This Vote on Account is an intimation to the House and to the country that the nation must prepare itself for raising £50,000,000 in taxation this year. When we consider that the State's demand for £50,000,000 will be accompanied by a demand from the local authorities for approximately £7,000,000 to be raised out of the rates, we are face to face with the position that the nation, out of its income, will have to provide £57,000,000 this year. For about 20 years the national income of the State has been static at about £150,000,000. Possibly, arising from inflationary tendencies, the national income might now be said to be £170,000,000 or £180,000,000. No recent figures are available to enable calculations to be made, but the fact is that out of a national income of approximately £170,000,000 we will have to provide £57,000,000 for national and local services.
I do not think the Minister will attempt to deny that that is a very heavy charge on such a relatively small national income. It seems that roughly 30 per cent. of the national income is raked off for services of the kind I have indicated, and I think that rake-off in our circumstances is something that is unusual, something that is unparalleled in countries whose circumstances are approximately similar to those which obtain here. In my view the significance of these figures cannot be gainsaid and the dangers which they indicate cannot be overlooked. To raise a sum of £57,000,000 in taxation out of a national income of £170,000,000 is to impose upon the people a very heavy burden. I do not, of course, attempt to deny that the raising of the £57,000,000 is necessary in our circumstances, but I think the point must not be overlooked, because it is at the root of our economic life, that if we are to make that burden tolerable for our people, it can be done only in one way, that is, by increasing national productivity and thereby making it possible for our people to bear the burden under more endurable circumstances. In New Zealand, a country with a population of approximately 1,600,000, the national income represents £180 per head of the population. Applying the New Zealand national income of £180 per head to our circumstances, our total national income would be in the vicinity of £540,000,000 and our financial and economic relationship with New Zealand may be gauged by a comparison of our national income, £170,000,000, with their national income, £340,000,000. That might give us some indication of the extent by which we must multiply our productivity here in order to be able to provide better standards of social legislation for our people.
The most significant feature and the most dangerous symptom of the Estimates is that in this relatively small country we find it necessary to make provision to the extent of £6,000,000 for services which are related to the relief of poverty and distress. If ever there was an indictment of our statesmanship it is surely to be found in the fact that, out of our national expenditure of £50,000,000 we must necessarily spend approximately £6,000,000 for services definitely related to the relief of poverty and distress. That is a dangerous situation. It is an undesirable situation. It is a situation which can only be remedied by removing the causes of poverty and of want.
For this situation there is only one remedy. It is now possible to find it in operation in most countries which have been compelled to mobilise their manhood in time of war. That remedy is the provision of full employment for each and every citizen able and willing to work. Are we doing that to-day? Quite clearly we are not. There has been no attempt whatever to utilise to the full the available manpower of the nation in all spheres of national activity. What we are doing to-day is simply relying on the worn-out, peace-time economic policy, which gave us deplorable results in peace-time and which are giving us still more deplorable results in the emergency. We are now in the fifth year of the war. If we failed in the first year of the war to make the provision that one finds it necessary to make in time of war, it might be said in justification of our inertia that we were caught on the wrong foot when the war broke out, that we had not time to make the necessary preparations. But to-day we are in the fifth year of the war and we have not yet realised the necessity for mobilising the nation's resources and for mobilising the available man-power and material that are dormant in the country to-day.
In other countries, notably those at war, the urge of war and the necessities of war have brought about economic and financial revolutions. Old economic structures have been ruthlessly torn up and replaced by others better calculated to ensure the success of the war effort in these countries. Old financial systems that stood for generations have been uprooted. What were thought to be orthodox methods of finance are no longer permitted to operate in these countries because, under stress of war, the various nations realised that the necessities of the time demanded that there should be an abandonment of methods that were not calculated to ensure the best possible equipment for the pursuit of war being available for the nations concerned.
While that has happened over most of the entire world and to a very large extent, even in neutral countries, we in this portion of Ireland are content to bask in the twilight of an economic and financial age which the world has long since left behind. We still cling to financial and economic policies which the world has long since abandoned, and we continue to tolerate the deplorable results which adherence to out-worn financial and economic systems inevitably brings. Nations engaged in war to-day are not merely taxing their people severely, but are mortgaging future generations. In many of these countries generations of their citizens will bear very heavy burdens inevitably associated with the prosecution of war. Many of these burdens will not be liquidated until many generations have passed. Indeed, he would be a very wise man who would attempt to say when the financial burdens which have been imposed on the principal Powers of Europe or other parts of the world are likely to be liquidated. Here, with a resolution and determination worthy of a better cause, we struggle on to maintain economic and financial systems which the world has long since abandoned. Possibly, there is no other nation in the world to-day that has such a conception of the purpose and the use of money as we have. We fail completely to realise that the main source of life here and elsewhere is the production and distribution of food, goods and services, that these are the vital factors of life and that money is merely the mechanism which promotes the production and exchange of goods and services.
We, however, prefer, against the better judgment of the rest of the world, to regard money as the supreme authority, as something which determines what will be produced, the quantities in which it will be produced, the manner in which it will be distributed, and the areas over which it will be spread. We overlook the fact, the incontrovertible fact, one that is realised to-day in Europe and the world generally more clearly than ever, and that is, that a nation can only live on what it produces, that there is nothing else on which it can live.
What we have to recognise as an essential part of any agricultural or economic regeneration here is that we must intensify production of goods and services, and the mechanism of money must be utilised for the purpose of serving rather than delimiting that objective. But we, of course, would not be content to do things even in a half-radical way. In the matter of money mechanism, we have probably the most conservative system in the world. Our money mechanism operates so that we provide currency and credit on the basis of an anchorage not associated with Irish goods or assets. We are content here with a monetary system under which we permit our banks to issue money on the basis, not of the assets of this country but on the basis of what another country owes.
Under the unfortunate Central Bank Act and the Currency Act before it, special steps were taken to ensure and make permanent our anchorage to the British pound. Before our banks can issue new money for any purpose they must get a British pound note, deposit that note with the Central Bank here, so that they may get permission to issue an Irish pound note. In other words, before you can get an Irish pound note into your hand, you must get a piece of paper representing what Britain owes—British Defence Bonds, British Victory Bonds, any type of British security—and deposit it with the Central Bank. Then, and only then, will an Irish citizen get permission to hold an Irish pound note.
I do not know what the Republican separatist members of the Fianna Fáil Party think of that; whatever their ambitions used to be about breaking the connection, there is no question of breaking the connection there. The Irish £ can now look the British £ in the face, but the British £ will decide on what conditions it can be looked in the face. When you get what represents British debts, and deposit them with the Irish bank, then you will have the privilege of looking at the Irish colleen on the Irish pound note.
That was the position of the last Government brought about by the Currency Act and that is the situation the Fianna Fáil Party are perpetuating in this country, and they are perpetuating it in the most dangerous set of circumstances that could possibly be visualised in this country. We are anchoring our currency to-day to that of a nation which is engaged in a great war and which is spending probably £15,000,000 a day. Britain has long ceased to have had any gold backing for her currency. Britain has ceased even to have any metallic backing for her currency. She is issuing notes on the character and the credit of the British people. She is issuing money on a colossal scale and we get it because we give the British goods for it. We plank these notes in the Central Bank and are then permitted to look at what is described as an Irish £ note.
I wonder whether the Minister is happy with that set of circumstances? The last Government, in 1927, took power to put into the Currency Act, in less dangerous circumstances, a provision which would enable them to break the anchorage with sterling and get an entirely new anchorage, probably related to Irish production or Irish assets. But here, in the face of the biggest crisis with which the nation has been menaced during the past 20 years, we are gaily carrying on a financial system under which our notes are anchored to the unlimited issue of notes of a neighbouring power engaged in a life and death struggle. I think such a policy represents the economics of a mad-house. Can any Deputy contemplate the situation of buying up the assets of a person who is scattering assets in the way that assets are being scattered in the prosecution of this war?
I think that it is imperative now to apply fresh thoughts and to bring new ideas to bear on this question of our relationship with sterling. It will not be an easy job at the moment to break the link entirely, but it ought to be an easy job to break parity with sterling, and it ought to be an easy job to look at the situation afresh with a view to seeing what can be done to protect Irish interests in a manner which will ensure that we will not have to bear what I fear will be the crushing fiscal and economic effects of the post-war period because of our present-day anchorage to sterling.
One of the most vital needs of our people to-day, if we are to ensure that full employment will be provided for all our people, is that money should be issued to finance every worthwhile scheme of national development; that there will be no reluctance on the part of the State to issue the necessary credits to put people into employment. Every idle man and woman, every man and woman able and willing to work and who is denied an opportunity of working, is a national loss. The idle man and woman must be fed, clothed and housed. Because of their involuntary idleness they are being maintained at the expense of the community and denied an opportunity of contributing to the pool of wealth out of which the community must maintain them.
The Minister for Finance said on one occasion that there was an abundance of money for every worthwhile scheme. I think that was a terse phrase on the part of the Minister. He knows it has no relation to reality; money is available at 5 per cent. but not otherwise. Mention has been made of the fact that persons are employed on rotational schemes for four or five days a week. When you propose that these people should get six days; in other words, that they should do on the fifth and sixth days what they were doing on the first, second, third and fourth days, you are told they cannot be put to work on the fifth and sixth days because there is no money to keep them in employment. The result is that these unfortunate victims of our present chaotic economic system are compelled to subsist on the fragmentary income they get from four days' work. They are denied an opportunity of getting full wages which would help to give them a better standard of living.
The defence put up by the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary, and the Government generally, as regards rotational employment and their parsimonious attitude in respect of the expenditure of money on schemes of national utility, is that the cost is too high and money cannot be spared; but it seems to me that in the circumstances of to-day, and in our circumstances at any time, cost is a trifling matter if we can only produce goods against expenditure and if we can only ensure that these goods are efficiently produced and distributed. I think that unless the Government recognises that the expenditure of money with which to put men and women into full employment represents the only real road to prosperity this nation will stagger on from one economic blizzard to another, and that the actual poverty endured by large sections of the people and the appallingly low standard of living of our people will become a permanent basis of economic servitude.
The need for mobilising our resources in material wealth and man-power is greater to-day than it has been at any time before in our history. The events of the past fortnight have an ominous meaning for this nation, and we must realise that those threats of isolation that are now being made against us may assume very serious proportions. They have yet to be implemented but, if they are implemented, then we must meet them with the characteristic courage of our people, and meet them in the spirit that difficulties are made in order to be surmounted. While on this subject, perhaps I might take the opportunity of saying that the whole nation is behind the Government in the stand it has taken recently. I, as a member of the Defence Conference, have had an opportunity of considering many aspects of our national defence, and I am breaking no confidence or giving away no secret when I say that in all the meetings of the Defence Conference the one impression made on me was the Government's scrupulous desire to maintain strictly the policy of neutrality, so far as our country was concerned, as between the different belligerents.
Every possible precaution, every possible care, and the greatest prudence were exercised by the Government and by the members of all the Parties who constituted the Defence Conference, to ensure that there could be no reflection on our attitude concerning the preservation of our neutrality as between the different belligerents. I think that an examination of the proceedings of the Defence Conference, and of the Government's handling of both national and international affairs, will show that there is no other country in the world which has maintained such a correct appreciation of what strict neutrality involves, and which acted with such commendable fairness towards the belligerents. I think that it should also be said, not merely for the information of our own people, but for the information of the peoples of the world generally, that the reply sent by our Government to the various Notes was not the reply merely of the Fianna Fáil Party, but of our united nation—a nation which is striving, as it always has done, to maintain its rights and its own honourable way of life. The reply issued by the Government to these Notes was a reply, not merely by the Party now in office but a reply reflecting the sentiments which every Irish man and Irish woman feels to-day. Our stand in this matter has been dictated solely by Irish needs, and that standard also conforms to international law.
We seek no domination over other lands or other countries. We merely seek to preserve our rights and our neutrality, as other nations sought to preserve their neutrality until such aggression as is now threatened against us forced them into the war, but if there is still left any respect for peace-time international morality, then we have a right to expect that no aggression will be resorted to against us, and that no sanctions will be imposed upon us—and especially that no such demand should be made upon us by nations which profess to the rest of the world that they are liberty-loving nations. If there are to be sanctions imposed upon us or aggression undertaken against us, they cannot be justified on any moral basis or by any reliance on international law. The imposition of sanctions, and the threat of aggression, can only be justified on the ground of the frenzied necessities of war, and let it be said that they cannot be justified on any other ground.
In such times, vigilance must be the watch-word of our nation. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of the preservation of our liberty and our national rights; and if, faced with the crisis with which we are faced to-day—a crisis which may be a continuing one, and which might lead to an eruption here—we fail to ensure that our people may be enabled to face the crisis that exists at present and the greater crisis that may yet be in store for us, and to enable them to preserve our liberty in the face of any difficulties which may manifest themselves, then posterity will pass judgment upon us, and rightly so, and I think that it will not be a judgment which will reflect much credit upon us. If the emergency through which we are passing, and the crisis in which we are now to some extent involved, demonstrates one thing more than another, it is the necessity for national and economic awareness, and the real necessity for that awareness shows itself particularly in what might be described as "the food front." Food is our chief defence line. It could be quite easily our weakest line of defence, but it ought to be our strongest line. We have at our disposal 12,000,000 acres of arable land—arable land which is the envy of Europe. The cultivation of 3,000,000 acres of that land would satisfy the demands of our people, and those who are responsible for the development of that land and for its administration must ensure that of those 12,000,000 acres not less than 3,000,000 acres will be used for production. In that connection, I may say that the greatest mistake that could be made in connection with this question of a possible food shortage is to haggle over the price that will be paid to the producers or the wages that will be paid to the workers. I think it ought to be an easy matter to get the goodwill of the whole agricultural community: first, by giving the farmer a remunerative price for his crops, and, secondly, by ensuring that the agricultural labourer will be given a proper wage and a fair share of the produce of his labour. That can be done, first, by giving the farmer a good price for his products, and, secondly, by insisting that the farmer will pay a reasonable wage to the agricultural labourer. Here, again, I should like to draw attention to the methods of our agricultural production. What is the use of haggling about money or prices if our people are starving? We are told about sterling assets, but what is the use of giving to Britain goods to the value of £2 if we are only getting £1 in return, and getting the remaining £1 in the shape of a credit note which may not be honoured on demand, while, at the same time, our people are unable to get food here?
At present we are exporting to Britain twice as much as Britain is giving us, and, while some people seem to take a delight in what is described as a favourable balance of trade, I think we are doing to-day something which is simply economic daftness. We have a relatively small productivity and we are exporting to Britain a very substantial portion of it. I do not say this in any spirit of hostility to Britain—the argument is the same if it were being sent to Germany or Russia. Of the limited produce we have here, we are giving Britain a substantial portion and Britain is giving us back half the value of it and is chalking up in the Bank of England a credit which we know perfectly well we cannot use during this war, because Britain is taking most effective steps to freeze our external assets, and which, in the circumstances of the post-war period, we may not be able to use either.
I think Deputy McGilligan was perfectly right when he pointed out yesterday that, in the post-war period, Britain will endeavour to pay her overseas debts in goods, and if her overseas debts are paid in goods to those who are her allies in this war, there may be very little goods available for us; but even if these goods were there, Britain is certainly not going to give us goods and take our sterling investments in lieu of them. If she gives us goods, it will probably be on a barter basis, on the basis that we send goods to Britain against the goods she sends us, and our sterling assets in the meantime will continue to be frozen. I put it to the Government now that they ought to make a serious effort, by means of a long-term agricultural policy, to fix prices for agricultural produce for several years to come in order to let the farmer know what he may expect for many years ahead and to pay to the agricultural labourer a wage which will enable him to enjoy a decent standard of living and which will beget his goodwill and his enthusiasm for the essential task of producing the maximum quantity of food for the nation.
If we can ensure for ourselves an abundance of food, if we can ensure that by paying the agricultural worker a decent wage and the farmer a decent price for his produce, then we are spending the money in the family, and, I never yet knew a family which became poor by distributing the family's assets amongst the various prudent members comprising the family. We, apparently, are satisfied with a situation in which we irritate the farmer for months and months by haggling over prices and in which we keep the agricultural worker in a state of constant indignation by our failure to pay him a decent rate of wages, and, in circumstances like those, and being in the position of a beleaguered island, we expect to produce here the necessary food for the maintenance of our human and livestock population.
Similarly in regard to fuel. I have grave fears for the whole fuel position in the coming year. I think it is known to everybody that timber is in pretty short supply. It is extremely difficult to get timber now and I think the difficulties will intensify as the months pass. Transport problems may intensify our turf problems because of the difficulty of getting turf transported from the turf to the non-turf areas, and, because the available labour power is not fully employed or thoroughly organised, I think our turf production this year will be found to be less than last year. We continue, as Deputy Healy said, to indulge in the most wasteful of all luxuries: the carting of useless wet turf from faraway places to the City of Dublin and wasting the time of those who cut the turf, wasting the railway wagons, wasting the man-power employed, wasting petrol, wasting tyres and generally irritating everybody who has any association with the wet turf. I think the Government ought to think, and to get somebody to help them in the thinking process, in respect of turf production. It is the most criminal form of waste to send to the City of Dublin and other large centres of population a good deal of turf which I see on the roads and in railway trucks. Some of it is light brown turf—yellow turf, they would call it in some areas because of its poor quality.
It is not capable of standing up to the weather; it is not capable of giving a decent fire; and it is not capable of being stopped from going into mould. The only thing it is capable of doing is wasting the time of people who have any association with it, taking up space and generally irritating the citizens on whom the thing is unfortunately passed off. If we are to avoid what I think will be a very severe fuel shortage, and a particularly severe fuel shortage if there is a restriction on the export to this country of coal from Britain, we must make sure now, and not at the end of the turf-cutting season, that turf cutting will be made attractive to the producer. It is a well-known fact that the producer gets only a small percentage of the price at which turf is sold in the City of Dublin. I should wager that turf is probably being produced at less than 24/- per ton, and in the City of Dublin the same turf costs 64/- a ton, plus a subsidy of about £1 8s. in order to enable it to be sold at that figure. What is wrong with the whole turf distribution scheme that turf, which is being produced at £1 4s. per ton, is being sold at 64/- per ton and then has to be subsidised to the extent of £1 8s. per ton in order to enable it to be sold at 64/- per ton? If there is anything more daft than that I do not know what it is, but we sail on merrily, satisfied that that is the best that can be done and taking no steps whatever to remedy such a situation.
If we are not to fall into the mistake of permitting a serious fuel shortage, which could conceivably cause considerable public disturbance, to arise, I think that at this stage turf cutting should be made attractive to every person capable of cutting turf, and it can be made attractive in one way, that is, by paying those who produce turf a decent family wage, and fortified then by the satisfaction that these persons are paid a decent family wage, we can appeal to their national pride and their sense of national preservation to win the maximum quantity of turf. We can get turf produced in greater quantities in that way than by attempting to defend the present low rates of wages paid to the turf cutters, or by attempting to justify the outrageously high prices being charged for rubbishy turf in Dublin and many other cities and towns through the country.
Another aspect of the present emergency, and one which grows worse as time goes on, is the serious economic position of the workers. The Minister for Finance told us, in 1939, I think, that the Government intended to set its face against the attempt of any one class to make profit out of the emergency; the clear implication of the speech he then made and amplified in the Budget statement the following year, was that if there was to be control of wages, a pegging down of wages on the one hand, there would be rigid control of prices on the other. Everybody now realises that his undertakings were wholly illusory as far as they represented Government policy or intent. Prices have been allowed to rise so rapidly that many commodities are now out of the reach of ordinary working-class families. Prices have been allowed to rocket skywards while the wages of the workers have been kept down to an inordinately low level. The effect of the policy of permitting prices to rise, while keeping wages low, is that the pre-war £ is now only worth 9/- from the point of view of buying capacity. When we talk of agricultural workers or road workers having a wage of £2 a week let us remember that wage in pre-war buying value represents only 18/-. That situation is the inevitable outcome of the policy of permitting prices to rise while on the other hand keeping wages inordinately low.
I do not know if the Minister or the Government fully appreciate what a keen struggle ordinary working-class people have to live in the days through which we are passing or their herculean efforts to buy food, clothes and footwear. Many families, even where the bread-winner is working, are unable to pay the current prices of articles of clothing and footwear. I was speaking yesterday to a man with a wife and seven children. One appreciates what the expenditure of that family on food and clothing must be. That man's wages were £3 2s. weekly and, when I met him, he was coming out of a shop where he had bought a pair of boots for a daughter aged 20. He had to pay 31/- for the boots out of his wages of £3 2s., and then provide food and clothing for a family of nine persons. One has only to walk through the streets of this city and other towns to realise that there is, so far as exterior appearances go, a very notable debasement in the standard of living of the working class.
In many cases their clothes are poor and tattered, while boots and shoes are bad. Most appalling is the degrading spectacle of little children running around in their bare feet, or with some type of equipment for their feet, masquerading as boots and shoes. One has only to walk through the poor quarters to realise the amount of poverty and suffering that exists. I am assured by social workers in the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul that even in the new areas of Crumlin, Kimmage and Drimnagh there is considerable privation and hardship because of the rising prices and of the low wages of the people living there.
It is probably inevitable in a time of war, when sources of supply are cut off, or seriously restricted, that there will be some hardship, but the whole policy of the Government is, in my opinion, based upon a misconception of the value and purpose of money. The Government seems to be satisfied that the way to tide over this crisis is to debase the standard of living of the people, and that the country can be prosperous while the wages of workers are kept low. I think that is economic heresy. I do not think it could be justified. I do not think there can be any sound economic justification for a policy which manifests itself in a constant lowering of the standard of living of the mass of the people. While workers see their standard of living forced down, while it is harder than ever to buy the barest necessities of life, and while footwear and clothing are unpurchaseable by many families, on the other hand they see large industrialists able to gather in wealth, and able to make larger profits, even by handling a lesser quantity of goods. They also see that what these industrialists cannot distribute in the form of exorbitant profits, they can store away for use some other day. I do not think anybody can pretend to be complacent about the standard of physical health of the nation to-day. The great scourge of tuberculosis continues defiantly. No effective steps have been taken to combat that disease in a manner which gives hope that its progress will be arrested at an early date. So long as the people are underfed, badly clad, and badly housed, as they are in the present emergency circumstances, it seems to me that we are simply embarking on a policy of aiding and abetting the development of T.B. by our inability to take effective steps to control its progress.
Every county medical officer of health who has reported on the standard of health in the county which he administers has been compelled to call attention to the growth of malnutrition. Rickets continue to blight child life in this city as well as in other cities and towns. From my knowledge of conditions in Dublin and of towns in my constituency I believe that if there was a close investigation of living conditions of a large section of the working-class people, a state of affairs would be revealed which would shock our sense of complacency to-day. Reports made from time to time by medical officers interested in social work reveal a deplorably low standard of health amongst young children who will be the citizens of to-morrow. Apparently we are content with a situation when, even in the early days of their lives, the physique of these children is being blighted by malnutrition and poverty associated with low wages or no wages. If we are going to permit that condition of affairs to develop, the future Irish nation will pay a very heavy price for our incompetence and our legislative laziness. Reflecting on these things one is tempted to ask: Why should all this be allowed to happen? Why should we compel our people to tolerate a low standard of living? Why should we permit poverty, malnutrition and various other diseases which have an economic origin to inflict such privation on our people? Why should we tolerate such a state of affairs when we have the capacity to alter it? If they were the consequence of invasion one could understand them flowing from invasion. Why do we deliberately set out to inflict such hardship and suffering on our people? It may be quite useless to do it in present circumstances, but I want to make a plea for a new, a Christian conception of life in this country towards the mass of our people, for a conception of life which will do some honour to our Christian past.
I put it to the Government that this crisis may well provide the opportunity of abandoning the pagan economic philosophies to which we have been anchored too long. I want to plead for a state of society and a condition of life, in which the State, acting for the community, will guarantee to every citizen who serves the nation a full and decent life for the service which he renders. I want the State to say to each and every citizen who serves the nation that he will be entitled, as part of the State's recognition of his service, to a share in the national heritage of public well-being. I want the State to say to the citizen that, in his daily life, in his service on behalf of the nation, the State will stand behind him, guaranteeing him decent wages and regular employment, and guaranteeing to him that, in want and poverty, in sickness and adversity, it will help him and befriend him. I make the plea that, in old age, a grateful nation will insulate the aged citizen from the shocks to which, unfortunately, old age accompanied by poverty exposes him to-day.
It seems to me to be a challenge to our statesmanship and to our capacity that we live in an age which has given us the most fiendishly efficient instruments of death and destruction, and the genius, the capacity and the so-called statesmanship which can give us those fiendishly efficient instruments of destruction but which cannot give the ordinary, simple, honest-to-God citizen a life which will ensure him three meals per day. That is a challenge to our capacity and a challenge to our statesmanship, but it is even more—it is a challenge to whether we have any real Christian philosophy within us at all. I refuse to believe, so far as this country is concerned, that the emigrant ship, the labour exchange and the workhouse, are the natural destinies of our Irish men and women. I think it is nothing short of a mockery of our Constitution that these evils should still haunt tens of thousands of our Irish men and women, in this fertile land of ours.
This crisis could be a valuable crisis to us, if it shakes us into a sense of human values and away from philosophies that have given us such evils as poverty, malnutrition and want, and if it teaches us that men and women are the most cherished assets which this or any other nation could have. I suggest to the Government, in the fifth year of the war—and I have submitted the same plea on every previous year of the war—that it should take stock, that it should realise the tendencies which are current to-day, that it should weigh and appraise the economic hardships and the social miseries which abound in this country to-day.
As Deputy Linehan has rightly said —I think he speaks not merely for his own Party but for every good citizen —there is an abundance of co-operation available in the economic field. I suggest to the Government that, in the course of its stocktaking, it should make up its mind to seek and to utilise the abundance of goodwill which is there available, in all Parties, for a mass attack on the social evils which confront our people to-day. I believe that the utilisation of that goodwill, properly directed, is capable of safeguarding our people from very many of the evils which, unfortunately, press so heavily on them to-day. I believe that goodwill, properly organised and properly directed, could avert what I fear will be still greater evils; and I believe that the implementation of a policy of national goodwill in the realm of our economic activities would enable our people to see a bright horizon, holding out the hope of a decent life. It might do something more: it might result in an abandonment of that bleakness and drabness which, unfortunately, surrounds the lives of tens of thousands of our people to-day.
