The House must be disappointed by the fact that the Minister has not taken this opportunity of considering the full implication of his continuation of the present policy in regard to Irish industry. Everybody knows I am a socialist and that I believe in public ownership, the development of nationalised industries and so on. I believe, at a time like this, even the Minister, with his conservative outlook on matters of this kind, without coming anywhere near to my approach to the reorganisation of society or economy in industry here, could have shown a much more enlightened attitude within the whole concept of a capitalist economy.
It appears, in regard to the provision of this money, that he is quite unwilling to accept that it is possible that the whole of Europe, or most of it, would show that there is a form of capitalism within which it is at least possible to provide for full employment. I do not see that the Minister is making any provision at all for the reorganisation of our industries or for his suggestion to industries that they should so reorganise themselves as to ensure full employment. The past is there for all of us to see. The best part of one million were not provided with jobs. It is very much more intolerable that the future does not hold out any great hopes and that there will be a continued relatively high unemployment figure and a consequential relatively high emigration figure.
As far as I can see, as well as the 8,000 for which he is going to produce jobs, there are about 12,000 who will not find jobs under the Second Programme for Economic Expansion. We shall export something over 100,000 people between now and 1970, in the middle of this Programme, which is being produced with so much extravagant praise, hopes and extravagant promises. One of the pities of our society is that we happen to be a highly romantic race, with a magnificent gift for fabrication, particularly in a literary sense. One of the things which we seem to be able to do better than anything else is to create a completely dream world, peopled by endless Walter Mitty-type characters, who believe they are operating in a highly efficient, well organised society, the tough, arrogant, self-sufficient go-ahead businessmen who are afraid of nobody, who want to stand on their own feet, and not depend on anybody but take on the toughest in Europe and meet and defeat them. That is the mentality that is built up by the interaction of the radio, television and newspapers. The widespread narcissism we find among our people is, of course, blown completely skyhigh by the relatively slight intervention of Mr. Wilson in imposing his 15 per cent levy. England sneezes and Ireland gets pneumonia is a reasonably fair comment on what happened.
These are the same people, this is the same Taoiseach, this is the same Government and Minister who promised us that we were ready and able to take on, not only the toughest in Great Britain but in the whole of Europe, that our industry was well founded, well organised and well run. They were fervent, devoted believers in private enterprise, and what do we find on the first attempt by us to stand on our feet or stand up against a little more competition? We find these people squealing all over the place asking for pity and turning to the Government for hand outs—the things they despised so much. They say we do not like this welfare society; we do not like people getting doles, free grants, allowances, and so on. Our so-called private enterprise is based practically entirely on public money, public grants, public loans. We take all the risk, they take all the profit and, in the process, they effectively rape the public through their organisation of restricted trade practices of one kind or another. So that, not only are there tariffs to protect them from outside competition, but we have restrictive trade practices within Ireland to protect them from internal competition. Therefore, the unfortunate consumer is pillaged by these people in order to create the enormous profit which they have collected in the past few years.
The profit figures I got recently from the Minister are—1957, £9.9 million, 1959, £13 million and 1961, £23 million. That is two and a half times increase in profits in two or three years and all because they grossly exploited the unfortunate Irish worker, whether this be a child labourer, a girl, a boy or the ordinary man in employment. This compared with Europe, is gross underpayment, together with gross over-pricing of Irish goods. I do not know why the survey carried out by the Economic Research Institute has not been referred to. There has been a discussion in the newspapers recently, and so far as one can make any comparison, the discrepancy between Irish and English prices is ten per cent, two per cent of which goes on distribution costs here. They are lower here than in Great Britain but it works out at a ten per cent discrepancy in Britain's favour, against our industry and against those people who are at the front gate at the moment waiting for another £10 million to come their way —not out of their profits, because they cannot afford it. It was £23 million in 1961 and I do not know what last year's figures are.
They cannot afford to pay anything. These are the self-sufficient, arrogant, we-stand-on-our-feet private enterprise merchants who are terrified out of their lives at the prospect of free competition, and the Minister knows that well. Why is it the Minister and the Government refuse to face that fact? I find it positively terrifying that the Minister should read a statement about adaptation grants where only 362 applications were made out of approximately 4,000—one in ten—and we are on the edge of this insane decision to look for full membership of the Common Market. I am glad to see there is a prospect of that being changed to associate membership. We should fall in with Greece and all those other underdeveloped countries. These are the hard facts of life which we have ignored for so long in this tiny narcissan society where we are blowing ourselves up.
We will not listen to the other point of view. When we do, we are called cranks or communists or atheists, or God knows what, so long as we can be destroyed and so long as one can then ignore reality. There are even the poor unfortunate people, the athletes, who were sent to Japan recently and the unbounded mention they got before they went, and the decimation when they arrived there completely outclassed. This painful contrast in the truth from outside always causes us a surprise because nobody is prepared to look at things in realistic terms here. That is the tragedy. When this 15 per cent came on recently and the Irish industrialists threw up their hands and all their financial advisers and economists screamed their heads off at Wilson, they knew quite well that it was precisely the same type of conservative economists—the Maudlings, the Homes and their advisers—who created that situation in Britain and that we are rapidly creating a comparable situation here in Ireland.
Unfortunately, there is no strong Labour Government here in Ireland at present to do what Wilson has done in regard to industry over there. They screamed their heads off largely because they know quite well when the Socialist advances in Great Britain, the same thing will happen here. It is as inevitable as the tide. The serious thing in this debate is the unfortunate casually in the debate. The casualty is the unfortunate worker and his children. It is he who has got hurt and it is he who will get hurt. I consider the offer of these unfortunate workers down the country more than pathetic. They have been grossly exploited in their rights to offer free labour to those people who have taken so much from them and given them so little in return. It is the mark of the workers' generosity and the employers' rapacity.
One in ten people who were so categorically anathematised in the Minister's CIO report as being inefficient, incompetent, unmechanised, badly organised and defective in seeking export markets, decided that this is a serious matter. They hear from the Taoiseach that Irish industry is strong, vibrant, dynamic and go-ahead and is as rosy as they tell one another it is. Rubbish! The 15 per cent found the Government out in that rubbishy statement, that rubbishy fairytale which, to their discredit and continued disgrace, the public media of communications are continuing to circulate as if it were, in fact, a reality in the community. Irish industry has failed to provide jobs for one million and there is another one hundred thousand it will not provide jobs for. It has exploited labour here and has provided goods at grossly unnecessarily exorbitant prices, all the time operating completely inefficient machinery, inefficient equipment, outdated, outmoded managerial and technological methods.
That is bad enough, but it is making no serious attempt to improve the position. Time and time again, and particularly from the Minister for Transport and Power, we get stupid homilies—nobody can be more stupid than that man in his speeches—to the workers about increasing production. If the Minister would give the slightest thought to increasing production, he would appreciate that the unfortunate worker has no say whatever, virtually, in the question of increasing production.
The Minister did not mention a word in his opening speech—and it is like talking about Hamlet and leaving out the ghost—about the whole question of automation. We are left as we are, in the Model T Ford era of industrial development. Does the Minister not know, if you have two men and give one man a shovel and the other a bulldozer and ask them to remove a hill, which of the two will remove it the quicker? If the poor devil with the shovel shovels hard enough, according to the Minister for Transport and Power, he will get rid of the hill before the bulldozer.
The reality is that the Irish worker is not provided with the tools to maximise production to keep in line with European production. Yet those slow, lazy, indolent, selfish people who control industry are completely indifferent to that reality. Why? For the simple reason that they know that when the time comes, the parent industry or the major industry outside will come in, start some cheap factory in some back street, work it on child labour, make an official impression with a golden handshake and the employer is all right.
But the worker is on the street if he has not gone to Liverpool for a job in Wilson's socialist England, we hope, properly cared for, clothed, fed and washed. The Minister should be damn glad to see Wilson in Government in Britain. He will have plenty of jobs and to spare. The Minister knows this quite well, and I wish he would tell the Minister for Transport and Power that he should give up this idiotic habit of asking the worker to increase production. A machine capable of turning out 1,000 candles, or 1,000 light bulbs, or 1,000 boxes of matches, cannot turn out 1,001 no matter how hard it is worked.
Unless you improve the machinery you cannot improve production and that is borne out in this matter of applying for adaptation grants. Those people have no intention of giving the Irish worker the machinery to improve production. If one looks at our export market, one realises that 75 per cent of our export goes to Great Britain. This is made more difficult at present; yet in spite of that no serious attempt is being made to diversify exports to other countries. Our industrialists have depended on the fact that the parent British factory would take the output of the Irish factory and anything else makes no difference to them.
The Minister must face the necessity for giving some direction to Irish industry to bring it into line with the needs of our society. There are very few, even conservative traditional economists, who would accept the laissez faire economic ideas of the present Government. No one of them directly has any kind of suggestion that there should be profit sharing, or encouragement to profit share, with workers. I do not agree with the idea at all, but at least there should be some greater measure of participation by the workers in industry than there is.
The Minister should draw the attention of Irish industrialists to the fact— I do not suppose they would take the slightest notice, but he should do it any way—that they have a responsibility to society. Their job is not to exploit the consumers here, the workers, in order to buy bigger Jaguars, build greater houses or go for more and more expensive continental tours. That should not be the objective of a properly orientated, civilised community, yet that is the way it largely operates here in Ireland.
The Minister should not be allowed to get away with this complacent acquiescence in the failure of Irish industrialists to show they are aware of what is coming to them in the early 1970's. He must now have very little confidence in their ability. Anybody who read the hysteria in the evening papers and the morning papers recently, the Federated Union of Employers, all these great independent industrialists, screaming for money from the public purse, must understand that these people are grossly incompetent, that they are completely unprepared for the challenge of serious outside competition.
The Common Market recently reduced their tariffs by 50 per cent. What would we do in that situation? What will the Minister do to see that this position is not recreated if Mr. Wilson decides he has, due to Tory mistakes and the idiocy of the policies over the years, to continue the 15 per cent surcharge or even to increase it? What are we to do? Are we to continue to subsidise these industrialists? What steps do they propose to take to see that serious action follows the granting of additional money towards the creation of significant export markets elsewhere than Great Britain?
The whole of the Middle East and Africa are hungry for supplies, particularly the products of Érin Foods. What incentive is the Minister giving in that direction? He intervened— and it was a welcome intervention, his first for as long as I can remember— to stop this pack of gangsters from taking something like £400,000, the produce of a penny on the gallon of petrol, from the unfortunate public, the private motorist, the public consumer. What is to happen to those people for having tried on that piece of highway robbery, which I have no doubt they would have got away with were it not for the fact that the Government's plate is so full of headaches at the moment they could not allow that particular outrage?
How many times have they increased their prices unnecessarily? How many times did the Minister not intervene? If he had intervened would he have succeeded in getting a reduction in price which has been greatly in excess of the price paid for petrol in Great Britain over a number of years? What does the Minister propose to do about the independent action of these people whenever they feel like taking another increase in profits by increasing prices to the consumer? What protection will be given the consumer? We are the consumer. We are speaking on behalf of the consumer. This sum the Minister is seeking will come from the consumer. What guarantee will the Minister give him that he will be protected from this crowd of men who have over the years behaved so completely irresponsibly in their capacity as leaders of Irish industry? What does the Minister propose to do about it? What redress have we when they continue to increase prices? Lecture the trade union movement, I suppose. Lecture the worker to increase production, to tighten his belt, to live on less. Thank heavens, we are coming to an end of the time when the worker would take that from anybody.
The reality of the situation is, as I see it, that the conflict must go on. The employer believes that wages are profits gone astray. The worker believes that profits are wages gone astray. In that is the conflict, which can only be resolved, I believe, when the worker gets the total profit of his labour in the form of wages and social services of one kind or another. That, of course, is the socialist system.
We have also had to bear, as a result of the inadequacy of these people, the remarkable shift in the impact of taxation over recent years away from the wealthy. Nobody likes taxation. In the ordinary taxation code the wealthy man paid as much as he was able and then there was a sliding scale down. Because of the Government's concern for the wealthy, taxation is changed completely. Now we find the burden of indirect taxation has changed very much in favour of the wealthy businessman and against the consumer, the ordinary worker.
Again, that is where most of this money will come from eventually— from the consumer, who is under-paid, who pays too much for whatever he does pay for, who, if he is out of work, gets relatively little or no social services of any kind. He cannot have health services because he cannot afford them. He cannot get his children educated because he cannot afford the educational services—all because of the incompetency of Irish industry. Indirect taxation is higher proportionately in Ireland than in practically any other country in Europe. The social welfare contributions paid by the employers are about six per cent here. In Europe they run at between 20 per cent and 30 per cent. No matter what way you look at it Irish industry is featherbedded, and the feather-bedding has created the useless, inefficient, decadent, selfish incompetence, which, to a considerable extent now dominates the activities of the Irish industrialists.
