We have been given to understand from various quarters, including the Minister for Finance, that the Minister for Industry and Commerce is the "bright particular star" of the Fianna Fáil Government. That may be so, but he suffers, if I may say so, from one serious intellectual defect, a defect perhaps characteristic of his enviable gift of youth, and that is a certain arrogance in his attitude towards anyone who has the misfortune to disagree with him. Members of this Party are quite as capable of seeing political facts and drawing inferences from them as is the Minister for Industry and Commerce. I am sure that, as he grows older, he will come to realise that and will, by degrees, discard the arrogance of which I speak and which, while it may give him satisfaction for the moment, does detract considerably from his charm.
Every single one of the quotations which the Minister for Industry and Commerce read to us on the subject of Great Britain's trade relations with the various Dominions has been the subject of attention by my colleagues and myself. We have not by any means shirked the issue to which such quotations give rise. Whereas, however, it seems to the Minister for Industry and Commerce that the British policy of tariff regulations and quotas is something that is necessarily fatal to our main agricultural export trade to Great Britain, it seems to us, on the contrary, that that orientation of British policy is something which can be of definite advantage to this country if we take the necessary steps to make it of advantage to this country. The Minister for Industry and Commerce appears to neglect the fact that there are very considerable differences between our position and the position, say, of Australia or New Zealand, Southern Rhodesia or other distant parts of the British Dominions. There is, in the first place, the element of distance, the geographical element, which is quite an important one. Aside from that, however, it has been a characteristic of Great Britain's trade relations with her various Dominions that she has always been receiving from them a far larger volume of goods than they have been willing to take from her. Now, that does not apply to this country. The strength of our position is that we are a magnificent market and always have been a magnificent market for the British manufacturer; that the British necessarily are anxious to retain that market, and that whatever we may do—and I am all in favour of doing a great deal—to start native industries in this country, we must still import a large quantity of goods from elsewhere. For geographical reasons and for reasons of our own commercial interest the natural place to import them from is Great Britain.
That being so, we have an enormous bargaining power. Therefore, it seems to us that, Great Britain having abandoned a policy of free trade, which made it impossible for her to give any special advantages to the Irish producer in her market, it would, in the normal course, have been open to us to secure for ourselves in that market a far better position than we had ever held before. We believe that, in spite of the opportunity that was thrown away at the Ottawa Conference, it is still open to us to do that when another Government comes into office or when the present Government sees the light. We are frequently being accused by Ministers of having no other interest than to drive the Government on the rocks. Our real interest is to save the country from being driven on the rocks, and we are only anxious to drive the Government on the rocks in so far as that might contribute towards saving the country from being driven on the rocks. If the Government would adopt a commonsense policy and take advantage of the opportunities that have been created by the economic situation in Great Britain we would be very far from offering any factious opposition in connection with that.
As regards the question of unemployment, I do not doubt the sincerity of the Government's desires to make as much impression as they can on the unemployment problem in this country. Surely, however, it is very remarkable that, in spite of all the money they have spent and all the efforts they have made, they have succeeded in making so very little impression on it. The truth of the matter is that expenditure of public money, and especially the expenditure of public money on public works, goes a terribly short way towards making any real impression on unemployment. What does make an impression on unemployment is the natural and normal development of industry in a country where confidence and courage prevail. It is just that that has made so big an impression on unemployment in Great Britain. Expenditure on relief of unemployment was greater a few years ago in Great Britain than it is to-day, and yet the unemployment problem kept getting worse and worse, and it is only because, under a Government which balanced its Budget, confidence revived and people put their heart and their money into making the wheels of industry go round, that a very considerable reduction has been made in the number of unemployed in Great Britain.
The Minister for Industry and Commerce speaks to-day of what can be accomplished by way of new industries towards reducing unemployment. He speaks of that in a very different tone from the tone in which Ministers were accustomed to speak of it at election times. We are all able to remember when we used to be assured that the conquest of unemployment was a relatively easy matter and that it was only because of the extraordinary denseness of the old Cumann na nGaedheal Government and their lethargy in the matter of starting new industries that it had not been conquered long ago. I was not present to hear Deputy Norton, but I understood, from the Minister's remark, that Deputy Norton expressed the view that new industries never could conquer entirely the problem of unemployment here. The Minister for Industry and Commerce was not prepared to go so far as that, but at any rate he did feel obliged to speak in a very hesitant tone as to the extent to which new industries could take care of the unemployment question. Now, I am sure that new industries can do something. I think that, up to the present, they have done very little, because whatever employment the Government have been able to create by fostering new industries, they have balanced it by the amount of unemployment they have created in destroying an old industry and in destroying our main industry. The Minister for Industry and Commerce speaks of agricultural expenditure being high. If so, the reason is simple enough. It is a reason to which the Minister himself alluded—the amount of Government money that in one shape or form or another has been distributed to the poorer members of the agricultural community which, no doubt, has tended to keep up the general volume of agricultural buying. But, unless the Minister is deliberately shutting his eyes to the facts, he must know that there are countless farmers throughout the country who, during the last two years, have had their life's savings swept away. We have all been in touch with such men; men who have worked hard all their lives and, perhaps, succeeded in scraping together a few hundred or a thousand pounds and they now, as the result of the last two years, find that they are back again at scratch and that their children will have to start in as poor circumstances, or in poorer circumstances, than those in which they themselves started.
The fundamental factor of the unemployment situation is the same as that which is the fundamental factor in almost all our difficulties in the present time and that is the decline of agriculture; the impossibility of a farmer making profits out of farming; the fact that only by Government assistance in its various forms is any farmer to-day able to keep his head above water. If the Labour Party are zealous, as I am sure they are zealous, to reduce the misery that exists in this country to-day as the result of unemployment, they cannot possibly do better than to co-operate with us in striving to bring the Government to a sense of realities and to effect a settlement of the financial dispute between ourselves and the British Government.
