I am asking the Deputy to give an instance where any trade union prevents an employer from paying 1d. or 2d. or 3d. an hour more to the better workman. It is all nonsense to suggest that there is an obstacle to employers paying higher wages to the more efficient workman. Although he did not say it, I think the Deputy had in mind that there should be a greater output when good wages are paid. He argued differently in the past from his argument to-day. His argument in the past was that he did not object to high wages provided that a high output followed the high wages. There again we are faced with the problem that has its roots deeply in the social and industrial system. I repeat, what I have said many times, that the way to solve that problem, not in a month or two months or even six months, is to give security to the workman in employment, to ensure him permanence of employment, and then you can find a way out of these difficulties which are alleged to impede production. I say that we ought to endeavour to solve this problem by way of security of employment for the landless men. You have allegations about rates of wages in Dublin, but we are apt—too many of us, I fear, and Deputy Good amongst the number—to think only in terms of Dublin city. Let us take a town some miles away, the town of Tipperary, where the rate of wages is much less than in Dublin, where the rate of wages for labourers is only 11d. per hour.
There were requests for tenders for four-roomed houses. The lowest tender was £570, and there was a difference of £100 per house in the tenders. Was that the fault of the rate of wages paid to the labourers? Are the labourers responsible for the difference between £570 and £670? Similarly, when you talk about strikes, as Deputy Corish pointed out, Dublin is only one part of this country, and the unemployment problem prevails all over. It is not merely a Dublin problem. Before the strikes that have been quoted here appeared, unemployment prevailed in Dublin. In those other parts of the country where there has been no strikes, no fear of strikes, no risk of strikes, unemployment is prevalent.
I regret that there have been strikes in Dublin city, and that strikes have impeded production, and therefore, impeded employment. I wonder whether those who have spoken on these matters, and, by bringing in this question, have tried to shield the Government from any responsibility for a solution of the problem, or even from tackling the problem with a view to its solution, would rather that there should have been a free hand in these strikes and that every demand should have been acceded to.
The Deputies who have spoken think production would have been accelerated or that there would have been less industrial trouble. I suggest that the very fact that that free hand was not given has saved the country, perhaps, from a great deal more trouble than it has suffered. If some Deputies here had their way, or if the solution for the prevention of those stoppages of work, had been in the way they seemed to indicate, the situation would not be quite as easy as it is to-day and the danger to the country would have been multiplied many times.
We have been challenged to make constructive proposals. It is quite true that we are justified in refusing to accept any challenge of that kind until we are in a position to avail ourselves of all the material information, to know whether, for instance, the Government have in their archives any schedules of the productive capacity of the mills and the factories of the country. We do not know, for instance, how many firms are capable of producing cloth, or their capacity for turning out cloth or any other requirements. We do not know whether, for instance, the Government is in a position to say what the capacity for turning out material for house building is. I assume that in the course of their inquiries they have obtained complete detailed knowledge of the productive capacity of the mills and the factories and the workshops of this country. If they have not, then they have failed to begin the consideration of this problem.
But I take the view, academic as it will be charged against me, that we have a duty imposed upon us as a Parliament, which has given authority to an Executive Council, to say to willing workmen: "We will not allow you to go hungry where there is food to be obtained; we will demand that you will give services for every pound of food you eat, and we will utilise the resources of the country, agricultural and industrial, to provide the needs of the country; having accepted that as a theoretical proposition we will immediately set out and work to adjust means to requirements." I speak of 50,000 men and women unemployed— the population of a county—and I ask the House to think of the problem in these terms. You have 50,000 people in danger of want, of moral deterioration, of physical deterioration, and possibly hunger. If you thought of that population, huddled together in one county, brought into that state of want by the action of a foreign enemy, you would say that all the resources of the country must be made available to save them. Simply because they are dispersed over twenty-six counties, our duty to save them is not lessened. I again say, what I said two or three times in this House, that if you had the problem of a foreign enemy or an internal enemy driving the population of a county into that state you would, at the risk of the credit of the country, commander, you would mobilise all your resources, and you would save those people. I say we have got to do the same thing now, bearing in mind that instead of leaving that 50,000 people helpless and idle, you can use them for production and the repayment of the things they consume in the time of their need, when you were succouring them.
The practical application of this argument will prove difficult, just as the practical application of the case for national defence has proved difficult in countries that have been attacked by internal or external enemies, to those whose minds have been devoted to the solution of the problem. I say we have got to tackle this problem just as if we felt it was as serious as the problem of national defence.
One Deputy said—he made a slip, I think—that the problem of unemployment was serious in every country. Whatever may have been the reasons for the last two or three years, two countries in Europe have been very free from this problem. I refer to Belgium and France. They have had their devastated areas, as we have had. They received, undoubtedly, a certain quantity of reparations in the form of materials, but that has not been sufficient to solve their problem of unemployment, at least to save them from the problem of unemployment, and I suggest that it is very well worth the while of the Ministry to make a very serious inquiry into how it has come about that France and Belgium have been able to avoid unemployment during these last two or three years, when other countries have been suffering from it. France is predominantly an agricultural country, as Ireland is predominantly a country of small proprietors. But I do not think that that is the fact that differentiates it from others. I suggest that it is very well worth while considering how far the utilisation of credit resources have been able to solve the problem there. It is alleged, of course, that they are only staving it off. That may be true, but I would prefer, at any rate, to save the people for one year, even if I felt that there was a grave risk of making them hungry the year after. I think unemployment has been staved off in France because of the way they have issued national credit.
While I do not know anything of the evidence Deputy Davin may have had for his statement regarding the banks, I believe that if the banking institutions have failed to ensure the easy exchange of commodities in Ireland, have failed to ensure that the produce of the community shall reach the consumers by easy means, then the banking institutions have proved their inefficiency as an instrument of exchange, and that we ought not to think of the banking system or the industrial system as something absolutely fixed and irrevocable, whether it fails or succeeds. But we should think of these as systems which have proved their worth and their suitability for survival by their success. And when they have failed to fulfil the functions for which they are purporting to exist, they should be changed. I am not dogmatic on that question. I admit that I do not know sufficient of the workings of banking systems and credit to be able to be very certain of my ground when speaking on that subject. It may be that I know as much as many people who speak on that subject, but that is not a great deal. I believe, nevertheless, that when we realise that the problem is how to get food grown from the land of Ireland into the hands and the mouths of the consumers in this country, that if we cannot get an existing instrument to facilitate that process, we have to make one. I believe that it is not outside the functions of the State to facilitate that process by whatever means it may find desirable, but the process must be facilitated and we must find the means of keeping people alive and of giving them employment, so that they may repay that which they are bound to consume if they are to be kept alive.
I ask the Dáil to believe and to feel that this is an insistent problem that brooks no delay in dealing with it; that there is not evidence before us that the Government has taken the matter up with the amount of earnestness that it should have taken it up, and that it has failed to realise the enormity of the danger that we are running. I think that the Government should be prepared to take the problem into account, as it would take a problem of national defence, and not be bound by custom, not be bound by the ordinary processes of trade when the ordinary processes of trade have failed, but go directly to the solution and say that when men are willing to work they shall be provided with the opportunities. In any case, if we fail to provide them with the opportunity to work and earn their livelihood, they shall be fed.
I do not shrink from the proposition that, just as you would enroll an army to take up arms in defence, it may be that we ought to enroll an army to undertake national works and, instead of having an army for destruction, we would have an army for construction. I think that if there is no other way of dealing with this problem; if you cannot stimulate the ordinary private employer or property owner to fulfil his trust by the undertaking of industrial operations, then we have to go beyond the private employer and property owner and say we must tackle this problem from the point of view of the community and by means of the institutions which the community has set up. But, however we do it, we ought not to run the risk of allowing ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand men to go hungry.
