I agree. It could emanate only from the quarter from which it came. Deputy Burke's suggestion of tanner bonds and Deputy Corry's bingo tax, and all the talk of bingo bands and republican tanner bonds—no, I do not think that will work. In another generation maybe, but not in this one—not twice in a lifetime.
The Taoiseach, in the course of his very capable walking-on parts at Montrose, capable in the sense of their consummate Thespian artistry, if you will forgive the expression, brought to his speculative conceptions all the energy of error. I have often observed in the course of the years, listening to him, that righteousness generates its own damaging vitality. The Labour Party consider it the function of an Opposition to bring to their task a ready scepticism of the policy of the Government. This is for the public good. The alternative to this attitude, and this policy of the Labour Party, is nothing more than an idolatrous worship such as is to be seen every day here in the Fianna Fáil pews. This worship promotes the delusion of political infallibility and can lead only to the certain end of all unbraked and misdirected power, which is a fatal national crash.
The Government blame for their present problems outside circumstances, amongst other things. As Deputy Corish very correctly pointed out in the course of his criticism of the Budget on television, the Fianna Fáil Party has the knack of taking credit for anything good that happens, regardless of what may have been the occasion of its happening, and blaming outside influences for anything that occurs which does not improve the position of the people.
Over the years, since we first heard of these productions entitled the First and Second Programmes of Economic Expansion, it has often struck me that very few people have ever read these documents, apart from the composers in the first instance, the civil servants who wrote them, and possibly some members of the Government, but, I am certain, by no means all members of the Government. I feel sure that the number of members of this House who have read these documents could be counted on one's fingers and toes. Outside, amongst the people, it would be impossible to say but, from my knowledge and from my contacts, I can say that I have never met anybody outside this House who has ever read either of these two documents. Their impact, therefore, upon the people has been nil.
The documents themselves have never proposed at any stage any definite, concrete steps to improve our economy. As I said earlier, they indulge in all kinds of fanciful, astrological predictions, wishful thinking, talking about what should be, very much like the Fianna Fáil election manifestos, in fact, of earlier years. All this bunkum, and it is noting less than bunkum, to which we have listened about programmes of economic expansion has been a pretence, a snare and a delusion, deliberately created to baffle and bemuse still further an already bewildered electorate and to lead them on.
But what caused this apparent plenty which seemed to be abroad within the past six or seven years? Where did it come from? Not from any conscious act of the Government. It was perfectly obvious to me that any prosperity that was there—it is fast disappearing now, as we know—was due to the overspill of the industrial boom on the Continent of Europe in so far as it affected the British economy and, in turn, in so far as the British economy affected us. The activities of this Government here, in relation to that matter, had no effect whatsoever but the pretence has been that, whatever good there was, Fianna Fáil brought it. Now that things are beginning to go badly, it is somebody else's fault—not ours—or it is due to influences outside the country.
Here we are, with our eyes fixed on Europe, and, mark you, these Europhistic delusions of the Government are displaying themselves in many distressing forms. One of the symptoms I may mention was the recent, I thought, somewhat churlish attempt of the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries to invade the publicity of that very fine young artiste, Dicky Rock, on the occasion of his arrival at the airport. However, it was happily obvious that the fans were not prepared to permit the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries to make Charlies out of them.
I met a man the other day who said to me: "With all this charge towards Europe, our traditions are going by the board". "What do you mean?" I asked him. He replied: "What has happened to the Féile Pádraig in the Mansion House—no rinnce fada, no féile fada, even. We just have some gentleman playing on the ivories the Fianna Fáil tune to the taxpayer ‘It had to be you'." These are just side symptoms of this fantasia into which we have been led by the Fianna Fáil Government.
In the course of his remarks on television, the Taoiseach expressed disgust with the Opposition and their attitude in so far as the Budget is concerned. Of course, Governments are notoriously disgusted with Oppositions. However, the Taoiseach said something in the course of his remarks which was very true. He said that agricultural incomes will be increased as a result of the Trade Agreement. I think this is true, in so far as I know anything about agriculture—and I do not claim to know a great deal, unlike some members of this House who claim to have invented agriculture. I have a passing acquaintance with it.
In my constituency, there are a number of agriculturists—we used to call them farmers at one time. Let us see how their incomes will be increased by the Trade Agreement referred to by the Taoiseach in the course of his remarks on the Budget.
If we look at the Evening Herald of 6th March, 1966, we see on the front page the headline that the first deal in the Anglo-Irish free trade area has been announced. Underneath, we read that the doubling of the Irish butter quota to Britain in the coming year from April 1st next will be a deal without jam for the taxpayer. Irish creameries will export 24,000 tons of butter to Britain instead of 12,000 tones and, for this, the Irish taxpayer will be called on to pay £4,750,000 in what is called a bolster to losses on exports of butter and other dairy products. I think the actual figure was given today, in reply to a Parliamentary Question, as £4,100,000. The report continues to the effect that a spokesman for the Department of Agriculture said the total cost to the nation of supporting milk products next year will be £12,600,000 and, of this, £4,750,000 will be to make up the export losses mainly on butter.
In other words, it shows one way in which agricultural incomes may be increased. I shall leave it to the experts to say whether in fact it will be increased. I do know this, and it is perfectly obvious—he who runs may read—that we are over-producing butter and have been over-producing butter for a long time, so much so that we have to pay the British to eat our surplus. This is subsidisation on a grand scale.
"Subsidy" is a dirty word in the lexicon of most of the Fianna Fáil Cabinet. It certainly was a dirty word in the vocabulary of Deputy MacEntee when he was Minister for Finance because he abolished all the food subsidies and subsidies were said to be very bad for the economy. It was held that if we had subsidies, it was fundamentally a fault. It could lead only to financial catastrophe if we pursued a policy of subsidies. Therefore, subsidies were lifted from the foodstuffs of the workers who, after all, are easily handled if you bring enough propaganda to bear upon them. If you drench them sufficiently with propaganda, probably you would have a hope of doing what the Fianna Fáil Party have been successful in doing for the past 30 years, that is, to get them to troop in to vote for you at the polls. Therefore, at that time, the subsidies on food were abolished.
Did anybody ever have the temerity to suggest that the subsidies might be removed from butter? Did anybody ever have the temerity to suggest that butter production might be reduced? Did anybody ever have the temerity to suggest that there might be a plan in this connection? Did anybody ever have the temerity to suggest that our planners might usefully be employed in thinking up a long-term programme to reduce the production of butter to dimensions which suit this country by encouraging those who are now over-producing butter to go into other fields of agricultural activity which might be even more profitable than the production of butter? Has anybody ever suggested that? Faith, and they have not and, if they did, you would hear the cry of "national sabotage" raised high and mighty throughout this House —and I fear that the cry would not be confined to any one Party.
The workers, of course, could not be pandered to in that way and dealt with in that way. The subsidies on food could be cut. It did not matter if it meant an increase in the cost of living of the workers. But we must not interfere with the "backbone", though, mark you, it is a diminishing backbone, even looked at from the could, calculating and somewhat cynical point of view of its electoral value. The agricultural community is reducing in numbers. I venture to prophesy, from the depths of my few short years experience in this House, that, as it diminishes in numbers, sympathy for it in the major Parties will diminish and then, who knows what may happen? But, certainly, how any responsible Government setting about their business in an honest way could not but have regard to that situation wherein we have to export butter at a loss is beyond my comprehension and, I may say, is beyond the comprehension of very many thinking people in this country today. It is costing An Bord Bainne £469 a ton for Irish creamery butter and the Board then sells it to Britain at prices ranging from £300 to £330 per ton. That situation surely cannot be looked upon with equanimity by any Government or any Party who claim to be honest even in the remotest possible way.
On the other hand, there is no temerity in talking about the workers in this House or outside this House, about the faults or alleged faults of the working people, about strikes, for instance. If anybody brings up any awkward subject and the Government want to get away from it they talk about strikes, the workers, the dockers, the busmen or some other section of the community which is deemed to be acting in an anti-social way. They are always available to be used as whipping boys by our rulers when they feel they must deflect public attention from more fundamental and vital matters which trouble our economy.
Nobody suggests rationalisation in agriculture. The cutting of costs and the abolition of subsidies is something conserved for the people at the very bottom of the social scale. Similarly we find the same situation if we look at the question of income tax. I mentioned recently in this House the whole problem of income tax and suggested the desirability of spreading the burden a bit more fairly throughout the community. I will give one example. It is odd to think that a single person, a single woman working in this House— we do not have to go far—for very low wages must make an income tax return and, if she does not make it, it will be made for her. The same applies to every worker throughout the length and breadth of the land who has to work for wages. If he or she does not make an income tax return, it will be made for them by the employer. But one can have hundreds, thousands of acres of land and one will not be put to the trouble of making an income tax return.
Where is the morality or the justice in that? Why have Governments run away from that? The answer is in votes, is it not? The answer is in Dáil seats, is it not? But we are afraid to go near that problem, are we not, in case we might lose our tenuous position as a Government? Is it fair, though, to the widow who has to go to work, and work for very little? We will say she earns seven pounds a week, and she is lucky to get that in the present condition of things. Is it fair that she should have to pay income tax and the wealthy farmer should not be asked to pay income tax at all?
Let us have a look at some of the figures related to this problem. It is estimated this year that people paying income tax under PAYE will have paid £15 million. How much money do you think is forthcoming from the wealthy farmers? I am not talking about—and let me emphasise this for those who may be transmitting reports to provincial papers for re-hashing and re-publication as was done on the occasion of my last reference here— the many thousands of small farmers who would not fall due to pay income tax because their incomes would not justify it. I am referring to the many thousands of farmers who should be paying income tax because their incomes justify it. Why did the Minister for Finance not relieve the burden on the taxpayers by extending the income tax code to such persons, by extending the income tax impositions to such persons? In other words, why should the young man and woman trying to rear a family, living, we will say, in Walkinstown or in any other suburban area, trying to buy a house, saving, doing their best to get along, to educate their children and making sacrifices, have to pay income tax, while, at the same time, somebody with ten times their wealth is not asked to pay income tax?
Surely these questions can be justifiably asked in this House and answers given to them? It is anticipated that £15 million will be paid by those wage earners I have mentioned in the coming year. How much do you think will come from the wealthy landowners, and I am talking about the big landowners, not the poor hard-working farmer who has been excoriated so strenuously in this House on so many occasions? The sum of £66,000 in a system of taxation based upon a national idea related to his valuation. That type of farmer will pay, in the coming year, something in the neighbourhood of £66,000 into the national exchequer to keep the essential services going, while the hard-pressed worker and salary earner paying income tax under PAYE will contribute £15 million. Is there justice in that, I ask the Taoiseach?
This matter was raised before but the Taoiseach made no reference to it. Some time ago I suggested in this House—I think it was in 1961 or 1962 —that the Taoiseach and the Fianna Fáil Party were making an effort, after the departure of you-know-who from the leadership of that Party, to project the then Deputy Lemass, now Taoiseach, as the farmers' friend, and indeed he has, at various elections, paraded the country and talked softly into the ears of the agricultural community.
It is to be noted that the astrologers who backgrounded the programmes— so-called—to which I have referred for economic expansion but more likely for economic extinction—day after day that is the way the picture develops— the planners who produced these works, estimated that there would be a reduction in the number of persons living on the land by 1970 of something like 6,000 people, if I do not make a mistake. In fact, more than that have gone. Since these programmes were first invented, more than that number have already gone. How many will be gone by 1970? God only knows how many will be gone. We get the excuse that this is an international trend.
We had that young philosopher of the Fianna Fáil Party, Deputy Lemass, telling us about what was happening in Australia, what was happening in West Germany, and what was happening last year when he was in, I think, Minnesota, as if there were any comparison between those places, with their highly industrialised economies, with their tremendous resources of all kinds eternally creating an attraction into the cities from the rural areas, and this country. How many times have we listened here to the abominable cliché about agriculture being the backbone of the nation, until the phrase has lost its meaning. Everyone who has come into this House has used that cliché. I must plead guilty that in my more jeiune and innocent days, I took spoke of agriculture being the backbone of the nation.
Accepting that it is a fact that we are basically an agricultural country, and also accepting the fact that we are sick and tired of hearing it, and of listening to Deputy Lemass comparing us with the relatively highly developed economy in Australia, and the highly developed economies of Western Europe and mid-west America, one begins to wonder what sort of people come into this House and by what standards do the electorate judge them. There is this continuing—and it appears that there will be a continuing —departure from the rural areas. It is common experience for us that if we have occasion to go down the country to the west or the south, we observe to whoever is with us, or to our neighbours when we come back, how few people we saw on the roads, or how few children we met going to school if it was early in the morning.
The people obviously are going, and it is incumbent on any Government to try to stop this haemorrhage—there I go again slipping into clichés—or to stop this running away from the land. No one has really made any effective effort in that direction. The answer is not easy, if, indeed, there is any answer at all. Certainly the will seems to have vanished, and the interest seems to have vanished, and from my observation there has developed a complete cynicism in regard to the rural areas.
The anxiety on the part of the young people living in the rural areas seems to be to get to Dublin or one of the other cities, at all costs, where there are soft living and bright lights—and that is not unnatural for young people—or to get across the water. Boys and girls are coming back with fairy tales of the streets being still paved with gold, and of money for nothing. It must be admitted—and I know it from personal experience—that more money can be got in England for less work than can be got here. There is no evidence of a will or an anxiety on the part of the Government to stop this disastrous trend, or to stem it, if we cannot stop it, to delay it, and hold it back for as long as we can, at least for the very short span of our lifetimes. Rather than being delayed, the whole process is being hastened. That is a tragedy, because as surely as the depopulation of the rural areas goes on, so surely will the Irish nation be reduced in size, in influence and in numbers.
This may not seem to be of any importance to many people nowadays, especially to the more cynical generation of younger people who come here and regard politics as a career to be followed, and regard this as a sort of arena in which one can show off effectively and not care very much at the back of it all. There are some of us who are oldfashioned enough to think that this nation is a body to which we are proud to belong, which we want to see live, develop and become great among the nations of the world, in the context of its own size and relations. That thought may perhaps even deter some of us from this rush into Europe. We have been hearing a great deal of talk about the urgency of our getting into Europe.
Looking at the British election campaign scenes on television, and listening particularly to Mr. Harold Wilson who is a shrewd man, a shrewd politician, an Englishman with, no doubt, the interest of his own country deeply at heart, I note no great anxiety on his part to rush into the European jungle. Here it is different. One would almost imagine that we were pastmasters in the development of industry, and that we could harness ourselves overnight to compete with the economic cartels which exist in West Germany and elsewhere. That is a pernicious and dangerous economic doctrine which could spell not only economic disaster for us, but also the beginning of the end of the Irish nation as an entity if that concept were realised. Perhaps that is too sentimental for some of the more pragmatic members of the Government.
However, I should like to ask in the context of the weeping and wailing which is now going on, what has happened to the golden age which was heralded by the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries not so long ago. It has turned out to be an age of goldbrick deception. The first and obvious result of the Budget is, as I say, to reduce the wage of workers. While that is happening, this Government, at banquets, are issuing lofty statements about the undesirability of people who work in this country looking for more wages and the awful fate that will befall us all if wage increases exceed an average of three per cent. It is a terrible thing to think that anybody can view with complacency the conditions of the lower-paid workers. I refer to those workers who earn £10 or less. You could very well regard anybody living in a city, particularly Dublin city, facing the rents and travelling costs which he has to face going to his work and facing costs relating to his family, receiving less than £14 a week as lowly-paid.
One speaks in terms of the real value of money and what it can get for you. The terrible thing is that not alone is nothing being done to ease their lot but a wage reduction is being inflicted on them. At the same time, they are being told they must not, and dare not, press for increased wages because of the disastrous effect it may have on the national economy. Sometimes I wonder, listening to all the jargon of the people who describe themselves as economists, and of politicians who have stumbled on the political lodestone of economics within the past ten years, how did we get on at all without it? I remember very well in the 1930s and early 1940s one heard nothing at all about things like gross national product, fixed capital formation or anything of that nature. Yet, we seemed to survive. We were not doing well, of course. In fact, people were doing very badly. As usual, as now, there were a number of people doing extraordinarily well and a large number of people doing very badly. Then another section of the people were doing desperately badly. That was the situation then and it is the situation now. I do not think the introduction of those confusing terms alters the position in any way. The development of this language is a gift. It is Heaven's gift to those who want to baffle and confuse the electorate.
I want to make one reference to something Deputy Dillon said last week. He was in order in saying it and I will refer to it very briefly now. He referred to Nelson's Pillar and the Mafia. I do not know how it relates to the Budget. I assume it does in some way relate to the expenditure of funds for the removal of the remains of the Pillar, and so on. Deputy Dillon ascribed the removal of the Pillar to the Mafia. I want to say I do not believe for one moment that Deputy Noel Lemass is a Sicilian and was he not the noblest Pillar-knocker of them all?
It is pointless, I know from experience, appealing at this stage, or indeed at any other stage, I suppose, for relief for the people in whom one is particularly interested. I am particularly interested in the lower-paid workers and in that class of people who carry this city and county on their backs and, incidentally, who carry us all. It is pointless, I know, appealing to the Government to relieve them. The Government are in the grip of this frenzy to get book-balances which, to my mind, are not in any way related to the actual facts of life. I venture this prophecy, that in the pursuance of that, they are sowing the seeds of their own eventual end. It seems to me we are witnessing in this Budget the beginning of the end of Fianna Fáil rule. It will not come tomorrow but it is coming as surely as the daylight because this Budget shows that the nation's affairs are in the hands of people who have lost touch with the reality of politics which is the need of the ordinary people.
There was a time when the Fianna Fáil Government might be said to have faced unpleasant facts with a certain courage. That time has gone apparently. I refer to an avenue of taxation which was open to them but which it would take political courage to follow. That lack of political courage always prefaces political death. A political Party will continue to exist only so long as it can convince the electorate of its own integrity. As far as I can judge, the corporate integrity of the Fianna Fáil Party is now regarded by all and sundry as a thing of the past.
