The Minister for Finance, concluding his statement on the Budget, spoke of the great disservice to national development done by those who belittle the advances made under different Governments and who, by spreading pessimism, lessen the determination we should all share to make greater progress in future. Deputy Sweetman has already commented on the audacity of the Minister for Finance in addressing that admonition to the Opposition bearing in mind the propaganda operated by him and by his kept newspaper "Pravda" who sought to undermine every advance achieved under the inter-Party Government when it was in office.
The Minister went on to say that by the standards of four-fifths of the world's population we are very well off. We are now driven to desperate necessity when we are called upon to congratulate ourselves on our standard of living by comparing it with that of the residents of China and Malaya and the chronically under-nourished countries of the world. We can all agree that our circumstances in Ireland are superior to theirs but I cannot feel that is a matter upon which we can very excitedly congratulate ourselves.
The Minister also said our people are reasonably well fed and housed, that the conditions of life in Ireland are good, that our people have the safety and comfort of a peaceful and civilised society. These are all propositions to which we are prepared to subscribe but I do not know what exact associations they have with the Budgetary position we are called upon to consider.
The Minister also made reference to housing. On page 49 of his statement he says:
Instead of the reduction in housing expenditure being a source of criticism, it should be a cause of satisfaction to all of us that we have progressed so far towards meeting our social obligations in this respect.
I cannot allow those words to pass without recalling the gyrations of Deputy Briscoe from these benches when he was thundering in 1956 and in 1957 that the Government of that day were heartlessly withholding from local authorities the minimum funds requisite to house the people in tolerable conditions. Deputy Briscoe is now, I believe, frisking through the United States. I trust that the veracity of his observations there are more dependable than those which he made in this House and which the Minister for Finance now so emphatically and cogently repudiates in the Budget Statement. It was an achievement upon which our Government and the Governments that went before us have reason to look back upon with satisfaction, that we did have the courage to make up our minds that the all-important thing was to get our people out of the slums, and we did it. It would have been a wonderful thing if in those days that work had been acknowledged on all sides of the House instead of being confounded and complicated by the dishonest and fraudulent campaign carried on by Deputy Briscoe and the Fianna Fáil Party in this House at that time.
I want to refer now to the Minister's speech in the context of our circumstances as we know them on this side of the House. I interpreted the Minister's speech as bidding us to rejoice that all was well in the country. In my considered judgment, with the fullest sense of responsibility, and bearing in mind the agreement which I gladly vouchsafe for the Minister's proposition that it is not right dishonestly to preach pessimism when there is no ground for it. However, the picture drawn by the Minister for Finance bears little relation to reality as I know it. The facts statistically, and the facts as we see them in the country where we live, clearly conflict with the picture which the Minister seeks to impose upon us.
I think it is true to say in respect of every policy that its best tests are its results. There is no other valid test. I recall that the Taoiseach, when in Opposition, prepared a plan in 1956 and, having been Tánaiste for many years and having been a member of an Irish Government for 20 years, placed the whole prestige of that position behind the proposition. It was no guesswork; it was a complete plan which only awaited the suffrages of the people to be put into operation. It was published in a supplement of their kept newspaper and put into the hands of every supporter they had and it carried an assurance on the authority of the Taoiseach that, given the opportunity over five years, he had plans in mind which would provide 100,000 new jobs in this country.
No matter how comprehensive and detailed politicians' prognostications for the future may be, I suppose one must allow, and one is bound to allow, some discount for the excessive optimism of a pre-election speech. But the Taoiseach returned to this matter as reported on 17th June, 1957, after his Government had got a clear majority in Dáil Éireann on the representations they had made to our people—representations of a dual character: (1) that they had the means and the plans to provide 100,000 new jobs—and these were admirable proposals if they were honest, which I do not believe they were; and (2) carrying the disgusting and dishonest implication that the Government, then in office, to which I belonged and to which my colleagues belonged, were, by implication, relatively indifferent to the circumstances of the people unemployed at that time.
The Taoiseach returned to that topic as reported on 17th June, 1957. Speaking as Minister for Industry and Commerce and Tánaiste he said:-
The Government is declaring its policy or aim in all its aspects at expanding employment and accept that the increase of employment would be a measure by which the effectiveness of all plans must be tested.
That appeared in the Irish Press of 17th June, 1957.
On the occasion of the Budget of the Minister for Finance for 1960, the booklet Economic Statistics was circulated. I refer to Table 7 which speaks of the situation obtaining in 1959, that is, after the Government had approximately three years in which to operate their plans. That Table shows that in 1956 there were employed in agriculture, forestry and fishing 445,000 persons, while in 1959, there were employed in agriculture, forestry and fishing 420,000 persons— that is, 25,000 fewer persons employed than were employed in 1956.
Further on appears Table 16 which speaks of the estimated number of persons at work in the main branches of non-agricultural economic activity, including mining, quarrying and turf production, manufacturing, construction, electricity, gas and water, commerce, insurance and finance, transport and communication, public administration and defence, and other economic activities. It shows that in 1956 there were 718,000 persons employed in that group of occupations. In 1959, there were 692,000 persons employed in that group—that is, 26,000 fewer than were employed in 1956. If I read those figures correctly, the present position is that there were 51,000 fewer persons employed in 1959 than there were in 1956.
All statistics have in them an element of uncertainty which constantly makes me suspect them, unless the picture they draw is substantially confirmed by what I see about me. I think the ground for that suspicion is fortified by the matter which I mentioned to the Taoiseach at Question Time to-day when I directed his attention to the fact that in Economic Statistics for 1959 a figure of £69,000,000 appears while in the corresponding Table for 1960, a figure of £77,000,000 appears. In that connection, I want to say to the Taoiseach that I feel that where basic considerations in preparing Tables of this kind have been changed for one reason or another, it seems to me an odd procedure not to append some note to the Table itself directing attention to the matter which may appear in a preliminary paragraph which did not jump to the eye when these Tables were being prepared as they ordinarily are from one year to another. Therefore, when I find that statistics tell me there were 51,000 fewer persons in employment in 1959 than there were in 1956, I check them with the atmosphere of the countryside in which I live, and the countryside which I represent, and with what I hear from those similarly circumstanced to myself in their knowledge of the conditions of the country.
I want to say with full deliberation to this House that I cannot believe the Minister for Finance himself believes that the situation in this country presents the rosy picture he would ask us to believe it does. Living in the west of Ireland as I do, and representing a constituency of small farmers in Monaghan as I do, I am bound to record in this House that in my opinion the circumstances obtaining in those areas are very bad.
I challenge any Deputy who has any knowledge of the parts of Ireland to which I refer to deny that there is developing in those areas a phenomenon which I have never seen before in my life. That is where the whole family locks the door and leaves the holding derelict and emigrates as a family. That is going on now on a scale that I have never seen happen before. It is going on, so far as I can find out, because these family holdings are ceasing to be viable. The people cannot get a living upon them. Not infrequently, what is happening is that when the father of a family seeks to persuade one of the sons to accept responsibility for the holding and to take it over he finds that none of them is prepared to do so but responds with the offer that if the father and mother and younger children will come, they can all go to England and make a living there.
I find it hard to maintain patience, when I read the Minister's peroration telling us how happy we ought to be because we are not like the coolies in Malaya and when I match that exhortation with the visit of a neighbour of mine to me within the past fortnight, a man of 71 years of age, who came to me to know if I could get his holding extended. He had raised 12 children upon it. He thought it hard that, in his 72nd year, he should be faced with the announcement that his last child proposed to leave him and emigrate to England because they could not live on the holding where he had raised 12 children.
A number of people here may say: "What is wrong with a family which itself was raised on that holding, not in luxury but with a standard that made it possible to raise 12 children to maturity and that enabled the father and mother to live into their seventies? Why can they not do it now?" I think this House has forgotten these people. We have sailed cheerfully along, quite indifferent that the policy of the Fianna Fáil Government has gradually built up a cost structure which makes it impossible for these people to survive.
In the past 12 months, the price of young cattle—and young cattle mean existence to these people—has fallen by about £12 a head. The price of pigs, while normally stable, has in fact very materially deteriorated. The grading of pigs has become much stiffer. A far higher percentage of total deliveries of pigs to factories has fallen into the unguaranteed grades. The price of sheep and lambs has catastrophically declined. At the same time, there has proceeded under the Fianna Fáil technique a steady increase in the imposts these people have had to carry.
It has always been the policy of Fianna Fáil, and it is a policy which I admit has considerable publicity value, to exclude from the annual Budget Statement to this House the bulk of the taxation which they propose to impose. However, that taxation is falling on these sections of our people least able to bear it. There arises no occasion to challenge it here because it never passes through our domain. The Minister for Finance, in the course of his oration, congratulated himself on the stability of the balance of payments. For that purpose, he took the years 1957, 1958 and 1959 together, recalling that in 1957 there was a surplus of £9 million, in 1958 a deficit of £1 million and in 1959 a deficit of £8 million—not a very reassuring progress but, nonetheless, one on which he said we have reason to congratulate ourselves for a fall in that three-year period and for stability.
The Minister forgot, when making that statement, all the things his colleagues had been saying about Deputy Sweetman whose courage and foresight produced the circumstances in which the surplus of 1957 was produced on which the present Minister has been living for the past two years. However, if we accept his three-year period, let us look at the other side of the picture from the point of view of the people living in rural Ireland both on the land and in the towns and villages which live by the land and where, let us remember, the bulk of employment provided in this country is being given to our people—because people forget that. They tend to think that nobody is employed outside Dublin, Cork, Limerick and the City of Waterford. If it were all tallied up. we would discover that there is a very great body of our people employed in the rural towns of Ireland catering for the requirements of the agricultural community who deal with them.
In the three years to which the Minister has referred, Fianna Fáil have put 3d. on tobacco, 1d. on beer, 5½d. on the 2-1b. loaf, 3/7d. a stone on flour, 10d. a 1b. on butter. At the same time, they have increased postal rates and bus fares. In respect of the tax on bread, flour, butter, postal rates and bus fares, no Resolution was ever passed through this House. The only mention of it we have ever had was when the Minister for Finance announced in his Budget Statement of 1957, as reported at Column 947 of Volume 161 of the Official Report, that, in respect of the bread, flour and butter taxes, at that stage, they amounted to £9 million per annum. Since then further impositions have gone on bread and butter which must bring that figure up to something like £11 million.
All that extra cost has fallen on the rural community and on the industrial worker but the industrial worker was organised and was able, at least in some measure, to secure compensation for the extra charges Fianna Fáil put upon them. But in rural Ireland, in addition to bearing those charges, the farmers are faced with the fact that the prices available for their output are steadily falling and that consequently, I think, the output itself is falling until we are now faced with the grim dilemma that families, who lived and worked on the land, are giving up the struggle by emigrating and going away.
I regard that as the erosion of the whole economic foundation of this country because, with every one of these farms abandoned, the productivity of the land on which that family lived is going to fall to a half or a quarter of its potential. In 90 per cent. of these cases these holdings are let on conacre which become covered with masses of rushes where few beasts are left to graze by whoever is prepared to take conacre from them. Year after year that land will deteriorate and, in fact, the rent received for it does not fully pay for the degree of deterioration that takes place in the land on conacre. Every month and every year that is suffered to go on reduces the capital assets of this country in a way that will be extremely difficult to repair.
That has its repercussions on every small business in Ireland. Any Deputy in this House who knows rural Ireland will confirm what I say, that every shop and business house in rural Ireland is finding business extremely slack at the present time. They are finding it extremely difficult to meet their expenses. As many city wholesale firms will testify, they are finding it extremely difficult to pay their debts. Today we are faced with the fact that on the charges which they have at present to carry, they and their employees will be required, under the Social Security legislation, to contribute a further £4 million a year or their share of it.
I want to suggest to the Minister for Finance that unless we are able to take energetic measures to correct this situation, the future of this country is extremely difficult. I do not know if the Minister believes it himself, but he told us in the course of his Budget statement that the gross national income was increasing at the rate of 3½ per cent. I look at Table 12(b), which describes the gross national expenditures at constant (1953) market prices, which, I understand, corresponds with what is commonly described as the national income. I find that in 1957 the total of that figure was £537.9 million. It fell, under the impact of the catastrophic harvest and, presumably, the decreased turf production, to £521 million in 1958 and it came back in 1959 to £539 million. That, so far as I know, represents an increase of 1.1 since 1957. Am I correct in saying that is, in fact, an increase in real gross national expenditure of something in the order of one fifth of 1 per cent. per annum since 1957 instead of an increase of 3.2 per cent, which the Minister has arrived at by comparing the year 1959 with the exceptional year of 1958?
I do not think it serves any useful purpose to deceive ourselves by reference to such illegitmate comparisons as I think the Minister sought to make, because I do not believe that our present difficulties are irremediable. I believe they can be remedied and overcome if we go the right way about it. The fundamental difference that I see between us and the present Government is that they are prepared to close their eyes to the facts that do not suit them, and they call upon everybody else, under pain of a charge of high treason, to do the same.
It is no part of the duty of this House to close its eyes to the ascertainable facts. I say that the ascertainable facts are that there are 51,000 fewer persons working in this country than there were in 1956; that the price of cattle has gone down by £10 per head in the past 12 months; that 80,000 fewer pigs were sent to the bacon factories of this country in the first three months of this year than were sent in last year; that small farmers are emigrating and that the small towns of Ireland are in a bad way.
There is only one way to correct that and that is restore the productivity of the land which is at present dwindling. Unless that is done, I do not believe anything else can remedy the fundamental economic difficulty in which we, in fact, are. I was at the Spring Show today and I see that the farmers are exhorted to have further and better recourse to the Advisory Services. It sought to demonstrate to them that if they do, real progress can be made on the smallest holding in expanding its output not only in quantity but also in quality. I think measures can be taken along those lines to repair the grave deficiencies that at present exist in agricultural productivity.
I deliberately refrained in this House and elsewhere from criticism of the bovine tuberculosis eradication scheme but I think the Government is not awake to the urgency of this problem or certainly, to judge by their activities, there is no evidence that they are. I would ask the Taoiseach to consult with the Minister for Agriculture and ask him what are the prospects of raising the areas west of the Shannon to attested status, what are the prospects of their meeting the essential requirements or being in a position to export attested cattle in four or five years' time? I would ask the Taoiseach to consult with his Minister for Finance and the Minister for Agriculture as to what the consequences will be if we are not.
What is the present impact on the cattle trade of the tuberculosis situation here and in Great Britain? I think there is a very real danger of the cattle trade dwindling away west of the Shannon. There is no reason why it should but far more energetic measures must be taken now to bring to the people's knowledge the means and the need of prosecuting the livestock industry effectively in the new conditions in which we find ourselves at the present time.
I note with satisfaction an increase in our exports of industrial goods, which arises largely from the inducements that were provided by our Government, and our successors, to those engaged in the export trade, by way of release of their profits from income tax. I am glad to see the pretty substantial expansion in our exports of raw materials which it is well to remember consist very largely of wool and copper ores. There is a grave danger in regard to the exports of wool because you will not have wool without sheep. The ordinary farmer thinks of sheep as a useful industry for him so long as he can profitably sell the progeny of his flock. He looks on wool as a by-product. It is a very valuable by-product now from the point of view of the country, but it all depends on the maintenance of our sheep numbers and the maintenance of our sheep numbers depends on the ability of the farmer to make a profit out of breeding sheep.
I view with consternation and alarm the virtual disappearance of our exports of butter and the steady reduction in our exports of bacon. I remember looking forward with confidence to an expansion of both of these and if they are allowed to disappear, I do not believe any alternative source of foreign exchange will ever be available to us, unless we can get from the 12,000,000 acres of land the kind of exportable product they are capable of producing. There is no other that will give you exports to maintain the standard of living to which the Minister for Finance referred in his statement.
This is not the appropriate occasion— the occasion of a Budget discussion —to go into all the details of the methods whereby the productivity of the land can be restored but it is the appropriate occasion to direct the attention of those responsible to the fact that unless it is restored, there is nothing else which will act as a proper substitute for it. This is the occasion on which to direct the attention of the Government to the fact that so far as I know, and so far as those whom I have consulted know, the position in rural Ireland is steadily deteriorating and very urgent measures are requisite to correct it. I believe it is possible to operate such measures but I believe it will make their operation doubly difficult if we are to be told that everything in the garden is lovely when in fact what is happening is that there are fewer people employed in the country than there were three years ago; that there are more people emigrating to-day than ever before, in my opinion.
I am often struck by the complacent rejoicing of Fianna Fáil in the reduction of the weekly returns relating to unemployment. These returns have been going down and the numbers of unemployed appear to be diminishing. If you are sitting in Dublin and reading these figures, you cannot but be impressed by them, but if you are living in the west of Ireland and see a notice in the paper that Mr. Wimpey's representative has arrived in Charlestown, and hear thereafter that in Charlestown, and two or three other towns, he has recruited 1,200 young men and taken them with him to London— from one area in the country alone— you begin to ask yourself what is it that is bringing down the record of the number unemployed.
I do not know the position in the city of Dublin. I do not know if people emigrate from Dublin as they do from the west of Ireland but certain this is, that if you ask anyone living in Monaghan, Cavan, Donegal, Sligo, Mayo, Roscommon, Galway, Clare and Kerry, and indeed in West Cork, to look around his own parish, to look up and down his own street, and to ask himself are the same people here this day as they were here this day twelve months, I think he will tell you some of them have gone and that more are planning to go. If you ask him why, he will tell you it is because they see no future for them on the land of Ireland.
I think that is deplorable and I am not at all sure that the Taoiseach does not sympathise with the view that there is not much prospect on the land of Ireland. I wish I thought otherwise but to those of us who believe in the future of this country and to those who are convinced that there is no economic future for Ireland unless its principal natural resource is exploited to the full in the future, it is a grim catastrophe that the whole of rural Ireland should be in the doldrums while the Minister for Finance is telling them that they should all be intoxicated by the prosperity of the standard of living they enjoy.
It will be a disaster for this country if Dáil Éireann suffers itself to be deceived by that kind of talk. The situation is very far different and it requires urgent and heroic measures, which are well within our capacity if we are prepared to undertake them, but above all, it requires an understanding on the part of the Government that the assembly and export of sewing machines from this country is no substitute for pigs and butter and bacon and livestock and meat and wool, because in respect of one commodity, we are bringing in the parts, putting them together and sending them out again. So far as that provides employment, it is a very welcome activity, if it is of an enduring kind but no country can abandon the natural resources with which it was endowed by God and commit itself wholly and irrevocably to the business of the assembly of foreign raw materials, abandoning the exploitation of its natural resources and the marketing of the products therefrom.
Substantially, the natural resources of this country are 12,000,000 acres of arable land. In their effective and efficient user and exploitation, there is abundant scope for the employment of more people. There is abundant scope for the use profitably, through that land, of a great volume of industrial production. There is abundant opportunity for the development of a great volume of foodstuffs, which we are told the world is short of at present, and it is true that for all the foreseeable future, as the Minister in his speech said, four-fifths of the human race will be more or less hungry. I admit that this Government will require collaboration from other Governments if an effective bridge is to be built between the available food supplies and the hungry mouths that wish to consume them, but certain it is that if there is one good bet in the economic future of the world, it is that the world's population will want more food.
One thing is certain and it is that we here are more richly endowed than almost any other country in the world with the means of producing the highly specialised foodstuffs that can command the best prices in the foreign markets of the world. One thing is certain—that we are side by side with one great market and that we have access to all the other markets of the world, if we go out to get it. One thing, I think, is certain—that we have potentially as competent a body of farmers in this country as there is in the world. I think it is demonstrably clear that we have not yet brought within their reach the means effectively to apply modern methods to the comprehensive exploitation of that natural resource. For the want of that, I believe much employment in the processing and export of our output of agriculture is being lost in this country. For the want of that, I think, we are ignoring markets that are vital to us while concentrating with enthusiasm on others which, in the long run, may be of relative insignificance.
I welcome any market for anything that we are prepared to produce but if I have to choose between the export of sewing machines and bacon, I think the prospects for an enduring and prosperous industry here for pigs and bacon are much more alluring than those for sewing machines. There may be no conflict between these two. The danger is that such a conflict should be allowed to develop and that all our resources should be concentrated on the development of relatively unimportant exports, while we suffer those which are capable of indefinite expansion to the great advantage of all parts of the country to wither and die. No economy can long endure one fragment of which is relatively rich and the rest of which is suffered to sink into poverty. This country cannot endure if one province is to be well-to-do and three provinces are to be poor.
The object of our Government and the object of our economic policy should be to create a national income in which all sections of the community could equitably share. The present situation is that with a national income which, so far as I see, is substantially stable, at present one section may be improving their position—and it is a relatively small section compared with the agricultural section—but as it improves, agriculture goes down and as agriculture goes down, not only the farmers are suffering, but all those who get their living by them suffer also. I do not want to see one half of this country denuded of its population and deprived of its livelihood.
I see in the Minister's attitude in his Budget speech the kind of attitude which suggests that he wants to put all that side of the picture out of his mind and forget about it. If he does that, he will do it at his peril and, what is worse, he will do it at our peril, too, because if one half of the country is substantially abandoned by the working population and there is nothing left in it but old people and children, it will be too late to reverse the process then. It earnestly and urgently requires recognition and confirmation now that unless we are prepared to take the measures requisite to restore prosperity to the agricultural industry, we are living in a fool's paradise, and if Ministers of this Government really believe—which I do not think they do—that things are truly as the Minister for Finance would suggest in his speech, then the situation of the country is extremely dangerous and will become more so.
On the other hand, if we will face the facts and instead of seeking to secure cheap political advantage by distributing small benefactions to various sections of the community on the suggestion of various interested bodies that make representations to the Minister from time to time, rather adopt a policy designed to secure that all will share in an expanding prosperity, there is great hope for this country.
I believe in this country. Most of us on this side of the House have staked all we have on the prospects of the country thriving and prospering in the future. If it should sink, we shall sink with it. I have never believed personally, and no one on this side of the House has ever believed, that, given the right policy, this country cannot provide a good livelihood for our people in their own land. I have seen this country brought low twice in my lifetime by the activities of the Fianna Fáil Party and twice in that period a dominant influence in those Governments was the Taoiseach. I mean no personal reflection on him, but I believe the policies he stands for and in which he believes have in them great danger for the country and unless, now that he is removed from Departmental responsibility into the wider responsibility of presiding over the policy of the whole Government, he awakes to the simple fundamental facts that the future of Ireland very largely depends on our success in exploiting our principal natural resource, the land, and that there is no prospect for Ireland half-pauper and half well-to-do.
We shall be in a bad way if the Taoiseach does not wake up to that for himself and I suppose we shall have a general election pretty soon and we can only bring this argument to the higher tribunal of the hustings. If we cannot win here, then we shall do our best to win elsewhere and I am satisfied that sooner or later we shall get the chance through the voice of our people to do what is necessary to make this country what we would wish it to be.
