We are selling to the foreigner the land which we purchased with blood. Sooner or later this proceeding must come to an end or a social problem will arise in rural Ireland, with utterly appalling over-tones, which may present us with grave social problems of a character that no one living in this House today can fully understand for no one has lived through the consequences of a similar situation 50 and 60 years ago.
I want to direct the attention of the House to the substantial sums of money that are at present being invested by persons concerned to purchase property in the cities of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and elsewhere. It is now becoming a pretty regular practice for foreign finance companies to buy up valuable property in Dublin, and elsewhere, exploit it, and set it to the people who use it in this city and elsewhere. I welcome, and I think most Deputies do, the foreign capital which comes in here for investment in industry to provide employment for our own people under our own law. I regard the presence of "hot money" deposited in our banks as a danger, as a danger not yet of such dimensions as to cause us unnecessary concern, but we should not forget its presence there and we should not forget the readiness with which it can emigrate if any difficulty hereafter arises.
What the people of this country are forgetting, and what this Government are forgetting, is that the capital invested here is reckoned by those who invest it to yield on an average an annual return of seven per cent. Let us assume that the bulk of the capital coming in is of that character, that the bulk of it is coming in for investment in this country, the fact remains that, while it operates to obscure the balance of payments at the present time, every £10 million so invested here begets an annual charge in perpetuity of £700,000 per annum on our balance of payments. If £50 million sterling has come in in the past two or three years, that represents a permanent charge of £3,500,000 on our balance of payments hereafter.
Now the great danger attendant on this course is that we can finance an adverse balance of trade by selling our land, by selling our property up to the point when our people cry "Halt" to that proceduure, which must sooner or later come, but it leaves after it the existence of that annual charge which hereafter must be met out of our balance of trade because, when the influx of capital ceases, the balance of trade must carry the burden of our balance of payments, subject to what contribution is made to it by our invisible exports. I want to suggest that unless this Government have viable proposals to place before this House, calculated to reassure us that the gap in the balance of payments can be effectively bridged when we have ceased to sell our land and property into foreign ownership and are dependent on our invisible and our visible exports for the funds necessary to meet this charge, then this Government are leading this country into an extremely dangerous adventure. I have found no evidence in all the Minister and his colleagues have said which carries to my mind any reassurance whatever that we are generating a volume of exports calculated effectively to bridge this gap which is growing, and will continue to grow.
I should like to hear from the Minister if he can give to the House any indication at this moment of what proportion of the balance of payments— as distinct from the balance of trade —is at present being met by the sale of land and the sale of property in this country. I imagine the Government have deliberately blinded themselves to the extent to which we are selling land and property to bridge this gap. I shall be interested to hear from the Minister what his present estimate of it is. I recall to his memory that not so long ago the Minister for Lands gave his estimate as £500,000, and within a fortnight, the Minister for Finance mentioned a figure of £1 million, that is, in reference to land. I suspect the figure is very much greater.
No one has yet furnished an estimate of the figure appropriate to the sale of property in Dublin and in the other cities and towns. I expect it is running at a very high rate now. I want the Minister to give his estimate of that source of capital payments which are obscuring the balance of payments at the present time, how long he expects that source of money to endure, and how he envisages that the existing balance of payments, plus the charge that will come in course of payment in respect of capital now moving into the country, will be met, when we are at present carrying an adverse trade balance of £105 million per annum, and on the monthly returns, all the evidence points towards a widening in the gap in our balance of trade. These are grave and serious matters to which I think the Minister should turn his mind and on which he should inform the House.