Dáil Éireann debate -
Tuesday, 9 May 1950

Vol. 120 No. 13

Committee on Finance. - Motion No. 5—General (Resumed).

Mr. M.J. O'Higgins

Last Thursday evening, when the Budget Resolution was being discussed, I invited the Deputies of the Fianna Fáil Party to consider in relation to their criticism of the various items of capital expenditure proposed by the Minister the items which were in fact passed as proper items of capital expenditure by their own Minister for Finance in his 1947 Budget statement. I should like at this stage to repeat that invitation, because it seems to me that the opposition coming from the Fianna Fáil Benches in relation to both parts of the present Budget, the domestic Budget and the capital Budget, was reckless in its nature and showed that very little consideration has been given to this matter by Fianna Fáil. Many Fianna Fáil Deputies have accused the Minister and the Government and the Deputies on this side of the House of changing their attitude in relation to the important question of finance. Deputy Briscoe, I think it was, said that the Minister had made a complete somersault since 1948. Other Deputies spoke along somewhat similar lines. The point I want to make is that many of the items outlined in the Minister's Budget statement as being items for which it was proper to borrow are already included in the list which Deputy Aiken sanctioned in 1947. They are items for which Fianna Fáil borrowed and for which this Government and future Governments will borrow.

In relation to the size of the domestic Budget, the part of the Budget which has to be met out of taxation, I want to extend another invitation to Deputies opposite. I want to ask, will any Deputy on the opposite benches have the courage before this debate concludes to point out to the Minister where they suggest he should make cuts? Since this Government came into office a couple of years ago, as the Deputies opposite are aware, a number of different sections of the community have benefited by the actions of the Government. The old age pensioners are in receipt of better pensions to-day than they were ever under Fianna Fáil. I should like to know if Fianna Fáil Deputies stand for reducing old age pensions and bringing them back to the Fianna Fáil level? If Fianna Fáil Deputies are sincere in their complaint that the amount which the Minister is going to take from the people in taxation is too much, it follows that they must have in mind some reductions which the Minister could make. It is perfectly fair to ask them where these reductions could be made. I wonder if there is any Deputy opposite authorised to stand up and speak the mind of the Party opposite on this question. Surely it is ridiculous that Deputy Lemass, Deputy Aiken, Deputy Briscoe, Deputy Corry and others should come into the Dáil and complain that the amount is too high, that the figure is too large, and so create the impression that, if they were here, the figure would be less and, at the same time, should lack the courage to stand over what they say and to point out to the Minister where they suggest he should make reductions.

I take it that it will be accepted as a general proposition, at any rate, that the only way of reducing the taxation proposed would be by reducing expenditure. I have asked any Deputy opposite who may follow me in this debate to indicate if Fianna Fáil want the old age pensions cut to the Fianna Fáil rate. Would they prefer to cut the salaries of the teachers? Would they prefer the teachers to go back to the same conditions under which they operated at the time when they went on strike when Deputy Derrig was Minister for Education? Would they prefer, not only that the national teachers should get back to the Fianna Fáil level of pay, but that the rating system, which was abolished by the present Minister for Education at a cost to the Exchequer of a considerable number of pounds, should be reinstated? Would Deputy Boland prefer to see the Guards operating under the conditions which obtained when he was Minister for Justice?

Mr. G. Boland

You will soon have no Guards here at the rate you are going.

Mr. M.J. O'Higgins

Does the Deputy want to see the Garda pay reduced to the Boland level? Possibly Deputies opposite would prefer to economise on the Army. When the Estimate for Defence was being discussed and when the annual Army Bill was being discussed, the complaint then was that we have not enough artillery and other arms and have not sufficient men in the Army. Now they come along in this debate and criticise the amount of the bill. If the Deputies opposite shirk making cuts in the directions I have mentioned, they have another wide field open to them. Perhaps they would like the civil servants to be put back to the old Fianna Fáil level of pay, or would they prefer to get back to 1946 and 1947 level of house production? There are various other items in the Book of Estimates, any of which might be cut if Fianna Fáil were back on this side of the House. I take it, at any rate, that Deputy Boland and the other Deputies opposite will at least concede this to me: that it is perfectly fair for any Deputy on this side to ask the Deputies opposite to have the courage to name the cuts they would make; that if they enjoy the liberty of criticising the Minister for Finance because of the aggregate figure in the Budget, there is, at the same time, a responsibility on them to indicate to the Minister what their attitude would be and where they would make savings.

When the Deputies on these benches here occupied the benches opposite, they at least had the courage to tell the then Fianna Fáil Government where economies could be effected, where waste could be cut out. When the change of Government came in 1948, a number of the wasteful, spendthrift projects on which Fianna Fáil were wasting money were cut out and the money which Fianna Fáil proposed to waste in the future was saved to the Exchequer. Fine Gael, Labour, Clann na Talmhan and Independent Deputies, when in opposition, at least had the courage to point out to the then Fianna Fáil Administration where economies could be effected. I do not think any Fianna Fáil Deputy who has spoken in this debate so far has pointed out where as much as £1 could be taken off the bill. As I say, there are many fields which they can choose from and the choice is there for the making. I venture to suggest that very few Fianna Fáil Deputies, if any, would have the courage to make the choice.

Glancing through some earlier Budget debates, I notice a colourful phrase used by Deputy MacEntee which would very well describe the activities of the Deputies opposite this year. He referred to the prodigals of March becoming the Scrooges of May. That is precisely what we have witnessed this year. When the Estimates were being discussed, and even before that, Deputies opposite were crying out for increased expenditure. On the Vote for the Department of Education, Deputy McCann, for example, complained that the Minister was not building enough new schools and was not building them quickly enough. Schools cost money to build. The Budget is now before the House for discussion and I think we shall find that before this discussion is over Deputy McCann will come in here and criticise the amount being spent. I think every Deputy opposite will adopt the same line.

I referred, as one of the choices which is open to Deputies opposite, to the old age pension position. Deputies will recollect that despite some early enthusiasm from the benches opposite in support of old age pensioners they changed that tune very quickly and that shortly before they were put out of office a motion was tabled for discussion in the Dáil which, according to the then Minister — I think it was Deputy Dr. Ryan who was in charge of the matter at the time — would have cost the State something in the neighbourhood of £550,000 a year. The motion suggested a modification of the means test as it then applied in the case of old age pensioners. A very peculiar thing about that matter is that the figure of £550,000, which Deputy Dr. Ryan thought the proposal would cost, was practically identically the figure which the Fianna Fáil Government were quite prepared to lose annually on the operation of a transatlantic air service. They were prepared to lose on that air service a sum of something over £500,000 per year. They preferred to retain that service and to have that loss borne annually by the taxpayers of this country rather than allow modifications of the means test in favour of the old age pensioners.

Cormac Breathnach

The loss the Deputy mentions was not to be permanent, but only for a period.

Mr. M.J. O'Higgins

There was never any hope at all that the loss would be turned into a profit — I am going on the written record and the spoken word in this House. I heard the present Minister for Industry and Commerce putting it to the Deputies opposite, and in particular to Deputy Lemass, that that loss would have remained — that it would never have been turned into a profit and that possibly it would have been larger. I doubt very much if even Deputy Lemass would have the brazenness to deny it. However, that loss had been occasioned for some years.

The Deputies opposite thought it was good business to have a loss. What was their explanation? It was not the explanation which Deputy Breathnach would have us accept now, namely, that it was only temporary in nature and that in a few years everything in the sky would be lovely and that they would make a profit. Not at all. The explanation offered by Deputy Lemass and by those who wanted to maintain the air service was that it was good for our prestige to have that air service; that other nations were going in for that kind of thing and that, small and all as we were, if we wanted to bolster up our pride and our prestige a transatlantic air service was necessary. I think that Deputy Breathnach, in all fairness, will have to admit that that was the case put up by his Deputy Leader, Deputy Lemass—that, and no other case. Subsequently, some effort was made to say that it should have been retained because of its dollar-earning capacity. In fact, of course, a currency loss in the region of £500,000 a year would be equivalent to a dollar loss, even before devaluation took place, of something in the neighbourhood of £1,500,000 a year. However, that was the Fianna Fáil mentality and the Fianna Fáil attitude towards the old age pensioners on the one hand and Constellation aircraft on the other hand. That was not merely accidental. It was the mentality which ran right through the Fianna Fáil budgets. What was the position as far back as 1935, when economies were felt to be necessary; when the then Opposition Deputies suggested various kinds of economy and when Deputy MacEntee was Minister for Finance? I wonder if Deputy Breathnach would make a case as to the attitude of Deputy MacEntee in connection with the means test?

I have been in this House only a short while but I am very well aware that even in the two years during which I have been here, and for many years prior to that, Deputies have from time to time put down questions asking the Minister for Social Welfare about individual pension cases. The attitude of the Deputies who put down the questions is that whatever means test is there — whatever the law in relation to old age pensioners may be — it should be administered in as lenient a manner as possible so far as the applicant is concerned. I am glad that Deputy Breathnach nods his head in agreement with that. I think that that is a fact, that it is the attitude of most Deputies here and that it has been the attitude of the present Minister for Social Welfare since he took office. But it was not the attitude of Deputy MacEntee while he was Minister for Finance. In his Budget statement in 1935, Volume 56, column 867, he had this to say regarding the old age pensioners:—

"I am satisfied, and the Minister for Local Government and Public Health concurs with me, that a closer supervision and a stricter enforcement of the law in regard to old age pensions would result in a considerable reduction in the cost of that service. It is felt that a saving of £100,000 can be effected...."

When one places that statement by Deputy MacEntee side by side with the callous rejection by the Fianna Fáil Government of the motion calling for a modification of the means test, it will be seen that the Fianna Fáil mentality was not one which was favourable to the weaker sections of the community. They were quite prepared, as I mentioned, to fly Constellation aircraft. They were prepared to plan for the building of new Parliament houses — to cost £11,000,000, presumably as capital development. They were prepared to go into many fields of activity of an unproductive character but they were not prepared to assist the weaker sections of the community — apart from their first few years of enthusiasm for that cause.

Criticism has been made, as I mentioned, by Fianna Fáil Deputies who spoke in this debate. One of the criticisms made has been that the present Minister for Finance is going completely back on form in introducing what has been described as a two-tier Budget — in recommending to the Dáil and the country a vast programme for capital development. Deputy Briscoe, I think it was, described the Minister as making a complete somersault. That is not correct. The present Government, from the moment they assumed office, made it quite clear that their policy was to cut out waste where waste could be eliminated, but that they were not afraid, and would not be afraid, to spend money on worth-while projects.

Looking back on some earlier Budget debates, we find that in the 1945 discussion on the Budget the present Minister for Finance had certain things to say with regard to the borrowing of money for capital development. He was sitting on the benches opposite at the time — it was before he had the responsibility for dealing with this particular Department. In Volume 97, column 63, Deputy McGilligan, referring to the Minister for Finance, said:—

"He tells us of the £100,000,000 which we have piled up more or less as dead-weight debt, but he does not tell us that he intends to spend another £100,000,000 which we would like to hear was to be spent so long as it was devoted to productive purposes and so long as it was possible to say there would be some return."

In 1945, when the present Minister was in opposition, he was then quite prepared to recommend to the people that if necessary £100,000,000 should be spent on capital projects, provided it was devoted to productive purposes and it was possible to say there would be some return for it.

The present Minister for Lands, speaking in the same strain during the same Budget debate, followed Deputy McGilligan, and, at column 65, Volume 97, he is reported:—

"As the last speaker said, if the Government advocated the spending of £100,000,000 on production, this Party and, I suppose, every other Party in the House would welcome it."

I think those quotations show quite clearly that the Deputies who now compose the Government were never afraid of projects of capital development; they were never afraid to recommend the borrowing and the spending of money for capital projects. It is quite untrue to say that in recommending the spending of £31,000,000 or £34,000,000, whatever the exact figure is, the Minister for Finance has in any way gone back on the policy he advocated when he first became a Minister.

I do not propose to keep the Dáil much longer on this question. I would like to conclude by congratulating the Minister on the work he has done during the past year, and particularly on producing this very satisfactory Budget. So far as the people are concerned, I think they are very satisfied with the results of the Minister's efforts. I do not believe the efforts of Deputies opposite, whether they were deliberately mischievous or not, will succeed in creating panic among the bank depositors in the event of the floatation of another National Loan. I do not believe they will succeed in doing that, even if they want to do it. I do not dogmatically charge them with that desire, but some of the speeches made, especially those by Deputy Lemass and Deputy MacEntee, are open to the very gravest suspicion. I think that is as far as I will put it now.

The people are satisfied with the Minister, who has found it possible to hold more or less at a standstill the cost of living figure and, at the same time, give increases in wages to most, if not to all sections, of the people and, side by side with that, to remit the taxes imposed by Fianna Fáil in 1947 on beer, tobacco and entertainments. The achievements of the present Minister for Finance are very heartily welcomed by the people, and my experience since this Budget came before the House is that the people of this city are very satisfied with the work done by the Government as a whole.

Mr. Derrig

In his Budget statement last year the Minister for Finance said, in column 493:—

"A very rough estimate, prepared by short-cut methods, put the national income for 1947 at about £320,000,000. The proportion of the national income which is absorbed by taxation — including local rates and social insurance contributions as well as Central Government tax revenue — is of the order of 25 per cent., or roughly £27 per head per annum. The persistence of such burdens over any lengthy period would be deplorable, and all our efforts should be directed towards securing their abatement."

That was when the bill which the taxpayer was asked to meet amounted to £74,000,000. This year the corresponding figure is £87,000,000, but as it would be impossible for the Minister for Finance to endeavour to cover the deficiency through raising money through extra taxation and as he has turned his back upon the policy of retrenchment which he seems to have completely abandoned, it has been found necessary to devise some new means of meeting the Minister's difficulties and the solution that has been devised, following upon experience which the Minister has shown himself very versatile and skilful in employing during the past two years, is to borrow to the extent of the deficiency, which may be said to be £12,000,000.

The first thing that strikes one about this new departure is that if the Minister for Finance succeeds in his purpose he will remove from the control of the Dáil in the review of the annual Estimates the items for which he now proposes to borrow. It was suggested by the Banking Commission, and, apparently, some of the pundits of that body are still sufficiently influential to have their advice accepted by the Minister, that it was only by specific legal enactments that money should be borrowed as, for example, in the case of the Electricity Supply Board. It was pointed out also by that body that there was no method, if borrowing for what was termed dead-weight debt was to be permitted, of ascertaining what, in fact, was the deficit and that there should be an annual account audited by the Comptroller and Auditor-General at the end of the financial year which would make it quite clear what exactly the deficit was. The Minister says there is no deficit. He has converted what was a deficit of £12,000,000 into a surplus. It may be that this deficit will be regarded by some people as a very good thing. It may be regarded by others as a very bad thing. Like these modern American drugs, if it does not kill the patient during the earlier stages of the treatment he may live to a ripe old age. By a process of trial and error we achieve better things. There used to be a textbook dealing with the adventures of a British officer during the Boer War called The Defence of Duffer's Drift. We used to hear a good deal about it in the volunteer days. This officer was quite inexperienced in Boer guerilla tactics and, having set up his little defensive position as well as he could, he was compelled when the guerillas descended upon him to adopt a new line of defence. This happened on several occasions, until finally the officer began to learn that there might be some means of keeping his enemies at bay.

I think the Minister for Finance seems to be driven very easily from the positions he occupies. In fact, one wonders if the Minister for Finance really has made up his mind to defend these positions. The line of retreat has been so skilfully laid that the Minister regards his retreat as a victory instead of a retreat, which it really is, when he is driven back from the policies he has proclaimed in the past and comes along now with a brand new one which he asks the country to accept. Two years ago the Minister told us that his policy was to reduce the cost of government and the cost of living. According to certain figures which I have obtained by way of parliamentary question, it does not appear that the Minister is making very much progress in reducing the cost of government. The figures indicate that, if he is making an effort, it is not a very successful one. When we were in office we were reminded pretty frequently by the Fine Gael Party in their attacks upon the Minister for Finance's squandermania that the central machinery of government was growing out of all proportion to the resources of the country. According to the figures the Minister has given me, there has been an increase in the number of civil servants during the past two years of 1,264, and an increase in the unestablished civil servants of 540; that is 1,800 in all. The additional cost of salaries, remuneration and superannuation—I think superannuation was included — came to about £1,500,000. In his Budget statement, the Minister has told us that, in respect of the Civil Service alone, there will be a further increase of some £600,000 in the current financial year. That means that, so far as the Civil Service is concerned, its cost has gone up by some £2,000,000 since the Government assumed office. Then we had the promise to reduce the cost of living. The Taoiseach, before he assumed his present office, informed the electorate that all other considerations must be subordinated to the overriding necessity of reducing the cost of living and increasing the value of the people's incomes.

"The first task of the new Government must be vigorously to grapple with and to provide a solution for the problem of the soaring cost of living which is menacing the economic life of the State and the happiness of its people."

In reply to a question by Deputy Cowan some time ago the Taoiseach made a long statement referring to reductions in the cost of a number of commodities; a wide range of articles and clothing, he said, had been reduced. It may be that there have been reductions but the reductions are not significant. They may sound great in number when a catalogue of them is read out, but they are not as significant to and cannot have the same bearing on, I suggest, the cost of living as items like food, clothing, footwear, transport and other items, including services. Last year the Minister told us that the wholesale price index had increased by 5.8 per cent. over the previous year. This year there has been a further increase and we have not yet had the full effects of the devaluation of the £ upon retail prices; but it is well known that our materials in general imported from areas which have not devalued their currency are increasing considerably in price and will, in due course, reflect themselves in the retail prices. Actually there has been an increase. The Minister may say it is only a small increase. He may describe the cost-of-living index figure as practically static. But if one takes the opportunities which people now have for spending, the things they want to purchase, the fact that certain important classes of the community, the professional classes and those described as the white-collar workers, have not got anything like the compensation that would enable them to buy the things they need one can hardly say that they are as well off as they were before the war.

It is quite clear to anybody who is familiar with these people and their circumstances that they are feeling the pinch more now than at any time since the war ceased. Yet, the Minister has not seen fit to give them any consideration in his Budget. He talks of social justice. One of the aims of the Budget should be to redistribute the national income so as to give more justice to the deserving.

While the Minister may be able to reconcile these fine principles with his complete lack of consideration for the taxpayer in the Budget, there is no attempt to reduce the burden upon ordinary workers, whether manual or clerical workers, particularly the workers on the lower scales. The Minister has even refused to consider increasing the children's allowances in these cases. I cannot avoid reminding the Minister that he used to tell us that the £ in 1947 and in previous years was worth only 8/-, and that if the Government were doing its duty, full recoupment should be made to salary and wage earners to enable them to get the things to which they had been accustomed, to look after the education and the upkeep of their families, etc. Now, after devaluation, I take it that the 8/- which the Minister emphasised so eloquently and so long in this House, is reduced in terms of purchasing power and on the international market to something like 5/7. So that the position the Minister had taken up that he was going to retrench on a wide field of Government expenditure has been abandoned. The promise to reduce the cost of living remains unfulfilled. Its fulfilment has not even been attempted and the remedying of the distortion of the £, to bring it back to something like its pre-war value, which was one of the proclaimed aims of the Minister's Party, is an absolutely complete failure.

Mr. Hickey

They could not do anything with the £.

Mr. Derrig

If they could not do it, why did they promise to do it? If Deputy Hickey had his way, we would have more pounds, but I do not know what value they would have outside this country. We are now to have this new departure of borrowing to meet the budgetary deficit. The first, and I think the most important, point for the people to remember is that, while there may be a pretence that the burden is being lightened on the taxpayer, in fact, it is only being deferred. The moneys which the State has to pay by way of interest and sinking fund charges are a first claim upon the future taxpayer. They are, in fact, mortgaged on the national wealth of the future and upon our productivity and taxable capacity. You can see there a lien on the productivity and the enterprise of producers, whoever they may be.

There has been a pretence that there is some justification for this new departure. Sweden has been mentioned. What was done in Sweden, so far as I know, was that the Swedish Government introduced an emergency budget to provide for public works, to alleviate unemployment and to create additional purchasing power in a time of depression, from 1933 to 1937. This is not an abnormal situation in that sense. If it is abnormal, it is abnormal in the fact that we have this inflationary pressure to which the Minister has called attention in his Budget statement. It is quite the opposite to a condition of depression and should need a different type of remedy. Although the Swedes borrowed for a period of years, they amortised the dead-weight debt, as they considered it, for a comparatively short period of years. I have a bulletin here of the Swedish Trading Bank giving an account of the matter, and it may be no harm to read it:—

"As from the budget year 1933-34, new principles have been applied to the financing of the appropriations for unemployment relief, differing from the traditional rule that borrowed funds may only be employed for the financing of grants for productive purposes. In the budget for 1933-34 and subsequent budget years, the use of borrowed funds has been extended. Grants have been voted to be paid out of borrowed funds even in cases in which no immediate return has been counted upon. Such grants out of borrowed money have been passed into a special fund, the non-productive borrowed capital included in the fund to be amortised on a short-term basis. The amounts voted to this fund for the budget year 1933-34 was 168,000,000 and for 1934-35 226,000,000 kr. Certain special sources of income have been applied towards writing off the non-productive borrowed capital included in the fund, viz. — for the budget year 1933-34 the income derived from estate duty and gift tax, estimated at 25,000,000 kr., and for 1934-35 also an extra income and property tax, estimated at 8,000,000 kr."

The particulars are given in the appendix. In the year 1933-34 the actual disbursements were 98.5 million kroner. Estate duty on the other side brought in 23.8. In 1934-35 disbursements were 197.3 and estate duty, excess income and property tax, and ordinary taxes allotted as appropriations amounted to 38.9 millions. In 1935-36 appropriations out of the Budget were 72,000,000, and the appropriations from taxes in aid were 41.5 millions. Finally in 1936-37, as against payments of only 11.6 millions, there were receipts from estate duty, car tax, royalties from mines and transfers from the Treasury reserves of 127.8 millions. So from 1933 to 1937 the total expenditure seems to have been 379.6 millions and the actual taxation levied during the period to meet that was 232,000,000. That was roughly about 60 per cent. That was in order to meet the depression, and even during the depression taxes were allocated to meet expenditure, and one might gather that even some additional taxes had been imposed.

What is the position in Britain at the present time? What is the distinction they are making between capital and current expenditure? As far as I understand — the Minister is in a position to correct me if I am wrong — it has been stated that nine-tenths of the moneys required in the annual Budget came from tax revenue. If that is the position, it means that Britain, having gone through one of the greatest wars in history, is able to carry on, paying her way to the extent of 90 per cent. and borrowing to the extent of 10 per cent. On the figures the Minister has given us, we are in the position that we are only paying our way to the extent of some 60 per cent., because, if all the borrowing that the Minister envisages takes place, it will amount to some 40 per cent. of the total of £107,000,000.

Mr. Hickey

We should practise the same austerity as they have in England.

Mr. Derrig

It might not do us any harm if we had a little of it now and again. I am only pointing to the fact that if, as the Minister says, our conditions are somewhat similar to England, and the same principles ought to guide us, and if we had such an admirable Chancellor of the Exchequer as Sir Stafford Cripps, who holds the same philosophy as the Deputy and has made it his business to pay his way, there seems to be no reason why this country should not do the same. We are told that the country is flourishing, that production is increasing, that exports are increasing and that generally there is a great air of prosperity. It seems an extraordinary thing that we are unable to meet our obligations and that charges which in the past were met in the ordinary way annually from revenue, and that were regarded as recurring obligations, to be so defrayed, have now to be met by borrowing.

The Minister, with his colleagues, has discovered this wonderful secret of the national debt: When you are in difficulties, you get an easy way out, transfer the burden to future taxpayers and add to the national debt. The charges are pretty substantial. The Minister estimates that they will be about £6.3 millions this year — an increase of £2.3 millions over last year — and, if he has to pay £655,000 a year for the next 30 years to liquidate the £12,000,000 which I think it might be fairly argued should be met from revenue this year, the ordinary man in the street, by a simple arithmetical calculation, will see that £655,000 for 30 years on an initial expenditure of £12,000,000 is not a very good proposition. One would need to have a very good revenue-giving investment to make it worth while but, in fact, there is going to be no revenue from that particular borrowing. There will not be even 1/- available to help to liquidate the costs. The money will come from the taxpayer and if the taxpayer does not pay for it in taxes this year, then, during the next 30 years, he will have to find that £655,000.

The dual budget, emergency budget, or special works budget which has been introduced in other countries seems to me to have been largely the fruit of prolonged depression and great unemployment in large industrial States. Even in those circumstances the amortisation was over a short period and, in addition, there was an effort to get production of capital goods for industry. The money was not simply spent in such a way that there would be no return afterwards.

We are told that some of the Banking Commission experts have now changed their minds and what they condemned as dead-weight debt and bad, reprehensible, financial policy when Fianna Fáil were in office is now not alone excusable, but it is to be admired and praised. Lord Palmerston on one occasion asked his Attorney-General for advice. Later, when he met the Attorney-General, he said: "I could do nothing. I was prevented from taking the step which was necessary by the advice you gave me.""Why," said the Attorney-General, "did you not tell me the advice you required?" I must remind the House that the Minister himself has changed his position in this matter. In the Budget statement of 1948 there is the following passage:—

"At a time when taxation is of unprecedented severity and economy in State expenditure is imperative, it is more than ever necessary to examine critically proposals for capital expenditure which add to the taxpayer's annual burden and thus tend to stifle incentive and to reduce savings."

In the Budget statement in 1948, the Minister said that capital expenditure had reached a record height:—

"Capital expenditure by the Central Government and local authorities will reach a record height in the current year. Gross capital expenditure by public authorities and by private concerns and individuals will probably account for almost one-fifth of total national expenditure. To keep capital outlay on this scale from having inflationary consequences, it is essential that output and savings should be increased."

Towards the conclusion of that Budget statement, having reviewed the more encouraging signs in the way of industrial output and employment, and so on, which the Minister foresaw, he went to refer to the less favourable aspect:—

"...agricultural output and exports as a whole are still at dangerously low levels, capital expenditure — some of doubtful productivity — is outstripping current savings,"

— not having the figures, we are not in a position to know whether that is still the situation —

"rates and taxes are excessive, dead-weight debt is rapidly expanding and production costs are unduly high. The primary needs of the moment are increased output at lower unit costs from farm and factory and more saving by the community generally. To this public authorities, central and local, can contribute by reducing their demands on taxpayers and ratepayers. With such improvements rapidly achieved, the national economy would gain in strength and stability."

With regard to capital investment, the Minister said in column 1629, Volume 120, No. 11 of the Dáil Debates:—

"One of the primary responsibilities of a Government is to promote, by an enlightened budgetary and investment policy, the continuous and efficient use of national resources in men and materials."

In the following paragraph there is no reference whatever to private investment and I want to know whether this new departure means that in future the initiation, financing and planning of enterprise by the State is to be the main feature of our economy. If it is, if that is to be the central feature of our future development, it seems to me that we will have that planning which is characteristic of Socialist States and which, outside the Russian-controlled countries, seems to have been abandoned. It would be an extraordinary thing if we were to be forced into that position now. If we are not, why is the emphasis in the Budget not upon the private investor? If we stand for private investment, why is there no incentive to the private investor and why is no encouragement given to him? Are we to take it that development is impossible in this country unless the State comes in? If that is the case, the central administration, as I have shown, will increase enormously, or if it does not increase directly, the overheads of these enterprises will be very considerable.

Mr. Hickey

Are we to take the Deputy's advice?

Mr. Derrig

Deputy Hickey need not depend on what I am saying. He can depend on what the Minister is reported to have said when he took part in a discussion on State control and expenditure in relation to national expenditure arranged by the Dublin branch of the Institute of Costs and Work Accountants held in Jury's Hotel.

"He did not think, he said, it was possible to speak in sufficiently exaggerated terms about the iniquities of these Government boards. They had nearly always been very bad. ‘Some of these days,' he added, ‘the population will get a real fright when they hear the whole truth about the transport situation in this country.'"

They have not heard the whole truth yet. There is a pious expression by the Minister that Córas Iompair Éireann may be able to pay its way during the coming year, and the Supplementary Estimates which we had last year for that service will be remembered. No provision has so far been made for the present year. According to the report:—

"The Minister said he might ask if the Electricity Supply Board was an efficient body. It was interesting to compare the accounts of the Electricity Supply Board with those of the Belfast Electricity Station. As a Government body, he would put the Electricity Supply Board at the top of the line, but were they doing the job as well as private enterprise would have done it? The directors themselves were not entirely satisfied about the position.

The Electricity Supply Board, he said, had been given a certain job to do in the beginning, but many duties had since been added, including rural electrification, and when all these things were done he thought the Electricity Supply Board would not be a very popular body. The price of electricity was bound to go up. He had an objection to a nationalisation of services, for as long as people knew the public purse was behind them there was a tendency to extravagance. There was not the test of insolvency in the background."

That was the Minister's view on that occasion and it was not the only occasion, I think, on which he expressed doubts regarding Government enterprise. According to a speech which he made in the Seanad, he thought that very little of the type of enterprise in which the Government may function was really remunerative. The Minister went on to say that only the Shannon scheme proper and certain advances from the Local Loans Fund could be regarded as remunerative. He has now stated very specifically in the Budget statement that the return from these enterprises is reasonably satisfactory.

Mr. Hickey

There is no hope for private enterprise. Is that right?

Mr. Derrig

There is no hope for private enterprise but the Minister had not always such a high opinion of Government enterprise as he has now when £34,000,000 is to be borrowed for projects for which the Government is to be responsible in one way or another. On the 14th March, 1947, column 2273, the Minister's views were:—

"The Government preached very much about inflation. Inflation is a sort of bogeyman 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 telephone 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 £1,000,000 or £2,000,000. The one safeguard we have is that they are only programmes."

It has fallen to the Minister's lot to carry them on and to boast of the fact that he is spending millions more——

Mr. Rooney

On luxury hotels?

Mr. Derrig

In column 1631 of the Official Report of this year's financial statement the Minister said:—

"In the White Paper of Receipts and Expenditure it is estimated that these ‘below the line' issues will amount to £19.6 million in the current financial year. The expansion in this category of capital outlay by the State is all the more marked when comparison is made with 1938-39, when the comparable outlay was only £1.5 million. Advances to the Electricity Supply Board in 1950-51 are estimated at £4,750,000, as compared with advances of £802,700 in 1938-39."

That is an increase of six times.

"Advances to the Local Loans Fund in 1950-51 are expected to reach £9,750,000 as against £450,000 in 1938-39,"

—that is an increase of 22 times.

"and advances to meet telephone capital expenditure are estimated at £2,250,000 this year as against actual issues of £240,000 in 1938-39."

That is an increase of ten times in the telephone expenditure. Let us get back to the Minister in 1947:—

"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"—

I think £5,000,000 or £6,000,000 is being spent by the local authorities on roads this year.

—"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."

The Minister has rather changed his attitude now about tourism. I suppose the Deputies whose parrot cry is "luxury hotels!" do not understand that in one Italian city there are more bedrooms than in the whole of this country. He says now:—

"Net receipts from tourism are estimated to have fallen in 1949 and, as holidays abroad become more popular for our own people and Ireland loses some of its special attractions for visitors, every effort will be needed to sustain this important source of external income."

I do not know what the income is, but it has been estimated to be far more that what we get from the whole of our live-stock exports.

I think this matter of tourism should be transferred to the Department of External Affairs, who have shown themselves so capable in providing entertainment. I have here an extract from the Irish Times, from a contribution by a well-known writer, on 13th August last. It shows the possibilities that exist in that Department for developing this business of national entertainment, if the Government will only properly attend to it. The writer says:—

"I saw Mr. MacBride before he went abroad—at the big reception— one just dare not refer to it as a ‘hooley'—in Iveagh House the other night. It was given in honour of the distinguished visitors to Dublin for the Horse Show and nobody can deny that it was ‘done' exceedingly well. I honestly do not believe that better catering could be provided in any other city of Europe at the moment—not even by Strasbourg, in spite of that foie gras which makes my mouth water even to think of it. Everything was perfect, and in exquisite taste. As the party was held of a Friday, as we say in the West, the buffet could not be opened until midnight, by which time most of the guests were fairly ravenous and did full justice to the excellent fare.

It was a most interesting gathering. It is a long time since Dubliners had the opportunity to rub shoulders with a real live prince..."

We continue on then and we are told that, as well as catering very admirably for the entertainment of these visitors, cultural activities are not forgotten. That is only what one would expect from the Department of External Affairs. The writer says that Mr. So-and-so

"is also quite an accomplished dancer, although I did not notice him among the performers during the ‘Walls of Limerick', which demands a certain amount of physical endurance, as well as terpsichorean grace. The Swiss Minister, on the other hand, seemed to revel in the cavorting, which evidently is an essential element in this traditional dance."

We may not have had the luxury hotels, but I suggest we have had something far better, which will add to the grace and the standard of entertainment in our capital city. If the Department would only hand over the whole of this matter of tourist expansion and development to that Department, I am sure it would provide a useful field for their undoubted talents in that direction.

In the Minister's statement with regard to investment, we are told that there is investment of the class to which I have just referred and which the Minister had certain strong views about in the past. He says:—

"There is, however, a wide range of useful capital work which private investors cannot be expected to undertake and which, therefore, must be done on a collective basis by the State. There is investment which, though expected to be directly remunerative, is beyond the resources of private enterprise to undertake or to finance; power development is an example. There is investment, such as land reclamation and afforestation, from which the return may not be immediate or conspicuous enough to stimulate private enterprise."

I think the Minister himself has expressed doubts whether the aim that he has set before himself, in these enterprises which he regards as of such a productive nature that they should be able to service the debt incurred upon them, is likely to be realised. In dealing with agricultural development, in column 1635 we are told:

"This total outlay of £6,250,000 is being treated as proper to be met from borrowing, a course suggested by its developmental character but which will, in the end, be justified only if the expected increase in agricultural output is secured and is consolidated by an improvement in competitive efficiency in the export market."

So that the investment of these Marshall Aid funds will not have repaid their expenditure unless we are in a better position to compete with the Danes than the Minister for Agriculture leads us to believe is the case at present. We have reference to the risks. The arguments for and against are so skilfully balanced in the Budget statement and the paragraphs so beautifully sandwiched—that in regard to the risks in State investment, for example, being confined to a comparatively small paragraph towards the end of the section—that one wonders whether the exposition of the principles has not been weighted in such a way that any Minister might be able to argue an entirely different point of view and even to come to conclusions contradictory of what might seem to follow from the premises in that statement.

Dealing with the repatriation of external assets, we are told that savings should increase and manpower should be gainfully occupied, but that there is a risk of a lowering of living standards if home production does not expand in such a manner as to compensate for the loss of the income derived from the external assets. One thing about this Budget statement is that it does give the country very useful information about this question of sterling assets and the problems of repatriating them which are not at all as simple or as beneficial to the national interest as some ministerial spokesmen would try to lead the country to believe. I hope the Minister will get his colleagues to study and indeed he himself might study some of these principles from which he seems to lean away and which seem to have been put in as a stop-gap lest this runaway juggernaut car of the Coalition should get completely out of control.

The national income, we are told, was £350,000,000 in 1949 and in 1938 it was £154,000,000. Was an income of £154,000,000 in 1938 not more valuable and not likely to purchase more than £350,000,000 in 1949? I have read a calculation showing that the total amount of our sterling assets at present, having regard to the fact that the cost of goods has risen about two and a half times over the pre-war level, is not in fact any greater in terms of the goods it might be said to purchase than in the pre-war period. We are told we ought to bring these assets back and apparently some people consider that the very fact of bringing them back, irrespective of whether they are spent on consumption goods leaving nothing behind or put into projects that can never hope to provide a return financially or to be described as productive in the proper sense, is better than leaving them where they are. We have the advice now of people who condemned the transfer of these assets to this country in 1938 as thoroughly unwise and foolish. They were described at that time as being a cushion, a shield or protection against our finding ourselves in the difficulties in which countries like New Zealand found themselves when they had to go with their hats in their hand to London, in the depth of a trade depression, to try to borrow moneys to make up in some way for the assets they had allowed to be dissipated.

Mr. Rooney

What about the 1937 Act?

Mr. Derrig

The Minister in the Seanad last year referred to the dangers of this policy at column 142 of the Seanad debates of 26th October. He said:—

"From one angle, it is very good to enthuse about capital development here at home and at times hearts might beat a little bit faster when they hear of these sums of money increasing from £700,000 up to £7,500,000 over a period of the financial year. But sending that money into circulation through the hands of the community, into which the money must get when expended, has, of course, a very definite inflationary effect. Unless it were to lead to an immediate production of goods—and very little of this money as expended in this way is to lead to an immediate production of goods— there is bound to be inflation."

There is an admission. The Minister continued:

"So at once, while I am pursuing this desirable course..."

How it can be desirable if no goods are produced as a result of its operation and when the Minister says that, in order to counter inflation, greater production of goods is the immediate necessity is perhaps to be explained.

"...of making a tremendous increase in capital development, do not forget the other side, that I may be weakening the value of the Irish £ and, with the high rate at which Government expenditure is running, our capital account and current account and with our situation in respect of balance of payments, I am not too sure..."

Neither am I.

"...but Senator O'Brien has said he agrees that one may take the risk and, even though in the short run what you do may have an inflationary effect, it may be necessary to take the risk in order to get certain desirable objectives achieved."

What is this risk that is spoken of and which has been described as being perfectly legitimate? The Minister has been assured that it is perfectly legitimate from every point of view to do what he is contemplating doing in this Budget.

One of the reasons, apparently, that he is being urged to do it and why it is beneficial is that the investor may get better terms and more security. He may get better terms and higher yields for his investment in Government funds at home than he is likely to get elsewhere. He will not have the trouble of risking what the private entrepreneur has to risk, the competition of trade, the trouble of going into the market and fighting his way there. He will comfortably invest the money that he has, probably his savings, and, in the words I have quoted, it is hoped he will get a higher return. Who is going to pay for this higher return? Is it those enterprises which up to this year the Minister had contemptuously described as being incapable of paying their way? Even the best of them did not fulfil the strict principles that the Minister then had. Are they going to pay? If they are not going to pay, still less are those projects of social and human improvement which we hear so much about and which, in fact, are only going to add to the national debt so far as their financial results are concerned. If the State has to give a higher return as well as more security, it may well happen, as the figures I have given of the charges which the taxpayer has to bear for even the sums which are being borrowed this year suggest, that the cure may be very much worse than the disease.

"Many countries," the Minister stated, "are carrying a heavy burden of debt." Of course they are. Countries that have been through the war, or that had an armed neutrality on a scale that we had not, may have a heavier burden of debt. It was stated by the Banking Commission before the war that we had no reason to boast, that the Scandinavian and other small countries had very small accretions of debt, if you measure the debt by the amount per head of the population. When the Minister takes credit to himself for being able to tell us that the amount of taxation is only 23 per cent. of the national income and has not substantially increased, it seems to me that the figures show clearly that it has increased. "On a broad view, Government borrowing and spending has not imposed an increased strain on the economy." It has not imposed an increased strain on the economy because money was not borrowed to anything like the same extent. There has been more borrowed in the past few years than during the whole of the period Fianna Fáil were in office. In any case, we had the war period then. You would not have borrowing for the enterprises because you had not the materials to carry them on, even if you wished to. The point is that we are only starting off.

It is rather early for the Minister to assure the country, before it has even received the first impact of his new policy, that it is not going to impose an increased strain on the economy. He tells us that he means "that they should produce the revenue sufficient to service the loan charges either by yielding a direct return or by increasing the national income and so augmenting the yield of taxation".

What does he mean by increasing the national income? If a drunkard spends his weekly salary of £5 or £6 in the public house and the Exchequer reaps the benefit, there may be some advantage to the revenue, but surely there is not an advantage to the country. It seems to me that it would be more legitimate for the Minister to argue that his aim is not in fact production but spending, that the more money that is put into circulation the more is likely to be spent on goods on which taxes are paid and the revenue, as in the case of tobacco and spirits this year where you have larger releases, will, of course, bring in very much larger and in fact swollen sums of money to the Exchequer. If you regard that as a desirable aim, then the spending of millions of pounds extra may, from a certain financial point of view, be quite all right.

Mr. Rooney

What was the object of the Supplementary Budget?

Mr. Derrig

The Supplementary Budget was introduced——

Mr. Rooney

To get more money.

Mr. Derrig

To get more money when the President of the United States had stated that the whole world was being plunged into a terrible situation at the end of 1947. The Minister talked about savings, but he has given us no information to show whether, in fact, the margin of savings is sufficient to meet the needs of private enterprise if he is to spend anything in the nature of £34,000,000 and to raise that by borrowing. There is a certain amount of money available for investment. Last year the Minister stated that about half of the money came from the external assets which were realised and the other half from savings. But the burden of Government borrowing has increased enormously and the Minister has given us no estimate of the total outlay of money which will be required for private capital purposes as well as public capital purposes and how that is to be divided.

We had a number of pious remarks about private capital. "Private investment is being encouraged in many ways," the Minister tells us. Perhaps that is the reason why we are not given any information as to the amount of money required by private industrialists and others. "The State can indirectly promote repatriation for productive domestic development by maintaining conditions favourable to private investment in our own resources and by its own investment and financial policy." Then he goes on to refer to the danger that the import surplus, when these assets are brought back, may go merely to increase current consumption, not into capital investment. Direct capital expenditure by the State is a net addition to domestic capital development only in so far as it does not restrict or delay private domestic investment which would otherwise have taken place. In fact, the Minister tells us that he is going to depend very largely on Government funds for the financing of some of these enterprises. The sterling investments might gradually be replaced by Irish Government securities though, in doing that, he recognises that there may be an inflationary tendency and that the Government will have to take extreme care that there will be no adverse consequences. Last year, the Minister said, about one-fifth of the total national expenditure went in capital expenditure and that he considered it too high, having regard to the level of savings.

There are some estimates here— they may be right: they may be wrong. We are told that £50,000,000 in 1948 represented the value of new capital goods brought into use and increase in stocks and work in progress, and £51,000,000 in 1949. It seems extraordinary if there is only an increase of £1,000,000, to ½ per cent., in the 1948-49 period in respect of capital goods brought in, increase in stocks and work in progress. However, the point I wish to make is that, not savings but Government funds are to a very large extent going to be the method of financing some of these projects. We have, of course, the Marshall Aid Fund. I recognise that the Minister has to expend on the projects which are most likely, in the long term, to develop our national production, the credits in that fund. He suggests that he is going to finance other items of capital expenditure from it. What I do not understand is why, if that fund is available and if there is necessity for developing long-term capital projects which, thanks to the generosity of the American people, we are in a position to do from the Counterpart Fund, we should not have confined our programme to such activities instead of taking over, in addition to what the Marshall Aid Fund and other Government funds are being asked to undertake, the items of expenditure which in the past had always been met in the ordinary way from revenue.

With regard to the private investor, I think it will be admitted that, so far as the development of our trade is concerned, we are very largely dependent upon him. In the export trade, for example, if the problem of the balance of payments is regarded, as it is in England and elsewhere, as the central one, the development of our exports must be one of our primary aims. I think everyone will agree that it is the private undertaker who is going to look after our export trade. There is no incentive in this Budget to that private entrepreneur. There are no allowances, no incentives, no relief from taxation and no allowance for the reequipment of his factory. Very extensive allowances and very great facilities are given in another part of this country to induce people to start industries there. Factory sites are presented free. Factories are actually being built at public expense. I cannot believe that the Minister thinks for a moment that the type of project which he is now going to ask the public to invest in is going to give better results in the way of building up our exports or even in giving permanent employment than private enterprise in the long run will give.

Mr. Hickey

Does the Deputy believe that?

Mr. Derrig

Yes—permanent employment.

Mr. Hickey

That is interesting.

Mr. Derrig

I am afraid that if we proceed in the other direction we are going to be in for a period of State planning. We are going to control investment; we are going to control capital; we are going to control the enterprises and, in the long run, we are going—as is too often the case in this country—to leave it to the State to initiate new schemes and to provide employment instead of trying, as far as we possibly can, to induce private investors to work themselves and to go ahead. I have no objection to private investors getting a reasonable profit. I do not think any Minister on the Government side who has had experience of administration in the past will deny that they are entitled to a reasonable—not an unreasonable—return on the moneys they invest. I would be as strong as any member of this House against industrialists or distributors taking undue profits. I feel, however, that in the state in which the world is at present and in our own state of development, we may take a wrong turn and, to make quite sure that there is room for the private investor—not to crush him out; to give him every encouragement—the Minister should have given more attention to the problem than he does in this Budget. It is entirely taken up with State projects as if they were the be all and the end all and as if there could be no other useful aim economically than to go in for State enterprises.

Take the question of housing. The Minister, in the Seanad, remarked on the "inefficient attempts to catch up on these arrears in the interval between the wars". I think we can point to a fairly good achievement during that period. In ten years I think 140,000 houses were built. The Minister referred to the fact—I think in the same speech—that inflation has already had its effects on house building. Even the Taoiseach has admitted that housing is in a very special category. He said, in a speech dealing with this question of capital investment, as it is called—a speech delivered to the Clonmel Chamber of Commerce:—

"A great deal of money was being spent on housing, involving the sacrifice of assets now yielding a money income without adding to the national income. That loss must be replaced. He was almost ruefully aware of the difficulties attached to the Government's projects—a wasteful application of capital, and that people might overlook that to invest you must have funds. We were fortunate in having external resources to supplement current savings."

But these external resources are no greater now than they were before the war. The point is that instead of enabling the people themselves to spend them properly, according to their own desires, or leaving the money in their pockets, the new idea is that the State can do it better. It is not alone in Whitehall that the Civil Service or the Minister knows best what should be done. That is the position also in Dublin.

We object to housing subsidies being borrowed. We remember that the Minister's advisers, when they had a different opinion, suggested that subsidies should not be granted in a form involving the creation of long term debt; they should be met from year to year. Now it is suggested that every single penny should be borrowed. The excuse the Minister gives is that this is a wholly abnormal situation, spreading the exceptional cost of houses over a reasonable period. In what way is it abnormal? Does the Minister suggest there is going to be a considerable reduction in the cost of materials or labour in any reasonable period of years? Does it not stand to reason that for a very long period this constructional work of building hospitals, houses and schools must go on, and that even when the programme is completed, there will be the question of wastage and work must go on permanently?

When the Minister's advisers were of another opinion they disapproved very strongly of that course. It would be improper, they said, to admit into this category items which, as in the Swedish budget I spoke of, should be amortised for a short period of years into a special fund. It would be improper to admit into this category items of expenditure like the provision of school buildings and Civic Guard barracks, though they possess a certain capital character on commercial practice analogy, but, in the life of the State, they are recurrent needs that should be met from the Budget.

Will anybody deny that that is the position? We have, up to the present, paid for schools. If we are going to borrow for schools and hospitals, why not borrow for every constructional work? There is nothing abnormal about the building of schools. The costs are likely to continue somewhat as they are, but, even if there be a reduction, the Minister is not treating this as abnormal in the sense that it is going to be dealt with in the next two or three years. He has devised and proposes in the future to implement, as far as he can, this whole principle of borrowing to meet expenditure that was normally met every year.

There were some other remarks, in view of the Minister's feeling that he has the consolation of knowing he is getting the approbation of those who condemned these practices so strongly in the past, to remind him that in the 1938 Banking Commission Report they mentioned in what, I think in present circumstances, is a singularly appropriate phrase, that borrowing to meet expenditure of dead-weight debt might provide too easy a recourse to the creation of such debt—might provide an insidious facility for evading obligations which ought to be discharged in cash as they matured.

They went on to state that it is the general view, not alone of politicians in opposition to Government, but of economists in general—and no doubt it was largely responsible for the views put forward in that report—that the people must be protected from the dangers of having a Government that refuses to face its responsibilities, refuses to pay its way, but is devising shifts and expedients and getting into debt by not making proper provision at the time or not exercising suitable discretion and avoiding such expenditure altogether. The temptation, they say, is to make concessions in the present with the knowledge that the responsibilities will fall on the future. It is an opportunity that often presents itself to Governments and we cannot very well blame the Banking Commission if they held the view that it was necessary to check-mate, restrain, constrict the Government in its opportunities for borrowing.

What is extraordinary is that the economists, who said that they believed that particular philosophy at that time, should now come forward and enable the Minister to boast that he has professorial thought—I am afraid it is more academic than practical—in advising him that he is quite right and safe and that it is a desirable policy to mortgage the future to the extent that he proposes in the very large scale long-term commitments upon which he is now embarking. We used to be told that the dam was very light in 1947, that it was scarcely sufficient to hold back the flood of inflation, and it was more a miracle of Providence than any design of man-made Government that prevented its being broken through. But apparently the sluices are now open and we are going to have a full flow.

In this statement to which I refer you might argue anything you like, that repatriation is a good or a bad thing, that it is a dangerous policy to embark on wholesale borrowing, that it is not likely to succeed; or, on the other hand, that it is a necessary thing and will give desirable results. The Minister is in the position of a tight rope walker and when he tells us that he is giving a remission, a very trifling one, to the amateur wrestling association, I think that he is, perhaps, remembering the shadow-boxing that used to take place between himself and some of his ministerial colleagues in connection with these financial matters, questions of credit and so on. Perhaps we shall see the Coalition groups themselves entitled to some such remission in the future when they transfer whatever wrestling exhibitions that now go on in private to the public platform.

So far it has been largely shadow-boxing on their part, but we remember that the Minister told us that we were the only civilised country practically which allowed the banks to control credit. We remember that he told us, lest we might think that he was a very conservative Minister, that he would rather be classed with the monetary cranks, like Deputy Cowan and Deputy Flanagan, and so on. Quite recently the Minister went to the Seanad and, in the same way as he has changed his mind about capital investment and the worthwhileness of some of our national enterprises, the policy of dead-weight debt and borrowing, he has also changed his mind about devaluation. He has told us that, even if all these barriers in the way of Acts of Parliament were not there at all, he is not at all sure that on a general balance of consideration as to what is best in the national interest we should not devalue in the same way as the British have done. He assured the Oireachtas that the banks are only doing their job. It was certainly very hard on the Minister that, following on the statements of some of his colleagues, he had to go to the Seanad and he, who had been so eloquent in telling us that we were the only State that had left the control of credit to the banks, in sackcloth and ashes had to announce there that he had recanted his heresy.

The Minister, together with his friends composing the pressure groups in the Coalition, is rather in the position of a convert. He reminds me of the landed proprietor in this country who, like certain other people, had to change his religion at a certain time in order to keep his estates. He presented himself to the Synod. The Protestant Archbishop was in the chair. He said: "What have you come for, my good man?""I have come to get my estate.""Oh, not that surely!""Oh well, to change my religion.""Oh, not to change your religion, but the error of it.""Oh, yes—Transubstantiation and the Trinity.""Oh, not the Trinity—Transubstantiation.""Whatever your Grace pleases." That is the position into which the Minister for Finance has been driven. It is a case of whatever the pressure groups in the Coalition require him to say or do. That is the principle underlying the Budget.

At column 132 of Seanad Debates of 26th October, 1949, the Minister said:—

"No doubt, the banks had in mind the question of the price stability of corporation stocks and how freely they are marketable at any given time and also how freely they are marketable if thrown on the market in any big quantities, and having taken a view of that the banks made up their minds that in regard to the corporation they had alternative investments of a better type."

That was in connection with the Dublin Corporation loan.

"One cannot blame the commercial banks for taking that financial consideration into account. There is a good deal of clamour that the banks should think more about the provision of amenities like housing. But the banks probably say that it is for some authority other than banks to deal with that. They would probably pass the matter on to the Government and say: ‘If you can improve the situation by some other method, maybe we could lend you the money, because the investment might become a more profitable one.'"

So much for the control of credit by the banks.

Mr. Hickey

I can assure the House that I shall not spend an hour-and-a-half, as Deputy Derrig has done, in practically re-reading the Minister's Budget speech. I think the real need to-day is a more equitable distribution of the wealth of the country. Let us picture for ourselves 100 persons, two rich, eight comfortable, 60 poor and 30 very poor; that is how wealth is distributed to-day in this country. Yet, we have Deputy Derrig speaking for over an hour-and-a-half without giving us any indication of what he would consider a suitable alternative to the Minister's Budget. Last Thursday at column 1785 of Dáil Debates, Deputy Lemass said:—

"It is clear that if he attempts to draw off from the amount available for investment this year any sum approaching half the total amount he intends to borrow, not merely will he stifle normal private enterprise but he will force this country into a position in which all private enterprise will cease."

May I press home one point? In the greatest hour of need that this country has ever known in the last war it was State intervention that saved us and not private enterprise. I listened carefully to Deputy Derrig. His one idea seemed to be that private enterprise was the solution for all our ills. Let us discuss this in a dispassionate way. Private enterprise and capitalism control industry here and the community has to make good the disadvantages that accrue to those people private enterprise can no longer employ to make a profit out of them. Private enterprise and capitalism have given us the slums and the airless hovels and it is the community's purse that must provide the hospitals and sanatoria to heal the victims. Private enterprise and capitalism have given us the wounded from the factories and workshops and it is the community's purse that must provide the hospitals to cure them and bring them back to normal health and conditions of living again.

Is Deputy Derrig serious in suggesting that social enterprise is to be the ambulance man and the mess cleaner of private enterprise? He speaks of there being no room for private enterprise. What do we find? We had a case recently of the General Textile Company, Athlone, where the chairman of the credit corporation made the following statements: that the General Textile Company had created an all-time record when they asked for £200,000 as capital last year and got £7,000,000 subscribed in 15 minutes. That is the private enterprise that Deputy Lemass and Deputy Derrig have advocated in this House during the past week.

Let me say in all seriousness that the problem of reconciling private enterprise and private profits with public welfare is not soluble. They can be no more reconciled than fire and water because one extinguishes the other. The Deputy quoted for us for nearly an hour, from the important statement we had heard from the Minister for Finance. Let me say that the statement the Minister made in introducing this Budget is one of vital importance to the country and I hope that many people outside this House will read and study that statement. The Minister is to be congratulated in so far as the statement embraces an economic survey, the question of national debt and private and public investments. It is a masterpiece. Let me say however, and let nobody have any doubts about it, that I still hold the view that neither this country nor any other country can borrow itself into prosperity. Let that be clear.

We heard quite a lot about the Electricity Supply Board. Deputy Lemass said last Thursday that we were not going sufficiently fast in spending money in the production of electricity here. I got certain information arising out of a question recently in the Dáil as to the financial position of the Electricity Supply Board. I was informed that in 20 years ending March, 1950, there was £22,680,930 given to the Electricity Supply Board and during that period they have paid no less than £12,059,396 in interest alone. We have paid back in that same period in redemption of the whole of the £22,000,000 the magnificent sum of £963,840. You might therefore say that for every £ I pay for an electric light, 6/- goes for interest alone. Deputy Bartley last week asked a question about the amount and the cost of the loans given under the Gaeltacht Housing Acts, 1929 to 1949, and he got an answer to the effect that there was a total of £173,117 given in loans. Of that £96,311 was given at 5 per cent., £73,381 at 4¼ per cent., and, of course, when the rates of interest went down, £1,021 at 3¼ per cent. This is the important point, that of the £160,888 advanced, the cost of repayment including principal and interest will amount to more than twice the sums issued. I suggest to Deputies on all sides of the House that it is about time to stop playing politics, as many Deputies are doing here, and that we should deal with the problem that faces us because this thing cannot go on.

Apart from the national debt, which I understand now reaches £160,000,000, there is a municipal debt of over £40,000,000. I speak with some intimate knowledge of the position in my own city. The Cork Corporation have paid in the past 12 years £767,027 interest on money borrowed to do socially desirable things. In other words they have had to pay £63,980 per annum for interest on money borrowed. What do we find at the other end? Our rates are 31/6 in the £ and less than 2d. in the £ is for housing. Are these not questions that every Deputy should think seriously over? We are sent here to deal deliberately with these grave issues and these problems and I submit we are not doing it.

Deputy MacEntee on this night week addressing a meeting of his Party in O'Connell Hall, O'Connell Street, dealt with the Budget and let me say without any prejudice that the statement which I am about to quote was a most damaging and a most unpatriotic statement to make about this country or about the people who have charge of the affairs of this country. Amongst other things he said:—

"It is proposed to take no less than £106,120,233 out of the savings of our little community, to spend these millions in its own interest and the interest of the political Parties which constitute the Coalition."

He goes on:—

"The Government proposes to launch the State on a career of unbridled extravagance in which every public interest and the resources of the industrious, thrifty and honest elements were to be sacrificed to the urgent need to buy political support at any price with the savings of the people."

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

What is the Deputy quoting from?

Mr. Hickey

I am quoting from a speech reported in the Irish Press on 3rd of this month, a speech made in the O'Connell Hall, O'Connell Street, this night week. The Deputy went on, and it is most interesting to hear him say it:—

"The screw is to be put on the banks to do what Mr. McGilligan has admitted the public are not prepared to do. That is the explanation of the cold war which the Coalition spokesmen have been waging on the Irish banks. The banks naturally, because they had certain traditional standards of conduct in these matters, were apparently refusing to become the instruments whereby the cautious thrift of their customers was to be fully explored and exploited."

I ask: is that a statement which a thorough Irishman would make with regard to the financial position of this country? Speaking further about the banks, he says:

"Unless the banks stood firm and the people supporting them, the State was heading for financial chaos. Inevitably in its train would follow hardship and suffering and widespread unemployment."

An ex-Minister of this House made that statement about the banks, who have taken £33,000,000 in net profits alone during the past 25 years from our people on a paid capital of only £9,000,000. I suggest that such statements are very detrimental to the State. If it means anything, it is telling the banks not to help the Government that is dealing with the financial position of the country to-day. There is no other interpretation that can be put upon it. I would like to know the extent of the banks' assets, in addition to their £33,000,000 net profits.

I have been listening to Deputies, hoping that I would hear something practical. I would not mind from which side of the House a practical suggestion came. Not one seemed to give a thought to the question of how we have been treating our old age pensioners or the mothers of children. No more important work is being done in this country than is being done by the mothers who are rearing families for the nation. We are spending millions of money on many things but I know of nothing that would give a better and more lasting result than the expenditure of £1,500,000 or £2,000,000 on our children, so that they would grow up to be healthy men and women. That is not possible at the moment on what they are getting.

What are we doing about unemployed people? It would be well if those who are in safe positions, who have good investments and security for the future, would consider the position of the man who is thrown out of employment and who has to go to the labour exchange and perhaps sign on there for the rest of his life. We give him a fixed sum of 16/- a week to clothe and feed him for the seven days of the week. Deputies speak for one and a half and two hours, trying to score political points, forgetting the people who made it possible for us to be here and who were responsible for the establishment of this State. I do not speak with political prejudice but I would expect that Deputies would have some realisation of their responsibility. There are serious changes about to take place in the world. There is a social revolution taking place in the world to-day and none of us can tell what the economic and social position of this country will be in the near future.

I would like to know how the national income is being spent. It would be interesting to know how much is spent on food, wages, rent and interest charges. The Statistics Branch should be able to supply that information.

I would suggest that the Government and the Minister for Finance should immediately consider the advisability of increasing the old age pension and family allowances. It is not good enough that, where there are three children in the family, allowance is paid in respect of only one.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

The Deputy should not pursue that line in this debate. That is too detailed.

Mr. Hickey

I may not suggest legislation on the Estimates.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

The Deputy will find other opportunities to suggest these alterations but it cannot be done on this Budget.

Mr. Hickey

I accept your ruling. I feel that we indulge too much in long speeches. A Deputy makes a speech for one and a half hours and thinks he has given wonderful service to the nation. He then disappears out of the House as if he had solved everything.

Mr. Davin

It is filibustering.

Mr. Hickey

That is all. The problems that we are faced with must be dealt with in the near future. Deputy Derrig or any other Deputy may blame this Minister or the last Minister but I have always made it clear that I could not blame them because we are not in control of our credit and our money. There is no pandering to a Socialist State. It is a dishonest statement to say that this country is well on the road to a Socialist State. I take my stand with the Archbishop of Australia who stated recently that it was contrary to right order that the control of money and credit of a country should be in individuals or a group of individuals. It should be the function of the State.

It is wrong that we have to pay £12,000,000 over a period of 20 years so that our people may get electric light. It would be well if some of the Deputies realised that there are thousands of families in this country who have in their homes only a candle and an oil-lamp and that they are contributing their share to the taxes as well as some of the wealthy magnates for whom all the sympathy is expressed here. I would suggest—and I hope the Government will take heed—that we must have more equitable distribution of the wealth of this country. I appeal on behalf of the old age pensioners, the widows and orphans and the unemployed. Do not forget that the unemployed are question marks for each and every one of us. It is not merely a matter of statistics. They are human question marks. The sooner we realise that, the sooner we will be doing something for our country.

Mr. Bartley

I have a good deal of sympathy with many of the remarks of the last speaker. It is a big burden on people who want to get a roof over their heads that the rent should be unduly inflated by interest charges. Deputy Hickey quoted a reply which I got from the Minister for Lands to a question, which showed that these charges can very often be out of due proportion to the facility granted. It seems to me that the remarks of Deputy Hickey do not make a consistent whole. I cannot see how you can avoid borrowing and, if you do borrow, I think you will have to pay for it.

Mr. Hickey

The Government should be in control of our money and credit in order to be able to do all socially desirable things.

Mr. Bartley

We on this side of the House subscribe to the principle of borrowing, provided borrowing is for projects that are well worth while. If anybody looks back over the annual Budget statement for a number of years, he will find that the Fianna Fáil Budgets did include borrowings. The borrowings in this Budget cover the same things as the Fianna Fáil Budgets and some things which the Fianna Fáil Budgets did not include. I am not approaching the question of borrowing from the point of view of principle, but the proportion of borrowings in the Fianna Fáil Budgets to the total amount was much smaller and the number of things considered to be of a capital nature is much greater now. The borrowing to meet the deficit in the present Budget represents 14 per cent. while the comparable figure in Fianna Fáil Budgets on no occasion exceeded 2 per cent.

I am not so much worried about the amount; what I am considering is the uses to which it is being put and what benefits will result. I naturally examined the question in relation to the conditions in my own constituency. I see that the Government has changed its attitude regarding the turf industry and has increased capital investment in it. My only regret is that there was any break in the turf policy or else that this change did not take place sooner. Quite recently the Minister for Industry and Commerce said that he found difficulty in recruiting men for the turf schemes upon which he now looks more kindly and upon which he has agreed to spend money. My reply to that is that when he stopped the hand-won turf scheme with a slap the people who had been earning good money on that scheme cleared out of the country immediately.

I know that the people in the cities got heart scald from the bad turf during the last years of the emergency. We all know, however, that we had most abnormal weather from about the middle of 1946 for nearly a year and a half and the public view of turf was largely coloured by that and that in turn had an effect on the politics of the turf situation. In my opinion it was regrettable that it was turned into a political question, and we have had large emigrations from these districts for that reason.

When I ask myself whether the money is going in any other direction which will benefit these districts I turn naturally to the question of roads and I find that in parts of my area the people lack bus services because the county council has not enough money for the repair of roads and bridges.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

Clearly the Deputy is going into Estimates now.

Mr. Bartley

The taxpayer is asked to find the money, but like Deputy Hickey we want to see the results of spending the money in the light of the comforts, facilities and amenities which that money gives to the people, particularly to the class who most need help from the State.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

The Deputy will be allowed that opportunity on the Estimates.

Mr. Bartley

I intend to refer to them on the Estimates also, but with all due respect I do not think I have made so far more than a passing reference to these matters.

At the present time the average consumer is complaining bitterly of the scarcity and high cost of some necessaries of life, such as potatoes and vegetables generally.

Minister for Agriculture (Mr. Dillon)

Potatoes are 2/3 a stone.

Mr. P.J. Burke

Where is that?

Mr. Dillon

In Dublin.

Mr. P.J. Burke

They are 3/6 in the county.

Mr. Briscoe

They are 3/6 in Dublin.

Mr. Bartley

They were 3/9 in Tuam last week.

Mr. Dillon

They are 2/3 in the consumer-producer market in Dublin.

Mr. Bartley

The borrowing of money, as I have pointed out, is not frowned upon on this side of the House, but we certainly feel that borrowing to meet a deficit and to pay for things which in the ordinary course of events should be met from revenue is false finance.

Housing grants, as in the past, should be financed from revenue, but I can see the need at the present time for borrowing for housing. In spite of their having been increased the grants for housing are not sufficient to enable a man to build a house for himself even when he supplies his own labour. Even if members of his family can build walls and do carpentry work he cannot build a house with the financial facilities at present available. In my opinion borrowing is necessary to meet that situation which has also been adversely affected by the fact that suppliers in some towns are not willing to give credit to the ordinary builder as they did heretofore unless the person concerned is prepared to put down a deposit of £100. That is the position in Galway City at the present time and not only has it crippled and hamstrung building under the Local Government Acts but the Minister for Lands finds that he cannot get supplies in the Galway area to implement his schemes.

Minister for Lands (Mr. Blowick)

That is not holding up housing under the Gaeltacht Acts and the Deputy should know it.

Mr. Bartley

I have only the information of applicants who have told me that they cannot get on with the work themselves. I do not know what the Minister's official information is on the matter but people have come to me and made this complaint. There is a good deal of money in the country and in a county like Galway where in one part the people are comfortable and in the other poor the people who are comfortable can build houses and they have first call on the timber, etc., which the suppliers hold. That is the present position and the Minister for Lands can take my assurance that unless it is remedied in some way it will interfere very seriously with building west of the Corrib. I have had complaints from people who wanted to build houses.

I do not want to deal too much with housing, but it seems to me that something must be done on the lines suggested by Deputy Hickey when he spoke of municipal housing. We all know that the rents of houses in urban areas are prohibitive and I do not know how that can be met but it seems to me that if the organised workers and the municipal authorities got together it should not be beyond their ability to do something to ease the position. I heard that after the first world war the municipal authorities in Vienna had a problem of this sort and met it by some system of municipal finance.

Captain Cowan

It is a bit dangerous to suggest that that should be followed.

Mr. Bartley

In any event it was carried out successfully for a period in Vienna but it was stopped by international vested interests which had some influence in the League of Nations.

The fact is that the cost of houses is almost prohibitive. At the present time the Minister for Local Government is preparing a scheme for differential rents in urban areas. He would not be engaging on a difficult task of that sort unless he himself were satisfied that there was a real need for it.

The main characteristic of the Budget has been referred to by many speakers, that is, the complete change of outlook of the Minister for Finance and those for whom he speaks in relation to a great many matters. Possibly there is a great deal of elasticity allowed to a politician, but when we find the professors of economics taking part in the same acrobatics we have to sit up and take notice. People who signed a very conservative Banking Commission Report before the war and who are now in the Seanad have swallowed everything they said at that time.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

Statements in the Seanad may not be discussed here.

Mr. Bartley

In those days, the housing grants were financed not out of borrowings but out of revenue. Even then, the scale of house building, even on those conservative lines, was denounced by the people who are prepared now to accept as a useful and wise experiment the financing of that very same service out of borrowing. We know that the science of economics is not an exact science, but surely there ought to be some more consistency in it than is evidenced by these people who hold themselves forth as economic scientists. We politicians have not, I think, made any more notable somersault in regard to this matter than that to which I have just referred.

The Minister, in so far as he is prepared to borrow money to finance worthwhile capital projects, has the full support of this Party. We are pleased to see that he is prepared to find money for these purposes, purposes which he denounced in round terms when he was in Opposition. We welcome his change of outlook in that respect. He will get all the encouragement which Fianna Fáil can give where a project of that kind finds favour with him.

The Minister claimed, when he was in opposition, that the Fianna Fáil bill was £10,000,000 or £15,000,000 too great, that if he got into power, without in any way curtailing services which were being provided, the cost, through economy and efficiency, could be reduced by this £10,000,000. It is interesting to note that the figure of the last Fianna Fáil Budget was £65,000,000 odd and that this year the Minister proposes to spend £87,000,000. That is £22,000,000 more than the Fianna Fáil Budget. One must remember that Fianna Fáil provided the transatlantic air service, they had a hand-won turf scheme as well as a machine turf scheme, and generally the poorer areas had a prosperity that had never come their way before. Now with this huge bill, the standard of these areas has been reduced, the young people who were employed at home have gone away and have been lost to the country and the question the people ask is: "What is being done with the money?" That is the question which we in this House, as representatives, put to the Minister. The national debt when the war broke out was somewhere in the region of £70,000,000 and when the war was over and we handed over the Government, it was £95,000,000. That is to say, that in the whole period of nine years from 1939 to the end of 1947, during all that terrible emergency and war period, the national debt was increased by only £25,000,000. Now, in two years, the present Government has increased the national debt by a further £50,000,000. Fianna Fáil carried on with an increase of £25,000,000 during the war. We are entitled to ask on what grounds such an enormous increase in borrowing can be justified, in view of the fact that in rural areas employment has decreased.

I do not think I could offer any fairer comment on this Budget than the comment that was made by the Irish Times a day or two after the Budget appeared. They gave a very non-committal summary of its provisions and this very interesting statement was made. It made some reference to the Minister's conservative outlook on finance and said that the financial proposals “represented a thoroughly sensible policy of masterly inactivity.” I do not think I could add anything to that.

Minister for Agriculture (Mr. Dillon)

Every country town in Ireland provides an example of the elderly gentleman who usually wears a black bowler hat, who has become so conservative that he fears to use credit and in almost every town there is the enterprising younger man who knows his business, who is not afraid to use credit when he can use it advantageously, and who is fated ultimately to acquire the business of the elderly gentleman with the bowler hat. His premises grow rustier and dustier, his windows grow more full of flies and he has a comforting feeling that his savings in the bank are rather larger than they were. The feeling of safety he enjoys consequentially grows greater every day, until he finally reduces his expenses to the purchase of a crust of bread and a glass of water; he does not buy boots and so does not come out any more; and ultimately, when nobody has seen him for two and a half years, he is respectably buried in a lonely grave and 90 per cent. of his neighbours have forgotten he exists, but his intestate estate reveals that he has £7,942 to which cousins in Australia are the sole heirs.

The question we have to decide is whether this country has reached a stage in its career when it should assume the black bowler hat of prudence so that its independence may be buried in a solitary grave and somebody better equipped to use the resources of this land shall take our country over and do with it what we might have done. I am quite clear that this Government is right in making up its mind that our people desire to use the resources of which we dispose to the maximum advantage, that our people desire to pay what they owe and that our people desire to ensure that every year an expanding production and a more effective utilisation of our resources will secure not for a few wealthy residents but for all our people a higher standard of living than they have hitherto enjoyed.

I anticipate no prospect of a group of millionaires in Ireland and my advice to any young man or woman who considers that the supreme goal of life on this earth is the attainment of monumental wealth to go elsewhere in search of it, for there is no prospect of any individual becoming a millionaire in Ireland. I hope there never will be. There is no possibility in this country of one man owning hundreds of square miles and thousands of men and their families getting a bare existence out of that land, while the owner, through the medium of rack rents, enjoys perennial wealth. We put an end to that in Ireland and it will never be allowed to come back. But when we put an end to a situation which created an aggregation of great wealth in few hands, unless we were fools, and there were those who hoped we would be fools, we would not tolerate the consequences of terminating the possibilities that arise from the control of wealth by individuals, because, if you have no fountain of capital from which to irrigate natural resources, national production must wither and die away.

If you are resolved that in so far as is practicable every man shall be his own master, shall have his own home and own his own farm, you have to reconcile yourself to the fact that such small proprietors do not ordinarily dispose of great capital sums as do those who own hundreds of square miles or great factories or vast properties. But a wise democracy contituted of property-owning men and women replaces the characteristics of an uncontrolled capitalist State with the power of the people's Government, acting for the people, prudently to use credit so that the resources of the State may be made to fructify. In the last analysis, everybody in Ireland, whether farmer, doctor, lawyer, trade unionist, shopkeeper or otherwise, lives out of the land. The only natural resource of consequence the Irish people have is 12,000,000 acres of arable, or potentially arable, land. On the user of that land and on the volume of production from that land will be determined the standard of living of all our people.

Deputies who are familiar with rural Ireland will long ago have noted this significant fact, that one of the relics of the landlord system in this country is the isolated instances where demesnes and home farms of the landlords have in them systems of field drains and ditches as well designed and as efficient as any in the world, and one may often ask oneself why did that degree of development stop at the farmer's fence and extend not a yard into the rented land where the people lived?

The answer is grim but true. It was our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers who made those drains at a penny a day, and they could not have been made except by famine labour— it would have cost too much. This Government resolved that the grandsons and the great-grandsons of those who dug those drains for a penny a day would, in our time, enjoy that same amenity on their own holdings, with the comforting knowledge that those who made them would be amongst the most highly-paid technicians in the society in which we live, because those drains and those improvements are being extended to every acre of tenanted land in Ireland to-day, not by famine labour at a penny a day, but by great machines operated by highly-paid technicians, every one of which machines it was possible to buy because we borrowed money.

Let us face this fact. If we had been afraid to borrow, we might have sat down and reconciled ourselves to the fact that, for all time, whatever individual effort might attempt upon the land of Ireland, not 70 per cent. of a just return upon the effort would ever be available to our people, because the land they worked on was robbed of its capacity to produce by the fact that it was not in a condition to produce what it could and should do. There is not a Deputy who does not know that, if the instrument of credit were not brought to the relief of that situation, that work could never be done and we would have passed into the ignoble category of the gentlemen in the black bowler hats turning green and gradually going down hill because they prefer to be misers rather than to be enterprising businessmen. Is there any Deputy who deplores the investment of our people's savings in increasing the capacity of the land to produce? If there is, is there any Deputy who can suggest any other method by which we could have made the land do what we are making it do to-day than the method we employ? Is there anyone who doubts that, if by investing in the improvement of land you can make that land produce 30 per cent. more than it otherwise would for the same effort, it is the essence of folly to forbear from the investment?

It is tragic to hear a Deputy like Deputy Bartley hugging himself in the happy thought that when Fianna Fáil were in office borrowings were microscopic. Of course they were. That is what has us the way we are. There was not a drain dug in the whole of Ireland since 1931. Is not that an interesting fact?

Mr. P.J. Burke

That is absolutely wrong and you know that it is wrong.

Mr. Dillon

When they came to face the prospect of the possibility of a wide expansion in land improvement at the end of the war, no time was lost in drafting an Arterial Drainage Bill which was presented in this House as the foundation upon which was to be built a programme of drainage hitherto without precedent in Ireland. But what was it in fact? It was an Act of this House which finally delivered the Board of Works from the annoyance of people asking them why they would not drain the land of the country. It was an Act which provided that no drainage might be done in rural Ireland which did not constitute part of the drainage of a catchment area of an arterial river; that no officer in the Board of Works would be engaged, directly or indirectly, in drainage work except as part of an arterial drainage scheme as defined by that Act; and the programme of drainage envisaged under that Act held out the hope that about the year 2150 they would be getting round to some of the larger rivers. It was a fine comprehensive programme to avert unemployment in the 22nd century.

That was not our idea of getting on with the job, the fundamental difference between us and Fianna Fáil being that we believe in the land and they do not. That is the fundamental difference—that we on this side of the House do not believe in the proposition so often enunciated by the Fianna Fáil Party, that there is nothing that our people are capable of producing in this country which cannot be produced better and cheaper somewhere else. I have heard that doctrine enunciated time and again by members of the Fianna Fáil Party and it is the key to their whole miserly, beggarman's approach to life. They expect everyone in this country to be a beggar for charity, because they proceed on the assumption that our people and our country are incompetent to compete with any other people or country in the world.

On this side of the House we are not interested in any production in Ireland which has not the promise of being better in quality and better in value than anything else produced in the world. We do not believe in inducing our people to embark on competition with the mass-production industries of the United States of America; but we know that there is in our people's natural ability, that there is in the climate and soil of this country ability to produce a wide range of articles for domestic consumption and foreign exports that can take their place in any market in the world, price for price and quality for quality.

I, for one, as Minister for Agriculture in this country, would never wish to see produced on the land of Ireland any agricultural product that was not equal or superior to the best that any other country had to offer. It is in the conviction that we are well able to attain that standard that this country is resolved to make the physical qualities of the land the farmers own equal, if not superior to, those of the land their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were constrained to improve for the landlords who are no more. After the land has been restored, are we revolutionaries if we maintain that those who work the land and produce the wealth out of which all the rest of the people live are entitled to have the minimum amenities which their city-dwelling neighbours enjoy? Is it wrong to say that people living in the country shall be entitled to wash and cook and clean without having to carry every drop of water 50 or 100 yards from a neighbouring well? Is it wrong to make provision, where the farmer is prepared to make his contribution too, to enable the farmer to put running water within reach of his wife, when the humblest resident of any town or city in the country would consider life without that amenity unthinkable? Is it shortsighted or reckless to bring within the reach of the small farmer the amenity of light and power? I will defend the proposition that it is an affront to a human being to force any man to do by physical effort that which he can make a machine under his control do. Is it wrong to provide on the small farms of Ireland that small farmers who, God knows, have enough physical effort already, if they are to live at all, should be relieved of so much of it as they can be relieved of by the installation of electricity on their holding? I know that there are certain aristocratically-minded persons who ask: "What kind of life are we living in when country people want electricity?" But the bulk of the Deputies of this House come from small farmer stock. Few Deputies of this House are more than two generations removed from homes in rural Ireland where mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers were constrained to perform every task with great physical effort. I do not think they think it wrong to lighten that burden hereafter, or that the money required to do so would be improvidently spent.

Is it wrong to build schools? There are schools in this country that would bring the blush of shame to a primitive African tribe. They are broken down horrors. Now, we can do one of two things. We can embark upon a 50-year programme and we can reckon that in a wrong school of that kind, 5 per cent. of the pupils will get tuberculosis or some other disease and die. We can reckon that 50 years is two generations and that, therefore, twice 5 per cent. must die. Or, we can say: "If my child were one of the 5 per cent., it would not console me to know that 95 per cent. of the children had passed through that school unscathed. My concern would be that my child was dead and need not have died." Is it effeminate on the part of this Government to say that they will not recoil from borrowing in order to ensure that those children shall not die? I think not. I know that there was a view strongly held and stoutly enforced that financial rectitude demanded in certain circumstances that you should not build new schools or replace old ones until you had the cash in hand and that if that meant a limited number of schools, well, you could not have omelettes if you did not break eggs. I want to state quite clearly the view of this Government on that. No appeal to financial rectitude will induce this Government to purchase a reputation untarnished in a financier's estimate by the expenditure of the life of a single child of any citizen in this State. We intend here and now, so fast as resources and manpower will allow, to eliminate the school calculated to destroy the health of children learning in it; to obliterate the slum and to establish citizens of this country in tolerable homes; to build such sanatoria as may be required effectively to control tuberculosis in this country; to provide such hospital accommodation as will ensure that no poor person will want for the attention which may mean the difference between life and death. Now, the alternative is this. Let us face it. There are in this country an ascertainable number of persons at present suffering from tuberculosis. We can make a reasonably probable statistical prophecy of the number of people who will die of tuberculosis over the next ten years, given that we do not add to the number of sanatoria at present available. Now, we may make up our minds to let them die because we will not build more than may be charged upon the annual revenue without overburdening the taxpayer and exhausting his capacity to produce tax revenue. There are a great many people in this world who accept that doctrine as the minimum of financial rectitude and economic prudence and, when pressed, they will say that it is better because, if you try to avert these deaths, the economic consequences may be so grave that infinitely greater dangers will supervene.

Captain Cowan

Does the Minister seriously suggest that that view is held?

Mr. Dillon

It is, undoubtedly, in many orthodox circles in this country. Take my friend, Deputy Hickey. Sometimes his heart burns with righteous indignation against the hard-hearted capitalists and money changers. I often wonder, when I hear Deputy Hickey getting so indignant over defects which, I agree with him, are well calculated to excite indignation, where does he discern those defects in Ireland. If you were to call together the directors of all the banks in Ireland, I doubt if you would find a single man amongst them who would not agree with you and say: "Of course, you must build and pay for it over 50 or 60 years as circumstances will allow." But that is not true the world over. It is a shocking and an appalling thing to visit a country where the people who work the land are living at a subsistence level which we in this country would consider too low for a store bullock—people who have no amenities and who are expected to accept death in their families as a normal risk of their daily lives.

Mr. Davin

Is that behind the Iron Curtain?

Mr. Dillon

No. God knows I wish that were the only place, and it would be a great consolation to me if I thought it was. What appalled me was to see it on this side of the Iron Curtain. God help the people thus afflicted. They are denied access to education, even to the amenities that an animal should have. Ignorance, neglect and oppression may well deliver them into the hands of those who will some day exploit them to their own detriment and to the detriment of the world. If that comes to pass, it will come to pass as a result of that outlook which I suggest scarcely exists at all. The truth is there are not conservatives in Ireland. I suppose if the truth were told some Deputies look upon me as a prop of conservative rectitude, but I am very conscious of the fact, because I have a very clear understanding of it, that if there is anything wrong with me it is that I am a dangerous radical.

Mr. Little

You are dangerous, anyhow.

Mr. Dillon

Deputy Little is all a-tremble. He regards me as a public danger and I sympathise with him, I am sure. Hardness of heart, indifference to human suffering, valuing money and wealth at a higher value than human happiness—I think these things are very rare in most parts of Ireland, and we should be thankful for it. There is a danger that besets this country, and it is not that we will do too little, but that we will try to do too much. There is one controlling limit that we cannot change and if we lose sight of it we could wreck the whole ship. Our policy should be that wherever there is a legitimate necessity pressing and men and material available to abolish it, we should go about the job there and then. But if we ever lose sight of those unchangeable limitations and seek to do at the one time twice as much as available hands and material are there to effect, we can end up in a wretched, futile morass of half-completed jobs, none of which we will be able to bring to realisation.

There is no single task that lies before us that we do not certainly have the means to complete if we but use those means with prudence and resolution. But if we allow crack-pots, publicity hunters, and vote seekers to dissipate the maximum effort our people are capable of making, for a whole series of irrelevant reasons, the immense programme on which this country has now embarked can be completely shipwrecked. But it will not be shipwrecked under this Government because if the pressure to wreck that programme becomes irresistible this Government will fall since the members of it will never yield to pressure of that kind. The reason is that we believe in the policy in which we have asked the people of the country to join us. We know where we are going. We have no guilty conscience as to the size of our effort and, rather than see it wrecked under political pressures from one quarter or another, this Government will make way most cheerfully for those complaisant vote catchers who will be more concerned for place and profit than they will be for the ultimate objective of making this country the kind of country it ought to be if we, the Irish people, are to acknowledge it as our own.

Forestry—I am often amused at the despairing hopes of some of the opponents of this Government: when all fruit fails, they hope to see cracks or fissures in the interests of forestry clash with those of agriculture. But they will not see that clash so long as this Government is in office. All the money that is necessary for the establishment of economic forest land in Ireland and its development is available and will be used to create that asset for our people, that tangible asset of timber and that invisible, but no less precious, asset of a forest background to an agricultural valley to avert the flood problems which would otherwise arise. The truth is that, properly appreciated, the possibilities of the immediate future are dazzling for our people. They are dazzling because our people want the right things. They do not yearn for the kind of wealth that a great industrial civilisation dangles before its people as the prize. What they want is happiness, peace and dignity in their homes. I do not exaggerate when I say that there is no country in the world that can provide these in more abundance for its people than we can. To have a part in the making of that supreme design in our time is, I do not deny, an exciting and inspiring occupation. It would want to be because if there is one thing perfectly certain in the world it is that no Minister of an Irish Government will ever grow rich working for the Irish people. No one but a fool would take a Minister's salary in this country for the work a Minister must do if he did not feel that he had a part in something which he would be proud to play were he to get no salary for it at all.

All that depends on this pedestrian consideration: in the last analysis you cannot take a gallon from a pint pot; in the last analysis, Deputy Hickey notwithstanding, you cannot spin wealth from the ether overhead. Wealth is the product of labour and the two things can never be dissociated. Silly men waste their labour on unnecessary physical effort or on unremunerative raw material. Thus, a great part of what that effort should produce is lost. Wise men rehabilitate their land, fertilise it, bring within the reach of those who work it all that science and ingenuity can provide so as to increase the effectiveness of the effort that they are about to undertake. But ultimately, be they wise or foolish, their ultimate destiny depends upon whether they pay what they owe, upon whether they understand that wealth is the product of labour.

Mr. Davin

Pay as they go.

Mr. Dillon

Pay as they go. That is the secret. If we borrow £20,000,000 this year, or even £40,000,000, and effectively appropriate from the national income every year the necessary sum to amortise that debt over a reasonable period—say 30 years—the financial rock upon which this country stands is as unshakable as the Rock of Gibraltar. But if in any unhappy day our people having activated the power-house of credit to their service, believe that it can long be made to function, and if they fail to pay their annual tribute, the lubricant of honesty, the whole machine will shatter, not only itself but the nation which it serves.

This Government will spend upon the tasks that await our doing whatever sums are necessary to bring unemployed hands and idle materials together to satisfy the legitimate requirements of our people. Whatever these sums may be, confident in the increased capacity of our people to earn and produce, we yield the annual tithe requisite honestly to pay the debt. I admit it calls for faith, not only in our people's capacity, but in our people's honesty as well.

Mr. Hickey

Should it not do to pay the capital rather than have to pay tribute on the capital as we are doing?

Mr. Dillon

I would like some day if the Deputy and I could sit down together and browse in the pastures of St. Thomas Aquinas, there to find mutual solace for our natural disinclination to pay rent for money.

Mr. Hickey

We have gone away from that for a long time.

Mr. Dillon

The unfortunate thing is that we did not go away alone.

Mr. Hickey

That does not make it right. Because we do not do it alone is no reason why we should do it.

Mr. Dillon

It is not always a wise thing to glory in one's rectitude and resolutely to keep out of step with the whole world. It is better very often to keep in step, always provided that no fundamental principle is compromised, and hope that you can gradually ease humanity back on the path of rectitude. If you fall out of step, you are alone.

Captain Cowan

Like the Minister for Agriculture at one time.

Mr. Dillon

But who never was very apprehensive that those from whom he was separated pro tem would see him alone for very long. I agree with Deputy Hickey that that is the truth. I remember when the late Deputy O'Donnell was in this House, we used to think he was daft because no matter what subject came up for discussion Deputy O'Donnell introduced the necessity of providing water for rural houses. I thought like others that he was daft, but at a later period, I had the courage to go down to his home town of Clonmel and to admit that I had come to realise how profoundly wise he was and how that wisdom was born of an intimate knowledge of the conditions of rural life. It was no small satisfaction to me at a later stage to be the humble means of putting into operation some of the amenities which he had advocated in this House.

I think, if the truth is told, Deputy Hickey is right, that the payment of rent for money is fundamentally wrong. I think Christianity is greatly the loser that the rigidity of that doctrine was not maintained down to our day but I think it is foolish, in the cause of abstract principles, to recoil from the opportunity of abating urgent evils and to engage in high philosophical discourses while children die and people starve when, with the instruments we have got, we have the means to come to their assistance now. Perhaps we could go more expeditiously and with less effort if ideal conditions obtained. They do not; we do not live in an ideal world. We live in an imperfect world. Why wait to do the things that want doing until we have made the world we live in perfect, for if we do, those whom we could help now, will have long sunk under the burden of their woes before we come to help them? Inexpertly, inadequately perhaps, but as best we may, this Government is going to the task of raising the standard of living of our people with all the resources we command and we go to it telling the people that, in the situation in which we to-day stand, an essential concomitant of using public credit is a readiness annually to finance from tax revenue an appropriate annual sum to redeem whatever borrowing is done over an agreed term of years, which I think should rarely exceed 30. On that basis nothing can stop us. If we abandon that basis we imperil our whole design.

This last word. The revenue of this State is, and will continue to be, out of our expanding production amply abundant to finance a comprehensive policy of this kind, always provided that we have the moral courage to eliminate the remnants of slush that were bequeathed to us by Fianna Fáil. The practice grew up in the last 16 years that wherever you had a troublesome bunch, who could put on the heat, the best way to quieten them was to give them jobs: "If you cannot ‘bate' them, buy them." There was established a regular organisation under which, if things got too hot in any particular district, you would build a bog road or you would dig a drain though you were quite well aware that it would sink within 12 months. If you happened to express that fear you would be told: "Oh, you poor gom, what do you care what happens in 12 months. All we want to do is to employ men now and the least work they do and the better they are paid, the better it will be for our Party." That outlook has created in our countryside a loathsome tradition in recent years. I have seen men doing relief works most carefully measure the depth of mud in the bottom of the drain and precisely bisect it so that they would be sure to leave enough mud in the bottom to ensure that there would be another relief grant to do the same work within 12 months. If they had devoted one half their skill they displayed in that bisection, to the performance of their work, they would probably have earned more eventually but there was that loathsome doctrine, something cute, something clever, to get something for nothing, that Fianna Fáil introduced into rural Ireland. If that loathsome philosophy remains a charge on the resources of our people, it can well come to pass that our resources will not be adequate to meet the financing of the credit we employ in honourable work but if every man who takes a job takes it on the understanding that if he gets a fair day's pay he will do a fair day's work, and if every man knows he is not employed as a relief worker or a dole man, that he is not regarded as a burden on his neighbours but that the community to which he belongs rejoice that his hands are there to help in the work that is waiting to be done, then the day will be forever gone when there was permanently in our community a body of men who were a perennial nightmare to their neighbours. Why do we ever speak of unemployed men as the problem of our society? Do they not constitute the opportunity of our time? If instead of ever thinking of them as a problem we glory in their presence as an opportunity, what can we not do if we have the men to do the work? What could we do if the men were gone and the scope of our exertions was further handicapped, narrowed and straitened by the want of men?

There is work here for every man in Ireland and for many that return from abroad, wherever they went during the last ten or 15 years—every one of them —if the programme outlined by this Government is to be completed in the next ten years. If everyone will do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, if everyone will recognise that they are not working, in the last analysis, for somebody else but for themselves, that all the money this Government disposes of belongs to the ordinary average citizen of this State, that this Government has no money of its own to give anybody but that it has the authority of Oireachtas Éireann to appropriate the people's money to certain work that requires to be done, that willingness honestly to work for honest pay, to a good end, should make it possible for this community to employ every employable man in town and country. Let us not go on calling up out of the vasty deep ghosts of multitudes of unemployed. Instead of talking vaguely about the unemployed, it should be the duty of every Deputy on this side of the House, if he comes on people who are unemployed, to busy himself in the task of finding out why they are unemployed.

Captain Cowan

It is very easy.

Mr. Hickey

It is because of the system.

Mr. Dillon

I would like to find them because, so far as I know, there is developing, if there has not already come upon us, a volume of work which requires to be done and, in certain areas, certainly, there are not enough hands to do it.

Captain Cowan

That is in rural areas, not in cities.

Mr. Dillon

I know—I was not born or reared a thousand miles away— Lower Gardiner Street. I know Dominick Street. I know Gloucester Street, Railway Street and Cumberland Street, and I often thought the time had come—and I am not altogether despairing of it that it is going to come fairly soon—when this Government will say to itself: "We want to know why is it, not that a big amorphous lump of people are unemployed, but why each family that appears to be poor or destitute is so circumstanced."

We want to know if it is because, with all the social services that are available, they do not fit in, because we want to provide somebody who will be the almoner for our less fortunate neighbours and whose instructions will be: "Find out if they cannot be made employed and independent. If that is not practicable, find out why the existing social services are not making such provision as would relieve them of destitute poverty and, if they do not fit into either plan, take power from us to be the curator of hard cases." It is a sound legal maxim that hard cases make bad law. I will accept that maxim provided at the same time there is established good law plus a curator of hard cases.

Captain Cowan

Does the Minister accept this, that every day of the week I am recommending to the Parliamentary Secretary behind him men for employment in this city and he cannot employ them?

Mr. Dillon

It is no surprise to me that if every man available for work be recommended to the Department of State for employment that the Department of State should find itself constrained to say: "We cannot employ him; we have no job available for him" but, it would amaze me, with the housing, the hospitals, the roads, the land rehabilitation, the farm buildings, the afforestation, the schools, the water supplies, the rural electrification, with all the attendant services over and above the direct employment thereby engendered, that gradually men are not drawn into the stream of employment that undoubtedly exists. There are 12,000 men working on the land rehabilitation project.

Mr. Hickey

There are 64,000 on the unemployment register in the country.

Mr. Dillon

There are 12,000 men working on the land rehabilitation project. There was nobody working on the land rehabilitation project before.

Captain Cowan

I accept that as good.

Mr. Dillon

This is where I want the Deputy's help. Instead of feeling that the best means of meeting the unspeakable misery that it is to a man who wants to work and cannot find work to do is to lament and deplore the fact that something effective is not done, we should try to see if we cannot devise a scheme whereby those who are mobile —take an unmarried fellow with no family responsibilities—might not be induced to work some distance from his home where labour is scarce and difficult to get, so as to make room for a man who is married and has family responsibilities in the job near home. Remember, we cannot have freedom and the right to command men where they earn their living at the same time. The Deputy will remember that in Great Britain they had direction of labour.

Mr. McQuillan

You have to pay them better than they are paid.

Mr. Dillon

I want to submit to the Deputy, at great risk to my own political future, that there is a middle course. I do not believe in directing labour, because I love freedom for great and humble, rich and poor, but there comes a time when you are entitled to say to a man, great or humble, rich or poor, who sits down on his own doorstep and says: "When I say I want a job, what I mean is, I want a job within 250 yards of my own home," that he is looking for the impossible.

Captain Cowan

Nobody wants that.

Mr. Dillon

Mind you, there are some people who want that. Where you have got a man who is sincerely looking for work and who is prepared to take some trouble to get it what you have got to do is to try to bring the man and the job together. I think the jobs are there. I know that in the City of Galway it is becoming necessary to bring the fellows in from the country in lorries because there are not sufficient hands to undertake the work that is progressing in that city. What is on my mind is that we shall not have the moral courage and resolution to complete the job at present in progress, that is, the marshalling of the capital projects we are resolved to complete. That danger is with us. If there are perhaps three big projects in one area, each urgently wanted, each with its own group desperately anxious to see it under way, all pressing strongly that the matter should forthwith be put in hands, the danger is that we, yielding to that pressure, will concede what we know to be impossible, the completion of the three tasks in one district at the one time, thus creating an acute famine of labour in one centre while work in another centre where there is relative unemployment is, inevitably, postponed. In fact the work should be undertaken in that area and two works in the first area while the third work in the first area is postponed. The Deputy may rest assured that at this present moment and for some weeks past the map of this country is under careful and constant review with the object of ensuring that in no given place will men and materials run out where there is money and a need to be filled, but that the need, the money, the men and the materials will effectively be brought together there and wherever else it is wanted and that no clash from lack of planning or prudent foresight will result in that most exasperating famine of labour, a famine in one place and irremediable unemployment in the other. Personally, I believe that over the next short period the drawing on the available hands will provide virtually full employment to the bulk of our people.

That does not dispose, in my judgment, with the remaining problem with which the Deputy and I are familiar in Meath Street, Cumberland Street and Dominick Street, that is, the destitute poor. There should not be any destitute poor in this community. At present it appears that our means of reaching them is not succeeding in its purpose. I would like to see in every district of this city a trained almoner whose duty I would describe: "First see if you can put that family on its feet; secondly, if illness or some other consideration makes that out of the question invoke the social services. If you discover, as I believe is the case, that you are dealing with one of the hard cases for whom no provision is made in bad laws and for whom therefore no petition can be made, know yourself to have an overriding function as the curator of hard cases and do for that unprovided case what it is necessary to do. Then come back and get permanent sanction for the ad hoc arrangement you were constrained to make.” In am never easy in my mind at this moment so long as we continue in the knowledge that there may be individuals in our community destitute and poor for whom no provision in existing circumstances under the law can be made. I do not believe that anybody wants that but I do not believe that anybody except an almoner armed with the wide discretion I suggest could grapple with it with any results. I believe that a person charged with that definite task among her neighbours in a given area, over and above the relief of that type of distressing case, would also be counsellor, friend and helper to a lot of people to whom it would be a great advantage to have such assistance from time to time.

I never believed this country to be safer and to have brighter prospects than it has to-day. Let the Deputies who work themselves into a frenzy over the alleged invasion of this country by foreigners desiring to buy land and invest their wealth in it pause from the fury of their indignation to ask themselves this question: what rich man ever stored his money in a sinking ship?

Mr. McQuillan

They will sink the ship all right.

Mr. Dillon

I will debate that at some other time with the Deputy. But is there not an interesting aspect of that question? When wealthy men proceed to deposit their treasure——

Captain Cowan

Do you call it treasure?

Mr. Dillon

They think it is treasure. They are usually well informed and they look around the world for a safe place permanently to domicile themselves and that which is nearest their hearts. It may not be an acceptable tribute, but it is a tribute none the less.

Mr. Davin

How many will they push out?

Mr. Dillon

I beg the Deputy to concentrate his attention on this significance of these events: some of our conservative financial friends on the far side of the House have cried havoc and declared that this Government treads the path of reckless extravagance that leads to inevitable bankruptcy. I am directing the attention of the House to the fact that despite the apprehensions of the economists of Fianna Fáil, the eminently practical owners of tangible money bags, having scanned the world horizon not infrequently, arrive with their money bags in this country which the Fianna Fáil economists declare is hell bent for bankruptcy and woe. The money boys are not bad judges as to whether their bankers are headed for bankruptcy and woe or for prosperity and the safety begotten of sound foundations. I would invite some of my colleagues to temper their growing rage at this largely imagined invasion by the consoling thought that this must be a wonderful country, safe, prosperous and happy.

Captain Cowan

Conservative.

Mr. Hickey

It is deeper than that.

Mr. Dillon

Even conservative. That draws the money barons to its shore. Mind you, for a country that has 20,000,000 of its people the owners of much property in America and 20,000,000 more the owners of a good part of the surface of the earth outside Ireland, it is queer to-day when we are stricken with terror at the prospect of an invasion by a few middle-aged financiers.

As far as I am concerned, anyone who lives in this country within the four corners of the criminal law lives in a free country and will get the full protection of the law, that and no more. I am much more concerned with some of the native tribes, who would build themselves up again in our time into landlords with attendant serfs, than I am with the terrible invader who threatens us with a bag of money and frightens us with the jingle of coin. Men that set land for money are noisome to me, whether their name is McSweeney or Jones. It is as old as history that the guilty people in one's own household are often too anxious to divert attention from their own activities on to a foreign scapegoat, hoping that in the unreasoning hatred of the stranger the iniquity of the domestic circle will be overlooked. The landlords are landlords to me, whencever they may come. The Land League was born on a parish priest's estate, albeit that it ended on Clanricarde. From whatever croft they were, whencever they may come, landlords are landlords to me and I will not be diverted from that fundamental concept by being warned of the imminence of our people's ruin by the arrival of any Persians from Persia or Greeks from Greece. There is only one danger our people have to fear and that is the re-emergence of the landlord; and, with God's help, however often they may emerge, we will find a means to put them down again.

For me, people who see in Ireland the safest, the happiest and the best country in the world are a good sign. They say that all good land can be recognised by the number of thistles that grow upon it. Sometimes it is necessary to cut to thin the thistles out of it, but it would be a foolish man who would pray that the day would ever dawn when his land would not grow thistles any more. God grant that this country will always be so run that those who look around the horizons of the world, free to choose any country in the world for their permanent abode, will choose Ireland, knowing it to be the happiest and best country so long as its people are given a chance by having even a tolerable Government.

Mr. Aiken

I can assure the Minister for Agriculture, on behalf of Clann na Poblachta, the two Labour Parties and Clann na Talmhan, that they are perfectly satisfied and that he need not go to the trouble of lecturing them here for a couple of hours and appealing for their continued support. They are going to give it, even if the Minister turns all the land of this country into a thistle ranch.

The Minister for Agriculture attempted here earlier in his speech to get the people to believe that there was something virtuous in borrowing, but towards the end of his speech he reminded the Deputies, Clann na Poblachta and the other Parties of something that the Minister for Finance said in his Budget speech. We have heard great programmes put before the people, of all that is to be built and of all the evil that is to be done away with out of borrowed money. It can be done on borrowed money, but you will take political responsibility for taxing for it. The Minister for Finance, supported here by the Minister for Agriculture this afternoon, indicated to a number of his own colleagues that this programme may not be carried out, that however desirable it is that no child should get tuberculosis from attending a bad school, however desirable it may be that hospitals should be built for the cure of tuberculosis, if it cannot be done on borrowed money it will not be done. The Minister for Finance, concluding his Budget speech, on page 65, said:—

"The large programme of State investment which is being undertaken to develop the national economy must not be allowed to over-tax our resources or trench upon the capital needs of private enterprise."

The large programme of State investment which is being dangled before every section of our community is to be carried out this year by borrowed money and if it cannot be done on borrowed money, as the Minister for Finance, supported by the Minister for Agriculture, said, it is not going to be done. The question is how long, how far we should go with this borrowing in an inflationary situation. That we can borrow money to the extent of £40,000,000 or £50,000,000 this year no one denies. It is as easy as rolling off a log. The Minister has £50,000,000 in the State funds of one kind or another—the Post Office Savings Bank or various other funds. He has £21,000,000 in the Counterpart Fund of the Marshall Aid. We can borrow somewhere between £50,000,000 and £60,000,000 this year, if we like, but what is going to happen next year, if we do, and in the year after that? What is going to happen if we borrow this £40,000,000 and pump it into a situation which the Minister says is inflationary? We can borrow £40,000,000.

Mr. Dillon

I wonder if the Deputy knows the meaning of inflation?

Mr. Aiken

I did not once interrupt the Minister for Agriculture.

Mr. Dillon

I beg the Deputy's pardon.

Mr. Aiken

The Minister for Agriculture should have addressed that question to the Minister for Finance. He should have asked him whether a situation is not dangerously inflationary in which we depend for the balance of our payments to the tune of £69,000,000 on invisible trade and whether it is not dangerously inflationary when we fail to balance our international payments, visible and invisible, to the tune of at least £10,000,000, plus, I take it, the £18,000,000 or so from Marshall Aid funds. We can continue to unbalance our international payments to the tune of £69,000,000 a year for slightly over three years. It has been estimated by the best economist I know in the country, an economist who has published books and papers on the matter, that our net balance of investments abroad is somewhere around a couple of hundred million pounds. We have a gross investment abroad of £450,000,000 or so, but the net amount is about £225,000,000, so that if we get really desperately anxious about our creditor situation and want to get out of that undesirable condition, we have merely to continue to unbalance our payments to the extent of £60,000,000 or £70,000,000 a year for three years and we will be in that grand position which a number of Deputies want to reach of being a debtor nation—somebody touching his neighbours for the means to carry on.

Mr. Davin

You are canvassing for the national loan now?

Mr. Aiken

Deputy Davin need not try to interrupt me, because if it took a week to get said what I have to say, I would take it. If Deputy Davin and his friends want to get rid of our creditor position, they can do it within three years by having a visible adverse balance of trade corresponding to what we had in 1949 without some invisible items to balance it. In order to get rid of it, we can get the Minister for External Affairs to pursue that campaign of his of taxing the tourists, of cutting out the tourists—the "spivs" as Clann na Poblachta used to call them. Get rid of the "spivs" and get rid of the interest on our external assets and the job is done. We will be a nice comfortable debtor nation in a few years' time.

Mr. Dillon

I shall have to buy the Deputy a bowler hat.

Mr. Aiken

I want to tell the Minister for Agriculture that he can keep the old bowler hat he has at the back of the wardrobe. I suppose he has relegated it to that safe and secure position since he became an optimist. What we in Fianna Fáil want to do is to look the facts of the economic and financial situation straight in the face and act accordingly. There is no one here need think that the idea of borrowing money rather than taxing to get money to spend is something new. It has been there from the beginning of time. Many Governments have ruined their peoples through that system and have brought about serious revolutionary changes. One of the causes of the troubles the French people have been stuck in for the past few years is that, unfortunately for themselves, they had Governments—I am not blaming these Governments; they could not get the necessary strength—who had to resort to this business of borrowing from the Central Bank of France rather than ask the French people to pay the taxes necessary to meet the ordinary current costs of government.

If the Minister wishes to look up the figures, he will find that they borrowed, in 1946, some billions of francs. A billion of francs is not so very much, but the result was that, at the end of 1946, the cost of living was exactly double what it was at the beginning. Here that will not happen because we are not a closed economy and the inflationary consequences of borrowing from people who normally save, even if we did it that way, and giving it out to those who are going to spend immediately, would not, perhaps, be all reflected in an increase in the cost of living, an increase in the price costs of various commodities, but would certainly be represented by either an increased price cost or an inflow of foreign goods, or both.

Mr. Dillon

Well?

Mr. Aiken

I am merely stating a proposition and I am not prepared to give the Minister a lecture to prove every simple proposition I propose to make. I state here as an uncontradictable fact that any inflationary circulation of money here would be reflected in either of two ways or in both—an increase in the cost of living, in the price cost of commodities sold here, plus an added import of foreign goods not compensated by exports.

Minister for External Affairs (Mr. MacBride)

Is there any evidence of inflation at the moment?

Mr. Aiken

The Minister for Finance says there is.

Mr. MacBride

No.

Mr. Aiken

I have not got very much meas on that Minister's financial knowledge, but I will state the proposition as the Minister for Finance sees it, as he stated it in his Budget speech, for those who know something about the matter to judge. The Minister said that there has been a slight increase in the lost of living—not very much— but that there has been, at the same time, a deficit in our balance of payments to the tune of £10,000,000, plus another figure which I think he did not take into consideration, a sum of about £18,000,000, representing the net increase in our foreign debt to the United States. We had that disbalance last year when our borrowings were very small, in a year in which the Minister for Finance stated he was going to have such retrenchment that he was going to meet all the expenses of government out of the huge rates of taxation which Fianna Fáil imposed.

I stated that we can get rid of our nice comfortable or uncomfortable creditor position within two or three years if we wish. We can achieve another very nice state of affairs if we continue to pile up the cost on our taxpayers for the payment of interest and sinking fund at the rate we have been doing for the last two years and propose to do this year. The Minister in his Budget speech gave figures which showed that in three years we will have doubled the amount paid out of the Central Fund for interest and sinking fund. Continuing at that rate of geometrical progression, I calculate that we will only have seven or eight years to go before we reach the stage in which we will have to get in some way or other for interest and sinking fund payments a total equal to the amount of the last Fianna Fáil Budget. We can do that. We can start on the road and we can keep on that road for one and a half years with the funds at the disposal of the Minister for Finance. He does not have to ask for one shilling, but he will have to ask somebody to repay it. The Minister for Finance has already shown what he is prepared to do with the funds at his disposal.

Mr. Davin

Get cheap money, and you object to it.

Mr. Aiken

The Minister for Finance has already shown what he is prepared to do with any loose assets left behind by Fianna Fáil. He swept from the Post Office Savings Bank Reserve Fund a sum of £466,000 in order to balance his Budget. Fianna Fáil was responsible for the Government of this country for 16 long years. During those 16 long years we had many years in which we would have been glad to get £466,000 without having to ask the taxpayers for it.

Mr. Madden

You took £750,000 out of the Guarantee Fund.

Mr. Aiken

We did not take this £466,000 from the Post Office Savings Bank Fund although we had power to do it. Power to do it was taken by the last Cumann na nGaedheal Minister for Finance and was operated by him. Although we had an economic war and a war in Europe, we never felt ourselves so badly pressed as to sweep that money out of the Post Office Savings Bank Fund. That money was swept out of the Post Office Savings Bank Fund behind the backs of this Dáil and of the people. When it was finally announced, the Irish Independent accused me of having done it. When it was pointed out to them that it was the present Minister for Finance, they were not quite so offended about this particular financial operation. As I pointed out, if we increased the payments for interest and sinking fund at the rate at which the Minister proposes to operate, and has operated for the last couple of years, we can reach the point in five or six years when our borrowings are going to cost us as much, if we keep on doubling the amount every three years, as the last Fianna Fáil Budget. Then we can see what we can tax to provide for all the other things that we want done.

The Minister for Finance's particular outlook, which was supported by the Minister for Agriculture, that we could not do any of these things like building hospitals or houses unless we can borrow money is not very much out of keeping with the attitude of Fine Gael in the past. The technique has changed somewhat, but the idea is still the same. In 1931, the present Minister for Education, Deputy Mulcahy, who was then Minister for Local Government, when we were urging him to build houses, said they could not build houses until the cost of materials fell, until wages fell to such a point that a house could be built without the subsidy and let at an economic rent. Two Ministers have indicated that however desirable house building, land rehabilitation and hospitals may be, they are not going to meet the cost of these out of taxation. They are not going to have any political unpopularity accrue to them on foot of building houses or hospitals or carrying on land rehabilitation.

The Minister for Agriculture boasted in his usual way about everything that is going to be done for land rehabilitation, how desirable it was, and how he was going to do it. By the way, he said that not a drain had been dug under the Fianna Fáil Government. We had been prepared to dig £500,000 worth of drains under the aegis of the Department of Agriculture in 1948-49, but the present Minister for Agriculture would not spend the money on the land reclamation scheme. We had provided under the land reclamation scheme and the farm improvements scheme a sum of £500,000. We were prepared to ask the people to tax themselves for that because we said it was good work. After we left office, Marshall Aid became available. It was not available the first year and they would not put on a 6d. of tax for that. However desirable it was to do all these things in connection with the land which the Minister for Agriculture fulminated about this evening, they were not prepared to put ½d. tax on anybody for fear it would have bad electoral results. They waited until they got Marshall Aid money.

Even with all this Marshall Aid money, we find according to an answer to a question, that last year the farmers got only between £3,000 and £4,000 out of an expenditure of over £300,000—the American machinery manufacturers got the most of it. If the Minister for Agriculture and those who put him into that job had really been desirous for the improvement of the land rather than some vote-catching stunts, they would have continued with that land reclamation scheme during their first year of office.

Minister for Lands (Mr. Blowick)

The people were not availing of it because the Fianna Fáil reclamation scheme was a cod.

Mr. Aiken

The Minister for Agriculture said that one of the things he had to deal with when he took up office —he gave this as an excuse—was that so many people wanted to avail of it that 30,000 letters were unopened.

Mr. Blowick

That scheme was a cod.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

Order.

Mr. Aiken

We have the word of the Minister for Agriculture for it that when he went into office 30,000 letters relating to that scheme were unopened. Do Deputies not remember that statement by the Minister for Agriculture? According to the financial accounts published by the Minister for Finance —of course, he may not have told the Minister for Lands about this—about £400,000 was spent on it in the last year of Fianna Fáil. But the people got no opportunity of availing of it under the Coalition Government until they got cheap money—until they could put it on the long finger and let somebody else find the money to pay. The Coalition Government are quite prepared to spend money if they can get it for nothing or at no loss of votes.

Mr. Davin

What is wrong with that? Is the Deputy objecting to cheap money?

Mr. Aiken

I want to remind the Minister for Agriculture who has escaped, that he was strongly against the spending of borrowed money or, indeed, the spending of money by the Government, borrowed or otherwise. When Fianna Fáil were spending at the rate of £69,000,000 a year Deputy Dillon, as he was then, came into the Dáil and he almost exploded because of the cost of Government. He made the calculation that we were spending at the rate of £23 per head of the population and that that was £140 per family. He asked me across the House —I was then Minister for Finance and responsible for that awful expenditure which was about half what it is at present—"Do you remember the time you were going around from houseen to houseen in Louth and South Monaghan and how do you think they can afford this expenditure of £140 per family?" If it was that sum then, it is now well over £200 per family and the Minister for Lands, Deputy Davin, or other Deputies can answer the Minister for Agriculture his question. Do they think the people of this country can afford this expenditure of well over £200 per family? I believed that the people in the country could afford to pay the £140 because of the way it was raised and the way in which it was spent—and, in State finance, that is the whole secret of success or disaster. Our people, if they are prepared to face up to it, can divert a great deal of their energy to capital development and other work but if they are not prepared to divert their energy in that direction it cannot be done without the expenditure of a lot of our existing assets of one kind or another. A farmer can, of course, improve his own house and spend the whole year at it by letting his land go to wreck and ruin. The wise farmer is prepared to cultivate his land and at the same time to do some sort of current repairs, in order to enable him to keep the land going to give him the crops and yearly income in order that he can afford to improve his house.

The Government can, by wise finance, organise the energies of the people in such a way that we can have any given reasonable standard of life and that the rest of their energies will be given to capital development. But we cannot spend all our energy on capital development or we will not have any income, any more than the farmer. We in Fianna Fáil were quite prepared to ask the people to tax themselves, that is, to divert a certain portion of their energy for the purpose for which the State Exchequer lends the money. I indicated that if there was a deflationary situation we were prepared, as a Government, by any of the means I outlined, to make provision for an increase in the supply of the money but that if there was a surplus of money in relation to goods we would meet that situation by taking off that surplus. While that is scientifically correct, it is not sometimes politically popular. The gentlemen opposite, who received the reins of Government a couple of years ago—having no past to be proud of and very little future to look forward to—are quite prepared to run the affairs of this State for their comfort in the immediate present. They can carry on at this game for another couple of years. They can saddle, even in an inflationary situation, the future taxpayers of this country with a very gravely increased burden for interest and sinking fund. If they could continue borrowing for seven years instead of three years, at the end of that time we would have to pay £50,000,000 or £60,000,000 by way of interest and sinking fund and if they could spend our internal assets at the rate of £69,000,000 a year we would very quickly get rid of the external assets that weigh so heavily on some of the Deputies.

Seeing that Deputy Davin is here representing the Labour Party, I want to remind him that this Budget of the Minister for Finance contains no provision for excess corporation profits tax. Does that ring any bell in his memory? Did he ever hear of excess corporation profits tax?

Mr. Davin

Of course, I did.

Mr. Aiken

I was deafened by protests when, Minister for Finance, we decided to abolish it here when the Labour Government in England abolished it. If there was one argument responsible for the Fianna Fáil minority in the 1948 election more than another—apart, say, from the allegations of corruption, which were not substantiated—it was this cry of the Labour Party that Fianna Fáil abolished the excess corporation profits tax because they wanted to give £3,500,000 to the "industrial racketeers", as they were called.

Mr. Davin

And threatened to restore the Wages (Standstill) Order.

Mr. Aiken

Fianna Fáil, we were told, could do nothing for the old age pensioners and could not do a lot of other things, but one of the things they were quite prepared to do was to give £3,500,000 of excess corporation profits tax back to the "racketeers". The Tánaiste, during this election—and I take this quotation from the Independent of 24th January—promised certain things down in Limerick. He repeated in Limerick the promises he made on 100 platforms during the election. He said that “by returning a strong Labour Party the people would have a guarantee that excess profits would be taxed to provide money to subsidise prices and thus reduce the cost of commodities”. The people, he said, would have a guarantee. Three Budgets have come and gone and that guarantee has not been fulfilled. The excess corporation profits were not put back, in spite of the Labour Party's promise that they would put them back.

Mr. Davin

The Labour Party is not the Government.

Mr. Aiken

The Labour Party is responsible for the Government. The Labour Party can decide that that Government will go out in the morning. It could so decide, but that is not likely.

Mr. O'Leary

And put your crowd back?

Mr. Aiken

The Labour Party has not lived up to the promises it made, particularly the promise that by returning a strong Labour Party—not as a Government, but as a strong Labour Party—the people would have a guarantee—not a probability, but a guarantee—that excess profits would be taxed to provide money to subsidise prices and thus reduce the cost of commodities.

I listened very attentively to Deputy Martin O'Sullivan the other night. Deputy O'Sullivan pointed out that there are a lot of these excess profits knocking around. He complained to the Minister for Finance on the 4th May—Volume 120, column 1870:—

"If profits were excessive in 1948, there is no doubt that they are higher now. I have had a statement prepared with regard to a number of firms taken at random in what might be described as the industrial group. These were firms concerned with drapery and clothing, textiles, tanning, boots and shoes, confectionery, milling, bakery trade, building materials providers and miscellaneous, totalling 69. The result shows that according to the last returns available for these companies, namely, returns for last year, as against the preceding year, there was an over-all percentage increase of 2.3 per cent. after provision had been made for depreciation, taxation and so on."

So the Labour Party, in order to remain as part of the Government, are prepared, not to give back the £3,500,000 that they said Fianna Fáil gave, but profits at the rate of 2.3 per cent. higher.

The other afternoon, on the Budget debate, the Minister for Finance could not remember whether the members of the Government had voted against the stamp duties tax when it was introduced by myself as Minister for Finance in 1947. The Minister for Finance, Deputy McGilligan, in column 1671, said: "I do not remember," and I said: "We will refresh the Minister's memory on that later." I introduced the Finance Bill of 1947 and into it I put a provision which I thought was advisable to stop the inflationary situation and to attempt to put our buyers here in a favourable position vis-a-vis any foreigners who might come in to buy up property here. What did the present Taoiseach think of it? The Minister for Finance cannot remember. He can refresh his mind by looking up Volume 108, column 1065. He will find there that the present Taoiseach said:—

"I believe that this additional taxation will merely result in making house property dearer and the provision of houses for people who have only limited means impossible."

I should like to ask the Minister is it because he wants to make house property dearer and housing for persons with limited means impossible that he is washing the bibs of the baby that was born in my time? He is taking great care of that particular baby. Does he want to make houses dearer?

Lest the Minister for Finance might think that was only the present Taoiseach's idea about the tax, I would ask him to have a look at column 1072 of the same volume. He will find there that he himself said:—

"...it means that there will be a rise in the already swollen prices being paid for houses."

Is it to bring about a further rise in the swollen prices for houses that the Minister has introduced these amendments to stop any gaps in this particular tax? Deputy Morrissey, the present Minister for Industry and Commerce, in column 1067 of the same volume, after fulminating over several columns of the Parliamentary Debates, finally exploded:—

"I can see no case, good, bad or indifferent, that can possibly be made for this increase."

He refers there to the tax. There you have three Ministers of the present Government who opposed that particular duty tooth and nail. Not only did they oppose it in the House, but they went around the country threatening the people as to what was going to happen under Fianna Fáil's new stamp duty, and by implication, if they did not do it otherwise, they actually promised they would do away with it. Instead of doing away with it they are tightening it up. Another Minister of the present Government opposed that particular stamp duty. The present Minister for Agriculture, Deputy Dillon, at columns 1171 to 1174 of the same volume from which I have already quoted, called it a "landlord's tithe"; he called it a "dirty fraud," a "dirty deceitful game," a "piece of flatfooted incompetence," a "shuffling and cloutish way of dealing with the problem," a "dirty wrangle," a "vicious and mean jab at those who were defenceless." That is the sort of legislation——

General MacEoin

How right he was.

Mr. Aiken

—— that the Minister for Justice is supporting at the present time.

General MacEoin

How right he was then.

Mr. Aiken

He will have a "vicious mean jab at the defenceless," and he seems to be proud of it. "Hear, hear," he said.

General MacEoin

To Deputy Dillon then, yes.

Mr. Aiken

He will take part in a piece of "flatfooted incompetence". He has supported for the last three years, although he was against it at one stage, this shuffling and cloutish way of dealing with the problem. He is quite prepared to support for another year a "dirty fraud", a "dirty deceitful game", a "landlords' tithe". The Minister for Agriculture wound up his speech on that occasion by saying of this stamp duty, which Deputy Davin and Deputy Dunne, the Minister for Justice and all the rest of them are now supporting: "It is a dirty, contemptible, vicious and disedifying proposal, well worthy of the mind of the Minister for Finance who has conceived it, and, to my way of thinking, a disgrace to the House that adopts it: a confession before the world that there can survive here a meanness of spirit that was unknown in this country in the darkest days through which our people had to live." That is the type of stuff with which the present Ministers deceived a great number of the people. It is like the corruption they were to prove and dropped like a hot brick in the last three years. The only miserable little attempt to continue that campaign was made by the Minister for Justice himself, but he had to drop it here in face of public opinion. Corruption and this dirty deceitful game have put the present Government where they are. It is a heavy price to pay and a dishonourable price; not only are they dishonourable but they are disgustingly brazen about the whole matter. They laugh now at the people. They spit in the teeth of the people who were deceived by this type of campaign. Deputy Davin laughs and spits in the teeth of the ordinary people who voted for him on the promise that the Labour Party, if they were returned as a strong Party——

General MacEoin

Change your uniform again.

Mr. Aiken

On the promise and guarantee that the excess profits corporation tax would be put back to reduce the cost of living.

Mr. Davin

Is 14 out of 148 strong?

General MacEoin

We shall have to get you an altogether new uniform.

Mr. Aiken

The Minister for Justice cannot take it. He has got what he was looking for; he has bought a few of the Labour Party; he has bought a few of National Labour; he has bought a few of Clann na Poblachta. He is sitting pretty. What more does he want? Can he not take a little bit of reminding as to the price he paid in dishonour and the price the people paid in putting them in as a Government?

Mr. O'Leary

Your Budget put you over there, anyhow.

Mr. Aiken

Our Budget put us over here. I thank Providence that we had the honesty to tell the people the truth about the financial situation that existed at that time. We asked the people to balance their accounts and to pay their way. We did not want to create further inflation by borrowing in an inflationary situation. I have no doubt that if this Budget were introduced by a Fianna Fáil Government Deputy O'Leary would have talked for a week on its effect on his constituents.

Mr. Murphy

You have not the ability to do that.

Mr. Aiken

I want to warn the Labour Party and their supporters that the people who pay for inflation are the ordinary people in receipt of a weekly wage or a monthly salary. It is not the man of property who pays since, when money goes down in value, property goes up. When money goes down in value the value of the weekly wage is less to the ordinary working man.

Mr. Dunne

Particularly when there is a Standstill Order.

Mr. MacEntee

There is one now, but it is imposed by you and your colleagues.

Mr. Aiken

Particularly when there is a Standstill Order and particularly when the subsidies that were given to reduce the cost of living have been withdrawn and particularly when road grants have been withdrawn with the approval of those people who are supposed to have the interests of the road workers at heart.

Mr. Davin

Their wages have gone up by 15/- a week.

Mr. Dunne

There are 18,000 more employed.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

These interruptions must cease. Deputy Aiken is entitled to speak without interruption.

Mr. Aiken

Standstill Orders on wages are of great interest to men who have no wages. The Standstill Order at the present time is of great interest to the 18,000 who had to seek employment elsewhere last year. Had we been on the Government Benches then it would have been said that these 18,000 were pushed out by a reckless Government which wanted to give back £3,500,000 to the "racketeers" and inflict a "dirty fraud" like the stamp duty on the people. I want to open up another subject. There is only a minute or so to go but I shall briefly introduce it. Deputy Davin can ponder over it until to-morrow.

Mr. Davin

Over what?

Mr. Aiken

Over a problem I want to discuss. You can read it up.

Mr. Donnellan

That would be a great education.

Mr. Aiken

The Minister for Finance used to say that if there was a good purpose for which money should be spent, the Government should print it.

Captain Cowan

Hear, hear!

Mr. Aiken

Deputy Cowan says "Hear, hear!" Deputy Cowan, having jumped the fence, is still saying "Hear, hear!" Deputy Davin is as mute as a mouse.

Mr. Davin

I shall deal with you to-morrow.

Mr. Aiken

Even Deputy Davin would not say "Hear, hear!" He cannot say "Hear, hear!" to that brilliant statement of the Minister for Finance: if there is a good purpose on which to spend money, the Government should print it. Did I ever think I would live to see the day when Deputy Davin would be as mute as a mouse and would not dare to say "Hear, hear!" to a sentiment like that.

Mr. Davin

Do you remember when you called Deputy Cowan a communist for advocating £3 a week?

Mr. Donnellan

He would not do a thing like that.

Mr. Aiken

Deputy Davin, in order to avoid discussing the matter, makes an allegation in which there is no truth. Deputy Davin is afraid to remain mute as a mouse on this particular occasion and he thinks he will cover up his confusion by making an allegation which is without foundation.

Progress reported: Committee to sit again.