It is a joke. It is a joke, even to the Parliamentary Secretary. He shakes his head, but, if he believes that, he has not anything like the knowledge of this country which he pretends to have, or which I thought he had. I doubt if there is a member of the House who will not agree with me when I say that you cannot travel two miles of the roads of this country without seeing useful work which could be done, work which would give a good deal of employment and which would be useful from the point of view of the country.
The Parliamentary Secretary made the point that the trouble was that where you had large numbers of unemployed, you had not suitable schemes, and that brings me to the point at which I consider the Department, with all possible respect to the Parliamentary Secretary, has completely fallen down. They are approaching this matter this year as they have approached it every year for the last ten years, without a change, except that they may be voting a little more money for development of roads consequent on the extensive drive for turf production. We have the Government, in this year, 1941, so completely bereft of any idea of planning as to tell us that we have unemployed in particular areas and no work for them to do. That comes from the Parliamentary Secretary, who told us some time ago that it was impossible to get sufficient men to go into the bogs to cut turf, that they were not to be had. It is the most hopeless confession of despair, of bankruptcy of ideas, to use a phrase very often used by the Parliamentary Secretary himself, I have ever heard.
Might I put this to the Minister? We have been talking for the last 12 months or more on the necessity for a national register in this country, but there is one very complete register that we have in this country, and that is a complete register of the unemployed: not only a complete register but a fully-classified register. The card of every unemployed man in this country, whether he is drawing unemployment benefit, drawing unemployment assistance, or merely registering for employment, is there. His occupation is stated on that card, whether he is married or single and, if he is married, the number of his dependants. The Parliamentary Secretary is in a position to get, within 12 hours, the number of men, of any particular occupation, unemployed in any particular townland in this country. Yet, in this year of crisis, and when we are told that unless certain steps are taken people may go hungry, and that unless very special efforts are made there will not be enough fuel for the people of this country, we get, on the one hand, the confession that in certain areas we have work but no men to do the work, and that in other areas we have plenty of idle men but no work for them to do. I put it to any member of this House: Is that a state of affairs that shows any responsibility on the part of those who are responsible for it?
Just imagine making every effort that we can, appealing to every section of the community, spending big sums of money on advertising, day in and day out, that every possible effort should be made to get turf cut here, spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on making roads and on drainage, and yet, having done all that, being told that where the turf is the men are not and that where the men are there is no work for them. Is that a problem that is insuperable? Is it beyond the wit of the Government to bring the men to where the work is? Is it a position that the Government or any member of this House wants to continue—in which there is work to be done and, at the same time, we go on paying men unemployment assistance?
I want to make my position very clear in this matter. Both inside and outside this House I have made the claim, as often as anybody here, that if this State did not provide work for those who were willing and able to work, then it was the duty of the State to provide them with maintenance. I stand over that, but I say this further, and I want to state it here publicly, that if there is work available in this country for working men—and particularly in a time of national crisis like this—and if those men are not prepared to do that work, provided they are able to work, then the State is under no obligation to maintain them.
What is the use of the Parliamentary Secretary coming before this House and telling us, with the huge number of unemployed that we had and still have in this country, that the Government or his Department is doing its job when, at the end of the last financial year, £500,000 had to be turned back into the Exchequer? Is not that, in itself, full evidence of the fact that they are only dealing with this matter on a day-to-day basis, and that £500,000—one-third of the total amount available for employment schemes last year—was turned back into the Exchequer on the 31st March last, notwithstanding the fact that the best that could be done by the Department was to give an average of 15 weeks in the year, under the rotation scheme, to between 68,000 and 70,000 men in this country? I would ask Deputies to try to picture to themselves what that means—an average of 15 weeks' work in a year for between 68,000 and 70,000 men. Is it not something that we should be ashamed of? The money is there. I maintain that the schemes of work are there to be done. The men are there, unfortunately. Yet, at the end of the Department's work, or mismanagement as it appears to be on the surface, one-third of the total money allocated by this House to provide work for those men is turned back into the Exchequer unspent.
There are unquestionably schemes of work to be done. I should like to say that, in my opinion, one of the most useful schemes that was introduced for some time was the farm improvements scheme. I do not want to criticise the scheme very much. As a matter of fact, I do not want to criticise it at all, because I fully realise that it was only in its infancy in the year under review. That, in my opinion, is a very useful scheme. It does great work and it gives a good deal of employment. Not only that, but to my own personal knowledge there are many fields of wheat, oats and barley in this country this year that were only rocks and furze last year, and they would be rocks and furze this year also if it were not for that farm improvements scheme. Now, I regret to learn from the Parliamentary Secretary's statement that the amount to be allocated—not necessarily to be spent, but to be allocated —for that very useful work is only £50,000 for the coming year. I am confident, and not only confident but almost certain, that within the present financial year three times that amount could be usefully spent on farm improvements under that scheme in this country. I am perfectly satisfied of that.
Again, however, that very useful scheme is hampered by restrictions that it is difficult for one to understand. I have been given certain information and I am now giving it as it was given to me. I know, of course, that under this scheme a farmer can get a grant to make a good yard in front of his house. Perhaps that is going somewhat further than I would be prepared to go. On the other hand, however, I am informed that a farmer, who may have to go across two or three fields for water, will not get any grant, no matter how small, if he wants to sink a pump in his yard. I would suggest to the Parliamentary Secretary and other members of this House that there are very few works that would be more useful or beneficial to a farmer than the provision of a good water supply convenient and available to his house. If I may say so, it is particularly necessary now, at a time when another Department of State is doing its best to see that the milk and butter produced in this country is produced under the best possible conditions. Now, if you want to have milk and butter produced under the best possible conditions, you must have a convenient and plentiful supply of good water.
It is no pleasure to me, as I have said on other occasions, to be raising these matters here year after year, but one begins to have a feeling of despair when, after all the years and all the talk and everything else, we find that even in this year of crisis we have the same attitude towards the unemployed. If we had any doubt as to the—I do not want to use the word "negligence", but certainly if we had any doubt of the fact that the matter is not being faced up to in the way and in the spirit and in the manner in which it should be faced, we have only to refer to the facts which I mentioned briefly on a previous occasion, in connection with a previous Estimate, when we had a long debate here, in December last, on the whole question of unemployment.
There was a motion put down calling for a commission of inquiry into the whole incidence of unemployment. The Government apparently considered the motion an important one; so much so, that they went to the trouble of putting on the Order Paper an alternative motion and that motion was carried here after full debate. The wording of the Government's motion— I shall read only part of it from the Parliamentary Debates, column 1241, 12th December, 1940—was like this:—
"Dáil Eireann requests the Government to appoint such a commission...."
I do not want to weary the House reading the whole motion, which dealt with one of the gravest problems we could deal with. Perhaps if one were to look into the future, indeed, the immediate future, it is the gravest of all our problems. I said just a moment ago that this was a very grave problem. I said that it was, in the present circumstances, and having regard to the immediate future, probably the gravest of all our problems. I refuse to proceed any further for the reason that there is not even one Minister in the House. That simply epitomises the whole Government attitude towards this problem. Even the Parliamentary Secretary has left the House.
