I can put my finger on it. To-day we have a taxation burden in the neighbourhood of £36,000,000 and our adverse trade balance is £20,000,000 on a total trade of £65,000,000. Remember the figures —£20,000,000 on a total trade of about £65,000,000. In fact, it is true to say that in the last four years the adverse trade balance of this country represents 93 per cent. of our total domestic exports. Our adverse trade balance in the last four years amounts to £75,000,000 and our total exports amount to about £80,000,000. That is to say, within the last four years we bought and paid for £75,000,000 of goods over and above our total exports.
The simplest Deputy in this House knows that if one buys things one has got to pay for them, and if you have got to pay for them you have got to pay for them with something. When France has a big adverse trade balance she pays for it with her accumulated gold — through the central bank — so long as she remains on the gold standard. In this country, the nearest approximation to the gold barometer in the central bank are the net external assets held by the joint stock banks. I emphasise the joint stock banks because, to arrive at that figure, one must take into account the two figures which appear in the quarterly return of the Currency Commission — the gross external assets less the external liabilities. I want to direct the attention of Deputies to the figures taken for the whole September quarter of the last few years. In 1932 the net external assets amounted to £86,000,000; in 1933 they amounted to £85,000,000; in 1934 to £76,000,000. Many Deputies will be shocked at that figure, but they may discount about four-fifths of that decrease of £10,000,000 because a great part of that was "hot money," money that had come here for safety during the instability of the dollar in America, and £8,000,000 of that currency of "hot money" left the country, leaving us with external assets of £2,000,000 less during these years. As I say, in 1934 the net total assets were £76,000,000; in 1935 they were £75,000,000; in 1936, £71,969,000, and in 1937 the net external assets were £71,000,000 at the end of the April-June quarter.
I venture to prophesy that when the October issue of the Currency Commission return is published, it will be discovered that we have lost approximately another million pounds in the last quarter. The net external assets of the joint stock banks are fading away, and remember that in proportion as they fade they affect not only the existing wealth of the country, but they gravely affect the true balance of trade, because, having disposed of the real and visible balance of trade, and having shown that we have imported £75,000,000 of stuff more than we exported, we must turn to what are known as invisible exports in order to get a true picture of the nation's finances. The invisible exports represent the payments that are coming into this country in respect of emigrants' remittances, interest on capital invested abroad, pensions paid by foreign governments to Irish residents, Sweepstake receipts, and some other minor items. The interest coming into this country in respect of investments held abroad substantially, though not entirely, consists of the income from the external assets held by the joint stock banks. As they decline, so does the interest payable on them into this country decline, and so does that item in the invisible exports decline at the same time. Remember that the annual adverse trade balance is financed by out invisible exports, and that if our invisible exports are not sufficient to bridge the gap between our ordinary exports and our ordinary imports, then we have to go to our savings and take enough out of the national savings to bridge the gap that remains. That is what we are doing at the present time, and, in financing our international trade out of the net external assets of the joint stock banks, we are getting into a vicious circle, because, as we take out of our external assets to meet our external debts, so we reduce that item of our invisible exports represented by the interest which Irish citizens derive from investments held in Great Britain and elsewhere.
Emigrants' remittances — the money that used to be sent home by children who went to America — are going to decline in the future. Any of us who have any experience of what that represented in the past know well that, for the first ten years after an emigrant went from the West of Ireland to America, he usually continued to send home money to his parents. After ten or 12 years he married, settled down, and stopped sending money home. By that time, however, a younger brother or other member of the family had gone out to America, and when the senior member stopped sending money home the junior member commenced to send it, so that there was a continuous stream of money in unabated volume coming into this country. Since 1931 there has been no emigration to America, and the last emigrants who went in 1929 are now beginning to marry and settle down. They are stopping their remittances, with the result that in another four or five years there will be practically no emigrants' remittances coming to Ireland. That is going to mean a substantial reduction of the invisible exports of this country.
I have touched on the decline of income derived from interest on capital invested abroad. That is going to be accentuated not only by decline in net external assets but also by this factor: there were left in this country a lot of people belonging largely to the old landlord class and that type — people who had a natural affection for Ireland. They were content to live their lives here, and though they had a pretty rough time for the last 20 or 30 years, they still lived here and liked to stay here. If they got money or land bonds under the earlier Land Acts, or if they got British securities which yielded them an income in lieu of their land, they spent that income here. But they sent their children to English schools and universities, and that rising generation has most of its contacts with Great Britain. The cost of living is rising here. These old people are moving out or dying off. England offers security, a lower cost of living, many amenities that this country cannot offer, and the children are continually saying to their parents, "Why do you not come over to England, where we can see you often, and not stay stuck in Ireland, where none of us can ever go?" The tendency is for these people to move out. That is going to be the tendency — to move out or die and leave their property to children now resident in England or the Colonies.
The income from these investments is going to leave the country and is going seriously to affect in the years to come the invisible exports of this country. Then we come to pensions. The pensions paid by the British Government to those who served them in various capacities, now that they are retired, are a very substantial sum. A great many of these people lived in this country and spent their money here. Any pension item is a diminishing quantity. The older pensioners are dying off. The new pensioners are not going to live in Ireland, and that item tends to decrease.
Then there are the Sweepstakes. Few people realise what an extraordinary contribution to the adjustment of the balance of trade was made by Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney when he sponsored the Sweepstake legislation in this House. That has become a great source of wealth to this country. It would be difficult to assess, with any pretence to accuracy, what the Sweepstake is worth every year as an invisible export to this country, but it is a very substantial sum. Inevitably, the tendency over ten, 12 or 30 years —we are talking in economic periods, if I may use the term — will be for the Sweepstake to decline. Its novelty will be wearing off. Rival institutions will be growing up. No doubt, it will maintain a certain measure of its popularity, but it cannot expect to have the same hold which it had in the first years of its existence. Prudent provision should be made for the deterioration of that item of our invisible exports. That means that the resources with which we used to bridge the gap between our imports and exports are becoming more attenuated with the passage of time.
Let us look at the other side of the picture. If we have got invisible exports, we have also got invisible imports. It is extremely difficult to assess these, but you have to view this problem with as great detachment as you can. You have got to remember that, if the economic policy of the Government has wrought havoc all through the land, it has done one thing — at an appalling cost. It has abolished one item of our invisible imports which did exist before Fianna Fáil came into office — the land annuities. We used to pay annually to the British Debt Commissioners about £3,000,000. A great deal of that probably came back to this country in the payment of land bonds, but a lot of it went to stockholders in Great Britain. So far as it went to Great Britain, it did represent an invisible import and, to a certain extent, offset the invisible exports we had at that time. It is true that that invisible import no longer continues, but we have got to remember that, with present Government policy, the items of visible imports will tend to rise and further aggravate the visible trade balance. If we are to go on with the vigorous policy of erecting factories here, we shall be importing the raw materials for these factories. If we are to have an increasing industrial population, we shall have an increased demand from that industrial population for consumer's goods imported from abroad. As their income rises, the tendency will be for them to seek consumer-goods which ordinarily would be imported. Even the maddest member of the Fianna Fáil Party now realises that the suggestion of absolute economic self-sufficiency is a pure chimera. As the industrial population increases and as the kind of wants that an urban industrial population have grow, they will operate to increase our visible imports of consumer-goods. At the same time as those forces are operating, you have a steady and immense increase in the public debt. The Minister for Finance, when he gives us a review of the public debt, says that it is very necessary to ascertain the true dead weight debt and not to be deceived by the gross figures of national debt, without taking careful account of the national assets which should be set against it; but the ascertainment of the true value of the national assets is extremely difficult and, in my judgement, the Minister for Finance is attaching to our national assets a grotesquely inflated value.
I am glad to think that the Minister will deal with the case I submit and will have an opportunity of going into these matters. I say that the dead-weight national debt has been immensely increased, and what many people forget is that when we talk of national debt we sometimes think only of governmental debt. There is all the time an additional immense debt growing up in this country — the debt of the local authority, which is a public debt as well. I recently asked the Roscommon Board of Health how much money we had borrowed in the last four years, and they told me £250,000. In addition to that, we have all the borrowings of the county council and the asylum committee. That is a very substantial sum, but not a penny too much if the country was strong and booming, because we got good value for most of the money we spent. It was largely spent on housing, and, of course, 60 per cent. of that £250,000 can be thrown back on the Exchequer for housing loans. It was largely spent on housing, but a great deal of it was spent on sewerage and enterprises of that kind, for the repayment of which the Government accepts responsibility for a much smaller share. That one item, however, gives an idea of the rate at which the public debt is increasing.
Roscommon Board of Health is a tiny public authority. If you investigate the Dublin Corporation's borrowings, the Cork Corporation's borrowings, and the other big municipalities' borrowings — the larger county councils like Cork and those who have a very large area under their control — and add all their borrowings to the total burden of debt, where will you get? In my opinion, to a most alarming position. The position is only alarming in so far as our earning capacity as a nation seems to be declining. If we were earning plenty, if the national income was steadily rising as it was up to 1929, we might have spent without hesitation and without anxiety, but it is not. It is declining. If the national income was declining in the presence of a world slump, I think we might have spent, and spent courageously and without hesitation, saying perfectly truly: "We saved when there was a boom on to provide against a rainy day. Here is the rainy day. Let us check in now on the good credit we have built up in the time of plenty." But what are the facts? In this country we are borrowing on an unprecedented scale, while we ourselves are experiencing an intense depression in the midst of a world boom. Every other country in the world is booming in an unparalleled way and riding high, wide and handsome on a magnificent wave of prosperity, and particularly so Great Britain, with whom we have the closest contact in the world.
This country is still in the throes of a deep depression, and we sometimes ask ourselves: are we ever going to get out of it? If we are sinking deeper and deeper into debt while the world is on the up-grade in a boom, what on earth will we be doing when we start accompanying the world down on the other side? Every hen-roost will have been robbed, every nest-egg cooked and eaten, and every ounce of credit we have stretched to the limit, with a long slump waiting for us which we ought to be levelling out by expenditure on our credit accumulated during those years of universal prosperity. We are not doing it, and we are not going to receive the results of our failure to do it for some years to come, but it is ghastly and wild irresponsibility not to take steps to meet that situation. What are the appropriate steps? Are they to stop spending? Not at all. If you do that, you are only making the situation ten times worse. The way to do it is to get back the earning power of our community, and you can do that over-night if the country will only face it, and without any difficulty. I shall be glad to hear the Minister telling us what is his reaction to the steady decline in the Exchequer balance. The Exchequer balance a year ago was over £2,000,000. It is about £900,000 now, and remember that the Exchequer balance is declining in a period of unprecedentedly high taxation, the highest taxation known in this country since Brian Boru won the Battle of Clontarf.
