Is it to strengthen our economy here, or to increase our production? Last year the Minister stated that never was there greater unanimity in the country on social, economic and general political policy. Where is the evidence that he realises or appreciates that? Where is the evidence that the difficulties in front of us will fall equally on everybody in it, and that it is realised they can never be faced until there is some chance of unified effort to increase production.
At the Social and Statistical Society the other night a Dublin citizen read a paper on general Government expenditure and there are some interesting figures to be taken out of it at this moment. He disclosed that the expenditure of the Department of Agriculture in 1929-30 was £430,000, in 1939-40 it was £865,000 and in 1945-46 it was £985,000. We can add to that that this year the Department of Agriculture is likely to cost £1,525,000. For what? The Minister tells us that the gross agricultural output for last year was something like £104.3 million. At any rate, it has gone down from the previous year. He made no attempt to express it in volume, and it is very unsatisfactory for anybody, either in this House or outside it, who wants to keep track of the present situation, to find that although we could get a statement on the national income before the Budget last year, we cannot get it this year. At any rate, agricultural output for 1945, expressed in volume, was 50.7 as against 52.7 in 1939.
That means less agricultural production. Even with turf thrown in, the agricultural production this year, in volume, is less than last year, and last year it was less than in 1939, and we are proposing to pay for the Department of Agriculture this year four times what we paid for it in 1929-30 and twice what we paid for it in the year before the war. That means that the people of this country, whose production is below what it was in the year before the war, are going to pay these astounding sums for the carrying on of Government.
The Minister says that the Government, by its action and by its expenditure, capital and otherwise, will increase the productive capacity of the country. The Minister closed his statement last year with his portraying of the Transition Development Fund as a thing which would provide for the expenditure of £5,000,000 over two years in order to deal with the short-term work required to be done, particularly to bring into constructive work the energy and skill of those then seeking employment. The money was to be spent in two years. The short-term object was to bring men into employment and the long-term object was that, by bringing men into employment and having them at work last year and this year, there could be a speedy development into greater production in the years that immediately followed.
Five million pounds were provided. How much was spent? We are told the amount spent was £56,000 on housing and £120 on scientific research and not one 1/2d. more in the 12 months. We had a long litany of all the things that that sum was going to effect:—Drainage, farm improvements, turf, rural electrification, hospitals, schools and university buildings, housing, sewerage, water schemes, reafforestation, roads, harbours, airports, industrial and agricultural research and many other types of development.
The census figures disclose that emigration in the past few years was 50 per cent. greater than was officially estimated. Even that did not stimulate the Minister to see that some of the ideas that were in mind when the £5,000,000 was provided were attempted. That is what money in Government hands is doing to-day. We have always argued that the people of this country, if left to spend their income, could put it to greater productive advantage and could get more development and more of the comfort and culture that the Minister speaks about than they could out of any Government spending it for them. That is the situation arising out of Government spending. Now the Minister is going to spend more. What will the result be? There will be no additional production in the country, but there will be a piling up of debt.
The Minister has given figures with regard to our debt position. Additional figures that the Minister has had to-day show that since 1939 we have added £19,118,000 to the dead-weight debt. Of that, £2,100,000 represents the Government's contribution to local housing but £17,000,000 is additional dead-weight debt against which there is not a halfpenny assets. Where are we going to get increased production in the country if we do not stimulate the people, develop their courage and their energy, and provide them with an atmosphere free from the frictions of the moment and free from the great sense of frustration that oppresses them?
The Minister has indicated that he is giving certain reliefs in the way of increased allowances for income-tax payers of certain classes. The Minister's proposal is an insult to the people who were looking for relief. I do not think anything has furnished a more striking commentary on the spirit in which our people exist in their distress at the moment than the fact that we have had strikes of national teachers on the one hand and bank officials on the other hand. These, you might say, were the only sections of middle-class workers in which there was any organisation, people who were constitutionally, educationally and, in every other way, moulded to oppose strikes and to oppose violent action. Amongst the two sections of middle-class workers where you had any kind of organisation in existence circumstances drove them to that particular decision. I think that is a matter to which more significance should be attached than the Government are apparently attaching to it.
On the back of the forms that are sent out indicating income-tax reliefs for those obliged to pay income-tax an example is given of the case of a person in receipt of a salary of £650 per annum and who has a wife and three children. Excluding life assurance reliefs, it is shown that he pays £28 5s. 6d. in taxation. The Minister's more recent proposal is going to relieve that man to the extent of £6 10s. 0d. Let us take the case of a man who is a civil servant. The Minister recently gave a certain increase to civil servants based on a particular cost of living item. The man who at the present moment would be getting £650 as a civil servant is being cut £48 in his income in relation to what he should have got if the present cost-of-living index figure of 295 represents the cost of living, which it does not. It represents an increase in the cost of living of 70 per cent.
Every normal indication that we have shows that the cost of living it at least 100 per cent. over the pre-war figure. The Irish wholesale figure shows that the wholesale cost of living is 200 per cent. over what it was in 1938 and the index for the price of British imports into this country also shows that it is 200 per cent. over what it was in 1939. In the case of textiles it is substantially greater—it is 260 per cent.—so that every evidence indicates that the cost of living is twice what it was in 1938. Here you have people who because of their income of £450, £550 or £650 each per year would not be regarded as being eligible to receive a county council or city scholarship for the education of their children. They are people who generally look forward to helping their children by educational assistance to have a better opportunity in life than they had themselves. They are now reduced to misery and to an outlook that involves lack of moral feeling, degradation and destruction of the whole atmosphere of the family by the fact that their standard of living has been substantially reduced below what it was in 1938. The Minister's proposal so far as it affects these people is an insult.
The Minister's suggestion is that these proposals are going to take 27,000 people now liable to income-tax away from it. But more than 28,000 people have been forced under the income-tax code by the increases in wages that have been fought for and won by workers during the last 12 months, fought for by people who lost substantially in their incomes and in their standard of living for the last five years by reason of the fact that wages were kept down. It has been freely admitted by the Minister that if civil servants had been for each year of the war in receipt of the income which the cost-of-living figure would have entitled them, they would have received £1,000,000 a year more. That in other words means that civil servants contributed £5,000,000 to the emergency situation here.
If you take the salaries and wages bill from the census of production, you see that it amounted to something like £23,000,000 and you can make an estimate of how much of that is wages. When you realise that the wages of workers in industry in the year 1945 were only 25 per cent. more than the figure for 1938, you will see at once that £5,000,000, £6,000,000 or £7,000,000 was kept by the Wages Stabilisation Order out of the hands of workers. Now when they have fought for an increase to meet the 100 per cent. increase in the cost of living, a considerable proportion of the increase that would normally come to them will go towards meeting income-tax.
These proposals will leave a considerable part of our people struggling in misery and distress at a time when, according to the Minister, money is flowing so much throughout the country that he declines to make use of the money provided by the Oireachtas to finance schemes he had in mind under the provisions of the Transition Development Fund. Work is deliberately held up by the Minister rather than throw additional money into circulation because, as he says, there is so much in circulation already. If there is so much ordinary money there already, then it is a scandal that the Minister does not make greater provision for the relief of the people, at any rate for the relief of people with families, so that not only the personal allowances but the allowances made in respect of children could be substantially increased.
The Minister tells us from time to time that he depends on private enterprise to increase our manufacturing industry and production in the country. Time and time again representatives of industrialists and of the commercial community have impressed on the Government how taxation prevents development in industry, and has pressed particularly that money which is retained in industry for its extension and development should be, if not left un-taxed, taxed at a preferential rate. There is no provision here to assist the development of private manufacture by making any arrangements by which money retained in it will be taxed under the income-tax code at a preferential rate, any more than there is any indication to those struggling to develop and strengthen agriculture and industry of what the Government view of world circumstances is. No idea is given to them of what the Government attitude is with regard to the monetary assets we have abroad, or of what use is to be made of them on the basis of priorities of one kind or another for the building up of industries here.
They are left completely without any discussion of the economic atmosphere in which they are expected to carry on to-day, and, with reduced development and with all the difficulties which certain classes of workers particularly labour under, they are simply told that the country is to pay £5,000,000 more than it paid last year. The ordinary farmer, the ordinary businessman, has to meet the same problems and difficulties now as he had to meet in 1924, 1925 or 1926 in carrying on his work. He has the same energies and the same intelligence, and these are the main things which, in co-operation with his work, he can bring to bear on the development of any additional production here, and I cannot understand, looking back over the past, why there should be the differences there are in the amount of money the Government has taken and now propose to take out of the people's pockets.
Time and time again, I have reminded people that there are three periods from the taxation point of view into which our history is divided. There was the 1927 to 1932 period, and, in the last year of that period, the amount of taxes taken from the people was £21,286,000 and the amount of rates, £4,677,000. There was a reduction in the total amount of rates and taxes taken from the people five years previously. We ran then into the period of the first Fianna Fáil failure, and, in the year 1938-39, £25,987,000 was raised in tax revenue and £5,849,000 in rates. Last year, £49,980,000 was raised in taxation and £8,000,000 in rates. Now we are entering on another year and we are told brazenly by the Minister that he proposes to take from the people £52,416,500. The footpad, when he wants to relieve his victim of whatever money he has, hits him a crack as hard as circumstances seem to suggest is necessary. The only reason I can give for the Minister's coming here and bluntly stating what he proposes to do in the way in which he has stated it, and the only reason that I can find for his Party applauding him from the back, is that they want to give the unfortunate taxpayer a good blow, because they must feel that he must be very stunned indeed before they can successfully take that additional amount of money from him and get away with it.
The Government are at the very apex of their third great failure, and in so far as we can see failure and distress for the country in the failures of the Government, we see very great failure for our people in the Government's proposals, if our people do not wake up and realise that if they are the people who must carry on the business of the country, they must get back their own spending and must bring about a situation in which this grasping, grasping hand of the Government will be stayed, because it is doing nothing to increase their production and is piling up our debt.
