I move:
To delete all words after "That" and substitute:
"Dáil Éireann declines to give a Second Reading to the Bill until the wishes of the people thereon have been ascertained by means of a General Election."
We believe this Bill should not get a Second Reading. The reaction in the country to the proposed turnover tax has been universal, as everybody knows, and covers all sections of the community; they have made their deep-rooted objection to the tax fairly clearly felt, I think. Listening to the speakers who preceded me, and speaking in the context of the results of the by-election, I think the Government can now be in no doubt at all that this tax is an unjust tax and one deeply resented by the people. It is a tax which will bring great hardship to a large section of our community.
I do not believe that a Minister of the standing of Deputy Dr. Ryan, or any of his colleagues, learned about the seriousness of the implications of the tax from us here in Opposition, from the RGDATA group, from the NFA, or anybody else. They introduced this tax knowing full well all its implications and appreciating fully that it would bring very great hardship on all our people. This action was taken by the Government knowing that it must bring greater unpopularity to the Government and in circumstances in which the Leader of the Government had spent the past 18 months assuring the country that we were in a state of prosperity never before equalled in this Republic, that there was a position of boom in all sectors of our economy, and that this boom was of such quality that there appeared to be no ceiling to it.
In the anti-climax period that has followed the failure of our application to enter EEC, it is difficult to recapture the ebullient euphoria that swept across this House, directed in particular at myself and Deputy McQuillan when we questioned the validity of the suggestions made here, by the Taoiseach in particular, supported to a lesser extent by the Minister for Industry and Commerce and other Ministers, and, probably least of all, in fairness to him, by the Minister for Finance.
It is difficult to believe that we had reached such a level of wellbeing. It was completely false, unfounded wellbeing. In this House and outside this House the case was put forward by the Taoiseach that, in fact, we were in a position of permanent prosperity, of permanent wellbeing of the economy, that we were in a state of expansion to which there were no bounds foreseeable.
Consider the complete falsity of that programme, in respect of which I attach to the Taoiseach the major responsibility for its creation, its generation and its mainteance throughout the period of time when we were jeered at here repeatedly, attacked, abused and misrepresented time and time again because we questioned the validity of this suggestion that ours was, in fact, a prosperous economy or a prosperous society, that industry was in a healthy state or agriculture was expanding.
Again and again we said we are not fit, our industry is not prepared for the competition of the Common Market; agriculture is not prepared for the conditions under which it will have to operate in the Common Market; our social services are not capable of being brought to parity with those of the Common Market countries in the present state of our economy without very radical and fundamental changes being brought about which could not have been brought about in the period before the changes were made demanded by the Common Market countries.
Nobody would accept the case we put forward here. Nobody would accept that this country is in a semi-bankrupt situation, that industry is not booming, that industry is highly inefficient, that industry is stagnating, that agriculture is stagnating, that our social services are of such a rudimentary form that it would need millions of pounds to be found somewhere in order to bring them anywhere near the level at present found in most European countries, that we are still, 40 years after the attempt by the joint great Parties to create a viable economy, a socially just and prosperous economy, still, 40 years virtually as far away from it now as when we started. That is not as much of an overstatement as it appears, if you take into consideration the fact that anything that has been done here has been done at the expense of exporting the best part of one million people.
I believe that the Taoiseach did a very serious disservice to the whole conception of parliamentary democracy, which is under a strain now never before equalled in its history, when he used all the processes of communication, as he did in the most unscrupulous and dishonest way, in order to misrepresent the position of the country, in order to try to purchase his way into the Common Market on a completely false, dishonest prospectus that he put forward to these European countries, which, incidentally, I do not believe fooled them for one moment. I do not think we would ever have got in as a full member.
However, he had his propaganda on television, the radio, his newspapers and support for his steamrolling methods in this House to shut us up whenever he could, to prevent us talking, to prevent us criticising or commenting or putting the other point of view, small and all as we were.
The Taoiseach did a very great disservice to the whole idea of parliamentary democracy in misrepresenting the position as he did and he is now facing the reality of the situation and having to tell the public here and the public in Europe that, in fact, this society is so seriously in need of money that it must now impose a tax which will take in our country the fantastic sum of £12 million in the form of indirect taxation from those least able to bear it. The Government are not doing this because they believe in flagellating the public or crucifying the public or punishing the public. They are doing it because they have so mismanaged the economy over the past 30 years that they have no alternative but to impose this penal taxation. It is merely one of the repercussions, merely one of the end results of the mismanagement of our affairs by these people over the years.
As Deputy Corish said, an attempt is made to attack those of us who do not agree with this tax, to attack us with the line: "Will you hit us now with the baby in our arms? Will you hit us now with the old age pensions? Will you hit us now with the social welfare benefits that we want to hand out?" and the line: "If you do not vote for this tax, then you are voting against better conditions for old people, better children's allowances, and so on". Of course, that is a completely false equation. It is a completely dishonest misrepresentation of the position. It is like saying to us: "We are going to give £10 a week to the old age pensioners. We are going to give £20 a week to the widows and orphans" and so on, without bothering to tell us how they are going to get the money. Would we be justified in giving £10, £20 or whatever it may be by way of increases if we are not content about where the money comes from?
Of course, we favour taxation. One has to have it. Taxation is merely the way in which there will be brought about a redistribution of the national wealth in order to provide the various services one must have in a civilised and Christian society. What is disturbing about this tax is, of course, that it brings forward at an unprecedented rate the development referred to by Deputy Corish, the development in recent years of the greatly disproportionate increase in indirect taxation as opposed to direct taxation in the community.
We now know that this tax is to be passed on. The Minister for Finance, if he goes back on his opening speech, will find that whether he intended it or not, he left us with the impression that he did not believe the tax would be passed on. The impression he created, certainly in my mind—I think his words were that the tax need not be passed on—was that he was hoping that the tax would be taken out of profits. It is quite clear that this tax will not be taken out of profits, but will be passed on to the consumer. Since the consumer is the man in the street and the person who bears the burden, we think he should be given an opportunity of passing a decision on the matter, once and for all.
We agree that the decision in the by-election is particularly significant. It is a decision taken on this tax in a reasonably representative city constituency. It was a reversal, and, I should imagine, a very unexpected reversal from the point of view of the Fianna Fáil Party, led by one of its ablest Deputies, Deputy Haughey, Minister for Justice, with the tremendous financial resources which they now have at their disposal. In all the circumstances, the Government must accept that the reversal was of particular significance, and they should now take the same decision in relation to the general public as was taken in the small area of Dublin North-East.
The tax is, of course, a complete reversal of the policy to which for years we listened, sceptically, with justification quite clearly, which laid down that the great incentive, the great dynamic to public enterprise capitalism, was to give them freedom to operate as they chose, and to reduce taxation to the minimum; that by giving them such incentives, they would increase production, increase output from industry, increase their own wealth and, in that way, increase the national wealth. Of course, this was never believed in. It has now proved to be completely fallacious. Obviously, by the imposition of this tax, it is now completely repudiated by the Government and reversed. Everyone will now be asked to pay this tax.
We believe that the ideal approach to taxation is taxation imposed in the direct form and based on the general principle: from each, according to his ability; to each, payment according to his needs. That was a just form of taxation. I know well charges have been made that it was a very difficult tax to implement, but I find it difficult to believe that the problems involved in collecting direct taxation were insuperable. Over the years since the State was formed, it seems to me that the wealthier minority who paid direct taxation have become more and more powerful and more and more influential with the Government. The result has been that while they have had to accept that certain rudimentary social services had to be made available, such as primary school education, old age pensions and unemployment assistance, they would not pay for them. Those people, best able to pay, would not pay.
The nice thing about direct taxation —and it is probably the only occasion on which I agree with a means test— was that there was a means test in its collection. It meant that no one paid tax he was financially unable to pay. Whatever he paid was according to a fixed rate and a fixed scale applicable to everyone equally. The married man was left with enough to rear and educate his family, and what he had in surplus was handed over to help the less well off sections of the community.
I cannot for the life of me see what is wrong with that conception of taxation. It seems to me that we should be concerned with the less wealthy people who are less able to care for themselves because of their lack of education, lack of skill, lack of training, lack of know-how, and because they are unable to get the highly-paid jobs. It seems to me that the wealthy should pay for the less wealthy and see that their children have access to secondary schools, universities, and the best medical care when it is needed. I cannot see why that taxation cannot be accepted as being the ideal taxation and, above all, the most just taxation to impose on a society such as ours which professes so loud-mouthedly the general Christian belief in the responsibility of every man for his neighbour.
If we look over the years, we see that there has been a progressive alteration and inversion of the whole taxation system. There has been an increase in the amount of taxation paid by the mass of the people, and a reduction in the amount of direct taxation paid by the wealthy minority who, of course, have always opposed as bitterly as they possibly could, the idea that it is an essentially Christian conception that they should look after the underprivileged in their own society. In order to do that, they have used the newspapers primarily and the radio, and they are now using television, and most of the schools and universities have preached the idea that the creation of what has come to be known as the welfare state was undesirable, that it was a bad thing, that it would undermine the independence of the individual and all that sort of rubbish.
It is now clear that the Taoiseach has nominally accepted the conception that we should go to the left, as he said. It has been accepted now, following the Encyclicals of the late Pope John, that it is possible for a society such as ours to have all the advantages of a welfare state, and still not be in any way in conflict with basic principles.
The result of this propaganda has been an increase in the payment of indirect taxation. It is disproportionately high in Ireland compared with other countries. Of course, indirect taxation is in no way as just as direct taxation, because indirect taxation, as was pointed out by Deputy Corish, bears on everyone but, in particular, it bears most heavily on the man with the large family, and on the socially dependent groups, the old age pensioners and the widow and her children.
Obviously, in a family, or a home, where there is a limited income, and where a man is trying to educate his children, to look after them when they are sick, to feed and clothe them, it is quite clear that the proportion of money spent on luxuries, or semi-luxuries, is very tiny indeed compared with the amount of money which must go on the necessaries. In the wealthy family where there is plenty of money, the price of the essentials is of relative unimportance. It is only of relative importance to that family. The consequence is that the person who will be hardest hit by this taxation is the white collar worker and the manual worker. Outside them, the people who will not be greatly inconvenienced by this taxation are the wealthy minority.
This is not a new development. It has taken place over a number of years, that is, the great pre-occupation of the Government with the protection of the privileged minority in our society, and the perpetuation of this privileged minority against the interests of the mass of the people. There is this retention of the old two-classes ideal which we had away back in the British days with no attempt to make any significant change, talking about making changes but, in fact, making no changes at all.
Consequently, there is the position in which a tax like this seems to be the last straw. Not only have we taxation in the direct way, which is at a fairly high level in spite of what the Minister, Deputy Dr. Ryan, may say, but we have a progressively increasing level of indirect taxation over the years and, in addition to that, there is the imposition of a further form of indirect taxation, and then this business of the rates. In Ireland we have four different types of taxes paid by the people.
I am not doctrinaire about the kind of tax we pay. As long as we collect tax I would sooner it was collected from those who are best able to pay than from the person who has family responsibility and who is already put to the pin of his collar trying to make ends meet. I would sooner tax was collected from the wealthy people but, apart from that, the Government should not try to create the impression that this is a separate creation which will cover all their taxation needs in our society. It is a supplementary tax in addition to, as I have said, three other different types of taxes and because of that it is particularly unjust.
On all occasions when we are discussing legislation of one kind or another, there are references, particularly on this Bill, to other countries, to what happens in Sweden, and so on. How anyone here can talk in the same breath about the social services here and the social services in Sweden or talk about any other conditions here and in Sweden is beyond my understanding. However, we do have these references in regard to Sweden, Britain, France, Germany and so on. There are all these taxes here and then an attempt is made to relate them to the same taxes elsewhere, but there is this difference here. While our people pay a very high rate of tax, there could be some excuse for it were we to give our people with that tax some compensatory reward. This is not so. We seem to take the view that the mass of the people must be penalised in every possible way; in rates, in direct taxation, in indirect taxation and then in this new taxation. We do not even bother to compensate them on the basis they have in Sweden, Britain or Western Germany, who have simply magnificent social services of one kind or another.
Personally, I do not believe, for various reasons, in the conception of, say, the British welfare society. I do not think it is a true redistribution of income in the socialist connotation. Leaving that aside, there is the fact that at least the people do get their own income redistributed because, in my view, that is all the welfare State is. The money is provided by the worker and it is given back to him. I want the money of the wealthy people as well but in Sweden, Britain and Western Germany the money is at least given back to them. They have the benefit of first-class health services and are able to have their children educated. They can be certain that if they are manual workers with a very limited income they need not worry because if they have an intelligent child they know he can acquire a skill or a craft, if he is that way inclined, or he can go to a higher educational establishment, such as a secondary school or a university and they will not be told they cannot get this for their children because they cannot pay for it, as people are told here. Nobody denies that, even the Minister for Education, because he tells us there will be a reorganisation of the educational services.
Not only do we penalise the people in taxation but we do not even distribute it amongst them again in the ordinary orthodox way in a liberal society such as the Government are pretending this is. We take the money from the people and we deny them the right to use it to get an education for their children or to help themselves to get better health services or to put the money by for their own old age. There is no attempt in the form of an insurance scheme to protect people against various things or to provide for better education. Therefore, it is grossly misleading and misrepresents the position to pretend that in imposing this taxation we are doing what other comparable societies do.
Not only will this new tax not add greatly to the position of the worker in society but it leaves him in the position in which he is denied these various social services. Furthermore, he is being asked to pay this tax at a time when he is faced with a wages standstill order, when he is told that he cannot recover what he will need in order to keep himself and his family in essential commodities. Here we have grossly defective social services as compared with other countries. In addition, we find that in this supremely Christian society the average wage of the worker is less than in most of these European societies. He pays more for the very much less advantageous benefits which he gets from the employer in our society and, as Deputy Corish said, he pays indirect taxation to a greater extent than is paid by his European comrades.
The workers in Ireland, both white collar workers and manual workers, are at a very serious disadvantage as compared with workers in other societies and this attempt to create the impression that there is a comparison between them is completely misleading and wrong. We cannot even complain that we have had a great outlay of money or great expense in the repair of war damage. We were talking this afternoon about the present housing position. There were unfortunate men with their wives and children parading last Saturday or Sunday night outside the horrible Mendicity Institute, tossed there with the local authority refusing to take any responsibility.
Surely that is a scandalous position in a society which pretends it is interested in the welfare of all its members. Why is it, with no significant war damage at all, we find ourselves unable to provide houses? We are not in the position of most of the European countries and we cannot even pretend that we have to pay large sums of money to provide for defence of one kind or another. We have practically no defence commitments whatsoever. In spite of this, we do not seem to be able to pay out the money or to make money available for building houses, for educational services, for the health services, or for the care of the old people. One wonders what we do with it. Of course all this is an inevitable end-product, as I said earlier, of years of mismanagement, of years of inefficient economic policies, policies which cannot be made to work not only here but in practically any country anywhere.
We have the position that there is a shrinking population—from nearly four millions down to 2,700,000, or whatever the figure is, since the State was formed. If money has to be found where industry is badly organised, inefficiently organised, where agriculture is stagnating and where the population is shrinking, clearly the only policy for an inept Government is to increase taxation on that already shrinking, captive population which remains behind. All of this is due to the Government's reliance over the years, and particularly the reliance of the Taoiseach on private enterprise capitalism. This reliance must be faced. Of course it will not be faced and I know it will not be faced. I know quite well that there are men with a much better knowledge of this than I have on the Government benches. They are well aware of the failings of their own economic policies over the years. They know where they failed and how they failed and I believe they know how they could be righted.
In spite of the betrayal of the objective of the freedom movement of the 'twenties to create here any kind of social, just or prosperous society, they will not change the organisation of a system which is responsible for all this, the reliance on private enterprise capitalism, when it comes to the ordinary type of productive investment in industry. When we said that industry was quite incompetent and quite incapable, in the majority of cases, of standing up to European competition, we were of course accused of being anti-national or pro-this or pro-that, that we were trying to undermine confidence in the country and all the rest of it. But now we have the irrefutable evidence from the Minister's Department which corroborates in the clearest terms the indictment which we have levelled time and time again in regard to the inefficiency and ineptitude of Irish industry as worked under private enterprise capitalism.
Every one of the CIO reports—I do not think that is an exaggeration— contained disclosure after disclosure of ineptitude, of failure, of lack of dynamic, of any serious intention to create a productive expansion in industry, to create a really significant export trade, to concern itself with the national income and with the national welfare as a whole. Every single report—on the motor car industry, the paperboard industry, the cotton and linen industry, the boot and shoe industry and recently on the shirt industry—showed grave deficiencies in Irish industry largely because, and, in my view, primarily because, it was financed by private capital and for that reason was concerned with the benefit of the minority who invested their capital in the industry. To that extent, it must be conceded that private enterprise capitalism has been highly successful. It is successful in its own limited objectives, that is, to make a lot of money for a few people. It does that very well, as we know.
There is a very wealthy minority, utterly callous, utterly cynical and utterly thoughtless about conditions of society as a whole. There is that minority unhealthy growth in our society which is not concerned with how the rest of their own people live. Recently I read about 500 of them who could afford to pay £4 a head for a dinner-dance. Four pounds a head! That may not be an awful lot of money to some people but I think that it is outrageous to spend that amount of money on that sort of thing in a society where there are poor people going to bed hungry every night, people who are slowly dying of starvation on 37/6 a week. It is monstrous and I think these people are semi-savages. I also saw where two people paid £1,000 for a box at the opera for a week. This is the type of thing that took place in Czarist Russia or in pre-French Revolution times, but it is going on in our society now and nobody seems to mind or object.
As I say, the purpose of private enterprise presumably has been achieved, but at what expense? We are told by the Department of Education that they cannot afford to provide radios or television sets or schools or universities or scholarships to universities and secondary schools. They have not got the money to do that. That is part of the penalty that has to be paid not by the wealthy or by the people who speak for them in this House, but by the youngsters who are growing up illiterate or semi-illiterate, without an education. We see youngsters of 14 or 15 pedalling around this city in the highly dangerous traffic carrying heavy loads—the poor little mites — because somebody cannot afford to give them secondary education. We make up some fake ecclesiastical objection in order to satisfy our conscience when we tend to develop any kind of a conscience and say that we must not help these people because it will undermine their self-respect.
We had the Minister for Health sniggering here when Fine Gael suggested that we should have a proper, comprehensive health service and he told us, when the price was mentioned, that it was too high. He did not see the indictment in that admission, that we cannot afford to look after our sick. That is all it meant. As Deputy Corish said, the unfortunate white collar worker cannot afford to be sick. If he pays for the wonder drugs that are available, he will go bankrupt: he cannot afford to feed or clothe his children. These are all the consequences of this reliance on private enterprise capitalism. We have had the same position in the Department of Social Welfare. All we can give to our old people is 37/6d. per week. It tells us the same story.
These are not acts of God. These are the end result of decisions which the Government have taken in Cabinet. They must accept responsibility for them. Industry has never bothered its head about expanding. Industry can make enough for the owners and main shareholders by supplying the home market. They have rigged the business so that they have not any competition on the home market and can sell at any price they want to. That is an admission made on many occasions here by many Deputies.
It is a well-known fact that no attempt is made to increase efficiency by having free competition. The result is that industry has never expanded. It has never made any serious attempt to go abroad to get foreign markets. The result is that industry has never expanded sufficiently to create employment to absorb the youngsters leaving school, the people driven out of rural Ireland by mechanisation and the ordinary unemployed people—the 6, 9, 10 or 11 per cent, or whatever it may be. This is another failure of our reliance on private enterprise capitalism in industry and, as a result, a million people have had to get out. Are there any limits to this insistence on the implementation of these inane, futile policies?
Consider the man at the street corner who is unemployed, the person standing at night in the rain with a placard outside the Mendicity Institute looking for a home for himself and his wife, the old age pensioner on 37/6d. a week, the emigrants, the inadequacy of our schools, the failure to educate our children. There is no sector of society in which Governments have not failed abysmally time and time again and this is a joint failure of Governments over the past 40 years. Yet, they come here, one year after the other, with idiotic financial proposals and plans for prosperity which is always around that same unending corner. Is it not about time they gave up the pretence at Government and got out——