There is something paradoxical in the fact that the Minister for Finance allocates at this juncture the sum of £300,000 for the relief of unemployment. It is paradoxical because of the fact that the President in his opening address this session told the Dáil, and through the Dáil the country, that we were in a position that practically no other country in Europe was in, that our credit was good, our prospects were good, that for us the sun shone, that every little cloud had a silver lining, and that the goose honks high. Two weeks after that the Minister for Finance proposes a grant of £300,000 to relieve unemployment and distress. Either the President, when making those statements regarding our prosperity, was a liar or a fool, or the Minister for Finance was giving something that was not required at all. I leave it between the President and the Minister to choose which is which. If the President was right in his statement that this country was a prosperous country, that everything should be viewed through rosy spectacles, then there should have been no necessity at all for the Minister to make this grant in order to relieve distress and unemployment. Since the Minister has persisted in allocating this grant, the only conclusion I can come to is that the Minister does not agree with the President that this is a country fit, for heroes to live in, and that this country should not be viewed through rosy spectacles. There is a division on the Government Front Bench.
The President, in making his speech here, said that they did not praise themselves. He said if there were any little defects in his Party or in his Government he could leave it to Fianna Fáil to find out and to point out those defects. He said: "We do not pose; everyone knows our imperfections and perfections, and if they do not know them the Party opposite takes the earliest and the greatest possible opportunity to show them what they are. But they always harp on the one string—imperfection." Why we harp on the one string is this: that where we see imperfection we point it out. If we attempted to point out perfection on the part of the Government we would certainly steal the thunder of some back benchers of the Government Party. We would steal the thunder, for example, of Deputy Sheehy, who comes along with a fine flow of sunburstry and tells the Government what great little fellows they are. He comes along and pats, figuratively speaking, the Minister for Finance on the back. He tells him what a grand little Minister he is. He says that the Minister, out of the generosity of his heart, has given the country £300,000 with which to relieve unemployment and distress.
Listening to Deputy Sheehy, I was a kind of muddled because I could not quite gather what status to give to the Minister. Deputy Sheehy thanked God for the fact that this country was not as other countries. He said that we had no earthquakes or famines or other things of that kind, and I was inclined to believe that the Minister for Finance had actually taken the part of some superhuman being and prevented earthquakes from visiting the Saorstát. In the next breath, when the Deputy told us that the Minister was giving this grant of £300,000 to relieve unemployment, I thought that the Minister must be some sort of magician, that he must have some kind of an Alf's button or magic carpet whereby at a word or the pressure of a button he could conjure up pounds and pounds ad infinitum in order to relieve the poor people of the Saorstát.
The President wonders why we point out their imperfections. We do it in order to preserve the equilibrium of that little microscopic speck of grey matter that I hope is contained in the cranium of each member of the Executive Council, seeing that they are subject to the fulsome flattery of the back benchers of Cumann na nGaedheal. Deputy Anthony referred to this particular grant and said it was dope. I disagree with Deputy Anthony in that. If that grant were dope it would have the effect of laying to sleep, if I may put it that way, all the pains and aches of all the unemployed and of all the destitute in the Free State. If it served the purpose of dope for the Saorstát, those people would then be like Tennyson's Lotus Eaters, not wanting to get out of the particular heaven created by that dope.
I characterise this particular grant not as dope for the whole body politic, but as a local anaesthetic applied to those particular people who were adherents and supporters of the Government. It has absolutely no effect, outside a particular clique or coterie who happen to support for the moment the Government in power. It was typical of the mentality of the front bench of the Government that the Minister for Industry and Commerce attacked Deputy Moore when this debate was on last Friday, and attempted to hold Deputy Moore responsible for the action, the ideas and the thoughts of some people who happen to employ Deputy Moore. I say that is a typical example of the mentality of the front bench of the Government. They have been in the habit, by those grants they have made for unemployment and for relief of distress, of doling out these moneys to particular partisans of the Government, and they have imagined that because they dole out this dope, if you like, or this local anaesthetic, every man who participates in it or in any of this grant should be bought heart and soul by the people who are doling out that particular money. That is what they have been accustomed to. All the Minister succeeded in doing, in his attack on Deputy Moore, was to establish the fact that the Deputy could not be bought heart and soul because he happened to be employed by any particular person or persons. That is what the Minister succeeded in doing in the case of Deputy Moore—that though he was employed by certain people he still preserved his own separate entity and still kept to himself his own mind, his own heart and his own soul. I would have expected more from the Minister than to try to establish that Deputy Moore should have taken part in anything of the nature of the Minister's own particular type of mind. Deputy Moore is not capable of it. That is all that the Minister succeeded in establishing to any right-minded person.
When we criticised this grant like the other grants that have been made periodically for the relief of distress and unemployment, we were accused of not rendering anything to the debate that should help towards solving for good and all the problem of unemployment. Time after time since I came into this House I have listened to suggestions that have been put forward here that would have made not for temporary alleviation of the distress in the Free State but for practically the permanent solution of the question of unemployment and destitution. In that time I have heard from the front benches the silliest arguments put up that were ever listened to in any responsible Parliament in the world against the ideas that came from these benches for the relief of distress and unemployment. Time after time Deputies on this side of the House have suggested means by which the people of this country would be enabled to get employment in their own country instead of having foreigners making products that were imported into this country and that should have been made at home by our own people. I have seen case after case put up to deal with unemployment. I have heard proposals for tariffs and prohibitions that would have enabled the people of this country to be employed in their own country. These suggestions if acted on would have cut down the adverse trade balance that is the béte noir of every Minister in this House.
Not alone is this the bugbear of Ministers, but it is the old-man-of-the-sea around the necks of the people of the country, and no responsible Minister can say that up to the present he has been able to find a definite solution of the problem. Time and time again I have seen cases put up whereby the people of this country could be supplied with commodities that we utilise in the Twenty-six Counties. I have heard replies from Ministers in connection with these matters that would not be accepted from a schoolboy. The Minister for Local Government, when faced with the fact that the Corporation of Glasgow were using Irish slates in their building schemes, said that the type of houses erected in Glasgow were different to those erected in Ireland, that they used smaller slates than we did, and that, in consequence, they were able to use the Killaloe slates, which the people of Ireland could not, hence the houses were roofed with tiles imported from Belgium. That is one instance of the single-track mind of the Government. They were not capable of changing the plan of the houses in order that the contractors might use our own slates, although the Corporation of Glasgow could do so. All that was necessary was a few lines drawn on paper to have men working in the Killaloe quarries, yet the Government were not capable of seeing that these few lines were drawn.
Time after time I put a question with reference to the use of our own stone from Mountcharles and elsewhere for building purposes in this country. But the Government cannot find time for these things. They must get stone from Portland, and then they come forward with their solution of the whole problem by providing £300,000 for the unemployed. They had to do the same last year, and still we find the population decreasing.
I heard Deputy Reynolds when these schemes were proposed last year asking for a grant for the construction of a road out of Arigna coalfields. Deputy Reynolds got up with his head in the air and, like an old war horse sniffing the battle from afar, he asked why is this road not built. The Minister calmly and coldly told Deputy Reynolds that road would not be built, and Deputy Reynolds, instead of rearing the head of the old war horse, bent his neck to the yoke of Cumann na nGaedheal. Developments might be carried out in the Arigna coalfields and permanent jobs provided for hundreds of men, but the Government had not the time nor the money to build the road through the Arigna fields. They told Deputy Reynolds that could not be done. It was a very small suggestion for the relief of unemployment, not of a temporary, but of a permanent nature.
There have been pleas for tariffs on flour and everything that might have tended permanently to the relief of unemployment, but the Government had no use for these except it suited themselves, and unless they had their fingers in some particular pie, and when it is a question of saving that by means of a tariff or something else.
The President may talk about the state of our credit. Deputies on the Cumann na nGaedheal Benches may eulogise the Minister for the steps ho has taken towards the relief of unemployment, but no matter how they eulogise him or talk about our prosperity the fact remains that they have to come along year after year and give grants for the relief of distress and unemployment, although when they go to banquets they tell distinguished visitors that this is a land flowing with milk and honey. If the Minister imagines he has done something for which he should be clapped on the back by giving this grant I hope he has been disillusioned before this. If he has not been I would like to point out now that, so far as I and my Party are concerned, or indeed anybody else who has any idea at all in regard to the country, that the Minister is not merely not entitled to a pat on the back, but is deserving of condemnation along with the rest of the Ministers for having made the present state of affairs possible.
Although we may owe very little money, and have natural resources to keep over and above twice our population, although we have withstood time and trouble and tests for 750 years, and even although the President and his colleagues have tried to beat the country to its knees, still the country's head may be bloody, but it is not bowed. We are not pessimists, nor dismal Jimmies, nor Weary Willies, nor anything like that. We know the resources of the country and what can be done with them, if we had the proper people to do it. It is the greatest test of optimism that we can say the country is still alive after eight years of administration, of Cumann na nGaedheal. We are a great country. If we were not, we would not be alive at all; we have good resources, and we have pointed, out how those resources might be used.
Time after time it has been pointed out in this House how we could make the most of our opportunities; how we could make the most of the resources that he to our hands, but Ministers have, after eight years, in spite of the nice things they say at the different fine parties they have attended, to grant £300,000 for the relief of distress and unemployment in the Free State. The President and Ministers can take it from me that every distinguished visitor that comes to the country knows perfectly well, in spite of the banquets, in spite of all the fine feeds that have been prepared for them, that this country is not as the President would have us believe, and the very fact that they have to reduce the representation because the population has decreased, and that they have had to come along repeatedly, year after year, with their grant for the relief of unemployment, is sufficient condemnation of the administration of Cumann na nGaedheal.
