This motion is framed to read that—
"The State should direct its policy towards securing that the citizens may, through their occupations, find the means of making reasonable provision for their domestic needs, and Dáil Eireann requests the Government immediately to formulate proposals for absorbing into useful employment at adequate remuneration all adult citizens able and willing to follow useful occupations."
The Labour Party have so far addressed themselves, so far as I can see, to the aspect of that resolution which would place upon the Government the obligation to provide regular employment at fair rates of wages, under reasonable conditions acceptable to free men, permanently. I want to say quite deliberately that I believe everybody in the House subscribes to the desirability of doing that. I do not know how to do it. I do not know how to get for every member of a civilised Christian community 48 hours' work in the week, at a fair rate of pay under reasonable conditions acceptable to free and honourable men, without periods of unemployment. I do not for a moment wish anybody to imagine that I am happy about that, or that I think that is a normal state of affairs that ought for ever to subsist.
My difficulty is that I cannot find anybody who will tell me how to avoid it. I say, and I think most Deputies in this House will say that if anybody will produce a plan which will get for everybody 48 hours' work a week, at a fair rate of wages and on conditions which are acceptable to free Christian men and women, I do not care what cost or what adjustment it involves in the social conditions of our people, I am prepared to go out and campaign for it. I agree with Deputy Murphy that it is the supreme desideratum in the temporal sphere. But my difficulty is to find somebody to tell me how to do it, and I am still waiting. I have read libraries of books on the subject. I have read the publications of the International Labour Office, I have read the works of Keynes and of other writers, and yet I can find nobody who will tell me how free men, living freely together, can produce this eminently desirable ideal. I have heard with consternation some uninformed fellow-citizens compare the Russian, and even the German, system favourably with our system. I grant that, at least, in those countries they have no unemployed. We can have that here to-morrow. By establishing the Nazi system, we can employ every man or woman not 48 hours a week but 72 hours a week, and we can make him do that under the penalty of death, or worse than death, at whatever wage we want to impose on him. Nero and Caligula were able to do that, they divided the Roman nation into Patricians and slaves. The slaves worked when they were told to work and under whatever conditions they were told to work under, and if they did not willingly accept that they died.
I agree that the resources of the State should be used in times when free enterprise and normal business are unable to employ all the persons who are ready and willing to work. State enterprise should be stimulated to provide labour for those people. I agree that, during periods when there is an abundance of employment in ordinary commercial pursuits, the Government should be busy formulating schemes, which shall be laid to one side, in order that all the preliminary work will have been completed when the time of unemployment and crisis comes and when work on those schemes can be started without delay.
I think it is true to say that our Government has fallen short of its duty in that matter. I think it has not prepared its schemes far enough ahead with the result that we have had intense and acute unemployment in our midst. Our Government has some ephemeral kind of idea of what it would wish to do in order to provide employment for everybody, but when it comes down to the task of putting those men to work, it finds that the preliminary work in connection with engineering, the acquisition of property and the investigation of title, which may be very necessary before big schemes can be put under way has yet to be done. It may take nine or 12 months to get this preliminary work completed before you can get men employed.
Bearing all this in mind, Deputies ought not to forget that public works will very often not employ the most deserving among the unemployed. Take the case of a man who has held a responsible clerical position in a mercantile firm, earning £6 or £7 a week. He has his children at school, he has a nice little home and is accustomed to a certain standard of living. That man loses his job. He has put something by for the rainy day, but when he comes to the end of his resources he is an unemployed man. What good is there in telling him that you will provide him with an agricultural wage if he goes out as a labourer on a drainage scheme in the County Westmeath? It is only adding insult to injury. The man would go with a heart and a half if only he could handle a shovel or a pick, but he knows perfectly well that if he attempted it he would certainly collapse, and would then leave himself open to the jeer and the gibe that he did not want to do work. If you are a shop assistant you cannot change yourself into a manual labourer overnight. Neither can you change a clerical worker of 50 years into a ditch digger in competition with young men of 22 and 23 who have been brought up to that extremely technical craft. Anybody who has not swung a pick cannot realise how utterly exhausting that operation can be if you do not know how to swing it. People in sedentary occupations marvel at the way in which labourers in the field are able to keep going for eight hours a day and more, because they do not realise the skill of those manual labourers.
If they were to undertake that work, not having the necessary skill, it would kill them in an hour. People not trained to manual labour, working beside a country man in the fields, find that they very soon have to lay down the instruments they are using because of sore wrists or a breaking back, the reason being that they had been using the instruments unskilfully. The trained labourer is able to use the instruments without bringing on himself any pains or aches because of his superior skill. The answer of the Labour Party to that is that their scheme of public works is going to absorb most of the unemployed. I do not know how to meet that problem, not because I do not want to meet it.
I agree with Deputy Murphy that it should be a first charge on our national income that all those men who are willing and anxious to work should be given work. I think it is right to fix the criterion that if they will not work they are deserving of very little sympathy, but it is tragic and cruel to say that the criterion should be fixed by offering a clerk the position of a ditch digger, or, vice versa, offering to the ditch digger the occupation of a clerk and, because the ditch digger cannot fill up his ledger with neat figures and keep his page immaculate and unstained, he is to be stigmatised as a man who does not want to work, or because the clerk is obliged to drop his tools after an hour, as physical exhaustion prevents him carrying on, he is to be stigmatised as too lazy to work. If that stigma is not to be attached to them, how are we to find for them the work they are able to do?
Every man, no matter how simple his task, is in some degree a skilled worker and is entitled, I think, to ask this: that either he should be given work analogous to the skill which he has acquired, or that he will be maintained while he is in training for alternative work of a kind which is available. In Great Britain that is being done, but there you have a vast industrial population. There it may be said, looking at it from the cold-blooded economic point of view, that it is economically worth while to set up such training centres in the large industrial areas so that individuals may be fitted for some calling. Is that type of thing practical in our community? If it is let us do it, but I wonder is it?
I confess, with regard to this problem of unemployment, that I know of no effective means of remedying it except by seeking as best we can by political action to make the prosperity, the productivity and the capacity to produce wealth of our people as great as we can make it. That is the most effective contribution to the abolition of unemployment that we could make. I believe that the only way we can make an effective contribution in the present state of our community to the abolition of unemployment is to ensure that every acre of our land will be as productive and as wealth-producing for its owner as it is possible to make it. I repeat what I have stated a thousand times in this country, that the only natural resource of consequence that we have is 12,000,000 acres of arable land. If we can make the produce of the 12,000,000 acres profitable, then all the community will prosper and the problem of unemployment will reach its lowest degree of gravity. If the 12,000,000 acres are rendered unprofitable, I know of no device, financial or otherwise, which will rescue the bulk of the wage-earners from the unemployment that must ensue on the principal natural resource ceasing to produce true wealth.
The kind of thing that I think makes unemployment inevitable is when our own Government goes to the owners of land and says to them: "You must deliver the barley that you sweated to grow to Arthur Guinness, Son and Company, for 35/-," while that brewery is paying 70/- in Great Britain. The kind of thing that produces unemployment is when the farmers who produce grain on the land are obliged to sell it to the principal consumer in this country for 30/-, as they did last year, while that consumer was paying 70/- in Great Britain. The result is that the wealth from barley-growing, which should have gone into the pockets of our farmers and enabled them to purchase the things the making of which would have provided employment for large numbers of our people, went to the shareholders of Messrs. Guinness, whose shares appreciated from 80/- to 115/-. Why? Because they had in their coffers £1,000,000—money that rightly belonged to the farmers of this country. Speculators on the stock exchanges of the world were prepared to pay 115/- for shares that were selling for 80/- six months ago. They were paying that extra 35/- a share in order to have their portion of the plunder that was extracted from the Irish farmers. By paying it they got their share of the purchasing power which should have been in the hands of Irish farmers and which would have meant considerable employment among our people.
The second contributing factor to unemployment is the curse of tariffs, that loathsome curse which has descended upon mankind through the damnable doctrine of economic self-sufficiency. The blocking of the channels of free trade between nation and nation has resulted in a diabolical competition between communities to starve one another out, and that progress of starvation has been demonstrated to us in our community in the persons of the unemployed. The cursed and damnable doctrine of economic self-sufficiency has produced poverty and unemployment in Ireland, just as the same cursed doctrine produced 3,000,000 of unemployed in England, and 10,000,000 of unemployed in America.
