The House is being asked by the Government to pass a Vote on Account which is approximately one-third of the annual amount required to carry on the Supply Services of the country. The total bill in that respect exceeds £40,000,000. When one remembers that the Estimates make no provision for the financing of the Central Fund services, one will then realise that the amount we are being asked to pass is approximately £45,000,000. I think that is the largest bill that has been presented to the House by this Government during the past 11 years and it is, perhaps with one exception, the largest bill presented to this House in the past 21 years. I am not so much worried about the size of the bill, because Supply Services or Central Fund services are all relative things.
In a country where the national income is high, where the national income per head of the population is substantially higher than it is here, a bill of this kind would not be a very serious drain on the resources of the people, nor would it make a very heavy demand upon the productivity of the country. What we are faced with to-day is this, that the bill which is being presented to us represents a very substantial portion of the national income and, to the extent that this bill is a demand on the national income, there is less of that income available for the personal benefit of those who help to produce it.
Even if the bill represents a substantial portion of the national income, that fact again, in itself, is not wholly dangerous. It seems to me that the real danger arising from this expenditure is that the demand is made at a time when, in fact, the national income is tending to get lower than at any previous period. Not only has the national income fallen, but, so far as one can see into the future, that income, having regard to our wealth-producing capabilities, will tend to diminish still further. We are, therefore, in this position, that we are making a heavy demand upon the taxpayers in the form of this Vote on Account, and we are making that demand at a time when the national resources are lessening and at a time when, because of our inability to plan our national life in a comprehensive and efficient way, we are spending approximately £8,000,000 on services which, in effect, are just injections of charity for the people in the form of unemployment insurance, unemployment assistance, home assistance, maintenance in hospitals due to malnutrition, workhouses and schemes covering social services of that kind. Not a single one of these services is a substitute for a decent wage. At the worst they are danger signals because they represent such an unhealthy economic condition that it is necessary for the State to make provision for the destitution which is the inevitable outcome of an unplanned national economy. The multiplication of workhouses and of hospitals, the giving of unemployment assistance, of home assistance and of national health insurance benefits, is all due to the fact that the recipients are unable to get normal employment in industry or agriculture. We have, therefore, to sustain them when they are idle, and when, through under-nourishment when employed, they are unable to stick the pace which industry and agriculture demand.
It seems to me that all this has its roots in three big problems. The first is unemployment which, when left unsolved, radiates in all directions. Secondly, we have the problem of under-employment, one which is particularly acute in this country, and, thirdly, the problem of a low standard of living among many of our people, not merely in the cities and towns but particularly in certain rural areas. It seems to me that, unless we can bend our energies and enthusiasm to compel a solution of these problems, we are going to have in perpetuity all the evils, miseries and privations which have been with us for too long a period.
I do not want to go economic ghost hunting. I do not want, for instance, to inquire where is the famous Fianna Fáil plan under which all our folk were going to be put into employment and under which the Atlantic Ocean was to be studded with ships to bring back the emigrants. Neither am I going to be inquisitive by asking where the Minister for the Co-Ordination of Defensive Measures found employment for those 80,000 people whom, as he said at Dundalk, we should be glad to have at the work that Fianna Fáil was going to make available for them. I do not want to indulge in any excessive curiosity in these realms to-night. I want to review the position without desiring to make either an election speech or a Party speech on this merely by looking at the economic facts as I see them. The net result of the application of the Government's energies, or what has been masquerading as the Government's energies during the last 11 years, has been this: that although the plan was to put everybody who was idle in this country into work, and at a kind of work that envisaged prosperity, the fact remains that during the past two years, notwithstanding the fact that 100,000 people have gone to Great Britain and the Six Counties in that period and that another 30,000 have been absorbed into the Army during the past three or three and a half years, we still have, the plan notwithstanding, approximately 90,000 persons registered at the employment exchanges and thousands of others unemployed who do not register because of the distances which they would have to go to sign for the miserable pittances payable under the means test regulation.
That is a very serious situation. If this were some mammoth State capable of immense, technical, industrial and commercial expansion, one could afford to look with equanimity on a situation where you have 90,000 people idle after exporting 100,000 who could not get a living here, although promised it by this Government when it was seeking power. Where you have a small State of less than 3,000,000 people in which the national income is not only low but tending to fall still further, the position of having 90,000 persons unemployed, according to the Government's own figures, in spite of the fact that we have exported 100,000 people and absorbed another 30,000 into the Army, betokens grave economic chaos. Such a situation at this period of our national life, and in the circumstances in which we are compelled to live to-day with the flames of war raging all around us, demands some indication from the Government that they are prepared to deal with those problems by methods different from those which have been followed up to the present.
I regard unemployment in an undeveloped country like this as the greatest possible source of waste. Idle men and women must be fed, clothed and housed, and that can only be done by taking from the working section of the community something which it creates for itself. If you are going to tolerate a continuance of a state of affairs in which you will always have 100,000 persons idle with a low and a falling national income, then you may rest assured of one certainty, and that is that those who work in the country, low though the national income will be, will inevitably have to sustain the 100,000 persons whom the State allows to remain in a condition of involuntary idleness. Any solution of our basic economic problems must necessarily embrace this question of unemployment.
I refuse to believe that it is our conception of Irish life that our unemployed people should be condemned to go to the employment exchanges, to the work houses or to the emigrant ship in order to fulfil such conceptions of human dignity as we have had. I realise, of course, that in the circumstances under which we are living it may not be possible to apply, in 1943, to the solution of the unemployment problem the remedies which were available to us in the years of peace, due, in the main, to the fact that whilst we had adequate notice of the danger of war and an abundance of sterling assets to purchase raw materials and ships while they were being offered for sale all over the world, we failed to take advantage of those opportunities. Because of that we necessarily have lost many of the opportunities which ought to be available to us now of taking steps to solve our unemployment problem. As Deputy Dockrell pointed out; by repatriating our sterling assets, we could have bought ships in abundance, we could have bought raw materials in abundance in 1938 and 1939 all over the world, and in France up to 1940, but the Government took no steps whatever to utilise our excellent creditor external position for the purpose of importing the commodities which we then so badly needed. It is because the abundance of opportunities then available were lost that we have to be more circumspect now in our application of remedies to the unemployment problem. Notwithstanding the handicaps under which we are suffering, because of the Government's inertia in the years 1938 to 1940, I believe there are still schemes of work which if attempted by the Government, would provide employment for a substantial number of our people, schemes of work which are a thousand times more preferable, no matter what their cost, than the involuntary idleness disclosed in the employment exchange figures, and the destitution that goes hand-in-hand with the appallingly low rate of benefit provided for those who satisfy the rigorous test of the labour exchanges that they are genuinely unemployed.
We have in this country to-day a very serious afforestation problem. Probably ours is the most timber-denuded country in Europe. Even in some Pacific islands you would get a greater tree density than you get in this country to-day. At all events, compared with our European neighbours, we are the most tree-denuded country in Europe. Even after 21 years of self-government, very little has been done in the way of providing employment on large-scale schemes of afforestation. I know the story which the experts will tell you. They will tell you the difficulties that confront you in carrying out large-scale schemes of afforestation. But we, on these benches, refuse to believe that our land has been inoculated by some kind of virus which prevents its growing trees while other countries in Europe can grow trees to an increasing extent. I believe the opinions of the experts are as nothing compared with the vital necessity of finding employment for our people, and one of the best schemes on which we could afford employment would be large scale afforestation schemes throughout the country. That could be done if we took good care to ensure that the punctilio represented by impediments in Land Acts was not allowed to stand in the way of the desirability of afforesting the country on the one hand and, by doing that, providing regular employment for thousands of our workers on the other hand.
Deputy Dillon has referred to the necessity for drainage. I assume he means land reclamation as well. If it pays a country like Holland where the land is 60 and 80 feet under the sea level to carry out extensive schemes of land reclamation, surely it ought to pay a country such as this to engage in such schemes? A few arterial drainage schemes have been introduced in the last 21 years, but no serious effort has been made to engage in a scheme of national drainage or national land reclamation. Even though it may be said that in normal times schemes of that kind have not got the economic content of other schemes, at present we have not the choice of doing other schemes of greater economic and labour content. We are now driven to the position in which we must undertake for our unemployed people the best type of work we can provide for them, and at a time when we want to exploit our land to the fullest, it seems to me that land reclamation and drainage constitute schemes which would enrich the nation, create new permanent national assets and would be amply justified by the results.
We have in many parts of the country schools which are wretched dens, schools which blight children's lives, which dwarf children because of the appalling conditions in which it is sought to educate them. In a country where there is an abundance of building material, and where we are too poor to neglect education, it should be possible to utilise the present opportunity to put large numbers of people in employment in the erection of proper schools in which we could decently educate our children and equip them for the stern battle of life which will come when this emergency ends. In the realm of the erection of new hospitals, new houses and general improvements in towns throughout the country, a vast amount of work remains to be done. If the Government could only realise it, it is much more preferable that our unemployed people should be put to work on schemes of that kind rather than be exported to Britain, sending back here British financial vouchers which give the recipients of these vouchers a lien on our wealth and food which give the recipients do not produce—a situation which obviously must mean a policy of naked inflation so far as this country is concerned. These men and women, whom we send to Britain, find employment on credits issued by the British Government, credits which have no gold or metallic backing of any kind. credits which are backed only by implements of war which may be of no value whatever five years after this war ceases.
If Britain, Germany, Russia and America can issue State credits and provide an abundance of work at high rates of wages for their people by such methods, how much more economic is it, how much more nationally sensible is it, for us to put our people into employment here financed by State credits, these credits in the end being backed by the creation of new capital assets in the form of afforestation, drainage, land reclamation, new hospitals, new schemes and decent schemes of housing for our people? Alone probably among any of the European nations, this Government clings to financial methods which give us the miserable results we see before us to-day.
It is not alone in the field of public utility schemes such as afforestation, drainage and the other items to which I have adverted, that we could provide employment for our people. We have here, happily, another asset which may well be, and in fact is, the envy of many other countries. We have 12,000,000 acres of arable land which is the finest land in Europe, possibly finer than any other land in Europe outside the Ukraine. We have no problems of dust bowls to contend with here. Agriculture employs approximately one half of our people. Every farm in this country is really an agricultural factory. If we have an industry employing approximately half our total population, an industry which gives them employment of a type indigenous to the soil, prudence and common sense demand that steps be taken to improve that industry in every way. Examination of agricultural statistics will show that our agricultural productivity has not risen in the past 30 years, that we have in fact a very stagnant agricultural position. While we may be growing more wheat now than formerly, there has been a corresponding loss of tillage in other directions. In present circumstances, obviously sensible economics demand that we should do everything in our power to intensify agricultural production and to provide more food for the people, more wealth for the country, and at the same time more employment for the population.
It seems to me to be a rather sad commentary on the way in which we have exploited our agricultural position that even in this fourth year of the war there is still some doubt as to whether we shall have enough wheat to carry us over to the next harvest. Notwithstanding the fact that we have 12,000,000 acres of arable land, it is difficult at the present day to get milk in many parts of the country. People who have milk vouchers are not able to get milk because there is no milk to give them. It also seems strange that in the fourth year of the war there is not sufficient sugar in the country although we have a number of big factories capable of manufacturing all the sugar that we require. If there could be any greater indictment of the inert way in which we are applying our energies to the development of the potential wealth of the country, it is to be found by advertence to these facts, that after four years of war and with 12,000,000 acres of arable land at our disposal we are still short of agricultural produce, and that dairy produce is unobtainable in many areas throughout the country. I do not think we can remedy that situation unless by frankly recognising that the farmer, just the same as the industrial worker or an investor in industry, is entitled to a fair return for his labour or on his capital. There has been a good deal of commotion about paying 25/- a barrel for oats. Oats could not be got at 25/- per barrel. When the Irish farmer does not produce the oats, or sufficient oats, we have no hesitation whatever in importing 54,000 barrels of oats for which we pay the American farmer, between the price of oats and shipping costs, approximately 54/- a barrel. That means 54/- for American or Canadian oats landed in Dublin, but 24/- a barrel for the oats produced by Irish farmers.
Whether you like it or not, you must face up to the fact that, if you want to utilise the land to the fullest possible advantage, you must encourage the people who own the land to give the best that can be got, and that cannot be done while you pay low prices to farmers and pay such low wages to agricultural workers. They leave this country in droves to try to get to Britain, where they will be paid decent wages, which are a passport for themselves, their wives and children to a better standard of living than they can know by growing produce on the land here. If you can absorb the thousands of unemployed workers into productive employment on schemes of national utility such as those I have indicated, and if you can exploit the fertility of the soil to such an extent as to produce more agricultural wealth and at the same time provide more employment, then inevitably you drive up the national income and make more wealth available for all our people. Just as in the case of a family that is wealthy, certain expenditure of a luxury kind can be afforded, so you drive up the national income by the creation of more wealth, through an intensification of the exploitation of our land and the production of new capital assets which enrich the national estate.
It is along those lines, and along those lines only, that you can hope for a substantial improvement in social services. Those services may be necessary here, to some extent, but so long as we are satisfied to allow the national income to fall and to carry a permanent army of 100,000 idle men and women and another army of periodically employed men and women, and so long as we allow a growing core of endemic poverty to eat into the economic fabric that we have, then I am afraid that inevitably there must be a low standard of social services, as there is not sufficient wealth production to maintain a high standard of social services. The new wealth created in the manner I have indicated would enable us to bear new social services, which would succour many of our people from the adversity which blows their way from time to time. Those who are sick, those who reach old age and those who are chronic invalids, might well find substantial help from the State by a scheme which would provide pensions for the sick and the chronic invalids, and decent pensions for old people.
We could, as is now being advocated by all Parties in the State, finance a decent scheme of family allowances, which would constitute a redistribution of the national income, and help us to maintain not merely the large families but the family unit which, in our circumstances, must be our main hope for the preservation and development of our race.
Instead of planning along those lines, the Government appears to have exalted that Dickensian character, Wilkins Micawber. There seems to be no appreciation by the Government of the necessity to grapple with problems on vigorous lines, on new lines, and the whole policy seems to be: "We can do nothing; wait and see what happens." You can wait too long in circumstances like these, and all the indications are that the Government is waiting too long before applying enthusiasm, energy and foresight to the solution of our problems. The present position of the mass of the people is utterly deplorable, and it could not, of course, be otherwise. According to the Minister for Industry and Commerce the cost of living has increased by 60 per cent. between 1939 and 1943, whilst the wages of workers and the incomes of those who are not precisely describable as workers, where they have increased at all, have increased by not more than 10 per cent.
If you have an economic situation in which prices rise by 60 per cent. whilst incomes rise by only 10 per cent. in actual and not real wages, then inevitably you have a situation in which the standard of living of the mass of the people is substantially depressed. The effect of the present increased prices in 1943, as compared with 1939, is that, if you want to buy what 20/- bought in 1939, you have to spend 31/7. If you take people whose wages were £1, 30/- and £2 per week, and apply that economic fact to their methods of living, the fact that they have to spend such a substantial additional sum shows the extent to which they are being hit by the rapid increase in the cost of living for the past four years. It must be obvious to the members of the Government that their price control policy has failed appallingly.
There appears to be no effective control over prices, as is manifest by the fact that prices have increased on an average by 60 per cent. over the past four years. In fact, a whole lot of commodities has increased by much more. If one takes, for instance, a commodity like fuel, to say that it has increased by only 60 per cent. during the past four years is just to rave. The turf which is being sold in the City of Dublin to-day at 64/- is really equivalent to coal at £8 per ton and its quality is such that a decent horse would not lie down in it for bedding.
There is widespread indignation and bitterness at the manner in which the Government has failed to control prices. That bitterness is intensified by reason of the fact that the Government has been efficient in only one respect—in the unreasonable control of wages. Whilst they have permitted prices to rise with apparent impunity on the one hand, they have been maliciously efficient in keeping the wages of workers low, on the other hand. If the Government cannot control prices, I suggest that, in all decency, they must provide for the adjustment of wages and incomes to enable the people to purchase goods the prices of which have risen skywards. The present policy means telling people that the more they can be made prosperous, the more they must starve, that they will be wealthy so long as they can get the lowest possible wage. That is the way of life that will result inevitably from Government policy.
Those people who have to depend on social services, such as unemployment assistance, widows' and orphans' pensions, particularly the noncontributory pensions, and home assistance, are living in a sea of poverty. It is hard to imagine that, in a rural area, a woman whose husband is dead has to maintain herself and four children on a widows' and orphans' pension of 10/—5/- for herself, 2/- for the first child and 1/- for each of the other children.
To imagine that a woman of that kind can keep five persons—herself, an adult, and four children under 14 years —on 10/- a week is to do violence to all intelligent thought. When you consider the situation of a person of that kind and then read Article 45 of the Constitution, in which we are told that the State will endeavour to enable people to provide for their domestic needs through their various occupations, you get an interesting sidelight on the uselessness of the Constitution in such a condition of poverty. Yet, this Government is drifting along gaily, quite unconcerned about the sufferings of people such as the woman to whom I have referred. I ask the Minister or any Fianna Fáil Deputy how they can expect, in 1943, with the cost-of-living index figure at 273 as compared with 100 in July, 1914, a woman to keep herself and four children on 10/- a week? If you cannot expect her to do so, obviously, the responsibility is upon the Government to remedy the situation.
If you take the position in respect of unemployment assistance in rural areas, you find that the maximum rate of payment is 14/- a week without vouchers. A man, his wife and six children are expected to live on 14/- a week. How can it be done? It may be said that there is no unemployment in the rural areas, but the official figures show that 90,000 persons are unemployed throughout the country. It passes my comprehension how the Government, knowing the rapid increase in the cost of living, knowing that the struggle for a living is sterner and keener than at any time for the past 25 years, can drift on, apparently indifferent to the sufferings of these people and do nothing to remedy their plight.
I do not grudge the expenditure on the Army in the present circumstances; far from it. But it is rather remarkable that when we can, in an emergency, find close on £9,000,000 for the Army we cannot raise money to relieve the plight of widows, orphans and unemployment assistance recipients who are suffering hardships such as the figures I have mentioned clearly demonstrate. The rates of benefit to which I have referred are maximum rates. They are rendered of less value by inquisitions in the form of means tests, applied by a vast army of people let loose on the country for the purpose of interrogating those unfortunate applicants for benefit. In this connection, I have seen the most extraordinary estimates of income. I saw a case the other day where an old age pensioner, living in a labourer's cottage, with a half acre of land, had his net profit from the half acre—taking no account of the outoffices which this man had put up—estimated at £26. In other words, every acre of land in the country was estimated to yield a net profit of £52. The investigation officer who compiled profits on land at that rate ought immediately to be made a Minister for Agriculture. I have seen other cases in which these investigation officers had the most inordinate conception of the egg-laying capacity of hens—so much so that one would imagine they should be given jobs as super-poultry instructors, or, in any event, be snapped up and brought to the Agricultural College in Glasnevin to impart to the less learned poultry-keepers knowledge of the methods they employ to multiply the productivity of hens. It is means tests of that kind which are most irksome and most onerous so far as the applicants for this type of benefit are concerned. Bearing in mind the low rates of benefit which we pay to these people and the cost of investigating what fragmentary means they are supposed to have, I suggest to the Minister for Finance that he might well call off the inspectors, whose main function seems to be to squeeze out of these unfortunate people any type of information they are likely to part with in order to reduce the low rates to which they would be entitled under the Act if they had no means at all.
Reference has been made to the post-war period, and every Deputy has rightly stressed the importance of planning for the post-war period. The post-war period will not come when we so decide. We cannot afford to postpone the planning. The post-war period will be that following the laying down of arms by the belligerents, and the signing of the peace. That will be decided by others; we cannot decide it. Bearing in mind that we shall have no voice whatever in determining when the post-war period will commence, prudence demands that we should arrange to plan for the post-war period now. In many other countries, new departments have been set up to plan for the difficulties which will be experienced in the post-war period. By providing for those difficulties, they hope to arrange for the switch from war to peace and for the orderly change from war-time productivity to peace-time pursuits. Are we doing anything of that kind here? Not a single Minister has indicated here what the Government hope to do in respect of the post-war period. Occasionally, at meetings of Fianna Fáil Cumainn in the city, the Minister for Supplies, who might now be called the Minister for Promises, tells us what the Government intends to do in the post-war period and what plans they have. I do not believe a single word the Minister for Supplies says in this regard. If I were ever tempted to believe it, the fact that he told us in 1938 that he was planning to insulate this country against the ravages of a probable war and that, in 1939, we discovered that he had done nothing except imitate Nero, would cure me of any desire to place faith in what the Minister for Supplies says.
Frankly, I do not believe that the Government is doing anything in the way of planning for the post-war period. I can see no evidence of that planning but I think it is vital that there should be planning and that it should commence at once. We may think that we can control the post-war period. We may think that, in the situation into which we shall be projected at the termination of the war, we shall be able to find a solution for our problems. But the problems may not be of our creation and they may not be of a kind that we shall be capable of mastering.
I suppose in the last four years close on 200,000 of our people must have gone to Britain and the Six Counties. A large number of them had been there already; they went there in a period prior to the last four years. We may have a strange situation developing after the war. We may not have to send for those emigrants. We may not have to bring those emigrants back in ships. The British may well draft them back here. They may produce the ships for us, and say: "Here are your 250,000 emigrants. Thanks very much. They were very good men while they were here, but now you can take them back and look after them." One day we may wake up and find all those emigrants in ships moored outside the harbours of the country, perhaps deported back here, or perhaps, because of conditions imposed on them in Britain, desirous of coming back. Have we any plan for dealing with that situation? Can anybody imagine what will happen in the post-war period when those 250,000 people suddenly make up their minds that, in view of the conditions in Britain, they will go back to Ireland, the land of their birth, claiming their heritage here, claiming their right to live here, claiming their right to be fed and clothed and housed here?
Has anybody contemplated the economic problem that is going to create? When they come back here, they will not have been accustomed to unemployment assistance payments. They will be expecting something more than the low wages paid to turf workers and agricultural workers here. They will come back, after five or six or ten years in England on £5 or £6 or £10 a week, and the first week they do not get that £5 or £6 or £10 here there will be trouble. When you tell them to go to the employment exchanges and put up with 14/- a week for themselves and their wives and five or six children, there will be more trouble. Obviously, that is a situation for which we ought to be planning a remedy. Has anybody thought about it? Has anybody any idea of what is to be done in circumstances of that kind? I think it is a very real danger, and a very serious problem. It is a problem to which the Government must apply itself. It is a problem which only the Government can solve, with the resources which are at the disposal of the Government, and not at the disposal of any other Party in the country.
My complaint in the main is that the country is allowed to drift on in a rudderless fashion. There is no planning. No effort is being made to generate enthusiasm for a plan. Such plans as we hear about from time to time seem to have no objective. One cannot discover what the particular goal is under any plan which has been adumbrated from time to time. I think there is a rude awakening ahead of us. We cannot go on in this drifting fashion for ever. One day, on the termination of the war or perhaps before it, our people will have a rude awakening. They will realise that the peace-time methods which have given such appallingly bad results in the past were no remedy for the specially accentuated difficulties that have grown up owing to the war situation. The Government, if it likes, can continue along its present road. It can simply paddle along, keeping people on low rates of benefit, exporting our unemployed to Britain, paying a low standard of wages to those who are left behind, keeping agriculture in a depressed condition and failing fully to exploit our agricultural potentialities.
If it chooses to do that, it will find disillusionment and privation for our people at the end of the road. But the Government could even now take a new road, by putting our people to work on the creation of new assets for the nation, by intensifying agricultural productivity in the country, by giving the farmer a fixed price for his produce and requiring him in return to pay decent wages to his agricultural workers. A policy of that kind can be financed with much greater financial security here than in any country engaged in the war to-day, whether in Europe or in Asia. Even now, although we have lost much valuable time, I suggest to the Minister that, either on its own or in co-operation with minds which are willing to cooperate, the Government ought to insist upon planning our national life. In planning our national life, the aim ought to be to raise the standard of living of our people. We have, in short, a choice between two roads. We can go on drifting, with a low standard of living, with large-scale unemployment, with endemic poverty in many places throughout the country, or we can take another road by utilising whatever resources we have to the full, financing the operations of our brains and our brawn on those resources by State credits, and by aiming at giving our people a decent standard of living, recognising that a decent standard of living for our people represents our best passport to prosperity.