I move:—
"That it is expedient to amend the law relating to customs and inland revenue (including excise) and to make further provision in connection with finance."
I do not intend to take up a great deal of time in moving this general resolution, the purpose of which is to have the Budget as a whole, and all the questions arising in connection with it and surrounding it, debated. I would like to refer again to a matter on which I interrupted Deputy Lemass, I think, yesterday. The Deputy was comparing the 20,600 civil servants in the Saorstát with 61,000 in Great Britain. The British figure that is comparable with the 20,600 is 296,825. The figure of 61,000 which was quoted by the Deputy as being the British figure did not contain any Post Office employees at all. It did not contain any revenue employees or any civil servants employed in connection with the War Office or the Admiralty, so that the conclusions people would be inclined to draw when these figures were used can hardly be justified. I do not want to comment on the proceedings or any promises made or policy announced in another Parliament. But, with reference to the plan for reduction of staff announced in the British Parliament, I would like to read an extract in reference to the matter from a British White Paper which has just been issued and come to hand. It sets out the reductions expected to be made within the next five years, and it says:
The whole programme of reduction will only prove possible in so far as departmental estimates are not varied by new legislation or important decisions of policy entailing considerable increases of staff, and provided that the Ministry of Labour in particular is entitled to assume that for the purpose of fixing the numbers of the employment department during the next five years trade will become good.
So that there are certain qualifications surrounding that programme of reduction. I would like to point out to Deputies who insist that it is always possible to continue services that they desire to have continued and to reduce the cost of them, that, as a matter of fact, all sorts of things have been done, and had to be done since the setting up of the Saorstát. They involved very substantial increases of staff. The mere setting up of a customs entity involved an additional staff. The new protective duties have also involved an additional staff. It was very much easier to collect the smaller number of taxes which were in existence before any protective duties were imposed and to administer them than to administer a great number of protective duties some of which bring in comparatively little revenue. For instance, the furniture tax brings in little revenue, and the confectionery tax is beginning to bring in but little revenue. Others show a decline in revenue in a greater or lesser degree, but even when a small amount of income is yielded by protective duty a large staff is required. We are continually asked to do more forestry. That, of course, is only a partially economic work. The view taken by those most competent to judge in regard to afforestation is that if we could borrow money at 3 per cent. forestry would be remunerative, but as we cannot, it means that we must have free grants which will not be recoverable for the purpose of carrying on forestry. Yet there are wide demands that more forestry and drainage works should be carried out. The number of drainage schemes that can be economically carried out, and that will benefit the land to anything like the cost of carrying them out, is comparatively small. We have a great many demands for expediting land division. The Land Commission is a costly and a big department which involves a great deal of expenditure. If we had not the 1923 Land Act the Land Commission would be a very small department, and the numbers of staff and expenditure required would not be a very serious matter.
We have done a good deal in the way of housing, and we have a demand for more houses, and more are required; but you cannot do more in the matter of housing without involving increased staffs all along the line. We have reinaugurated the system of loans for the improvement of agricultural holdings, for the erection of hay barns, the building of farm offices, and for the thorough drainage of land, fencing, and all that sort of thing, which involve charges of administration in the head office and inspection and a loss of interest, for the whole cost cannot be recovered. Then there have been agricultural services, some of which have been the result of Acts passed in this House. Others have been the extension of existing services. Take cow-testing, which is a most remunerative one to the community, the expenditure there is increasing year by year, and is still growing. You cannot have that, or any other service like it, without an increase in the cost. Other things that have swollen the expenditure are the necessary costs of the repaying of compensation and the litigation involved in the valuing and inspection, and the actual checking of accounts and so forth. All that has involved an increase of staff. Then, again, the restoration of the buildings burned in Dublin and of the police barracks throughout the country involved an increase of staff and expenditure. The expenditure in connection with roads out of the Roads Fund is included, but that is new. The Road Fund, I think, was just in existence in 1914. The amount involved was very small at that time, but it has grown to be a considerable sum. There is now an expenditure on roads far and away beyond what it was in 1914, and the roads are there for it. If you want to have roads they must be paid for. Then we have had new services just commencing, like the Patents Office, which involve an increase in our total expenditure. The Railways Tribunal and the Tariff Commission also involve an increase.
In connection with education, there has been a considerable increase in grants for secondary education. An incremental scale has been provided for secondary teachers, and we are committed to a scale of pensions for them. I think that is necessary if we are to get the right material to go in to secondary teaching and to remain in. It cannot be avoided. We are pressed for pensions for certain classes of teachers in national schools who ought to be entitled to pensions. For the class of junior assistant mistresses I think there is a strong case for pensions, and there is a much stronger case for teachers in convent schools who are not now entitled to pensions. We have passed a School Attendance Act which has involved increased costs generally in education, and has done away with certain possibilities of economy, or reductions of numbers in regard to the Civic Guards. The enforcement of that Act, which was necessary, has thrown a great deal of work on the police. I believe in most stations it takes very nearly the whole time of a Guard to look after the enforcement of the School Attendance Act. Possibly, if the enforcement is carried on for a period of time certain changes in public habits and outlook will enable the enforcement to be carried out more cheaply, but the immediate result is a great increase. We have founded in University College, Dublin, a faculty in general agriculture, and in University College, Cork, a faculty in dairying science, the cost of which is considerable. That work, with the expenditure involved, is necessary.
We have increased the annual endowments to the colleges for their general work, and that again was necessary, for they were in a state approaching bankruptcy before the changes were made. We have started preparatory colleges, which were necessary to give us in the future national teachers with a command of Irish and able to educate through Irish. That is desirable, and there again costs were involved. Probably something will have to be done in connection with technical education. However poor the country is there is this much certain, that while we may scrape and pare here and there, in connection with education any cutting down in education work will be ruinous to the country. The real difficulty is, as somebody has said, that what was wrong with this country during the British occupation was not half so much over-taxation as under-spending—not so much that too much money was taken but that things were not done for the people with the money taken from them, and consequently new services had to be initiated since we took over. The problem is one of what services we must have; and the other, of the services we can have and do without, and which of them are worth paying for and having. You cannot possibly have services without paying for them. It has been suggested we should spend money on productive work and lessen our expenditure on enforcement. I do not think we can do it so simply as that. If you have a law and there is some requirement on the public, the law ought to be enforced and the requirements insisted on, and you should not have the position where you have a multitude of requirements that some of the best people—the people with a conscience—will obey while others will have the advantage of evading by a sort of social blacklegging. I believe that if we do lay down any law or requirement we ought to see that it is carried out, and if we feel that we cannot afford to carry it out then we ought to repeal it and require something less that we will get without the enforcement. But I do not see that we can simply shut down enforcement and let the laws stand—let those who like obey them and those who like to slip out, slip out. So that we come back to policy at every stage in connection with this whole matter.
Even in the matter of enforcement we have been asked for more. Some of the recent Agricultural Acts, and the most beneficial of them, are simply ordinances which must be enforced. The Live Stock Breeding Act is for the rejection of certain bulls for stud purposes. The Eggs Act prescribed conditions with regard to the export, packing and dealing with eggs. The Dairy Produce Act is the same sort of thing. Then we come to other Acts—I do not know whether Deputies had them in mind in speaking about this—like the National Health Insurance Act. I know that Act is unpopular in a great part of the country, but I think it is a most useful and beneficial Act. But it should be either enforced or it should be abandoned or modified and made into a voluntary Act. I could go over a great number of items of that sort.
If there is a serious disposition to cut down expenditure, we might find some Acts that could be abandoned, and some other requirements that we can say we will no longer insist on, but I do not think that the number will be found to be so very large. In a great many cases it would be found that failure to enforce requirements that exist at present would result in certain confusion and loss. On the other hand, I turn for a moment to the question of the system that we have inherited. We have inherited certain things which are perhaps not as we would have made them, if they had been made in this country in the first instance, but to change them would be very difficult and probably a costly matter. For instance, I do not know that we would have adopted all this system, with its multiplicity of approved societies, for National Health Insurance. We might have insisted on a single society. I do not think we would have stood for direct administration by the State, because that creates a lot of difficulties and means a lot of waste of Parliamentary time and all that, but we might have insisted upon one society. We have a large number of existing societies. If we abolish them it will be found that pressure will be brought to bear on Deputies, with all that that will mean, and compensation will be claimed for the abolition of vested interests of various sorts. In the long run the cost of the change, unless we were to spread it over a great period of years, would be such as to rob us of most of the benefit of making the change. That applies to a great number of other things. If the British, for instance, had not extended the postal system in the way it was extended, it might be that we would not have given all the facilities that are now in existence. But when a service has been given, it is very difficult to withdraw, and it is doubtful if it is right to withdraw it, because the withdrawal of such things has a certain effect on the mind of the country. It prevents the idea of progress, advancement and improvement taking root and grip. It is extremely difficult to effect economies once a system has been brought into being.
Then there is the old theory advanced —that what is being done could be done by fewer people. In my opinion, that view is entirely without foundation. As I said last night, nobody can say when you have a huge organisation that there is nobody slacking anywhere. You cannot say that everything is absolutely perfect, and that there is no flaw and nothing wrong anywhere. That will happen where you have a big commercial undertaking or governmental machine. You cannot just tune up a huge machine and keep it right and supervised in the way that some very small concerns might be. But I do say that, on the whole, there is very hard and honest work done by the mass of the Civil Service. Of the civil ser- vants whose work Ministers see most of—those at the top—there are men who are almost killing themselves with work. It would not be possible to get harder, more zealous, or more disinterested work done by any body of men. Among the men who do that work themselves, and who are perhaps better able to see into the machine than Ministers, who are occupied with political matters and have pre-occupations of various sorts, there could be no such thing as conspiracy to allow slacking, inefficiency and waste of public money by the people under them.
I pointed out once in connection with the Civil Service, when there were attacks on the Government and statements that the Government were sheltering them, that we inherited these people—that they were nothing to us. As far as the big body of them are concerned, they were British civil servants who were handed over and were absolutely nothing to us. We have no reason for allowing them to "go easy" or for covering up their faults. When dealing with anybody who will look at the matter rationally, I think that is the answer to that. The real point is this: that while from time to time there may be little adjustments and changes effected, you cannot get the work that is at present being performed done any cheaper than it is. If we want to reduce the cost of public administration and to be in a position to reduce taxation, we have to make up our minds what we will scrap or what we will slow down. When we have considered each item that might possibly be scrapped, we have then to consider what will be the economic effect of scrapping it. I know certain matters will be raised which do not involve great sums, taken altogether, and which are really political questions. They are matters that might be dealt with separately, because they only prevent any debate on economy or retrenchment in expenditure from having the appearance of reality. I refer to questions such as the Seanad, the Governor- General's establishment, and one or two others. When they are brought in we cannot have any real debate, because they are all——