A very relative term. I do not think I will be anything like quarter as long as the Minister. This year, the Minister is turning to provision for the Shannon airport and apparently the same idea is being pursued. There was a certain amount of ridicule here last year in finding that our hopes were based entirely on tourist development. One wondered if the tourists were to come here to be transported over a derelict transport concern, to look at the ravages of poverty and disease, and to take a side glance at the prisons where, according to the Minister for Justice, the number of occupants leaves us in the position of stabilising crime at twice what it was before the war. Possibly the Minister will tell us what advantage financially this country is going to get from the expenditure of £1,000,000 upon the Shannon airport and the concreting of runways around Dublin at a cost of something approaching another £400,000?
After that, as far as this Budget is concerned, the next relief that is granted is in relation to matches. One firm is to get remission of the duty on matches and the promise to the consumer is, not matches at a cheaper rate but matches in more reasonable quantities at the same rate. The only other relief that is proposed for the hard-pressed community is that the transport concern, which was set up under such magnificent auspices here recently and with such laudatory comments as to its possibilities in the future, is to be relieved from the impact of corporation profits duty and excess corporation profits duty, if it should ever earn enough to get inside that class.
I think the only hope that is contained in the Budget is the Minister's view that the situation has now reached a point when we may begin to think of the demobilisation of the Army without interfering with national security. The Minister will find that, as usual, his time lag in the appreciation of that point of view is somewhere in the neighbourhood of one year to two years behind that of other people. He also tells us, in a flight of great imagination, that plans are being formed which it is hoped will result in turf being produced for this community which will be a satisfactory fuel and will be produced for an economic price. It has taken five years to bring the Minister even to promise that plans are being formed which it is hoped will have that result. It is no wonder, when he looks back upon the hardship that has been put upon the community by unsatisfactory fuel at a shocking price, that he should have moved very hastily away from that, without giving any idea as to why these hopes are better formed than the realisation of hopes has been in the past. Outside those things, the Minister neither gives us the promise of relief immediately in this Budget nor any hope of relief in the early future.
Certain people, of course, are going to be kept well in a favoured position. The upward trend of profits is considered so certain that the Minister budgets for a big increase in his revenue arising from these profits. He states what he thinks of Irish industry and of the amount of money there is in it. Quite recently, in the Seanad, when this matter was discussed, the question was put to the Minister as to whether he believed that there were millions of pounds held and stored in reserve by Irish industrialists and he replied that not merely did he believe it but he knew it, and he hopes it will continue for the next year. He will gain a little bit of extra revenue from this upward trend of profits which, he presumes, is going to continue during the year.
Beyond that, the Minister has given us as a new weapon this year figures which really show the difficult position in this country in a better way than it has ever been known. On page 35 he goes into calculations of national income and shows the rise from £150,000,000 in 1938 to £250,000,000 in 1944. Then he says that, of course, "it should suffice to say that the increase in national income is purely a monetary phenomenon;" so at least we have accepted now what has been said often in this year and has been as often denied from Government Benches. The Minister for Supplies and his colleagues will tell us we can still get 20/- for the £. He accepts that still, and you can still get two sixpences out of a shilling. The Budget statement shows that we have now £250,000,000, so to speak, of national income. At least, it is put under the heading of "pounds". In the year 1938, it was £150,000,000, and now it has jumped to £250,000,000, and if any man were to delude himself by thinking that because he has £5 in his pocket, and thinking in the terminology of half-sovereigns, that he now has £10, his reasoning would be something like that of the Minister for Finance now, but if he has to purchase goods and pay for them, he will very soon know what is the purchasing power of that money. However, that is one side of the question.
The Minister says that the increase in the cost of living is about 70 per cent., while the increases given in certain directions on salaries is 60 per cent., and he also points out that there has been a decrease in the consumption of goods, other than foodstuffs. He also says that what the financiers call the dead-weight debt of this country is somewhere in the neighbourhood of £100,000,000. So, here we are. The community, so to speak, has been put on half-pay since the war started, despite the rise in the prices of various commodities, and yet the Minister for Finance solaces himself this year as, indeed, he did last year, by saying that, judging by the pressure to which the Minister for Finance is subjected from many quarters to reduce taxation, even though the shoe pinches in more than one place, so far it has been without causing actual lameness. Last year I asked how far the shoe pinched without causing loss to the community, and I asked, particularly, what the stabilisation of the cost-of-living bonus of the civil servants in 1940 would mean, and I was told that it would mean about £1,000,000 a year. In other words, that is the loot that has been gathered in from the civil servants by reason of the way in which the cost of living has been allowed to grow without any corresponding increase to compensate these people. Let us remember how that has been allowed to occur. Many years ago the Taoiseach addressed the civil servants and told them:—
"In my opinion, it would be a bad thing for Labour to agree to get rid of the sliding scale. I am as certain as I am standing here that world prices are going to go up and that the cost of living will go up, and when prices do go up it is a great boon to civil servants to know that salaries will go up to meet the cost of living".
In respect of that class of the community, the Secretary of the Department of Finance, in 1931, said:—
"Civil servants have made an outstanding contribution to national economy. The cumulative saving thereby effected in Civil Service pay since 1922 is nearly £2,000,000. No other section of the community has so substantially contributed to national economy".
That saving of £2,000,000, of course, was effected by reason of the fact that, while the cost-of-living bonus went down, or was stabilised, the cost of living went up, and that to a certain extent their emoluments were so fixed as to enable them to keep pace with the cost of living as it increased or decreased. The Taoiseach gave them the promise, having asked them to hang on to the cost-of-living figure, that their salaries would go up according as the cost-of-living figure went up, and that it would be a great boon to have their salaries so related to the cost-of-living figure. Then we had the stabilisation of the cost-of-living bonus, bringing in a saving of £1,000,000 a year. Recently, however, we had the case of a deputation to the Taoiseach from the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, asking for an increase in their remuneration as a result of the increased cost of living, and they were told by the Taoiseach that they could not get any increase because the teachers' remuneration was not formally or directly governed by the cost-of-living figure. It is a pity that it was not because, if so, they would have been told by the Taoiseach that it would have been a great boon to them; but here, when they recently went to the Government, they were told that their salaries were not governed formally or directly by the cost-of-living figure and that, therefore, there could be no cost-of-living bonus; whereas the civil servants were told that they would be deprived of an increase in the bonus because of the emergency. I wanted to raise the question to-day of the national teachers as an index of the hardships inflicted on the middle classes of this community and the workers in this country—those who have to depend on their wages at the end of the week for services every day and who have had their wages or salaries controlled by the standstill Order. Possibly, it will be a satisfaction to the civil servants, the national teachers, and so on, to know that some of the millions of pounds that have been raked in from them have been given to the development of industry in this country and that the Minister hopes that the upward trend in industry will continue so that he will be able to get a little extra in revenue. Then, at the end of his Budget Statement, the Minister indicates that, with the usual time-lag, he has now come to the conclusion that various movements with regard to international trade may be of value to this country; and that certain committees or commissions are sitting dealing with these matters which may be of interest and have relevance to the needs of our community here.
He has told us that we must balance our imports, the imports we require, by exports on an efficient and competitive basis. It is a pity the Budget does not contain some indication of what the Minister has done to see that whatever goods we have to export will be allowed to enter the places which require them. One sees around the world arrangements being entered into with Great Britain on a five, six and eight years' basis for the provision to Great Britain of the particular foodstuffs in which we are competitive. We have yet to learn that any approach has been made to Great Britain with regard to this matter.
People recently have been writing to the newspapers to know what is our situation with regard to the holding of moneys other than sterling. If we require goods from America, have we any store of dollars for the purpose? Apparently the Minister for Supplies, round about the new year, began to appreciate that the old conditions under which sterling was freely exchangeable into dollars no longer hold and are not likely to hold in the future, but have any steps been taken to find out what amount of our exports can be diverted, or must be diverted, to countries outside the sterling areas and what are our resources in the way of holdings of these other currencies for the purpose of purchase? Can we send exports to these countries to get the necessary currency and, if not, what are we going to do?
During the war, we have worked on a policy of piling up assets of a sterling type in England. Again, about the new year, the realisation hit members of the Government that it was possible that we would not be able to cash in on these resources at once and might not be able to cash in on them for many years, and apparently now there is a realisation that we may have to take whatever goods England likes to send us. There is also a realisation that the goods we require are what are called capital goods and that we may be fobbed off with ordinary consumer goods. Finally, there is dawning on the Government the realisation that for any pound we have packed away abroad in sterling assets we may hereafter be fobbed off with a payment of about 10/-. Are we, notwithstanding that, going to continue a policy of piling up these credits abroad without knowing whether they are to be frozen, for how long they are to be frozen and when they will eventually be liquidated and in what manner?
So far as the internal situation is concerned, the Minister has quoted Sir William Beveridge. He has contented himself, in the main, with referring to his proposals with regard to social security, but surely the Minister must know that Sir William Beveridge's plan is in two: he talks of the conditions required for a decent community in the future in the way of social standards, standards of living, but he also has projected for what is called full employment. The two plans are conjoint. So far as I understand his plan, he has no belief whatever that the amenities of social life which he wants to give to the people of England can be obtained unless there is something in the way of full employment. He has his plans for full employment and it was only as late as the year 1939 that there was any scientific approach to the problem of employment and unemployment and it was generally appreciated by most of the decent countries all over the world that there could only be full employment, or something approaching full employment, if there was effective demand, that if there is a deficiency in demand, it leads to unemployment.
One again would have expected to feel that there was some realisation of that in the Minister's mind and that he would have told us, even though it was something projected in the future, what were his plans for increasing production in this country. We have had in relation to this tot of £52,000,000 with which we are being charged nationally, some reference to moneys to the extent of £3,000,000 or £4,000,000 which are called aids to development —most of them in connection with housing and some others in connection with roads; but we have not heard of moneys being provided or of plans being made directly affecting production, and particularly agricultural production. The Minister knows that without an increase in national income, in real national income, it will not be possible to have any of the benefits which neighbouring countries propose to give their citizens.
We know that, lying as close as we do to these countries, there will be a mass invitation to our people to go over there. We have seen from speeches made in England since the recent Budget there that one of the matters about which they are concerned is that they have not available a sufficiently large labour supply, and I suppose that any man would at least come to this conclusion, that if they have not a big enough labour supply and if we have more than we can occupy at decent wages, there will be started again the outflow of emigration which has always been bewailed in this country.
Notwithstanding all that, the Minister presents us with this Budget. He tells us of the £100,000,000 which we have piled up more or less as deadweight debt, but he does not tell us that he intends to spend another £100,000,000 which we would like to hear was to be spent so long as it was devoted to productive purposes and so long as it was possible to say there would be some return. All we get are some trifling reliefs in respect of the box of matches and in relation to Córas Iompair Éireann in connection with something which may never arise.
The Minister in this Budget has failed, as he failed in every Budget since he took over, and it is lamentable that he leaves this country now merely with the realisation that under a series of controls, finance, economy, development, he and his colleagues have been responsible for bringing us to the condition where actual income has declined. It was declining before the war started in relation to the cost of living and has declined seriously since then and the Minister does not show us that there is any means whatever present to his mind for reversing that position.
