One of the great advantages, Sir, in one sense, of a debate of this kind is that those who have asked questions, which, presumably, they expect to be answered, have generally departed into the shades of a better land and into a more comfortable and pleasanter occupation when the time for answering their inquiries has come. Consequently, I am afraid that I will find that those whose comments I have to answer are not here to listen to my replies. Deputy Brennan discussed the whole agricultural situation, which does not come under this Vote. He did ask a certain question in relation to how money was being expended, and why it was being expended, on turf development. It is being spent for the purpose of enabling our natural fuel here to be used and to be available throughout the whole country for domestic and, I hope, for industrial purposes. Certain difficulties have arisen, as the House knows, in relation to the uniformity of the supplies coming up from hand-won turf, and, for certain purposes, uniformity in the nature and quality of turf is very important. For that reason, arrangements are being made to provide for those purposes a more uniform quality of turf in the form of machine-made turf, but that will not interfere with the production and development of turf by other means.
Deputy Brennan also said that there had been a lot of complaints. All I can say is that they are the most silent complaints that I have ever heard. The ears of my Department are probably wider open to complaints than, perhaps, those of any other Government Department that ever existed; and I can say that this year there have been no complaints —no complaints which brought to our knowledge matters of importance of which we were not already aware and with which we had not already dealt. Deputy Brennan also complained that money was being spent on non-productive schemes. I have searched the records—the archives that were handed over to me from all Departments—to find that mass of productive schemes that were left there by my predecessors. I have not found them. What they may be perfectly sure about, at the present moment, is that in every area the best scheme which is available in that area to deal with unemployment, at the time at which unemployment exists, is being used.
I think I have rather avoided telling the secrets of my prison house, or telling tales out of school, but anything more impudent than for men to get up from the Front Benches opposite and speak of lots of complaints, and unproductive schemes, and all the rest of it, having regard to their own record in the matter, I cannot imagine. We took over a very bad job. We have made that a clean job and an efficient job. We have done that with the cooperation—and I want to bear that testimony—of all members of all Parties in the House in bringing forward to us complaints to be dealt with; and now, at the end of that period, when the House is universally conscious that this money, which was given in trust to be spent for the benefit of the poor, is being efficiently and honestly spent for that purpose, it is an outrage that men should so irresponsibly get up and attempt to leave behind them a trail of insinuation of that kind when they know that there is no basis whatever for it. Deputy Brennan then went on—like a sort of male Cassandra—to tell us all the terrible things, which he imagined existed, which were bound to have their reaction. Well, at least that is better than the phrase that we were going to be bankrupt in a fortnight. I do not think Deputy Brennan said anything else.
Deputy O'Leary wants a commission. set up to investigate the farming position; but, surely, not on a Supplementary Vote for £150,000 for unemployment. With that genial courtesy and meticulously generous choice of adjective which is a distinction of speeches delivered sometimes from the opposite side, he informed us that we were the greatest pack of hypocrites unhung. That also is a contribution to a solution of the unemployment question. He then wanted a little general election in East Cork. That is all that Deputy O'Leary has to say on the subject of this Vote.
Deputy Haslett apologised for being in order. He made the only suggestion up to that which had any relation whatever to the subject, and it was a valuable suggestion, one which, I think, is in the minds of men of all Parties in this House and which is emphatically in the minds of the electors of all parties in the country. That is that some method should be found by which those people who are now receiving the new unemployment assistance and are not working for it, but who are anxious to work for it, should have an opportunity of doing so. All I can say is that that ambition of Deputy Haslett —that ambition of the electors of this country—has very cordial sympathy over here. Deputy Davin said the amount was inadequate. No amount that could possibly be put forward would, in my opinion, be treated in any other terms. You have to define what you mean by inadequate. You will have to settle down to some standard by which you think it is the business and the duty of the State, by artificial means, to raise the whole body of the State. I would be very glad to hear a discussion of that kind. I would be very glad if somebody would formulate some standard under which the State, as a whole, would give to every willing worker a decent standard of comfort. But until somebody does lay down a standard of that kind. mere phrases such as the inadequacy of the amount are no use. I remember when we introduced a Vote of £2,000,000 it also was stated to be inadequate.
It is the wildest illusion to imagine that the only money which is being provided for unemployment relief at the moment is this £150,000, or the £350,000 which preceded it. There is being supplied by the State a sum of, roughly speaking, £1,500,000 under the name of Unemployment Assistance for the purpose of relieving distress without work. If the State were to provide that £1,500,000 for the purpose of relieving distress by work everybody would be of the opinion that the State was meeting, or at any rate beginning to meet, its obligations adequately. Take, for instance, the City of Dublin in relation to which there is being, and there is going to be, a considerable amount of interested propaganda for the purpose of increasing the Relief Vote. If we were to provide them with £50,000 as a Relief Vote it would be considered a generous gesture. But as a matter of fact under Unemployment Assistance at the present moment the City of Dublin is being provided with £350,000 a year approximately, and the only acknowledgment of that is to make a grievance of the number of people which that artificial provision is bringing on to and making visible on the rates. At the present moment the Government in the City of Dublin is paying for the relief of distress an amount of money which would keep employed at full wages all the year round somewhere about 2,500 men. But no acknowledgment of that is made, and it is the same right through the country. I do hope that some arrangement will be made by which these people will be put in employment and will cease to be an artificial reproach upon the register.
Deputy Davin asked whether or not the position in the country in relation to unemployment had improved. He asked me to tell him whether or not it had improved in his own constituency. It is quite impossible for me, with the statistical information now at my disposal, to be able to answer the latter of these questions though in the unemployment register there is being set up machinery which will enable us in future years to check up very accurately on this matter. One of the great advantages of the Unemployment Assistance Act was that it brought for the first time into view on the statutory register, the degree of economic distress existing in any part of the country. As far as the country in general is concerned it is possible to answer precisely the question which was asked. A committee was set up by the Department of Industry and Commerce to examine the whole of the figures available and the trend of employment and unemployment in the Saorstát. I do not know how many members of the House have read the report but, as one who is rather closely familiar with the figures, I will say that it is a difficult document to read. It is, in my opinion, an extremely competent document. The statistical information which is available in very few cases is directed to the point which it is desired to examine. Sometimes it has been necessary to examine two or three sets of related statistics in order to get the final indication of the trend. That committee has reported on page 31, paragraph 44, under the heading "Conclusion as to employment," as follows:—
"All the available evidence goes to show that employment in the aggregate was considerably greater in 1934 than in either 1926, 1931 or 1933. Even in Agriculture, employment has shown an improvement."
Paragraph 45 says—and this is the result of expert examination of all the available figures in relation to the trend of employment and unemployment:—
"The examination of the facts and figures readily available relative to unemployment which have been made in this memorandum makes it apparent that there is no evidence of an increase in unemployment during recent years. At the same time it has been shown that there is a great increase in the volume of employment, especially in the volume of industrial employment."
That is the best answer which I can give to the question which Deputy Davin has asked. I will go further and say that the investigation which has been there started, and which has been brought up to 1934, has in the process of investigation created the machinery and standards by which it will be possible to keep tally in future on trends of that kind. I believe that to be very valuable work. Personally, I think you cannot exaggerate the value of careful, systematic and impartial investigation of that kind of social and other trends.
Deputy Davin raised one question which, curiously enough, had been raised entirely from the opposite point of view by those speakers who spoke in the previous debate. He objected strongly to the doing of relief work by stages. That was a practice which we have adopted only in the last two years. Personally, I think it is not merely a thoroughly defensible thing, but a thing essentially desirable in itself. Whatever system of distribution or administration of a limited sum is used for dealing with unemployment or distress it will involve the allocation to particular bodies of people, to areas containing numbers of people of particular degrees of distress, of a certain amount of money out of that total fund and the basis which we have adopted, in relation especially to minor relief works, has been to take the 3,000 electoral areas in Ireland and estimate for each of them the amount of the total sum which those particular areas would be entitled to.
You may find that there is to be given to a particular area the sum of £100, and you may find in connection with the five or six schemes which are competing in that district to be done, that the schemes which can be done in one year for £100 are inferior in permanent value to a scheme which would cost £200 or £300. In all those cases, so long as a reasonable advantage will immediately accrue from the first expenditure of money upon that scheme, we deliberately choose the better scheme and, even if it does take two or three years to complete, even if it takes the quotas of two or three years in order to get that scheme completed, we think it a better and wiser method. That has been applied to schemes running into thousands. Often a link road wants to be done, but you could not justly, having regard to your duties to other areas, find the whole of the money in one particular year. In those cases they have teen properly spread over a series of years and I think Deputy Davin will agree with that, if he examines the relative schemes which have been accepted or rejected for purposes of that kind.
Deputy Davin also was strongly in favour of public health works in towns and villages, and so are we. I do say that of public health works generally the ones in the smaller towns and villages are really the ones of the highest social value and anything that can be done in ration to them ought to be done. But you must remember we are dealing with a limited sum of money and that sum has to be divided over all the different claims, not merely in all the different areas but under all the different departmental and other heads. Of the £370,000 which is the net grant up to the present for this year, £100,000 has been allocated to the Department of Local Government and Public Health for the purpose of energising local government and public health works. In addition to that, they carried over unspent from last year in the re-vote about £66,000, giving a total of £166,000 which they could use for the purpose of giving grants to local authorities to induce them to borrow the remainder of the money to enable public health works to be done. That is what is being done.
Broadly speaking, you may fake it that the average grant would be about 40 per cent. It varies entirely with the conditions of the district. On the basis of 40 per cent., it means that £166,000 of a grant will energise a total expenditure of over £400,000, and it is in that way the grant for public health, for unemployment assistance, is being made, not merely up to the extent of its own amount, but to the extent of two-and-a-half times the total amount which appears in the Vote to help to bring on public health works. Deputy Davin alluded to the fact that the Parliamentary Secretary sometimes perambulated into strange places for the purpose of inspecting works. Experience has shown that that is a very valuable thing. It is not always a comfortable thing, but there is no question as to its actual value. It does encourage carrying out good work to know that someone will see the good work which has been done, and it helps to prevent things being left undone.
Now we come to housing as a relief to unemployment. At the present moment there are probably between 20,000 and 30,000 people engaged in housing work. The actual amount of labour on a house has certainly turned out to be discouraging. When I first came to tackle this job, I had illusions of five or six or ten men engaged on a house. When I was told there were only one-and-a-half men per annum on a house I began to feel somebody must be dreaming. Now we have every reason to believe that the actual employment over the whole year on a house is considerably less than one-and-a-half men. At the same time, owing to the number of houses that have been built, it is at the present moment a very real and solid contributory to the employment position in the State.
