions, the case put up from these benches. Deputy Dolan referred to the Land Purchase Act which is to be brought in. Of course Deputy Dolan knows that the Land Purchase Act is not an Act that is going to be the legislative fruit of the Agricultural and Land Commission presently sitting. He knows that it is really an Act intended to complete the British Land Purchase Acts passed for Ireland. He said that it would bring a certain measure of land to certain landless people and small farming people in the West. Quite true, and in other places too, but the great bulk of the unemployment is not in the West, and it is not going to be remedied to any extent at all by the Land Purchase Act, and Deputy Dolan knows that very well. I was glad to observe that the Minister, with that frankness which is characteristic of him, did not pretend that this Government is only in office for a week as other Deputies are apt to do. We used to hear the sing-song that this or that cannot be done before the 6th December. We now hear a number of Deputies with a variation of that sing-song that it is too near the 6th December and that the Government has only been established for a week and that they should get a chance of seeing where they are. Deputy Wilson yesterday evening made a speech after which I think we should invite him to come over and sit on these Benches, because he put all our case when he said, and I presume he had authority for the statement, that if all the people of Ireland or of the twenty-six Counties were employed for three weeks in the production of textiles they would produce as much textiles as the people of Ireland required, and that if they were engaged for another period of, I do not know how many weeks, in agricultural production, they would produce all the agricultural produce necessary for the people of Ireland, and so on through the gamut, if engaged in certain production or distribution. They would be able to produce enough for the whole population in Ireland, but in spite of that there are people who cannot get enough textiles or agricultural products or any other things produced in Ireland. Why? Deputy Wilson did not answer, because he knows why. Tinkering with those things will not solve these things at all, and we know that the root of the whole trouble is the system. Deputy Wilson says, "Do certain things in three weeks, and certain other things in three months." When you have got all those products, you mismanage the whole distribution of them. They are distributed in such a way that some people have got too much of them and other people have got too little; and while people are suffering and while stomachs are empty in Ireland, some of those products are shipped away to other countries. There is something rotten in the state of Ireland there. The whole system is wrong, and it is the job and the duty of the rulers of the country to see that the system is so changed that those old evils which we suffered in the past are minimised now; and they can be minimised now if the job is gone about in the right way. Another Deputy seemed to take it as a grievance that we here, Labour Deputies, are desirous that the working people of Ireland should have higher wages than the working people of anywhere else. We do. We are not in the least ashamed of the desire. To us the general interest is not what it seems to be to Deputy Milroy—a means of getting away from the particular needs of individuals. We are concerned with the good and decent living of the individual, because to us his general interest is not an abstraction at all, and the community is not an abstraction at all. But this people, this Ireland, this community of ours is composed of a certain number of individuals, and when we talk about Ireland or the nation, or the people, we are talking about the men and women, the boys and girls, the whole manhood and womanhood of Ireland, and therefore we have got to consider the chances of the decent livelihood and the decent and honourable living of the men and women in this State. For that reason we have not been willing, and shall not be willing to agree that because people in Belfast or in England, or in France or in Germany, have had their wages and standard of living cut down and reduced, that therefore we here in Ireland must suffer the same reduction in our wages, standard of living, and so forth. We are not willing that that should be so. We would want the whole body of the Irish people, to use a Scotch phrase, rather "to have a good conceit of ourselves." That is one of the things that is wrong. Undoubtedly it is one part of the legacy of our years of slavery that the ordinary life in Ireland is not considered as highly as it ought to be considered. Now, we are not asking in this particular thing for higher wages. We are asking for employment; that those who live in Ireland should have the right to as decent a living as anybody else, should get a fair opportunity to live in Ireland and work in Ireland. The Minister is quite in agreement that the mere giving out of doles is not going to get you very far, but that is better than nothing. But there are people in Ireland who would give nothing, who would allow starvation, who say that in order that we may have profits a certain number of people must suffer. We are dead up against that. We on those benches may seem a bit remarkable to Deputy Dolan who was speaking for a class. I have no hesitation in speaking for the whole citizenship of Ireland, and we see that unless remedies are got for those things, and got soon, that the whole citizenship of Ireland is going to suffer, because you cannot have any part of the body politic suffering or diseased without that suffering and disease affecting the whole of the body politic. There was a certain untruth in the statement the Ministry put into the mouth of the Governor-General when he said that if it were not for civil war there would be much less unemployment in Ireland than in any other country. That is not true. It is true that the civil war led to an aggravation of unemployment, but there was unemployment, and growing unemployment, before the civil war at all, and this Dáil knows it, because some of us came up when the Second Dáil was wrangling over the Treaty, to warn the Second Dáil that the menace of unemployment was getting very serious indeed. Unemployment is not an Irish question alone, nor an English question alone. It is a question affecting most countries, but we in Ireland, with our good conceit of ourselves developed too much on the one side, think that the Irish nation is so good, so national, that we cannot see that the things affecting us are the same things as affect other people. In one respect our conceit is too great and too little in another. I hope the Minister will be able to reply that even for this "No Man's Land," this interval between the preparation of those big schemes and the necessary legislation, something is going to be done, even if it is only an increase, first of all in the amount of unemployment insurance, and secondly, an extension in the area over which the insurance may be paid. Deputy Wilson in running away, because it was nothing else, from one suggestion made by Deputy Johnson yesterday said that Deputy Johnson wanted the Government to issue scrip, and if that were done the same consequences would follow in Ireland as followed in Russia and Germany. They would not, because the state of Germany and Austria are not due to the things Deputy Wilson thinks or pretends to think they are due to; they are due to quite different causes altogether, and no Deputy supporting the Government has faced the proposition which Deputy Johnson made yesterday. Not a single one of them has attempted to understand what the proposal actually was. I hope some of the Ministers will face it and answer it. Deputies said yesterday that if you increase agriculture you would not get markets in this country. I submit it is the duty of the rulers in this country to devise ways and means for finding markets for the products of the country. While not in a good many things a protectionist at all I subscribe to Deputy Johnson's dictum that there should be certain measures taken to find markets in Ireland for certain Irish products which are going outside Ireland. Deputy Milroy, Deputy Cole, and other Deputies have been deprecating hasty and immature legislation. They were referring particularly to the reports of the Railway Commission. I am not going to go into the delicate position of the Railways at all, but I am going to remind those and other Deputies that there has been no haste or immaturity about the work of that Commission.
