As the House will remember, we were engaged somewhat broadly in discussing the reduction by £1,000,000 of a sum of £7,898,061 and we had got so far, at any rate, as to the examination of the reasons put forward, and the history of the reasons put forward by certain interests in this House in favour of continuing expenditure upon a huge scale Though I believe, without doubt, that the expenditure, which is now being taken for the purposes to which it is now being put, is extravagant and is above the capacity of this State continuously to bear, and though I desire to see, and I believe it is possible that we should see, a very considerable and significant reduction in that sum, I do not for one single moment stand for the reduction of expenditure upon productive work below the highest price which we can, looking broadly at the matter, see our way to pay. The difficulty is that we have huge establishment charges and relatively small productive charges.
I would take, merely as an example, a Ministry in which I am very sympathetically interested, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. I have been through the figures and I find that the salaries for which that Department is responsible amount to about £215,500— salaries and bonus. When you contemplate a figure of that kind and contemplate the amount of obvious result which we are getting, or not getting. from that it seems to be an outrageous sum. I have been through that, merely as a sample Vote, to see whether I could separate in some form the reproductive or primarily productive or development expenditure from expenditure on enforcement and other statutory work, or in other words, development expenditure as distinct from overhead charges. Giving the largest and most liberal allowance, including portion of the expenditure on Foreign Affairs in London, New York and Paris, I cannot make at the highest estimate more than £25,000 of that £215,000 which is allocated to development work. If those figures are correct, it puts in somewhat better perspective, from the point of view of the Minister for Trade and Commerce, the activities of his Department, but it seems amazing that so small a proportion should be devoted to primarily productive work by that department and, probably, nearly nine times as much to overhead charges of one kind or another.
I want to see the proportion between overhead and development expenses in every Ministry in the State increased. If we are to save at all, we ought to save upon enforcement and statutory work and upon what I call the molluscs. This Department is practically new in the sense that I do not think it took over many of the old staff. It had to start work again and build from a new basis and it has not had the time nor, I think, the intention to employ unnecessary, supernumerary people, but there is no question that the amount of development work being done by it is quite inadequate for the necessities of this State. As you know, a few years ago this House entered on a system of what was called experimental tariffs. Those of us who have been used to making experiments, for one purpose or another, have one very definite outlook upon experiments, namely, that we shall carefully and in orderly manner fully record the results and reason from the implications of such experiments. You have had these tariffs now in operation, some of them for quite a few years and some, I think, like the boot and other tariffs, extending over a considerable area of industrial effort. When I went to the Ministry of Trade and Commerce and asked for particulars which would enable me, as a Deputy of this House and as one eagerly anxious to get the truth on economic matters, for the recorded results of that experiment, I found that there were practically no such results available. I also found that there was practically no machinery in existence to get them, even when they were asked for, and though the Ministry of Trade and Commerce did, with great courtesy and great kindness, their best to give such information as was at their disposal, in relation to no single tariff were we in a position to get the information upon which, judged merely as an experiment and for the purposes of information, could we have founded sound conclusions as to the correctness or incorrectness of the particular policy adopted in that case. To the extent to which they were enabled to make that experiment or begin to report the results of that experiment, practically new machinery had to be set up, and set up, I believe, at the cost of putting upon the skeleton organisation for development work, work for which they were not then properly equipped. In relation to industry and commerce it is essential that there should be the most careful, the most critical, and the most open examination of the whole of the facts, the most intimate facts, surrounding some particular tariffs in order that we may get some sound information. That has not been done.
If it has not been done because the Ministry of Trade and Commerce has not tried to get a proper staff for that purpose, if it has not been done because the Ministry of Trade and Commerce has not transferred as much as or more than it has from enforcement and overhead charges to development charges, then the fault is very definitely at the door of the Ministry of Trade and Commerce. We ought to be able to know now from their records, from their experiments and their investigation what exactly is occurring in relation to the particular tariffs with which we are concerned. That we apparently are not able to do.
I, for one, am not moving a reduction of this Vote in the direction of reducing development work on industry and commerce. I find that that Department is loaded with a whole lot of things which might just as well be put somewhere else. In this £215,000, for which they are responsible in one way or another, is included the Statistics Branch which, in my opinion, is doing excellent work and which is certainly under a very competent man, but a very small proportion of that wages and salaries cost is really and properly attributable to industry and commerce. For instance, we had a very remarkable publication, a credit to that Department and a credit to the man who is personally responsible for it—the Report on Agricultural Statistics. The Minister for Lands and Agriculture might very well take responsibility for costs of that kind. I think that one of the things that we might look for is a better segregation of the charges which are laid down here and in the estimate, so that we may know how much of the revenue which is expended by the State is rightly attributable to the development of manufacturing industry and how much to the development of agriculture.
I am now going to take up some of the points which came to the surface in the debate. Honestly one feels, merely looking over the notes, that we must have covered a very considerable amount of ground. Deputy Cooper wanted to know if we want to repudiate something. Does he want to repudiate the Wigg and Cochrane decision? He wanted to know did we want the British to continue to collect certain funds and hand them over to us. We most certainly do not want this House to collect certain funds and hand them over to the British. If this House did not include in its estimates a Department for the purpose of collecting revenue from this State which it does not owe, to be handed over to those who have no right to it, there would not be the necessity to move the Vote which we now are moving here. He told us that the Secret Service Vote was small. Is the Secret Service Vote small? Where does the Secret Service end and where does the patronage Vote commence? That we would ascertain if some independent professional authority went through a Department, say like the Post Office or some other Department, and segregated out definitely every man who is doing his work, set down exactly what he was doing and what the doing of it was worth and set down on the other side the patronage and the merely unemployment relief bodies which undoubtedly have accumulated in some of those Departments. Deputy O'Connell said that there is no case for a reduction. I was down in Achill the other day and I heard them laughing when I was nearly a mile away——