Considering this Estimate and the motion to refer back, I think one is entitled to comment on the Minister's introductory statement that it is not a very exciting document, but at least it has the quality of moderation. I see that the Taoiseach has recently been on the rampage in the country and emulating Mr. Khrushchev in Paris, he discarded his text recently in the town of Kilkenny and worked himself into a furious passion about the failure of Parties, other than Fianna Fáil, to have confidence in the future of the country. The fundamental difference between Parties in this House and the Fianna Fáil Party is that Fianna Fáil have confidence in their own future and do not very much care about the future of the country. The other Parties in this House have no confidence in Fianna Fáil, past, present or future, but believe that if we could get rid of them and get a decent Government into their place, all rational people could legitimately entertain high hopes for the future of this country and the people living in it.
I sympathise with the Minister who has to introduce his Estimate here to-day and forbear from making any reference to his predecessor's undertakings, given in Clery's Restaurant as recently as 1956 and on foot of which the Minister is sitting where he is. The Minister's predecessor is now Taoiseach and head of the Government and the basis on which he sought the suffrages of our people was that he undertook to supply 100,000 new jobs as a result of a plan which he assured them he had worked out, which he had published as a special supplement to the Fianna Fáil kept newspaper and which he announced was not designed to provide 100,000 jobs in one year but he was so sure of his plan that he was prepared to tell the people that the jobs would become available at the rate of 20,000 jobs per annum over a five-year period.
He has now been three years in office with an absolute majority in this House secured very largely on foot of that promise—that promise and the promise that he would not abolish the food subsidies. On these two undertakings, he got a clear majority in this House and the Minister in his statement today, speaking on industrial employment, on page 6, has it to tell that there are 3,700 more people engaged in industrial employment in 1959 than there were in 1958.
That is the measure of his own claim but anyone who has had occasion to refer to the Grey Book on economic statistics published in connection with the Budget is only too well aware that, despite the precaution taken of dividing into two tables the employment figures which used in the past to appear in one Table—they appear under Table 6 and Table 16 in Economic Statistics issued prior to the Budget of 1960—will realise that in the third year of their period of office, there are 51,000 fewer people working in the country than there were on the day he made that promise in Clery's Restaurant. He is 110,000 wrong in his undertakings to our people because, instead of creating 60,000 new jobs, there are, in fact, 51,000 fewer people working.
We are told today, and Deputy Norton has already commented upon it, that if the Minister cannot demonstrate that there are more people working, he can at least claim that there are fewer people registered as unemployed. I am sure he can. There are seven adjoining houses on one road outside the town of Ballaghaderreen closed, the families having gone to England. Is there a townland west of the Shannon or west of Cork city in the south or is there a single townland in rural Ireland where there has not been one house closed in the past few years? That is a phenomenon we never had in this country before. We always have had emigration—I admit that—but I have never seen whole families go before. Nobody need take my word for it. Every independent testimony that has been uttered in public in regard to this matter in recent times recalls that outstanding fact, that whole families are moving out of rural Ireland at the present time. Naturally, the sons and daughters are no longer appearing on the register of the unemployed.
I never really understood from Fianna Fáil that their remedy for unemployment was to ship the people out of the country. These were the methods of Cromwell and Queen Elizabeth. They shifted them off to Heaven; we are shifting them to Great Britain. I have no doubt that, in the days of Queen Elizabeth, when Spenser wrote of Munster that there was scarcely a human creature to be seen, she could have boasted that there were no unemployed to be seen in the whole of Munster. Neither Spenser nor the present Government would be likely to add that Queen Elizabeth sent them to Heaven and the present Government sent them to the United States and Great Britain. It is surely not the solution of the unemployment problem that Fianna Fáil campaigned for.
When we were in office, we never made these sweeping undertakings to resolve the problem of unemployment and of employment overnight. The great mistake the inter-Party Governments made was that they did too much and said too little. That is a charge that will never be brought against Fianna Fáil because they say plenty but do sweet damn all.
It is an interesting reflection that after the first three years of inter-Party Government, the census of 1951 was taken and that was the first census since the Famine in which the population of Ireland went up. It has been going down ever since.
Over and above that, if Deputies will look back to the year 1955-56, they will find the level of employment of persons at work in the main branches of non-agricultural economic activity—Table 16 of Economic Statistics published for the Budget of 1960. In 1955, there were 726,000 people employed in those categories of employment, which was the highest figure attained, so far as I know, for a very long time, higher certainly than in any year since 1951 and much higher than in 1956, 1957, 1958 or 1959. If they look at Table 7, they will find the number of males engaged in farm work on 1st June in agriculture, forestry and fishing, which covers substantially the rest of the economy. In 1954, the figure was 460,000 and since that year, there has been a steady decline down to the figure of 420,000 at which it stands at the present time.
The Minister for Industry and Commerce should accept the distasteful task which, I admit, is set him of reconciling his leader's undertakings of 1956 with the performance of his Government up to to-day. On the facts, I think a prima facie case of fraud is made out and it behoves the Minister for Industry and Commerce to rebut that, if he is able.
I spoke of the two promises they made. One was the 100,000 jobs. Everybody knows the contemptible nature of that fraud and the cruel and iniquitous kind of fraud it was because it was an appeal, remember, to the wives of unemployed men to go out and vote for Fianna Fáil so that Mr. Lemass and his colleagues could get jobs for their husbands. We have 51,000 fewer husbands working to-day than when he gave that undertaking but, at the same time, I want to ask the Minister for Industry and Commerce does he realise, when he hears the story from Monaghan, Mayo and his own native county of Cork of the disappearing population of small farmers, how far his policy of abolishing food subsidies and increasing the cost of living is responsible for that emigration?
We heard in the course of the Budget debate of the steady decline in the income of the agricultural community. Mark you, when you read that for the year 1958-59 there has been a heavy decline in agricultural income, many people forget that it is superimposed on a very substantial decline in agricultural income in 1958. But while that decline was proceeding, the increase in the cost of living which was precipitated by the present Government's repudiation of the election undertaking not to remove the food subsidies, hit the small farmers of this country just as much as it hit anybody else but far from giving any extra remuneration to help them to carry that burden, agricultural prices went down and I think there was a complacent view held in the Fianna Fáil Government that if that happened the only result would be that the farmers would tighten their belts and accept a lower standard of living because the Dublin-Cork mentality maintained that was the only thing they could do.
Mark you, for years that was substantially true; the small farmers accepted the situation philosophically; they did tighten their belts for lower standards of living and stuck it out but we have crossed the rubicon. We have gone a little too far and we have initiated this astonishing new phenomenon of small farmers moving out, lock, stock and barrel. This is a trend, which we may discover too late, will be extremely difficult to correct. I do not want to pursue that question on this Estimate because I think it will arise in greater detail on the Estimate for Agriculture but I want to emphasise that there is a combination of circumstances contributing to the exodus from rural Ireland and that for part of that combination of circumstances the Minister for Industry and Commerce is responsible because he has forced up the cost of living in the hope that the small farmer would accept it quietly and without any corresponding assistance. That belief is quite unfounded and we are reaping the harvest of that deplorable decision at present.
I often wonder if the members of the Fianna Fáil Government ever ask themselves why their predecessors spent so much blood, sweat and tears in trying to keep down the cost of living. Did they think we did that for fun? We did it because we believed that if you want to maintain the economic fabric of the country you must have regard to the wage-earning community, to the self-sufficient farm family and to the farmer who employs labour. The only way to do that is to try to hold the cost of living at a certain level and, on the one hand, by trade agreements and negotiation, to get as remunerative a market as you can for agricultural output, and on the other, to see that wage rates are kept reasonably in step with any increase in the cost of living that you cannot avert and, at the same time, by the stimulation of investment of foreign capital in the country, expand opportunities of employment.
The most irresponsible thing ever done in the history of this country, following the arrival of the Fianna Fáil Government in office, was the reversal by them, largely out of spite, of that whole economic policy without the remotest conception of what they were to put in its place. It had, of course, the immense attraction that if you had a complacent majority in this House the Minister for Finance could then get his hands on £9 million in revenue by the abolition of food subsidies. That enabled him to cut a bit of a dash, but he never thought of the consequences that were to ensue. We have the consequences in the £3½ million extra which civil servants and public servants will cost this year on top of the increases of last year and we have the consequences in the seventh round of wage increases—the just and inevitable consequences. While you can compensate the Civil Service, including the Army, the Garda and the teachers, and the organised trade unionists, who is going to compensate the sheet anchor of the whole economy, the family farmer? Nobody thought of him, and we are now in grave danger of his moving out.
What astonishes me is that although the Minister had the evidence before his eyes of the dramatic collapse of agricultural exports, to which I shall refer in a moment, it never dawned on him that if you drive a 20-acre farmer into emigration and you talk of providing 20 more jobs in a provincial centre, the seven farmers that leave the countryside have left after them between 100 and 150 acres of land every perch of which will be set in conacre. The output of every acre of that land will drop by 50 per cent. this year and, in four years, the output of that land will be down to 10 per cent. of its true potential.
The Minister knows enough about rural Ireland to realise that conacre land rapidly becomes rushes over which a few thin store beasts graze. That agricultural output will disappear. That extraordinary circle of diminishing output has been established with our principal natural resources being less and less profitably used. And then we are all expected to go into ecstasies of excitement because somebody is bringing in parts of a Japanese sewing machine, screwing them together and exporting them to Hong Kong. We shipped £1 million of those sewing machines which were assembled here, some to Hong Kong, some to Ceylon and some to Great Britain.
I do not know what employment that provides and I have no objection to the assembly being done here, if that is a profitable operation for our people, but I think it is clear madness to associate in our minds exports of £1 million of sewing machines with exports of £1 million of agricultural produce because one involves the import of £900,000 or more parts for the sewing machines whereas the other involves the importation of nothing at all as the raw materials and the finished products are derived from our own soil, and, if not so derived, the soil will not produce anything at all. Every £1 worth of increased agricultural output will go almost entirely into the export market.
People forget that there are certain fundamental economic facts, and one of them is that we are the best fed people in the world. By and large, we cannot consume any more agricultural produce than we are at present consuming. It might be suggested that some of that produce might be better distributed over the population, but we are eating more and better than any other community in the world. If we increase the output of the agricultural land of Ireland, 90 per cent. of that increase will go straight into the export market in our present situation. I cannot see how any rational Government—and from that category, I exclude Fianna Fáil—can go into ecstasies of joy at Kilkenny, because we have added £1,000,000 worth of sewing machines to our exports, at a time when these are the real figures of the exports from the land.
In 1957, we exported cattle, beef, veal, tinned beef, mutton and lamb— and I ask the House to note that these are not only exports, but agricultural exports, many of which have been processed and which employed much labour in Ireland. The export of those commodities has fallen from £55.3 million to £44.3 million. That is £11,000,000. More labour was employed in one month processing those commodities, the export of which has fallen by £11,000,000, than was employed in 12 months in connection with sewing machines. The Taoiseach says we have lost faith in the future of the country because we dare to inquire if the sewing machines are a substitute for the cattle, beef, veal, tinned beef, mutton and lamb that did not go out last year?
More than half the value of bacon and ham represents employment and the processing in Ireland of products, every ounce of which is produced from the soil of Ireland because the bulk of our pigs are now fed, as a result of the policy of the inter-Party Government, on skim-milk and homegrown barley. In 1956, we exported £2,000,000 worth of bacon and ham; in 1957, we exported £4.3 million worth; in 1958, we exported £8.1 million worth; and in 1959, we exported £5.5 million worth. Our exports of bacon and ham have gone down by £2.6 million in the past 12 months. The Taoiseach out-Khrushchev-ed Khrushchev in his indignation at Kilkenny because anyone dares to doubt that it is a desirable thing to replace £2.6 million worth of exports of bacon and ham by £1,000,000 worth of Japanese sewing machines.
In 1956, we exported £200,000 worth of butter; in 1957, our exports of butter went to £4½ million; in 1958, we had a very wet year and our exports of butter did not further expand, but dropped to £4,000,000; but in 1959, our exports of butter had virtually disappeared: they were down to £500,000. The Taoiseach says: "What the hell—we exported £1,000,000 worth of Japanese sewing machines."
