Every penny of it had been taken by Deputy Seán MacEntee not to build hospitals, not to build houses, not to construct roads, not to carry out any civic or urban amenity but to balance his Budget. What was the result? We had a raging, tearing inflation and the following year, we had Deputy MacEntee's famous Budget. Now, a great many of the younger Deputies will not remember that Budget, but it sacrificed and crucified our people to such an extent that they rose up in revolution and chased him out of the country in 1954 and ever since he has been like a sore thumb in the Fianna Fáil Party, until, eventually, they squeezed him out and when Deputy Jack Lynch, as Minister for Finance, found himself in difficulties this year, the dagger came stealing down Deputy MacEntee's sleeve and he wrote: "If he is in trouble, I know why: Because he let these necromancers and soothsayers dictate his policy".
That is the type of history I think the young fellows of this House ought to know. When you think, or when you are persuaded, or when you have people thinking that in 1948, Bill Norton, God be good to him, Tim Murphy and Michael Keyes—Brendan Corish was only a lad then and I do not think he was in the Government—prostituted their trust and when you are told they squandered the public money in collaboration with their Fine Gael colleagues and their Clann na Talmhan colleagues and their Clann na Poblachta colleagues in the Government, go down and take these accounts, which are still being kept because the fund is still there, and read the history of one of the greatest services ever done to this country.
First, there were thousands of families housed that would have been broken up and driven out of this country by emigration but for that fund and the masterly use made of it by the Government of which we were members. There are living monuments in every town and village to the extent to which they were financed by that fund. There are fathers of families today healthy and strong all over Ireland who would have been mouldering in their graves as a result of tuberculosis, but for the way we spent the money from that fund, and the glory of it is that as we look around the country today, one half the santatoria we built are empty. That is why we built them, so that 20 years afterwards, they would be like white elephants, empty. We want them empty, but we desperately wanted them in 1948 and they were all full the day they were built.
Was that extravagance? Was that folly? Go and ask the mothers who did not lose their children, go and ask the wives whose husbands survived to rear their families, go and ask the children would they have sooner never known their fathers than that we should have spent the money we spent to see that they survived. That is a story I wanted to tell and the documentation of it is no secret. There are public documents in the library of Dáil Éireann and any Deputy can go down and read and study them. There was never a read penny of net debt due to the United States of America in respect of the Marshall loan fund. It was purely a currency transaction, to secure the materials we bought to build houses, sanatoria and hospitals.
Do not forget that the day I took office as Minister for Agriculture, there were fewer cattle, fewer sheep and fewer pigs on the land of Ireland than at any time since the famine of 1847. That is the situation I was confronted with the day I came into the Department of Agriculture. I had to produce the pigs, the sheep and the cattle but there was no use producing them if I could not feed them. Do not forget that in 1948 Ymer feeding barely was unknown in this country. Do not forget this crop was unknown in Ireland. The only barley grown in Ireland in 1948 was malting barley, the average yield of which was 19 cwt. per statute acre. Ymer barley which yielded 40 cwt. per statute acre made it possible to feed our pigs from our own land, but the day I started, there was no grain crop available in this country that would economically feed pigs. The only place I could get grain to feed them was the United States of America and if I had not dollars to pay for it, the farmers of this country would have had to slaughter their pigs. I shall not talk about calves. That arose in the days gone by. I bought maize, hundreds of thousands of tons of maize, so that the farmers would have the wherewithal to feed their livestock.
I remember during that period we had no fertilisers in this country. The French would not sell us phosphate and they controlled it in Algiers. I remember a Dutch firm coming into the Department of Agriculture—I thought they were bluffing—and saying to me: "Minister, would you take 100,000 tons of super at £8 a ton?" I asked: "Are you offering it?" They said: "Yes, we are.""Well," I said "you have sold it", and I remember picking up the telephone and ringing Deputy McGilligan in the Department of Finance and saying to him: "Paddy, I have spent a million". He said to me: "In the name of God, what on?" I said: "On super for the farmers," and he said: "All right; I will find the money for any raw materials for the farmers". In one split second, because we had to, we brought into this country 100,000 tons of super, where there had not been a pound put out for the previous ten years.
So I would say to any young Fianna Fáil Deputy, if anyone talks to him about the £40 million again, let him go down to the Library and read those papers; let him go down to the sanatoria, empty now, and say to himself: "I myself might be in the grave and there might be Deputies here amongst us who would be dead and gone but for the sanatoria built by Dr. Noel Browne." But then there are none of the houses or livestock of this country which could not have been brought back to the levels at which they stood when we left the office if that currency had not been borrowed. Bear in mind, there was never a penny of net debt. We took in the dollars but no man got a dollar to spend who did not put down a pound in exchange for it. No, not one cent of that money was spent if it was not to buy raw materials for our agricultural industry, or the means of housing our people or to save those who must otherwise have died.
This is a vote of no confidence in the Government and you were apprehensive a moment ago, Sir, that I would be primarily concerned to deal with the vindication of things past. I do not want to talk about things past at all, except in so far as it is appropriate to set the present in its right perspective. This is a vote of censure on the Government and it is a demand upon them to get out and make way for other men. The ground upon which we make that motion is that we charge this Government with having deliberately, recklessly and improvidently led our people down the alluring road to an inflation and we are now faced with the moment of truth. Let us fact the truth for what it is. This country is bust.
Now, I know those are harsh words but let us make up our minds to this —do not let any Deputy imagine that the world of international finance will estimate our economic circumstances by what we say or do not say in Dáil Éireann. They knew all that we knew six months ago. They sit in Zurich; they sit in Wall Street; they sit in Threadneedle Street; they sit in Sweeden. Their business is to know and they are not one bit impressed by Ministers for Finance here, or Taoisigh, or anybody else, who get up and say: "Everything in the garden is lovely". They put the statistics through the computers; they look at the picture that comes out and they mutter under their breath: "Not bloody likely". And, when we go to borrow 10 million in Eurodollars, or USA dollars, or any other dollars, we cannot find the man we want to meet; he is at a tea party. The next day we go to call, he has gone to the country; the following week he has received an urgent call to leave for California and, in the heel of the hunt, we come home without the Eurodollars.
Then we go to Bonn and we say to them: "We are the only country in the world on which you never declared war; is it not time we did something about it?" And they say: "Well, I suppose it is"—£7 million, and we borrow £7 million, but, when it comes to the practical question about terms of repayment, they are seven per cent for 15 years, and we come home with the £7 million rejoicing, only to discover that we have spent it before we got it. We have spent it, not to build hospitals, not to build houses, not to invest in industries but to balance last year's Budget, £50 million of which were to pay the previous years' debts.
Then we go to negotiate a loan in London and the Minister for Finance gets very angry with me, shocked, dismayed, distressed and, mind you, he is a nice, decent kind of fellow— Deputy Jack Lynch—and he says— I quote him from columns 1615 and 1616, volume 223, of the Official Report of 29th June, 1966:
According to Deputy Dillon, the country, and I want to quote him, "had its back to the wall and never stood in greater economic peril than it is in today". These assertions, I think, went beyond legitimate criticism of the Government, both as being untrue and harmful to the country's credit and reputation. He made other assertions which I think I can establish as being unfounded as well. I hesitate to repeat these lest I give them further currency but I can only describe them as not only hysterical but malicious—the assertions that this Government were unable to raise £5 million in sterling and that the general reserves of the Central Bank were, again to use his own particular term, "gone and spent".
Indeed, the announcement on the day following the Deputy's remarks, 15th June, of the negotiation of a loan of £5 million on good market conditions and good market terms with the Bank of Nova Scotia gave the lie to these assertions.
Now, my assertion was that we went to negotiate a loan in London and we failed to get a loan in London. We then went to the Bank of Nova Scotia, which we had admitted to this country not so long ago, and we said to the Bank of Nova Scotia: The Joint Stock Banks of this country have been on strike for the last two months; now you have raked in a lot of deposits here; what are you going to do with them? I suggest you did not come in here for a month, or 12 months; you came in here to stay. We expect you to cough up and, if you do not cough up, we will not burn down the houses around you, but we will remember it and we can get very awkward out here. And the Bank of Nova Scotia said: "Now do you want anything?"; to which we replied: "Yes, £5 million." The Bank of Nova Scotia said: "That is all right, but what about paying it back?" What were the terms for paying it back? —seven per cent and ten years. I want to ask the House this question. Has any other sovereign Government in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, or Australia ever borrowed £5 million at seven per cent with an undertaking to pay it back in ten years?
I want to put this analogy. The Minister for Finance is a kindly and a friendly man. If I met him one morning and said: "Look, Jack, I left my wallet at home. There is something I want to pay. Will you give me £10?", he would take out his wallet and give me £10. But if I sidled up to him and said: "Would you ever lend me half a crown?" he would say: "What in the name of God has happened to Dillon? Is he drinking secretly?" I do not think he would say it maliciously. He would go to the other Ministers and say: "Do you know what happened to me this morning? Dillon came sidling up to me and asked for a loan of half a crown. He must be bust. Is there anything wrong with him?"
Is that a fair analogy? I think it is, and that is what causes me alarm. You may ask yourself why is it that we are driven to this extremity. I am obliged to say that in my considered judgment, we are driven to this extremity because we have borrowed every penny the Joint Stock Banks in this country are in a position to lend. We owe the Joint Stock Banks on the short-term a debt of £60 million sterling. I want to tell the House that to the best of my information the Joint Stock Banks told the Government, when they went to them before the strike to ask for a further loan, that they had not got it and could not lend it. To the best of my knowledge and belief, they got from the Government the reply: "If you have not got it, go and get it from your customers."
I now assert that until the banks closed, there was pressure being brought to bear on businessmen in this country, small and large, to reduce their overdrafts at a pace and to a level which put many of them in very serious peril of survival. It is very difficult to explain to people who are not in business how vital an element to an ordinary small business in this country bank overdraft accommodation is. I remember saying to the Government when they brought in the turnover tax that one of the progeny of that tax would be the arrival of Garfield—Weston Tesco and all the big international combines, with a corresponding burden thrown on small family businesses who would have to compete with those great combines.
I remember saying to the Government: "Do not be under any illusion. These big combines are prepared to spend £½ million, £1 million or £2 million to do what they call making the market." What does making the market mean? It means closing up 20 or 30 shops in the neighbourhood which are competing with them. While these people, our own neighbours, our own people, are fighting for their lives to meet that kind of competition, our own people, are fighting for their lives to meet that kind of competition, our own Government come up behind them with a stiletto and sink it in their backs by saying to the banks: "Go to John Byrne or Pat Tynan and tell him, battling as he is with the big combines who are trying to take his business away from him: ‘You must reduce your overdraft by £1,000 by this day three months or get out.'" Between Tesco on the one side and the banks on the other, he is out.
I beg Deputies to listen to this story I am telling now. They will never hear from the victims who are about to die because if you are a small businessman and the word goes around that you are under pressure from the bank, you might as well go out and cut your throat on the market square. The minute the word goes out that a small businessman has been sent for by the bank manager, or if he is seen looking worried going along the street to the bank, all the commercial travellers in the whole province leap into their cars and fly like the wind to line up in a queue outside his door.
They greet him: "Good morning, Mr. Fleming. You are looking well. I am glad to see you. I have a little business with you." Then they produce the bill. If Pat Fleming is lucky enough to have the money to pay the bill, he is all right, but if he says he will post it on, the traveller is off like a scalded cat to the nearest hotel to tell the other travellers: "I gave Pat Fleming a bill for £17 3s 4d and he told me he would post it." They are all down on him and Pat Fleming's credit is gone. I am not naming any individual. It could be John Smith. I am talking of my own neighbours in Monaghan, Clones, Castleblayney, Ballaghaderreen or Elphin.
When I say the country has gone bust, what I mean is that our own Government are reduced to straits which constrain them to join in the crucifixion of our own people. I do not think I am guilty of any exaggeration, I do not think I am guilty of any reckless language, if in those circumstances I say the country is bust. A country does not sink under the sea if it is bankrupt and bust. What happens is that the people suffer. I now allege that the kind of people I came from, the kind of people I belong to, are suffering. I now allege that old-established businesses, which are run on what I suppose might be described as old-fashioned lines, where the employees are friends and have been with the business for ten, 20, 30 or 40 years, are being wiped out and not only the owners but the workers are being put on the road. I say a country whose Government are constrained to act in that fashion is bust.
That alone would not, in my opinion, adequately describe the syndrome of being "bust." You must add to that the fact that in the capital city of Ireland any family of fewer than five people living in one room will not even be considered for a house, while at the same time we see London public companies coming into the country, buying up property and building skyscrapers to be let at 25/-or £1 per square foot.
Am I justified in saying the country is bust? Am I justified in saying we have got our priorities madly wrong? We have allowed people to come in and build skyscrapers and let them at £1 or 25/- per square foot while we cannot find a place for a family of five persons—father, mother and three children—living in one room, bearing in mind that since 1963 no residential unit in this city has been condemned as unfit for human habitation by Dublin Corporation. There are two branches of the corporation dealing with habitations: one is the architectural department which exists to find out what buildings are in danger of falling down and injuring people; the other is the sanitary section which determines whether a room or house or cottage is fit for human habitation. I now allege that there has not been a single condemnation of a building or a room in this city since 1963 on the ground that it was unfit for human habitation and I know of houses, I know of rooms, which are rat-infested, damp, unhealthy and dangerous to health and in some of them a father, mother and three children are living, cooking, eating and sleeping while we are building skyscrapers to set at 20/- or 25/- per square foot.
It is not people who have no place to work in, not people who could not do their work if these skyscrapers were not there who are being put into them. It is people who have been working in offices better than I ever had, people who have been working in Georgian and Victorian Buildings, some of them erected at the end of the last century but much better than any office I have ever worked in in my life. They have now moved in, largely Government employees, into two floors at a time because we took a lease of two floors of a new building for I do not know how many years and undertook to spend £80,000 decorating it before ever we went in. I think we are stark, starting mad.
I am not talking about ulterior motives. All I am asking is did I say too much, did I speak too harshly when I said a country in that situation is bust? We have sold ourselves; we have sold the things that matter for money. My God, if the British Government had attempted to do that by fire and sword 100 years ago, is there a man or woman in this House who would not have gone out and manned the barricades to stop them? If the British Government by force had said: "We will put the bloody Irish out; we will put them to live five in a room so that the servants of the State and of the plutocracy will have wall to wall carpeting, central heating and airconditioning", what would we have said? We would have said: "Not bloody likely, so long as we are here to fight".
What staggers me, what terrifies me is that the British and the Germans and the Americans have discovered they can conquer us with a cheque book, we who are the children and the grandchildren of men and women who fought with their bare hands in their bare feet. I remember my father told me he saw them walking to meet Parnell in the town of Ennis to fight the Vandeleur evictions in their bare feet and with nothing but their bare hands. Why? Because Vandeleur wanted to put them in the workhouse and they fought for their homes because they would not submit. If Vandeleur had known, the right way was for Vandeleur to come around with his cheque book and say: "How much?"
It makes me quite ill. I do not know if anybody else feels that way. Have we all changed? Are we all corrupt? We have just moved ourselves into a great air-conditioned five-storey building, carpeted from wall to wall. I do not complain about that: I think it is reasonable that the premises in which we work should be efficient, but as we are sitting here, do we think of the families of five in one room? What appals me is that sometimes I do not think we are thinking of them. We think of them sometimes in a vague, general kind of way. Are we thinking now of a mother, living with her husband and three children in one room? She has sent the father out to work, perhaps sent one or two of the children to school and put the baby in a corner with a bottle.
There she is now washing potatoes for the father's dinner. The children will probably come home and she will have to feed them. She will have to give the baby a bottle. She has to try to keep the room clean; she has to make the beds. She must say to herself: "If he goes out to the pub tonight, can I blame him? If he is not going to the pub but to a place where there is mixed bathing, can I blame him?" In conscience, she could not blame him. He has come home to one room, three children and a wife worn out trying to make ends meet.
Would any of us like it? The husband comes home to a worn-out woman. He has his wages and he can say: "I have the money to pay for a house but I was down at the corporation today and they told me they will not put me on the list." All would be well if he could say to her that he had been put on the list, that she would have to hang on perhaps for 12 months but he had been promised a house. If he had been put on the list, he would have been told by the corporation of the houses they were building and the claims for those houses. All he can tell her is that he had not even been put on the list.
I never was poor. Sometimes that is a disadvantage. I do not know what it means to have been hungry. Maybe I would be all the better for it if I had. Maybe it is because I have never been poor, never hungry, that I feel such compassion and personal distress at the thought of the misery of my neighbours. I cannot dissociate myself from them. I cannot think of them as other people: I was born among them and I lived among them in George's Street in this city in the early years of my life. The rest of the time I have spent in the country. They are my neighbours and I know no difference between them and me. I know how they face their problems.
I love this parliamentary system of Government because I know it to be the true symbol of freedom, but how long can people be patient and accept it, if it proves so callous and indifferent to their intolerable woes? The problem in rural Ireland is not as unbearable as in the city. Even in rural Ireland it is not a good thing for a young couple to have to go and live with a father and mother but it is not as intolerable as it is in the city. In rural Ireland there is the farmyard: there is the road; there is the crossroads. The young man can take the father down to the crossroads and if he wants to take his wife to the pictures occasionally, the mother will look after the baby.
However, it is a great evil that the authorities in this country cannot build the houses so urgently needed in rural Ireland. It is even a greater evil that we are urging the young people to get married when the first thing any sensible girl would ask a chap who wanted to marry her is: "Have we a house?" If he says: "We have. We have my father's house," she goes out and she sees the house without water, and other facilities, a house which maybe 150 years ago was comfortable, and she says: "How am I going to keep the place clean?" and he says: "You can go to the well for water." She replies: "Maybe I am in love with you but I am not all that much in love with you."
That fellow goes to the local authority; he has the money to put down a deposit and he has the income to pay the interest on the loan. He says he wants a Small Dwellings Acquisition loan to build himself a house. In County Monaghan if he makes application now, he will be told his application will not be considered for at least 12 months. Some of my colleagues may think perhaps I am unduly conscious of my age, but there are some of them young enough to realise that if you are in love and you want to get married, there is nothing standing between you and the altar but a house. You have the bird but you have no cage to put it in, and there is a danger that somebody else might provide the cage or find a more attractive cage than the one you have. You go to the bank manager and he says: "I would not lend you 6d." You inquire if there is anywhere else you can get the money, and the answer is "No, you will have to go without it for the present." This may be considered a problem for the young, but it is not their problem only. It is the problem of us all. We who are in middle age ought to understand the problems of the young. It is really their problem, but they have not the means nor the wisdom to resolve it.
I say the Government that cannot give that help to our own people are "bust". Am I wrong in saying that? I do not think so. I represent Monaghan, and I live in Mayo. Those are two congested areas at the present moment. The rural improvements schemes, the special employments schemes, and the bog roads schemes are all being closed down in these counties. That does not only mean that a variety of amenities are going to be withheld from people. It means the ganger, the supervisor, the other people who got temporary work to help out with their income are being refused employment, and it means they are going to England because they have no other means of subsistence. Am I wrong in saying a Government which finds itself in these circumstances is "bust"?
Does anybody maintain that Deputy Gibbons is doing it out of malice? I think he is doing it because he has not got the money. We find poor Deputy Blaney, the Minister for Local Government, being lambasted because he will not provide houses and finance sewerage and all the other things local authorities want to do. I often feel compassion for him. I think he wants to do it, that he would like to do it, but the answer is he has not the money. That is the one alibi he cannot advance here because as a member of the Government, he has to accept responsibility with the rest of them.
These are the facts as I see them. Some Deputies may think I have spoken too strongly if I say a country which is reduced to these circumstances is "bust". I do not, and I claim I have the right to say that now, because I warned them of it years ago. At great political cost I went out to the country and I warned the people, not yesterday or a month ago or a year ago, but two years ago. Fifteen times at public meetings during the general election and the by-election campaigns I warned people of the dangers that lay ahead. Fianna Fáil beat us in Cork and Kildare, the two dearest by-elections that ever were bought in the history of this nation.
