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Dáil Éireann debate -
Thursday, 20 Apr 1967

Vol. 227 No. 13

Committee on Finance. - Resolution No. 4—General (Resumed)

Debate resumed on the following motion:
That it is expedient to amend the law relating to customs and inland revenue (including excise) and to make further provision in connection with finance.
—(Minister for Finance)

Why this sudden departure? I understand that the Minister for Finance is a man loaded indeed with responsibility but I cannot understand the sudden flight of my colleague from County Dublin who is temporary incumbent at the Custom House. It is to be hoped that what I have to say will reach his ears.

Do you think you might make the evening newspapers?

It may very well be that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Taoiseach and his colleagues who are so used to having dinner at this hour of the morning—they probably have only one meal a day anyway under this Government——

This is scarcely relevant to the Budget debate.

Indeed it is, and it is to that subject I wish to address myself. Let me say at the outset that I observe in this morning's newspapers what I consider to be a reasonable suggestion made for the benefit of the country and of the Government Party. Now, as we well know, no opportunity is lost by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Taoiseach and his colleagues to instruct their Civil Service staffs to prepare for them the lengthiest possible speeches, extolling the virtues of the Government, for delivery to an unsuspecting public on every conceivable occasion, usually after the consumption of substantial dinners. If it is not a dinner, then a cocktail party will do.

I thought we had only one dinner a day.

I am not talking about yourself, but about the élite.

It is jungle juice the Parliamentary Secretary has in front of him.

I am talking about the Cabinet. So great is their anxiety to deliver themselves of these lengthy exhortations, usually directed at the workers to work harder, that no opportunity is lost to deliver them. As I mentioned before in the House, on one occasion I happened to be straying through the lobby of a certain hotel when I heard coming over the intercommunication system the notunpleasant, gentle western accents of a certain Minister indulging in the usual exhortations, and in the background one could hear—at 11 o'clock in the morning—the soft tinkle of ice against glass.

Oh, for the past, now that we have the pledge.

What was he doing only opening a car wash?

What were you doing in an hotel at that hour of the morning?

Seeing as how the Parliamentary Secretary is so inquisitive, I will tell him what I was doing. I had occasion to go there to see one of my constituents who works in the kitchen.

No better place to be.

Do you think I was doing wrong? Do you think I should not have gone to see my constituent when he sent for me?

If that is all the Deputy was doing, of course I am with him.

As I was saying, on this occasion the Minister was declaring open a car wash. Beat that if you can for a ministerial obligation—opening a car wash. We all know why he was doing it—because the party interested in the car wash was concerned with a certain organisation to which I will come shortly.

In due course.

Shortly. This report which appeared in the paper struck me as being very apposite in the context of the state of the country as revealed in the Budget Statement. The suggestion is that in the light of the anxiety and preparedness of Ministers to be present when industries are being opened, would it not be only right and proper that they should show a similar anxiety to be present when they are being closed? The closings of industries under this Government have assumed a significance far greater than their openings because they were more numerous within the past couple of years than was the case hitherto. I do not want to turn, as it were, the knife in the wound, by overstressing the condition of hotels which has been canvassed here pretty widely but might I suggest that the more proficient of the hearse chasers in the Government Party whose path to Dáil Éireann is dotted with tombstones might be appointed to the task of attending at the closing down of industries. However, that is just a thought which occurred to me on my way here this morning, having read the papers.

I had hoped that in any Budget Statement some effort would be made by the Government to ensure that the ground rents legislation for which the Labour Party was initially responsible, and in relation to which I myself moved a Private Members' Bill in this House, the purpose of which was defeated by a tactic of the Minister in appointing a Commission in order to stall action on that matter, would be taken into consideration. I had hoped that the effect of the Ground Rents Bill would not be negatived in the fashion which has now become apparent according to a reply given by the Minister for Financ. Apparently persons who wish to purchase the fee simple of their property are liable to Schedule A tax. This appears to me to be the creation of an injustice for the people concerned, and a perpetuation of the evil of ground rents in another form. It has long been accepted by most Parties that ground rents, as such, have no moral justification.

We have been reduced to the hard core.

As I said before, this House which is allegedly a legislative assembly is rapidly becoming little more than a letter-writing academy, not due to any fault of the Deputies but due to the fault of the Government in permitting this to happen. I want to say as an aside that it is time, if we are to do justice to this Parliament and to the people outside, that some reorganisational steps were taken to remove from the shoulders of Deputies the colossal drudgery of having to spend nearly all their time writing letters when they should be participating in debates and giving consideration to important matters.

However, to come back to the question of ground rents. Most Parties have long felt that there is no moral basis for continuing this system. It cannot be said too often that probably the greatest revolution—one of the greatest in Europe and without a doubt the greatest revolution that has occurred in this country—was that achieved by Micheal Davitt when he secured the land for the farmers—not by Parnell as some people would have it but Michael Davitt and the Land League. The left-overs, as it were, of that problem are to be seen in the ground rents which operate still in the urban and municipal areas of the country.

Davitt, with his tremendous vitality and genius, broke the power of the landlords. Nothing that has occurred in Irish history can compare with that— nothing. It broke the economic power of the landlords. Yet we still have to this day a situation in which people have to pay out their hard earned money in ground rents. This is a mediaeval tax upon their industry, upon their energies, toil and effort. It has long been accepted that this should not be so. It was hoped that through the efforts of the Labour Party in the introduction of the Ground Rents Bill relief was about to come. The number of people affected by ground rents is something of a post-war phenomenon. I suppose that before the last war the number of people who felt the impact of ground rents and were agitated about them was relatively small, but with the tremendous advance in house building and house purchase, the building of houses under the SDA Act which was promoted by the inter-Party Government, continued for a time and finally stopped by Fianna Fáil, a new class of people were affected by ground rents. The benefits which this legislation was supposed to confer have been vitiated by the fact that such people are now deemed liable for Schedule A tax—in other words, property tax.

Were they not always liable for property tax?

They were. We were trying to remove this.

Surely others are liable for property tax?

Property tax on a strip of earth——

And the house thereon.

——on which you could not feed a chicken.

I know nothing about Dublin.

That is the trouble with all of you.

The Parliamentary Secretary is being too naïve.

I know you know nothing about Dublin but you know Government Buildings. It is the lack of knowledge of the conditions in Dublin and the prejudice and bias against Dublin which is the cause of all the trouble. All of you take the first opportunity of coming up here.

There is no bus, train or other means of communication that you do not avail of to get up here as quickly as you can.

We are discussing the Budget.

I am being subjected to continuous interruptions and I can hardly be blamed if I seek to deal with those interruptions as best I can. I was very disappointed that the Minister did not take the opportunity of the Budget to remit this tax altogether. I do not believe it can represent any great amount of money to the Exchequer but it represents a hardship on the class of people concerned because this particular group, the house purchasers, the people who have to save money and sacrifice many of the pleasures of life when they are preparing for marriage and saving money to make a deposit on a house, are people who deserve great consideration.

Those people make very little demands on the country and I feel they are very badly treated. Such people—I am thinking of the young couple planning marriage in this city and hoping to buy a house because in the ordinary course of events it is not reasonable to think that they will be housed by Dublin Corporation until they have a family—are facing a gangster setup. There is a combination of so-called house builders and developers who hold them up to ransom and squeeze the last halfpenny out of their pockets.

I want to give the House an example of what is happening. This Budget provides me with the opportunity of doing this. A young couple go to a builder or a building company—the Minister for Local Government is fully aware of the procedure; other Members of the House more fully aware of it—because they want a house. They are offered a house in a suburban area. What is the price of that house today? This young couple are lucky if they get a house which runs to between £4,000 and £5,000.

The average person seeking to purchase a house is very often a tradesman or a white collar worker who is not earning a great deal of money. The deposit which must be paid to the builder works out in the neighbourhood of £300 or £400 apart from the State grant. The total deposit will run from £500 to £600. I ask anybody to think of the effort which it takes any young couple to assemble that amount of money? I challenge any Deputy——

To assemble it?

——to save that money, £600, out of a salary of £1,500 a year. The people I speak of do not earn £1,500 a year. That gives you an idea of the size of the problem. This young couple have to find £500 or £600 to deposit with the builder. Now what happens? They sign a contract. There will be small print in the contract as is usual in relation to such documents. The builder sets about building the house. The county council loan is applied for and is probably sanctioned. The builder probably has political friends who will put pressure on and make sure the grant will be sanctioned but there may be some delay in the payment of the loan.

The first payment is usually made when the house reaches roof level. There is a roofing grant and so on.

The couple purchasing the house are, by this time, living either in a flat, if they are lucky enough to find a flat at a rent of from £3 to £5 a week in this city at present, or they may be living with the in-laws. I invite any Deputy to consider the concentration of misery that living with in-laws entails. All of us are in touch with people seeking houses. Is it not true that there seems to be some fundamental natural law which forbids the habitation of one house by two families and particularly by two women? I do not know what it may be like in the Parliamentary Secretary's area but I have discussed this with many Deputies and they say that the housing problem is aggravated by young couples having to live with in-laws.

Life for those young people is pretty miserable. They are waiting to go into the house on which they have paid a deposit of about £600. What is the builder doing? He is extracting from them—I am speaking of a specific builder whom I shall name if I have to in this House because I think it is a scandalous act he is perpetrating on the people of this city—and squeezing interest out of them while he is waiting to be paid by the county council the loans and the housing grants. Even if the house is finished, this man turns the key in the lock. The purchaser is not let into the house even to inspect it.

The builder concerned—this is known to the Minister for Local Government—is extracting and squeezing interest—he had not even lent money—from the unfortunate house purchaser. At the end of it all the house is standing idle. I attended a Departmental inquiry some time ago and I asked a builder who was present how many houses he had idle in these circumstances. He told me that 60 houses were finished and locked up. There was nobody living in them. That man was drawing interest from the people who had paid him the deposit. He had not lent money to them. He was waiting on this money from the county council. I ask you if that is not Rachmanism.

That is a new word.

It is not a new word. It is an old trick. Were it not for the fact that I do not want to be too personal there would be red ears around the corridors of this House this evening. I will be personal unless there is something done about it. I am uttering a warning now. There is nothing which will compel me to condone what is going on in the suburbs of this city. The Minister for Local Government with his loud moryah talk about land values is trying to conceal the facts, which is what he is doing. Building lands are at extortionate prices because racketeers of builders such as I have described are putting up the price of land. The Minister for Local Government will not believe that but I hope he will read my words. Perhaps the Parliamentary Secretary knows what I am referring to.

No, I do not actually.

I shall let it rest at that for the moment. I could not but avail of the opportunity to express my indignation at what is going on. The unfortunate young people just married and about to start a family and battling with life are finding it difficult to get a house. When they do get into their house, the repayments amount to anything from £5 to £7 a week. Imagine taking on that loan, as they do. They are looking forward to life with great hopes, but here they are cornered and trapped by those unscrupulous gangsters who are bleeding them white. It is not good enough. This Budget does not give any indication of relief for that class of person, the house purchaser.

There are varying views as to the value of the rates concessions to the farmers. I am not qualified to speak about the real benefits these concessions may confer. They may be great or may be small, but I do say that the Minister in the preparation of his Budget might very well have thought about the ratepayers in the SDA type of houses who live in the suburbs of this city and in the other conurbations throughout the country. These people suffer greatly. However, the farmers are best able to express for themselves whether what was done for them was just or not. It may very well be that the young member of the Fianna Fáil Party who, I understand, is being groomed for the Department of Agriculture—Deputy Dowling—may give us an insight into this. I understand he is a man of very radical views, particularly in so far as the Minister's approach to the pig problem is concerned. The matter of production concerns Deputy Dowling very much and I understand that he suggested solutions to do with the crossing of pigs with rabbits.

The Deputy is suffering from myxomatosis, I think.

With regard to Deputy Carty, one can only say that it is groomed he should be—currycombed. To get back to the rates remission, there is an unanswerable case for relief for the kind of families who live in SDA houses, particularly those who have taken up occupation in the last decade or so. Local authorities are enabled to make a certain partial remission. They stop one-tenth of the rates per year on a sliding scale until the rates finally become fully payable after the tenth year. This system applies to families at the beginning; it starts when they enter the house. They are usually small families, perhaps with one child or no children at all, but by the time the tenth year is reached, they are families of greater size.

I thought the Deputy was going to say the tenth child was reached.

It is to be regretted that the days of the very large families seem to have disappeared.

They have not disappeared completely.

Obviously the Parliamentary Secretary is now advocating in a very hidden way a very obnoxious practice.

That is a sore pill now.

I do not like to hear that in the House. I wonder what Deputy Carty's constituents would think of that. Would he care to elaborate his views on that in the Connacht Sentinel?

I do not want to sugar the pill.

Large families were once, as we know, a feature of the Irish countryside but you would travel a long way now before you saw a family of ten children.

All this is scarcely relevant.

I would be inclined to agree with you, Sir, but you will observe how the Parliamentary Secretary seeks to misguide me.

The Parliamentary Secretary's intervention does not necessarily make it relevant.

Only in the sense that I have to listen to him and reply to him.

Me, too.

If he were not so childish, we could get on with the job.

To get back to the question of the rates, at the tenth year of marriage of the particular social group to whom I refer, the family has reached its most expensive, if not extensive stage——

There you go again.

——in the matter of costs in relation to children travelling to and from school, medical expenses and wear and tear of footwear and clothing. Everybody knows that in or about that time the breadwinner is hardpressed to make ends meet and that his wife is harassed with the problem of bills coming in. I would have thought that the Minister for Finance might well have looked at this very important and urgent social problem and give some relief to those people. It appears now that you can get out of this Government just as much benefits or relief as may be measured against the amount of a row you kick up in the publichouse. If those people to whom I refer were able and willing to organise themselves and exert pressure as other groups of society with considerably less justification have done, I have no doubt they would be remembered in the Budget speech and would get some benefit. Perhaps that is a criticism of them more than anything else but it is something they will have to think about because I feel they are being very badly treated and made the subject, very often, of false propaganda.

For instance, we often hear descriptions and see pictures painted of the great salaries being earned by people living in the cities as against those in the countryside, and how much better off the city worker is as compared with his counterpart in the country. And there are people who believe this, who think it is true; a lot of people who say it think it is true. Then there is another big group who know it is not true but pretend it is because it suits their political book. But the facts are that the cost of living today, and the problems of life, bear most heavily on the type of person to whom I have been referring, that is, the housepurchaser, or the industrial worker in the city, the industrial worker in the city of Dublin who is not given any relief worth talking about in this Budget, who has average earnings of £12 a week—that is the official figure issued from the Government's Statistics Office—and, of course, that is put very often against the alleged income of residents in rural areas on £5 a week. The Parliamentary Secretary will know better than I do whether people exist in this country on as low a figure as £5 a week and, if they do, it is a scandalous thing.

But I can say this: there is no section of society which registers as much solid, measured, unremitting, accounted for, card-punched, work for that £12 a week as does the industrial worker. The industrial worker clocks in and, if he loses time, he loses money. He cannot just stall during the day at his leisure as do those in other occupations, and as is really the case, because it is a form of life I do not really fall out with since man is not an animal. But the industrial worker must work solidly during the 40 or 44 hours per week and must keep his nose to the grindstone or he will know all about it. I wonder is this true of such other sections, who make such a loud clamour? I wonder if in fact the number of hours worked by the various sections of society were examined who would come out as working hardest of all? I make a modest claim that it would be the industrial worker who is the only one I can see who must be at it all the time.

As is usually the case in the unbalanced world in which we live, the criticism for what is our stated lack of production is invariably directed against the worker, the industrial worker. I notice some degree of moral courage in this matter beginning to emerge in certain quarters with the diminution of the importance of the rural vote. Politicians, as we know, particularly opportunist politicians— and, of course, every politician, to some extent, is an opportunist—lose entirely the little grain of divinity called moral courage. Some lose it to a greater or lesser extent but there has been some evidence of a little growth in this in recent years, as I say, coincident with the diminution of numbers in rural Ireland and coincident also with the growth of importance of the industrial workers and the population of the towns and cities, their importance as an electoral voting force. I will bet that when the predicted, forecast and prophesied day comes, when the completely undesirable situation will be reached that rural Ireland has only a very small percentage of the population, little will be said in this House of any account of their doing. I mentioned last night that the world trend—an undesirable one but none the less inevitable trend—seems to be towards centralisation and departure from the agricultural areas. It is easy to be sentimental about this, of course, and think of how attractive are the old whitewashed, thatched, mudwalled cabins made out of yellow marl taken out of the ground.

They danced their wild jigs in them.

Indeed they did; they are dancing their wild jigs now in Hammersmith Broadway and in Coventry.

The Deputy must have been at the Palais de Danse, too. The Deputy should have performed in Hyde Park; he would do very well there.

Please do not bring that up.

I suggest we confine ourselves to the Budget on this occasion.

I am trying to do so; I assume the Budget has to do with finance, and Finance being the key Department——

I do not think it deals with dancing taxation at all; the record is not too good.

On dancing? Ah, well, that is merely something which betrays some recreations of the Parliamentary Secretary when he goes abroad. Now we know what he was doing on his way to Strasbourg.

I want to talk about the Budget and, in talking about the Budget, it is impossible—and I hope it will not be said; I do not think it is being said— for one to confine oneself to the very narrow limits of pure financial discussion.

The Chair does not agree with that.

There must be some liberality in the matter. If we discuss finance purely in a technical sense, we will get nowhere; certainly, the people will feel more disgusted with us than they now are and that is a fate which none of us wishes. Therefore, if we are permitted as we have traditionally been permitted, to talk about the various problems which afflict the country, to discuss the omissions from the Budget, what we think should be in it, as well as general Government policy, it can be said that when Deputy Jack Lynch, that very affable, benign but indeed worthy man, came to power and, in doing so, established himself as the only contender in a race who won backing away, a great "lep" forward was foretold. I was looking for this great "lep" forward and have been looking for it. We had at that time the conflict and the struggle for power between the present Minister for Industry and Commerce, Deputy Colley, an estimable young man, whom I will describe as an Old Guard Fianna Fáilnik and by his side that keeper of the Fenian flame——

I do not see how the Deputy can say all this.

Perhaps the Ceann Comhairle would permit me to conclude the sentence? I am sorry I cannot be more succinct or brief. Perhaps my methods of expression are tortuous, but I think I can bring you to a conclusion eventually. I merely want to say that is past. A great "lep" forward has not occurred. In fact, we might very well benefit now from a third effort in that literary country of mystery and imagination which was landmarked by the First and Second Programmes of Economic Expansion. We now need a third prophecy in collective calculation which might be entitled, if you like, "The Thoughts of Jack". We need something on that line. We are getting into the doldrums. I am sure the Parliamentary Secretary must feel this. He looks like a man who feels he is getting into the doldrums—politically, I mean, of course.

Men may come and men may go, but Dunne goes on forever.

That will be the killing of the half of you. I hope your prognostications of longevity come to pass.

I would not like to see you not go on for ever.

It would be too far to come for the obsequies from where you live.

We were in Mohill together.

No; you have the wrong name. Your memory is playing you false. It was Cloone. Should we discuss that?

Let the Ceann Comhairle decide.

Should we discuss that? I do not think so. This Government have in their declarations concerning the economy shown themselves to be advocates of the Christian Science theory of economic growth. Perhaps that is a new thing?

This is the name to be applied to the theorising the Government have indulged in. You can grasp it, if you try, by thinking of faith healing. If you say something is going to happen, and say it often enough, be the hokey it will happen. This is the Christian Science theory. It is only this which can explain the theorems of the Second Programme for Economic Expansion, nothing else. As I have mentioned many times, there is no plan in it. I do not want to bother the House by repeating myself.

We had no mention in the Budget Statement either of a matter which is surely of vital importance, that is, the matter of redundancy and what is generally described as manpower policy. Again, this is part of this theory of growth, which is another name for political confidence trickery. If you give something a grandiloquent title, it will suggest to people that the Government really have a forceful policy and are really doing something about the problems referred to. Manpower policy: that conjures up in the mind virile, active, imaginative young men setting about the solution of the unemployment and redundancy which have been created by the closing down or reduction of industries and are about to be created in greater number, as far as one can see, as we progress towards what has been euphemistically called the liberalisation of trade, the dropping of barriers and eventual participation in the intensively competitive commercial world of the EEC.

But what has happened in fact? There is no mention in this Budget of anything happening in regard to this question of redundancy. I feel strongly on this because it is occurring in my own constituency in the paper industry. Last year the workers in that industry, having endured a very long stoppage, were told that if they agreed to certain changes, which involved working longer hours and a completely different system of work, it would certainly mean more employment and greater security of employment. In spite of that, there is redundancy in the paper making industry in my constituency. Potez has been mentioned so many times here that it has become somewhat hackneyed.

It was not allowed to get off the ground again.

It has never been off the ground. That is the trouble. I am not going to go into the details of it and I will tell you frankly the reason why. There is a small number of people working there and, if I say too much——

You will lose their votes.

——even that handful will lose their jobs. That is the kind of atmosphere in which the Government are operating, that people have become terrified of losing what little security they have. God knows, it is small enough. In the Budget Statement also there are the usual vague generalisations, which can mean anything or nothing, concerning capital expenditure. The very phrase is enough to clear any Dáil.

Like yourself this morning.

I do not know how I should regard that.

As a compliment.

I want to come to the question of how this capital expenditure is divided up. Eventually, the money raised from the people finds its way into somebody's pocket. I want to suggest that there is a select group in this country, hidden, not advertised except when that is absolutely essential, who operate in such a fashion that the Government and the whole apparatus of Government are no more than a front to them for their own personal enrichment. The Government, whether they wish it or not, are being used by this clique, and I am going to designate them.

There has been a lot of talk about them. The name hitherto given to them was Taca. That is the wrong name. Taca is the Irish name for it. I am going to designate them for what they are: Cosa Nostra.

The Mafia.

"Our thing".

Cosa Nostra, and here are the similarities: the family blood ties are there, are they not? As in the Mafia, the idea is to remain secret, is it not, as it was in the Gresham when some of the waiters were paid to keep out the cameramen and the reporters——

That must not have been the kitchen the Deputy was rambling around.

——and when there was high indignation that any mention should be made of this meeting at all. I was supplied with a list of the Capo Mafiosi—is that what one would call them, the captains of the Mafia? Whom do we find as the principal one, no less a person than the Minister for Finance who has to do with this Budget and who has to do with the disposition of colossal sums of money in this Budget, and these gentlemen are not to be found a thousand miles away from the eventual destination of these colossal sums of money. Talking about the Cosa Nostra. I am going to demonstrate the connection between them: Cosa Nostra, the illfamed, notorious, sinister and international byword for political chicanery, trickery, double-dealing, nepotism, and its Irish version is Taca.

Surely there are more expressions than that?

There are many more. Please do not be importunate. There is plenty of time.

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs.

No doubt, Sir, you will be asking me how I relate that to the Budget, and if you give me a moment. I shall demonstrate that. I should like, first of all, to define what this is, and what greater authority can one seek for a definition of an Irish title than Dr. Dinneen, to which source I have gone? It did not occur to anybody else. It would have occurred, no doubt, to the late lamented Myles na gCopaleen, but in his absence, somebody else to do it. Taca Fáil, sin é an t-ainm. "Taca" is defined as follows: a peg, pin or nail, an item of rigging, a fastening, a foothold, security, one who can be relied on to do a thing.

Is mór an taca dúinn thú.

An impediment to speech.

Níl an rúd sin ortsa, bail ó Dhia ort.

If you use an aspirate, it also means a want, defect, isolation. That is Taca. What does the other half of the title mean, according to Dr. Dinneen?

Destiny.

Fáil: a hedge, a dead hedge; a protection, a paling or wall, bedclothes, a covering, a circle, a fold, a pound, a barrier, a legal bar, an obstacle.

What relevance has this to the Budget?

It is relevant to the extent that in talking about anything, one has to define one's terms. The definition there is perfectly clear on the very best scholastic authority. If you take any of the various interpretations of Taca Fáil, they all just add up to the one thing, freemasonry, Irish, Gaelic-speaking freemasonry; not Gaelic alone but freemasonry as well. Was it for this the Wild Geese spread their grey wings on every tide? I rather doubt it. On other occasions in the future as opportunity presents itself, I shall develop my remarks on these political queer hawks who regard the Irish people as their natural prey. I shall conclude my remarks on the Cosa Nostra by saying that the name of the head of the Mafia in the United States is Charlie Lucky. There you have the complete parallel. I shall leave that matter rest for the moment.

I want to ask what is the significance of the Department of Labour, which is provided for by taxation raised in the Budget, other than to provide a haven for the Minister, Deputy Dr. Hillery, and for him to exercise his most effective and attractive bedside manner. What other purpose is going to be served by this Department of Labour?

The Labour Party continually pressed here for the establishment of a Department of Labour.

Quite so, provided——

A Labour man got it.

Provided it was being made to serve some useful purpose, but we did not at any time suggest that it should be purely ornamental.

Which it is not.

Sure it is. What has been done by this Department except create, as it has created, a certain degree of public unrest, public unrest to the extent that the Minister for Labour has suggested the use of coercion against the workers, and not alone has he suggested it but, to put it correctly, he has almost gone to the extent of using the already existing Fianna Fáil legislation for coercion against the workers? In regard to matters I have raised here—the question, for instance, of employers giving a chance of a living to disabled people—the attitude of the Minister for Labour has not been made known at all.

He did not get an opportunity.

The Parliamentary Secretary was shoved into the gap.

The Deputy talked for two and a half hours.

Two hours out of eight.

A damn good performance, if I may say so, as one performer to another.

I think that is mean. I can only view with the utmost contempt——

I knew the Deputy would resent the remark.

——the suggestion that what we do here is a performance. What does the Parliamentary Secretary think we are? To the extent that "all the world's a stage" I will accept it, but we are no specialists on this side of the House from the point of view of reciting prepared lines. Certainly, I am not.

And never could be.

If I did not believe in what I say I could not say it. Indeed, I could not be got to say it. This may well be what distinguishes a person who is naturalised on these shores as against one from the hinterland.

Is the Deputy referring to the west of Ireland?

To no other place.

Perhaps the Deputy would try to get back now to the Budget.

I am sure the Chair appreciates my difficulty. I was talking about the Ministry of Labour and the lack of any evidence, to me at any rate, to show that it is serving the purpose for which is was originally set up. We, in the Labour Party, welcomed the announcement that the Ministry of Labour was to be established. To us, it was the resumption of a great tradition. The Countess was Minister for Labour; Mr. Joe McGrath was Minister for Labour. The idea of a Minister for Labour was dropped and was not taken up again until comparatively recently. We felt it was a progressive step. This was a young man. Surely his mind could not have been completely stultified by the impact of the flood of Fianna Fáil indoctrination? Surely he could not yet be tainted because of mixing with the inbred Fianna Fáil society? We might perhaps, see some progress. What did we get? Nothing but a series of remarks designed to intimidate, remarks made in the most comfortable and luxurious surroundings, remarks threatening what the workers would get, and they would get it in the neck, unless they toed a certain line.

Speaking on behalf of the workers, I am certain that the wage earners in our society are contributing more to the gross national product than any other group. If the Minister for Labour does not know that, then it is time he learned it. Irish workers, workers anywhere, are responsible people. There has been talk about the number of days lost through strikes, and so on. Everybody deplores strikes, and no one more than we do. The people largely responsible for strikes are, as a general rule, the managers who tolerate bad labour relations. Up to comparatively recently the idea of a trade union existing in many firms was regarded as a Utopian conception, especially outside Dublin. I remember, when I was young, trying to organise the workers in a certain town——

Which shall be nameless.

I can name them, if the Parliamentary Secretary wishes. One was in the area in which he lives. All the opposition was based on the idea that, if one suggested workers should be in a trade union, one was an anti-Christ. Very much so. One was out to destroy the whole basis of Irish Catholic civilisation. It did not matter if one went to Mass, or anything like that; that did not count. One was dealing with the gombeen man and he naturally had only one ambition, namely, to kill the trade union movement. But he did not succeed. No one can defeat the advance of knowledge— no one. Some of these same gombeen men are now rushing to take part in trade union seminars.

With regard to the fact that there is no provision in the Budget for redundancy payments or for the retraining of workers, the situation gives cause for anxiety. Workers, as far as I can see, will be put out of employment as a result of this vaunted Free Trade Agreement which, let us face it, is no more than a second Act of Union. That is all. It is a complete recantation by Fianna Fáil. It is the quenching of the Fenian flame. Unemployment is bound to flow and there is no indication in the Budget as to how workers will be resettled. It puzzles me how any man who has spent the greater part of his life in a particular trade or industry —for instance, the car assembly industry—and who has reached middle age, or a little more, will be retrained for some other occupation. In what particular trade will he be retrained even if the opportunities are there and his services are required? We know very well that the demand simply does not exist. There are no jobs into which people can walk, much less the kind of jobs they have held for the best part of their lives. There is no opening, unless, of course, they take part in the mass emigration which has gone on. In that regard, it strikes me the time has now come at which we should rewrite, or paraphrase, Parnell's slogan: "No nation has the right to set a boundary to the onward march of the nation to the mail boat".

Thus far shalt thou go and no further.

The Parliamentary Secretary could make arrangements for them to go further. Shortly, the Irish will be able to travel to the Continent to provide, I suspect, cheap labour for the continental cartels which operate in the European Economic Community. No doubt they will be told when they are going that they are going to Christianise Europe.

They did it before.

Pity they did not begin here. We could still do with a little Christianising.

I read in the papers that the Minister for Health is a firm opponent of free health for all. He nailed to the mast his belief that the flag of free enterprise, which is, mind you, the standard carried only by political pterodactyls—I should explain that pterodactyls are a prehistoric——

Yes, we know.

I know the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance knows——

I do not know.

——and I also know that his colleague does not know. It is not presumption; I just know this. Pterodactyls are amoebas such as may be observed——

Amoebas are not pterodactyls.

In the ponds of Leinster House.

——such as may be observed in the lobbies of Leinster House now and again. I am grateful for that correction about amoeba. It is very helpful to have somebody who is co-operative. However, on the basis of what the Minister for Health had to say about the undesirability of free health or medical services for all——

There is no such thing as free. Somebody has to pay for these things.

The originality of that is startling.

It is original and it is time it was drummed home that somebody has to pay.

There are people in this world who never had to pay for anything and they have everything there is.

Somebody had to pay.

Somebody had, but the somebody is long dead. All right— if the Parliamentary Secretary wants to score in this pedantic fashion——

I am not making a deposition on that particular word. I am just telling you that there is no such word as "free" in the context in which you are using it.

I hope the Connacht Sentinel will take due note of this staggering revelation.

It might get into the Connaught Telegraph. It is of a higher order than the Connacht Sentinel.

I thought the Parliamentary Secretary was speaking of the Sentinel this morning.

Brother and sister.

Let me come back to the point I was making. The Parliamentary Secretary can do what he likes with that: I am not concerned with words; I am interested in facts. The Minister for Health in his speech reported yesterday or the day before in the Irish Times, which is the paper I usually read, said that a comprehensive health service—these may not be his exact words; I am speaking from memory—such as operates in Britain would not be suitable here. It would not do here at all. I think he went on to suggest that it would be so enervating that it would destroy the national fibre and produced the usual arguments to the effect that such activity by the State robbed the people of personal initiative. You know the usual kind of Victoriana we get when any proposal is made for the benefit of a great many people. In this it is interesting to observe——

What is the Deputy quoting from?

You are determined to drag this out.

Is it the Irish Times?

I am going to tell you but I think it is rather an impertinence to ask before I have even quoted from it at all.

Time magazine.

I will tell you what it is: it is not Gléas.

I thought it might be Our Boys.

Or Playboy.

It is Time magazine.

I merely want to quote from it to show that all unsuspecting we have had in Deputy Flanagan the very soul of conservatism and we never thought it. One would not think that the Head of Christendom would be a revolutionary. It is not a reasonable proposition and one would therefore accept that whatever he had to say on world matters represented a fairly, shall we say, reserved viewpoint, to put it at its most extreme, a middleof-the-road political or social viewpoint. I would think it would be the most natural thing in the world that the Head of Christendom should be a conservative, but bedad Flanagan is more conservative than the Pope. In Time magazine, of April 7th, Pope Paul is quoted as saying in his Encyclical Populorum Progressio: On the Development of Peoples—I know it sounds odd for me to be reading this——

It is nice to hear the Papal Encyclical read by yourself.

Yes, I know, but in the absence of——

Your colleague from Dublin.

——the incomparable piety of my colleague——

Monsignor Burke.

I say in all humility that I know it is not my function and it is probably contrary to canon law but none the less I will say it——

The Deputy would make a fair old deacon.

An archdeacon.

They operate in the deep South.

An archdeacon.

An arch what?

The Pope anyway said and I am quoting from Time of 7th April:

It is unfortunate that a system has been constructed which considers profit as the key motive for economic progress, competition as the supreme lot of economics and private ownership as the means of production as an absolute right that has no limits and carries no corresponding social obligations.

Did the Parliamentary Secretary to the Taoiseach take that in? It rather stymies the Parliamentary Secretary because it cuts across his deeply-held views about the obligations of private property and so on. I know very well that he, if his real mind were known, would subscribe more to the balance of what is in this report in Time magazine, which goes on impudently to attempt to criticise and castigate the head of Christendom for the expression of this very excellent and liberal thought——

It will indeed gladden the heart of the Pope when he hears about the Deputy supporting him in this fashion.

You would never know.

You would never know but we might get this debate finished some time.

Some of us spend some time here. Some of us spend days, weeks and months here. It is hardly to be thought that we should all step back on the appearance of some of the great tribunes of other parts on the occasions of their visits to the capital. Let me say to Deputy Séan Collins that I am trying to discharge my obligations to my constituents, and if it takes a little time——

The Deputy is quoting from a little Time.

——it is because I have to do it carefully. The Parliamentary Secretary brings me back. He had some appropriate remarks to make about my relations with the Vatican.

Or Vat 69.

Deputy Flanagan, the Minister for Health, now finds himself to the right of the Vatican.

At loggerheads.

That is to be expected, and no doubt that is where Deputy Carty most probably belongs. Under banner headlines "Tyre Dumping", the Evening Herald of Friday, 14th April, reported:

The first cold blast of the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement is hitting the Irish tyre manufacturing industry.

On page 4 of the same issue under the headline "Redundancy Feared", it is reported:

Seven hundred and fifty workers out of 1,760 may go. The craft workers employed in the heavy works of CIE are concerned at the possibility of redundancy which could mean that within the next year about 750 of the 1,760 workers will be laid off.

Is that not appalling news for the people around Inchicore? I hope the people around Inchicore will take it up with Deputy Dowling who pretends to represent them in this House—that they will take up with Deputy Dowling this new threat to their employment. This danger of 750 out of 1,760 losing their jobs comes at the end of many years of continuous applicational effort by the Government to reduce CIE and the numbers employed in it to a shadow of its former self; this danger in spite of the fact that branch lines were chopped off left, right and centre, and that we had in occupation there an iron man who is now ironing out the affairs of RTE. When it came to the question of sacking he did not baulk. This also in spite of the assurance of the Minister for Transport and Power, who has often expressed his conviction, and expressed it as a conviction of the Government, that it did not matter what way a business was run, how much employment it gave, the main test being whether it was economically viable, meaning whether it made a profit or not. In spite of all that, the CIE workers at Inchicore, at Spa Road, are now being made to worry that they may lose their jobs. What will happen if they are disemployed?

Send them to the west of Ireland.

What preparations are being made for this situation by the Department of Labour? Just plain nothing. What are they going to retrain us for—to milk cows?

We have a new equation over there—two Parliamentary Secretaries equal one Minister.

I think it would be 1.5 really. I suppose by that time the Government will have trotted out some proposal that such workers can be sucked up in the drainage of the Shannon. I should have mentioned when discussing the Cosa Nostra that there is abroad in the public highways a rumour which needs some attention —either confirmation or denial by the Government—to the effect that this Taca and company, consisting of the backroom boys of Fianna Fáil, a sinister organisation, are taking over the activities of the voluntary pools. Is this so? There are some 30 in the voluntary pools organisation. Is there any comment on that?

It is a good rumour anyway.

I was saying last night that while other countries have monopoly capitalists, we have monopoly patriots and it comes to a lot of them by hereditary right.

The evening papers are out. I have read all this morning's speech.

That is most unworthy.

Most unworthy. I dissociate myself from that remark.

It is immaterial to me. It shows my dedication to the job that I intend to go on much further. I should like now to comment on the disastrous housing policy of the Government. Some of the Capo Mafiosi of the Mafia, the captains, the leaders of the Taca fold, are concerned with a piece of pretence known as the National Building Agency which I now propose to dissect. It is called a consortium. There are a few able and decent men associated with it but if one is to judge the rate of progress of this country on what we have seen of the production of this National Building Agency—let me repeat the phrase used by one of our most famous statesmen, another day, another time, before the emergence of either of the Parliamentary Secretaries—if the National Building Agency is an example of how fast we are going to travel or how efficient our production will be, this country is doomed, as Mr. de Valera said on the eve of the 1948 election when he announced that if he did not get in the country was doomed.

This National Building Agency was set up in Ballymun. We have in housing in Dublin a problem far more serious than that which obtains anywhere else. Not only have Dublin Corporation to house the normal natural residents of Dublin, but they have also to house the fleeing refugees from the West, the South, the Midlands and the North—refugees from the effect of Fianna Fáil policy which is more deadly than Stuka bombers in some instances.

I hope they will remember what the Deputy called them.

They are very adaptable creatures. You would be surprised at how chameleon-like they are in their politics. They know what side their bread "does be" buttered on when they eventually find themselves here. This housing problem in Dublin has been aggravated by the fact that the old city within the canals started to collapse from old age. It started to disintegrate from old age. The old Georgian houses began to fall. It is over a century and a half since the days of the prosperity of their owners. As we know, they fell down upon little children in the streets and killed them. Dublin Corporation already had a very long housing list of some thousands seeking houses, and they were urged by public fears to institute a campaign for the destruction of houses the condition of which was in the least doubtful and which might at any time be thought to be in danger of collapsing. This resulted in an accumulation of housing applications to such an extent that we had 10,000 or 11,000 families on the list seeking accommodation urgently.

Many people will be familiar with the expedient known as Griffith Barracks and the undesirable conditions in which families were separated. Heads of families had to live outside the barracks and the rest of the families had perforce to live in dormitories, and so on. This added to the accumulation of difficulties which surrounded this problem. This demanded urgent action. This was an emergency situation. The youngest Cabinet in Europe had the responsibility of doing something about it. I may say this situation would never have developed, were it not for the lassitude and laziness of certain Fianna Fáil Ministers who quite unjustifiably were put in office, and who fell asleep over their desks so far as the problem of Dublin housing was concerned, and remained like Peter Pan in that condition.

The Deputy may not be too specific.

I accept that. In fact, I am not being specific. I am not mentioning any names. I am leaving it to the imagination as to who I am talking about, except that I say they are Fianna Fáil Ministers.

There is only one Minister for Local Government.

Acting Chairman

The Local Government Estimate will be before the House.

I am trying to discuss, if I may, with your permission, the development of the housing problem and the reason why the housing situation of Dublin Corporation is in its present parlous and disastrous condition. I want to pin the responsibility where it belongs. I also want to point out the utter inadequacy, pretension and fraud of suggesting that the National Building Agency is doing any kind of a good job.

They have nothing to do with Ballymun. I thought the Deputy said it was a consortium.

They are the Mafia, the Cosa Nostra. There are others in other branches of industry and commerce. They are all over the place. I was in Ballymun recently at an official opening. People must be heartily sick of these official openings. If they are half as sick as I am as a participant, they need medical attention. There we had the Minister for Local Government telling us this scheme would be finished in time whereas in fact——

Who caused the delay? There were quite a number of strikes.

Now we have it coming out: blame the workers again.

The Deputy asked the reason why.

I did not ask the reason why. The Parliamentary Secretary is blaming the workers.

I am not blaming the workers.

He mentioned strikes and said the workers were responsible.

He did not say anything of the kind.

Do not try to run away from it. Own up.

Acting Chairman

The Deputy may not be interrupted and he should address the Chair.

Thank you for your protection. It is a scandalous thing that I cannot come into this allegedly democratic assembly and make a speech without being subjected to this kind of thing. Not only that but the workers have been attacked.

By whom?

By the gombeenism of the West.

I have often been called names but never a gombeen.

Now the Parliamentary Secretary has heard it for the first time.

I will have to refer, like yourself, to Dinneen's Dictionary.

Like your erstwhile leader. He used to be a great dictionary man.

The Deputy is not a bad hand at dictionaries himself.

My approach is utilitarian. Yours would be for a different purpose.

Academic.

When I go to the dictionary, it is to serve the people, not the section like the Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, the Taca group you represent in this House and for which you are the spokesman. I do not mean you, Sir, but Deputy Carty. Now Deputy Carty has succeeded in doing what he probably set out to do: he has thrown me off my train of thought.

The Deputy will not be long coming back on it.

I thought you heard me puffing. Now, to get back to the National Building Agency. Ask anyone in Dublin Corporation how things are progressing in the housing schemes? The delay has not been due to any remissness or any lack of application on the part of the workers. It has been due to bad planning and I would say bad labour relations.

Bad weather: there were four months of it.

You should not be trying to cover up the fact that you made a foul attack on the workers of Dublin. My pious colleague will have something to say about that because they are also very close to his area. We had in the Custom House this mentality that there was something wrong about solving the problem in Dublin city. It was hoped, that with the change there, with the arrival in the Custom House of my other constituency colleague and his appointment as Minister for Local Government, now at long last we might have a reasonable point of view put into operation in respect of Dublin city and Dublin county. After all, seeing that he represented Dublin county, it was reasonable to imagine that he would know the problems of Dublin county.

Acting Chairman

Will the Deputy please move away from housing because he has been much too detailed in regard to housing for a Budget debate? His remarks could be more properly related to the Estimate of the Minister for Local Government, especially with regard to the matter of Dublin Corporation.

Can I approach the subject then from another point of view? Indeed, I wish to approach it from another point of view and say that the money provided for housing in the Budget is by no means adequate to meet the problem as we see it, certainly in Dublin. I wish Deputy Dowling, who has now just come into the House, would consult with his co-conspirator from across the Shannon and arrange another interview with a few of his cumann friends in the Fianna Fáil Party and pretend they are a representative organisation, as he has done, non-political, and get some more money allocated for the provision of houses for the many hundreds who he must know are applicants for houses and who must wait for accommodation in the city because there is not enough money in this Budget to bring us within sight of the beginning of the end of this problem. I know Deputy Dowling does not give two hoots about those people. I know he is a cynical product of the Fianna Fáil machine and I know the very height of his ambition is to become, if he possibly can, a close associate of Cosa Nostra, the Mafia.

I thought you were making him Minister for Agriculture.

I will come back to that.

It is very important. He is here now and obviously he will inflict himself on the House at a later stage.

Acting Chairman

The Deputy may not go into what another Deputy will do. The Parliamentary Secretary will please refrain from these remarks.

Perhaps when he inflicts himself on the House, he will tell us whether the rumour, to which I referred earlier this morning, is true, that he is being groomed for the Department of Agriculture and that this is based on his radical proposals to secure greater pig production and the crossing of pigs. He can tell us more about that when he comes to speak.

The Deputy is crossing turkeys.

No; I am merely giving the Deputy an opportunity to tell us if this rumour is true. The Deputy does not lose any opportunity of indulging in McCarthyism. I will give him a touch of his own medicine when he speaks later.

Good old Al Capone.

Those sentiments are not peculiar to Al Capone. Let me say—I am sure the House will agree with this—that I am the very last person to indulge in any kind of personal recrimination.

I have heard it said that you fast twice a week like the Pharisee.

I have also heard it said that he is the most insincere man in this House.

The unique excrementality of Deputy Dowling calls for attention now and again. However, the housing problem is not being adequately provided for in this Budget. I wish, Sir, that some degree of silence was preserved so that I could concentrate. There is too much muttering.

Acting Chairman

The Deputy is too provocative. He should move away from housing because he is much too detailed on it.

I bow to your ruling. The proposal to make a very limited concession to the old aged in so far as bus travel is concerned is welcomed by us because, of course, we initiated it and the Government fought against it several months ago. I cannot understand why it is necessary for us to have to go to such extreme lengths to prod, push, shoulder and caiole the Government to do such a simple thing as this.

The concession, if it can be dignified by that title, to the old aged, to be made in regard to the ESB, must, I am sure, have been a bitter pill for the Minister for Transport and Power to have to swallow. I am glad he was made to swallow it because time and time again he has shown all too clearly that his position vis-à-vis the Irish people and his appreciation of the problems of the Irish people are remote. We were shown that when we originally put up the suggestion of free bus travel for the old aged. We see no reason why it should be limited. What advantage is there in limiting it to the valley periods when the buses are not deemed to be so busy? What advantage is there to CIE in that matter? We see no reason why it should be so. When we put up this proposal, we were conscious of the fact, and we felt strongly, that it was so small a thing that only a gross malevolently opposed political nature could have rejected it. Yet, it was rejected and here it is belatedly trotted out in the Budget. However, for these small mercies, one has to be thankful, but they are nothing compared with what is required. A much greater effort is required from the Government in so far as these old people are concerned.

It may be that I will be made to appear a sentimentalist or that I am insincere in this matter. I have been speaking about these things most of my life, since I was about 16 years of age. Unlike some of the latter day halo patriots, I lost a considerable amount of time due to my political convictions. I spent my formative years travelling the highways and byways of this country organising the economically lowliest class in western Europe, the farm labourers who had no friends. I had the great privilege to work closely over many years with the late James Larkin, From him I learned and developed my political ideals and, let me put it frankly, any bias and prejudice I have. I am prejudiced in favour of the poor and the lowly and the downtrodden, and against the privileged. I have no doubt that no matter what I say in regard to these people it will be misrepresented and will be made the object of criticism by those who can see no further than the polling station.

This Budget is fairly described as one designed to capture the maximum number of votes at the coming local elections. That is an understandable political exercise. No matter what Party are in power, they would do that, I suppose, except that it would not impinge in any way upon the general welfare and the problems of the nation. That is how I feel about it.

If we are to get a solution to the great problems which beset us, and to the far greater ones confronting us, we need a far more radical approach to our economic state than we now have. A conscious organisation of society has been given as a definition of socialism—the conscious organisation of society. The thing should not be left to happen in a haphazard way. Man should at least control his own destinies to the extent of providing against bad times. The weaker sections who cannot help themselves should be enabled to help themselves to work for a living.

This Government will not provide that. It is obvious to me that there is not the divine fire which brings about social change in the magnitude which certain situations demand. At times, indeed, the Government give the impression of being more of a flyboy of a Government than anything else, people who are more concerned with the capture of position than with the fate of the country. There have been jokes and exchange of pleasantries and unpleasantries, and insults perhaps, but most of us started out in the first place with the idea of doing good. For many, of course, the idea disappeared along the way and the determination became to do good only for oneself, but not everybody has lost the zeal which first provoked him into taking an interest in the welfare of his own people. Fianna Fáil as a Party are in the years of decline, whether they know it or not.

We heard that before.

It is obvious to me that they are in the years of decline. They will not go without a struggle, of course. It is a tragedy for some of the younger fellows.

(Interruptions.)

You arrived too late —too late, my friends.

In the two recent by-elections——

I am talking about things bigger and more important than elections engineered by politicians. You had 150 full-time politicians down in Waterford and Kerry under the command of a fuehrer in Dingle who gave hem their orders and they went out and they traipsed every highway and byway. I have a report from Kerry which says that any TD whose constituency was in danger or running down could do no greater thing than resign his seat, and because of by-elections——

All this is largely irrevelant.

All the bribery that went on is something appalling.

If there is anything outstanding relevant to the Budget, I would ask the Deputy to address himself to it.

As you may have observed, Sir, I was coming to the general question, and the final matter, of what I think will be the future of this country when I was set upon. I regret very much these unseemly interruptions. I believe Fianna Fáil are in their decline: I believe this to be true. I do not think that it is in the nature of things that a monopoly Party can last for ever. I never believed in the Thousand Year Reich. I do not believe that any Party can last for ever because I believe life is evolutionary and that change is inevitable.

Now we are back to it.

How percipient of you! How keen a brain is that to have seen Darwin! You can add in Freud, Jung and, even, de Valera, if you like, but the fact is that change is inevitable. I want to say to the two Parliamentary Secretaries, whose company I have enjoyed so much, that when they do depart from office, they will be going, not for just an hour, not for just a day, not for just a year, but always.

Sing it out. I have neither the inclination nor the desire to embark on the rather perilous journey of pursuing Deputy Dunne in and out of hotel kitchens, where he tells us he was at an early hour of the morning——

The forenoon, I said; I did not mean a.m., in the sense the Parliamentary Secretary means.

Or through the Ballymun scheme——

Into which the Parliamentry Secretary trapped him.

——or into the definitions of a syndicate, Cosa Nostra and all the other organisations he equated, to his own satisfaction at any rate.

Apart altogether from the double talk we have heard from the Labour benches and the ranting about the Budget by Fine Gael, we should examine this Budget by the yardstick the community will use to examine it and see what it is and what it means for them. The first reaction of the public to a Budget when it appears is: what extra taxation does it involve? That is, of course, a natural reaction: has income tax been increased, has the pint gone up, and so on? That is what they look for in the paper when the first report of the Budget appears, or when they hear it on the radio. In this Budget the increase in taxation has been purely minimal: 2d on the price of a packet of 20 cigarettes, a penny on the pint——

What about the bottle of stout? Has the Parliamentary Secretary any information on the price it should be?

I do not drink stout.

There has been no increase in taxation, no increase in turnover tax, no increase in the wholesale tax, but that purely minimal taxation increase to which I have made reference and, for that minimal increase— and I say that advisedly, it is a minimal increase in taxation—there have been wholesale concessions to practically every section of the community.

Dealing, first of all, with income tax, a very big concession has been granted —one, of course, that has often been sought by different Parties in this House—to those who have heavy medical expenses. No allowance was made in the past for hardship of that kind; you could get no relief in your income tax claim for money spent by way of medical expenses. That point has now been conceded and that, of course, must appear on the plus side of the Budget.

There is greater relief for a taxpayer supporting, or helping to support a dependent relative; that is something everybody has pressed for for many years. There is an increased allowance to those who have to pay income tax for children under 11 years of age, which will mean, in the case of a taxpayer with a big family, considerable relief. I met somebody here in this House who told me that to him alone it would mean about £70 a year.

He must have a lot of children under 11 years.

Increased help by way of relief to manufacturers for capital expenditure is being granted if they propose to increase their production and promote their efficiency methods. In areas like my own, which form part of the undeveloped areas, concessions are being offered to manufacturers which we were all hoping would be offered.

May I interrupt the Parliamentary Secretary to clear up something with him? He said he met a man who told him this allowance would mean about £70 per year to him.

It is £11 per child.

That is true, but the Parliamentary Secretary said this man told him it would mean an increase of £70 a year to him. That would mean he would have to have ten or 11 children under 11 years.

Six children under 11 will mean £66; these are the figures he quoted to me.

As I was saying, in areas like my own—where it is rather difficult to induce manufacturers to expand and extend their businesses—increased tax allowances are being given for new machinery, to encourage them to modernise plant and all the other factors which will enable them to expand their businesses.

I have listed those things, as I see them, in the Budget—that is the fifth item of particular concern to the taxpayers. Then I come to something we have not adverted to enough, the 5/- a week increase for non-contributory old age pensioners, widows, and recipients of unemployment assistance. Other concessions have been granted to similar social welfare beneficiaries, those who draw the infectious diseases allowance, the DPMA, and all the other benefits administered by local authorities. But the kernel of the Budget which has appealed to me is the fact that the Minister showed great consideration for the old people, the old age pensioners who are living alone, often lonely and in remote places, by his decision to grant them free electricity and transport, nor has he forgotten other elderly people, retired public servants like national teachers, who worked for so many years and had to retire on low pensions based on the salary they were earning before their retirement, to whom he has seen fit to give a 12 per cent increase.

In particular, the relief to the extent of £5 million granted to the farming community is something with which we are all very happy. I am happy with it, not because it affords any great relief to the larger farmers but to the small farmers, most of whom live in the western areas. There is to be total derating for all landholders with a poor law valuation of £20 and under. The relief has been scaled to help farmers up to £33 valuation on land. In my county 90 per cent of the farmers are under £20 valuation. While there are some over £20, the percentage is small. I heard a Fine Gael Deputy say in the House yesterday that he did not think the relief would be very considerable. I regret to say the rates in my county are running very near £4 in the £. To grant total relief to a farmer of £20 valuation means the sum of at least £16 per year.

It is good to think that many of the reliefs granted down the years to farmers, particularly small farmers, were granted by this Government. Away back in the past, when there was a clamour from the farmers, a Cumann na nGaedheal Government decided to grant relief. Money was scarce at the time and the relief they saw fit to give was 2/6d in the £. That meant a lot to the big farmers at the time. Indeed, the greater benefit was enjoyed by the richer farmers. A man with £20 valuation at the time got 20 halfcrowns, while the man with £400 valuation got 400 halfcrowns, which in that period was a considerable sum. The pendulum is now swinging the other way and relief is being conferred on the smaller farmers.

Another matter which affects the worker, particularly the rural worker who has a small holding and a low valuation, is the abolition of the employment period orders. Concessions also have been granted to the rural community in respect of milk and an increase in the guaranteed price dead weight for pigs.

But the part of the Budget that appeals to me, as one who lives in the West, is that our area has been designated a special development area. We hear a lot about the flight from the West, saving the West and all that has been done to allay the decay of the West. In this Budget a particularly vigorous policy has been indicated and a programme will be embarked on to take practical steps to save the West. These practical steps mentioned by the Minister in his Budget Statement are of great importance to that part of the country stretching from the northern tip of Donegal to the southern tip of West Cork.

A number of promotional efforts have been indicated by the Minister and money has been allocated for the purposes of these projects. It is all right to say we will do this, that and the other, but in his Budget Statement the Minister has indicated in a positive way the steps to be taken to help save the West and has allocated money for them. The pilot areas are to be extended. We already have a pilot area in my county at Clonberne. Now it is proposed to establish a number of pilot areas. This is a step in the right direction.

The Minister also indicated that, in co-operation with the Minister for Lands, a big settlement programme will be started to consolidate holdings, to make them viable and at least to bring them up to the standard of an economic holding. This is a very big problem in the west of Ireland. The farmers with scattered holdings — patchwork quilts, as they are called—represent a problem continually demanding the attention of the Land Commission. Oftentimes a man has to travel half a mile or a mile to portion of his holding separate from the rest. That an attempt should now be made to resettle these holdings, to get the consent of the landowners affected and to acquire land where necessary will help to solve that problem.

The Minister has also indicated a renewed interest in industrial activity in the West. There is particular emphasis on smaller projects based on local skills and requirements to keep industrial activity alive. There are craft industries, such as boat-building, which may be peculiar to a particular area. While these industries may not be considered large by people in other parts of the country, they are very important to areas like Galway, Mayo and Cork, where certain skills have grown up, where there are families noted for boat-building and the making of certain types of furniture. These should be encouraged to go ahead with their work and helped where necessary by way of capital assistance.

This is a step in the right direction. In the West we cannot always hope to have vast industries giving employment to great numbers such as exist elsewhere. But a start can be made with the smaller local industries, which can be promoted and helped when they are not doing as well as they should be doing.

The biggest break through will be in tourism. The remoter areas of the western seaboard are noted for their beauty. While God did not give them very good land, He gave them a very beautiful countryside. Full use must be made of the advantage by the development of tourism and the provision of tourist attractions over and above what they already have. Many people who come to this country like to visit the West, places like Galway, Cork and Kerry and the other areas renowned for their beauty. However, they find to their disappointment that the services which should be there are not there. There is an absence of suitable hotels. The roads are oftentimes very bad, and all the other things that discourage tourists from visiting these remote areas are there.

The Minister in his Budget Statement has concentrated—and rightly so—on providing more and better accommodation for our visitors. He mentioned the farmhouse accommodation scheme which will be a valuable source of supplemental income to people who have or could have accommodation for tourists. The Minister will be providing for toilets, for extra rooms and all the other facilities that are demanded in rural Ireland, particularly west of the Shannon.

When the Minister is preparing this scheme in consultation with Bord Fáilte, he should get them to rid themselves of these grandiose ideas they have about hotels. They are absolutely stupid in their approach to this problem. Most of the people who come to this country are not looking for palatial hotels and the excellent services which are to be found in other countries. They like a plain hotel with cleanliness, good accommodation and good food. That can be given in Ireland if Bord Fáilte adopt a more rational approach to the problem than they have been doing in the past.

The small family hotel should be encouraged by Bord Fáilte. The standard required, while high, should not be as high as that which they insist upon in relation to big hotels. The big hotels are very well able to manage for themselves. Let Bord Fáilte get down to the question of farmhouse accommodation and the provision of more and more small family hotels catering for the ordinary tourist who comes to this country and who neither can afford nor wants anything swanky or luxurious.

In connection with the farmhouse project for which provision is being made in the Budget, I would appeal to the Minister to see if Bord Fáilte could help a special type of catering accommodation that is being given in my constituency, and I feel sure this would apply to many of the western areas. We have on the roads during the summer months a large number of hikers. Most of them are on their way to the local An Óige hostels which are located in very scattered places; at least it is hard to get from one hostel to another in the course of a day if the hiker is not lucky in getting a lift as he oftentimes does. Many owners of houses, especially big farmhouses, while they would not like to go into the farmhouse accommodation scheme are in a position to cater for hikers by providing bedrooms, kitchen facilities and ancillary services, while at the same time allowing the hiker to do his own cooking and provide his own meals.

There are two centres quite near me where the owners allow hikers facilities of that kind. It would be in the interests of Bord Fáilte to give some attention to that problem. They could provide the owner of such a house with grants, say, for bedding and beds, kitchen utensils, and other facilities of a simple kind that will be of great help to the hiker when he is making his way to another hostel. After all the hiker spends money in the country and contributes to the solution of our balance of payments problem.

Reverting to the concession that has been granted to the small farmer, the derating of the first £20 valuation, I am coming across an extraordinary situation in my part of the country. A new breed of landlord appears to have come on the scene. This new landlord, while bemoaning and complaining about all the money he is losing on farming, buys up every available farm in the locality, if he is allowed to do so. The more land he buys, according to himself the more money he is losing. I feel sure that many rural Deputies come across that type of gentleman. I urge the Land Commission to have a good look at this problem when they are dealing with the land resettlement question as mentioned by the Minister in his Budget Statement.

The agitation, the strife and the disorder which these people are trying to engender, particularly among small farmers, are no help to the Government, nor indeed could they be of help to any Government. If they are losing money as they say—most of them are big farmers—why do they not offer their land to the Land Commission or dispose of it otherwise if they so wish? Let them give the land to the small farmer who will work it. There are many working farmers in my part of the country who are short of land and particularly short of arable land or land fit for tillage.

The Minister for Finance is to be congratulated on this Budget in so far as it has meant a very small increase in taxation and fairly substantial benefits. The benefit which is of most interest to me is the programme he has announced for the development of the West. The Minister also deserves praise for the display he has given of social conscience, particularly in relation to the aged, those living alone and those who are disabled. He has made an attempt to stabilise costs, to prevent them spiralling and causing inflation. He has stressed the point that any increases sought in incomes must keep pace with increased productivity.

Attempts have been made to denounce the Budget as a bad Budget. Those who indulge in tactics of that kind must be adepts in the art of selfdelusion. Ask ordinary people throughout the country, the small farmer and the worker, is this a bad Budget? Ask them to weigh the increases in taxation against the undeniable advantages that will accrue and, by that yardstick, judge whether this is a bad Budget. While Opposition Parties may have succeeded in deluding themselves into the belief that it is a bad Budget—as an Opposition, they have, I suppose, to say that—it is another job to convince the people generally that it is a bad Budget.

The problems that affect the West are peculiar. The difficulties that arise there are associated mostly with the type of land there and the fragmentation of holdings. Life generally in the West is difficult for many people, but that an attempt should be made to alleviate the position is praiseworthy. This is certainly a step in the right direction.

I have not held the House very long, due to the absence of Deputy Dunne who would, I am sure, if he had been here——

Have supplied the Parliamentary Secretary with fodder.

——have supplied me with fodder, as I did him.

The Budget is normally regarded as the economic yardstick by which to measure the strength of purpose of a Government in relation to the economy generally. It is to be noted that our present Minister for Finance, Deputy Haughey, is a pop fan. He was among the people who received the returning Eurovision second prizewinner and, in the context of pop, we could legitimately describe his Budget as a Mary Poppins Budget, sung to the popular tune of "A Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Medicine go Down".

"If I Could Choose" would not be a bad selection either.

I have chosen my tune: the Deputy can choose his own. Why do I say "A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down"? Because I will approach this Budget realistically. I shall ruthlessly point out its defects. Credit is to be given for an adroit political concept in relation to this Budget. Whatever else we may accuse the Minister for Finance of we cannot but admit that he has a good deal of political perspicacity and skill. Like Mary Poppins, out of his bag he has distributed little palliatives in a number of directions. I say this without any political bias. All of us must be conscious of the fact that the time was well-nigh past when social welfare recipients should be looked after and I believe there would have been no cavil had they been looked after better because, while the 5/- may be extremely valuable, it is still a rather inadequate pittance.

That is all the Deputy gave in six years.

I am not talking about what we gave. I was never responsible for giving any of it. If I had my way, these people would be the first to be looked after properly, irrespective of popularity polls. I have never been afraid to advocate their case in and out of government. I do not think there is any room for boasting that they were given 5/-. I would be equally enthusiastic in supporting an increase of 10/- because no class in our community needs a realistic appraisal of their difficulties more than social welfare recipients do. There is a good deal of satisfaction to be found in the fact that at least some recognition has been given to lowly-paid pensioners. Deputy Carty, the Parlimentary Secretary, knows as well as I do how heavily the burden lies on the lowly-paid and older sections of our community.

These increases are, in my opinion, palliatives in an effort to cover up in this budgetary instrument the continuing economic difficulties and ailments from which we suffer. Because certain concessions are given, we are, apparently, to be asked to forget the effect of iniquitous taxes, like the turnover and the wholesale tax, which are now becoming a copperfastened feature of our tax-gathering. We are meant evidently to forget the difficulties that have arisen in our economy because of wrong concepts in taxation and wrong directions in development. We are inclined to forget that our unpaid taxgatherers are still being penalised and that various sections of the community are still carrying more than their reasonable share of the taxation burden. It appals me that there should be such atrophy, such a lack of imagination in tax conception that we have to go back once more to the hardy annuals of beer and cigarettes to get additional revenue.

This is as good a point as any at which to remind the people, through this House, that part of the money now available to give the reliefs is available because, as the Taoiseach admitted here, there was gross underestimation by him as Minister for Finance, and by his advisers in the tax-collecting department, as to the probable yield of the wholesale tax over a couple of months.

It was a new tax. They could not estimate it.

I am quoting what the Taoiseach said.

(South Tipperary): He estimated the t.o.t. all right and it was more complex.

I have a deep-seated objection to the type of mendicity successive Fianna Fáil Governments are creating in our society. They talk about the repeal of the order to enable more and more people to draw the dole, making mendicants out of decent, respectable small farmers. I am always appalled when decent people are reduced to the level of mendicants, drawing sops and doles, when an integrated land development should have been conceived years ago for our agricultural community in the West and in the area I represent. There is no good in talking about 1d a gallon here, a subsidy for milk coolers, an incentive bonus for milk, unless we can get the fabric of a progressive plan that will show a steady rate of investment in agriculture and a regulated, properly conceived escalation into the type of production and the type of economy that we really need in relation to our agriculture.

I represent, thanks be to God, some of the finest small farmers in the whole of Ireland, proud of their tradition, with generations of evidence of their capacity for work. We understand what the nature of our ailments is. It is time the Departments and the Government opened their eyes to the fact that there are certain zones in Ireland where experience and knowledge have proved conclusively the need for integration, have proved that in an area like southwest Cork, milk, pork and now this new vegetable growing scheme must be integrated and that you have to plan on the basis that because the units have to be comparatively small, they can have only the optimum quality of stock in cattle and pigs and the maximum type of vegetable yield from their soil to make it possible to make these holdings a practical economic reality for the people working on them and getting their living thereon.

That is the cavil I have with this Budget. God knows there is none of us but is glad to see the farmers getting a limited relief and glad to see that it is now mainly directed, for this year anyway, towards the smaller elements of our farming community but it is the lack of hope and the lack of concept and progressive thinking that have been appalling me over all the years I have been in this House fighting the cause of the small farmer. I want to see a realisation of the necessity of investment and the proper progressive trend towards it.

I am all in favour, and have never been afraid to say so, of seeing our holdings brought up to a more practical, realistic, economic level but I am not unconscious of the nature of the problem. Bad and all as it is in south-west Cork, where the holdings may average from 25 to 40 acres, it is an appalling problem in the West. It is one I spoke of in this House 20 years ago and made a statement which I now repeat: you can only face the problems of these areas by realising that you have to pour tremendous investment into them or face the reality of their decay.

I am proud to be able to say that where tourism is concerned in west Cork, for a number of years they have been developing the realistic type of holiday that does not envisage penthouses in luxury hotels but envisages the need of what we find to be the best tourist of all, the English tourist travelling in our area. He seeks only cleanliness, reasonable comfort, good plain food and hospitality and the integration of the people to enjoy his holiday. We cater for that type of thing extensively. I would like to have seen the Minister giving the type of direction that would stop the building of luxury hotels and give the small hotelier greater encouragement in the more remote areas to build up and extend that type of family hotel for which many of our small seaside resorts have become famous and which provide the type of holiday most of our visitors really like because of its simplicity and its contrast to their normal way of life. That is another integral part of the economic plan if we are to save the congest areas. It is the negative approach of this Budget to those type of problems that are now beginning to stick out like a sore thumb or the nose on a person's face that is appalling me.

I may not have the type of economic mind that chases flippertygibbets or reads into blue books something that is not there. I do not care what the Government call it but plans for economic development that have no reality in fact or no deep-seated affinity with our people are all cod. The sooner we stop talking about first or second programmes for economic expansion, blue books, pink books or green books and get down to appraising the real situation we must face the better. We are told that the flight from the land is a continuous trend and that we can expect more and more defection from rural Ireland in the course of the next number of years. Then it becomes all the more incumbent on the Government to ensure that the tremendous contribution which agriculture makes to our whole economic being is properly preserved. We will have to have in rural Ireland the type of planned economy that will ensure stability and worthwhile returns for the people who are going to stay on the land to work it and to carry the backbone of our exports.

Let the economists, the great Whitakers and the rest of them, talk as they may about escalation in industry: the backbone of this country is still agriculture. If we are looking into the future in which we have either to integrate into a greater Europe or the Six, our capacity in the agricultural field will have to be keen, our production will have to be highly competitive and our quality superb if we are to survive. Any of us, even though we may not be in some modern schools of economic thought, realise that any serious setback in agriculture could be disastrous to our whole balance of payments and our whole economic situation.

To talk of this Budget as a good one in that context is nonsense. It is a good Budget in one way only, that is in that, thanks be to God, after year upon year of bludgeoning the taxpayer, for the first time Fianna Fáil have seen fit to give certain reliefs but even at that an arbitrary figure was picked for over-estimation. It appeared at the close of the financial year as if we would have a much more substantial surplus than was ultimately revealed. A fortnight before the close of the year it seemed evident that the surplus would be £3.4 million, or something in that region, but two days after the account closed, it was down to £0.8 million. We then take an arbitrary figure of £4 million for over-estimation and clap on 1d on the poor man's pint and 2d on his cigarettes. This gives us a sugar distribution among a wide range of people which sets up a screen to cover the ineffectiveness of the Budget.

I have always said that if taxation has to be raised for progressive, well thought out schemes of development, it is the duty of responsible Deputies to see that the money is voted and it is the responsibility, in a national sense, of every Deputy also to see that such schemes are given the support and impetus they require. I am saying in a deliberate way that many of the problems between our agricultural organisations, much of the dissension, unrest and unease in agriculture, can be dissipated at any time if the agricultural community can be given a sense of security, if the Government can show some real concern by the production of well-conceived, progressive plans for the development of this industry.

We are up against the perennial problem that we have not got yet what we should have got years ago, full replacement stock for the bad cow. I have recollections of Deputy Dillon thundering in this House a truism we have lost sight of, that it takes as much, if not more, to feed a bad cow as a good cow, and it is becoming inevitable that where you have the mixed farmer with a certain number of cows, a certain number of sows and running a small acreage to produce silage and mixed grain for his own use, we must have the ultimate quality in stock for him if his holding is to become economic.

That is what I cavil with in this Budget. That type of thinking and effort are not here. I know the young Parliamentary Secretary sitting opposite me has the same kind of outlook as I have, that he wants this type of small farmer—he represents quite a number, though there are some big farmers in his constituency as well—to get something more than sops, doles and increased mendicity. This type of small farmer wants right thinking, cohesive planning. It should have started years ago.

We are told sometimes that we are on the brink of Europe, that the time is now and there is greater urgency than ever that the Budget should cater for initiation of these plans. This Budget shows some effort, but only in an expediency way, to deal with the problems of the congested areas, of the small farmers in the congested areas. I know that the temporary benefits of the 1d increase in the gallon of milk, the further increased bonus for quality milk and the grants for coolers are of immediate benefit to the people I represent but it is only an expedient, a stopgap effort. It would be far better for the economy and for all of us if there were a planned, progressive effort at real investment in agriculture, a plan that would keep stability in prices and give some kind of hope and earnest belief in our future, particularly in the many parts of Ireland where farms are small and where the question of resettlement in bigger farms is at best a long-term policy.

Mind you, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Taoiseach was in earnest when he referred to the Land Commission and what they do. I have long experience of the Land Commission and I am quite sure that in the next century somebody will be able to point to things they have done, but I know many things they commenced before I came into this House which still are not done by them. To suggest there might be any great speed in the creation of viable holdings in the West by way of resettlement is self-deception of a serious nature.

My cavil with the Budget from the point of view of agriculture is that it has no real norm of hope or no sense of the parental interest which the Government should show. Apart from dealing with the problem which was brought to their notice forcefully by the pickets outside the Dáil and by people sitting on the steps of Government offices, they have not got to grips with the situation with any sense of reality. Fundamentally, the fault is that the Government are not thinking broadly enough in the atmosphere of 1967. Whether the Government know it or not, this is 1967 when we are at a stage, whether we join the Six or some more extended form of a united Europe, when things will become more difficult, more competitive for us.

I have always felt deep-seated sympathy with the workers of this country and I have complete sympathy with the towns' point of view that this Budget is a disaster because of its lack of impetus for the drive to rehouse our people, particularly in the metropolis and in the municipal areas throughout the country. There is nothing in the Budget to give impetus to the housing drive in places like Dublin and Cork where there is a huge backlog of unhoused people. There is nothing in it to indicate that the Government will act, even though we hear speeches from various Ministers condemning the exorbitant cost of building land, condemning rings who are buying the land up and exploiting the people who have to go to builders under the SDA to get housing.

There is nothing in the Budget to impose Government curbs, Government restraint, on this type of gangsterdom, because that is what it is. I shall not enter into the merits or demerits of the various Fianna Fáil associate bodies. Speeches should be followed up by action. If the Minister for Local Government is sincere in his recent utterances, and the Taoiseach is sincere in his recent utterances, I should like to see some curb put on these facets of hardship for the ordinary people. There is no good in looking for restraint in various fields. There is no good in pointing the finger at the worker and telling him he is to work harder, and stop looking for certain types of increases, while there is no curbing of Government expenditure and no curbing of increases in certain spheres of administration.

There is nothing in this Budget to show that the Government are in earnest about tackling the problem which has become a tremendous bugbear in the minds of the people, and is of tremendous concern to Deputies who take each financial year seriously, that is, the fantastic increase in administration costs, and the fantastic extra burden of increases given to people in the public service, or the semi-public service. No one wants to deny that these people may be entitled to them, and that there may be justification in their claims, but there is no indication in this Budget that the Minister is coming to grips with what this annual escalation means for the taxpayer or with adjusting the extraordinary proportion of administration costs against the effective investment element even in our capital programme.

When one sits down and analyses our capital programme, one is appalled at the percentage which is dissipated in administration costs. For that reason I say this is a bad Budget. I am not the type of person who will deny that some people have benefited under this Budget. I am glad they have, particularly in the lower pension groups, and in the social welfare groups, because it is long overdue to them. I am glad to see certain reliefs given under the income tax code. For a long time I have been an earnest advocate of the reliefs given under this heading in relation to the burden that hits the middle-class worker, the white collar worker, and the person who has no protection because of illness in his family. I am glad to see the reliefs given in relation to children. I am glad to see a continuation of the relief in the upward bracket for children going to secondary school.

These are practical but small helps given to a wide section of the community but given by Fianna Fáil in the context of the local elections next June. Apart from seeing their political sagacity, we must remember that this may be the forerunner of another mini-Budget in the fall. This Budget is so conceived and designed that if anything practical went wrong, it could go out of balance and into chaos without too much difficulty. We have known that to happen before under this now allegedly benign and benevolent Government. We know perfectly well that they have a history of two Budgets a year for a number of years. I am hoping that is not going to happen. I am not attributing that motive to the Government but I am saying that this Budget, in its wide distribution of small palliatives, and particularly in its wide diffusion of small palliatives in rural Ireland, must be designed and cleverly designed to give the biggest possible impetus to the local election candidates. It will be very interesting to hear the many exaggerations and distortions which some of the reliefs will get outside the chapel gates between now and 25th June.

Taking the situation by and large, there is a sense of relief in the country that the people are not being bludgeoned down again, as it was suggested at one time they might have to be, by a heavy incidence of increased taxation. Where is the injection of virility and purpose in this Budget? Where is the incentive to the industrial investor and to the expansionist in this Budget? It is not there. This Budget is completely negative in many ways. It is positive in the benefits which some people make capital out of, because after years of training the Irish people in mendicity, Fianna Fáil find it very effective at local elections time to give palliatives to this class of people. I have no hesitation in saying this. In my area people would far sooner see an integrated and co-ordinated plan for making their farms secure and their markets secure than any sops by way of dole or temporary expediency grants to get them over temporary difficulties.

For too long in my view, under all Governments, agriculture has been the plaything of politicians. For too long we have heard lip service in this House about the farmers being the backbone of our economy. It is time for the Government to start thinking on the basis of the real value of agriculture to the nation, and of our debt of gratitude in perpetuity to the people who work the land of Ireland and keep our economy viable. It is time we realised that the more investment we put into the six inches of top soil, and into the quality of our cattle, pigs and sheep, and into the excellence of our vegetable products, the better. The sooner we get down to giving agriculture its fair share of national investment, the sooner we will reach the day when we can have Budgets which will give the people not only reliefs that are long overdue and an adjustment in the burden of taxation, but instruments of practical advance in the nation's economy and an assurance that an Irish Government is a worthy steward of the national finances for the advancement of the people generally.

I would like to start off by congratulating the Minister for Finance on his foresight and sympathetic approach to the many problems which we have today and which are likely to be here for quite a substantial time to come. His action has created a further upward spiral in public confidence in this Government. His recent action, his recent concessions to the weaker sections of the community, have been welcome. It would seem that the only people who disagree with the Budget in any shape or form are the Opposition Parties.

I can well understand why the Opposition Parties disagree with this Budget. The reason they disagree is that they are only anxious to draw in so many red herrings and suggestions to damp down or in some way to take from the assistance and the contributions made by the Minister and the Government. We all hope to see from time to time more reliefs and assistance given to those people. We hope to see them given to a much wider section of the community. In Fianna Fáil we are desirous that this situation will continue until such time as we have brought about a situation whereby no further assistance is desirable or necessary.

We understand that in order to bring about the reliefs which are necessary, there is another side to the problem which is almost forgotten by the Opposition. They conveniently forget the question of providing the necessary finance to give these concessions and reliefs to the weaker sections of the community. While they continue to deplore the lack of assistance or the lack of concessions, at the same time they are not prepared to support the necessary financial provisions in the Budget for giving the concessions given this year. In that way it can be said that the Fine Gael Party on this occasion who voted against Financial Resolution No. 3 gave a clear indication that they were not prepared to support the provision of the necessary finances to enable the various concessions to be given.

The care of the aged has got lip service from many people for a long time. Now we arrive at the situation where something concrete is being done. A clear indication has been given by the Minister and the Government that those reliefs are being given to the weaker sections of the community. During the Budget speech. I watched members of the Opposition Parties, and as the Minister read out the different concessions to be given, they sat further down in their seats. By the time the Minister had concluded his speech, it was difficult to see any heads visible in the Opposition benches.

They are still visible.

They seemed to become more and more disappointed by the reliefs given and seemed to be disappointed that it was not a more difficult Budget.

There was no necessity for any further taxation.

They hoped it would be a very severe Budget with very substantial new taxation.

The Deputy must not have been reading the papers. Deputy Cosgrave said there was no reason why there should be any increase in taxation but he did not say that no reliefs should be given.

Deputy L'Estrange should allow Deputy Dowling to make his speech.

They hoped that very substantial taxation would be inflicted on the people.

The Deputy should read the papers.

They hoped there would be no concessions for various sections of the community.

Is there anything for the Dublin worker?

There is substantial help for him. I will deal with him later. First of all, I want to deal with the old age pensioner. Fine Gael were no friends of the old age pensioners. On this occasion they voted against the Financial Resolution to provide relief for the old age pensioners.

One could see the shadow Minister for Social Welfare as those concessions were announced sink deeper and deeper into his seat until such time as only the top of his head was visible.

He did not have to sink as far as Fianna Fáil.

If the Deputy has anything to say, let him get up and say it. He should not be trying to throw mud by suggestion. If he has anything to say, he should be man enough to stand up and say it. He should give up interrupting and stop bringing this House into disrepute.

The Fianna Fáil Party have brought the country into disrepute. It is all right for some people. If they are well in with the Fianna Fáil Party, they get what they want.

That is very unworthy.

The truth may be hard to swallow.

It is time the Irish people knew the truth about this mudslinging the Deputy carries on.

The truth may be hard to swallow.

Will Deputies cease interrupting and allow Deputy Dowling make his speech?

As the Minister indicated, the widow will benefit by further concessions. Again, there was deep depression in the Fine Gael benches, and indeed also among the Labour Deputies who nevertheless had the courage to support the Financial Resolution to provide this money. The orphan is another person provided for under the concessions given by the Minister. The Government decided that those concessions could be given in this year's Budget. Again, it was the Fine Gael Party, by their failure to support the Financial Resolution necessary to provide the money, who voted against the widow, the orphan and the old age pensioner. We know the reliefs given are limited this year but we hope that in time to come we will give them many more concessions. I am quite sure that as long as the Fianna Fáil Party are in government very many more reliefs will be given to the widow, the orphan and the old age pensioner. The unemployed were not forgotten, either—they received the same increase. Of course, the Fine Gael Party, by going into the division lobby and voting against the Financial Resolution voted against any increase for the unemployed man.

Tell us about the 2d increase on the loaf.

We did not reduce the size of the loaf in order to cod the people as you did when you were in power. You said: "Give them a smaller loaf and they will be fooled." However, the Fine Gael Party voted against the Financial Resolution which would give these concessions to these people.

That is completely wrong.

Will Deputy L'Estrange cease interrupting? If he does not do so, I will have to ask him to leave the House.

I do not wish to continue interrupting but I should like to hear the Deputy telling the truth.

The Deputy should listen and cease interrupting.

As I said, the Fine Gael Party voted against Financial Resolution No. 3 which provides the money to give the concessions to those people. The unemployed man who was to receive a limited concession on this occasion was again stabbed in the back, as was the widow, the orphan and the disabled when the Opposition trooped into the lobbies to vote against that Financial Resolution. But they did not finish at the widow, the orphan, the disabled and the unemployed. There were also the blind.

That is what is wrong in this country.

They are laughing at the blind and laughing at the afflicted. They laughed at them in the division lobbies when they voted against the Resolution to provide money for concessions for the blind. Not alone did they vote against the widow, the orphan, the unemployed and the blind——

Could the Deputy tell us how far the penny will go?

Will Deputy L'Estrange cease interrupting?

The magic one penny.

When assistance was being given, you were not prepared to give one penny. We stated that we were prepared to support the widow, the orphan, the unemployed and the disabled but you voted against the Financial Resolution which was providing the money for this deserving section of the community. As I looked across the floor, I could see them sinking deeper and deeper into their seats, but when free transport for the old age pensioners was mentioned——

It is deeper and deeper the country is going.

At this stage the Opposition were really mad and the Minister applied shock treatment when he stated that there would be free electricity for the old age pensioners.

Did Fianna Fáil not vote against the Labour motion for free transport?

Fine Gael wanted to vote against the widow, the orphan, the unemployed, the blind and the disabled——

——as they voted against the provisions for free transport and free electricity for the old age pensioners.

It is a marvellous penny.

The Deputy is wasting his time; he will not knock Deputy Dowling off his tracks.

We are trying to help him.

We are helping him.

The increase in the allowance for children is another indication of how we are trying to help those sections of the community who are most deserving of relief of one kind or another. We must be prepared to face up to our responsibilities if we want to see these things done. The one contribution you could have made was to support the Financial Resolution giving those things. It would seem from the Fine Gael attitude that they might have been prepared to give the old age pensioners 1/- and the widows and orphans 1/- but they were not prepared to support the concession in full. They believe that we are giving the widow, the orphan, the old age pensioner and the blind too much money but we will give these increases despite their opposition and we will also give the increase in the allowance for children. Income tax relief for medical expenses was another concession which got lip service.

How long has Deputy Byrne been looking for it?

You voted against it in last year's Budget.

The Fine Gael Party trooped into the lobby——

That is Deputy Byrne's brainchild.

——and voted against the Financial Resolution giving money to increase these allowances. The concession in relation to dependent relatives and the concessions to agriculture and the small farmers are others which they voted against.

Now we have it.

It is a pity the shadow Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries is not here as I would have something to say to him. Deputy L'Estrange is the shadow's shadow and when he is in difficulty at Question Time, the shadow's shadow comes to his rescue and provides the loophole whereby he can get away on the public.

It is deplorable to think that we have in this House a group of men who are prepared to stab all these people in the back. They are not prepared by their action to give their full support to concessions proposed in the Budget for the old age pensioner, the widow, the orphan the disabled and free transport and electricity. Neither are they prepared to give concessions to the small farmer nor the increased personal allowance. The Labour Party at least supported what they were called on to support. They believed that the money was required and even if it were not enough they were prepared to lend their support to the necessary taxation which would be taken off this very deserving section of the community whom the Minister for Finance saw fit to assist in the Budget. The Minister has not only been thanked here but people outside, not members of our Party, have, since the date of the announcement, conveyed in one form or another their appreciation of the Minister and the Government in meeting those people who are deserving of consideration. Other members of the Fine Gael and Labour Parties indicated that this was an election Budget——

Hear, hear.

——a Budget that was designed to facilitate Fianna Fáil candidates in the elections——

Amen to that.

Like the first one last year.

After the first one last year, we won two. If there had been three, we would have won them. There was one for every Budget last year.

They got in by less than 700 in two of their best constituencies in Ireland.

You will not force the Government to have a second Budget and neither will you force an increase in the price of butter.

What about the price of bread at present?

The reason for that is that the price of wheat has gone up.

You reduced the acreage of wheat and you did not give back that reduction. Wheat was the same price 12 years ago and the loaf was 4d less. Can you explain that?

Will Deputy L'Estrange cease interrupting?

It was necessary to bring in a supplementary Budget last year to increase farm incomes and again we saw the lobbies deserted. It was necessary and desirable to carry out this particular exercise. The people who cry about the small farmers now and the concession given them voted against these concessions by virtue of the fact that they did not lend themselves to the necessary means of procuring the money required for the provision of aids to small farmers and to the farming community as a whole.

We heard a lot of talk about conscience money the other night from a Fine Gael Deputy, from a man without a conscience; it is a pity he is not here now because I wanted to deal with him in some detail. I should like to say to the Fine Gael representatives in the country: Do not be misled by the Dublin Deputies——

On either side.

The Dublin Deputies of the Fine Gael Party.

I thought it was irrespective of Party.

Deputy Ryan, in volume 227, column 1567 of the Dáil Debates, talked about the case

of a widow with three children, living in a very comfortable Dublin suburb, but in a derelict cottage, the roof sagging in the middle and covered with moss, a building so decrepit that, when she applied for a house improvement grant, she was denied the grant on the ground that the house was not worth saving.

If Deputy Ryan would supply me with information, I will see that that woman is housed. If he has not been able to get her housed, then, if the Deputies opposite will ask him to send me the details, I will see that the woman gets recognition.

Deputy Ryan also mentioned the case, again in volume 227, column 1568 of the Dáil Debates of

...another family living in a basement seven feet below street level... This unfortunate family—husband, wife and three children, are condemned to live in the basement of a house so damp that a fungus grows on the floor as quickly as the housewife removes it.

I can have this woman fixed up overnight.

I shall not comment on that last remark.

That is good.

A mind like a sewer. I am willing to assist Deputy Ryan to have this woman housed. If the position is as stated, there is no reason for not having such people housed by Dublin Corporation, because people living in superior conditions are being housed at the moment.

Are there not 10,000 people looking for houses in Dublin who cannot get them?

The Fine Gael spokesman on housing is Deputy Ryan. I have seen Deputy Ryan advise Deputy Cosgrave in relation to the Myles Wright Report before Deputy Cosgrave got up to ask a supplementary question. Deputy Ryan is the expert on Dublin housing and on Dublin problems. May I tell you about Deputy Ryan and about the Fine Gael Party in general?

Is it in order for the Deputy to attack another Deputy?

The Deputy is in order in criticising what Deputy Ryan or any other Deputy said.

Deputy Ryan spoke about the terrible situation of Dublin housing. Quite recently Dublin Corporation discussed this matter in a great deal of detail. We spent five hours examining the estimates of Dublin Corporation Housing Committee, the future of the housing situation and the housing programme in Dublin. But Deputy Ryan and no other member of the Fine Gael Party thought it worth his while to come along to that meeting of the Housing Committee of Dublin Corporation—the largest local authority in the country—to discuss the housing problem, or the future development of housing in Dublin. That is the interest the Fine Gael Party have in housing the citizens of this city: not one member of the Fine Gael Party came to that meeting to discuss the future and the progress of Dublin Corporation in relation to the housing problem.

Those attending are making a very bad job of it, if they are all Fianna Fáil representatives !

Not one member of the Fine Gael Party—and I give Deputy Luke Belton credit for attending most meetings of the committees in relation to other problems—on this important occasion thought it worth his while.

I had a good reason for being absent.

It shows quite clearly that they have no interest whatsoever in the housing situation in Dublin, that it is lip service they give to this particular problem.

Then we had a meeting of a committee of the whole house to discuss this great problem of the housing. Again, what happened? Was Deputy Ryan there? No, Deputy Ryan was not there. As a matter of fact, I am quite sure Deputy Ryan will say: "I am not a member of the Housing Committee, so I did not attend the housing estimates meeting," but he did not attend the other meetings and only two other members of the Fine Gael Party thought it worth their while to discuss any particular aspect of Dublin local authority problems, one of whom is a doubtful member of Fine Gael, a man who has been in and out for some time, and it is doubtful if he will contest the next election as a Fine Gael candidate. He was one of the Fine Gael Party present; there was also a lady member of Dublin Corporation who attended. Only two out of ten attended any estimates meeting of any of the committees of Dublin Corporation, so as far as local authority problems are concerned. Let no member of the Fine Gael Party in this House indicate that Fine Gael have an interest in them; they have no interest whatsoever.

Will the Deputy find out what happened in Westmeath or in any other county?

Is it not a sad state of affairs when Deputy Ryan has to put down questions to find out what is happening in Dublin Corporation, when he is a member of that authority? When Fine Gael Deputies want to find out what is happening in the local authorities of which they are members, they have to put down questions in Dáil Éireann and try to extract from the Minister for Local Government how the problems are being handled in their areas because they seldom attend meetings. As I said at the last meeting of Dublin Corporation——

Are we entitled to talk about the activities of our local authorities?

Yes, Deputy Dowling is not making any personal attack on Deputy Ryan; he is criticising him for his policy, or lack of policy.

Can he do that on the Budget?

Other Deputies have been allowed to discuss housing; I cannot see that I can rule Deputy Dowling out of order when he does.

Surely we are not allowed to discuss one local authority? If that is the case, I shall get down to Gorey Town Commissioners when I speak.

Deputy Dunne spoke at length about the terrible situation in relation to housing in Dublin. Of course, most Deputies are out of touch with this expanding city, with the increase in population which will inevitably take place in a living city. We are conscious of that; we know that the fluctuation in figures for housing, employment and industry should be related to a developing city and a developing population.

We know that at a recent meeting of Dublin Corporation, a committee of the whole house, which no Fine Gael member attended, discussed the provision of sites for local authorities and the provision of buildings in Dublin city. At this meeting the City Manager outlined in great detail his desire to meet the problem existing in relation to housing, so that Dublin Corporation would make available, in addition to the ordinary building programme, sites for sale in the city area, and make further land available over a period of five years, to ensure continuity of the building programme, outside the scope of the local authority, and to ensure for the next five years that there would be in Dublin a future for building workers. This meeting discussed in some detail the various schemes the manager had in mind in relation to the provision of sites and services and to the co-ordination of effort necessary between the three local authorities in Dublin. I am happy to say that the manager secured the agreement of the people who had seen fit to attend, or who had the interest of the future needs of housing in our city at heart which he desired in his wish to discuss with other local authorities the necessary means for co-ordination of effort, so long lacking in our city.

The Fine Gael members who spoke at great length about the terrible situation existing in Dublin were not present to back up the criticism they so freely gave in this House. The building workers in this city have no need to worry over the next five years if the necessary support is forthcoming from the various Parties for the City Manager. The aim is to bring about a situation in which sites will be made available in a short space of time and at a reasonable price, that the local authority would force down the price of sites, which at present are abnormally high—some of them, no doubt, are in the hands of racketeers—and bring about a realistic situation so far as future building in this city is concerned.

It was stated that we are not catering for the needs of the people and that the building programme was at its lowest ebb. Recently the City Manager indicated that, in addition to the corporation's programme, 1,450 sites would be available for private development. These sites were in the possession of the corporation and would be made available to organisations and individuals, people on the approved waiting list and corporation tenants for the purpose of building their own homes. In addition, we have in progress 2,589 dwellings in Ballymun and a further 636 were under construction at the end of March. In Coolock-Kilmore, we have the erection of 222 houses and tenders worth £500,000 were accepted at the last housing committee meeting.

Tenders have been sought for the erection of 288 tenant purchase type houses. Tenders have been invited for the erection of 116 at Coolock-Kilmore. Site development work is in progress at Coolock-Kilmore on one area with 140 sites, another area with 150 sites and another area with 133 sites. At last Friday's meeting of the housing committee, approval was obtained from the Department of Local Government for lay-out plans for Poplar RowSpringarden Street; Lower Dominick Street, section two; and St. Vincent Street South-Clanbrassil Street. The people who attend the meetings of the corporation are aware of our longterm housing programme, but some members of the corporation have to put down questions in Dáil Éireann to find out what is happening in City Hall. Reading their comments makes one feel very depressed. I suppose these people, who did not attend any of the estimates meetings or the committee meetings, will have the audacity to face the public and ask for re-election to Dublin Corporation. I only hope they contest the election in my area.

I wish you would contest it in mine.

You know the area I am in. Anyone who wants to come in there is welcome.

You told us so much, you can tell us now who the candidates are.

I am one. If Deputy Cluskey wants to come in, he is quite welcome.

Come on over to us.

Why did you leave Walkinstown?

Now that we have shown the building workers of this city the building programme of the corporation for the next five years, I hope some of you fellows over there will drop into a meeting of the corporation and that we can have the advice you give so freely here in a place where it would be more fitting. Deputy Dillon mentioned the abundance of houses available when you left office. This was supported by many speakers over there. It was only when we came into office that no houses were available.

Worse than that. You have no money to build them.

I have a very interesting piece of information here. It is contained at column 2052, volume 160, of the Official Report of the 6th December, 1956. This is the year you ran away and deserted the nation.

Read what the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries said in the debates of that year.

Deputy Dowling should be allowed to make his own speech. Deputy Harte will please cease interrupting.

I am only remarking that he should look at what the present Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries had to say then.

Deputy Harte will have to cease interrupting. He is continually interrupting. He has no licence to do so.

Deputy Dillon said that 1,500 houses were available then. But listen to what Deputy Larkin stated on the 6th December, 1956.

The election was in 1957 but you did not come back. Deputy Larkin said:

I was pleased to hear Deputy Smith make that statement—I hope the Minister will repeat it—because, while people may talk about targets being achieved and tapering off, the position in Dublin is that if there is no TB in the family or the family does not come into a slum clearance scheme, then there must be six persons living in one room in order to qualify on the priority list.

According to Deputy Dillon, there were 1,500 houses available.

That is right.

Where were they? This was a developing city with a developing population.

Unless the house is falling down on you now, you will not get a new one.

Will Deputy Cluskey please stop interrupting?

No Fianna Fáil backbencher has the right to talk about housing.

(Interruptions.)

At column 2053 of the same volume, Deputy Larkin goes on:

The first step required the cutting out of the new contract for the Finglas area. That has been approved by the Minister, but now we will have to tell the contractor: "Sorry, we cannot continue with this contract now." That involved a reduction of £61,000 in the estimate. The next item was in reference to the direct housing scheme for the Finglas area. That scheme was not to be proceeded with either. It was also suggested that there should be a gradual diminution in employment on direct labour housing schemes and a gradual laying off of the workers concerned.

Fianna Fáil built one house in Galway last year.

It goes on:

The next suggestion was that the corporation would delay the giving out of other schemes or proceeding with them, which would result in a cut in the estimate of £69,000. Finally, proposed development works this year and next year would have to be reduced by approximately £158,000.

That was the last occasion you had an opportunity of speaking to the people as a Government.

That was the occasion when there were more houses than tenants to go into them.

They were going out quicker than they could be put back in.

Read for us what the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, Deputy Blaney, had to say on agriculture in that debate.

Progress reported; Committee to sit again.
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