When I intervened in this debate I was directing the attention of the House, first of all, to the deplorable fact of the continued rise in the cost of living, and secondly to the alarming fact that there was a reduction of 30,000 in the number of men employed in this country. I was expressing the hope that some member of the Fianna Fáil Party would intervene, at some stage of the proceedings, and tell us what they thought of that, and then I went on to draw the Minister's attention to the fact that the whole doctrine of economic self-sufficiency, with which he has associated himself for so long, has now blown up. It has proved ineffective to provide the employment that he hoped it would. It has put an immense burden of cost upon the community and what is worse now, it threatens to isolate us between two trading blocs—one, which we call the Scandinavian, and the other, which we can call Little Europe.
In that connection it is striking to look at the Minister's own words as reported at column 587, Volume 175, No. 5 of the Official Report when he was opening this debate. He says:—
It seems, I think, clear that the whole trend of events throughout the world is towards the formation of economic groupings between nations. Indeed, it appears likely that, in the future, small nations like ours will have difficulty in maintaining viable economies outside the ambit of wider economic combinations.
Those are very grave words. I understand the Minister is shortly to become the Taoiseach, but it is a strange envoi for his 25 years' labour that the policy which he has so strenuously pressed upon the country has led us finally to the position in which he is himself obliged to warn us that it appears likely that, in future, small nations like ourselves will have difficulty in maintaining viable economies outside the ambit of wider economic combinations. Therefore, these have been 25 lost years; they have been very costly and for that I think the Minister must accept his full share of responsibility. God knows, I often found myself a voice alone protesting against many of the follies that he wished upon us, but I am prepared to say I am not now deeply interested in where the responsibility for all those economic follies lies. What I am concerned about is the future.
I have believed throughout my whole public life that the whole idea of economic self-sufficiency is the purest cod; it always was, it is now, and it ever will be. The striking fact for us is that the Fianna Fáil Minister for Industry and Commerce, the future Taoiseach, now announces he has come around to that view but, from that, certain consequences ought to flow.
I think there are two things urgently necessary to be done. Up to now the Minister for Industry and Commerce has shown himself desirous, if it were possible, of arranging for the participation by this country in the Common Market and, through no fault of his, the Common Market project appears, for the time being in any case, to have collapsed. That development was grave enough from our point of view but it is made much graver by the emergence of the Scandinavian concept, but still I do not think the situation is irremediable. I think what we ought to do is quite simple—to say we were prepared to operate the Free Trade Area concept when it envisaged participation by all the Rome Treaty Nations, and by Great Britain and the other nations. We are still prepared to operate that and we are prepared to organise in an association of that character with Great Britain in the morning and, for the purpose of our negotiation, we would not come empty-handed.
Great Britain is our largest customer but we are the second largest customer she has in Europe. Let us sit down together and work out between ourselves a Free Trade Area agreement, fixing all and sundry with notice that if others want to join us on the same terms as we have negotiated between ourselves they would be made very welcome, but we are not prepared to start off in another interminable wrangle leading nowhere. We are prepared to negotiate with our principal customer a viable free trade agreement on the lines of the free trade agreement envisaged by the O.E.E.C., due regard being had to the relative positions of Great Britain and ourselves—one a hugely wealthy, industrial nation, the other a relatively poor, agricultural country with a great capacity for development, not only in the sphere of agriculture but in industry as well.
I want to offer the Minister for Industry and Commerce proposals that could march with a bilateral Free Trade Area, which would make very real effective contributions to industrial development at the same time. Now, at first glance, it may seem paradoxical to speak of a bilateral Free Trade Area. I have always believed that to get 15 nations to agree about anything at a conference in Paris is virtually impossible, and I have always believed that if you wanted to get any degree of effective co-operation between 15 sovereign Governments the only way to go about it is to get two—at a maximum, three, but preferably two—to work out a viable, commonsense, reasonable agreement in which neither party gets all they want but both parties get a considerable part of it. Then say: "That may be a poor thing but it is our own. If anyone else wants to come in, he is welcome but let us not start the argument all over again. That is the nearest we could get to equity between us. If anyone else wants to come in and share it, he is welcome but we are not going to have any more wrangling and tangling about it. We are prepared to accept that as the best thing, poor as it is; it is the best that ourselves and our partner were able to agree upon." Mind you, if an Anglo-Irish agreement of that kind were worked out which would secure equity to both parties we might be surprised at the number of nations who would be prepared to say: "Very well, we are prepared to join you."
I am prepared to go on record as saying that if we are to follow the Minister's broad view as expressed at Col. 587 of the Official Report, to which I have referred, ultimately from a world point of view what we want is an Anglo-American Free Trade Area in which there would be free passage for men, money and goods throughout the Commonwealth countries and the whole United States of America, and then simply say to the other nations of the Earth: "If you want to join that, join it, and if you want to stay out then stay out and no hard feelings." I believe if we got that kind of a world Free Trade Area, in the fullest sense of the term, of free passage of men, money, and goods throughout its whole territory, that would be really going places. I believe that into such an association a united Ireland could ultimately find its way, but I recognise at once the difficulties of realising that in the immediate future are formidable and depend not on us but on Great Britain and the United States of America.
Ad interim, I think we might provide a very suitable example and that is to arrive at an analogous arrangement between ourselves and Great Britain, with a standing invitation to any other nation who thought as we do to come and join us. If we started that ball rolling, I am not at all sure that we could not build up, with the help of other countries, not a rival but an alternative to Little Europe of which Little Europe might itself some day become jealous. Although the Rome powers are making considerable progress at the moment, many teasing problems still confront them and might yet confound them.
I could conceive ourselves and Great Britain working out an agreement which, the longer it endured, the more it would redound to the advantage of both parties. If this scheme is to fructify, it must be based on a proposal to Great Britain that, in exchange for import facilities into this country for her manufactured goods, she must equate the position of our agricultural producers in certain sectors of the agricultural industry with the prices and conditions she provides for her own farmers.
That, in itself, however, while it might make fair provision for the agricultural side of our society—and, without that, there could be no agreement of an enduring character—would not cover the problem of developing industrial employment in this country. Let us be precise. It would be futile to make out a trade agreement on the floor of Dáil Eireann because an agreement envisages two parties, one of which is Great Britain.
What I mean when I say "equate the position of our farmers with that of the farmers of Great Britain" is that in respect of certain commodities such as bacon, butter, cattle, pigs, sheep—I deliberately exclude eggs because I believe England is now self-sufficient in eggs and is, in fact, herself an exporter and is not, therefore, open to receive additional quantities of eggs—if we were put on a parallel with the British farmer the scope for expansion of production here is almost limitless and without any substantial volume of imports of raw materials. The raw materials of all these industries could be produced from our own soil. If we got a price ratio of the kind I envisage, they could be produced economically from our own soil, leaving our farmers a modest standard of comfort which would, I believe, multiply employment on the land.
But when you come to face the question of providing Great Britain with adequate inducement to participate in an arrangement of that kind you must reconcile increased imports from Great Britain with increased industrial production in our community. I do not think these two things are irreconcilable. I want to direct the attention of the Minister to the fact that I am not the only person who thinks that.
There appears in the Financial Times of Wednesday, 22nd April, 1959, an article by Mr. Leslie Gamage. It is a long article from which I shall not by any means quote in extenso. However, Mr. Gamage says to his own people in Great Britain that the plain fact is that we have to get out of our heads that the only type of industrial export available to us in the future is the finished product. We have to realise, in the changing world in which we live, that we ought to raise the standard of living of the people resident in our traditional export markets and sell them the means of raising their standard of living so as to expand their capacity to purchase what we have to sell. In the initial stages, Mr. Gamage puts forward the case that the two things essential are know-how and equipment. I now quote from the article:—
The export of know-how along these lines has been criticised in the past on the grounds that, by sharing our knowledge, we were hastening the setting up of local industry and thus endangering our markets for the future. This argument fails to hold water on several counts. First, it is impractical by present-day standards: industrial expansion of less developed countries is obviously desirable for the higher living standards which it brings. And with the loans that are now available to many of these countries, quite apart from those that can partly finance their development from their own resources, their industrial expansion is already under way; and if they do not get their know-how from Britain, they will certainly receive it from the U.S., Russia, or Western Germany and others.
Secondly, an industrial revolution on the scale that is now taking place in many of our traditional overseas markets will, as their national income and standard of living improves, give us a bigger, not a smaller, market—though we must realise that the goods required by such countries may change in type, for example, machine tools instead of electric fans. Furthermore, as the economies of the countries now exporting primary products broaden, they will become less dependent on world price fluctuations for their primary exports and will themselves offer a more stable market.
That is merely an extract from an article which I commend to the attention of anyone interested in this problem. I want to put a more radical suggestion even than that envisaged by Mr. Gamage which I put to the Minister before and which I am profoundly convinced, the more I think of it, is of real value.
There is not a doubt that at present in the world a great struggle is going on for the minds of men. The argument very largely is the argument between individual liberty and serfdom. Mr. Khrushchev, the Premier of Russia, puts the case strongly and confidently that, in the end, serfdom is bound to win. You may have a rough and ready way of doing things but, even if you have a generation of desolation such as they have had in Russia and are now experiencing in China, the nett result is an immense increase in the standard of living and, even if that results in a cost of millions of deaths, they are soon forgotten. Mr. Khrushchev, and Mr. Stalin before him, said in effect: "We admit horrible things have to be done but the nett result is worth it all."
I do not think the Minister or I would agree with that sentiment. The principal proponent of the economy and philosophy founded on freedom is the United States. I think where they have gone wrong is that they have believed that in sharing their wealth they are promoting freedom and individual liberty in the world. There is no doubt that they have shared their wealth on a magnificent and dramatic scale but I think they have been giving the people what they do not want.
At first glance, if the United States Government offered us tommorow £100,000,000, or the equivalent in dollars, the temptation to take it would be well-nigh irresistible but probably prudence, if it prevailed, would charge us to refuse it on the grounds that that was a once only transaction and that we would build up for ourselves desires and customs on the basis of that gratuitiously acquired wealth which subsequent dependence on our own resources, which is the essential of the preservation of liberty, would make it impossible for us to provide for ourselves.
I think at this time I am bound to say that I am shocked to hear people in this country seriously flirt with the idea that now that England is so well off, now that she is pouring so much money into Northern Ireland, ought we not consider equating our position with that of Northern Ireland? They are afraid to say: "Ought we not re-enact the Act of Union?" But it is no harm to remember that the love of money is the root of all evil and there are unthinking elements in our society at this moment who would seriously contemplate campaigning in this country on the proposition that the financial reward of surrendering independence would be so substantial and immediate that we really ought to think about it.
They are the people who begin by asking: "Ought we not go back into the Commonwealth?" They say: "Look at Northern Ireland and all the bounties and subsidies they have there and all the money they get from England. Look where we would be." To these people, I want to say that if they propose to sell this country, they could get a better price. If they want to put up this country on the block for international sale and to be bid for, whoever would be prepared to bid would pay a better price than the doles and grants which the Northern Ireland Government are getting in exchange for the surrender of their independence.
I assume that there is nobody in this House who seriously proposes that in order to secure economic advantage for our people, we should consider the sale of our national independence, but it is shocking to realise how some people can be so dazzled by the longing for money that they consider that, and it is time somebody said in public what I am saying to these people: "If you want to sell this country, and get authority from the people, do not sell it for the doles which Northern Ireland is getting." This country is worth more than that and we would be much more dearly bought by plenty of bidders if anybody wants to sell it. I do not want to sell it and I am not prepared to enter into negotiations with anybody, however well-intentioned, if one of the agreements is that surrender of our national sovereignty should be part of the bargain.
I do not think that any of our friends outside have any thought of that kind at all. I do not think the British Government or the United States Government have any thought of that in their minds and would be shocked and almost nauseated by the idea. I know whereof I speak and I have heard some of them speak of the position in Northern Ireland compared with Ireland but what they have said is not for publication. I believe you would find, in discussions with either the British or the United States Governments, a ready acceptance of the proposition that the maintenance of the present constitutional position is desirable and wise and makes possible a more frank and cordial relationship between ourselves and Great Britain especially, than any previous constitutional link that bound us to each another.
I believe that there is growing between ourselves and Great Britain a firmer and stronger understanding as a result of our present constitutional position than was ever possible in the past and I believe that many of the loud-mouthed pseudo-patriots in the country who are always shouting "Up the Republic" have not awakened to the fact that we have accepted not only the advantages but the responsibilities of independent Republican status. One of those is constructively to face the position to which the Minister for Industry and Commerce referred when he envisaged the possibility of the viability of our economy being no longer possible outside the ambit of wider economic combinations. I have said that I thought that America in her desire to counter the propaganda of the Soviet had sought to give her friends what they did not really want and has overlooked the immense benefit that she could confer at relatively insignificant expense to herself.
I would be prepared to make the case to the United States that the help she could give this country would cost her nothing—nothing at all. If and when the Minister has time to turn his mind to the article of Mr. Gamage to which I referred, I think he will find enshrined there the germ of the same idea as I have adumbrated on two occasions. Certainly he accepts the urgent necessity of free democratic powers, like Great Britain and the United States of America, realising that it is to their own advantage to help relatively undeveloped countries to rise in the sphere of industry and that it is no menace to them because, although they may have to change the nature of their industrial exports, the rise in the standards in those other countries will call for other forms of exports which they are equipped to deliver.
Therefore, I want to say to the Minister for Industry and Commerce that I believe he could do a great service not only to this country but to the world if in the suitable language of diplomacy—not in the fairly crude forms in which we express ourselves here—he said to the United States: "What we want is the opportunity of earning money in our own country. Instead of mobilising the countless hundreds of millions which you have done so magnificently for the countries of the Orient and indeed for Europe, all we ask is this: you have a vast industrial complex in the United States and already the Rockefeller interest have voluntarily built up a great corporation devoted to the task of locating industry for the South American Government and countries in Middle America, from Mexico south to Brazil, and great and valuable work is being done on that line.
"Could not the American Government challenge some of its great industrial enterprises such as General Motors, United States Steel or Firestone Rubber"—the Minister knows the kind of companies to which I am referring—"and other companies of that kind and ask them if they would not undertake to participate with their own Government in demonstrating to the world that there is a much more effective way of providing a decent standard in freedom for a people prepared to work than the way of slavery which Communism declares to be the sine qua non of industrial development and that they should locate in Ireland, as a matter of policy, 12 plants, each designed to employ 500 to 1,000 men.”
I think that would have to be done as an act of faith in the initial stages, and would have to be done in an act partly of public duty because I do not believe there is a cohesive economic argument for it if it is disassociated from the practice of making the philosophy of freedom prevail against that of Communism. The immense advantage that confirms upon a country like Ireland at once is that we get forthwith a considerable volume of employment in the production of merchandise for which there already exist marketing channels through which to move. I see no other way for a small under-developed country such as this to get into international markets on a viable and enduring basis.
We cannot escape from the vicious circle that if you have not markets, you cannot generate mass-production; and if you have not got mass-production, you cannot get the markets. If you go out to look for the markets before you have the production wherewith to supply them, instead of doing good, you can do harm. If you fall down on delivery after your first excursion in search of trade, build up production and then go out on your second effort, you will find that every contact you have made on your first trip will turn away from you on the ground that they have suffered economic loss as a result of your failure to deliver on the first occasion.
I have examined that question ad nauseam and I know of no way in which that vicious circle can be broken, except on the lines of which we have an illustration in the case of the Athy wallboard factory. There is no harm in recapitulating it. The only thing holding that factory back and threatening it with financial ruin was the fact that it had not got a marketing channel through which to dispose of its capacity output. It made contact with the firm of Bowater, and in two years a complete metamorphosis takes place. Not only are all their stocks passing freely into consumption, but I understand the factory is now doubling its capacity for production. That is all as a result of bringing it into contact with a progressive and adequate marketing organisation.
I do not believe that even if the Athy factory had been battling in that market for the past 40 years with the assistance of the Government, they would have got a footing in it. It is not until you try to make your way in that you discover the labyrinthine difficulties of trying to force your way into a market which is tied to large producers of that particular line of goods. As soon as the consumer can shake himself free, he is always under the threat that if he deals with another small entrant, he may find himself cut off from his supplies by the large and influential person who ordinarily caters for that market.
If you could get America to initiate a demonstration of that kind in this country, it has this immense advantage for her. This is one of the few countries that have not got the incalculably invaluable invisible export of a Communist Party. If we had an active and viable Communist Party here, we would have a great many people battering at our door seeking an opportunity to pour in money to offset the Communists, but the poor old Communists here are not worth 3½d. We are one of the only countries in the world that have not got that considerable invisible export, an active Communist Party, but it has this advantage. In every country where they are working every move made by the United States Government to try to help to maintain the independence and viability of a free nation is frustrated and misrepresented by the Communist Party and everything possible is done in order to make the best efforts of the organisations operating for the United States ineffective.
Here is a country where their efforts can be understood, will be given the fullest co-operation, and where their efforts can be made in the absence of a running guerilla campaign to try to sabotage every plan they initiate or organise. Here can be given a demonstration to the whole world of what real co-operation, with a friendly effort to help in the development of our economy, can produce. But that is not the end of the story. To me, the whole thing would be dust and ashes if it ended with twelve branch factories of American organisations planted here. I think that is only the beginning. In time, I think there would begin to arise around each of these factories native industrial efforts to supply the components on which those factories are dependent.
I do not know if the Minister recalls that in the early stages of the motor car industry in Great Britain, every motor car company made its own gaskets. Then one small workshop started to make gaskets, not for the factories, but to sell to the garages. Eventually, one company said: "If you are making gaskets to sell as replacements, what about making them for our entire output?" They got in with the Rover Motor Company or some such company. That has grown into one of the great industrial enterprises in England today in which they are making all the gaskets used by practically every company in England. It has proved more economical for the motor car companies, even those the size of the four-company B.M.C., to leave it to specialists to make them rather than have each one set up its own gasket department.
I could conceive of small Irish industries of that kind growing up around large industrial units of the kind I have suggested as being established as a matter of policy by a United States consortium in this country. I should like to see a United States consortium because I am pro-American. That is quite frank. I am sure there are those who would sooner see British or West German companies, but I would sooner see Americans. I am pro-American; I like them. I think they get on and really mean it when they say they want to help under-developed countries develop and share in their standard of living. I believe that out of that would come a real economic dynamic in this country, which would be utterly independent of the whole loathsome structure of tariffs and quotas, and all that goes with it, which is to me a horror and a disaster because it develops in our community a growing demand for the right to be inefficient. I am not such a disciple of efficiency as to say I am prepared to sacrifice everything to it, but I detest the whole structure of price control and regulation which grows out of the fact that individuals are accorded the right to manufacture here for consumption on the home market at fantastic prices—any price they like to ask almost—inferior goods.
I want to see industry in this country based on the production of competitive industrial products which can stand on their own legs in any country in the world, which will evoke greater industrial effort on the part of our people, of individuals, of small men availing of the opportunities offered by these larger industrial units to supply the components which they may require for the production of the finished article, whatever it may be. I can conceive a chemical company finding it could buy from a small rubber manufacturer here rubber bottles suitable for the distribution of its goods. One could multiply the cases where one can envisage small industries growing up operated by our own people to serve large industrial units with international marketing organisations. Then we can produce in this country, given the opportunity perhaps in our time, a B.A.T.A. such as was produced in Czechoslovakia before the war.
But something must prime the pump, spark the fire, if we want to get effectively into world trade, and I suggest it is along the lines I here adumbrated. That is the reason I direct the Minister's attention specially to the article by Mr. Gamage. It shows that the plan is not in our mind alone. It has been adumbrated so recently as April 22nd in the Financial Times. It is being operated at the present moment in South America and in the Middle East and I am not sure that it is not being promoted by the State Department of the United States. Therefore, I urge the Minister, without delay, to examine the possibility of negotiating a free trade area with Great Britain and then making a real step forward which will involve a very dramatic impact on the whole economic life of this country by providing 10,000 new jobs in factories built by a friend, the United States of America, in this country primarily for that end and in the confident belief that from it great developments will flow, not only for the benefit of this country but for the benefit of the world and the United States and all she stands for as well.
There are certain other matters I want to refer to, Sir. I watch the operation of virtual unrestricted hire purchase on our economy with growing alarm. When I walk out to my own doorstep in a small town in the west of Ireland and see £50,000 worth of motor cars parked on the street of a town with a population of 1,200 in the middle of an ordinary week-day, I begin to wonder if there is not something fundamentally wrong in our whole approach to life. Twenty-five years ago, the presence of £1,000 worth of motor cars on that street would have caused quite a sensation. Forty years ago, the passage through that town of a motor car—there were plenty of horses and carts going through—would cause quite a sensation. Now there is a capital investment of £50,000 standing about the streets. That could be reproduced in every country town in Ireland. Look at the streets in the city of Dublin. Am I exaggerating when I say that 85 per cent. of those cars are bought on hire purchase? Averaging the recently purchased with those purchased two or three years ago, 50 per cent. of them represent borrowed money that a great many of the borrowers probably cannot afford.
I cannot afford to buy a television set. Yet if I drive out the canal way through some of the new housing estates, I observe chimneys bristling with television aerials. No one can challenge my solicitude for good housing or my readiness to bear my full, fair share and ask my neighbour to pay his full, fair share of providing everybody in this country with a good house. If that means the subsidisation of housing, I think it is our duty to do it, but damned if I think it is fair that I should be asked to subsidise television. What is happening at the moment is that you can see sticking out of the chimneys of houses heavily subsidised a television mast, the weekly instalment on which approximates pretty closely to the amount I am paying towards subsidisation.
These may be unpopular things to say but unrestricted hire purchase is a cause of inflation. What is the use of imposing restraint on a variety of public services, if, at the same time, you say the people can buy anything they want and that all the finance is freely available? I have been watching the trade returns for the first four months of this year. What is the adverse balance of trade for the first four months of this year? I think it is running at about £10,000,000 per month on the trade. Is that not right?
