I am perfectly clear and I am very grateful to the Minister for agreeing these things interact. That is all I am saying. If there is an increase in the price level, if it affects those items within the cost of living index group, then it must affect the cost of living. Our concern must in the main be directed towards those people whose incomes are largely of social welfare origin or whose incomes, if they are working, are low enough, God knows, in these days.
While the Government might have considered some alternatives earlier than in fact it did, once it had not done that, and once the £ had been devalued, the Government had no option except to devalue. Any Department of State, and the Department of Finance in particular, must keep its ear to the ground and must have known about these things long in advance. The people with the money knew it. They were shifting it long in advance. If there was an alternative course, or even part of a course open to them they should have taken it, if it was going to be of advantage and I think the Minister is now bound to tell the House and the country what the alternative courses were, how they were considered, if suitable, and why they were not adopted, instead of taking the straight and easy line, when the time came. When the £ was devalued, there was nothing you could do about it. You just had to get up and do it, and no more about it.
I want to ask the Minister to answer these questions. Why was devaluation —that is, by the same amount as the devaluation in Britain — the best course? I want to know if the Government prepared for devaluation by studying alternatives and, if so, what these alternatives were and, if they did not, why they failed to do so. We want to know too, what advice they got and, if that advice contained reasons for following the British course of devaluation, what these reasons are. To say that we had to do it because of parity with sterling does not appear to me to be a valid reason, that is, if you have neglected to do anything about parity up to the time of emergency. Will our hands be tied in future in this country and bind us to any kind of devaluation that takes place?
A further question poses itself at this time, a question that arises from the relative lowness of the amount by which sterling was devalued. Is this, at this time, merely a partial devaluation as a test to see if they can get by on this much now and, if not, at some future time, not too far away, will there be a further devaluation? If that is true, are the Government gearing themselves to meet such a situation?
As I have said, reference has been made to the fact that we are paying our way here. Does anybody ever think at all about what has been borrowed and what must be paid back? As I understand borrowing, it is something that you get for some time at a cost which you must pay back: you must pay the service charge as well as the capital. I think that is the experience of everybody.
Since 30th September, 1957, that is, a little over ten years ago, a Government formed by the Fianna Fáil Party have borrowed £489 million. They got £54¼ million from turnover tax; they got £5¾ million from wholesale tax; they got £24 million from prize bonds. Yet, in those ten years, the national debt has more than doubled from £342 million to £771 million.
Is that a situation within which we can reasonably be described as "paying our way"? I do not think so. Perhaps there will be a good explanation for it. I should like to hear it because, when you bring this down to a question of population unit, these figures represent a situation the same as if every man, woman and child in the State had borrowed £560 each in the past ten years. Imagine the effect within a family if, say, a husband and wife and their six or seven children in ten years, borrowed £560 each.
Since 1957, as well, the local authorities have borrowed a total of £128 million. Still, in spite of obtaining all the kinds of things which I find it diffiserious cut-down in this country in the provision of money for employment in rural areas. The amount of money available for road works is seriously cut this year as well as a reduction for the smaller road works from the Special Employment Schemes Office. These are the kinds of things which I find it difficult to reconcile and, as Deputy Esmonde said, the First Programme for Economic Expansion is now not very much read as a fairy tale. The Second Programme still attracts the odd one who must be wondering how it could possibly have gone wrong, having been introduced with such a fanfare of trumpets and its accuracy vouched for. The prosperity which was to come from the great principles it contained would be unbounded. Where is that prosperity? That Second Programme is in the fairy tale department, too.
We now have a third Programme which, if I understand it correctly, is based upon the assumption that we are going into Europe by 1970. It seems to be the underlying principle upon which this Government works out everything in recent times that 1970 is the great year, the year of opportunity, the year when we are to enter Europe. But, surely to goodness, in view of the situation of the past few days, we must at last realise the futility of such thinking. I am not talking about the press interview of General de Gaulle alone who made it very clear that 1970 is certainly not the year of vision for the British or for ourselves. I am thinking of a statement made a short time before that by his Foreign Minister, Monsieur Couve de Murville, who said that, even if General de Gaulle went, French foreign policy would remain the same.
How, then, can we continue to live in this world of make-believe, basing our assumptions for the future on entry into Europe by 1970? This is 1967. We are almost into 1968. The years pass all too quickly, in every sphere of activity. How long can we continue to lead the people into the very false belief that whatever is wrong now will be righted by our entry into Europe by 1970? It must be perfectly obvious to even the least discerning that we are not getting into Europe by 1970 and that, even if General de Gaulle goes, French foreign policy will still present itself as an obstacle to British entry. As of this very moment, we have done nothing and are doing nothing about associate membership because, as the Taoiseach blandly says — and I think rightly says because he cannot say anything else— our application for full membership is still there and we are awaiting a meeting of the Foreign Ministers concerned in December.
If you have an excuse, use it. This was not an occasion for the Taoiseach to bare his breast or for the headline in the newspaper, when the Taoiseach was going to Paris, "Lynch Smooths the Way for Entry into EEC". Did anybody ever hear such balderdash? How long the people will be prepared to put up with such treatment is another question.
Deputy de Valera spoke about the Japanese, the Germans and the French. I think he was addressing himself to the Labour Party and I think he was placing the accent on work. His point was, I think, that work and co-operation are the solution but not anything disruptive such as strikes, and so on, for which he blamed the final failure of the £ in Great Britain. May-be he was right. He said that where there is a will there is a way.
Of course, all of these sayings still have some of the validity they had when they were originally thought out, but leadership, to my mind, is the thing that counts. Leadership is the thing that will provide, in the end, the answer to all our problems, social, political and otherwise. However, this leadership must be inspiring and it must be honest. We hear a lot about ability. Somebody, somewhere, defined ability as the capacity to appear solemn. If there is any one person in this Government who possesses that ability in full it is the Minister for Finance because, mark you, to appear solemn in the face of the difficulties which he has to face, and surmount if at all possible, demands rare ability.
If I might return to the cost of living for a moment, I should like to say that it is going to go up and the Government should take some steps to offset it, particularly in cases where it might result in hardship. Already we have seen where transport and passenger costs have risen considerably. That is only a start. Something should be done straight away for social welfare recipients. In this regard I would be inclined to confine it to old age pensioners, particularly those living alone, if it makes any impact on them. I would not be so concerned about social welfare recipients who have land and are able to draw upon their own raw materials to assist them, but certainly I would do something in the towns and cities for these people. I would also try to offset any increase in housing costs by increasing the grant. Indeed, there is something to be said for what Deputy Belton has said, that this grant should not be readily available to people in a very high income group. After all, the grant does not help anybody very much when it is taken into the overall costs of a house. The average purchaser of a house is not highly skilled in costing and I am inclined to think that the £275, or certainly most of it, goes into the pocket of the builder straight away. The same might be said about petrol or oil and something should be done to assist people who will be affected.
I am sure when the Minister is replying he will deal with this question of price levels and the cost of living. Everybody accepts the fact that this is going to give rise to an increase in the cost of living. If it is kept at the two per cent, at which the Minister says the price level will be kept, it would not be too bad, but having regard to past experiences, I am inclined to think it will be higher. These things always have a tendency to be higher than anticipated, often for reasons outside the control of the people who make the mathematical calculations. Nevertheless, if it is as low as that I would think, having regard to our proximity to England, and enjoying and suffering with them parity with sterling, we must take our rap side by side with the advantages we enjoy as a result of our very large trade with the United Kingdom.
To recapitulate, I want to say that the Minister should look realistically at the west of Ireland. If he looks in his own office, or in any of the offices for which he is responsible, he will find hundreds, if not thousands, of letters from Deputies who went long before me recommending that certain things should be done in certain places. They were examined by the officials then charged to examine them and the Minister should stop this nonsense in 1967 of having surveys which are only costing more money when everybody knows where the thing should be done, how it should be done and what it will cost. Indeed, if it had been done long ago, it might have helped to keep people at home and not have allowed the West to go. What I am afraid of now is that after so long a period of promise, promise which has not been matched even to the smallest degree by performance, the people will refuse to believe—"wolf" has been cried so often. I am not complaining about this, but I come from these parts and I cannot help having a certain amount of feeling in the matter, feeling of such an emotional content that from time to time it may cloud the real reasons. Nevertheless, when I go down there and spend time in the various parts of my constituency, all of which are known to me, and when I see, even as late as the weekend before last, two more houses on a main road closed and barred, I am disturbed.
These were houses in which there were young families. If a bachelor or a spinster is involved and if the house goes into disrepair eventually and then the bachelor or the spinster dies and the house is closed down, that is a different matter. That is something probably for which the economics of the day may or may not have been responsible. It might be that after very careful study it was the choice of the person concerned not to marry and to have a family. But we see young men with wives and children, some of them not even of schoolgoing age, packing up, in spite of the fact that in his last Budget the Minister extended the employment period orders to all the year round, which I do not think is the solution.
That is a statement that could cost me, and probably will cost me, an awful lot of votes down there because it will be represented that I am against this kind of thing. I am not against people receiving social welfare benefits if they deserve them. I do think the real solution for the west of Ireland begins with the decision of some Government to turn all this money into productive effort. I cannot for the life of me see the economics of paying £4, £5 or sometimes even £6 or £7 a week to an ablebodied man and not ask him to do anything for it. Surely there should be attached to this money a condition that will make a man drain his land, make a man clear his field of rushes, see to it that he keeps an extra cow, see to it, in a creamery area, that he supplies milk to the creamery? This is probably what Deputy de Valera was talking about but did not spell it out, that productive work is the answer to the problem of the west of Ireland.
Whether civil servants going to Castlebar are going to give that wonderful inspiration of productive work to the rest of the country, I do not know: they may. I do not know the Minister for Finance that well; all we can do is study him, study his utterances, see what he does and see how he works. However, I am inclined to think he is realistic in his approach, and that he would agree that the continuation of employment period orders, the increase in the amount of dole money being given out in that way for nothing, is not the way to revitalise the west of Ireland.
I am prepared to make that statement, and have made it, irrespective of whether it will cost me a seat or not in this House. I want to go farther and say that the Government who would bring about that situation wherein this money would be turned to productive effort, even if they were put out of office the next time because the succeeding Government would not change it, would be the first Government that would be doing something for the west of Ireland.
