No heat of argument or no stimulated reverie of the Fianna Fáil Benches can for a moment change the unfortunate situation that we must face up to in the course of this debate. I do not propose to follow lines of either personal invective or cheap politics. We are here to-night to tell the Government what the real situation in the country is and I am going to answer the Taoiseach's challenge and put on the records of this House positive works ready for immediate action that the Government can put into being to-morrow to alleviate the position in West Cork if they are so disposed. It is a significant thing, standing here as a young man, to find that we have the extraordinary situation returned in this country, in 1953, under 20 years, virtually, of a Fianna Fáil Government, that this country is back to the situation of the famine years, where there was nothing for unemployment but Government relief schemes. Let us face the reality. Let the stupid little fop of a Minister for Finance snigger and laugh if he likes, but the situation is rankling from one end of the country to the other. In point of fact, now a situation has arisen where the Government say that relief schemes can meet an emergency situation. This is a poor tribute, not only to Fianna Fáil but to native Government here for 30 odd years that we have a situation where, instead of having a progressive plan that was going to improve the economy of the country and gradually envelop more and morepeople in employment, that we are an this divided state where we hear sneering gibes and hints and talk rather than getting down to the reality of trying to get a way to keep in work, to keep in decent comfort Irishmen and Irishwomen as worthy of our consideration as any of us in this House. I am sick and tired of looking to a past instead of building on a present and ensuring a future.
I am coming into this House to-night to make a plea, not on the basis of any Party membership, but on behalf of a generation that has in its day a right to maintenance and sustenance in its own country, and to try and direct the Government's mind to the fact that even though they may be the generation that is passing on, having given worthy service to this country, that they have got to face the reality of the present and the fact that if something is not done rapidly and courageously, we are going to find this country denied initially of the basic, fundamental essential necsssary to it—the manhood of its young men and the energy and trust of the young men and young women of this country who will not be here if something is not done to arrest the instability, the unemployment and the lack of security that now exists at home. One cannot blame the Government exclusively for what has happened. It is true that stupidity and blunders may have caused a recession in trade and a restriction of credit that is the atmosphere and breeding ground of the ills that we are now suffering from. The Taoiseach or the Minister may say that the Government have not control over the credit situation, but it is true, I believe, that a Government has some control over the situation of credit. If they have not, then I say this, that we have not any freedom in this country at all. If they cannot control that situation then we are, in fact, only legislating in name here while the iron grip of control of our a hole economic fabric is held somwhere else. I do not believe that that situation exists, but I do believe this and I am saying it quite seriously to the Taoiseach, that if something is not done forthwith in this country to ensure that hunger, unrest and unemployment rapidly wanethe Taoiseach may find himself with a situation that may lead to consequences far more far-reaching than we would like to envisage here.
We hear talk about schemes having to be brought to fruition. I am glad that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance is here because I do not believe that there is any Department of State that abounds with more schemes technically complete, ready for going into action, than his Department. I want to tell the Taoiseach, who is listening to me now, that if he wants to keep young boys and girls at home in West Cork, which I have the honour to represent, there is the pier at Castletownbere falling to pices, which wants to be fixed up at once. There was a slipway built there by the Board of Works and they admitted afterwards that they did not know where they had built it. It was built for purposes which it did not serve. Go into Schull, where we have the nucleus of a revival of Irish fishing under way. They are crying out there for a breakwater year after year. The Taoiseach, as long as he has been Taoiseach and while he was in Opposition has heard me striving over five years to get that work commenced. The plans are there, the blue-prints are there, the engineers are there. There is employment there for 80, 90 or 200 people in the peninsula that stretches from Ballydehob to Goleen. God knows it is a hard, beautiful part of the country in which to grub a living. I tell the Taoiseach that if he will say so in the morning work could be given there to people that is not going to last them only one night. It will last a considerable number of years; not only in ensuring a safe resting place for boats that Irish money is being put into but for the safety of the craft that we are using to develop that industry.
These are instances of what is necessary in the islands that abound about West Cork. It is not so long ago since the Taoiseach took a corvette to go around to see them. He knows himself that in those islands where you have dwindling populations and rising unemployment there is an unlimited number of schemes for little harbour developments and amenitiesthat have to be added to the lives of the people down there that can be immediately put into operation. I say to the Taoiseach if he is in earnest that we people come here representing constituencies such as that to make an earnest appeal for the survival of our areas, not alone for employment in them but for the hope of survival for the people who have worked so hard for so long in those áiteanna iargcúlta.
We come here to make a plea for those people who played as big a part in establishing this very institution in which we now meet, we voice our views on their behalf, and I say to the Taoiseach if he is in earnest about employment schemes—not throwing any blame individually on anybody for what has arisen—that they should go into my constituency and put into operation any amount of those works. If that is done, there will not be 400 odd people on the unemployed register in Castletownbere, as I was told last week, nor 200 odd in Dunmanway, 200 in Clonakilty and 500 in Skibbereen. That is a very poor tribute of an Irish Government to a part of Ireland that certainly cannot be challenged on the sacrifice it made that Dáil Éireann having been established might persist and come into the existence that it now has.
We talk too glibly in this House and refer too often in the most scurrilous way to forbears or connections of forbears of this House. It would be better for us all here, as I said some time ago in this Dáil when talking on the Republic of Ireland Bill, to appreciate the worth of individuals in their effort for this State and, having appreciated it, to try to build on the foundations we have, rather than constantly recall something that most of us never knew of and do that with a bitterness that this generation should not be asked to perpetuate. When I come into this House as a young man to talk on the problems of to-day, I want the Government to realise that most of the people who are hungry in Dublin City and throughout the length and breadth of Ireland to-day are not worried about the rights and wrongs of 35 years ago, but about the immediate present and how they are going to exist in the State as it now it.
I will pay a tribute—and I always have, irrespective of the side of the House I was on—to anybody who did his part manfully and well in the formative days of the State. But we cannot live on that glory and put people into employment on that glory. We have need of a practical economic policy to meet the difficulties of to-day. Let the Taoiseach take this responsibility and let the Minister for Finance take it effectively, that his very financial policy must of itself beget some of the conditions we have to-day. You cannot have increased taxation to the level that it becomes a complete burden on the people, a nauseating unsustainable burden, without having the situation arise of increased costs of all essential foods. You could have, as we did have, the "Up Dev." with: "Up tea, up bread, up butter, up sugar, up milk, up beer, up tobacco, up cigarettes and all the rest. We had, with the same catch-cry retricted credit and a rapid growth of unemployment. That is the seed that was sown in the economic policy brought in here, in a hair shirt austerity vein, by the Minister for Finance in 1952. For that the Government is responsible.
You may not want a general election: that is a matter that is within the Taoiseach's own purview at the moment; but if you do not want a general election at least you must take cognisance of the message that is being sent by the people to the Government, that they do not approve of their present economic policy. I am a bit like Deputy Davin in this. If the Taoiseach recants his economic stupidities and gets down to the job and helps to solve the problems of the immediate present, I think he will he given credit for that, no matter whether we agree fundamentally with the policy of his Party or not. We do know this, that they have tried an economic policy on this country and the country has in a positive, effective and repeated way said they do not want it.
Now, the Government can do either of two things. One of them theTaoiseach has indicated to us to-night quite clearly in his speech. Let me Say this, in sincerity: it was a pleasant thing to see the Taoiseach back to his old vitality and virility in the course of his heated discourse here to-night; it was a good thing to see him back in energetic vein. Maybe it portends a reasonable drive by the Taoiseach himself now to make the Government meet the problems they are not meeting. We are glad to see that. Let me say this to the Taoiseach. that the answer to the immediate present goes deeper than relief schemes. It is appalling that the situation is that we must force the Government, or try to force the Government, to put into effect immediately relief schemes to give employment to the people throughout the length and breadth of Dublin and throughout rural Ireland.
Let the Taoiseach take this message from me. He can rant as much as he likes about the balance of payments and sterling assets. I am quite sure the Minister for Finance, when he gets the chance next week of replying to this debate, will rant and rave about, Marshall Aid and a lot of other things; but to the unemployed man, whether he is in Werburgh Street Exchange or Lower Gardiner Street Exchange, or Clonakilty or Skibbereen or Castletownbere or elsewhere, sterling assets and balance of payments are damned poor consolation to his empty belly. It is time we in this House realised that when we are talking here about the level of the balance of payments or the repatriation of assets, we are dawdling and wasting time, while in fact the very basis of all that, the primary factor in production, the very manpower and woman-power of this country is drifting as it never drifted before from the land of Ireland.
The Taoiseach made reference to the fact that we are only a small island. We have had a significant experience recently. If we study the census of population and the various statistical documents issued to us by the Central Statistics Office, we get a reasonable photograph of the situation that is arising in the country—a dwindling marriage rate, a dwindling population and increasing emigration.
What is the remedy? The remedy is not going to be found in the invective and counter-invective of ex-Ministers, or Ministers against each other here. The answer is to be found in some kind of cohesive, constructive plan that is going to envelop people, gradually assimilate them into industrial employment or agricultural employment that is of practical and permanent duration. There is no good in suggesting relief schemes as anything other than a temporary alleviation. The Government has to get down to the problem that I have pressed, not only on this Government, but on the last one, of getting established in this country, in their full solid foundation, industries that are germane to the country. I have said here before that it is pathetic to me—and I am quite sure it is pathetic to my colleague from Donegal, Deputy O'Donnell—that we have an excuse for a fishing industry left in Ireland, when he can gaze out, and I can gaze out in West Cork, on the trawling fleets of every nation in the world fishing under their initial expense and overhead expense off the coast of Ireland, to enhance and enrich the coffers of their own countries in the enhancement of the catches they bring home to the fishing of their own lands, while we here toil and labour without any conception of what the real national wealth of that fishing industry could be to us.
Has the Government come to grips with the problem of planning at all progressively for a future? Has the Government—and I mean not only the Government of to-day, but Governments before it—come to grips with the problem of stepping up the production of Irish land in the way it could be stepped up? Is the way to step up production in Irish farms the way this Government has elected to take? Is the making more difficult of credit facilities for the farmer, the impact of increased costs in every direction of his cost of production, a stimulation to further production? Is the present economic plan of the Government— that puts, as described by the Taoiseach himself, a crushing burden of taxation on the people—the type ofplan to stimulate a drive for production in Irish farms?
Is this driving of a wedge between town and country, as we have seen the Government try to do in recent by-elections, a way of producing balanced and stabilised economy at home? I am talking on the basis of the situation as it is to-day. Whoever is responsible for it, the situation to-day is that we have an abnormally high figure of unemployed. There is no doubt whatever but that we have one of the highest figures ever, since-the Famine, for emigration, and we have an even worse feature than that creeping into the economy of the country. We have people who were in employment here trying to find an alternative country to which to take their wives and children because they cannot see any future in their own country. I will readily agree that that cannot completely be the Government's fault, but nevertheless it is a situation that exists, and what are we, who purport to be the legislators and the guiding power of this country, going to do about it? The problem goes deeper than we can hope to solve by relief schemes. It is on that basis that I want to address my remarks generally to-night. We have to restore confidence in the people in this country. We have got to get rid of this cult which is growing up throughout the-length and breadth of Ireland and that is making the people shun politics. A situation is arising in this country whereby young people are not taking the interest they should in the development of their own land and are not making an effort to get into the scheme of development of their own land.
Rather are they more eager to get some profession or some kind of a qualification and to get out of their own land. That is a cancer that this country cannot stand for too long. But when to that cancer are added the three serious difficulties already adverted to, we have a situation in which the Government must take deliberate and serious action. I believe that, with a bit of goodwill in this House, as distinct from thrust and parry, and with the willingness of thisHouse to form a united front in an effort to meet the immediate emergency problem, we have the resources and the credit to enable us to surmount our immediate difficulties. But the Government must produce—and if this Government cannot, it must give way to one that can—some kind of an economic structure that is practical for this country, that shows a progressive development and that can be preached to our people as something that ensures a future not only for those ripening in age, as many members of this House are, but for those coming behind and for generations to come.
We have had too much talk in this House for too long about individual failures to do this or to do that. While we all come here and criticise each other for what has been done, and for what has not been done, we allow— apparently willy-nilly—the denudation of our own land to take place. It is little credit to any of us—and I am saying this with a full sense of responsibility—that, after 30 odd years of enjoying the fruits of sacrifice which was so honestly made in this country, we have not been able to establish a State in which the young people can have hope and are eager to stay and work in. It becomes more appalling to us all when we realise full well that no reason except lack of initiative and lack of drive within the Governments of this country has caused such a situation to arise. We have the grandest hit of country in the world here. We have some of the finest people, technically, that the world can produce. We have the solid basis of our own people that never wilted and that, generation after generation, have proved their worth and their love for their own land.