Like Deputy Brennan, I am inclined, in one respect, to rejoice at the introduction of this Bill, because it is an admission that Fianna Fáil has completely lost the confidence of all the persons who are responsible ratepayers in this State. The object of postponing the elections, and the object of bringing in this Bill, is perfectly obvious. The present administration knows that on going to county council elections, especially in the rural districts, upon the present register, on going to ask the suffrages of those persons whom it has ruined by its legislation and by its administrative action during the last year and a half, they would be absolutely swept out of existence. Therefore, as far as it is an admission on the part of Fianna Fáil, I suppose that if we were mere politicians we would rejoice at the introduction of this Bill, but when I come to consider what the Bill is and what its repercussions are going to be it becomes obvious that the Fianna Fáil Party is clutching at any sort of straw it can see. At no matter what cost to the country, at no matter what cost to the State, we have Fianna Fáil endeavouring to keep itself afloat. Take this Bill. It is a matter of expediency of course—I will deal with expediency in a moment—for the Government to bring it in. Let us take the principle which lies behind it, and there is a big principle behind it. There certainly is a case which appealed to the last Executive Council that in the matter of electing Deputies to this House every adult man and woman should have a vote. Why? Because every adult man and woman pay taxes, directly or indirectly. There is nobody in this State who does not pay some of the taxes which are levied. Whether he pays them out of his own pocket, whether he gets the money from another person to do it, or whether he gets it actually in the shape of dole or otherwise from the State, some of it is taken back in indirect taxes from him, taxes on the various articles essential to life which he has to buy, and which this Administration has taxed.
Every administration levies indirect taxes. This House is a great deal more than a rate-collecting or tax-collecting body. This House, and the Oireachtas generally, is a law-making body. It brings in laws which regulate, to a certain extent, the lives and conduct of the people of this State. The people of this State, therefore, when general laws are being passed, must undoubtedly have a claim that they should be considered in the making of those laws. As I have said, there is a case in that respect, and a case which appeared to be a good one to the last Executive Council, when manhood suffrage was introduced into this State before it had been introduced into many countries in Europe. When you come to local administration it stands upon a completely different footing. None of those considerations arise. According to our system of administration nobody pays rates except persons who own property, and apart from Government grants the entire funds which are being administered are funds which are taken out of the ratepayers' pockets. It is, accordingly, to the interests of the ratepayer to see, in the first place, that no unnecessary amount of money will be raised by way of rates, and secondly, it is to the interests of the ratepayer to see that the money levied as rates shall be properly and efficiently expended.
We have had a great example recently of the danger of indiscriminate expenditure—of persons expending money who have not got to provide the money. I do not believe there is a single Deputy in this House who will not say that the £1,000,000 borrowed on the Road Fund was frittered away or that there was 5/- worth of work done for each pound of that money expended, because the persons expending it had nothing to do with the raising of the money. What you have here is that people, who are not interested in anything except getting the rates as high as they possibly can if they can make any money out of it themselves, are to be the electors. That is entirely wrong. Why should they? The ratepayers pay all the rates. Why should they not have the sole voice in the expending of the rates? Why should any person, who does not contribute a halfpenny to the rates, have a voice in the spending of them? Why should they have any voice in electing the representatives who are to have charge of the expenditure of the sums collected in rates?
Deputy Kelly, speaking a few moments ago, made a very remarkable pronouncement. He said that every man had a responsibility to provide for himself. Most men have a responsibility to provide for themselves out of the labours of their own hands or the exertions of their own brains; but this is a new doctrine, that a man should have a responsibility to provide for himself out of the pockets of other people; and you may be certain that no set of men in this world yet have been economists when they were dealing with the contents of the purses or of the pockets of other men. That is precisely what you are going to have in this State. You are going to have a large body of electors putting in men who are pledged, not to economy but pledged to expenditure. You are going to have money spent indiscriminately in unnecessary works and flung in every direction, because they will not have to pay for it themselves.
Already—and here I come to what is, possibly, the most serious part of this Bill, coming as it does in the present crisis of Irish life—we know, at the present moment, that the Government has put on such heavy expenditure on the country and such a heavy load of taxation on the back of the taxpayer that the Minister for Finance admits that he has completely exhausted all the possible sources of taxation. Nothing more can be got from taxation unless, he says, he goes down and taxes the absolute necessities of life more heavily than they are taxed at present, or heavier than they can bear. That is the position as far as the ordinary taxpayer is concerned. Now, under this Bill, you will have the young men, about whom we hear so much and who are anxious for expenditure, getting control; and there is, at any rate, a very grave danger that these men will run up the rates until the rates, like taxation, have reached to the very highest possible point. You will have, then, some persons unable to pay rates, and any person who has a single penny left after he has paid his taxes will find it taken out of his pockets by excessive rates. This Bill, taken together with the taxation which the Minister for Finance is imposing upon this country, is having this effect, and must have this effect—that by taking away from every single person who has got money every single penny that you can wring out of him—and I do not mean now large-moneyed men or men of large possessions, but men of small possessions—if you take away from such men the entirety of their possessions, and that is what you are doing— you are cultivating and tilling the field for the establishment of those things that we hear so much about now-a-days: workers' republics, the Communistic State and everything of that nature. You are heading fast for it. I do not say that the Executive Council are deliberately playing for these results to follow. I do not say that. But I do say this: that if Deputy O'Kelly and the other members of the Executive Council spent their nights and days studying Marx and Engels, I do not think they could devise methods better than the methods they are devising at the present moment for bringing about that revolution which was to be the principal method to which Marx and others of his school look for the achievement of their aims.
We have already had in this House, or have been asked to have, a complete disregard for law of all kinds and disregard for the dictates of common honesty. We have two Bills already before the House which are direct infringements of the Seventh Commandment. We have now in this Bill a direct encouragement to persons who, by electing the representatives, may get control of the finances of the country and, getting control of the finances of the country and having no responsibility, not having to find the rates themselves, will very naturally — because it is in human nature that they would do it—will not have any regard to the interests of the ratepayers and will make the burden of rates as heavy upon the ratepayer as the burden of taxation is upon the ordinary individual at the present moment. The combination of those two is the most excellent tilling of the field for other people to scatter pernicious doctrines in.
