For the first time in my experience of listening to the ex-Minister for Industry and Commerce I have to confess that he has wearied me. I certainly do not say that in any terms of prejudice, because he knows, and this House knows, that I have on many occasions paid very willing tribute to the ability and interest of his debating. But it must have been entirely obvious to the House that long before the ex-Minister did stop, he had completely exhausted himself and was merely engaged in some sort of time wasting, which, frankly, I do not understand, having regard to the period of time which he would have had to occupy if he were to do any good in that process from a merely Party point of view. It has been stated, and I agree with it, that consistency is the virtue of little minds. Looking back myself, as most of us do, upon the things that we have done and said in relation to Irish economics and Irish political and economic development for the last seven years, I have had to recognise with considerable trepidation that not merely have I said things that were very hard and very controversial, but that now, looking back on them, I am not able to alter, as far as I know, by a syllable or by an intonation, what I have said.
The ex-Minister has been good enough and foolish enough to quote certain passages in relation to taxation which I, as an ordinary Deputy in this House, and outside this House as a mere person interested in the economic development of the country, have used. I have nothing to withdraw, nothing to extenuate, nothing to apologise for. Every word that I have said, I have said when it was unpopular. I repeat it now when it may not seem, to certain standards of intelligence, good tactics. The ex-Minister has put up to-day, in quoting from us, in quoting from the Dean of the Faculty of Commerce in Cork, who most certainly knows more about economics than he does, a case against income tax. According to him, income tax is one of these things which are a burden upon industry. It is. According to him, quoting with appreciation, money which is taken out of an industry in the form of taxation, which could have been used in the development of that industry, is a tax not upon the proprietor of that industry, but upon the future of those who work in it. If the Deputy so believes, if he is not merely using those phrases for the purpose of Party attack, if he is not merely using this great occasion of the Budget debate of this State for narrow little debating points, why did he not say it when we were fighting the no income tax campaign? Why, if he believed that in relation to income tax, did his Government extract from industry in the last ten years forty or fifty millions of that kind of money? If he believed that, why did he turn on his torturers to extract from Irish businesses in the form of back taxation those reserves upon which those businesses were existing, and with the withdrawal of which every Deputy knows that business after business has crumbled. I am prepared to give it to him as a debating matter against me if he likes. That does not matter. But, if he believed what he said, how can he reconcile his conduct in the matter? Forty or fifty million pounds of income taxation has, by that Government, been taken from the people, and they have so defined with approval the incidence of that tax. The Deputy is perfectly right. That tax is a burden upon industry, and in the attack which the Deputy has made he has indicted the whole policy of his own Government in relation to the methods by which they have extracted the tax.
Let us take the second point. These are the only two points in the whole of the wordy one-and-three-quarter hours address which we listened to. The second point he puts up is that on Fianna Fáil platforms it was declared that a saving of two million pounds could be made in the cost of the public services of this country without interfering with their efficiency or creating hardship. That is his statement. If that is put forward merely as a debating point against Fianna Fáil let them have it. If we are here to score debating points, let him say that on certain platforms such-and-such things were said. But how far does that carry him? Not an inch. Here is the debating point put in the only form in which it can fairly be put—and I am anxious to give the Deputy every possible credit and value that he can get from it as a debating point—here is the debating point expanded: That Fianna Fáil having declared that the services of this country could be dealt with by an expenditure of two million pounds less, have inside three or four months of their coming into office, not produced the actual plan by which they promised to reduce expenses by that amount. That is the whole basis of the thing, that we who are dealing with Estimates which have been framed by the late Government, that we who are dealing with machinery which we took over from them, that we who have to get down to the ordinary functions of Government, have not instantly provided in the form of a promise in this Budget, the economy of two million pounds which in fact we did state could be obtained, which in fact we do believe can be obtained, which in fact we do intend to obtain by proper organisation as and when the opportunity and the time can be given to it.
Now the debating point being removed what is the position of the Deputy in relation to these two millions? Is it suggested that because upon a political platform it was stated that this thing could be reduced by two millions, for that reason in this year we should reduce the actual amount of tax revenue by that amount? Is that the suggestion he is making? Let us see what that means as far as the Deputy is concerned. That is said on behalf of the ex-Ministry who have stated that the services could not be reduced by two millions, by one million or by any other such sum. They who would say it would be wrong so to reduce the total expenditure, are blaming us because we do not say in this Budget that we will do it. If it is a serious matter, if this is not merely a debating society, and if the effort is not to secure a debating point, are they going to take up the position of saying that they who believe that the taxed revenue cannot be reduced, say it is our obligation to do what they say it is wrong to attempt to do?
When you have dealt with these two points you have dealt with the whole of what the Deputy said. We had repetition, time after time, of the two million pounds. Time after time we had the story of the burden of income tax. He has been responsible for extracting income tax to the extent that I have stated, and he was responsible when a Minister for saying it would be wrong to do the thing which to-day he demands we shall do, and attempts to blame us for not doing.
I do not believe in income tax as a good thing, per se; I do not believe in taxation upon the necessaries of life as a good thing, per se; I do not believe in tariffs as a good thing, per se; I do not believe in policemen as a good thing, per se; I do not believe in armies as a good thing, per se; I do not believe in the compulsory notification of contagious diseases as a good thing, per se; because I do not believe in contagious diseases as a good thing, per se. All these things are part of the necessary evils of human life. All these are things which, in one degree or another, we have to face up to, and the consequence of which, in one degree or another, we have to mitigate in making the whole of the system of the enforcement services under which a community can live together. Tariffs, broadly speaking, ought to be the policeman, the national policeman, which will safeguard individual communities against the conscienceless exploitation of international trade. To the extent to which they are used for that purpose, they are necessary and right in themselves in so far that they so perform a proper function. There is no question at all about it, but tariffs, all over the world to-day, are being used for an entirely different purpose. They are being used for the purpose of smashing up, in organised Europe, and in the inter-relationship between two worlds, the whole of the channels of transport and inter-communication on which those highly organised communities live. They are being used, not as protection, not as a medicine, not as food; but they are being used as weapons; they are being used for the purpose of challenge. They are being used absolutely unintelligently for the purpose of driving the selfish interests of individual people.
In our country we have to use them for an entirely different purpose, and so far as we do use them for that entirely different purpose of self-protection they are right. The Deputy said we started a decade after other people. We start 700 years after other people. We start after 700 years of artificial interruption of the national development of our life. We start nearly 70 years after the industrial revolution which reorganised the face of Europe. We start from not merely scratch but a long way behind scratch. And no protection or instrument of protection which is in the possession or capacity of this or any other Government, whether it be that of fiscal protection in the form of tariffs, whether it be the protection of discriminatory taxation, or whether, above all, it is the protection of conscious national purpose permeating through the people, and energising and operating in every act of their practical economic life, there is no single weapon of that kind which in the actual emergency in which we stand in relation to our development and the development of other countries of the world, we are entitled to neglect.
And it is because in this Budget there is an attempt to use, to the extent to which they can use, at the present moment, these particular resources which they have at their disposal, that I commend this Budget. I speak as probably the most conservatively-minded man in this country in his outlook upon economics and it is as one so conservatively-minded, that I defend it. It is said we are taking from the community an immense amount of money. We are. We could pretend we were not. We could have borrowed. We could have put off to next year, or the year after, the burdens that we ought to bear this year. We could have done as the previous administration did, sell something that was loose and not tied down. I remember the first Budget speech of Deputy Blythe which I had the experience of hearing here. I described it as the Budget of a dishonest holder of an entailed estate. It was the Budget of a man who cut down the growing timber and sold it for firewood. It was the Budget of a man who had eaten somebody else's seed potatoes. It was the Budget of a man who had sold everything that he could lay his hands upon that belonged to his heirs, and sold it for his own interest. That has not been done here. The complaint is that it has not been done here.
The complaint is, to take a specific case, that the Minister for Finance, in a case where he could have got away with it—the £550,000 provided for local loans in which the House probably would have accorded him at least acquiescence in doing it—even to that degree, he would not default on his Budget. That is the complaint. The complaint is that he has been honest. "Oh," they said, "the £550,000 on local loans, you are getting it back." Here is the legitimate case that can be put for the Minister for Finance not doing the honest thing he has done. The £550,000 for local loans, why charge that up to taxation? Are you not getting it back? Are you not getting interest and sinking fund on it? Why cannot you charge that back to local loans? For the simple reason that every year we are pouring into local loans more than is coming back. The Local Loans Fund is rising far more quickly than it is being repaid. In addition to that, from the Central Fund into which is fed only taxation, there is being paid out every year more and more money to local authorities for the purpose of enabling them to pay us the interest on the money which we lent to them. That is the reason, and it is because the Minister for Finance has had the honesty to face up to that fact, which he might very easily have ignored, that he is accused of being harsh, hard and doctrinaire.
We have heard the story of the money which is going to be raised from outdoor sports and the money that is merely substitution money which is being taken out of the tea tax, of the hardship and all the rest of it, and of the three extra sixpences on income tax. Let us agree to everything that has been said here about those things. Do they alter the fact that of normal expenditure on the estimates provided by the outgoing Government, on the estimates of the yield of the taxes imposed by the outgoing Government made by the officials who dealt with them and worked for it, that he was £3,700,000 in arrears? Let me accept all over again every word he says. Income tax is an outrage on industry. It is an outrage to tax outside sports. It is a dreadful thing to send people with or without hair shirts to dances. I say again, accept every word of it, add to it, multiply it, exaggerate it, make platform speeches of it, do what you like with it, but will you get over the fact that there is still £3,750,000 approximately to be found on your normal Budgets? When they have not got over it, and when they have thrown away, as they have in every debating speech, the merit and the legitimacy of every tax that is here imposed, tell us the other taxes.
Deputy McGilligan will not stand for income tax. He will not stand either for hair shirts at dances. He will not stand for a tea tax. He will not stand for a reduction of the Civil Service. Will he stand for a deficit of £3,750,000? That is the issue. He will not. Then what are his other taxes? Where is he going to get the £3,750,000 which he will not give to us under the scheme in which we are asking for it? He has gone out. That is what he always does, gets out. He ought to be here. This is the time for him to deliver the goods. An hour and a half of words! We want ten minutes of sound work, telling us about the £3,750,000's worth of taxation to balance the normal Budget which he is prepared to substitute for ours. Will he put in sugar instead of tea? What is he going to tax? One million pounds on income tax? He will not have it. What is he going to put a tax of £1,000,000 on, or is he going to leave it as a deficit? Adjustments in tea, sugar, beer, tobacco, buses and entertainments, £595,250? What is he going to give us for that £595,000? Just going to sit by, just going to complain of everything, just going to be a critic, produce nothing. I put it to this House, I put it to the conscience of every individual Cumann na nGaedheal member that if they object to these taxes they must formulate an alternative or they must openly come out with the resolution that this Budget be allowed to be unbalanced to the extent of £3,750,000, because this Dáil has not got the courage to face the country and tell it the truth about the position, one or the other.
It may be said, it has been said by insinuation, that this £27,064,000 which we say we have to budget for as the normal Budget is unduly expanded. Of that £27,000,000, £26,794,000 is on their own estimates, the estimates which they say could not be reduced. The onus is on them, having regard to what they know of the decrease in the yield of the existing taxation, either to take the responsibility of saying they will not pay their debts, they will not meet their obligations, they will not pay their outgoings out of income or to find for us alternative taxation over which they will stand in providing that deficit. I am perfectly sure that they have not left the ex-Minister for Justice here to tell us how you are going to do that.
Now, turn to the second portion of the Budget, the emergency Budget— income tax on hospitals' receipts from sweepstakes, £650,000. What did we hear from the ex-Minister for Industry and Commerce? Did we hear any complaint about that except that it should not be called income tax? Is there anyone here who is going to say that in this particular emergency, faced by the unemployment condition we have, faced by the collapse of the whole international structure of exchange and commodities, that we are to turn our back on the £650,000 which we have here from the Sweeps. What is the alternative? Come on, Cumann na nGaedheal! Give me a tax out of which you are going to find £650,000, or do you prefer ——
