I want to underline some of the representations made by Deputy Cosgrave in dealing with this Bill. He spoke of the impact of the consequential steps which were in contemplation in connection with the Bill on the labour content of industry. I often think when I sit here and listen to the Minister for Industry and Commerce producing legislation of this kind, what the Fianna Fáil position would be if we were in their place and they over here. I can imagine the screams of hysteria that would be heard from these benches and the charges that we were betraying the industrial interests of the country. I am proud of the fact that that kind of hysterical fraud does not characterise this discussion.
I make no apology for recalling to the mind of the House the fact that we are members of OECD and that one of the obligations of membership is to progress steadily towards the abolition of quotas. Is not that true? We are bound to proceed deliberately to that end and, where it is desired to retain protection, to substitute for quota appropriate rates of duty. We have the choice of cutting ourselves off altogether from external contact with Europe, the US and Canada and "going it" utterly alone or else collaborating with them in OECD and other international organisations which are becoming more and more a fact of international life and, outside of which, I believe our circumstances would become well nigh intolerable.
There should be no sentiment in dealing with matters of this kind but there should be prudence. I recognise at once that progress, slow or rapid, towards the disappearance of quotas is bound to create problems for our industrialists but I am also aware that very considerable help has been provided by this House for industrialists to adapt themselves to the new climate in which we must operate. I want to say again what I have said here repeatedly and what I went out of my way to say at our Ard Fheis in the Mansion House recently and what I have heard Deputy Cosgrave and other members of his Party refer to repeatedly: we do not seem to be sufficiently preoccupied with the problems of the people who are working in these industries. I sympathise with the man who has a substantial capital investment in the country but I am conscious of the fact, having been in business all my life myself, that you have an obligation if you are running a business on rational lines, of accumulating from your profits reserves adequate to meet any foreseeable contingency. Indeed, you ought to have supplementary reserves to meet the unforeseeable contingency. If we add to that the adaptation grants and other devices, difficult as some industrialists may find the process of adaptation, they are not without resources and anyone who pleads he is absolutely without resources is, I think, open to question as to whether he has himself taken reasonable precautions.
Take the case of a man who at 23 or 24 years of age had the option in 1933, 1934 or 1935 of going to England or to America or of taking a job in a new industry established here with Government patronage and the extremist type of quota tariff protection. He said to himself: "This is a new departure. The Government guarantee they are going to give whatever protection is necessary to ensure this industry will survive." He took a chance and took a job. He trained himself in that industry and in due course got married. He bought a house and his children are now going to school. He has a wife and family and maybe payments are outstanding on his house. Suddenly he is confronted with the situation that it is not impossible that the industry in which he has invested not his capital but his whole life is going to close down.
I remember a specific case of which I had personal experience. I remember a man who was in just that case. He had spent approximately 30 years in an industry in this city and had reached a very responsible position in it. He was not a director but he was a principal foreman. He was very comfortably circumstanced. He was a hardworking, industrious man, most highly thought of. In this case the family owning the business died out. The employer was an elderly man, and when he died his executors simply wound up the business.
I shall never forget the despairing prospect with which that man was faced through no fault of his own. He would have most gladly taken any work, but the difficulty was he had attained to a position of responsibility and distinction in his particular industry, which was a small industry of which there are only four or five units in the city. To get that man a job in the lower ranks of experience in that industry was virtually impossible, because men who were 10 or 15 years younger than he and who had attained to supervisory capacity naturally recoiled from seeing a man who was their senior in experience being brought in under them. This man was, therefore, out of a job and was suddenly brought smack up against a problem of a man with family responsibilities who has attained a time in life where it is hard to get a job no matter how willing or eager he is to take it. He suddenly finds his employment folding up under him.
What I am anxious about is this. There is no use closing our eyes to the fact that with the disappearance of quota protection there is a certain number of industries here whose survival is highly problematical. As Deputy Norton said, without particularising I can think of certain commodities where the large mechanised industries in Europe and Great Britain could supply our entire requirements in one day. What are we saying now to the individual workers in these industries by way of reassurance, if they find that the employment in which they have spent their lives and invested the only capital they have, which is their life, spent in acquiring experience and expertise? What are we saying to them if they are faced with the prospect of the industry in which they have worked closing up?
The Minister ought to address his mind to this problem and take an early opportunity of saying that our resources will be mobilised and that we will regard as a first charge upon them two obligations to persons who find themselves in that circumstance. First, that we will seek, where their age is such that entry into a new industry is virtually impossible for them, that superannuation on reasonable terms will be provided to ensure that they will not be thrown on the industrial scrapheap. Secondly, we ought to say, boldly and resolutely, in regard to others of middle-age and below middle-age that we will devise a re-training scheme, access to which will be available to them all, to retrain themselves for alternative employment, that we will concern ourselves to get them settled in alternative employment, and that during the period of re-training we will provide them with an income to make it possible for them to keep their families together and to avoid a complete disruption of their lives.
I believe we ought to have the moral courage to say to the employees of such industries whose survival is highly problematical in the completely free trade era, particularly to the younger man: "Listen, you ought to look around now for alternative employment in an analogous trade so as to avoid becoming unnecessarily a social problem in five or ten years' time when it might be very much more difficult for you to make the necessary adaptation in spite of any help the community can provide for you."
These things are to be faced. If they are not faced, it will gradually dawn on a great many trade unionists here that this kind of danger is looming up. You will be liable to get a very acute reaction, which perhaps will on occasion appear to be irrational and extreme. But then you pause and think that a man with a wife and family to provide for finds it extremely difficult to concentrate his attention on the wider economic interests of the country as a whole if it involves his utter ruin. You cannot expect him to be as calm and as deliberate as we here who are trying to look at the thing from an overall viewpoint. I urge the Minister to turn his mind to that aspect of the situation, in the certain knowledge that any proposal he has to put forward will be most sympathetically received in this House, if we are to provide a real solution to the inevitable problem that will arise.
I heard a good deal of talk about a kind of nostalgic yearning for the preservation of highly protective tariffs here no matter what happens in the world outside. This is an illusion, because the industries that have a prospect of expanding employment and have a dynamic future are the industries that have passed the point of depending on the domestic market exclusively. I do not think there is anything truer in business or trade than this: nobody ever stands still. You either expand or you decline. No business long stands still. The firms which are depending for their dynamic on expanding production are the firms who are exporting a part of their output. And what will those firms find, whether they like it or not and whether we like it or not, in 1966?
The EFTA countries are pledged to abolish all tariffs and all quotas. One of the EFTA countries is Great Britain, and we will find ourselves in competition in Great Britain in 1966 with her partners in EFTA on the basis of free trade. Not only that, but President Kennedy is pressing very strenuously for an across the board reduction of all existing tariffs by 50 per cent in the immediate future. As the Minister has said, Britain is preparing very hard, with her EFTA partners, to get into the Common Market, which presupposes a complete disappearance of any tariffs, of any protective device, in Europe by 1970.
That is a world for which we must adapt ourselves. We had better ask ourselves whether all this is unqualifiedly black. I do not think it is. In the first place, I do not believe that the Grand Design adumbrated by President Kennedy at Philadelphia on 4th July last year will disappear into smoke. If I did I would substantially despair for the survival of free society. If I had to accept that prospect I would not give a fiddle-de-dee, I would not give a damn for our chances, because then Mr. Khrushchev and Mr. Mao Tse Tung would be calling the tune. I believe that unless the Grand Design of the Atlantic Partnership is implemented then Mao and Khrushchev and their subscribers will call the tune. I do not believe that they will call the tune. I believe the Atlantic Partnership will become a fait accompli, despite the work of some Europeans to stop it. If it is illuminated altogether——
