The Minister told us that the cost of doing what he proposes to do from 1st January next will be £500,000, but he was very careful not to say that this sum was portion of the few million pounds of which he has succeeded in depriving civil servants since he stabilised the cost-of-living bonus in June, 1940, and that the civil servants who will get this sum of £500,000 as a result of the Minister's decision will get only an instalment of what the Minister knows is morally due to them and of what was legally due to them until the Minister introduced the stabilisation regulations.
What are the facts of this whole matter? In 1920 a cost-of-living bonus agreement was negotiated between the Civil Service staff organisations, on the one hand, and the Government of the day, on the other. For approximately 18 months after the negotiation of that agreement the cost-of-living index figure continued to rise, and in accordance with the terms of the agreement, wages and salaries moved up in direct ratio to the increase in the cost-of-living index figure. Then, in 1922, the figure commenced to decline. It declined for a long number of years until, in 1932, the index figure, which at its peak stood at 165, fell to 50, from the point of view of its application to basic wages and salaries. One has only to form a mental picture of these two figures, 165 and 50, to realise the extent to which civil servants suffered when the index figure was falling from 165 to 50.
That fall represented a very serious and a very grievous sacrifice on the part of those whose wages were related to the cost-of-living bonus agreement then current. The staff no doubt felt these hardships keenly, and from time to time they made efforts to induce the Government not to insist on its full pound of flesh. They pleaded from time to time for an easement of the bonus agreement because it was pressing with considerable rigour upon them, but every appeal by the staff organisations to the different Governments was met with the reply:—"This is an agreement, a bonus agreement. There is nothing essentially or inherently wrong with it. If there is anything wrong at all, the difficulty is in the basic wages or salaries." Generally speaking, they said, the agreement was all right and they intended to apply it.
We remember when the Taoiseach went down to the square in Ennis on 8th January, 1933, and there declared the almost sacred character of the bonus agreement. He told all and sundry, and civil servants in particular, because there was an election on at the time, that the agreement was an instrument which they did not propose to violate, that they intended to honour the bonus agreement. He said he thought it would be a bad thing for those concerned if they tried to get rid of that sliding scale agreement, because, he said:—"As sure as I am standing here in the market square in Ennis, the cost of commodities will go up and it will be a great consolation to civil servants to know that, when the cost of living goes up, their wages will go up to enable them to meet the increased cost."
The civil servants, with that assurance from the Taoiseach, with that definite promise, one might say, suffered on and continued to labour under serious grievances through the rigid application of the cost-of-living bonus agreement. Then the war broke out in 1939. A state of emergency was proclaimed here, and, in November, 1939, we had the Minister for Finance announcing that the Government intended to set its face against the efforts of anybody to secure compensation for the increase in the cost of living. Arising out of that declaration, the bonus stabilisation regulations were introduced in June, 1940, and applied as from 1st July, 1940. Under these regulations, the Minister pegged down the wages and salaries of civil servants to an index figure of 85, although, in July, 1940, the figure which should have applied was 105. Since July, 1940, civil servants have been paid on the basis of a cost-of-living index figure of 85, when in fact— and this gives some picture of what they have suffered—they ought to have been paid on the basis of a cost-of-living figure of 190.
The State, although a party to the cost-of-living bonus agreement and having taken every possible advantage it could from that agreement, repudiated the agreement in 1940, the effect of that repudiation being to compel civil servants to accept a condition of affairs whereby their basic wages and salaries were governed by an index figure of 85, when a substantially higher figure ought to have been applied every week and every month since the bonus stabilisation regulations were put in force in July, 1940. It is worthy of note at this point that, although the Government introduced these stabilisation regulations in 1940, so far as civil servants were concerned, they did not introduce the general wages Standstill Order until May, 1941, the result being that civil servants' remuneration was stabilised approximately ten months before the Government felt justified in introducing the general stabilisation of wages Order, so that, between July, 1940, and May, 1941, civil servants were compelled to accept stabilisation regulations which were not imposed on workers in outside industry.
Now the Minister comes along, in December, 1944, four and a half years after he introduced the stabilisation regulations, and says he has discovered that it was unfair to have stabilised civil servants' remuneration from July, 1940, as he could not stabilise wages generally until May, 1941. Instead of making restitution, like a Christian gentleman, for the wrong he inflicted in 1940, the Minister now wants to try to get it over to people that this is a very generous gesture on the part of the Government and that everybody is to stay quiet about his wages and bonus until after the emergency. The Minister said that this increase for civil servants is fully justified. Of course it is; it was fully justified in July, 1940. There was no answer to the claim of the Civil Service organisations that this bonus should have been paid from July, 1940, to May, 1941, and in fact there is no answer to their claim that the bonus agreement, under which they lost such substantial sums of money, should continue to operate.
It is manifestly unfair and unjust that, if an agreement is going against a person for a long number of years, and then a set of circumstances arises in which the agreement is likely to be favourable to him, one party to the agreement should be able to say: "I want to repudiate the agreement when I have squeezed every possible advantage out of it." That is what the Government did in 1940.
Now the Minister's conscience has apparently been stricken in the matter and he wants to yield up some of the money which he knows he had no moral or legal right to withhold and he proposes to make restitution as from 1st January next. It seems to me like a case of taking a man's watch and chain, getting some qualm of conscience as to your right to it and saying to the man: "I have been worrying about that watch and chain of yours; I shall give you back the chain next Monday," and still keeping the watch. That is what the Minister is proposing. He is proposing to give £500,000 back to the civil servants when he knows that he is comfortably lining the Exchequer's pockets with a couple or more half millions which do not belong to the Exchequer, but which properly belong to the civil servants and ought to be given to them to enable them to meet their heavy domestic responsibilities.
I put it to the Minister in all equity that there is no case for not making restitution, for not providing for an earlier date than that proposed in the Estimate. The Minister knows that he is only giving back some of the money which he has withheld. Not only have civil servants lost between July, 1940, and May, 1941, by the stabilisation bonus regulations, but since May, 1941, they have lost still more. Since that month the cost of living has increased still further and they have borne even heavier sacrifices, because the index figure has risen from 110 in May, 1941, to 190 in July, 1944. That gives a picture of the heavy loss which civil servants suffered when the bonus during that period was related to an index figure of 85. I put it to the Minister that in all conscience he is bound to make adequate restitution for what has been done. He is unfair and spoiling the sense of conscientiousness of which he is now apparently possessed by not making the increase which he proposes to grant retrospective so as to compensate the staff in some measure for the substantial losses which they have incurred.
Even when the Minister's increase is granted as from the 1st January next the staff will still suffer very serious hardship. I have before me just a few figures which I took the trouble of working out. I find that a man who had a pre-war wage of £2 per week will, as from the 1st January next, even when he gets his increase, be suffering a loss of approximately 19/-per week which he would not suffer if the cost-of-living bonus agreement were operating normally. Even a man with such a low pre-war wage as £1 10s. 0d. will, after he gets this increase on 1st January next, be suffering a weekly loss of 13/- on that low basic wage as compared with what the position would be if the cost-of-living bonus were operating normally. Even a man with a pre-war wage of £3 10s. will continue to suffer, after he gets this increase, a loss of 30/- approximately. People in that low-wage category who are constantly struggling to make ends meet, people who have never been able to save up for the rainy day, people afflicted with one trial or another in order to maintain a home and a wife and children, cannot afford to make such heavy sacrifices as will continue to be demanded by the Minister even when these increases have been granted. I put it to the Minister, therefore, that he ought, in view of the appeals which I am sure will be made to him from all parts of the House and the appeal which I am glad has been made by a Deputy of his own Party, to reconsider this matter and recognise that, if he is going to give civil servants back some of what he has taken from them, he ought to go a little further than he proposes in this Estimate.
The Minister, in referring to the increase of 1/- per week in the emergency bonus, said that he was raising the ceiling from 10/- to 11/- for the purpose of equating the position of civil servants to that of workers in private industry. I should like to point out that the equation will not be complete even when he raises the emergency bonus from 10/- to 11/-because in the application of the 11/-ceiling to workers in private industry there are none of the differentiations which are embodied in the Minister's application of the emergency bonus of 11/-. For instance, the Minister will allow the emergency bonus of 11/- if you are married, but if you are married and doing part-time duty you cannot get that much. If you are unmarried and doing part-time duty you get still less. I put it to the Minister that he ought to recognise that there is no case whatever for the differentiation between married and single officers and between part-time and full-time officers in respect of the emergency bonus.
A rather extraordinary position arises in connection with this. We have the Minister for Industry and Commerce, who is responsible for the the administration of the Wages Standstill Orders generally, permitting banks to pay to their staffs an emergency bonus of 11/- per week without any marriage or single differentiation and without any full-time or part-time differentiation. If the Minister for Industry and Commerce believes that it is right that bank officials should be paid an emergency bonus of 11/- per week without the differentiations contained in the bonus arrangement of the Minister for Finance, surely the Minister for Finance, if he wants to equate the position of civil servants to the position of outside workers, ought to remove these differentiations. They cannot be justified. There is no basis on which they can be explained. They have not a moral basis, an ethical basis, a philosophic basis, or an economic basis. I give up trying to plumb the mind that created a formula of this kind and I hope for an early reformation of that mind in the interests of national economy and national sanity. I put it to the Minister as a sensible man that, if left to himself, he would never have dreamt of inventing a formula of that kind. Having looked at it and relating it to the position of outside employees and the authorisation issued by his colleague, the Minister for Industry and Commerce, in respect of outside workers, he ought to apply the 11/- emergency bonus fully without those odious differentiations which cannot be justified on any ground whatever.
There is one other matter to which I should like to make reference on this Estimate and that is the position of persons who have retired on low rates of pensions. If the Minister had recognised in July, 1940, what he is recognising in December, 1944, that civil servants' remuneration ought not to have been stabilised earlier than that of outside workers, a number of persons who retired from the service, either on the ground of age or ill-health, since July, 1940, would have had their pensions increased by a proportion of the increase which civil servants are to receive on the 1st January next. If the Minister is only going to apply this increase from the 1st January next, it means that, although he is making restitution to serving civil servants in some measure—an insufficient measure in my opinion—he is going to do nothing apparently to deal with the case of persons who were compelled to retire on age or medical grounds since this injustice was first inflicted in 1940. If the Minister admits that he really did wrong in July, 1940, and that he ought not to have moved in this matter so precipitately in that year, then he ought to recognise that a special case exists for those persons who were compelled to retire on health or age grounds since the bonus stabilisation regulations were introduced.
A man whose health is such that he is able to continue in the Service until 1945 will, for pension purposes, get the benefit of the increase in bonus; but, if a man's health was such that he was compelled to go out at any time since 1940, that man will lose, inasmuch as he will not have any benefit from the increase which will be granted on 1st January. He will lose that, notwithstanding that the Minister now admits that he is granting this increase because of the precipitate application of the bonus stabilisation regulations from July, 1940, when men who have since retired were in the Service. I put it to the Minister that these pensioners, many of whom were retired when the cost-of-living index figure was as low as 50 and 55, have a very special case for investigation and a very strong claim for an increase in their pensions to enable them to meet the high cost of living.
These people went out when the cost-of-living index figure was 50 or 55. That figure is now 190. How do you expect a person who went out on pension when the cost-of-living index figure was 50 or 55 to be able to keep his head above water when that figure is 190— when, as a matter of fact, for pension purposes it ought to be 195? It is asking that person to bear a burden which it is not possible for him to bear on his small pension. There is a special case for the lowly-paid pensioners. The resources of the country are not so depleted that the Minister must compel these persons, who have served the State loyally and faithfully, to bear hardships out of all proportion to those which any citizen is required to bear in our circumstances to-day.
