That may be, but it bears on the point I am making that there is a great deal of talk of the imminence of economic disaster: we are not broke—that is stupid talk— but we are heading for economic disaster if the workers look for more. This is the menace I am talking about. The practice is that when in doubt, one should look for a menace and the menace today is the trade unions looking for more money. There are 100,000 workers in this country getting less than £10 a week. I do not know how many of them are getting married but a fair proportion would be so that you might say that from 200,000 to 300,000 people are living at that level.
Is it seriously suggested by the Minister that such people will be content or can be expected to be content with an increase of 6/5d or 6/7d a week when they know very well that prices have been allowed to skyrocket, particularly in the period before the Government invoked the provisions of the Prices Act, not that the making of the regulations under that Act has caused any great stir in the country? There was one example which was brought before the Minister's Department as a case of profiteering. It seemed to me to be a gross case of profiteering but the reduction effected was so minimal that it might as well have been left alone.
However, the menace is the thing. We are asked to consider the menace of economic disaster. As one political writer said in regard to a situation of this kind in another country and the plight of a Government faced with a difficult situation because of its own inadequacy:
First there needs must be a menace. Then there must be such a tremendous menace that the nation is convinced that it stands at the brink of disaster, shuddering and trembling.
That statement might very well be applied to statements made by members of the Government as a yardstick of their truth.
I am not suggesting that we do not need greater production in this country but I am suggesting that there is enough wealth here at the moment if social justice is to prevail, enough wealth to improve very considerably the condition of the most needy sections of our people. These are, in order of priority, the old people depending on old age pensions, the unemployed and the sick, and the workers, farm labourers, roadworkers or workers throughout our towns and cities earning less than £10 a week. There is a need for something to be done for these people. Do the Taoiseach, the Minister for Finance and the Government seriously consider that this country is so poor that we propose to permit the wages of such people to be increased by a miserable 6/- or 7/-a week with prices what they are today?
We turn now to the subject to which this Report devotes considerable thought and space, the question of an incomes policy, to which no Government speaker made any effort to advert. The motion before the House asks us to confirm our acceptance of the NIEC Report and generally the principles contained therein. We agree with that. We agree with the idea that there should be an incomes policy but I want to ask the Minister how it is proposed to determine the incomes of farmers. Is it thought that if you ask them they will tell you? That is hardly likely.
There was a rush on the banks to take out deposits when it was announced a year or two ago that certain investigations would be carried out in relation to deposits which might be drawing £15 a year or more in interest. How are we to find out what are the farmers' incomes? How are these incomes to be determined? Deputy Corry will tell you that the farmers are in a desperately bad way. I feel they are not in such a bad way at all. By and large, the land-owning farmers in this country are far and away better off than the workers in manufacturing industry, the average workers, and not the exceptions who may earn reasonably big money.
How are the incomes of the professional men such as lawyers to be determined? In what parts of the world has an incomes policy succeeded? I do not know any. Talking about an incomes policy is very much like talking about an immediately unattainable ideal. Talking about it here in the House, as Government speakers have done, shows an apparent desire on the part of the Government to bring about social justice so that everybody will get a fair deal. But really, as it is based, it is an effort to pin the responsibility for the Government's own laxity and faults upon the trade union movement.
There is no doubt we have had inflation here and it is continuing. Who is responsible for that in truth? Who is responsible for encouraging wage demands which meant nothing because they were nullified by prices? Can anybody deny that that was an obvious political ploy used on the eve of two by-elections the year before last? It worked. It won two by-elections which might have been lost. But it did a tremendous lot of harm. The Taoiseach said at the time that the economy was all right and the workers should go ahead for more. If the Taoiseach had taken steps then to control prices, things would not be as they are now and workers' wages would be buying effectively far more than they are able to buy now.
The Taoiseach sought by a little bit of economic jugglery to let things balance out. What happened? Whatever increase was secured by the workers then was completely negatived by the development of the prices spiral as time went on. In the end, the workers are worse off than they were at the beginning. The Government are responsible for that situation. They are trying to shuffle it off by continuing to refer to the need to maintain wages within the three per cent indicated by the Minister for Finance.
The Minister for Industry and Commerce spoke about the impossibility of regulating wages by legislation. That is unquestionably a fact. Neither in this nor in any other country can you, I think, impose wage rates by legislation or by compulsion upon the workers. We saw what happened here four or five years ago when the Taoiseach in a moment of aberration, sought to compel the ESB workers on strike to return to work by the introduction of a Bill which contained penal clauses making refusal to work in certain circumstances punishable by imprisonment. It had a very short life. I do not know if it went through the Dáil. Certainly, it revolted the workers of Dublin and they responded in a characteristic way. The ESB workers, who might not normally have got public sympathy, not alone got massive public sympathy, but huge financial support voluntarily given by the people of this city. That is the kind of people we are. We are not for compulsion.
The Minister for Industry and Commerce was right in what he said about this. He was referring to his own difficulties. I know he is surrounded by them. This very specialist field of industrial relations requires a lot of experience and a cool head. His job is not by any means an enviable one. He stated the facts. Certainly in this country you cannot force people to work if they do not want to work, and that is apart altogether from the fact that it is an abrogation of human liberty. A man has a right to work if he wishes and not to work if he does not wish to.
The Taoiseach was not so timorous. In the course of his remarks, he conveyed to me at any rate that, if he was not satisfied with the progress of the present economic situation, he was toying in his mind—he did not state it explicitly but it emerged clearly from what he said—with the idea either of compulsion or of compulsion by taxation. If he could not secure the fastening down of wages by exhortation, he would turn either to the introduction of legislation to secure that end or, if the workers insisted upon increased wages and succeeded in getting them, he would secure the nullification of such increases to some extent by taxation. This is what I took from his speech. We will see what falls out as time goes on. I would hesitate to think he has not learned a lesson about compulsion. He surely must have done so. It was a wonder to me that a man with his background in this city, knowing the people of Dublin, ever tried that caper at all. But we know the result there.
It is not unlikely that taxation will be brought to bear very heavily on the working people in the near future. We have already had intimations of taxation from the Minister for Finance. He has made it clear we may expect additional taxation in the Budget of this year. Taxation is inevitably inflationary in effect. When people are taxed, they seek compensation in increased salaries and wages. What greater act of an inflationary nature was there than the turnover tax when everything needed by every family in the country was taxed? This was the greatest single incitement. It was an absolute detonator of inflation and much of our economic problems at present stem from it. How do we know but that this year the turnover tax may be doubled? If it is, we will be all in right trouble because it will worsen the present position very much.
Recently, we were talking about a subject very much the same as this. The same matters arose in relation to the Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement. I made inquiry as to what had happened to the legendary First and Second Programmes for Economic Expansion. I wonder how many have read this Report from cover to cover. It is a painful operation. I am not given to reading such prose myself but I read this. I think there are possibly two mentions of the so-called Programme for Economic Expansion but there is definite mention of the fact that, between 1960 and 1965, employment in industry fell each year I think by seven per cent—and this was at the period of the introduction and operation of these wonderful revelations, the First and Second Programmes. I suggested some time ago that not all the booklets in the world, containing all the figures in the world, would secure an increase of .001 per cent in the gross national product if the language used in them was of such a kind as to be completely and absolutely unintelligible not only to workers but even to the average man. Even with this Report, which is written by admirable people on both sides, there should be a glossary, at the very least, to tell the ordinary average person such as myself what some of the phrases mean. I challenge any person in this House to tell me what “gross domestic capital formation”, for instance, means. Very few persons would be able to do so: possibly if Deputy P. J. Burke were here, he might be able to do so, but I do not want to be unkind to him.
The First and Second Programmes were a lot of wishful thinking, a pious expression of opinion. They were really amalgams of cliché, platitude, tautology, guess-work, a few facts and an awful lot of bad English. As seen now, they have no relevance at all to the economic facts of life as we know them and they have hardly been mentioned in these discussion. Therefore, let us have less talk about the so-called plans for economic expansion.
I remember a time when, if one mentioned plans at all, if one mentioned a planned economy of any kind, Deputy MacEntee would be after one with a red hot poker. You would be pinned down as an agent from Moscow and you would have very little chance of ever again achieving membership of this House by the time he would be finished with your character. The world has gone plan-wise now, particularly Western Europe. We have young men who want to be up there and with-it and we decided to produce these plans but they have no meaning whatever in so far as the economic facts of life in this country are concerned. I defy anybody to prove that the First or Second Programme for Economic Expansion has contributed in any real way to the improvement of the economic position of the country—in any real way. Can anybody give me one example?
There is an awful lot of pious talk about what should be done, about what might be done, about what the gross national product should be, about what everybody should strive for. Can anybody give me one example, in that five-year period, of what those propaganda pamphlets have achieved for the country? What they have done is to provide Fianna Fáil speakers on various occasions, particularly dinners, with something sounding important on which to hang their thoughts.
On Sunday last, 30th January, 1966, I happened to read a piece in the Sunday Times concerning an economist. I think perhaps all of these materialistic young men in a hurry, and not-so-young men in a hurry, whom we have in the Fianna Fáil Party, on the Front Bench and elsewhere, might pay attention to it because it is an expression of opinion by a very eminent economist. This is to be found on page 9 of the Sunday Times and was written by Professor Kenneth Galbraith who is regarded as one of the cleverest economists in the world. What puts him beyond criticism from our point of view is that he was United States Ambassador to India and President Kennedy's economic adviser. He is now at Harvard as Professor of Economics. He had this to say about economists:
Unfortunately, the politicians are still the victims of economists. They must shake off their control—and I am talking as an economist. I keep on having the same dream. I imagine the day when the last automobile drives into London and comes to a halt in a solid mass of metal. As the driver slowly suffocates to death of carbon monoxide poisoning, the last words he hears come over the radio from the BBC. They announce the great news that last year the country's gross national product went up by five per cent.
Although that is perhaps a lighthearted observation by this man, it does contain this much of a grain of relevance and truth for us, that is, that we are allowing ourselves, as politicians, or are in danger of allowing ourselves, as politicians, to become the creatures of men whose thoughts are most fitted to the drawing-board of politics rather than to the arena. Economic theorists and such like people have their place in society but greater damage has been done, I think, by the attempted implementation of what were claimed to be perfect economic theories than by most other forms of human activity.
What I am trying to say is that we should not give ourselves over entirely to the control of the professors. We are members of the House and our duty is to reflect the feelings of the people we represent. By and large, I think that if we let our normal instincts operate, we shall do that. The members of the Fianna Fáil Party have been forced to sublimate their normal instincts in this connection. I am sure that many of them would be in complete agreement with what I have to say, particularly in relation to the lowly-paid workers, but that they have had to sublimate their normal instincts. That is a very unhealthy process and will lead to all kinds of queer complexes later on. Not that what I say will be acted upon but I suggest that they should make themselves felt in their Party. They should try to bring some commonsense to bear on the Taoiseach and those around him with regard to the plight of the workers, many of whom are facing grave difficulties. They cannot afford not to look for an increase and a more substantial one than three per cent.
This Government have pretty successfully made a mess of conditions in this country. As I have already observed, I can very well imagine what would be the case if this Government were on the other side of the House and there were another Government sitting where they are now. They would make hay. Certainly, the Taoiseach would make hay because the sun would be shining for him, and the national interest would not be cited.