Most people consider that the Budget is dull and uninspiring, serving the interests largely of the few thousand income-tax payers and doing nothing to implement the policies of the smaller Parties who guaranteed to end the spectre of unemployment, to check emigration and bring about a system in which the whole community would gain by the productive capacity of the State. Certain Deputies opposite seem to have forgotten that it is quite possible to operate an economy which will make a large number of people richer than before and at the same time induce or encourage emigration and unemployment and so fail to solve our major economic problems. It is perfectly possible to operate an economy in which a whole group of people benefit largely, without dealing with these fundamental problems. The reckless promises of the Government Party, when in opposition, to reduce taxation, have not been fulfilled. They have broken that promise in every sense of the term.
The Fianna Fáil Estimates for 1946-47 with supplementaries totalled £52,000,000. We had all sorts of wild statements about the country being overtaxed and ruined and that the grasping hand of the Government must be stayed. Now we see the Estimates total £65,000,000. It is as well to remind some of the Minister of the things they said on the last Fianna Fáil Budget. Deputy Mulcahy said then, on the 7th May, 1947, as given in column 2262:—
"I wondered for a moment—just for a moment—at the applause that the Minister's statement received from the Government Benches, because the Minister proposes to put his hand to the extent of £5,374,000 deeper into the taxpayers' pockets during the coming year than he did last year, and last year he had an all-high record of £47,042,000."
That is an all high record of £40,000,000, increased to £50,000,000, and the present Minister for Education is surprised at the fact that members on the Fianna Fáil benches clapped the Budget. The Minister went on to say, as reported in column 2270 of the Official Reports:
"...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 back 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."
Since that occasion, we have borrowed £24,000,000 and further borrowings are anticipated as a result of spending all the money put in reserve for E.C.A.; we have Estimates for £65,000,000. If the Government had not reduced the food subsidies, the Budget would have been still higher; the Estimates alone would not have been for £65,000,000 but £71,000,000.
In connection with all the talk about the stabilisation of the cost of living, I might add that, although one in every six lbs. of sugar is consumed in this country by households at unrationed prices, the cost-of-living index as it is calculated by the Minister for Industry and Commerce uses only the rationed price in estimating the cost of living. Although one in every six lbs. of sugar is not bought by hoteliers or caterers but by householders at unrationed prices, there is no change in the estimated cost of the sugar so far as the cost of living is concerned. That applies in a less degree to tea, as to which, again, the cost of living is reckoned on the rationed price, although householders can go into the shops and get unrationed tea in any quantity they want, no matter what the regulations may be.
Moreover, there have been all sorts of savings in connection with this Budget which a lot of the public fail to appreciate and of which it is well for us to remind them. For example, there have been savings on social services which have gone far to offset the increase available for the old age pensioners. Miscellaneous allowances in cash and kind to the tune of £145,000 have been abolished. There is a saving on the Widows' and Orphans' Pension Fund of £450,000. The old age pensioners special cash grants have been reduced by £164,000 and the National Health Insurance cash allowances have been abolished. The total of all these, £1,238,000, just about equals the increase in the old age pensions, comes to something near the same figure, while at the same time workers are now being taxed by over £1,000,000 for the increase in the insurance benefits granted to them by the Fianna Fáil Government without any extra increase in the employers' and workers' contributions. All that is hidden taxation. In fact this expenditure should be added to this Budget in order to indicate its relation to the spending and earning capacity of the people.
There are other features which should be mentioned, items that are not being put into the Budget and which are either going to be borrowed from the Irish people in the future or which are going to be paid by the taxpayer next year. First of all, we might take the new local authorities' drainage scheme. We do not know yet in this House whether that is a very minor scheme to remove obstructions along ditches which are close to a certain type of road and buildings or whether it is an invasion of the main drainage scheme with the consequent destructive effect it will have, costing a great deal of money. We do know, however, that if the employment afforded is going to replace the unemployment caused by the reduction in the road grants in areas where the land reclamation scheme is not going to operate this year it will cost at least £1,000,000 to the taxpayer in the present financial year. If the Government are sincere in recommending that in substitution for the declining employment, it must cost at least this sum.
Then there is the land reclamation scheme which we are told will cost £5,000,000. If even the mildest promises of Clann na Poblachta and Clann na Talmhan are to be carried out, the land division Estimate will have to go up form the modest increase of £60,000, i.e., the additional sum exclusive of salary increase costs. That will have to go up from £60,000 at least to £1,000,000 per year if we are to have these promises fulfilled. Then we have also the increased grants to Bord na Móna as a result of the doubling of the machine-won turf plant. We can add another £250,000 for that. A lot of unfortunate people have not yet been paid the land improvements grant in respect of work effected late in 1947 and early in 1948. Another £300,000 might be put down for that. That makes another £7,500,000 of expenditure which should be anticipated this year in addition to the increase in the Budget of £6,000,000 or £7,000,000 more than the last Fianna Fáil Budget.
Of course there have been other forms of hidden taxation. We have had increased postal charges amounting to £475,000. We have had the increase in passport fees, the increase in educational examination fees, and the increase in social insurance contributions levied from contributors under the social insurance scheme. These alone amount to £1,500,000. Then, of course, many Deputies on the Government side have not stated that there has been another increase in taxation —the increase of rates all over the country. Some local authorities have not yet struck rates—at least they had not at the time I received the reply to my question. In any event, for the coming year the increase in rates leviable by 27 county councils, 48 urban district councils and one county borough council amount to over £1,250,000 —another impost on the taxpayer. That is the final result of the promises made by the Government to reduce taxation. They only achieved victory by the increased votes they got in Dublin, and they achieved it largely on the cry that the country was suffering from the result of inflation resulting from grossly extravagant Government spending and from our inability to reduce the cost of living.
I was listening to one Government Deputy talking about the general economic position and I was wondering whether the left-wing side of the House appreciated Deputy Coburn's remarks when he talked about this country basking in sunshine during the war and said that we must not mind if perhaps the over-exaggerated prosperous conditions did not continue in the same way after the war was over. We were never informed of that during our term of office. No member of the left-wing group ever suggested that this country was basking in sunshine during the war and enjoying unheard-of prosperity. I suppose some people in these smaller Parties will take any punishment, judging by their speeches and reactions to the Budget.
In regard to the cost of living, Deputy Sweetman's statement in relation to the recent increase in wages and the fact that the cost of living had not notably increased since the coming into office of the present Government is obviously not believed in by the trade union movement because, as we all know, there have been increases in wages and there is a third crop of increases coming into review. We all of us know from statements made in the newspapers that there have been either official or unofficial negotiations between the Government or certain Ministers and trade unions trying to arrest a third group of wage increases. We all of us know that the trade union movement as a whole is not in the least satisfied that the Government have observed their promises to decrease the cost of living. I would remind Deputy Sweetman that the only reduction there has been in the cost of living was effected by the Fianna Fáil Government when they increased the subsidies on certain foodstuffs. There has been no decrease whatever since that date. In fact the cost of living went up very nearly 3 per cent. from the lowest point it reached in the Fianna Fáil Government's time as a result of providing increased subsidies. However, we need not worry about what Deputy Sweetman says about the cost of living because we have the statements made by Ministers during the last year or so. We have had the Ministers threatening the profiteers with penal taxes. As time passed we found a gradually softening attitude on their part. We have, for example, Deputy Larkin, on the one hand, reported in the Irish Press on September 20th, 1948, as saying that the public had no faith in Departmental machinery in the control of prices. It had operated for the last eight years, and the same officials were still operating it. No matter how well-intentioned they were, they could not convince the workers that prices could not be broken. So far as I know, the same officials are operating the prices section in the Department of Industry and Commerce. There has been no change in their method of operation and apparently Deputy Larkin has cried in vain. A little while later the Minister for Industry and Commerce, who apparently did not consult Deputy Larkin in advance, had the insolence to tell people in the country that the remedy in regard to the reduction in the cost of living lay largely in their hands. He had done what he could about it, he had taken all the steps possible.
He said on October 28th, 1938: "The remedy is really in the hands of the public." It was not during the election we heard the people being told the best way they could reduce the cost of living was to stay out of the shops and not buy any of the goods. Later on, as it will be remembered, on December 1st last year the Taoiseach finally told Deputy Cowan beyond all doubt that he could not slash the cost of living; it was impossible to do so because the cost of imported commodities was so high. We got to the end of the campaign to reduce the cost of living and we got an admission from the mouths of two Ministers that all the accusations against us and all the suggestions that the profiteering throughout the country was the result of a conspiracy by which Fianna Fáil would get large funds for its war chest in return for arranging that the officials take a light-hearted attitude in regard to the reduction of prices, were untrue. We now know it is all nonsense and it came from the mouths of the Minister themselves.
I next come to the question of the many inconsistencies that we have noted in connection with Government policy during the past year, inconsistencies which cause a disturbance in the minds of business people, inconsistencies which prevent business being far better than it actually is. I should like to hear from the present Minister for Finance which of these two views is now correct in regard to wage levels. In the course of his last Budget he said.
"The substantial wage and salary increases... have gone as far as is possible, in present circumstances, to meet the claims of social justice, and I would make a most earnest appeal to all employees not to seek further increases.... Recent experience confirms that the benefit of an increase in money incomes is rapidly swallowed up by rising prices."
Deputy Norton then said in the course of the debate:
"The present wage standards are incapable of providing workers with a decent standard of life."
While wages have gone up by 5 to 11 per cent. according to the particular industry, the cost of living has remained exactly the same. Certain features of the index I do not think are entirely accurate because we know that the cost of a number of commodities such as bread, milk, meat in certain areas, sweets, biscuits, and insurance stamps have all gone up. I should like to hear from the Minister what is his general wage policy, which statement he believes in, that of himself or that of the Minister for Social Welfare. So far as I can gather the scalp hunting in regard to profiteering charges seems to have ended. The Government, because of their talk during the election, had to go on suggesting that many employers should be in jail. The fantastic contrast in the statements made by the Ministers of the Right Wing and the Ministers of the Left Wing as to whether or not there was excessive profiteering appears to have ended for the moment. Doubtless we shall hear more later on. I think it is well to remind the House that the Government includes two Ministers who can say the following contradictory things. The Minister for Social Welfare was reported in the Irish Independent on the 21st January as saying:
"I am afraid that many of our tariffs in the past, and many of the tariffs in operation to-day were not merely imposed in a thoughtless and unsupervised way, but are being used to-day by some inefficient industrialists to provide them with an income with a minimum of risk and inconvenience.... If you saw the balance sheets of some of those companies-those boys have certainly got away with money since 1939. While other people were undergoing the hardships of an emergency and suffering the privations of rationing, there was a small group of unscrupulous people lining their pockets thicker and thicker with money raked out of the pockets of the consuming public."
I need hardly say that when the average working man, home after a hard day's work, reads that kind of statement he does not read with great care the details of it. A general impression is created in the community that if you made money you must have made it dishonestly, as a result of some imperfection of the social system which could only be cured in a drastic way. The Taoiseach, almost at the same time, said in the course of an address that: "This was an age in which the business man had become a popular target for frequent criticism and not seldom, uninformed chastisement. Too often he was depicted, not as the amiable and human personality they know him generally to be, but as a predatory hard-faced, self-seeker differing little, save in dress, from the antisocial spectres alleged to have haunted Manchester before the first Reform Act." Maybe we could hear something from the Minister as to his attitude to these matters; something about his social economic policy, so that business men and workers alike may know where they stand.
We note with relief that the Government have at last decided to carry out the scheme of the previous Government to double machine-won turf production. We still await the Bill by which that can be done. We hope that Bord na Móna have been instructed to prepare the scheme even in anticipation of the Bill. I might add that in my constituency and neighbouring constituencies a very large number of young men did not wait for the Minister for Industry and Commerce to announce that plan. They left the country. I can well understand it. If the types of men suitable for turf production do not offer themselves for turf employment in certain areas it will be because emigration has been very extensive from the turf area. I still wait to see the Bill introduced here, the scheme actually put into operation and the turf workers given the feeling that they are going to get regular employment for years ahead and not merely wondering whether this is not going to be another unfulfilled promise. I can only hope that enough of them will remain in the country by the end of the turf season to carry out this plan so that the promise that 5,000 people will be employed this year on turf will be implemented.
So far as the Government's new reclamation scheme is concerned I hope, myself, that it will succeed in a very large measure. It is a post-war extension of a Fianna Fáil scheme which has been in operation for a number of years. It is an amplification of the Fianna Fáil plan for subsidising fertilisers which has been in existence for a considerable number of years. It is a further amplification of Fianna Fáil's existing land reclamation scheme.
I must say that I would be glad if the Government and the Minister for Agriculture would permit some of the 13,000 out of the 30,000 people who applied for farm improvement scheme work beginning in July of last year to go on with the work, and also if they would pay off the people who have not been paid yet for work carried out in 1947 and in the beginning of 1948 before we engage on the £5,000,000 reclamation scheme. There are a very large number of people in my constituency who have not yet been able to get on with the original scheme. It would be an earnest of the promise of the Minister who introduced this great scheme if he would at least see that, what may seem to him a very modest little scheme, is kept in full operation.
I have already spoken about land division. In that connection we are awaiting with interest to see whether the present Minister for Lands will carry out the promise which he made as recently as February of this year that he would complete the land division of this country after five or six years, a promise made after watching the efforts of the Land Commission during very many years past and viewing the difficulties that they must experience. Knowing all about the legal complications and the difficulty of selecting allottees, and knowing all about the difficulties in carrying out migration in the proper manner, the Minister for Lands promised the country that land division would be completed, he hoped, in five or six years. In the course of the debate, when it came to discussing the matter, we found that he had inspected about 3,500 acres of land in the Midlands during the past year, that he did not acquire any land, that the only land actually acquired had already been inspected and looked at by the previous Government. We find that he intends to give to each congest now some 30, 35 or 40 statute acres of land, and that at the rate at which he is likely to proceed it will be some 20 years before land division is completed and not six years. We also found out from him that whereas he makes claims in regard to land division which we would like to see substantiated, the pool of some 500,000 acres supposed to have been available throughout the country is no longer available, that a lot of the land has been sold or is worked by people from whom land cannot be taken since they exercise reasonable husbandry, and that it is going to be extraordinarily difficult to carry out the task of settling the 25,000 migrants from Mayo who, he says, should be settled. Of course, as I have said, he tries to satisfy the people in the constituencies where there is congestion, and at the same time tries to give a realistic picture of the situation. That cannot be done. His colleague in Mayo, I may add, wishes the whole Land Commission to be abolished, a suggestion which very much shocked the Minister for Lands.
With regard to the roads, the reduction in the grant by £2,000,000 is undoubtedly going to affect employment on the roads. There, again, to give employment of another kind to workers does not always result in curing the problem. There are classes of workers in this country who do not want to do a certain type of work—they are not accustomed to it—and who will remain unemployed, even though new schemes are put forward. Road work is of very great advantage by reason of the fact that it can be scattered all over a county. Road work can be changed from one part of a county to another and it can actually follow, if necessary, the incidence of unemployment in a particular area. The difficulty in regard to the mobility of unemployed labour is largely overcome through road work. Moreover, one of the biggest advantages in regard to road work is the fact that it can go on in winter. The preparatory work on the roads can be carried out in winter for the summer work which is to follow. During the year 1948, under Fianna Fáil grants, from 21,000 to 25,000 persons were employed on the roads. I think the minimum number was about 20,000 and the maximum something like 25,000 as between the winter and summer months. It is one of the methods of doing national work that will give good employment, very largely the whole year round, if the road work is properly organised.
If the Government are in earnest about solving unemployment, if they are going to borrow £24,000,000 for one reason or another or borrow the money that will have to be paid back later for E.C.A. payments, they might as well budget for £65,000,000 and continue to provide employment on the roads, particularly in the areas where the new land reclamation scheme is not going to be in operation this year.
