The Budget introduced by the Minister yesterday has been described, both here and outside, as a standstill Budget. I do not think it merits that description at all. I fail to see how the bill presented by the Minister for Finance, that is £2,250,000 greater than the bill presented to the House last year, can be described as standing still, especially as the Minister admits that the Budget as introduced by him yesterday does not take into consideration certain further liabilities which might have been included. I mention two. By the end of this financial year, on the Minister's own figures, under the fertilisers credit scheme, the State will owe to the farmers of this country something over £1,000,000. The second item I shall mention—of course there are others—is the obligation of the State to members of the Defence Forces in respect of deferred pay. By the end of this financial year, that will amount to something between £900,000 and £1,000,000.
There is one fact which emerges from the Minister's statement yesterday, and that is that he was a little more candid as to the actual state of this country than he was in his previous Budget statements. He went a little nearer to the heart of things. He let us see some of the difficulties which have arisen, during the last five years particularly, and he issued several notes of warning. The fact, no matter how it is glossed over, is that we to-day in this country are carrying, both in respect of national and local taxation, the greatest load that was ever placed on the shoulders of the people. We have, too, this other fact to face up to—and this is something of which the Minister for Finance and every member who sits behind him ought to think— that in the 13 years since they became the Government of this country they have not balanced a single budget. Our dead weight national debt is over £100,000,000, and we still go on gaily borrowing, notwithstanding the fact that the Minister told the House in his Budget statement that already the servicing of that debt is costing £4,000,000 a year. Of course, as we go on borrowing year after year, that amount will increase.
The Minister said, on page 16 of his statement:—
"I would like to emphasise here that our extensive programme of post-war development in these and other spheres can become a reality only if the cost of Supply Services after the war is radically curtailed, and if the emergency services, such as food and fuel allowances and subsidies, disappear. The country cannot carry the double burden of emergency services and post-war development."
"If the cost of Supply Services after the war is radically curtailed"; I think the Minister conveyed to the House and to the country yesterday that he sees no prospect of that curtailment. He was not able to hold out any hope that there will be any reduction in this sum of approximately £53,000,000.
He spoke about the Army, and demobilisation from the Army, but he went on to warn the House that, certainly in the coming year, far from that leading to any reduction in the Army Estimate he would probably have to come here looking for a substantial addition to the amount of the Estimate already placed before the House. Apart from that, I suggest to this House and to the Minister that, merely by demobilising men out of the Army when you are not in a position to put them into gainful employment, you will not effect any saving to this State. On the contrary, it may be a much more costly process. Certainly, it is not going to be either a saving or a credit to the State to transfer from the Army Estimate to the Estimate for Unemployment Assistance men who, as the Minister very properly said yesterday, have given good and loyal service to this country.
The Minister, in accordance with the usual practice of the Government, dwelt at some length on and rather gloried in the millions that are being made available for social services. May I again suggest, as I have often done before, that so far as a considerable amount of that money provided for at least certain classes of social services is concerned it is something not to be gloried in but something to be ashamed of, because certain of those services have to be provided only because we have failed to provide those men and women with an opportunity of earning their own living.
The Minister mentioned on more than one occasion the fact that over £5,000,000 of this Budget was being set aside to help to provide employment. He went back over the last four or five years. I should like if he had gone a bit further than that, and had examined the position regarding employment in this country, notwithstanding the expenditure of that £5,000,000. If it takes £5,000,000 out of the national Exchequer to bring about the present position, where we have 70,000 people lined up at the labour exchange—notwithstanding the large numbers who have gone to Britain; notwithstanding the enormous increase in tillage; notwithstanding turf development, and all the money that has been poured into it; notwithstanding all the other State activities over the past five years; notwithstanding, because of the war, the capacity of certain people to give more employment—how many £5,000,000 will be required to meet the situation with which we will be confronted in a few years, perhaps in a few months?
In the course of his Budget speech, the Minister made one statement which I consider an amazing and a very disquieting one, when he informed the House that, notwithstanding all the efforts which have been made by the Government, by Parliament and by all sections of the community, to induce the fullest productivity from our soil, the output in volume from agriculture has decreased by 11 per cent. over the past five years, in spite of the inducement of high prices due to the war. The Minister goes on to say that the farmers should look to greater production rather than to present day prices. If high war prices for agricultural produce, plus a patriotic sense of duty, have resulted in a reduction of 11 per cent. in the last five years, now that the war is coming to an end and the tendency of prices is to go down rather than up, does the Minister see any prospect of improvement in agricultural production? Does the Minister see a prospect of agriculture absorbing more people into employment in the next five years than it has taken into employment in the last five years? I would be very doubtful if the Minister would think any such thing.
The Minister, as I said, was a little more candid with regard to the position of the country. But the Minister was delightfully vague—as a matter of fact, it was not a question of vagueness at all—he shied completely away from the future, even the immediate future. Our position, as some of us see it to-day, is that, as I said at the beginning, with the biggest load of taxation that the country has ever had to carry, with the largest number of actual and potential unemployed which this country ever had, we are facing into a black future. There is no evidence from the Government that there is any plan ready to be put into operation, within any reasonable time. We hear vague talk about national drainage schemes, electricity schemes and the turf scheme, of course. But I venture to say that the paradise which was referred to in one of the newspapers this morning in which this country is supposed to be living is at an end. Because of the war and for no other reason, we have been enjoying prosperity over the last five years; a prosperity which enabled the people of this country, and even then not without substantial sacrifice, to meet the very heavy load placed upon them. That financial prosperity is going to come to an end.
We have had a position here that many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of our people, for whom we ourselves were unable to provide, went across and found a living in another country and, through their work there, were enabled not only to provide for themselves, but to send back here between £12,000,000 and £14,000,000 per year to provide for their dependents at home. That is going to come to an end. The Minister does not concern himself with that. The Minister has nothing to offer to the House for next year. I venture to make this propheey—I suppose it is, to say the least of it, foolish for anyone to prophesy—but I certainly doubt very much if the people of this country in our time will ever see a lower Budget than £53,000,000; and they will be facing a Budget of that size without the same capacity to meet it as they have to-day or had 12 months ago. The Minister may say what he likes about social services. But, if we are to provide for our people, either by way of employment or social services, then we have to plan, to construct, and to spend money.
We got a White Paper dealing with the Government's building scheme at a cost of millions upon millions upon millions of pounds. I am sure a lot of thought and consideration was given to it. One of the principal raw materials in building is timber. In this country we are in the position that our own native supplies of timber suitable for building are almost completely, if not completely, exhausted; that it is unlikely, to say the least of it, that within the next two, three, four or five years it will be possible for us to import as much timber as we were importing in pre-war days. I understand that in pre-war days we imported 60,000 standards of commercial timber. I am informed that, even if the difficulty of paying for that timber in foreign countries were got over, we will be extremely fortunate if within the next one, two, three or four years we are able to import one-sixth of our pre-war imports of timber suitable for building. Of course anybody having a knowledge of the conditions or anybody reading in the daily newspapers of the conditions that are supposed to exist on the Continent and in Great Britain will fully appreciate the difficulty in our position of our getting a chance of buying any of that limited supply, and it will be a limited supply, of suitable timber. I am not blaming the Government for that; I believe that they will make every effort they can. But I do blame them for putting forward their building programme in a White Paper without telling the people of the very great difficulty, the almost insurmountable difficulty, that is there.
One other point, and it is a very important one. Coming back for a moment to this reduction of 11 per cent. in the volume of agricultural produce, the Minister stated that farmers should look to greater production rather than to present-day prices. The Minister, towards the end of his speech, referred to exports. Will the Minister tell the agricultural community that, if they can be induced to go in for more and more and greater production from the soil of the country, there will be markets outside this country available for their produce? Will the Minister tell the House what steps have been taken by the present Government in the past three, six, or 12 months, or what steps they propose to take in the immediate future, to see in what way suitable markets for our surplus agricultural produce can be secured?
We are too inclined, the Government in particular, to think that the proper way to meet difficulties is to ignore them, to refuse to believe that they are there, or to hope that before we come smack up against them they will, by some miracle, have disappeared. We have a happy, or unhappy, knack in this country, and particularly in this House, of sticking our heads in the sand and refusing to see what is proceeding in the rest of the world. The fact of the matter is that at present there are representatives of 40 or 50 nations sitting in San Francisco trying to decide the future economic life of this world. We have as little say in what is happening there, or what is going to emerge from it, and what will probably govern us all as well as the rest of the world, as the man in the moon.
I would have thought that this period, at the end of five and a half years of a world war, would have called for a far more outspoken and courageous statement than we got from the Minister yesterday. I thought we would have some recognition, in the review of our national position, of the fact that we are entering on a completely new period of world history. We have had no such recognition. I think the Minister should have gone further. He should have warned our people that we have been fortunate enough during the past five and a half years, not only to escape the horrors of war, but actually to benefit from it substantially in a financial way.
We were doubly fortunate in the sense that the war, and what flowed from it, struck us at a period when agriculture had been so weakened, from 1932 to 1938, that it was almost exhausted. The agriculturists of this country, or the vast bulk of them, have been enabled during the five and a half years of war to recover what, under normal circumstances, they would not have been able to recover in 50 years.
We have, again, in the Minister's talk about turf, a failure to face up to realities. I want to be quite clear on this question of turf. I know something about turf. I fully appreciate, and I am glad, that we had in this country, during the last five years, the bogs which we could fall back upon for fuel. I am perfectly satisfied that turf had to be produced and made available to our people at £10 a ton, if it could not be produced at any lower figure; but what I am appalled at is the unnecessary, the almost criminal waste of time, labour and money. We have the Minister, after the experience of the past five years, saying he hopes that we will have better turf, first-class turf, produced at an economic price.
Let me quote two examples, which may be familiar to some Deputies. I am talking now of turf produced by county councils. Last year, after four years' experience, in one county 25,000 tons of turf were produced at a first cost of £54,000. That turf was produced and clamped in the bog. I inquired how much turf was produced and I got the figure from the responsible official. I asked what it cost, and I was told it cost £54,000. I inquired what had become of the 25,000 tons and I was told that so much had been sold locally, so much had been given to local institutions, and so much was allocated to the company operating as fuel distributors. I found that there was a balance of 8,725 tons out of the 25,000 tons of turf. I asked what had become of the 8,725 tons. Those questions were asked by me within the past six weeks. The answer I got was that the 8,725 tons were on the bog since last September. I leave it to any Deputy who has a knowledge of turf to decide how much of the turf that has been left for seven months on the bog, and particularly during last winter, can be brought now out of the bog, and how much will be added to the £54,000 which it originally cost to produce the turf.
In another county there was a loss of £30,000. When the assistant county manager was questioned about it by the members of the local authority, what did he say? He said:—
"Although we were satisfied that we could not cut turf with any prospect of saving it after the middle of July, as a result of the special appeal made by the Taoiseach to cut more turf we continued cutting it up to 30th September."
I do not mind if it is necessary to spend £10 a ton during an emergency to procure turf and place it at the disposal of our people because it is essential to do so, but I do object to criminal waste of that type, using men and machines and money to cut and save turf on the bog when there is never a hope of bringing it from the bog. It is simply shovelled back into a boghole in the following spring.
Is the Minister aware that, even with five years' experience, it is costing £3 2s. 6d. a ton on some bogs to produce turf and put it on the bank? I do not know how much it costs to bring it to the side of the road, how much it costs to put it on the lorries, or what are the transport charges to bring it to the consumers. However, we get some idea when we are asked in this Budget to provide £860,000. That is not anything like the end of the story. I would like the Minister to give those of us who are members of local authorities and have a sense of responsibility to our people, some information as to whether local authorities that have, as a result of acting on instructions from the central authority, got deeply into debt, in some cases to the tune of £20,000 or £100,000, will be recouped by the central authority, or whether it is the intention to saddle the local ratepayer with these huge sums which were largely, if not altogether, due to the local authority acting against their own judgment on the instructions issued from headquarters.
This country has every right to feel uneasy, to put it mildly, in facing the future, with this load of taxation in which there is no real prospect of a reduction, with the certainty that the people's capacity to meet that heavy load is going to be reduced, with 70,000 unemployed at the moment, with anything from 10,000 to 30,000 men to be demobilised from the Army and anything from 50,000 to 150,000 men and women to come back from across the water, with the almost inevitable reduction in the prices which have been operating in the past few years for our agricultural produce, with the certainty of a reduction in the £13,500,000 which has been flowing into this country from our workers in Britain and without one single concrete, practical proposal in this Budget to meet the situation that arises now that the war has ended. The country is entitled to expect more than that from a Government which has been in office for 13 years; the country should get more than that from a Government which has an overwhelming majority in this House and which can put through any proposal it thinks fit, if there are any proposals. Frankly, I do not believe the Government has any. It is an appalling thing that a Government which was immune from all the major worries of a war situation which, in fact, had many of its existing difficulties made easy because of the war, finds itself at the end of the war without any provision having been made to meet the aftermath.
The bill is £53,000,000 approximately, which is over £1,000,000 per week—the Minister said that it may have pinched some people here and there, but it did not make them lame. The road worker, who had 35/- per week in 1938, and who, because of the Government Order, has not been allowed to rise beyond 38/- up to the present moment, to meet the high cost of living, has felt more than a pinch. The cost of living cannot be accurately or truly represented by the cost-of-living figure. Speaking as a parent, I can tell the Minister that if I bought a pair of shoes for a child in 1938 for 18/- and if I now have to pay 24/—allowing only that increase—for the same sized shoe, it does not mean that I am paying only 6/- more. I am really paying 24/- for a pair of shoes which will not last a third or a fourth of the time the 1938 pair would last. Those are factors in the cost of living which are not taken into consideration in the index figure.
It is all nonsense for the Minister or anybody else to say here that there has been a determined, sincere and honest attempt by the Government to equalise sacrifice and hardship over all sections of the community. The Government has succeeded effectively and only too well in controlling one thing, wages and salaries, but they did not control at the other end. When they did go about it, particularly in the case of one type of business, they fixed the prices and the margins so high that in the last two years or up to the present moment you could walk into shops in Dublin and buy the articles there displayed at 5, 10, 15 and 20 per cent. under the Government marked price. That is no hearsay statement: I have done it myself. The trader can afford to do it, and is glad to do it. At the other end of the scale, you have the man with a family, facing the huge increase in the cost of living, who had 35/- a week six years ago, and who now, by the grace of the Minister for Local Government and Public Health, has been allowed to get a maximum increase of 3/- per week.
