Vol. 106 No. 12
Tairgim:—
Go ndeonfar suim nach mó ná £64,750 chun slánuithe na suime is gá chun íoctha an Mhuirir a thiocfas chun bheith iníoctha i rith na bliana dar críoch an 31ú lá de Mhárta, 1948, chun Tuarastal agus Costas Oifig an Aire Airgeadais, lena n-áirítear Oifig an Phághmháistir Ghinearálta.
As Deputies will see, there has been a change in this Vote, an increase of £10,000, which is largely due to the increases in salaries granted during the year.
That is the figure in which I am interested. If the Minister looks at it, he will see that there is an increase of £9,000 over last year's figure of £77,000. That would seem to be an increase of one-seventh. Is that the full increase to the Civil Service, or is there a further increase which is to be added? I am interested in this because of the claims made that the £60,000,000 Budget is really only a £30,000,000 Budget. If the impact on civil servants now is that those who used to enjoy £60,000 are only getting £77,000, I would like some explanation from the Minister, as that is a surprisingly low increase.
That is the increase in the Estimates. There have been other increases since the beginning of the war.
What would be the figure at which that would stand, in respect of the £77,000, relative to the numbers employed pre-war? What is the effective increase since the war in the salaries, wages and allowances— sub-head A?
I have not got that figure here.
Ministers generally have had difficulty in answering that question and I thought I had put it sufficiently often to have it adverted to in most of the Votes. I have no belief that it represents anything as big as a 25 per cent. increase over the pre-war rates.
The minimum increase in Civil Service salaries was 25 per cent. over the pre-war figure.
What does this Department show? Is it the minimum?
No, it is more.
Is it over 30 per cent.?
I could not say. It is over 25 per cent.; it may be 30 or 35 per cent.
Let us take it that it is 25 per cent. If one takes the cost-of-living figure on which Civil Service emoluments used to be based, they would have got a much greater rise than the Minister shows here they have got. There was a contract which the present Government broke with the people who had lived under it and who had been mulcted in part of their emoluments. When the cost-of-living figure went down, they were made to pay the difference. They were asked to hold on to that cost-of-living index figure, as being their sheet anchor when the storm came. Then the rise in prices blew up and the cost-of-living figure disappeared and the contract based upon it was broken. But leave that aside—imagine no contract with them, imagine it wiped out because they were the people closest to the Government's hand and the people most easily coerced.
The Minister knows, and official figures bear it out, that the index of wholesale prices shows an advance of a minimum of 100 per cent. over 1938. That shows that prices have doubled, not in this meagre list of commodities taken into the calculation in the cost-of-living index figure, but in the general range of commodities over the whole country. The figures show more than 100 per cent. increase. It was a little over 100 per cent. the last time I saw it and has certainly increased since then. As opposed to the doubling of all items of expenditure, the Minister is content that the Civil Service must be satisfied if he gives them an increase of 25 per cent. The people for whom I am speaking at the moment are the people most entitled to a fair deal on this point. One could have imagined a situation developing in which, in order to avoid some sort of inflationary period, through the increased moneys being paid, the Minister would say: "We will stop the effect that the cost-of-living index figure has upon Civil Service salaries and we will fund a certain amount of money for them, to be paid out as soon as we think that might be done without causing inflation."
The fear of inflation was supposed to be the reason for this particular hardship put upon civil servants. At the same time, when we were speaking of civil servants between them getting £1,000,000, we were allowing in over £13,000,000 in emigrants' remittances and £10,000,000 in tourist expenditure. Apparently they were not considered to be inflationary, either of them, but to give the Civil Service £1,000,000 was a type of inflation that was to be feared. In any event, on an inflation fear being properly expressed and substantiated by figures, one could imagine some resort to a policy of funding the moneys taken from the civil servants, but, instead, we now find ourselves at a point when we are emerging from all the hardships which were definitely imposed on certain classes of the community during the war at which apparently the civil servants have been coerced into accepting some increase much less than what they were entitled to on the cost-of-living figure. The Minister presents his Departmental service as getting, so far as this Vote is concerned, £1 in £10 of an increase —I am bulking the salaries together. I consider that that is an injustice and that greater injustice was done to the civil servants than to any other class. There was less case to be made against the payment of the money to them in respect of inflation than to any other class and—I come back to this— while all that was going on, while civil servants' wages were battened down, the drapers and all the other profiteers were being allowed to push their hands into the pockets of the people, including the civil servants. They paid certain taxes the Minister imposed upon them and then blatantly secured for themselves fierce profits, with not a word said about them.
I want to ask a few questions regarding the operations of the officials of this Department who are charged with investigating means.
It is not this Department.
Will the Minister tell me which Department it is?
The Department of Social Welfare.
Do I understand that the officials of this Department, who investigated and continue to investigate the means of old age and blind pensioners and so on, have now been transferred and are officials of the Department of Health?
The Department of Social Welfare.
I take it that they have ceased to be officials of or part of the Revenue Commissioners' establishment or the Department of Finance, that they have been transferred in their entirety to the Department of Social Welfare. In view of what is going on in certain parts of the country, may I ask if, before they were transferred——
I have no responsibility for them.
Let me finish the sentence. I want to know if, before they were transferred from the Minister's jurisdiction, any special instructions were issued to them in relation to the assessment of means of either applicants for old age or blind pensions or those in receipt of them.
The Deputy can get an answer to that question by putting it to the Minister for Social Welfare.
In the year just passed, who had charge of them?
I have no Parliamentary responsibility for that particular section at the moment, and I do not propose to go into it.
Whether the Minister proposes to go into it or not does not bother me in the slightest, but I want to put it to the Minister that the practice is, and has been from the beginning of this institution, that, in discussing Estimates, we review the administration of the particular Department for the previous 12 months.
Deputies review what is in the Estimate and there is nothing in this Estimate about this matter.
I will review what the Chair allows me to review and not what the Minister tells me I shall review.
I put it as a point of order that I am here to answer for what is in the Estimate and not to answer what Deputy Morrissey wants to raise. I do not wish to be raising points of order, but that is the position.
I think the Minister is correct. He is responsible only for what is presented to the House as coming immediately under his Estimate. He shed his responsibility for the matters raised when the particular offices went from him.
Am I to understand that we are shedding the practice which has obtained here for a quarter of a century, that practice being—and the ruling has been given on innumerable occasions by the Chair—that Deputies are confined, in dealing with Estimates, to the administration of the particular Department for the previous 12 months?
For which the Minister is responsible. I am not responsible in this case.
For nine months of that year the Minister was responsible.
The Minister in charge of that section is answerable for my sins in that regard, if any.
God help him; he has a heavy load to carry.
He will say he has no responsibility.
He will say that it was all done before his time.
There is collective responsibility.
There is a weak link in that chain. Between the two Ministers, we know what is happening to the unfortunate people. However, there will be another day.
