I will now deal with a speech which a Minister made here three weeks ago. As a worker I strongly protest against his remarks with regard to the people on national health insurance. The Minister for Social Services called these people chancers. Fancy a responsible Minister calling people chancers—people trying to exist on the 15/- or 7/6 a week which they are entitled to draw for the contributions they pay. I think the present Government is the biggest crowd of chancers that ever came in here.
Committee on Finance. - Vote on Account, 1947-48.
The Dáil, according to order, went into Committee on Finance and resumed consideration of the Vote on Account for the year ending 31st March, 1948.
The word "chancer" may not be applied to a Minister. The Deputy must withdraw the word.
Did not the Minister use it?
The Deputy will withdraw the word.
The Minister used the word and he was not asked to withdraw.
The Minister did not say that Ministers or Deputies were chancers.
He said that the people drawing national health were chancers. It was an uncalled-for remark.
What is a chancer, anyhow?
Chaps like you.
I think you know very well.
The word "chancer" may not be applied to Ministers or Deputies.
The Minister should not be allowed to use the word "chancer". He is sent in here by the people just as we are. I was greatly surprised that the Minister, who comes from my own county, should use that word.
Is a Minister allowed to tell a Deputy that he is "a damn liar"?
The Chair would like to hear Deputies on the Vote that is before the House.
I am trying to keep to the Vote. When I asked the Minister if the means test would be withdrawn he said it would not. It is still being applied against the old age pensioner, the widow and the poor people, but there is no means test where the wealthy people are concerned. Deputy Walsh wants to know what a "chancer" is. The people who stood behind the Taoiseach and who made the promises—they are the "chancers."
The majority of the nation, then, are "chancers."
You bribed the majority. You gave them free beef at a time when the people were far better off than they are to-day.
You got your share.
I need not thank you for it. You also have got your share. You have a good I.R.A. pension, like everybody over there.
Would the Deputy address the Chair and come back to the Vote?
I have a letter here from the Wexford County Manager which I got on 20th February. It deals with the case of an old age pensioner from the New Ross area who went into the county home and subsequently died there. While in the home he contributed 6/6 per week from his old age pension. He had an insurance policy and a claim was made on that policy for the cost of his burial. It was later found that the amount of the policy was reduced to £6 4s. 0d., from which £4 was taken as a contribution towards his funeral expenses, a sum of £2 4s. 0d. being sent to his widow. Is that propaganda—a letter from the Wexford County Manager? The letter continues:—
"I may state, too, that the widow was admitted to the county home on the 28th November and discharged on the 18th December. During the time her husband was in the home I understand that she was getting home assistance. I do not think there is anything wrong in the case. You will note that, under the Public Assistance Act, if persons die with means the council is supposed to recover cost of assistance given."
What has the Minister for Social Services or any Deputy over there to say to that? When will we get away from that atmosphere of pauperism? In the county homes all the old age pensioners contribute 6/6 and get a bit of tobacco with the remainder. There are no fires in these institutions to-day, but a few weeks ago coal was distributed to certain institutions, and the Minister for Industry and Commerce said there might even be a domestic ration of coal. To-day we have neither coal nor turf.
I have here a letter addressed to a merchant in Wexford from the Royal Liver Buildings, Liverpool, dated 16th November. The man to whom this letter was addressed has been put out of business by the ring of fuel importers and coal merchants. The letter reads:—
"We understand that you are open to receive offers of coal cargoes for discharge at Rosslare or Wexford. Unfortunately, owing to a serious shortage of wagons which has developed recently supplies have been considerably reduced with the result that shipment of certain qualities has been suspended until further notice. We may, however, be in a position within the next two or three weeks to offer you a cargo of about 250/300 tons of inferior Yorkshire (half-inch down to dust, dry slack with an ash percentage of about 25 per cent.). Therefore, let us know if this would be of interest and we could then let you have further details when the fuel is available for shipping."
The man to whom that letter was sent had to get in touch with the people in O'Connell Street. He wrote to them on 20th November, as follows:
"We have been offered a parcel of 250/300 tons of Yorkshire dry slack with an ash content of 25 per cent. by Messrs. The Modern Transport Company, Royal Liver Buildings, Liverpool. This parcel is the first of other lots promised. Would you be good enough to give me a direction as to the disposal of this and subsequent lots? As the above offer is urgent as to acceptance or refusal will you please write or wire by return?"
That was sent to Mr. J. Murphy, Department of Industry and Commerce, Fuel Section, Upper O'Connell Street, Dublin. He did not get the facilities asked for because he was not a coal merchant, although he was in the fuel business, employing 12 men in Wexford town, with four lorries. During the emergency he carried on the business of turf transport, and, at the conclusion of the emergency, bought a yard and got his business going, getting his turf through the coal merchant in Wexford. Everything went well for a while until the coal merchant in Wexford refused to give him turf. He got in touch with me on the 'phone and told me what had happened. I rang the coal merchant, Mr. Stafford, and told him I took a very serious view of the matter and that the Minister would take a serious view of it, if there were no turf for the rural areas. Finally, he gave this man another few tons. The supply stopped after another few days and I had to do the same thing. Mr. Stafford said to me: "If you are in Wexford, John, I want to see you." I went in to see him and he said: "You are interested in this man?" I said: "I am interested in the workers this man employs and I want to see that he will be enabled to keep going." He replied: "I will give this man all the turf he wants for the yard, but I am not going to let him tread on my corns." He would not give him any turf for the rural areas.
This man and I then came by car to Dublin and put our case before the high official in O'Connell Street. The man asked who was behind it all and who had caused the stoppage. I have nothing to say against civil servants— I have always found them very reasonable—but on this occasion the official said to that man, a constituent of mine: "There is the door, and go. From now on, you will get nothing except what I cannot keep from you." That is the sort of thing that has brought us to where we are to-day. That man has now closed down. His lorries are lying idle and his 12 workers are on the dole.
We now have a turf workers' strike, and what is the threat in relation to those workers? It is that their rations will be withdrawn if they do not go back to work. There is the threat to the workers, although I heard over the wireless a few nights ago the Minister for Industry and Commerce speaking about these workers and the hardships they were going through. He is not thinking much of the workers in his charge in the Forestry Department and other Departments whose wages are lower than those of the agricultural labourer.
In to-day's paper, the Minister for Industry and Commerce in trying to defend his own policy and to attack the Fine Gael Party, said that the £ is value for only 10/-. Yet, the Minister for Local Government will not sanction increases in rates to meet increased wages to the road workers. In County Cork, I see that these workers were offered an increase of 2d. per day. Is that the reward of the great sacrifices made by the citizen army and the working classes—to be in poverty, cold and hunger? Yet, we have members on the opposite benches attacking the unemployed man. I refer to Deputy Kennedy, who spoke of the men who would not clear the roads. It is becoming a racket now—to obtain voluntary labour for everything because the harvest was saved by voluntary labour. We had an order from our county manager in Wexford to the town clerk of Enniscorthy to put a notice on the door: "Volunteers to clear the roads". Who were those who were to clear the roads? Men who had nothing on their feet, nothing in their stomachs and no clothes. They were to go out in the slush and clear the roads for Córas Iompair Éireann, so that the buses could proceed. If the railways had been blocked, special break-down gangs would have been brought down to clear them but Córas Iompair Éireann did nothing in the case of the roads.
All over the country we had snowdrifts. Of course, the Government could not help that. But what provision have they made in the unemployment exchanges for work? Since I came here in 1943, the debates have dealt with post-war planning, drainage, and electricity for every farmer's house. Then, men like Deputy Kennedy get up and attack unemployed men. I know those who left my own town. I see letters from them from time to time. They are working in the bottoms of the pits in England. In some cases, they are three miles out under the sea. Yet, we are told that these men would not work. Would Deputies have said that during the election campaigns, when they promised them everything? I like men to be honest to the people they represent. Deputies on the opposite side must have got labour votes as well as capitalist votes. Yet, the Government is backing nobody but the capitalists. They are protecting them in every way.
In this Vote, there is provision for a big increase in the allocation to the Department of Justice. I should like to tell the House something about the Department of Justice. In my constituency, there is a young woman with two children whose husband, after 22 years' service in the Garda, died. How much did she get? One pound a week. When I took the matter up with the Minister for Justice, I got this reply: "I am desired by the Minister for Justice to refer to your letter of the 22nd relative to the pension awarded to Mrs. ——, widow of the late Garda —— and I am to state that the pension awarded is the maximum allowed under the Garda Síochána Pensions Act, 1925-42 in respect of this case. The orders are statutory and there is no power to exceed their provisions in any way. In the circumstances, the Minister regrets he is unable to be of any assistance in this case." With all the talk about family allowances, is it not a scandal that this woman, living in the village of Camolin, should be receiving only £1 a week and that her father, a workman, should have to support her and her two children?
We have a big Vote for the Secret Service. Is the bogey coming out again, that there is an undercurrent at work or that they want to track down the I.R.A.? I have here a case of another widow who has four boys, aged from 13 years downwards, and who is in receipt of £1 a week, which includes family allowances. The Minister for Social Welfare gets up in a debate in order to get the big headlines in the papers so that he and his supporters can go down the country when the election comes and say that they were giving all these concessions before the Opposition said anything about them. On this question, I was put out of the House before because I spoke the truth. I told the truth about the old age pensioners and the widows and orphans but I was ordered out by Mr. MacEntee.
The Minister for Local Government.
By the Minister.
The Minister could not order the Deputy out of the House.
He named me.
The House may have ordered the Deputy out; the Minister could not do so.
He named me.
He often tried to do so.
But he could not order the Deputy out. If the Deputy was named and a vote was taken, it was the House which ordered the Deputy out.
He moved the motion.
When a vote is taken the decision is by the House.
It should be pointed out that the Deputy was named not because of the opinions he was expressing but on the technical point of order, that he had disobeyed the Chair.
Yes. But the Minister could not order the Deputy out of the House.
I know that, but we often saw him try to do it.
That did not frighten me.
The proposal would have come from the Ceann Comhairle, in the first instance, and the motion would have been moved by a Minister.
Nothing stings so much as the truth. That is the greatest weapon anybody can use—the truth. Deputy Giles referred to the Border. I do not believe that anybody across the Border is anxious to come into the Free State. They are not going to come here for lower salaries, lower pensions and two ozs. of butter. There were temporary huts on the Border but now I understand that permanent buildings are going up. That looks as if we are going to be in the same position as the Chinese, with a wall between the Six Counties and Éire. What do the people say now? They say that the Government do not care, that they want to get out because they have been long enough in and that they will get £500 a year because the majority——
That was provided for under an Act of this House. When a Bill is passed, the question of the majority does not arise; it is a decision of the House. That is democracy.
Democracy is not running the right way. What happens in this House puts me in mind of a great ringmaster in a circus. When he cracks the whip in the circus, all the little piebald ponies come out and go around the ring.
The Dáil may not be compared to a circus.
That is what happens here. All the Deputies on the far side come flocking into the Division Lobby like a lot of sheep and they do not know what is going on, whether it is to burn the country or to hang someone, and they do not care, as far as I can see. We had 78,906 signing on in the employment exchange last Saturday. In that list, we have the army of ex-servicemen, we have the agricultural labourer who cannot leave the rural area, we have the turf worker who gets 5/- for being a turf worker and he cannot stir, either. I had a case a fortnight ago of a turf worker who got another job with a local man in a wood and he is informed now that he cannot go back because he refused to go to the bog. He did not refuse, but the work in his own area came first. They were trying to compel him to go to the bog, although he had work at home. I know a lot of turf workers who leave my own town to go to Kildare and other places and I do not believe the Minister when he says that all the turf workers are happy and well contented. I know men in Wexford who go to the turf bog and have to keep themselves and send home a few shillings for their wives and families. When a man has to do that, he cannot be happy, as he has not enough and the people at home have not enough, either.
I do not know why the Minister for Industry and Commerce is holding to the rules about going to Britain. There is an awful lot of red tape. There are fellows in every town like my own who have offers of employment in Britain through their brothers and sisters over there, but they cannot get across as they must go through the labour exchange. At the same time, when the agent comes down to the hotel in Enniscorthy to interview the lads to go down the mines, there is no barrier. They are wanted for the mines and the unemployed never were in such a plight. I hear some of the farmers talking about the flight from the land. I know farmers, young men, who sold their land, and where did they go? They got good jobs in the Carlow factory and left the land around County Wexford. They were relations of the Minister and through his influence they got jobs in the factory in Carlow. These things are really happening. It all depends on who you are. You can get a job wherever you like, if you have the pull. The farmers' sons are leaving the land in Enniscorthy to-day. There were two sons on a farm and one of them was put in charge of the fuel dump in Enniscorthy, through political influence, although there were very capable men at the exchanges, after leaving the Army, who could take up the job.
In Wexford town a short time ago, there was a position open for an income-tax collector. The previous man was from my own town, but he left it. When the job was open, although there were Army officers out of the town available, they did not get the job, but a man from Cork came in, to collect the income-tax.
The Deputy should realise that on this Vote matters of policy and of general interest are to be discussed. All these details of minor posts in County Wexford surely are not general policy?
It is the general policy of the Fianna Fáil Party to get jobs for their friends. There is no doubt about that. That is the position as we find it, anyhow—nothing but graft.
Does the Deputy ever try to do anything for his own people, to get them jobs?
I have not as good influence as the Deputy. He has a pull with the Party crowd. He ought to do something with the Red Cross money for the people in the institutions.
The Deputy has no control of Red Cross funds.
The Deputy is very busy, through the Red Cross machinery, doing his political work in County Dublin.
He has no control of the funds, and I do not think the Red Cross may be the subject of debate here on general Government policy.
What is the Government policy for the future? Are we to be here year after year carrying on these debates without any success? Is there any improvement in the condition of the working-class people? The Minister attacked a certain newspaper, but I must say that that paper has shown up the Government very nicely.
In this debate?
During an emergency we have Ministers shown on the papers at functions with wine glasses and all the rest, while the people in the country areas and in Dublin are starving. That should be stopped immediately. These people who are giving big staff dances, such as the flour millers, should cease to do so. This is no time for that. If we are in an emergency, let everyone feel it. There is only one section of the community to-day that is rationed, that is, the poor people—the road worker, the farm labourer, the industrial worker. He gets so many shillings a week, be it 44/- or 60/-, from his employer, to pay rent and keep his family, to buy clothes, and he is rationed all the time. Certain people can keep a bag of wheat for everyone in the household and at the same time they can purchase flour in the shops. The unfortunate poor people, who could at one time go into the huckster's shop and get a 1/4 stone of flour—they were not able to buy 10 stone—or a loaf of bread, are not allowed to do that to-day, as the shop-keepers say: "You drew your rations and I cannot give you any more".
All over the country to-day we have inspectors going around to small flour mills and to farmers' places. A whole crowd of young chaps just out of college are telling the farmers what they should do; how they should plough, and what they should sow. State interference is bad. Then we have luxury hotels being provided in the cities and seaside resorts out of Government funds. In County Wexford, where there is a new hotel at Courtown Harbour, through the chairman of the Fianna Fáil Party, Deputy Allen, a new concrete road has been built for the use of the visitors to that hotel.
I presume that is county council work. That has nothing to do with this debate.
Why did the Minister sanction such a thing when he will not sanction by-roads and other roads? He sanctions a big scheme like that which will cost the ratepayers £3,000. You would want to be the Auditor-General to understand this Book of Estimates. Before I was in political life we heard a lot about the Estimates at that time and what the Governor-General was costing this country. We were told by the present Government that when they got in they would do away with all that. Yet, when I was in Dame Street the other day I saw mounted soldiers accompanying the President to meet some French Minister. We have all that going on while the country is suffering at the hands of the Government with the Taoiseach at its head. The only defence the Government can put up is to say to the people on this side of the House: "When you were in power, you did not do this and you did not do that." That is no excuse. They were to cut down expenditure and to do away with pensions which had been granted, except to men who had been wounded or who had lost their health. But they brought in the 1934 Pensions Act and put another burden on the country.
Legislation must not be discussed on this Vote; the administration of it, yes, but not the merits of it.
As to workmen's compensation, I have a letter here from a man who was working in the Forestry Department and who was injured in 1941. He is disabled for life and is drawing a little pension. He was offered £350 compensation, but he did not accept it.
Will the Deputy leave himself something to say on the Estimates when they come along? General policy is discussed on this Vote on Account and the Deputy will have all the details he wants on the Estimates.
I may be rambling a bit outside the Estimates.
The Deputy is rambling into the Estimates.
I heard the Taoiseach speaking about money for education. To my mind, learning Irish or speaking Irish outside the Gaeltacht is a loss of time. I am a married man with a young family and when my children come home at night I see them doing their exercises. I do not know Irish, because in our time we never got a chance of learning Irish. I often ask one of the children: "What is that in English?" The answer I get is, "I do not know, daddy." It is all right for children to learn Irish when the parents speak Irish, because they can help the children.
Is that not a matter for the Education Vote?
There is money provided for education here.
We are not discussing the Estimates?
I understand that these are the Estimates for the public services.
What is before the House is the Vote on Account and not Estimates.
It all comes to the same thing. Instead of having all this teaching of Irish, it would be better if we had decent sanitary rural schools in Ireland. When we speak about these things, we are asked: "Where is the money to come from?" Yet, the Minister comes in here with his papers under his arm and asks for millions of pounds in Supplementary Estimates.
I should like now to deal with people who had small pensions from the British Government after serving in the British Army or who lost sons who had been serving in it. When they apply for an old age pension the means test is applied and all they are allowed to live on in this State is 16/- per week. There you have interference with another Government that was giving these men something in the way of compensation. It happened in the case of my own father, who is 86 to-day and who lost two sons in the first world war. He had a pension of 8/10, and when he reached the age of 70 he was informed that, with his pension, he could not get more than 16/- a week. That is how the Government treats these people by applying the means test.
Then there is the case of a small farmer in my area who had an only son who was doing his best to keep a farm of 25 acres going. He died suddenly and I appealed to the Minister to grant old age pensions to these people and I was informed that they were only entitled to 2/- a week. Then there is the case of a widow whose husband was killed when a motor belonging to his employer ran into a ditch. She got £600 compensation. As she had two children, £300 of that was put aside until the children came to 21 years of age. She bought a small house in her own part of the country.
Is that general policy?
But that is the thing we are trying to bring out. The Government has no policy at all.
The Deputy must discuss general policy, not these cases.
But that is the only way I can discuss them.
Well, that is not my fault.
I was sent in here by the plain people to put it before the Government.
The Deputy was sent here to the Dáil but he must follow the ordinary laws of debate in the Dáil.
I am following the ordinary laws of debates more so than Deputy Dillon, who is not challenged as often as I am, when he is saying more serious things. I know that what I am saying is true.
The Deputy must reserve these detailed cases for the Estimates. He will have an opportunity then.
Very good, but I would like to know when we do, what action will be taken by the responsible Minister. What are people who represent constituencies to say with regard to the Estimate? Do we not all know that the people will ask when they see what we are going to be burdened with? Do we not all know that, only Hitler cracked up, £7,000,000 could be spent on the Army if the war were still going on to-day? But now it is like every place else. In Britain they spent £15,000,000 to £16,000,000 a day on war. Éire spent £7,000,000 but to-day, after two years of peace, we are worse than we ever were before. There is no saving by demobilising the Army. These are things the Government must realise and, of course, it is the Irish Paddy and the Irish farmer has to pay the piper. The cost of living has gone up so much that the extra 2/6 will be of very little use to the old people. I was surprised to see that there was £4,700,000 for national health insurance. Our own County Wexford man should know that the least recommendation for the old age pensioners should be 30/- a week and that would not be too much considering the £ is only value 10/-
I think I have covered a lot of ground and I hope, if I live until next year, that I will not have to stand up in these benches again and say the same things I am saying to-day. I hope that the people who are mostly in need and who are suffering and who have suffered since the Parnell times—they are in as bad a position as they ever found themselves—without any food, without any clothes, without any fuel— will get some relief. This country was referred to in an English paper as the land of full and plenty. The Taoiseach —the man who was going to send food to Britain! That happened nine months ago. It is also printed here that 1,000 people left Holyhead for Kingstown— and 90 per cent. of them were escaping from rationing. "Hotels in Ireland are doing a roaring trade and money is flowing into the country"—that was in an English paper. That is not in the Irish Independent; that is in an English paper. “Talks of bigger exports from the land of plenty”—and there is not a lb. of butter to be had. I went to see a friend of mine in my constituency and he said: “Are you anyway great with the butter people up there?” and I asked him: “Who are they?” He said: “The Minister: when you see him get me an extra ration to help me to cater for my customers.”
It says here also that we can have steak at midnight. It refers to all the condensed milk that has gone away, all the eggs, and it say: "In the shops and street markets fruit is very plentiful. In Moore Street market there are more stalls and plenty of customers and these customers can buy as many oranges, lemons and bananas as they can carry away"—but they cannot buy any butter.
I do not think an English journal is an official document.
This is "Dublin, Saturday, 7th July".
That does not make it official either.
"From our special correspondent in Éire"——
In what paper?
The paper is the News of the World, dated 7th July, 1946. Nine months after, we find we have nothing. We are going to bring over all the tourists, yet we will not give the agricultural labourer an extra loaf. It is about time this Government wakened up and came to the aid of the Irish people, the down-trodden people, the poor working-class people, and forget the Jews and the gentiles. One thousand tons of beef went to Jerusalem, where Jews are shooting Irishmen in the British Army. Is it any wonder that there is a reaction here? We have food to send to the enemies of the Empire, but what are we doing for our own Irish people who are abroad? My daughter and my brother are abroad, and I have to go into a butcher's shop and pay 12/6 for a little box of beef and I cannot put anything else in it or the customs would seize it. We have food to send to everybody, but we forget the thousands of Irish people who are on low rations in Britain and the only thing we can send from a butcher's shop is a bit of chop or fresh beef. I am telling the truth and I defy contradiction.
Deputy O'Leary has covered a good lot of ground and brought forward a considerable number of facts. The position is that if the facts that have been suggested in such a variety of ways by Deputy O'Leary are brought together in some kind of constructive picture, then we come to the frightening situation the Minister for Industry and Commerce speaks about, without any intelligent outlook or without any purpose. That is just what the Government are doing, and if the various members of the Dáil, in every Party, do not take the Minister at his word, that there is a frightening situation facing us, if we do not step into the breach that the Government have left behind by their inaction and face the facts here ourselves and collect them and correlate them, we are going to follow the Government blindly into a situation in which there can be nothing but very disastrous results for our people.
When the war began in September, 1939, there was a crisis and from that crisis flowed very grave results, continuing to the present day. If, in the extraordinary and perhaps unexpected circumstances shown to-day as a result of the previous crisis, we find ourselves in such another crisis, consequences are going to flow from that and, if we do not better prepare ourselves to face the consequences that flow from that crisis of to-day than we did prepare ourselves with respect to the economic consequences flowing from the war, we are going to be in a very bad position.
The Minister for Industry and Commerce told us yesterday that there was such a situation and he said they would have to examine the fundamentals of their problems if they were to prevent the foundations of their economy—that is, of our economy— from being undermined in the next three or six months. They would have to examine the fundamentals of their problems. When are they going to examine the fundamentals of their problems that are such that, if the foundations of our economy are not going to be undermined in the next three or six months, they will have to be attended to? What has he to say as to when they are going to examine those fundamentals? Nothing in the world.
In another voice he says that they cannot, in the circumstances, make good the ground lost in the past. The difficulties ahead are frightening, he says, but we have got to go ahead with our plans. What plans? Have we heard any kind of plans in the discussions that have taken place here from the Minister for Finance, the Minister for Social Welfare, or the Minister for Industry and Commerce that give us any inkling, good, bad or indifferent, of any plans to deal with the present situation except one plan that is analogous, in certain circumstances, to the plan the Minister for Social Welfare carried out as Minister for Agriculture in the economic war—the plan analogous to the free meat plan?
It is a very disappointing thing that the beginning of the Ministry of Social Welfare should be tarnished and prejudiced, particularly at the opening of another crisis, by being in the hands of the person who was responsible with one hand for the injury to our agricultural economy and, with the other, for dishing out the free beef that was knocking around everywhere in the country as a result of the injury to our agricultural industry. When the war began there was a crisis and, on 13th September, 1939, I was commissioned to discuss with the Taoiseach and the then Minister for Finance, now An tUachtarán, our feeling that they were approaching the crisis in a wrong way. Without reference to us they had mobilised the Army reserve and were incurring certain expenses and wasting manpower without clearly envisaging why they were doing so, or what were the problems before the country.
I was commissioned on behalf of Mr. Cosgrave and colleagues in our Party to represent that, in our opinion, it was the economic situation that required attention during the war and that it was the economic results of the war that would affect us much more than any military happenings. One of the representations I then made was to remind them that the Australian Government had officially announced that Professor Copeland, Professor of Commerce and Dean of the Faculty of Commerce in Melbourne University, had been appointed economic adviser to the Commonwealth of Australia for the duration of the war. He was a professor in one of their universities. He had been chairman of an economic commission some 20 years before that which reviewed aspects of Australian economy for the Government.
We had, a few years before that, brought in one or two economic experts from abroad, with some national economists from our universities and from other walks of our national life, to be associated with them, to examine the past, if you like, of our economic practices and look to the future to see what advice they could give, based on the experience of the past and what they saw of the world around them. We suggested that it might be possible to examine the past by utilising the types of people we brought to examine the economic situation and report on the Banking Commission, and that we should do as Australia was then doing, set up a small committee of experts of about two or three who would stand in a detached way in a developing world situation and, from the long-distance point of view of our economy, look at what was happening in the world and how we were likely to be affected, looking at these steps in this country as emergency steps, and indicate what the effect on our national economy was likely to be.
The attitude of the Government was that they had all the machinery for doing that and now we find ourselves to-day in the economic aftermath of the war and we are told we are facing a frightening situation and that the Government will have to examine the fundamentals of the problems to prevent the foundations of our national economy from being undermined in the next three or six months. All that time has gone and we have not a single set of facts presented to us; we have not a single outline of plans presented to us to show that the Government have been using foresight of any kind. The Minister for Industry and Commerce suggests that he knows now that there is no substitute for foresight.
We are suffering to-day because the Government have failed properly to utilise our own resources and people, to build up and strengthen our economy and protect it against the aftermath of the war, and make the best use of our economic contacts with the world, so as to strengthen ourselves and to strengthen our own resources.
If we are going to do that, we must have foresight here even if we cannot make up for the mistakes and omissions of the past. The very facts upon which ordinary people would have to rely to see what was facing them and what our conditions were, are denied to us. This is March and we have yet no account of Irish trade for the months of November, December, January or February. It took nine months to give a preliminary report of the census of last year that ought to have reached us in two or three months. We have had officials recently in London discussing our economic relations with Great Britain particularly, inside the general scheme of commercial and financial policy pursued by the members of the British Commonwealth. We have not been given the slightest information as to the preparation made for that conference. Months and months ago I pressed the Minister for Industry and Commerce to consult with the various bodies representing our agricultural, industrial and manufacturing interests and to discuss with them the likely impact of any change in imperial preference policy of the British Commonwealth on their interests. Earlier last year, or perhaps the year before, other members of the Commonwealth had to come together in London for a consideration of these things. From that conference, it was announced that they had decided the principles of financial and commercial policy that were going to guide them in their external trade. I asked had we a representative there and I was told we had not. I asked had we any information as to the principles of financial and economic policy that had been decided there amongst the other members of the Commonwealth and I was told we had not any information. Can we get any information now as to the extent to which, before we sent officials to discuss these matters in London last week, the various bodies representing agricultural interests, industrial or commercial interests were consulted?
The Minister for Industry and Commerce told us yesterday that international trade was now largely a matter of inter-Governmental negotiation. Have we any information as to what trade plans the Government have? "The difficulties ahead are frightening but we have to go ahead with our plans." Have we any trade plans? Even during the time when we were members of the Defence Conference during the war emergency, when we sought information about the fundamental aspects of things that should be discussed at the Defence Conference, we were told that the Government had no more information than we had or than could be got from the papers. In the present situation is the attitude that the Government are taking up to Deputies and to those who are the upholders of our economy, in agriculture, industry and commerce, that the Government have no more information to give them than they can get in the papers? Are we going to sit down seriously to find out the fundamental facts of our economic life here to-day, fundamental facts about the resources of our country, fundamental facts as to how the best use can be made of these by production for internal trade and for export, fundamental facts in regard to our needs in raw materials and machinery or otherwise, fundamental facts in regard to the necessary food that we want to get from the world outside or how on the basis of our own resources, intelligence and energy, we can strengthen our economy here and increase national resources for the purpose of sustaining our people?
From the attitude of the Government, the absence of facts and even the disturbance caused by anger of the national mind because of the things that are amiss in the present situation, it does not seem likely that we are going to get a full, complete and calm examination of these things until we set up some kind of body, detached from purely Party political interests, uncontaminated by the possibility of any charge that they may be advocating for Party or political purposes some particular line of policy.
Just as Professor Copeland at the beginning of the war was set up as an economic adviser to his Government, we should see to it that there are set up two or three people of the highest calibre, of the type of those who were brought in specially to deal with the examination of our economic position for the Banking Commission. We should set them up as a group of economic advisers to the Government or to the nation, to do the detached work of looking at our resources here, at our natural economy, see what is happening in the world and what is happening here, and the way in which our long-term national well-being and economy are likely to be affected so that we, seeing in our own impartial way the various facts of our national life, can relate our own opinions to the facts more broadly laid out and developed.
Consider the position we would have been in if in September, 1939, such a detached body had been set up. We would not then be in the position that we would have the report of the Committee of Inquiry on Post-Emergency Agricultural Policy left in the half-baked way it is, with nothing done with regard to pigs, with nothing done with regard to agricultural education, with nothing done with regard to men and women in their handling of the resources of agriculture here. We would have some complete picture. We would have some clearly set-out set of principles that, whether it was accepted by this Party here and that Party there and refused by some other Party, would be there for everybody who wanted to speak, so that he could say: "That is a principle, anyway; I do not agree with it because so-and-so. I think the principle should be that." We would have a House here in which, over a set of principles, facts, detachedly set out, issues could be knit.
The Government have reduced this Assembly to an Assembly in which no issue can be knit, because the House is put in a position that rabbits are put into when hunters go out at night and turn a bright light on them and shock or daze them into immobility. We here are simply told by the Government that a frightening state of affairs exists. We know the complex set of distresses that are around us in every part of the country, and we are shocked by the Government's suggestion that they realise these things and further shocked by their incompetence to paint them in any ordered or complete way, or to show us that they have any kind of plan that would suggest to the various classes of the people of this country how each of them in their own way, by facing up courageously and imaginatively to the work immediately around them, can fit themselves into the general national plan. No. A frightening situation. No information. But the Government must be let go ahead with their unknown plan. And then the suggestion that if they had been allowed to go ahead more quickly before the war, things would be better now, that they were right before the war.
There is much in the general line of the reports on agricultural policy issued by the Committee of Inquiry that the Government must regard as a reflection on their policy in the past. There was one very important aspect of our agricultural economy that this report said nothing about—pigs. When I went to see the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance in September, 1939, it was part of my duty to impress on them the importance of the poultry and the pig industries as two branches of agriculture that could be quickly expanded. There is nothing here about pigs and, with regard to the Government's line on pigs and bacon in their pre-war policy—which the Minister for Industry and Commerce said was right—I had occasion, in March, 1939, to react against a statement made by one of the lady correspondents of the Irish Press. She wrote:—
"Bacon has become a political gag. It is beginning to get a laugh. The Englishman used to laugh at the Irishman's pigs. Now the Irishman laughs at the Irishman's bacon."
I thought it would be useful to take it as a text and to see what I call cúis an gháire sin. What had the Irishman to laugh at about his bacon? On the 25th March, 1939, he had to laugh at the fact that the effect of Fianna Fáil's policy—the right policy of yesterday—in regard to the bacon industry, was to reduce the consumption by Irishmen and women of any kind of bacon from 825,844 cwts.—for which, at wholesale prices, they paid only £2,927,000—to 534,010 cwts. in 1938, for which lower quantity they had to pay £3,408,000. So that, one of the facets of the position that the Irishman had to laugh at, when the Irishman, according to the Irish Press correspondent was laughing at the Irishman's bacon, was that he was consuming 500,000 cwts. instead of 800,000 cwts. and that in 1938 he was paying £500,000 more for the smaller amount than he paid for the bigger amount he had in 1931. Another aspect of the matter was that he was paying, at wholesale prices, for the bacon that he ate, of his own production, 128/- per cwt., and that he was selling the same bacon to the Englishman, who used to be laughing at his pig, at 81/- a cwt. A third aspect of it was that, taking 1937, because I have not the Danish figures for 1938, while the Irishman was getting 63/- a cwt. from the British for bacon for which he paid 139/- himself, the Englishman was paying the Dane 102/- a cwt. That is the bacon policy pre-war. Is it any wonder, if that was the position to which our pig position and our bacon position had been reduced pre-war, that we find it difficult to get bacon now?
We have said often and often that the number of workers in agriculture before the war was reduced by thousands, that from 1934 to 1938 it was reduced by something like 42,000. Deputy Hughes told the House the other day that a further 11,000 have gone. We find ourselves with our population the smallest on record. But the Minister for Industry and Commerce tells us there is a frightening situation, that we have to go ahead with our plans, that three to six months may injure the foundations of our whole economy if we do not examine the fundamentals of our problems. At the same time he says that agricultural production is greater now than before the war. We have no figures to show us that. The latest figures we have are for 1945 and for the year before the war. The 1945 figures are even less than the figures for the last year of the economic war—1938. Are we going to compare the standards of our possible agricultural production with the standards of our agriculture after that industry had been trampled upon during the six years of the economic war? I do not think we should. If we are looking for a higher standard for our people, we must have greater development, production and employment, all that is needed if we are going to maintain substantially increased social amenities and social services. Foresight is wanted, as well as a detached looking at the facts and at our possibilities. In September, 1939, I urged that a small group of experts should look frankly at our position, in a way in which it could not be said that the examination was tainted by Party or by policy. I wanted that so that from every bench in this House it could be said: here is a statement, or a number of statements, made by people of competent and experienced outlook to the best of their ability and with the full support of their consciences. Something like that would give us a baseline by which to measure our own more limited experience, and to relate the various agreements that we may come to on particular lines of thought. Unless we get that, what chance have we of getting out of the chaos that has been wrought by the lack of information and lack of policy as well as the purely political outpourings of the Government in this House?
We have had thrown into our discussions here the statement that additional expenditure is wanted for certain social services—to increase old age pensions, blind pensions, national health insurance, widows' and orphans' pensions. Deputy O'Higgins provided a most suitable comment on that proposal when he said that a Minister of the Government in coming forward with it reminded him of an expert swimmer who carefully and callously watched the drowning man until he was going down the second time and then pulled him out because he would be more grateful for being pulled out at that critical moment than he might be if pulled out earlier.
Deputy Morrissey has dealt with the hypocritical attitude of the Government to proposals from various parts of the House. He has shown that when the Dáil was coming together for its winter discussions—it was due to assemble on the 6th November—some days before that I sent a modest resolution that had been tabled by Deputy Morrissey, Deputy Coburn and Deputy O'Higgins asking that the Old Age Pensions Acts and the Blind Persons Pensions Act should be amended so that an additional 5/- a week would be paid to these pensioners. I said that the urgent aspect of the matter was that these people were suffering considerably, and that owing to the high cost of living they were in a specially helpless class. I added that we considered that something must be done in their case, now that the winter had begun. They have gone through as distressing and as bitter a winter as they have ever gone through, with the Government standing callously aside and doing nothing to assist them.
The Government is now coming forward to help. That help, which is badly wanted, will not be begrudged by any person in the country, nor will the extra 2/6 which is to be given to the old age pensioners be thought sufficient. The Minister for Social Welfare says that the amount of money that is to be paid now to an old age pensioner or a blind pensioner is not expected to keep him: that he is expected to do something to help himself. If an old age pensioner to-morrow is able to do something to help himself to the extent of increasing his income by 2/6, will the Minister withdraw the 2/6 that he is now offering? He will. He cannot deny that that is so. I want him to say that, as well as providing the 2/6 and acknowledging that the payment that he is making will not maintain him, he will tell the old age pensioner that, if he can go out and assist himself to the extent of providing himself with an additional 2/6, the Government will not withdraw the 2/6 which it is now offering. If a son or a daughter, also recognising, as the Minister does, that the extra 2/6, with the 10/- and the food vouchers, will not keep a parent, out of a sense of filial responsibility provides the parent with an additional 2/6, will the Minister withhold the 2/6 which he is now offering to the old age pensioner? My answer is "yes", unless the Minister undertakes to say that he will not withhold the 2/6.
Take the case of an employer and of an old retainer who is no longer able to work. She is now drawing the old age pension and is promised an extra 2/6 by the Minister. Suppose the employer makes her a small weekly payment because of the services she had rendered to him in the past, as well as out of a sense of obligation for those services, as well as to help her to meet the present difficult circumstances, the present high cost of living and the fall in the value of money, will the Minister withdraw the 2/6 that he is now offering to that person? He will. He has told us that he will, and these discussions should not finish without the Minister telling us that he will not withhold that 2/6, that he recognises the principle that we have asked him to recognise in motion No. 5 on the list of motions, in which Deputies Costello and O'Higgins propose:—
"That Dáil Éireann is of opinion that the basis upon which income is assessed for the purpose of the means test in the case of persons entitled to old age pensions, blind pensions, and widows' and orphans' pensions, requires revision and in particular that in assessing income for such purpose, no cognisance should be taken of (a) gratuities paid to a pensioner by members of his or her family whether in cash or in kind; (b) any benefits received otherwise than in actual cash, and (c) casual moneys earned by the pensioner, and requests the Government to take all necessary steps accordingly."
It was only yesterday that the Minister for Industry and Commerce asked us to accept that the £ was worth only 10/- and the increase in certain payments under the social welfare scheme of 50 per cent., and, in the case of old age pensioners and blind pensioners, of half a crown, is a fractional recognition of that by the Government, a body which has travelled very slowly after the people in the recognition of these things. If citizens, recognising the same thing from to-day or from the date upon which the additional half-crown or additional payments become payable, recognising what the Government now admits it recognises, out of their charity, their sense of filial responsibility or their recognition of past services, increase their charity, if, in the interests of charity and from a sense of responsibility, they voluntarily agree to redistribute some of the national income in the way in which the Government says it is doing on its side, will they be allowed to do it, without there being withdrawn from these people the benefits which the Minister is offering in these new proposals? That is a matter which ought to be answered fully and clearly before we leave this discussion.
The very fact that the Minister for Social Welfare has to come here and say that he wants £1,500,000 additional to what is disclosed in this enormous bill of £52,000,000 is an additional argument against that bill of £52,000,000 to strengthen all the arguments put up here. Deputy O'Leary has referred to the Estimates, for the purpose of saying some of the more detailed things he was anxious to say about the poor and the unemployed. There must be said, too, on the individual Estimates what are the sums that are being wasted there, that are being misspent there, on an inert Government there, possibly ill-informed, but certainly uninforming, so far as we are concerned, because, if in this crisis social payments have to go up and money has to be spread from the better-off sections of the people to the poor and stricken, you cannot afford to charge that bill to the whole nation.
Taking the Army, we are presented there with a bill which is, first, unnecessary; and, secondly, not straightforward, and there may be found in that Estimate a residue of money which might pay the bill of £2,500,000 for our social services, but Estimates should not be presented to the House in that way. Why may there be that residue there? Because, as is disclosed, the country's sense is greater than the Government's sense in relation to our defence forces and men are not prepared to wrap up their energies in mere Army work at this period of the world's military history. They want something more useful, more productive, to do, and it is their sense of that that is keeping them out of the Army.
They have their eyes open, too, and I submit that their eyes have been opened to the way in which men, having served, as I indicated last night, for a quarter of a century are treated —marooned to-day in Army married quarters, hedged in by an unemployment situation and anchored there by the heartless, thoughtless, unimaginative type of Army administration and outlook which pays a man 17/6 as a pension for a quarter of a century's service in the Army, preceded by a considerable amount of voluntary military service in the volunteer forces, and then takes 16/2½ out of that, as the rent of a house for which, when he was a soldier, he paid 5/2½ and which has no helpful word to say to a man with a quarter of a century's service and with a wife and seven children, who is marooned in married quarters by the unemployment situation outside, encircled by a lack of housing situation and left there practically to starve.
That is an aspect of the Estimates that may help to relieve the situation, but we have our duty to do here. Lacking any action, any plan, on the part of the Government, and in face of the complete withholding of all the important facts of our national life, we have a duty here to try to put our facts as plainly as we see them. In the atmosphere in this House, due to the Government's attitude to it, we ask that there be set up outside some detached body which, being expert, and seeing things in broad outline, will look at the world facts and at our own national facts in such a way as will give us a picture of national conditions and the possible impact of international conditions on them, so that we may carry on our discussions here related in some way to a detached, competent, professional statement of our economic resources and our economic possibilities. If the Government want to move in that way, then the responsibility that lies on the rest of us is all the greater. No person here can escape the consequences of failure to see that the striking situation of which the Minister for Industry and Commerce spoke yesterday is faced with some understanding, some intelligence and some kind of organised plan for finding out information, for assessing the importance of that information and for trying to get unity of outlook on the policies which should be pursued. The Government are not doing that. We shall have to do our best to do it here and in the country.
Mr. P. Burke
I have been listening to the leaders of the Opposition for some time and I thought that, during this time of national emergency, a time which calls for the service of every man and woman, they would lend some constructive aid. Instead of getting some lead from them, we have had to listen to the same kind of stuff for which they are usually responsible. I take this opportunity to thank the Leader of the Opposition for his gentlemanly and courteous retort during Deputy O'Leary's contribution to the debate. The Minister for Finance has been repeatedly blamed for spending £30,000,000 more than was spent during the régime of the Opposition Party. But not a vote was taken in this House during the past 12 months favouring increases in salaries or in social services in which the Opposition did not vote against the Government and in favour of greater expenditure. We may reach the time when the responsible Minister will be able, by the wave of a wand, to get more money. The situation reminds me of the play, The Merchant of Venice. The Opposition want their lb. of flesh but dare the Government draw any blood! The Opposition have represented themselves as being the champions of the downtrodden and have represented us on this side as having no heart for anybody and as being unconcerned with social distress. Listening to speeches from the other side, one would think that Opposition Deputies were the only virtuous and honourable members here. We have to face facts. Since the Opposition put down motions during the year in favour of increased moneys for social services, why are they not candid enough to say that the taxpayer will have to pay more?
Who has denied that? It all depends on the person you are going to tax.
Mr. Burke
You are an abler man than I am and I shall not interrupt you when you come to make your speech. Your colleagues have accused the Government of squandermania and of spending £30,000,000 more than they did.
That is right.
Mr. Burke
At the same time, they are asking why we cannot grant increases for this and that. That is the position.
Is there anything wrong with it?
Mr. Burke
If they were quite honest about the representations they have made, they would say to the people that the allocation of additional money to social services could only be done in one way—by ordinary taxation.
It depends on whom you tax.
Mr. Burke
Money cannot be got except from one source. A speaker last night referred to the cost of the President's establishment and other items. I am delighted that I lived to see the day when we were able to have a President and I hope I shall live to see the day when we shall have the same man, or a successor, ruling over the 32 Counties. That is our object. One would imagine from the references to these items that the State was depending for existence on these small amounts. I listened to one speaker— Deputy O'Leary—talking about the foreigners who are coming into the country. He spoke of the amount of food they were using here and, a few minutes afterwards, he said that this country would only allow so much beef to be exported. It is very hard to reconcile those two arguments. We are now almost in April and we have snow and rain. The Government has almost been blamed for the bad weather. I should expect responsible Opposition leaders to come along, at a time of national emergency such as the present, and try to co-operate in some way.
In what way?
Mr. Burke
Try to have something worth while in the country. The Government have been blamed for bad turf, shortage of food and other things. All we get from the Opposition at such a time is destructive criticism. I was delighted to hear that the Minister for Finance has agreed to increase the amount for social services, even old age pensions. Deputy McGilligan is laughing now and says the increase is only 2/6. But no old age pensioner in the towns is depending on the 10/-. He is really getting 16/8 a week. I do not say that that is enough.
It is worth 8/-.
Mr. Burke
During the term of office of the present Government, a number of necessary social services have been introduced and met by the State. The Minister for Social Welfare came in very nicely the other night——
He ought to beat us.
Mr. Burke
Nobody is going to beat you. He told us of increases for the widows and orphans and those concerned with national health insurancé. Everybody would like to see these people better off, if the State could afford the money. I want to refer again to the hypocrisy of the Opposition, who criticise expenditure at one time and ask for more expenditure on another occasion.
That statement has a familiar ring.
Mr. Burke
It has and you contribute to it, too. If the Exchequer can bear it I would like to see a little more given to the agricultural community as I know their standard of living is very low. It is our staple industry and I would like the Government to consider, in its own time, increasing the grant. The country is up against it and we want more food, so the agricultural community should get more money.
The debate has centred around the shock caused by the amount of money involved in these Estimates. I do not think the amount of the Budget is excessive, but rather that, on our present standard of living and the provision which the Estimates make for the various services, including the Civil Service, the Garda, the Army and the social services expenditure, the amount in the Budget could be regarded by reasonable people as not even sufficient to pay enough towards the salaries and amenities with which it is proposed to deal. The vast bulk of those engaged in the Civil Service are living on too meagre a standard, on their present salaries. Similarly, many of the teachers, the Gardaí, the Army, the old age pensioners and the widows and orphans are not receiving a sufficient amount. If a tribunal or committee were set up to examine the merits of each case, I am satisfied that general increases would be made in practically every service covered by these Estimates. However, we are asked by those who counter that: "Where is the money to come from? Can the country stand it?" That is the problem raised very often and, personally, I am not able to answer it. I have a shrewd opinion that the country is not only unable to stand an increase, as suggested from time to time by all of us, a necessary increase, but it is not able to stand even the present outgoings. If that is so, we are in a dangerous condition as we are spending more than we can afford.
My impression is that it is not through our workers that we are able to spend our present expenditure but through the money we are receiving from our workers outside, which is put into circulation in a fictitious way here and enables businesses to keep going and keep profits up. In return, the Government get a share of that money to balance the Budget. That is a very insecure way to balance the Budget. If for any reason that inflow of money ceased—and it is bound to cease—we would be thrown back, as we should be naturally, on our own resources, the result of our own production and the sale of that in the outside world markets to enable us to buy the material we want. I am afraid our production will not allow us an expenditure of anything like the £50,000,000 which is in this year's Estimate of expenditure.
A reduction in the Estimates has been suggested and if it can be done it would be a good thing, but I cannot believe it can be done. I do not believe in criticism of small items—such as the money spent on our President and his retinue, or some other apparently luxury item—or that, even if saved, it would be of any effect. How, then, are we to face the situation, if we want to balance the Budget and live within our own resources, that is, the natural resources of our powers of production? We must do something drastic and would require a committee of all Parties to face the problem. It will mean a substantial reduction in the amount of our Budget and, accordingly, a substantial reduction in the standard of our living generally. If we are able to face up to that situation, we might keep here at home the young people we are sending out. If we are looking for a sound basis of economy, we must remember that the most valuable asset we have is our young people. In any period in which we export these people to earn money, in an outside country, to send back here to keep our finances going, we are working an unsafe, unsound, unholy and unnational system. If we are to establish the national economy that we talk so much about and believed would be so easy of achievement years ago, there can be only one way. We are exporting our people to an adjoining country and taking back their earnings to use here, almost in conformity with a wealthy nation, a millionaire nation with all the resources of an empire.
We are a small nation troubled with lots of things, including weather, which affects our main industry substantially. Those in that main industry have been, and always will be, as far as I can see, on the verge of want. We must reduce the general standard of living, dispense with our wide expenditure and come down to a small expenditure, habituate ourselves to a meagre living. We must train our people to live in the rural areas, teach them Irish, if you will, and let them speak it, and they will not be disturbed by being taught Irish only, since part of their existence will not depend on migrating to a country which knows not their native language. If we are serious in establishing a sound national economy and making Irish the spoken language, we must live on our own resources and cut that close connection and that part of our economic existence which is in close association with an outside country. It is a hard problem to face, but any other solution would only be a makeshift one.
I do not blame the present Government any more than I blame any other Government. They were all hopeful and wishful thinkers 25 or 30 years ago and believed that, with independence in our hands, we could transform the whole life of the people. We believed that not only could we provide for our people in prosperity and well-being but that we could bring back our emigrants from abroad. After all these years of trial—and I have no doubt a fairly vigorous trial has been made—we find it is not possible to do that. What is the alternative? Surely it is not fair or just that we as politicians should continue to say to the country: "Give me power and I will solve the problem. I will find employment for all the people at home and improve the conditions of all classes of the people", when we know after 25 years of trial that it is not possible to do it. Why do we not say that to the people and face up to the new situation which we have discovered? Why go on with what is nothing more than electioneering camouflage between one Party and another? "Everything is right only the Government that is in office. Give me power and I will do the things that should have been done all these years". I believe that it is all cod, that it is not possible. I regard it as dishonest for the different Parties to continue asserting a thing which they realise is not possible.
A good deal has been said about the shortage of milk and butter. Of course, the weather of the last season was responsible to some extent for the shortage of milk supplies. As a farmer having long experience of the production of milk, I can say that I anticipate a much more acute shortage of butter next year. I cannot foretell the weather, but let the weather be as good as we hope it will be, it is the preceding harvest which determines the quantity and quality of milk for the following summer. Having regard to the conditions during the last harvest and the poor condition in which the cows will go into the coming season's grass, I anticipate that there will be a very low production and a low quality of milk, with a consequent low production of butter.
The production of milk has been steadily decreasing. I can give you this experience after being 25 years engaged in farming. We kept a dairy farm and supplied our milk to the creamery. We had to reduce considerably the number of our cows because, with the problem of finding men to milk the cows on Sunday, more than once the cows were left unmilked. We think the problem to-day is due to the improved wages and conditions demanded by the workers. It is not. It has been in existence as long as I remember. It may have developed further, but at no time in my association with milk production was there ever a price paid for milk which would compensate for the work attached to the production of it. If the Government are serious in providing against a further shortage of butter next year and a greater shortage than this year and for a supply of good milk for the next year and the years to come, there is only one way to do it. It must be done in a national way, if these things are essential, as we know they are. There is no use in weeping crocodile tears about the misery of the baby who is without milk and the people who are without butter. We will have to do it in a national way which will pay those engaged in the industry. The price paid to milk producers is not sufficient. It must be raised.
There is another aspect of that milk supply question. The State has been spending a lot of money for many years on the improvement of live stock. I have it to my credit that a good many years ago in this House I advocated something in the form of a change from the established practice and which has been continued since, namely, directing expenditure to placing what we regard as good quality bulls in the country. We have also been spending a good deal of money on research work, cow testing associations, etc., with the view to finding a good quality milk producing cow. When we spend all that public money what happens? When our money, our time and our efforts have resulted in producing good quality cows, they are taken to the market and, in the majority of cases, they find their way to some city in England or to Belfast to produce there milk of very good quality and in large quantity. The value of these cows is lost to us. Our good milking cows are exported because people get a good price in currency notes which increases the demand on the available food supplies. We have not sufficient food supplies to buy with that currency which we get in return for the animals we have produced at such expense and which yield a profit and benefit to people outside the country.
To meet that situation, I advocated long ago that a premium should be put on the heifer, the springing cow and the milking cow so as to enable them to be kept here. Otherwise, to a large extent the money that we spend in trying to improve our live stock and milk supply is lost to us and we are deprived of the benefit which the nation should receive from that expenditure. These cows should be subsidised. If the Government are serious in making provision for the emergency which we are in at present, let them give a price to the farmer which will compensate him and his family for the effort they are making in producing milk. In that way you will get results. We must get the best quality milk we can produce. That only can be done by giving the producer a sum equivalent to what he can get in the public market, and the public market means the outside buyer who gets the benefit.
Would you stop the export of milk cows immediately?
Why not, if we require them at home? But I would only do that by compensating the owners of the cows, because it must be remembered that it is a very tedious thing to build up a herd of cows of good milking strain. It can only be done at enormous expense. Having done that, to allow them to go out of the country because somebody is able to pay a few extra pounds for them in the market is a foolish and reckless policy.
Thanks for a very useful speech so far.
We talk a good deal about education. There is a difference of opinion about Irish, but I do not intend to go into that. Leaving out the primary schools, I must say that I feel that the public who have to bear the expenditure in regard to the higher grades of education have seen very poor results from them. There should definitely be a tightening up there and an examination into the matter. I would have thought that all the money we have spent on the higher forms of education would have given us much better results, especially in regard to a scientific approach to our main industry of agriculture.
We have had nothing new by way of artificial manures suitable to our land for the last 30, 40, 50, or 60 years— probably hundreds. I am not at all satisfied that we have not in our own country materials and chemicals which, if properly utilised and scientifically examined, would prove highly efficient. I know myself, some of them could prove of high value as artificial manures. As a result of the absence of imported manures over the last six or seven years and the intensive tillage, the value of our land and its productivity has been substantially reduced and a heavy drain has been made over the last six years upon the national resources embodied and held in the soil of this country. We may complain about budgets. They are a heavy drain, but money is not the thing. The withdrawal of that reserve of wealth in the form of the productivity of the soil which has been caused over the last six or seven years runs into millions. There can be no doubt that the withdrawal from the soil of its productivity during the period of the emergency is a national charge and the nation should bear it and return it to the soil in the form of supplying free manures to the farmers thus bringing the soil back to the condition in which it was before the emergency caused its exhaustion. That proposal may mean increased expenditure in the form of Estimates for next year but unless the Government do that they will deprive the individual farmers of this country of soil which was theirs and which was compulsorily used to meet an emergency. The emergency was national and the nation is responsible for restoring to the individual farmer the amount of wealth which it compelled him to use up during the emergency.
I think education should have given us a much better result. Our educationists have produced nothing for us in the way of improving our soils. The soil of this country is very varied, some poor, some very rich. The poor soil has steadily grown poorer. I would have thought that our educationists would have examined the possibility of improving the poor soil not merely by draining it but by treating its subsoil. I would have expected some effort in that direction Our educationists have done nothing to improve quality of seeds or to produce seeds which would be suitable for different soils. I am disappointed and I think that the Government should examine the question before paying out all the additional money to these institutions: there should be some practical way of returning it to the nation.
There has been a lot of talk about our emigration, about our rural life and about the flight from the land. Of course there is a flight from the land and there is a very good reason for it. The land cannot give a reasonable standard of living to the number of people who have been living on it. There are no attractions there. Is it any wonder that our schoolhouses are being closed all over the country? Our people have reached the stage where they will not get married unless they know that there is an economic existence for them. There is not on the land. In the western and congested areas the people will die out. Open the ports to-day, give the people from these areas an opportunity to leave the country and they will fly. Not only is that the position but there are still very serious injustices being inflicted by Government policy on those people. If a man applies for an emigration permit he will get it, but if that man is associated with the land it will not be granted to him. If the Government want to be fair they must make the same conditions applicable to the whole people of the country. The rural worker is being conscripted — this year, last year and other years — he is not allowed to leave the country and he is told that there is work for him on the bogs. That is not freedom; that is not liberty. Coercion should not be applied and restrictions should not be put on certain individuals. We are told it is in the national interest, but if the national interest is to be served these people should not be coerced and restricted. In time of war conscription is enforced as an emergency measure, but why say that we have no conscription here — we have it in its worst and most sinister form? It is applicable only to some of the community who must, whether they like it or dislike it, whether they are suitable or unsuitable, work on the bogs to provide fuel for the nation. Others, if they feel like leaving the country, may leave. I am not suggesting that I approve of allowing anybody out of the country, but the present restrictions are unfairly applied to one section of the community without regard to their suitability or their inclination. Many young fellows who live in rural areas could find careers for themselves in other countries, could be trained in professions and get permanent positions, but they are told they cannot take up these positions because they are wanted to cut turf. Is it any wonder the people do not like rural areas? Then, of course, since turf production gives them only part employment they are forced to go back and sit at home and draw the dole and become demoralised. The system is wrong. The system is bad, and I say that the Government will have to face this serious and immediate problem and determine a new line of action.
A Vote of this kind provides an opportunity for a review of the trend of Government policy and while I do not intend to undertake that review at any length there are some aspects of Government policy to which I would like to advert. In the course of his speech yesterday the Minister for Industry and Commerce referred to 1947 as a crisis year and, indeed, so well he might so describe 1947, because it seems to me on the facts available for publication that 1947 — two years after the war in Europe has concluded — is likely to prove for us the most serious year that we have had since the emergency commenced in 1939, because in the range of national activities one sees factors which tend at once to cause very serious crises so far as the national life of our people is concerned.
I want to refer briefly to the main aspects of life here that seem to me to provide very considerable room for disquiet, if not for very serious perturbation on the part of the people. Let me refer first to agriculture. During the years since 1939 we pretended to concentrate our energies on utilising our land to the fullest. Although we were in the position of a beleaguered nation in a state of semi-siege, and although that situation ought to have called forth the best efforts that were within us, so far as agriculture was concerned our efforts to apply our talents, our abilities and energies to the fullest exploitation of our agricultural possibilities yielded the most disappointing results. We have 12,000,000 acres of arable land. Some of that land is the envy of many countries in Europe but, notwithstanding the fact that we have that arable land available to provide food and employment for our people, we have never been able to get under cultivation more than 2,500,000 acres of it and we have never been able to put under production on that land the vital cereals and dairying produce so necessary to sustain a healthy life.
It seems to me that having 12,000,000 acres of arable land, having utilised or, rather, misused that land in the way in which we have done, especially over the past eight years, we have been guilty of the most appalling inertia and the most striking agricultural ineptitude. Can anybody imagine any other country in Europe, immune from the ravages of war as we were, with no devastation and none of the dislocation which unfortunately ravaged Europe, with 12,000,000 acres of arable land available to our people for cultivation, put in the position that to-day we have a shortage of butter, our people brought to a ration never previously experienced in living memory? We have a butter ration of 2 ozs. per week for our people, a ration which is usually associated with famine and destitution.
To-day, although we have an abundance of sterling to our credit, we still ration our people. They have a famine ration of butter, a type of ration usually associated with economic destitution. That is the best we can do in a country that has 12,000,000 acres of arable land available for cultivation. Not only is butter short, but we have a shortage of bread, of bacon and now an acute scarcity of milk. And all this in a land which, if it were properly organised agriculturally, is capable of producing all the commodities it needs in the sphere of cereals and dairying products.
We may say in respect of minerals, such as coal, that our efforts to develop our resources are restricted because of the fact that we have to depend on outside supplies. There is no external factor present to-day which has brought about the butter famine, the bread shortage, the bacon, and the milk scarcity. We should provide these commodities from our own resources. There is no serious or insurmountable external factor which would prevent us overcoming these difficulties. Only our own inertia and ineptitude are preventing us from having an abundance of these products, not merely for our own people, but to exchange with other countries for the essential commodities we do not produce here.
The Minister is an agriculturist. Does he accept the position that we are capable of producing, for less than 3,000,000 people, all the butter, bread, bacon and milk that they require? I do not think anybody will seriously attempt to say that 12,000,000 acres of arable land are not capable of providing these commodities for less than 3,000,000 people. If we accept the position that 12,000,000 acres of arable land are capable of providing all the butter, bread, bacon and milk which our people require, as well as other agricultural and dairying products, why is it that, at the end of eight years of effort, we are still short of these commodities, and shorter of them to-day than we have ever been at any time during the past eight years?
No explanation about internal interference, no explanation of the weather conditions, can possibly excuse or justify our failure to produce these commodities in abundance. All the essentials for production are here, if only we had the economic and agricultural intelligence to apply our talents to that production. One thing, at all events, is clear. As we stand here in 1947 and look back through the years that have passed since 1939, we realise it is the methods on which we relied in the past which have given us the disappointing results we experience to-day, disappointing results which are not understood by the people, disappointing results which are creating an atmosphere of dismay so far as large masses of our people are concerned. Are we going to continue to rely in 1947, 1948, 1949 and 1950 on the same unsatisfactory methods that have given us such appallingly bad results, or are we going to seek other methods and apply a new enthusiasm and try to galvanise the nation into a cooperative effort to produce the goods which our country is capable of producing in abundance?
These Estimates provide no answer whatever to that question. If they indicate one thing more than another it is that through 1947 we will continue to follow the easy Micawber-like road that we have trod since 1939, hoping that adversity may not blow this way, hoping something important happens in some part of the world which will give us the products we are too lazy to produce, hoping that by some evolution or some unexpected plenitude elsewhere we will get what we do not deserve to get, because we are too lazy to provide for ourselves.
I do not think that in the past 25 years our agricultural position reached such a decadent level as it has reached to-day. There is little doubt that our whole agricultural position has deteriorated. There is little doubt that there will be no effective remedy so far as this Vote on Account or Estimates are concerned. There is no indication of any policy calculated to arrest the deterioration which is all too rapidly accumulating.
Let me refer to another matter which, I think, must be a cause of grave national disquiet, namely, the recently published population statistics. An English paper once said, with an element of glee, that the Celt was going and that it could look forward, in a spirit of political malevolence, to the fact that the Celt would soon cease to be a source of trouble to the political mentors of that British newspaper. I wonder what it would write to-day if it were to examine the population statistics that have just been published? In my opinion, they provide a grave source of worry so far as this country is concerned. One thing that they make clear is that we may give up in our lifetime pining for the day when we will see the population of this country what it was 80 or 90 years ago. Not in the lifetime of anybody now living, or in the lifetime of the next generation, will it be possible with the population we have to-day, by normal means to produce a population that will ever approximate in size to the population at the middle of the last century. The figures recently published indicate that the decline in population between 1936 and 1946 was five times greater than the decline between 1926 and 1936.
Is there any normal country on the face of the earth to-day in which, comparing one inter-censal period with another, its population has declined five times more in the last ten years than in the previous ten years? Yet that is the unenviable reputation which we have built up for ourselves, looking at the problem of population through the recently published census returns. And all this, not because of any falling off in the birth rate, because the population statistics show that in the inter-censal period, 1936-46, births exceeded deaths by no less than 175,000. Although births exceeded deaths by that very large figure, our population in 1946 was 19,000 lower than it was in 1936. Can anybody on the Government Front Bench or in the Government Party feel complacent with figures so revealing as these are of national decay? Can there be any greater evidence of the economic unattractiveness of life in Ireland, than to find that even with a birth surplus over deaths of 175,000, we still have a population of 19,000 less than we had ten years ago?
Most progressive countries in the world, certainly the countries which approximate in their way of life and in their methods of husbandry to our own, are clamouring for citizens to create new wealth. Australia, South Africa, Canada — all these realise that the way in which they can best produce new wealth is by attracting more good citizens to their respective countries and by endeavouring to keep at home all those able and willing to produce wealth. Whilst each of these countries realises that more man-power, in the form of capable men and women, is the only means to build up a standard of prosperity and a high degree of wealth which will provide a good standard of life for all, yet we imagine, apparently from our actions, that their economics are a complete heresy and, with the sheerest indifference to the economic consequences here, we permit the export of tens of thousands of our people to create wealth in another country and to send home financial coupons which give the non-producers of wealth here a lien on all sorts of produce here.
Nobody can blame the tens of thousands of people who seek permits to go to Britain. The picture of unlimited poverty, the low standard of living, the appalling conditions under which they are compelled to live, the insecurity of employment, are the culminating factors which induce people to seek permits to go and work in England, where they can get regular employment, decent rates of wages and from which they can send home money to sustain their wives and children, instead of having to go week after week to the labour exchange or having to spend week after week hunting home assistance officers to get a few miserable shillings in order to keep the wolf from the door. That was the standard of life which numbers of our people were compelled to endure in this country. Whilst we are an underpopulated nation, whilst we can only-create wealth and prosperity by production, we complacently tolerate an economic and agricultural position in which we export men and women for no other reason than that we are legislatively too lazy to provide work for them at home.
Nobody can deny, surveying the relatively undeveloped condition of this country, that there is an abundance of work to be done, and that there are men and women available to do it. Nobody can deny that we have sterling balances which have now reached a new high level. With work to be done, with men and women to do that work, with an abundance of money available to finance that work, what, short of our sheer inability to plan to utilise these three elements in providing plenty, prevents us providing that employment for our own people at home and providing an inducement for them to stay at home, instead of leaving to seek a livelihood in other lands? Is it any wonder that our people want to leave rural areas? I think Deputy Maguire has put his finger on the real problem in rural areas — the problem that people cannot be induced to stay in rural areas, because living in rural areas to-day is a case of living under workhouse conditions.
During discussion in the Dáil a short time ago on a Bill which I moved designed to provide a week's holiday with pay for agricultural labourers, Deputy Corry asked: "What is the use of giving these unfortunate people a week's holidays? An agricultural worker has not a good suit of clothes to wear on Sundays? What would they do with a week's holidays? They have not a shilling in their pockets. There is no use in giving holidays to agricultural labourers because they have no good clothes to go anywhere and they have not a shilling in their pockets." That is the position our agriculture has reached to-day, that the agricultural worker is compelled to maintain himself, his wife and children on 44/- a week, that, as Deputy Corry says, there is no use giving him summer holidays because he has no clothes to go anywhere and he has not a shilling in his pocket to spend while he is on holidays. Is it any wonder that people leave employment of that kind to go elsewhere? If the Government were to take off the ban to-morrow on agricultural and turf workers, there would not be a dozen of them left in the country because the attractions, even in agriculture, in Great Britain, are so great, from the point of view of wage-earning possibilities, that they could not be induced to remain here. They stay for one reason only, that they are being conscripted for agricultural and turf work. If that is the position, then we ought to make sure that they are paid decent rates of wages for that work. Nobody could contend that the rates of wages to-day, especially in agriculture, remotely approach a Christian concept of life. In 1947, to ask a man to provide for himself, his wife and four, five or six children on a wage of 44/- a week, having regard to existing price levels, is to ask him to do what every member of the Government knows is a physical impossibility.
I have said, and I repeat, that one of the greatest pities of life to me is that hunger is not infectious. If it were, some members of the Government Party would be compelled to bestir themselves and to realise that it is inhuman to compel agricultural workers to tolerate such a low standard of life in this country which should be capable of providing a much higher standard. Unless we are prepared to arrest the continued depression in the rural areas and the present suicidal drift from the land and the rural areas, to employment elsewhere, I shudder to think what our ultimate position as a nation is likely to be. We can arrest that drift, I suggest, by providing work and better wages, in better standards of life in those areas and by increasing production, which can be shared by the people in the rural areas, the towns and cities. If it is not possible to achieve that, a picture of unrelieved despair confronts us as a nation, such despair as would wreak greater havoc in the nation and in the morale of the people than would have been caused if we had been a belligerent in the last war.
I have listened for some time past to appeals, made by the Minister for Industry and Commerce in particular, as to the necessity for increased production. I agree at once that increased production is vital to our very existence. The nation lives on what it produces. There is nothing else on which it can live. If we do not produce goods and services, we must have a low standard of life. We can get a high standard only by producing more and more goods for distribution in greater volume among our people. How does the Minister for Industry and Commerce reconcile a plea for increased production with a policy which regards with the utmost equanimity the export of close on 200,000 of our people during the past ten years? How can you have increased production in a country with a rapidly falling population? How can you have increased production if the flower of our manhood and womanhood are being driven from the country to find elsewhere the living they are denied here? If we are ever to face up seriously to the task of increasing production here we must start by retaining within the nation the services of every man and woman capable of rendering service in the production of additional wealth. So long as we tolerate a continuance of a policy of exporting virile men and women and of underpaying and overpaying those who remain and depressing their standard of living, there are present all the elements which make, not for increased production, but for a continually deteriorating standard of production.
In an effort to brighten an otherwise bleak and sombre economic picture, the Minister for Health was thrown into this debate as a shock battalion, to tell the country that the Government has decided to improve certain social services. It seems to me a rather strange occasion to make an announcement of that kind which I thought would have been made either in connection with the Budget or by the introduction of special legislation for an improvement in existing social services. Apparently, it was felt that the whole economic position was so bleak that something would have to be done to relieve the picture. The Minister for Health was thrown in to indicate that the Government propose to do little things here and little things there in order to raise the standard of life, as he thought among that section of the people which might be described as the depressed classes because of the appallingly low standard that for many years they have been compelled to endure. I welcome these increases in so far as they tend to make life even slightly more tolerable than it has been. But, while Deputy Burke can get ecstatic over what is being done, a close examination of the position provides no grounds in old age pensioners' homes for the enthusiam he manufactures here in adulation of the Government Front Bench.
Let us see what is being done. It is proposed to give old age pensioners an extra 2/6 per week, and to make their statutory pensions 12/6 per week. Deputy Burke thinks that is the highlight of generosity, that once you equip these people with 12/6 a week they can breast any economic gale. Let us consider exactly what we are doing. In 1916 the British Government gave old age pensioners 10/- a week and they have had that 10/- a week up to 1947. If you were to give the old age pensioners the purchasing power of the 10/- of 1916, you would want to give them, not 12/6, but 25/6, so much has the purchasing power of the 1916 10/- decreased; we should give 25/6, not the miserable 12/6 which is being provided amongst the palliatives which the Minister for Health has thrown into this debate. 1916 seems a rather extraordinary year to mention in connection with old age pensioners. We here regard that as an epic year, as the year in which our modern liberty was framed, as the year in which the freedom which we now enjoy was, to some extent, moulded. We look upon 1916 as the fount from which the liberty which we now enjoy flows. We are quite entitled, and every citizen is entitled, to take an immense pride in the achievements and enthusiasm of the national resurgence which flowed from that epoch-making event so far as our political freedom is concerned. But let us look at what significance 1916 has for us in the social sphere. The best we can do on the social side, so far as 1916 is concerned — that is 31 years afterwards, with the cost of living to-day enormously greater than it was then — is to increase the British Government's 10/- old age pension to 12/6 a week. That is the best we can do after 31 years' effort, 25 of which were spent with the right to do what we liked so far as our social services are concerned.
I do not want at this stage to follow the Minister for Health through the various proposals which he indicated to the House a few days ago, except to say that, looking at the improvements which he proposes to put into operation, I am of opinion that they are still utterly inadequate in view of the conditions under which the recipients are forced to live, that they make no prospective contribution to an improvement in the standard of life of these people and that in the long run, when these improvements have been put into operation, the recipients will still have a hungry existence. Their standard of life, with prices rising as rapidly as they are to-day, will be no better at the end of this year than it is at the beginning. In my view there was never a greater need than there is to-day to build up our standard of social services. Every person in the country rightly protests against its unnatural division, against the tearing away of the Six Counties from the motherland, and against the maintenance of a puppet Government in the Six Counties by an external authority. Everybody years for the day when it will be possible to reunite and reintegrate the Six Counties with the homeland. Are we going the right way to create in the minds of the Irishmen of all denominations in the Six Counties the desire to be reintegrated with the motherland? Our social services to-day, are appallingly below those in the Six Counties and in Great Britain, and, so long as that is the position, we are deliberately and consciously, whether we like it or not, building up another barrier to the ending of Partition and of the unnatural division of the country. If we want to attract our brethren in the Six Counties to a policy of desiring reintegration with the motherland, we can do it in many ways, but we shall never do it sufficiently well to attract them so long as our standard of social services remains low, while they continue to put brick upon brick in building up for their people decent standards of social services.
In the Six Counties to-day the old age pension is 26/- a week. In addition, the cost of living is lower there than it is here. With our higher cost of living, the best that we are able to offer to the old age pensioner is 12/6 a week. Does anybody think that is calculated to create amongst the people of the Six Counties a desire for reintegration with the motherland? That great disparity between the two codes of social services provides a justification for those people who want to manipulate antagonism between those who live in the Six Counties and those who live here. If we are ever going to create in the Six Counties an atmosphere conducive to a desire for reunion, we certainly will not do so by providing the outmoded social services which we have.
So long as we continue to provide an inadequate standard of social services, inadequate wages and depressed standards of living in the towns and rural areas, our people will continue to look to the emigrant ship as the only way of getting relief from the unending grind and poverty which they are compelled to endure at home. One has only to look at the manpower problem in Britain to-day to realise that for many, many years to come Britain will provide a market for all our manpower, no matter whether that manpower is essential to our requirements or not. Britain is now suffering from the effects of a low birth rate in the early thirties. The raising of the school-leaving age in Britain to 15 and 16 years is taking 370,000 youths out of industry each year. Britain has now got, according to her statesmen, to increase her exports by 150 per cent. in order to maintain her pre-war standard of living. Britain is applying herself energetically and enthusiastically to a solution of all these problems. There will always be a demand for manpower in Britain in our time and, so long as there is regular employment there with good rates of wages and with a higher standard of social services, there will be an irresistible attraction for Irish youths, Irish men and women, as well as boys and girls, to seek there what they cannot get at home.
I put it to the Government that this is as serious a position as has ever confronted us. It is one which the Government must grapple with. Does anybody imagine that Irish lads leave this country to work in British coal mines, under the conditions in operation there: that they venture into a class of life for which they have not been trained, merely for the sake of seeing what it is like to work under the earth? These folk drift into that type of employment for which they are unskilled for the simple reason that they know that even if they have to endure hardship in following that vocation there, at least they will get a wage that will sustain them and their families. If we want to attract them to remain at home we must offer them comparable standards of living, of wages and of social services.
I see nothing in these Estimates which affords consolation to any thoughtful citizen or which gives any ground for the belief that the Government is applying itself to the very serious problems of agricultural deterioration, population decline and of low standards of living in the rural areas with that poverty level of wages for agricultural workers and that general ineptitude in dealing with all the problems which are growing from these basic problems. I suggest to the Government that, instead of pursuing a policy, or, as the Minister for Industry and Commerce says, following our plans — plans which nobody can ascertain, which nobody can follow and which nobody can see — they ought to think and ought not to regard themselves as having a monopoly of thinking.
Probably the most humorous commentary on plans is the statement made by the Minister for Industry and Commerce in the House yesterday. He told us that the importation of Poles, Germans and displaced persons might relieve the population problem here. I do not want to be facetious on an occasion like this, nor do I want to rake the ashes of Fianna Fáil promises in 1932, but I am sure it would make even the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Taoiseach smile if anybody were to say to-day: "Do you remember the merry old days when you were going not merely to provide work for every man and woman in Ireland but were going to send to America to bring back the emigrants, were going to comb that vast continent and bring back boatloads of boys and girls to the abundance of work which was to be available here?" Somebody, in 1932, said to the present Minister for Finance: "Do you know that there are 80,000 unemployed in this country?" The Minister's heroic reply was: "What about it? Should we not be glad to have them to do all the work which Fianna Fáil will provide for them?" I do not want to go back on this long litany of promises made to a trusting and simple people, but I am sure we shall hear no more about them, since we have now to face up to the problem of importing Poles, Germans and displaced persons while we calmly export the Irish, the natural inhabitants of the country.
I say to the Government — and it is my last word on the matter — that they ought now to realise that the situation has got so serious that it demands the establishment of some kind of national thinking box and some kind of national planning organisation. When in opposition, this Government pretended to favour the establishment of an economic council, which would be the eyes, the ears and the brains of our agricultural and industrial development. Since going into office, the Government have felt that they themselves are the economic council which can do the planning, the thinking, the seeing and the hearing, so far as our national requirements are concerned. All that has been said in this debate is the clearest evidence that the Government have fallen down on the job of thinking, seeing and planning; and I suggest to them now that they ought to go back to their first economic love, the establishment of an economic council, representative of the best minds and the best brains we can get in this country, and charge that body with the responsibility of advising as to the best method by which our more serious economic problems can be surmounted and of wrestling with the serious problems that confront us to-day.
Many of these problems are of our own making. Many of them are due to our own inertia and ineptitude. Many of them would disappear, if energy and enthusiasm were applied to their solution. In the past, we have relied on methods which have given very unsatisfactory results. We can continue with these methods but associated with adherence to that policy is the full emigrant ship, the low standard of living and the appalling pittances which many of our weak and destitute people are compelled to exist on. But if we want to get away from that morass of poverty, depression and despair, if we want to get out on the high road to prosperity and to leave poverty behind, the one thing we ought to do is to apply to our problems in future methods and enthusiasm radically different from the methods and enthusiasm which we applied in the past. As surely as we follow the line we have been pursuing, we shall have the same miserable and disappointing results— miserable and disappointing results which are exemplified in every big field of national endeavour — but if we are to break with the past, with the poverty and depression of the past, we must try other methods, better methods, and I suggest that the Government ought now to stop and think, and seek co-operation and consultation with all those elements within the country who, being Irish, have their destiny cast in Ireland and want to see this country as prosperous as it is possible for a united Irish people to make it.
Scarcely any aspect of the life of the people has been left untouched in the course of this debate, and my chief reason for intervening is again to direct attention to a very urgent matter affecting, in particular, my own constituency. I have always heard, and I think everybody regards it as so, that one of the fundamental duties of a Government is to protect the life and property of its citizens. If a very serious fire or a rebellion broke out in a district, the Government would immediately concern itself with rushing sufficient rescue parties and so on to protect the lives and property of people in that area. Deputy Coogan and I, a couple of nights ago, referred to the urgency and serious effects of the position created by the flooding problem in Kilkenny and I have to raise this matter again to-day because my attention has been called to a report in to-day's Irish Independent, on the principal news page. If a national newspaper considers a matter of serious importance, it is on the principal news page it will publish the particular item. The item, which is headed, “Severe flooding in County Kilkenny”, says:
"The biggest flood in Kilkenny since 1941 caused considerable dislocation of traffic in the city yesterday and many houses in John Street, John's Quay, Blackmill Street, Irishtown, Vicar Street, and Green Street were flooded to a depth of several feet. In outlying areas along the River Nore, thousands of acres have been flooded and a vast stretch of land in the area of Threecastles is covered with water.
"There was also serious flooding in the Thomastown area where the Nore flowed on to the streets, entering shops and houses in Low Street, the Quay, Marshes Street, Market Street, and Logan Street. The water rose to six feet in Marshes Street."
I, with Deputy Coogan, asked that the Government would make some definite statement on this matter of flooding, because this situation has persisted in Kilkenny for some time and has become much worse in recent years. I am glad the Parliamentary Secretary to the Taoiseach is here because he lived in Kilkenny and knows that what I say is not by any means even a mild exaggeration of the situation. I think I should ask even more now than I asked the other evening and should ask that the Minister would direct his Parliamentary Secretary to go down, or to send some competent representative down, to investigate the situation arising out of the tragedy of yesterday. Last August, I was personally associated with a member of the Garda in saving the lives of three persons there. Life and property are at stake there, and I hold that it is a fundamental duty of the Government to protect the lives and property of the people. I hope that it will not be necessary to call attention further to this state of affairs in Kilkenny and that what I have said will be sufficient to arouse the Minister's interest.
As regards the Vote on Account, generally, we, in Kilkenny, have every reason to find fault with the manner in which fuel is alleged to be controlled. I stated recently at a meeting of the county council that there was no effective control. In fact, there is no effective control. I saw in a Dublin evening paper a few days ago an advertisement for seven tons of fuel in one lot. If we have a fuel-ration scheme, it ought not to be possible for wealthy people to get seven tons of fuel at a time when those frightful scenes which are reproduced by photograph in the newspapers are taking place. I saw some of them myself both here and in my own city. They could only be compared with what is happening in certain parts of the European Continent.
Poor women with prams and, in many cases, with infants in the prams, were waiting in the hope of getting a stone of fuel. In my own city, I have seen them go home with one small block of timber under their arms. Some control of an effective character should be instituted, so that, as in the case of every other commodity in short supply, the poor would obtain their share as well as the wealthy. The poor people feel that there is no hope of getting fuel unless one can buy a big quantity. The suffering endured in most working-class homes in recent weeks is a thing that I, as an Irishman, have to deplore. It could be avoided if the Government would encourage co-operation. The people would be willing to co-operate if they saw that fuel supplies were effectively controlled.
Any member coming from a rural constituency has reason to complain because the rural schools, attended in the main by the children of the poor, are very badly heated and, in many cases, not heated at all. There, again, there is a faulty method of allocating fuel. I welcome, at long last, the admission, in principle, and in effect to a small degree, of what has been advocated from Labour Benches for a great many years — a form of social service on a broader scale. Like other speakers, I deplore the further insult offered to the old age pensioner. I do not think that any section deserves better treatment from the State than the old age pensioners. At a meeting of the borough pensions committee of Kilkenny the other evening, we had before us the case of a man of 72 years who suffered physically and financially in getting the British out of the country. He was awarded an I.R.A. pension of £30 odd a year. Because he was awarded this pension, his old age pension, according to the information placed before us, ceased to be payable. What he is getting under the Military Service Pensions Act for suffering for his country is being taken away by the means test. I intend to pass on the particulars of that case to the Minister for Local Government.
I join with other speakers who have condemned the wages policy of the Government. No words which would be permitted here would be strong enough to describe the feelings of decent people in respect of the Government's wages policy. How they expect people such as road workers to maintain themselves and their families in any sort of decency on the wages paid them is impossible to conceive. The idea of relating road workers' wages to those of agricultural workers is absolutely ridiculous, because we all know that, in the vast majority of cases, the agricultural worker, though his wage is insufficient, is far better off than the road worker, because he does not suffer loss of wages in respect of what is called "broken time". For every hour that he is out of work, through weather conditions or otherwise, the road worker suffers a corresponding reduction in his pay. Having regard to the fact that what was known as the Wages Standstill Order has ceased to operate in regard to workers generally, I trust that the Minister for Local Government will be induced to reconsider his attitude in this connection and that he will agree to sanction the very reasonable proposals which have been made by various local authorities in recent weeks.
I do not think I could add anything to what has been said with regard to the terrible tragedy of emigration. There is no use in Government spokesmen or others telling us that we always had emigration. People leave every country and enter every country but the type of emigration which has been taking place here, particularly for the last seven or eight years, can only be regarded as an absolute drain of the nation's best energy. If it is not stemmed or slowed down, the nation, as previous speakers have said, will cease to exist and the country will be completely reoccupied by another people. The Irish race will rapidly die out. May I repeat the hope, in conclusion, that the Government will show the people in Kilkenny City and county that they have some regard for the terrible visitation which has once again come upon them?
Judging by this debate, it would appear that the Government are more out of touch with the many pressing needs of the people this year than they were in any other year. If there is any part of the country which is confronted with difficulties, it is the western part, especially the area I come from, west of the Shannon. In saying that, I have in mind the train service, the road service, the general haulage service and the distribution of goods from this city. When the passenger trains went off, a few passenger carriages were attached to goods trains to other parts of the country. These carriages are attached to the goods trains so far as they run, but the strange thing is that these carriages are taken off at Athlone and not allowed to proceed to Galway, Roscommon or Mayo. If no such carriages were allowed in any part of Ireland, our district would have no grievance, but the fact they were allowed to other districts and that we were cut out leaves us with a genuine grievance. That is one way of looking at the matter. The more serious aspect is that, as things stand, with two goods trains a week, we have no opportunity in our county of disposing of our stock.
In my part of County Mayo, stock raising is part and parcel of food production. If you want food, you must have the stock and if you have the stock you will have food production, as one works in with the other. We have no means of disposing of our stock, as we have no transport to take them to the usual centres. A big proportion of our stock went to the Midlands and the city markets. To-day we have fat cattle which cannot be moved outside the local fair, as there is no transport to take them to the city markets. We have farmers with 20 or 25 stall feds to-day which were ready for sale a month ago and still remain unsold, and there are many people with smaller numbers of cattle for which there is no market.
The Minister may say that conditions are such that we cannot maintain for those people the transport service which was originally in operation. That would be a reasonable statement. I came up here on Tuesday from the West. From Longford to Dublin, and especially from Mullingar to Dublin, it was nothing but a procession of empty lorries all moving down towards the West. If those lorries going down were allowed to carry goods from the city and were on the road as a service to take the traffic originally carried by the railway, there would be a means of coping with the difficulty.
In addition, the Government put into operation an Order preventing private lorries from carrying goods on the roads and, as a result, the lorries were put into the garages and left there to rot, or were sold instead. Later on, those people were permitted to re-purchase a lorry and put it on the road to do their own work. Many of those people did not buy new lorries, but instead some young fellows from my county came up to the city to the lorry sales and bought lorries, which are now in different parts of County Mayo engaged mainly in the employment of the road transport department of Córas Iompair Éireann. They have been lying idle for the most part during the past three or four weeks, as the work they were doing for Córas Iompair Éireann ceased to exist, that is, turf haulage and beet haulage. These lorries cost £300 to £500 and they paid the road tax and insurance. In many cases, they are lying outside the owner's place, as the owner has no suitable garage.
When the coal shortage and the trouble started in England three or four weeks ago, the British put every vehicle in existence on the road to cope with the times and give service to the people, even working on Sundays. The railway company does not seem to be able to carry out the original services, and I am satisfied that that is through no fault of their own as they cannot get the fuel, but there is a method by which the lorries bought for the temporary work of Córas Iompair Éireann transport could be used. I am sure there are very many lorries lying idle also in Army headquarters. Why does the Government not take them over and put on a road service? The Minister may say there is not sufficient petrol. Would it not be better to ration petrol and divide it out? Something must be done inside the next two months, or parts of the country will be up against a very stiff problem and the people will suffer seriously.
If those people who originally came to the big fairs in my part of the country cannot come and when these cattle are on offer there are no buyers to buy them, the few that will be sold will go at a price much less than it would be if there were competition.
The farmers in my part of Mayo do their tillage well and produce a certain grade of cattle, both fat and stores, and also pigs, eggs and butter. The cattle are there and there are certain farmers who must get rid of all the cattle before putting down the crops. Otherwise, they have no place and cannot continue to feed them. I suggest to the Government that at the fairs in my part of the county — I am not saying it applies there only, as I am sure it applies everywhere, but I am interceding specially for the Ballina district — the Government should provide sufficient wagons or lorries on the road to transport the cattle from the fair to any destination from which the buyers may attend.
Ballina fair is the biggest fair in my district and from this to next June there will be 50 to 80 wagons laden after a fair. There may be more this year, due to the holdup some time ago. It will be easy for the Government to calculate the quantity which will be offered, as they have records of last year's fairs and can take it for granted that there will be as much, and almost certainly more, this year.
I feel that this centralisation scheme by which goods are being imported through the Port of Dublin and then being transported to the West is putting up the cost of living on the people in the West as compared with the cost of the same commodities when sold to people in the city or in counties near the city.
I think that in fairness the three ports of Sligo, Ballina and Westport, which are properly looked after and in good condition, should be put into operation. These ports gave a cheap service because they were in competition with other services. The port of Ballina and the railway company were always close competitors as regards freights. For instance, if the freight from Dublin, or Glasgow via Dublin, to Ballina was a certain amount, then the freight by boat to Ballina was less. In that way you had competition. If you had not both of these services, you would not have the competition to produce the reduced rates. Take Indian corn, for instance, imported into western districts. Sligo was the main port for importing that corn, with the result that the people of Sligo paid 15/- a ton less for it than the people of Mayo, because it was landed at Sligo quay and had to go by rail to Ballina. If that Indian corn came to Ballina port, that 15/- could be saved and that would lead to an increased production of pigs, bacon, and many other things for which the people of this city are looking.
Many Deputies have spoken about the increase in the old age pensions and other pensions. I am glad the Minister, even at a late period in the emergency, has come to the help of those poor suffering people, the old age pensioners, the blind pensioners, and those receiving a widows' and orphans' pension, because there could not be more deserving cases. The point I want to make, however, is that the increase of 2/6 in the old age pension and the small increase made in the widows' and orphans' pension will have very little effect unless the means test is adjusted in relation to some cost-of-living figure.
The old age pension of 10/- represents only about 5/- at present. I am sure the Minister, before he made his announcement in regard to the increase, received resolutions on the matter from many county councils. As a member of Mayo County Council, I know that this matter was brought up on several occasions. It was stressed that old age pensioners were at a disadvantage owing to the way in which the supplementary allowance was made. Old age pensioners in many cases had to travel five or six miles, each way, and in extreme cases in my county more than that, in order to sign a document and hand it to the relieving officer. Then from that date the pension officer allowed the supplementary allowance to be paid, whatever the allowance may be in the different counties. In our county it varies.
Take the case of an old age pensioner who was given a supplementary allowance of 1/6. He had to travel five miles, each way, to fill up his form and after that he has to travel five miles, each way, to collect it. If he did not go to collect it every week he went every fortnight. In nine out of ten cases the people collect it every fortnight. Many of us felt that this money should be paid through the post office in the same way as the old age pension. I am glad that the old age pensioners are to get an increase and that it will be an increase for all time. There is one matter, however, on which I should like some explanation. These pensioners are in receipt of supplementary allowances. I should like to know if the increase will be in addition to the supplementary allowance or if it will only supplement the allowance to bring it up to 2/6.
As regards widows' and orphans' pensions, many widows have asked me to make representations on their behalf. Some widows may have three, four, five or six children. They may lose their pension when they come to a certain age. If, say, one of the children goes to England and makes a small contribution to her mother, a question is raised as to her pension. If she receives £15 or £16 from her daughter, then because her yearly income exceeds £19 a year she loses the whole of her pension. If the yearly income of a widow is over £19, she gets no pension. I believe that that is very unfair. Then there is another point. If a widow is in receipt of a pension, when the youngest of the family is over 16 years of age and the widow is under 55 years of age, the pension is taken from her.
Perhaps the Deputy might raise that on the Estimates. It is a very small point which would be more relevant on the Estimates.
There is just one other point. Take the case of a girl who gets married at 24 years of age and her husband dies when she is 30, six years after, leaving her with four in family. When that widow is 46 years of age, the youngest of the family may be over 16 years and the oldest of the family 19 years old. When that widow reaches the age of 46 she is deprived of her pension by reason of the fact that the youngest child is over 16. I think that if there is any pressing need on any section these things should be adjusted.
I wish to refer to the question of milk. It appears to me, having listened to the debate, that the milk situation is very serious. The conditions are awkward in the city but I want to tell the Minister that the situation is becoming very serious in the rural towns, too. A number of registered milk sellers were forced to go out of production. Take, for instance, one town in my district where there is a small portion of grazing land convenient to the town and where a registered milk seller had the land which was specially suitable for milk production. That man was compelled, under the increased tillage operations, to till 37 per cent. of the eight-acre field, thus depriving him of the means of keeping three or four cows and to continue the ordinary sale of milk to his customers. Now I imagine that where registered dairy men have land near towns which is especially suitable for cows serious consideration should be given to their applications to be allowed to continue as milk sellers. They would be doing their duty as far as the provision of food is concerned by producing milk in place of, say, barley, wheat, oats or potatoes.
I would like the Minister, when replying, to state the quantity of seed wheat, suitable for the different parts of the country, which is available. I am informed that the only seed available this spring is Atle which is not suitable for the land in my area. April Red, Diamante or Calpe are the only seeds which are suitable to the soil in my part of the country and the farmers will not get any return from any other wheat seed. I am anxious that the Minister, when replying, will let me know whether any of these three seeds are available and, if not, I think that the Government should, if at all possible, make it available. I could raise this question on the Estimate for Agriculture but it would be too late and I am raising it now so that the Minister will have an opportunity of saying if these three varieties are available — I know they suit my county and other counties, too.
Lastly, I would make a special appeal for transport for live stock, from my district to the ordinary centres. If the railway company cannot run the trains every available lorry in this country should be put on the roads. In other words, if petrol is available for other means of travelling it would be just as well to reduce the ration and hand over the petrol for at least two months this year so as to get the people over the present difficulty and to give them an opportunity of going to the land and producing for this country what the people will badly need over the next three or four months.
This debate has gone on in this House for the past two days and there is at the moment a feeling of loneliness, desolation and depression, a feeling that better and more enjoyable times are now dead and gone and had possibly better be forgotten. It is as when one finds some old faded flower reminiscent of some happy occasion, some old piece of clothing that reminds him of a festive occasion, or some old, yellowing document written when life was young and hopes were high, containing adventurous spirit, plans for himself and what he thought possibly and sincerely he could achieve. I have one such yellowing document here before me. I only mention it to more or less put it aside with a sort of obituary tear. It is the famous plan of 1932 which was to have meant less taxation, lower rates, better times for all, and the other detailed promises about emigration, about increasing production, about even how we were going to bring back the exiles and how we were going to have such conditions existing that nobody would be out of work. In any event I am entitled to stress that document if only to remark this fact which should be taken into consideration on this occasion. Fianna Fáil are now 15 years in government and, even though they were in those days wild and inexperienced men with no great capacity to learn, they did not suffer the hardships their previous successors suffered. They have had 15 years to try their hand. We can draw a line now and see just what they have done.
I understand yesterday the Minister for Industry and Commerce accepted the view that I have long pressed on him that his £, the Lemass £ with which we are paid in this country, is only worth 10/-. He rates it too high, putting it at 10/-. The Lemass £ of 1939 is now worth 10/-; the Lemass £ of 1935 had dropped by at least 4/- before 1939 had come. What we are all being paid in nowadays is not a 10/- instead of a £ note, but something approaching 7/- or 7/6, three half-crowns instead of the eight as far as purchasing power is concerned.
If the Minister for Industry and Commerce urges that these Estimates are not the full thing that they seem to represent, I agree with him. He can even take the line his colleague in Local Government took with local authorities recently, when he pointed out that the bill for rates nowadays does not represent any greater fraction of the national income than it did in 1933. We may accept it, but we must accept it right along the line and see the harm that has been worked in the five or six years before that idea was accepted. We will see how the purchasing power of the £ is being forced down ruthlessly against certain sections. It is a poor thing to boast of, at the end of 15 years, that the efforts of your Government have depreciated your currency by half. That is the boast at the moment, and it is accepted in 1947, although the acceptance of it must relate back at least to 1940.
If we were all getting either twice or three times as much nominal money as we got in 1939, then nobody could complain of the present figures. We could divide by two or three and say that that is the real burden you are bearing. But when certain people are still being paid their old 1938 or 1939 wages, when they have got no increase, as professional and salaried people in the main have got no increase, and when the wage earners get something between 30 per cent. and 40 per cent., it is not very easy to convince a person that the whole impact of the distorted economy that Fianna Fáil has brought about should be just as easily borne by him as anything he did bear in 1938 or 1939.
We now have the Minister boasting of that; he accepts that. At least three years ago I challenged him with the same view and the easy answer I got was that the £ was still worth 20/-. When I pursued him I was told the shilling was still worth 12 pence. Now we are having it accepted that the £ buys the old-time 10/- worth of goods, if it does as well. Surely the Government must realise that in the interim they have worked considerable harm to the people. They cannot carry on a community pretending to the people that they are still being given the old purchasing power and, when they have suffered from reality for seven years, the reality being that the £ was worth only 10/-, then imagine that they can make ends meet by confessing to that reality now and giving, not the doubling that the acceptance of the view would entail but some percentage increase less than the doubling.
In the meantime, how many people have suffered? It does not need any stressing here that crime has reached a level never before thought of in this country, that sickness, tuberculosis, and particularly the diseases that arise from malnutrition, are at points we have never experienced before. We have the flight from the rural areas to the towns and the flight still further from the towns and cities to England, all those being, as I suggest, consequences of the policy the Government, whether deliberately or not I do not know, have followed for the past six or seven years.
One of the dangers of the present situation is that we get too complacent about the evils that are so easily seen. People nowadays have got into the mood to accept emigration as unavoidable. They say: "What can be done?" and if they mean what can be done with the present mood as regards production and rewards of the workers for production, I agree nothing can be done.
I have here a long article written by the Taoiseach when, over 17 years ago, he was in America trying to raise funds for the group that now form the Government. The article written by him mentioned that he was heart-grieved to see the Irish leaving; that the emigrant flow was appalling; that it saddened him to find men and women in the prime of life forced to go abroad, and he stressed that as a fact which should give those interested in the future of Ireland most concern. He pointed out specially that it was the cream of the population was going and that we had to achieve political liberty in order to give to the Irish citizen, the worker and his family, the opportunity for the fullest and the best of which he is capable, and which the organised resources of the nation can afford.
He did not forget to tell that audience in those days, having regard to emigration and unemployment, that this country had the easiest answer of any country in the world. He pointed out that there was unemployment in many countries and many men had bent their efforts to solve it. His answer was that these countries could be discarded. There was a remedy here staring us in the face and all we had to do was to put in a proper group of people and they would operate that remedy and both emigration and unemployment would be things of the past.
The advance report we have had of the census of population shows that 190,000 people left this country within the past ten years; 166,000 left in the preceding decade. It is a conservative calculation that, since Fianna Fáil came into office, 250,000 have left the country — and that under the sway of a man who is heart-grieved to see the Irish going. 250,000 is a big figure where the total population is about 3,000,000. We have our proportion, and more than our proportion, of aged; we have our proportion, but less than the proper proportion, of young people. The 1936 figures showed there were about 1,125,000 people gainfully occupied, but in this number there were people who were employers, living by their businesses, and there are other people of an employing class who need not be counted. The figure for real production, for workers' production, was not more than 800,000. I do not know whether any employers have left the country since Fianna Fáil came into office, and I do not know if many of the people who owned businesses at that time have gone. If they have not, the 250,000 have come out of people who should be gainfully occupied at some time or other in the country. Therefore, the 250,000 came out of a number which is reproducing, adding on each year as people left, but keeping at a level of 800,000, year by year. Two hundred and fifty thousand of those have gone.
We are very agitated at this moment about Partition and want to get back the lost six of the thirty-two counties of this country. The 1936 figure of population in this country shows that in the remaining counties of Ulster — Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal — the entire population — men, women, children, old aged and everybody — was 280,000. So under the auspices of the Taoiseach and his Government, almost the equivalent of the remaining three counties of Ulster have been forced to emigrate. He has done what was equivalent to almost sweeping bare Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan of men, women and children, leaving a bare 30,000 in those three counties. If we can relate the emigration figures to the population of the three remaining counties of Ulster, these last ten years have seen 190,000 disappear. Take three other counties. The population of men, women and children in Leitrim, Roscommon and Sligo does not come up to 190,000. So that in ten years, not to go back any further, the Taoiseach and his Government have got rid of the entire population of Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon and Ministers are complacent about that. The Minister for Agriculture says that it is only natural that people should leave the countryside and a variety of other Ministers are trying to put the gloss on emigration that it is not really flying from hard conditions, that it is due only to a spirit of adventure. These people, we are told, are like old-time pioneers. They are going abroad, their hopes are high and they think that an adventurous life awaits them.
One of the commonest types of propaganda is to say that people have gone because they think that conditions in England are better than here, but that people who go to England become disillusioned and soon come home again. In any event, 190,000 have gone and we should see from next year's report how many of these people have come back. Do not let us forget what happened during the war years, if there has to be talk about propaganda. All the various employment exchanges in the towns and through the countryside were used as recruiting places to get people to go abroad. Offices were opened and agents of English firms came here to claim our population. We had a reproduction in this Christian period of something like the old slave market, with the overseer coming across from England, running his eyes hurriedly over the people lined up at the hatches, picking out those who looked the likeliest and the fittest and giving them arm-bands with statements as to their destination. Lest the English might have any objection to our people going in, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Public Health here boasted in this House of the organisation he had set up to clean up those people before they went abroad, to fumigate them, to put them through what was called a process of disinfestation, to give them a health ticket and a clean record. The Government did that fearing that they might not get as many people out of this country as were inclined to go.
Deputy Norton and other Deputies have referred to a point, which is almost such a national scandal that one should forbear from referring to it if one could. We had the recent experience of our people being sent to France and the special plea being made in some quarters to give them special training so that they might go into the mines and thus relieve the situation in which France found herself because of lack of man power. Coal mining has now become, so to speak, a degraded type of occupation into which English people will not go, but we had a special effort here to recruit Irishmen, to give them some training and to send them over to the English mines. The Minister is apparently satisfied that that is a good situation.
Several Deputies in the course of the debate referred to what has now come to be accepted by the Fianna Fáil Government as clear although they had previously strenuously objected to it. That is that the English situation at the moment pivots on lack of man-power, that the English situation is most marked by this condition — that they have a very high wage, that they have a cost of living which did not advance by more than 25 points and a wage level which advanced by 75 points, that the English worker is now ranked amongst the highest paid in any European country or any country attached to Europe. If workers cannot spend all that money in England, they are at least not being forced to go into debt in the way the citizens of this country are. They get sufficient to sustain health and they are enabled to give of their very best in the way of physical effort. They are being provided at the moment with a stake in their country through savings that are forced upon them by deductions from wages, moneys which are accruing for their benefit, instead of having the situation which has developed here of people running into debt, people selling out any resources they have, people trafficking in the furniture and equipment of their houses, people saving on the education of their children and people eventually finding that they have even got to save at the expense of their health and that of their families because of the fact that we had depreciated our £ without realising sufficiently the effect that was going to have on the lives of the people whose fortunes were so depressed.
I should like the Minister to give some explanation of one set of figures which I find very alarming. They appear in the pamphlet called National Income and Expenditure, produced by the Government last year. I do not suppose it is any longer necessary to argue the situation with regard to our depreciated currency, but I want to repeat a point I made the other night, that we are picked out to be bracketed with three other countries as four countries throughout the world in which wages have dropped below the 1937 level.
The three that are joined with us are France, Czechoslovakia and Japan — France, which was devastated, Czechoslovakia, which was devastated several times over, Japan, which was imprisoned like people in a fortress, subjected to a most rigorous blockade and finally devastated in one horrible episode. But we get that honourable, or dishonourable, mention that in the world four countries are picked out in which wage rates have dropped below the 1937 level and in that list we are the only country not actively engaged in the war. Other countries that were, like ourselves, not actively engaged in the war, do not appear as having that peculiar record that we have.
Let me refer only to the 1938 or 1939 £ and its diminished value. This pamphlet speaks mainly of what is called the national income but in one chapter it deals with what is called personal income. Personal income is described in the pamphlet as being the aggregate of incomes from all sources, including income in money and in kind, pensions, social payments, interest on the public debt and dividends at the disposal of individuals normally resident in a State. The one thing it excludes is undistributed profits of companies. Again, may I get this matter into its setting? We are a country of nearly 3,000,000 inhabitants. Naturally, they are not all gainfully occupied. We leave out the children. We leave out the old people. Although "gainfully occupied" is not the test for this particular figure because, as it includes all sorts of social payments, people who are too old to work and in receipt of any money from any source are taken in in this table, we do get the figure as a standard of some type of those who are gainfully occupied. This pamphlet in a footnote tells us that 1,235,000 were returned as being people gainfully occupied. 613,000 were in agriculture, 622,000 in other employments Let us take the figure of 1,250,000. The pamphlet divides what is called the personal income of these people over various groups and various stages of income. The first big group they have is those who are not over £150, people who do not get more than the old-time £3 a week. In 1938 there were 161,000 of those. On the calculation which we now have accepted, to get the comparable figure, we have to find out how many are now getting as much as £300 which has the purchasing power of the old £150, and it is not too high a standard to take. There are only 66,000 who are getting over £300 in 1943, so that nearly 100,000 people have been pushed below the £3 a week level. If there is anything that is to be quarrelled with in that figure, I should like to hear it because it seems to me to stand out from the pamphlet, if it be accepted that £300 now has only the buying power of £150 in 1938.
At any rate, there is the situation. It is a low figure that, out of 3,000,000 only 161,000 were over the £3 a week level in 1938. I have taken out from the total of the 3,000,000 those who are aged, those who are children, those who may be invalid and cannot work for themselves. But, remember, that 161,000 had to provide for whatever proportion of the aged or of the children was attached to each of these persons. The figure there is not too happy a one, not one that we can hold up to the world and ask them to admire, that only 161,000 people in 1938 were getting over £150 in the year. It is certainly a much worse picture if we have to admit to the world that there are now in this community, with a 3,000,000 population, only 66,000 who are getting over the present equivalent of the old £3 a week.
Of course, as is natural, that being the situation, we have many evils that follow in the train. I do want to stress that when taking that pamphlet on national income and expenditure I am taking only the 1938 pound as reduced by what it is now admitted it is reduced by in 1943. It do still assert that the cost-of-living figure, used as a marker would show that the 1935 pound had, before the war, lost about 4/- of its value and that compared with what we called a pound in 1930, it was only 16/-, and that that has been reduced now to the 7/6 or the 8/- level. But I am relating the figures in the pamphlet and they are adjusted to 1938 and 1943 and they give the result that I have indicated.
I have read here in this House — I am not going to read them all over again — the numerous reports that I have collected from the speeches of medical men who spoke of the condition to which the people had been reduced during the war years. I want to give two of the quotations of the numerous ones I have given before. I take one from a speech made by Dr. Moran, speaking at a Muintir na Tíre week in August, 1944. He said:
"The stark, naked, cruel truth appears to be that half of our people are, in varying degrees, starving."
About the same time, Dr. McSweeney, speaking at another meeting, said that malnutrition was the common factor that entered into infantile gastroenteritis and tuberculosis. He said that in the war years there had been a notable increase in those diseases. And then he made this comment:
"Make no mistake about it that the root and primeval cause of all infectious disease, whether you talk about the typhus that swept the country in the 40's or the gastroenteritis which decimates the infant population in the Dublin slums in our own time, is malnutrition. The children of the well-to-do do not get gastro-enteritis, just as the unhygienic progeny of the lords and ladies in the lovely Georgian houses in the squares in Dublin did not die of typhus. There is a basis to specific infection and its name is inadequate nutrition."
How could people who were at one time being paid £3 or £4 a week be expected to buy the food they used to buy when their £4 suddenly became £2, when their £3 became 30/-?
It was quite clear in the war years — and this was happening under the happy eyes of Ministers — that emigration was going on and that one obvious reason for emigration was the reduced standards to which the population had been brought, and that malnutrition was on the increase. It did not take much imagination to discover that poor pay, reduced wages, reduced purchasing power in the people's hands would clearly lead to the diseases that sprang from malnutrition.
Many years ago a comparison was made in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record as between the decaying days of the Roman Empire and the situation that then — and that is a long time ago: 1937 — seemed to be developing in the country. One of the phrases used in that article as regards the people of the Roman Empire was:
"Driven from their fields through continued agricultural depression and the iniquitously high cost of living, the country people fled to the cities and towns.
The doles and largesses, dispensed so generously, as time went on, by those who wanted to remain in power at the expense of honest people, the shows and gaieties and festivals provided to placate the mob and secure their support at the elections, proved too attractive not only for the idlers and the improvident, but for those who were deprived in the productive countryside of what was once a decent livelihood."
Later on in the article he says:
"The large families which country life favours were no longer reared, the number of marriages decreased, and the population of the empire shrank. Debased by the life of the city, the sturdy countryman lost his independence in an eager scramble for a place in the waiting line of the poor to whom the Government distributed free meat, grain and wine. (So you see the Roman Government was even more than modern in some respects.) The time which should have been spent in breadwinning was worse than wasted among the cheering multitudes at the chariot races, bloody games, and barbarous spectacles. (Our compatriots who support the Turf, or Hollywood, on the dole, are more refined in their tastes.)"
Later again he says when comparing Dublin to the City of Rome:
"But the serious and awful fact was that, notwithstanding the fine families who moved to Rome from the provinces under the liberal Emperors of the second century, the city became a great hive of shiftless population, supported by the State with money which the struggling agriculturists were taxed to provide."
Finally, there is this:
"With the insecurity of life and the never-ending rapacity of the fiscal authorities, multitudes of the country people forsook their fields, and as they had no kindly neighbours to emigrate to, they turned citywards to increase the ever-swelling ranks of adherents to the corruption of the dole and the games."
We had a record, apart from our emigration record, in another way. Sixty-six per cent. of the women folk under 30 years of age in this country are unmarried, and 88 per cent. of men under 30 years of age are also unmarried. Although there is a fertility rate here of a high type, the number of marriages is so small, and the period at which marriage relationships are entered into is so late, that we have got a situation in which the ordinary proportion that this country should have of children to the adults in the population not merely always was very poor but is getting still poorer. That, I suggest, is something analogous to the comments which I gave from the Irish Ecclesiastical Record. The high marriage rate that was once a characteristic of the countryside has declined. The number of marriages that take place, except perhaps during the hectic period at the start of the war, has definitely declined, while the period during which marriages are entered into is also getting later, and the number of people left without any hope of getting married in this country is on the increase.
I have often referred to the calculation that the Dublin Corporation made in their housing inquiry. I need not trouble the House with the details of it again. In the year 1939 on a sample of 10,500 families taken out of this city— which the corporation say is a good enough sample to enable them to make a calculation—the situation revealed was that 20 per cent. of 33,000 families had family incomes of from 5/- to 20/- a week, and that another 25 per cent. had incomes of from 20/- to 40/- a week. That is to say, that 45 per cent. or almost half of 33,000 families had an income going into the house of not more than 40/- a week. That 40/- would now have a buying power of 20/-.
Deputy Norton spoke to-day of the demands made on workers in this country to produce more. I was glad, but I expected that he would have said that he agreed with the claim that this country cannot advance unless there is something more in the way of production. I thought that he would have gone on to ask: what is the stimulus that is held out to the working classes in this country to-day — what stimulus are they given to induce them to produce more? Apart from the fact that the £ has declined in value: that it has not anything like the same purchasing power as it had before, the workers are getting very anxious in their quest for knowledge on one point, namely, where has the money gone to which was so plentiful in this country during the war years? I have seen one figure quoted so often although I cannot measure up the sum for myself — not measure it up to the same total—that I want to speak in this House on it to get it corrected, so that we may know from those who have the figure what is the real figure, if this one I refer to is not the correct one. The last reference that I saw to it was in Christus Rex—an Irish Quarterly Journal of Sociology, produced by a very eminent priest in Maynooth. In an article on page 42, in the first issue of that journal, this is stated:—
"The answer of Irish capitalism, in the words of its official spokesmen (that is the answer when more wages are claimed) is:— `Increased wages mean increased prices.' As a statement of fact that is unfortunately only too true. As a statement of what can and should in all conscience happen it is not. The fact of the matter is that prices in the Twenty-Six Counties are far and away too high at the moment. As proof we have the figures of the excess profits made as a result of the prices charged in the war years. Be it remembered these profits are excess profits, that is, profits made over and above pre-war profits, or when there were little or no pre-war profits, then over and above some 6-9 per cent. on the capital invested. From the figures published by the Department of Finance at the end of each financial year, it transpires that excess profits to the tune of a whole £7,000,000 yearly were admitted to by big business, a figure that does not tell the whole story of profiteering—even if there were no evasions of the tax on excess profits — since it covers only individuals and companies with a profit rate of more than £2,500 a year. The special tax of 50 per cent. on these profits is now repealed. Hence, apart altogether from the extra reserves piled up during the war, big business could now afford to spend £7,000,000 in wage increases and price reductions and still be as well off as it was before the war."
The author adds: "What is more, it is bound to do so", and then follows a quotation from the Papal Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, which fortifies that conclusion, that, if the profits are there, they should be put back.
I do not know whether that figure of £7,000,000 per year is a correct figure or not, but I do know that, at the start of the war, when we were asked to give the Government the Emergency Powers Act, one of the things questioned by many Deputies was whether the Government intended to use the marvellous powers we gave them to keep the poorer classes and the middle classes of the community from being crushed by war. We got numerous and repeated promises to that effect. I remember one of them. The then Minister for Finance said he would set his face rigidly against any attempt on the part of any community to make money out of the exigencies of the war situation and, on that basis, we gave the Government these powers. It was less than 18 months later that he came into this House with a Budget in which he proposed certain additions to the excess corporation profits tax, on the basis that the Revenue Commissioners' returns to him had shown — and this was his phrase — that many people were making money out of the exigencies of the war. About a year or a year and a half ago, on, I think, the last appearance of that Minister for Finance in the Seanad, he was challenged by a member of the Seanad on the statement that Irish businessmen had made millions out of the war, and asked if he agreed that that was so. He said that not merely did he agree that it was so, but he knew it was so, and, when asked where he got his information, he said from the accounts given to him by the Revenue Commissioners.
We have it on record, twice, from a Minister for Finance that, through what he saw in the Revenue Commissioners' returns to him, he was convinced that business here was making, and making well and fat out of the war. If this article is right, the admitted profits of the excess corporation profits type, over the five years, amount to £35,000,000. I cannot add up the figures I have to that amount, but that figure has been quoted several times and never denied. It is also true that what is stated to be the admitted profits only represents 50 per cent. of what was made, so that, if the £35,000,000 be true, these people made £70,000,000. They paid to the State £35,000,000 and took £35,000,000 to themselves.
The writer of this article says that even this is an understatement because there have to be considered the profits made by individuals who were not corporations and there has also to be considered the question of evasion. Later, although he does not put it in the same way, he indicates that money which was put into reserve, and particularly money put into the betterment of the business was, of course, not subject to tax, but would have been part of the moneys extracted from the population.
I do not know if the old rule still holds, but, at a time when I had some association with Finance, I understood that the Revenue Commissioners, when budgeting in a particular year, made their calculations as to what the assessment of various rates of tax on property would bring in and then struck their budget on getting in 75 per cent. of that amount. In other words, they always regarded it as not merely a possibility but more than a likelihood that there would be 25 per cent. evasion, and schemes of taxation were in the old days built upon that. If the £35,000,000 be correct — I do not know whether it is or not—and if it represents only 50 per cent., there is another £35,000,000 which business people got away with. If there is evasion, or if the evasion figure is rated at the same amount as previously, there is another £18,000,000 to be added to it, and there is then something to be added for the fact that the figure takes no account of anything but corporations.
The deduction has often been made that business people — I do not say that they made this amount, because they had to pay the Government part of it— extracted from the community over the five years of the war something approaching £100,000,000. Suppose they took only £50,000,000—making a reduction of half to allow for any mistake in these figures — it would appear as if the business people of this country got £10,000,000 a year, over those years, over and above what they were getting pre-war. Any worker who is asked to produce more at this time, particularly in the light of the admission made by the Minister for Industry and Commerce yesterday, may easily stand back from the situation and say: "I was once a £4 a week man. You have reduced my earning capacity to £2, and you have now given me something in the nature of 15/- or so, but, for giving me a £2 15s. 0d. wage, where I previously had £4, you want me to do more work. For whom am I working and what will I get out of the new production?"
In that connection, I again want to refer to the point I raised in this House previously. My conclusions in regard to it were objected to, but I never got any answer as to what the proper conclusion was. In the Irish Trade Journal of 1944 certain figures were given. They are under the heading of a well-known item which comes in one of the quarterly issues each year — net output. It is the figure arrived at after deduction of raw materials costs and a variety of other things. The net output of industry in 1938 was £24,500,000 and, out of that, there was paid in salaries and wages a sum of £12,000,000. I take it that, roughly, it was an even divide, as between the employing group, on the one hand, and the employees group, on the other — about fifty-fifty. The Irish Trade Journal for 1944 showed that the figure for net output had risen from £24,652,000 to £29,400,000, but the divide was no longer on a fifty-fifty basis. The workers then got £13,455,000. That is to say, in 1938, whatever was made in industry was divided, roughly, equally between the employees as one group and the employers as another, but in subsequent years, taking the addition made to net output — which, as I say, is the figure arrived at after taking away all costs of raw material — the extra money made is no longer divided in a fifty-fifty proportion, but in a proportion of six to the employers and one to the employees.
Is the employee to be asked, although he has in fact less purchasing power than he had, to work for greater production, and, if so, is he to see, as compared with the old situation in which he got half of the net output, the addition being divided in the proportion of six to the employers and one to him and his group? If that is the situation, how can he be asked to accept it, in the light of all that is known, all that is known to the employees in the different businesses around the city, who know well what the increase in prices has been in the past five or six years and who know, and know only too sadly, how little is the increase which their moneys show over the 1938 period?
I relate this whole matter to a matter I brought before the House previously. I relate it to a newspaper of January, 1944, where an analysis is made of the profits of five business firms in this city. They are startling.
The figures I am going to give represent net profit after tax. There is no question of my being answered by saying that they had to make more because there was higher taxation. These are figures after tax had been deducted: Arnotts, 1938, loss £1,400; 1943, profit £23,680; Crowe Wilson, 1939, profit £7,485; 1943, profit £15,777; Pim Brothers, 1939, loss £3,631; 1943, profit £12,658; Switzers, 1939, profit £4,940; 1943, profit £12,084; Todd Burns, 1939, loss £984; 1943, profit £18,057. That is only one group — of drapers. In a recent series of letters in a newspaper, we were told by a draper in this city that drapers' profits were down to the bottom. If you can raise losses of £1,400 or £3,000 to profits of £23,000 and £12,000, or a loss of £984 to a profit of £18,000, what is the mentality of those who say that drapers' profits are down to the bottom? Do not forget that there are multitudes of employees in Arnotts, Pims, Switzers and Todd Burns who know the extent to which these firms benefited during the years and know the increases they got in their pay packets. They have seen these recorded results and you think by giving those people some bonus that may increase their wages by one-third you will get them to work more laboriously and to produce more abundantly. For what? To enable those people to make extra profits on top of those I have read out?
If there is to be increased production—and we require it—there must be some reconstruction of the whole system of prices. There must be some definite readjustment of the rewards that people get for the services they render. It is only when the working classes get some idea that they are, at least, getting fair play, you can ask them for greater production. I should like to get figures on one other matter. I do not know whether the figure I have given of £35,000,000, confessed excess corporation profits tax, is sound or not but some figure can be substituted. I think that the Minister for Finance was not speaking without his brief in the Seanad nor was he doing so here in 1940 when he introduced his new Budget. He said that his brief was made up by the Revenue Commissioners and that millions had been made by Irish business men during the war. I am not talking of profiteering; I am talking of profit-takers — people allowed to take profits with the blessing of the Government. Apparently, they took millions. I want to know who subscribed to those millions. I put a question with reference to the Civil Service and I was told that the fixing of the bonus at a particular figure had saved the State £1,000,000 a year. The Civil Service have, therefore, contributed about £5,000,000 over the years.
I was told that the figure in the case of local authority employees would be about the same, though it would be hard to arrive at an exact figure. They have contributed over the years about £5,000,000. Even if they were to get their salaries doubled, they would have contributed — each of them — over the five years £5,000,000. Yesterday, the first day of this debate, the Minister for Social Services told us that he was going to increase unemployment assistance, unemployment insurance and health benefits by 50 per cent. and that he was going to increase the old age pension by a quarter. He calculates that that will cost him £2,000,000. It is, therefore, a correct calculation that if the old age pension were to be doubled — and the Minister for Industry and Commerce admits that the pensioners' emoluments have been halved — and if unemployment assistance, unemployment insurance and health benefits were to be brought back to the old level, it would, apparently, cost £4,000,000 a year. Does that mean that we have taken from those unfortunate sections of the community, as their contribution to the war, over £4,000,000 a year for the past four or five years? I think it does mean that — civil servants, £1,000,000; local authority employees, £1,000,000; old age pensioners and those who depend upon unemployment insurance or assistance or health benefits £4,000,000. That is £6,000,000, or £30,000,000 over these past five years, of which they are being deprived.
What the figure is for wages and salaries I do not know, but I do know that recently the Director of Statistics, Mr. Stanley Lyon, lecturing on Statistics and Production at a meeting in Jury's Hotel, said that, in 1944, salaries were about £5,500,000 and wages £18,000,000. That is leaving agriculture out. That figure was for what, I think, is described as "transportable goods". The figures are at the half-rate. I take it that that means that if an employee who is paid wages were to be put on his old level there would be a charge of £18,000,000 on industry and that, if the salaried classes were to be put on their old level, there would be a charge of £5,500,000. Am I right in saying that the salaried classes have been subscribing £5,500,000 over the war years to drapers and others in the city and that employees living on wages have, as a group, been subscribing £18,000,000? If we accept the statement that the £ has only 10/- purchasing power now and that these people have a right to be put back in the position in which they once were — they have a right to be put back to such a position if business people have that right — then they have been mulcted over the years in £23,500,000, between them, while old age pensioners have been mulcted in £4,000,000, civil servants, £1,000,000, and local employees in another £1,000,000. Is it fair to say to people who have read of Todd Burns, Pims and Arnotts doing as well as the records show: "Come back into your work; we will give you one-third on your old wages but it will not bring you up to your old purchasing power or anything like it. Nevertheless, we want you to work harder and, in that way, we will get greater production"?
I think that the worker at that point would say: "Greater production for whom? Who is going to enjoy the fruits of it? Give me no greater share than pre-war but give me the old share. Promise me something better out of the new production and I will see in what way I can bend my efforts to get better production to help everyone in the community."
I have distinguished what are called profit-takers from profiteers. There are two groups in the community. These were clearly only profit-takers. The Government knew what was happening. As a matter of fact, they could make the excuse that for part of the money the Government used them as tax collectors. So they did. It was the heavy hand of the Government coming down on these people that made them raise prices. But there are profiteers as well. I think it occurs in the same speech, on the day on which the Minister for Finance here was speaking on the new Budget in the autumn of 1940. He definitely spoke in terms of profiteering and not profittaking or profit-making. In case there may be any doubt, the present Minister for Posts and Telegraphs spoke to a meeting at Waterford in February of this year and this is what he reveals, from his knowledge inside the Government, of what is happening:
"Obviously, if clever individuals kept one set of books to deceive the Government and had various subterfuges to deceive the officers of the Revenue and of Industry and Commerce it is a very expensive and difficult matter for the Government to get after them, and the community paid."
I have been accused of saying many harsh things about profiteers here, but I never accused them of doing that. I certainly never was so fatuous as a member of the Government, to go to a meeting and confess that the Government knew that that was happening. The rogues kept two sets of books—one so that they would know how to divide the spoils between themselves and their confederates and the other to deceive the Officers of Revenue or of Industry and Commerce, making it a difficult task for the Government to get after them.
I have often urged with regard to real profiteers that something drastic must be done. I mean profiteers who break the law, black marketeers, people who are ready to deal in rationed commodities, who do not give people who should get the ration their fair share and who then sell it at an enhanced price to other good customers. I would like to have them tried in court. I do not believe in Government Departments trying to deal in that prejudiced and preferential way with those people. I heard a judge saying in court one time that he thought that in certain cases capital punishment would not be too severe for men who made money out of the community's needs on such occasions.
Let us not have any capital punishment. The idea of the stocks and pillory was a good idea. Profiteers could be paraded outside their Church, with a label saying what they have been guilty of. You could have the shop front plastered with a notice, compulsorily attached, stating the offences of which they have been found guilty. I am all the time speaking of offences charged and proved in court. If you made these people, as is sometimes done in other countries, compulsorily advertise their offences and sins and keep up continually, for a week or ten days or whatever length the judge might require, a newspaper advertisement that they had been found guilty of such and such offences and fined for it, I believe 12 examples of good publicity of that type would wipe out most of the evil of the profiteering and black marketeering and all the other offences in regard to rationed foods and short commodities that there are.
We still go on in namby-pamby fashion producing people in court, subject to the difficulties of very technical proof, not having the proof arranged but having it dragged out so that it appears years after the offence was committed, when it is very easy for excuses to be made for those defending such cases—and when penalties have been imposed, in the background the Government remits them. That has happened more than once. Profiteers can be dealt with in one way and they are, I think, a small enough group in the community, although they can demoralise a fairly large group.
At the start of the war, we set out by saying that no man was going to be allowed to make the profits out of the war that it is clearly demonstrated have been made. The worst feature of all this is, as anyone may learn from the last war, that the man who gets it into his head that 33? per cent. is an ordinary profit during war time finds it hard to come down to the level of 12 per cent. in later times. It is the psychological spirit in these people, particularly when they get away with these profits with Government blessing. Unless that money is exacted from these people by taxation, you will not get them to readjust themselves to the new mood and, if we do not got a new mood, we get no reduction in prices and, if we do not get that, where are we?
The situation has been complicated by the fact that there is far too much money in the country. The Government way of meeting that is to give more money. That means inflation. We have inflation as it is. If old age pensions, wages, salaries, civil servants and local employees have to get what they are entitled to, we add another £50,000,000 or £60,000,000 to the bill the community has to face. Unless there is drained off an equivalent to that from the people who should not have it, the new situation will be worse than the old one.
This article in Christus Rex to which I previously referred has this note:
"Until wages go up something like 70 per cent.—"
and this is italicised —
"without any consequent increase in prices, or until prices come down, the average worker will not be as well off as he was in pre-war years and we may expect trouble."
But the easy and slovenly way to deal with the matter is now to recognise — and recognition is lagging every time — that people are not getting the same value as reward for services as they used to get; and we give them more, and by giving more we again reduce the value of the unit of their purchasing power. If you redistribute the money in the country, if it were drained off and taken away from those people whom we are letting take it and given to those who should have it, we might get a situation which we could face with a certain amount of equanimity.
The Government preached very much about inflation. Inflation is a sort of bogey-man at the moment. The Government's very activities show they do not know what inflation is. They are doing what I have mentioned already, but in addition we heard of a vast reconstruction programme, of great tele phone extensions, of marvellous stretches of broad, straight roads, more money on airports, and a lot of luxury hotels. I do not know what fantastic business there is that the Government have not accepted. We have heard of the various Bills for reconstruction, adding £100,000,000 or £200,000,000. The one safeguard we have is that they are only programmes and no one expects them to be put into effect. But if they were put into effect, is not every one of those expenses I have mentioned inflationary?
Surely it is realised that to pour more money out through the country, without adding to the stock of consumable goods in the country means inflation? We can build roads until the country is riddled with straight, terraced roads. Do we add to production? Only very remotely, very indirectly. We hear of telephone extensions, putting this country on a par with Sweden, one of the greatest telephone-using nations in the world. What do we want it for? How much money is to be spent on telephone extensions? Will it get any more consumer goods produced in the country? The money we have spent on airports and the money we propose to spend will not bring any more goods in, but there will be more money flowing through in circulation.
The same applies to these luxury hotels, only we have added to it that you bring in, not merely money to make future claims on our small stock of consumer goods but bring the people to consume the goods. Yet, these are the designs that the Government have on our economy in the future.
What have we in the way of checks on inflation? We had a speech from the present Minister in the Seanad in June, 1946. He objected very vigorously to the point being made that the money in circulation in this country was in any way dependent upon what the Bank of England did or thought. As reported in column 2279 of the Official Report, he said:
"Our volume of money is not controlled, as he contended, by the Bank of England. It is controlled by the operations of the Central Bank and the commercial banks here."
I felt myself that that pinned a responsibility on the Central Bank that they would not be anxious to accept, and, in the next report, I think they have the counter to him. This is the report of the Central Bank for the year ending 31st March, 1946. On page six they talk about the prevalence of inflationary forces and say: "Direct action within the sphere of the Central Bank to safeguard the currency from consequent ill-effects can only in the circumstances of this country be of a negative character, that is by the avoidance of credit operations which would expand the supply of money."
I suppose that anybody who knows the situation would listen with impatience to the Minister saying that the Central Bank has anything to do with control in relation to money here. They have been deprived of the powers which we sought to give them in the debate on that very point. Who then is to control the expansion of money in this country?
The Central Bank on page 47 of the report make reference to the vast increase there is in the money in the Savings Bank and in Savings Certificates. But the reports of the bank show something far worse. I take the figures as between 1938 and June, 1946 — sometimes it is 1945. If I take the currency list from the quarterly report of the Central Bank and take cash in the Twenty-Six Counties, investments in the Twenty-Six Counties, investments, cash and money at call elsewhere, in 1938 the total tot of these was £102,000,000. For the December quarter of 1946, it is shown there that they had risen to £271,000,000. If I add the two items here, the Post Office Savings Bank and Savings Certificates, the tot for 1938 is £124,000,000, as opposed to £324,000,000 now. The comment was made to me on that situation by a person whose view on economic matters I have great respect for: "The deluge has been held back in a very narrow mill-race by a very insufficient sluicegate."
What control has the Minister over that money? I suggest that he has none. I think I am right in that, because when it was previously raised we were told that we can take control if the situation looks bad. At the moment, there is no control. If our community had suddenly launched on it any great part of that £324,000,000, £200,000,000 in excess of what there was in 1938, we would probably attain a new high record before such groups as the International Labour Office and those other investigating groups. We would probably show here an inflation of the type that the previous war showed plenty of in the years immediately after and the last war once or twice. What control has the Minister? When he was questioned about it, he said the commercial banks and the Central Bank. The Central Bank responded that they had no control except in this way, a negative one, "that we will not expand the value of money ourselves." But beyond that, they are helpless. What can the ordinary banks do? The Minister put them in the position that, if there are English notes presented to them, they have to increase. They are entirely without control on that point. That was the Minister's own doing.
I want now to come to my last point. Three years ago, I raised here the question of the money that we had sent abroad. I asked whether those in control of our finances were happy at that situation. I pointed out all the matters that were then spoken of in various English financial and economic journals about the bad situation that England was likely to find herself in after the war, and the situation as it has developed is worse than they expected. I asked what about our money abroad? That used to finance trade to the extent of about £18,000,000 a year. In the last five or six years it has financed us, over and beyond what we sent out in the way of actual goods, to the extent of about £100,000,000. That was frozen and we got nothing for these credits. We appear to be getting something now, but how much?
The price of importing has gone desperately against us. Even if our money was as good as it used to be, it would now only pay for less than one-half of what it once would purchase. Our export price does not appear to be under our control. The episode about the turkeys, small as it was, was significant, because it showed that the price these people offered was, apparently, the price that we had to take.
Apparently, so far as trade is concerned, they govern it both ways. They fix the price at which they will take the goods we send them, and they fix the price that we are to pay for what we import from them. It emerged from the contribution of the man in the drapery trade that we are in this amazing position at the moment: that the English will not allow us to import what they call austerity garments, but only the luxury ones and the price of these articles is so arranged that the luxury article carries part of the price of the austerity garment, so that not merely do we import at too high a price, but we help some English families to pay for the cheap austerity garments they are getting.
I do not know what value these old-time credits of ours are to us now. I do not know whether they will be frozen, or whether they will be, in part, obliterated, or made freely convertible. But I do know—and this is a point I never raised before — that there has been a group of English financiers going around the world negotiating with people to whom the British owe money. They have dealt with the Argentine. They have been in touch with India and with Egypt. They are now going to Palestine and Iran. They are coming very near us and the arrangements have to be made by July of this year.
Have we had any preliminary negotiations with them? Have we had any approach to a settlement with them? Is there anything doing about that treasure, as it was represented to be, which we have abroad? If so, what do they propose to do about it? Are they going to make a further exchange of goods possible on foot of the money we have there? Is the usual situation to develop with regard to our money, that they propose to write off one-third, freeze one-third, and let us have one-third to play with? In any event, will the Minister tell me, as the money is there and it has not been written off yet, what is it worth to us? In the arrangement made with the Argentine, the British agreed to pay a very much higher price for imports which they took from the Argentine on condition that the Argentine allows in a certain amount of sterling balances unconverted, while the British would pay them what they call the appropriate amount now being paid on deposit receipts, namely, ½ per cent.
As far as I can make out from the finance accounts, without any arrangements being made, certainly no arrangement that gives us a proper price for our produce, we are getting now a little more than ½ per cent., about .6 per cent. Is it a fact that we have slipped into the situation of accepting from the British their rate for money on deposit receipt although we have no counterbalancing consideration from them that they will give us better prices for our goods? That is what would appear to emerge from the finance accounts, but I hardly conceive that that has been accepted. The policy of the present Government has been to boost what they call the social services. We have now a new Minister for Social Services. It is funny that his other title, so to speak, is Minister for Income Maintenance — when one considers that the last thing he ever speaks about is income. He is always talking about charity. No healthy community, I suggest, can be reared on charity. The aim of Fianna Fáil, at least 15 years ago, was not to put more and more men on the dole, not to have more and more men depending on health contributions, not to have people depending on unemployment assistance, but to put people in the position where they would earn incomes sufficient to satisfy their family needs. Do they think they have achieved that or anything like that?
I objected here two years ago to this boosting of social services. I say that it marked a degradation of the whole countryside and since that all we have done is to increase these things that are called social services and to diminish real wages. A famous old book written many years ago called The Servile State has a motto on the title page that if in a country you do not create the institution of property you must create the institution of slavery — and you can have slavery even though at a good level and it is certainly something approaching what I think has been called the old-time plantation economics. The people are more and more dependent on what the State will give them and less and less dependent on what they make for themselves. After emigrating 280,000 people, after getting people into all sorts of unproductive work, the Government have found that people are being paid at such a low level that they could not possibly maintain themselves and then they step in with these social services and pride themselves on their action.
It could be and probably was a good angle of politics for some years; I think it is even wearing out as far as politics are concerned. Politically it had the advantage that Lenin spoke of many years ago that whoever controls the ration books of the proletariat controls their votes. The present gospel is control the family allowances, control the old age pension money and what you will give by way of an increase, control employment insurance and unemployment assistance, control all these subventions that are made there as a substitute for wages and then possibly, the Government thought, we will control the votes. So far it has worked out detrimentally to the community if advantageously to the Government.
After the last two days' discussion on this Vote there is very little left now that one can say except to emphasise a few things that have been said by others. I rise as a Dublin Deputy to emphasise for the Minister's attention the fact that there is a demand in Dublin City for food, fuel and shelter. Unemployment, unfortunately, is growing. Demobilisation of a number of Army men with 21 or 25 years' service added a good many to the already overloaded list of unemployed people seeking employment. Poverty, unfortunately, can be seen in our midst and not alone in Dublin.
I read recently in an article in a newspaper the report of a meeting of the N.S.P.C.C. in Galway in which a very eminent representative of the Church —I do not know the exact words— drew attention to the number of children who were to be found even in Galway City barefooted and very badly clothed and he conveyed the impression that there is something wrong in a country that had, in a city like Galway, children suffering from lack of clothing, lack of footwear and malnutrition. Now, it is not alone in Dublin that we see women and children suffering from malnutrition. It is well known that a good many of our people who see Dublin from O'Connell Street, especially those who see O'Connell Street from the steps of the Gresham Hotel and who always, when they come out, turn to the left towards Nelson Pillar and never turn to the right and go to the back of the Gresham Hotel and see the real Dublin, the Dublin of the working class, the Dublin of the unemployed and the Dublin of great hardships and malnutrition and bad housing fail to realise these conditions. That is the place to go if you want to see what is happening in Dublin.
Certain types of food are at the moment in short supply. We are on two ounces of butter, rationed sugar, rationed bread and, as a result of the high costs of other foodstuffs, you might say that they also are rationed to the working class and to those who are on small payments, especially the unemployed. There are certain types of food which are beyond the price which they can pay so they have to do without them. Nearly a month ago I raised in this House a question — I had reason to do it because my attention was very forcibly drawn to it in the Cabra district where the corporation has recently built a number of houses and removed people from the condemned area and from single and two-roomed flats into the cottages up there. One day when passing I, in company with a priest, counted 66 children with jam jars and small jugs in their hands on the road within a couple of hundred yards of us. They were going into the city to look for pennyworths of milk— that is the quantity, a pennyworth, two pennyworth, a pint or a half-pint. I made inquiries and I was told that there was definitely a shortage of milk and that, as well as the bad weather which was particularly responsible for it, there was an export of milch cows going on that was unjustifiable in view of the scarcity.
I asked the Minister would he stop, temporarily, the export of milch cows, and the Minister rather indignantly said to me: "Certainly not; the Dublin cattle market is a free market and I will not interfere with the sellers getting the best price possible." I am not quoting the Minister's actual words, but that is what he conveyed to me and to other members of the House.
Yesterday we heard a Dublin Deputy repeating that there is a scarcity of milk in the City of Dublin. The fuel situation was appallingly messed up by those in charge. I do not know what words to use adequately to describe the failure of the fuel supply in the city within the past month or two, but if precautions are not immediately taken by the Minister in charge, the fuel scarcity, bad as it was, will be nothing compared with the milk scarcity. I earnestly hope that that will not occur and that the Government will take immediate steps to ensure that a reasonable supply of milk for those in need of it, the old and the young, will be provided.
Deputy Ben Maguire to-day spoke with knowledge of dairy farming and milk supplies and he said unhesitatingly in reply to an interjection by me that he would certainly agree to the stoppage of the export of milch cows immediately. It might be only a temporary thing and I do not want to interfere with the rights of those who have milch cows for sale, but it is our duty to safeguard the health of our own people first and then, to the best of our ability, give as much as we possibly can to those in need in other countries.
I read in a paper recently — I am one who has little knowledge of farming, being a city man — that the cow population of this country had declined by over 110,000 animals inside ten years, and that there was no effort made to counteract the loss of milk and butter resulting from such a decline. That appeared in a Kerry journal within the past two months. It was brought out in very bold type and that should have been a warning to the Government and to those who engage in milk and butter production. I trust the Government will take steps quickly to safeguard the supply of milk.
Talking about milk supplies, I observed in parts of Dublin within the past month a scarcity of potatoes. I believe that scarcity was due to the bad weather, that the potatoes could not be taken out of the ground, but nevertheless it is a reminder when we see a small shop in a Dublin working-class area, in the same area as that in which there was a milk scarcity, without a supply of potatoes. People had to come in from the outlying districts, very hardworking persons, and they were forced to pay bus fares to visit the heart of the city to look for supplies of potatoes and milk.
With regard to the clothing position, I would like to emphasise the conditions that exist in the poorer areas of Dublin City. The Church dignitary to whom I referred earlier dealt with the conditions in Galway, but if you go into parts of Dublin, particularly that section at the back of the Gresham Hotel, you will observe conditions there that cry out for improvement. In that area we have a Minister's headquarters and many other fine buildings and to visitors it would seem that everything in the garden is lovely, but not many have seen the back portions, behind the Gresham Hotel. I have been there and I have seen barefooted children with washed-out little bits of linen rags on them. They go barefooted to school and the schools are often cold.
These are all prospective patients for our sanatoria, for places that are already overcrowded with tubercular patients. There is definitely a scarcity of beds for tubercular patients. You cannot get a child into the children's sanatorium for months. I do not wish to mention the name, but I know that in the institution where children are taken the list is full.
Yesterday the Minister for Industry and Commerce was talking about planning for the future. I want to know his plans for the future. Surely something must be done to protect our people who are suffering great hardships through lack of supplies. Some time ago I suggested that our Minister, with his great ability, should cross to England and encourage the people there to give us whatever commodities they have an excess of in exchange for our surplus, if we have any surplus. At the moment I think we have a surplus of beef and there ought to be a renewal of the coal-cattle pact. Instead of taking paper money from England for our best quality cattle, we should ask them to give us a reasonable share of coal, if they have any to spare.
I would like to thank them for the supplies of coal they have been able to give us out of the meagre supplies they have for themselves. Those who live in little dwellings or single rooms and who have to put a penny in the slot to get whatever little gas is going, should remember that that gas is produced from the coal that came from our friends across the water. We should give them all we possibly can, but not at the expense of our own people. I do not want to see our milch cows going away. Give them the beef that is plentiful and, in exchange, let us get something that we are not producing ourselves.
There are people all over Ireland who are apparently nobody's children. I refer to those between the ages of 65 and 70. They have gone beyond their work, nobody wants them. In Dublin, we read that every Thursday or Friday 8,500 people are relieved at an expenditure of £3,400. Just calculate that number having that amount divided between them. It means less than 9/- a week for each person. I think this is a matter for the Minister for Local Government and he should recommend to those who distribute that money that, as the Government have thought fit to increase old age pensions to meet the higher cost of living, those receiving home assistance in the city should get some increase also. They should get something within the next few days if that is possible.
Another question which I should like to ask—I do not know whether it is in order although another Deputy has already referred to it—is whether the Minister has got any information regarding farmers' losses of cattle, sheep and poultry during the past month and whether he intends to provide any compensation for these unfortunate people, many of whom have lost their all. I heard of one case, not very far from Dublin, in which a small struggling cottage dweller lost all his possessions as a result of the blizzard. It would be a terrible pity if these poor struggling people, who are doing their utmost to produce food for the natives of the city, were not compensated for losses which they have sustained through no fault of their own.
I should also like to refer to the claims of a number of ex-civil servants —postal officials, teachers and ex-officials of that type—who went out on small pensions in pre-war days and during the war and who are now suffering terrible hardships because of their inadequate pensions. Many of them retired at a time just before they were due to get an increase in wages and their pensions are most inadequate. There are also some ex-soldiers who after 25 years' service went out on a pension of £54 a year, just sufficient to prevent them getting relief work in the city.
All these people are suffering great hardships through no fault of their own and if the Government could do something for them I think the country as a whole would be grateful. Nobody wants to see people suffering hardships.
I should also like to draw attention to the rigid enforcement of the means test, not alone in the case of old age pensioners but even in the case of unfortunate elderly men who were in the I.R.A. from 1916 onwards. I know of one case of an I.R.A. man who is in ill-health and dejected. I do not know what his pension is but recently because some member of his family got a job at about £1 per week—not sufficient to keep him in footwear—this man's pension was reduced. When I.R.A. pensions were given to these people I do not think that it was intended that the Government should reduce that pension because of the fact that a son or daughter of the pensioner got a job. The man whose case I have in mind is named Meade; he lived formerly in the North Strand and now lives in Cabra. The Minister for Defence knows of his case. I am not giving his name in full. I am rather reluctant to mention names in this House but sometimes when these people complain of reductions in their pensions and other hardships which they have to endure they say: "In the interests of others we do not mind you mentioning the name". This man's pension has been reduced for some reason I do not understand.
Another section whose claims I should like to bring before the Minister is the widows of officers and various ranks of the Garda Síochána who received awards in pre-war days which are now totally insufficient to maintain them. These people should get some increases in their allowances, whether they be widows of superintendents, of members of the detective force or of ordinary Guards. I think we should consider their claims in conjunction with the claims of ex-civil servants, teachers and postal officials.
I may be told that I should not interfere but I thought that a month ago the Government should have declared a state of emergency as by that means certain steps could be taken to relieve the hardships of the people. The declaration of a state of emergency is a matter for the Cabinet but I really think that in view of the terrible poverty that exists in Dublin, and in other parts of the country — and in that connection I am relying on reports which I have seen in the newspapers regarding conditions in certain parts of Galway — the Government ought to have taken that step.
While logs are beginning to trickle into Dublin, they are apparently not trickling into the right quarters where the working class can buy them in lots of two and four stone. I have seen several lorries passing through the city with five and six-ton lots. I give those who are responsible for bringing them in all credit but I often wonder where they are going. I am not going to worry the House in speaking about the poor; I rather dislike the word "poor", but there is a certain type of decent citizen, sometimes described as "poor", whose needs are not being supplied from these sources. There are those of us living in comfortable homes who would buy half a ton or a ton if we could get them — the type of person who has reasonably good wages, the clerical worker who is at the present moment suffering hardships and whose wife and children are deprived of heat because they cannot get fuel of any kind.
Deputy Dockrell last night referred to the fact that some people cannot obtain sufficient supplies of milk for their families. Anyone who has a large family feels the shortage of milk very much. I do not wish to blame the Government for everything though I do think some blame attaches to them for their failure in the last few months to ensure that the people would have adequate supplies of fuel. I know that the weather conditions were responsible for many of the troubles that overtook us in Dublin and in many other parts of the country. I would make one final appeal to the Minister to see that something is done to relieve the needs of those who are suffering from malnutrition. I cannot say exactly what should be done in the matter.
I rise, in no unfriendly spirit, to criticise the Vote. Those of us who ask for remedies, who ask for increased grants by way of Parliamentary Questions, should not, when the Minister proposes to provide the money, go into the Lobby against him and should not be unfriendly in our criticism. I merely avail of this opportunity to put forward an appeal for the people I have described and to tell the Minister that poverty is rampant in parts of the City of Dublin. We are depending on the Government to put a stop to that. I have referred to unemployment. The Minister for Finance was at one time Minister for Defence and he must know the position of a large number of soldiers who leave the Army after giving service over a long period of years. Some have served only for the six or seven years of the emergency, but there is a very large number of senior men of 42, 45 and 48 years of age, who have large families, and who have retired on pensions of 22/- a week. What can they do on 22/- a week but starve? There is poverty and starvation for men who served the country, and served it well, and who deserve better from us. The emigrant ship ought not to be the remedy for poverty. I do hope the Minister will be able to do something further for the people I have mentioned.
I have been listening these last three days to the ologóning of the people on the opposite benches about the state of the country, or the alleged state of the country. The first reaction of the leaders of the Opposition to this group of Estimates, which indicate expenditure of the order of £52,000,000 on public services, was to call it a "crazy demand", an "unjust extortion". These are phrases of Deputy Dr. O'Higgins and they are almost the mildest that he uttered or that were uttered by other leaders of the Opposition on the first day. Then the Minister for Social Welfare took opportunity to announce that, in addition to the £10,000,000 or so which is provided in this Book of Estimates for social welfare, he was going to ask the Dáil to approve another £2,000,000. And immediately there was a howl that it was not enough. Fifty-two millions were a crushing burden, an unjust extortion but, when it was proposed to add another £2,000,000 to it, that was not enough. I am sure that if I calculated the number of demands for additional services, bounties, subsidies and payments of all sorts out of the Exchequer, made during the last three days, it is not £52,000,000 or £54,000,000 that we would have to provide for these services, but £154,000,000.
I do not want to spend very much time on certain aspects of this debate but I wish to goodness that the people who are responsible for sending certain Deputies to this House had been here during its course. Certainly, any friend of Ireland would be ashamed if an enemy of the country and an enemy of our people had been listening to the abuse and falsehoods that were levelled at this Government. The person who proposes himself as leader of the coalition of all Opposition groups to oust Fianna Fáil, made the allegation that the sum provided for secret service this year was greater than during the war, which is absolutely false, to the knowledge of the members of this House. He made the allegation that, as this was to be the twenty-first year of Fianna Fáil, the moneys provided for secret service were to be distributed to that organisation. That is worthy of his new followers in his new Party.
He made the allegation that in one of the towns in his constituency the people who were in the organisation of Fianna Fáil, the decent people there who had come together to do something for their country, had elected a man who, in collusion with the Garda in the locality, was getting portion of the secret service funds. I think it is time that that sort of allegation should stop. They are made, I take it, in this House so that if the Minister objects on the spot the Deputy concerned will create a scene and he will get the headings in the papers.
As the Minister for Industry and Commerce pointed out, we are facing a year of crisis. I think we all realise that — at last. Deputy Mulcahy's contribution as to how we should face that year of crisis, beyond asking for more statistics, was that we should bring back the gentlemen who came along here to the Banking Commission, to tell us how to run the show.
Deputy Mulcahy wanted further and further statistics. The Deputy is intoxicated with statistics. All he can do at the present time, having imbibed so many of them, is to lie on his back and howl for more. What statistics do the people of this country want in order to know how they should behave and how they should act in this situation? The statistics as to how this nation should govern its economic affairs are already available in abundance and have been available for these past 25 years. Anyone can take the statistics of trade and industry and see how far we are dependent upon foreigners for the essentials of life and resolve that we are going to decrease that dependence, for, to the extent that we are dependent upon them for the essentials of life, during war or during periods when economic war is uppermost in nations' minds, to that extent also are we politically dependent on them.
I once used rather violent language here when we had the same sort of debate as we have had for the past three days, growling about the state of the country, exaggerating every difficulty and shortage and Deputies going to the extent of saying that, if we did not get ships and imports from abroad, the nation would be down and out.
I remember, in reply to an interruption by Deputy Hickey, rebuking him for saying that we were so weak that we would have to surrender to every behest of foreigners; saying to him that if there was not a single ship afloat on the sea this nation could keep afloat and that this people could survive the crisis. Because I used the phrase — not every single ship but every damn ship — the Opposition rebuked me for my violent language, but if they had known, and some of them did know, that we were in a situation then when certain people in this country had sent a memorandum to a foreign Government advising them to starve us into the war, they would have overlooked my violent language on that occasion.
We have been trying to get our people into this frame of mind over the past 21 years: that their national existence and their political independence depend upon their getting economic independence in the essentials of life so that at all times we would be able to be our own masters of national policy and would not be dependent upon foreigners for the essentials of life in order to survive.
The situation to-day is that we are short of coal: that we are not getting coal at the rate of 1,000,000 tons a year as we were getting it over the last two years. The Minister for Industry and Commerce pointed out that, in that situation, we would have to examine the position very carefully. We have had to examine it, and have had, for the first time, to import coal across the Atlantic Ocean. That is very costly in dollars, and I think it is a disastrous policy both for Britain and ourselves that that should be the case.
We know that they are in temporary difficulties owing to the bad winter that they have had, but over a year they burned more coal than ever they did pre-war. It would be in their interest as well as ours to see that a certain amount was put aside so that essential transport in this country that is bringing the food which they badly want and for which they would otherwise have to pay dollars, was made available to this country. We have got to assume, if we are wise, that the extent to which we leave this country dependent on any foreign country for scarce goods of a vital kind — to that extent that country in the future will try to influence our native affairs.
In my Budget speech I was rather welcoming the change in the Opposition over this last 15 years. I had in my mind the bitter complaints that were made during the war by Deputy McGilligan and others that we were not spending our foreign assets to get goods for our people. I had in mind the great advance that that was from the time when the complaint was that we were ruining the country prior to 1938, and that our external assets were falling because we were translating them into capital goods that enabled us to build houses for our people, and that enabled us to survive the last war and to maintain our own policy against very vigorous opposition from abroad.
We had to bear in mind that the Opposition had advanced somewhat from the state of mind they were in when Deputy Mulcahy was Minister for Local Government, and when he said that we could not build houses in this country unless the price of materials and wages fell to a point when they could be produced economically. Had we waited from then until now in the frame of mind in which Deputy Mulcahy was then, we would not have built the 120,000 or 130,000 houses that we did build during the pre-war years. We would, therefore, be short of that number of houses to-day, and if Deputy O'Higgins complains that houses and hospitals are overcrowded they would certainly be very much overcrowded if we had not added about 20 per cent. to the number of houses in the country prior to the outbreak of the last world war. The times were not very easy then either for the building of houses.
Some Deputies of the Fine Gael Party still have the same ideas about political affairs as they had then. Deputy Giles thinks that the solution of all our difficulties here is a dictatorship. Well, they tried that during those years but they did not get it. However, I do not want to go into that. I want to come to this point, that I welcome the change in the Fine Gael attitude which is indicated by their complaints now that we are not more self-sufficient. They say two things in the same speech, but at least to the extent that they complain that we are not self-sufficient and self-supporting in the essentials of life, I welcome it and I hope they will continue.
In my Budget speech last year I said — and it was not contradicted by any speaker afterwards on the Opposition Benches, though they all got a copy of it:
"It is now generally agreed that our objective should be to secure out of our own resources for all our people who wish to remain at home, a reasonable supply of food, fuel, clothing and shelter, and everincreasing opportunities for cultural development."
I also said then and I repeat now:
"I wish I could add self-sufficiency in mechanical transport, tractors and motive fuel to the list. But an approach to that, too, is coming, I hope."
Thank goodness, the complaints of members in these last three days from the Opposition have shown that there is some germ of appreciation coming into their minds that if we want to develop here — if we want to develop our resources so that we can maintain our people on a reasonable standard of life, that is a standard of life they are prepared to work to achieve themselves — we must not only be reasonably self-sufficient in food, fuel, clothing and shelter, but also in motive spirit as well and in transport and tractors.
Various complaints and bitter complaints were made during these last three days of the failure of the Government to take everybody in the country by the back of the neck and force them to do what the Deputies thought was for the national good — that we should go down and seize all the tractors and force every farmer to do this, that and the other, that we should force townspeople to go out and put in the crops as well as save them. At the same time these are exactly the same gentlemen who complained against the extent that we interfered with the farming community when we compelled them to grow a certain percentage of wheat and to put a certain percentage of their land under the plough during the war years.
The attitude of those speakers was very much like that of Deputy McGilligan who seemed to-day to be all out against private enterprise of any kind being allowed to survive in the country. Any practical man knows that the Government cannot govern 3,000,000 individuals, including 400,000 farmers, in the dictatorial way that we are asked to do on occasions such as this. My belief is that we shall secure increased production more efficiently if we indicate to the farmer the minimum we want him to do in the line of acreage, give him reasonable prices and encourage him to make the greatest possible profit out of those prices on that acreage. If anybody knows a better way, I should like to hear from him.
One would think that the farmers were down and out when listening to Deputies on an occasion such as this. I should like to know of any other farmers in the world who are getting as high prices as our farmers are getting for their various tillage crops. The fact that the system the Government adopted to get the acreage of cereals and beet we required during the war worked reasonably well is indicated by the growth of these crops since 1938. Wheat went up from 255,000 to 641,000 acres; oats from 536,000 to 828,000 acres; barley from 73,000 to 142,000 acres; potatoes from 317,000 to 392,000 acres. There was only a little swing-up in turnips. Beet went up from 41,000 to 78,000 acres; cabbage from 14,000 to 18,000 acres and flax from 4,000 to 26,000 acres.
In face of those figures, can anybody say that the agricultural net output did not go up? It is true that we were not able to import the machinery and the artificial manures which we normally imported prior to the war. Despite that, the farmers, under the leadership of the Government, produced what kept and sustained our people either by direct supply or by exchange with Great Britain for her produce or for dollars to buy American produce. We lived during the seven years of war— the most disastrous war in the history of Europe — on a higher standard of physical comfort and nutrition than any other country in Europe. Deputy McGilligan searches the statistics of the world to prove that our people are the worst off, to prove to individuals who should now be up and doing, who should be building our houses, getting our fuel and producing our food, that they had better lie down and die at once. He said that our workers, with those of Japan, were the lowest paid in the world. I have here the latest statistics showing comparisons between wages here and in Britain. Bricklayers and masons in Dublin get 2/11½ an hour. What do they get in London? 2/7½. In the large towns in England, they get 2/6. I have here corresponding wages for carpenters and joiners, painters, plumbers. Electricians get in Dublin 3/- an hour and in London 2/9. In the large towns in England, they get 2/7.
As against the 70 per cent. increase in the cost of living here compared with——
If the Deputy will wait, I shall deal with his point. Labourers in Dublin get 2/3 an hour; in London, 2/1¼ and in the large towns in England, 2/-. All the members on the Opposition Benches resent my complaints against Deputy McGilligan and others, that they have been encouraging our people to go over to England in search of a standard of living which is not to be obtained there and that is not to be compared with the standard they could obtain here. These figures prove that.
For the building industry and as against the cost of living of which I spoke.
I shall come to the question of the cost of living. We must find how much a man puts into his pocket before we can talk about the cost of living or comparative standards of life. Take those people who are earning much less there in wages than is being paid here. The first thing a man has to do in England is to pay his income-tax. That is no secret. There has been so much talk about it in the papers recently that everybody knows, despite Deputy McGilligan, that there is such a thing as income-tax in England and that a man who goes over to work there with a shovel or spade has to pay it.
If a man in England earns £150 a year, he commences to pay income-tax. If he earns £170 a year here, he pays £2 12s. 0d., but he would pay more than twice that amount in England — £5 16s. 0d. If he earned £225, he would pay £19 15s. 0d. in England as against £8 11s. 0d. here. These figures are all for single men. I shall give one other figure for the single man. If he were earning £500 a year here, he would pay £74 15s. 0d., as against £121 2s. 6d. in England. When we come to the married man, it is not a question merely of paying twice as much income-tax in the lower income grades; he pays very much more, as Deputies will see.
In case of a married man here with no children on £300 per year, he would pay £3 5s. 0d. — if he has less, he pays nothing — but, in England, he pays, not £3 5s. 0d., but five times as much, £17 5s. 0d. If that married man with no children had £500 per year, he would pay £42 5s. 0d., while in England he would pay over twice that amount, or £89 12s. 0d. In the case of a married man with three children, he does not pay income-tax here until he reaches £500. He starts a little quicker in England. Here he would pay £2 15s. 3d., while, in England, he pays ten or 11 times as much, £24 15s. 0d. These are figures which Deputy McGilligan or Deputy Mulcahy will not quote when they encourage our people — I say it again deliberately — to go off to England in order to get a living in that El Dorado which 250,000 of them in the last few years have found was not anything like as desirable a place to live as Deputy McGilligan and others painted it and from which they have come back here to work at home. More and more are coming back every day, and I trust that they will come back, and that our people will be put up against the problem of having to organise themselves to utilise the energy and brains of these people at present in England and unemployed here, in order that we may raise our standards of life.
After paying his income-tax over in England, if the average workingman who likes a pint of stout occasionally, gets a pint of what is called stout over in England, he pays very much more than he would pay here. The difference between the taxes on beer is the difference between £5 12s. per standard barrel here and £14 6s. 5½d. per standard barrel in England. He pays almost three times as much for his beer to the British Government as he pays here.
In the case of whiskey, the difference is the difference between £4 15s. per proof gallon here and £7 17s. 6d. per proof gallon in England. In the case of tobacco, the difference is the difference between 18/10 a lb. here and 35/6 a lb. in England. All told, taking all the taxes here and in England, the British Government, for central Government taxation, takes 34 per cent. of total private incomes, while here the figure in 1945 was 15 per cent. Not only are those in the categories I have quoted, of working people who are urgently required here to build our houses, paid better here, but they pay less income-tax and very much less taxation on the things they normally consume in order to get a reasonable standard of life.
Is it true, as Deputy Morrissey said, that this burden of £52,000,000 is a withering burden on our people and should our people fly from this country to other countries in which the prospects of life are much more rosy? I gave in my Budget statement a comparison between the debt here and the debt in England and other countries. I shall take the big countries first and come then to the small countries like our own.
In the United States, the national debt is one and five-eighths times, and in Great Britain, two and seven-eighths times, the national income. Here the gross national debt is only three-eighths of the national income. Since 1939, Sweden's national debt has trebled and those of Switzerland and New Zealand have roughly doubled. Of the major belligerents, the national debt of Great Britain trebled; that of the United States increased six-fold; while we added less than one-quarter to ours. Had we increased our debt during the war at the same rate per head as Great Britain, we would have added £1,080,000,000 to the debt, and instead of owing, as we owed last May, £95,000,000 we would owe £1,170,000,000. So much for the debt.
What is the Budget in relation to the national income? In Sweden, budgetary expenditure has almost trebled since 1938-39 and Sweden is a country which is held up to us as a country we should emulate, but if Deputies were over in Sweden in the Riksdag, they would have to complain that the Budget had gone up three times since 1938-39. If they were in New Zealand, they could complain that it had quadrupled, and, if they were in Britain or the United States, that it had gone up roughly four times. But here it has gone up by only 60 per cent. Our budgetary expenditure from 1938-39 to this year for Supply Services has gone up from £32,000,000 to £52,000,000. Had it gone up in the same proportion as Sweden's, the sum we would be asking for to-day is not £52,000,000 but £96,000,000. If it had gone up in the same proportion as New Zealand's, we would be asking for £128,000,000 instead of £52,000,000. I do not quote these figures in order to prove that the sum we are asking the people to subscribe for Supply Services should not be very critically examined by the representatives of all Parties in the House and by the Department concerned.
Deputy McGilligan not only tries to disturb the minds of the working people, of the clerical workers outside the Government service, but he tries to disturb the mind of the Civil Service, making them, if he can, sorry for their lot.
I believe the civil servants are better paid than their opposite numbers in England and I think I proved that in a large number of cases to the civil servants with whom I was negotiating across the table for perhaps 48 hours from time to time.
I want to ask the civil servants here in public to-day what I asked them in private, that is, to do their duty as Irishmen and as good civil servants, to cut down the burden of taxation on our people by seeing that their Departments are run as efficiently as possible and that there is the greatest possible output per man hour and per woman hour in the public service. I regard this sum of £52,000,000 as something which should be cut down, if it is possible to do it without decreasing efficiency.
I trust that the civil servants, seeing that our people have treated them generously in the matter of pay — as they have, having regard to the circumstances under which our people earn the money to pay their salaries — will give a return for that by giving good and efficient service, cutting out waste in any Government Department and doing their utmost to promote the general interest of our country in so far as civil servants can do it in administering the official machine.
When all is said and done, the prosperity of our country depends upon two things. One is a reasonable leadership, trying to promote a reasonable policy; but the second thing is the co-operation of the people in working out that policy and their preparedness to take off their coats and do as much work as they can in their farms, their factories and their offices.
My one doubt about this large bill we are asking for for Supply Services is whether there will be an increase in output in the coming years sufficient to enable our people to carry it in their stride. We can afford to spend £52,000,000 on central Government services if our national income tends to rise above the present level of £250,000,000 or thereabouts; but if our national income tends to fall or should fall, through inactivity on the part of our people, through inefficiency either in management or on the part of workers, then we cannot afford it. All the demands that have been made here during these last three days are simply crying to the moon, unless we can get our people to do the work as efficiently and as energetically as is necessary to produce the amount of goods to support this bill.
Deputy McGilligan introduced the question whether or not industrialists and traders made too great profits during the war. During the war, the excess profits — in all cases these profits could not be called excessive profits — amounted to somewhere around £17,000,000. I have no doubt that there were certain concerns which made not only excess profits of which the State took about 75 per cent. but in some cases made excessive profits; but there are other cases in which excess profits were charged and the profits made by the concerns involved, though they were excess profits according to the law, were not excessive from a human point of view.
Take some of the firms Deputy McGilligan mentioned, that had no profits a year before the war. Is he going to count as excessive the profits necessary to balance their books and give them a reasonable profit thereafter? I have no brief for those who profiteered, who took excessive profits, but I recognise that, as long as we have the private enterprise system, with the inducement to people to give us the goods and services that the nation requires, the incentive is the profit motive. Does Deputy McGilligan think that the concerns which made losses in 1938-39 should have continued to make losses during the war? If he thinks that, or that they should merely turn over, let him put that down as a proposition for future policy for the State and we will debate it. One of the difficulties of discussing the matter in this House in the last few years is that not only is there no central body of opinion running through the various Opposition groups, but even within the Fine Gael Party one will find completely opposite policies put forward on the same day. Deputy Mulcahy should get his Party together and, following Deputy McGilligan's speech, they should find out as to whether they think this State should do away with the profit motive, should depart from private enterprise altogether and, instead of allowing people to manufacture, produce, distribute and transport goods here on the profit incentive, that should be abolished and we should nationalise the lot.
The Minister is not suggesting that Deputy McGilligan suggested a policy of that kind?
That was the only logical conclusion I could draw from his policy. I want to leave that matter of profits, because it would be a long debate in itself, by saying that I did not agree with the Opposition on many occasions during the war when they advocated the abolition of, or a big reduction in the excess corporation profits tax. I think it was reasonable, on the basis arrived at in the Finance Acts, to sweep away from these individuals into the State Exchequer, to be used for Central Government purposes, the amount that we took off them.
I think it is also reasonable to leave them the amount that was left over, because we could not take it off them efficiently. There was some incentive left to businessmen to run their businesses with reasonable efficiency and economy when, out of every pound, they had 5/- left. Had that incentive of 5/- in the £ which was left with them been removed, we would have had the same experience as the British had in the last war when the excess corporation profits tax had the effect that everybody in business was trying to spend as much as he could in lavish improvement of his premises and so on, because he was doing so out of the pocket of the State.
To sum up my answer to Deputy McGilligan, I think that it was right that the State should have taken from the corporations concerned the amount of excess profits which it took. I think it would have been unwise to attempt to get more. I believe that the profits which were left with these individual concerns during the war should enable them to do a reasonable job of work for the Irish people by expanding their activities at the present time so that we may have more production. I trust that those concerned will lose no opportunity of getting the equipment and adopting the managerial practices which will result in our getting greater output of industrial products at ever-decreasing prices.
A number of questions were asked about production of various kinds. I have dealt with some of them. I could not possibly deal with the great number of questions that were fired at me during this debate.
The Ministers responsible for the Departments concerned will be quite prepared to answer them during the debates on the Estimates. But there are certain things that I was determined to reply to if I could remember them. There were certain questions raised here, certain allegations made, as to our economic health which I was determined to answer if I had the time to do so. I dealt with agricultural production. I dealt with the allegation that our farmers did not produce more during the war than they did before the war. I think we have a right to be proud that our farmers from 1939 up to last year increased their production by the amount they did, namely from £41,000,000 to £46,000,000, net output, at 1938 price levels, so far as I can remember the figures.
Yes, £41.1 millions and £46.1 millions, net output, so far as Table 12 goes.
Deputy Hughes adverted to the fact that we did not export as much as we did prior to the war, that our cattle exports fell. It is true that our cattle exports fell during the war; but our consumption of cattle products went up. If Deputies will look at page 64 of the National Income and Expenditure Statistics, they will see the extent to which our consumption of fresh milk, even creamery butter up to 1945, farmers' butter, cheese, beef, sausages, and fresh pork went up during the war.
I have a summary of the percentage increases. The consumption of creamery butter, strange to say, although the production decreased by 30 per cent., increased by 27 per cent. between 1939 and 1946. The consumption of farmers' butter increased in the same period by 4 per cent. These increases can be explained by the fact that exports of butter gradually diminished and came down to a nil figure and, as we know, prior to the war we used a lot of margarine which was not available during the war. However, the fact is that our people consumed 27 per cent. more creamery butter and 4 per cent. more farmers' butter during the war. The consumption of cheese increased about two and a half times.
Cattle exports declined. There were two causes for that. One was that the stock of cattle went up from 1939 from 4,057,000 cattle of all kinds to 4,146,000. They went up by about 100,000 head. Even cows almost held their own. There were 1,344,000 in 1939, and 1,308,000 in 1946. While exports therefore decreased by 41 per cent., as Deputy Hughes pointed out, the stock of cattle went up and the consumption of beef increased by 47 per cent. Milk consumption also increased by 6 per cent. The same phenomenon occurred here during the war with the increase in the income of our people, with the increased ability to buy, that happened in the town of Drogheda in the middle thirties.
I remember going into the town of Drogheda sometime in the late thirties. I went into a saw mill and I said to the saw miller: "I see you make egg crates"—there was a pile of egg crates in one corner of his factory — and he said: "Yes, we used to. There used to be a big trade of eggs from Drogheda Port but," he said, "they are eating them themselves now in the town of Drogheda." They started to eat eggs in the town of Drogheda after industry got going there: the eggs that they used to have to export when, under Fine Gael, the factories were closing down.
During this war our people, a number of whom for the first time had the money, increased their consumption of beef and of milk. Do not let anyone run away with the idea that I think that everybody in this State is eating as much meat and drinking as much milk and eating as much cheese or eggs as I would like to see them.
I believe, however, that the best way to get that increased standard of life is to encourage our people to get up and work either by hand or brain in order to produce the materials concerned. There is no necessity for the doleful propaganda that the Opposition members are engaged in throughout the country. Our farmers are not broke. Their prices are better for most commodities than they are in any other country in the world, America included, and the result is that during the war not only did they reduce the very big amount of arrears of land annuities, reduce the shop debts they had for a long number of years, reduce the rate arrears, but they also reduced the advances got from the Agricultural Credit Corporation and from the commercial banks.
The advances given to farmers by the commercial banks fell by 31 per cent. during the war period from 1940 to 1946 and their deposits went up by 72 per cent. during the same period.
Our people in the towns are not burst. I have only to refer to the figures of increases in bank deposits, increases in Post Office and Savings Bank deposits, referred to here to-day by Deputy McGilligan, deposits which are largely put in the Post Office Savings Bank by the lower income groups in towns and cities. The fact of the matter is, as I pointed out in my Budget speech, that if we have a will to work, to produce the goods to give us an increasing standard of life, we have the money to do it with. We have also, as Deputies know, the external assets abroad. Those external assets have been drawn upon by us to a large extent during the war. Our visible exports during the war were less than our visible imports by about £50,000,000, and it was from our external assets, either pre-war accumulated or currently accumulating during the war, that we drew upon that £50,000,000 in order to get the imports of the materials that we imported.
Deputy McGilligan complains of the "inflation" that is in this country, as he called it to-day; complains that the £ pre-war is worth only 10/-. By the way, the Minister for Industry and Commerce did not accept that figure except for the purpose of argument— to pay them back in their own kind of argument. If Deputy McGilligan's recommendations, made at various times in this House during the war, had been followed up the £ would not be worth 10/- or 12/6 or 13/- to-day — it would not be worth 1/-. It would not be worth much more than wallpaper. He wanted at every period to dish out more and more money notwithstanding the fact that the volume of goods was falling. I have as keen and a much keener appreciation of the value of money, of its usefulness to do a job of work in the modern economy than Deputy McGilligan.
The Government refused, and I have refused, to follow the crazy policy of trying, during the war, with a falling volume of goods for distribution, to increase the volume of money. We pointed out that that could only result in one thing, and that is that the people who are on a weekly, a monthly or a yearly salary or wage would be adversely affected in their standard of life as compared with the people who own real property.
It is my job, as Minister for Finance, to see that, as far as I can ensure it, and as far as Government agencies can ensure it, the volume of money will suit the volume of goods, so that there will be neither inflation nor deflation, so that the people will know where they stand in regard to values, and will be able to invest their money and put their sweat and their brains into work, knowing beforehand, roughly, what is going to be the result.
We have not the situation at this moment, nor will we see it for some time, when there will be a surplus of goods and a shortage of money. In such circumstances it would be the duty of the Government to ensure that the volume of new money, if necessary, was pushed out in order to ensure that the goods on sale would be absorbed. We have to watch, in times when money is plentiful and goods short, not to add in such measure to the volume of money as would send the price of goods still higher.
Last year, as Deputies are aware, I started out to balance the Budget and, having secured that and imposed the taxes required to absorb the money that would balance it, I gave a guarantee that if there was any project in the country of a State or local government or semi-State character that could be promoted by the spending of money, I was prepared to borrow the money if necessary and pay it out of a special transition development fund which we established.
Unfortunately, the year since May last has not been such that there were opportunities to spend very much of that money, but we encouraged local authorities to go ahead building their houses with the materials available, even though they were dear, and we gave them promises of such sums of money as would enable them to let those houses at a reasonable rent. We have on our books a large number of those promises to pay in the future, but very little has been paid out to date. However, 1,500,000 promises have been made, but they are not yet fulfilled though some have already been fulfilled.
I asked the members of the Opposition and, indeed, the members of all Parties, to give me propositions for the expenditure of that money, to suggest projects that could go ahead now in order to increase our capital equipment, to improve our land so that we may get an increased output — projects that otherwise would have been held up because of costs. During this debate, within the past few days, we got plenty of personal abuse, but very few constructive suggestions. There were two suggestions, one from a Deputy who said that the Opposition groups should form one united Party, and the other from Deputy Mulcahy, who said that we should call back the foreigners who were on the Banking Commission and ask them to run our affairs. We do not want them; we can run our own affairs.
Who asked you to get back the foreigners?
Let the Deputy read his speech and he will see who asked to get them back. I believe that in this country we have enough brains and experience to run the country just as well as any foreigners could do it.
If the brains were used.
There are brains in the country just as well as on the Government Benches and there is no use in the Deputy saying that the ten or 11 men on the Government Benches should do all the work. It is the people in the country who will have to do the job that has to be done.
We have been told that the Government have all the brains.
The Government have their share of the brains, and thank God for it. It is a good job for this country that they have the brains. When I think of the vilification that has been poured out here on this occasion and on the last occasion when I was in this House for a couple of days, I thank God that it is not the members of the Opposition who are writing history. When I think of Washington, who is now regarded by the American people as not only the greatest American, but probably the greatest man of all time—when I think of what happened to him at the end of his period of office, it helps me to bear the abuses hurled at my leader and the members of this Government. When Washington, though now the hero of the American people, and rightly so, came, to retire after his eight years of office, somebody made the innocent proposal that they should say: "Thank you, Washington." It was turned down in Congress.
I and the other members of the Government are not going to be diverted by personal abuse. We know that people who are in public life, particularly those who have been in public life for 15 or 25 years, are likely to be abused. We know that if people have been members of a Government for 15 years, there are certain gentlemen who want to have them out and who are prepared to do anything that is necessary in order to achieve that purpose.
I hope that the Irish people, when it comes to an election in a couple of years' time, will not be influenced by the amount of dirt the various Opposition groups can throw upon the Government, but that they will be influenced by policies, clearly enunciated, which are offered to them for their choice. The people of this country have no doubt as to how Fianna Fáil will govern the affairs of the country if they are left in office for another 50 years. We set out to develop the resources of this country and to give our people a reasonable standard of life. We have done that in so far as it was possible for human beings to do it.
In my opinion we did well, when one considers that during our period of office, we had six or seven years of an economic war with one of the greatest Empires in the world and beat her in it and, at the same time, we had to contend with two abortive revolutions within, and that of the 15 years, 14 of them had been years either of war or of bitter economic war. If in spite of that we have got, for a country which was in decay, from which 300,000 persons had fled to America alone——
For what years?
Between 1922 and 1932. Remember this, the American quota for emigrants from this country was 30,000 per year. What year was it not filled?
It was never filled in any of these years. Does the Minister accept that?
If they did not fill it, they went very near to filling it.
How many went?
I have it in my note book.
I have it in my note book, too.
Deputy McGilligan quoted the figures for that period.
The Minister is extravagant.
Deputy McGilligan quoted the figures between 1926 and 1936, four years of which were years of Fianna Fáil administration and four years of which did not correspond to the closure of emigration from this country.
Does the Minister say that he left out '22, '23, '24 and '25.
Yes. He did not quote the figures. He quoted two inter-censal periods.
And the Minister charges Cumann na nGeadheal with the emigration of 1922 and 1923.
I am not charging anybody with anything. I am saying that during the Fine Gael régime, people not only went to England but upwards of 300,000 went to America.
That is not so.
They went to America, as the Deputy's leader then said, "to see their friends". Does he remember that expression?
I do not.
Well the Deputy should remember it. I am quite prepared to admit that it is the greatest disappointment of my life that we have not been able to control the situation that we could persuade more of our people to stay at home. Some of them in the last number of years have been driven, I grant you, by loss of their jobs to go over to England to work and some of them, who should have stayed at home, have gone without any necessity to do so.
I feel that they are going to come back in another few years looking for jobs, thinking that the people who have stayed in the country, who have developed it and defended it in the Army, should make way for them. There is plenty of work to do in this country. I hope that those who have money and those who have a desire to work will get on with the job so that as time goes on, we shall improve farms and extend factories to give us that production that is necessary if we are to have a higher standard of life.
Motion put and declared carried.
Resolution reported and agreed to.