That contribution was certainly an improvement on the extraordinary type of hysteria shown by Deputy O'Higgins and by Deputy Ryan whose offensive references to the electorate who elected him and to the rest of us, quite astonished me. To blame the Labour Party because we did not do on this occasion what we did on two other occasions, to our own great detriment, is an oversimplification of the whole process of forming governments. It is important that we should know why we had the result which we did have and it is probably important to Fine Gael to know why they did as they did but it is much more important in regard to the question of the Cabinet that the Taoiseach should try to assess in realistic terms the reasons for his own success, the success of his Party and of their election. I am quite sure they would surprise him very much.
It is not too serious if those of us in Opposition come to the wrong conclusions or make the wrong assessments but it is terribly important if the Taoiseach does the same thing. We have tended to oversimplify the reasons for successes and for failures. During my years in politics I have always been fascinated to see how prepared we are and how ready we are to come in here and lecture the people, farmers, industrialists, doctors, bankers, university people and the rest on the essence of the correct solution to their particular problems at any time and to say that we know in detail how it is possible for them to run their affairs well, yet we ourselves know so little about the whole process of motivation in politics, the process of forming public opinion, the reason why a decision is made by the public and subsequently changed. One tends to project one's own particular prejudices into the situation and then arrive at a solution which happens to satisfy us.
There is no single reason why Fianna Fáil won and we did not. There are obviously such factors as the resources of the organisation known as Taca and the very considerable influence of the smear campaign, which is a very rare thing, and there is the fact that Fianna Fáil have a magnificent political machine which is kept in action from one election to another; there is, too, the factor of patronage to which Deputy Conor Cruise-O'Brien referred. It is there. Legitimate, illegitimate, honest, dishonest, it is there and it is a very important factor in the determination of the kind of government or the attitude of people at the time of electing a new government. There are also the very conscious decisions made by the Government to pack the various means of communication whether it is the control of university bodies, or other organisations, television or radio, and there is, too, the necessity for a very powerful press, which Fianna Fáil certainly have. There are many factors involved in this process of the return to power or the loss of power that it is oversimplification to blame any single one of us.
I wish that we could assess in very much more scientific terms this business of determining attitudes on the part of the public. We as working politicians fail very much in not having a much better understanding of the working of Parliamentary democracy. We also have the position where many of us in the Labour movement are frequently blamed for being naïve or ingenuous when we go looking for power. One has this dilemma of looking for power or looking for power simply in order to change society. That is the very important difference between our approach and that of other parties in the recent election.
It appears to be legitimate in a political democracy to do that if you want to, but where one simply looks for power it is a simple matter and you can pull out all the stops in relation to promises, undertakings, guarantees, the revolution, and the fight for freedom and all are used and interused in order to achieve a particular objective. If one is anxious to change society, then it is not so simple because to change the attitude of mind of the mass of people in any community is obviously very formidable indeed. Any person who tries to strap his watch on the right wrist instead of on the left, or tries to take one road into town instead of another knows how difficult it is to change oneself. To change a society is much more formidable. If you could do it in a dictatorship or in a vacuum it obviously would be much easier than to do it with an articulate, live and very powerful opposition. We tried to do something in that situation and, of course, found that we met the natural resistance of the community to change and that was reinforced by the misrepresentations of our policies on various occasions— misunderstanding, misrepresentations, whatever you like. The general effect was the result as we see it now. I am only concerned with this from the point of view of the Taoiseach and his choice of Ministers because he may also have his pet theories. I regret to say that he appears to feel that there is no need for serious change in regard to the individual personnel of a number of Ministeries. That is a very serious failure on his part. This failure of correct assessment of the win by the Fianna Fáil Party will turn out to be a very serious failure on his part. Many reasons have been given. Some of them are true to some extent but I think that he himself has a very serious responsibility indeed to recall that most of the Ministers to whom he is entrusting new Ministries or reinstating in their old Ministries are Ministers who failed in a very signal way in their administration of their various Government Departments.
It seems that memories fail very quickly, very easily, but is it impossible for people to put themselves back into the feeling of Ireland at the time, say, of the maintenance strike when, really, we were on the edge of a general strike, a general breakdown of the whole economy here? I would remind the proposed Minister for Finance, Deputy Haughey, of his own attitude at that time. Deputy Haughey I would criticise on grounds different from those on which he has been criticised up to the present time. I concur with those who say that he is an extremely able man, extremely articulate and well able to look after himself in any situation, but I think we have to concern ourselves with the attitudes he has in relation to policy decisions which he has taken over the years in the Department of Finance and also the collective decisions taken by the key Ministries, Agriculture and Industry and Commerce in particular. It is the failure of those three key Ministries which the Taoiseach, in my view, ought to carefully examine.
On this question of taking power to change society one has to examine whether you are satisfied with the society in which you find yourself at the present time. If you are reasonably satisfied, then I think you have a perfect right to continue in the way you have continued in the past. If you think it is permissible to have 60,000 or 70,000 unemployed, if you think it is permissible to have 20,000 emigrants, if you think it is permissible to have substandard social services, health services, youngsters not being able to get into a university or higher education, for whatever reason, people who have to live in dreadful home conditions, if you accept all that as permissible, then there is no reason in the world why you should go to all the great trouble and all the great mental torment that is involved in trying to go out and tell people that what they accept, what they believe in, what they hold to be sacrosanct and untouchable is something which must be changed if they wish to change society. That seems to me at any rate to be the basic conflict between those of us in the Labour movement and those in the two other great parties.
The Minister for Finance is, of course, the key Minister and, therefore, Deputy Haughey's appointment is the most important appointment of all. We believe that all the Deputies here would like to see precisely the same thing as we would like. We do not believe that we have a monopoly of social conscience in the Labour movement. We believe that we would all like to have youngsters going to universities because they belong there intellectually or that the health services should be the same standard for everyone and that there would be no unemployment. But it is not good enough to want these things. Up to the present both of the major parties have wanted these things but have not achieved them and they must face that fact: they have not achieved them. That is not a hostile statement by me as someone opposed to the parties. I am not opposed to the parties but opposed to their policies, policies which have failed and which have demonstrably failed. I do not think you can seriously deny that.
Therefore, it comes to the basic question and the question Deputy Haughey must face—the creation of wealth, the method for the creation of wealth and the distribution of wealth. That, to me, must be the key debate in the next five or ten years in Leinster House—the creation of wealth and the method of distribution of wealth, industrial policy in relation to Industry and Commerce and Agriculture and then the fiscal policy in relation to the Department of Finance.
Surely it must be quite clear after half a century that, even if we did accept these proposals which I have put forward from time to time as obvious ones in regard to fiscal policy, things like excess profits tax, capital levy, capital gains tax, corporation profits tax, serious death duties and things like that, it is quite possible that you still would not be able to provide the wealth you require in order to create the sort of society you want to create. It is possible that there is not the wealth there. It would negative my case against private enterprise capital if it were not there. Private enterprise capital is simply concerned to make a lot of money for a few people and it does that extremely well. It is not concerned to make money for the child in Cahirciveen, Skibbereen or Donegal who wants to go to a university or who needs a health service. It is a question of whether you are seriously concerned about the mass of the people or whether you are concerned for the protection of the interests of a minority of people in that community by a private enterprise capital society.
We were particularly anathematised for our defence of the idea of nationalisation of public ownership. I believe that the Taoiseach must ask his Ministers to inquire into this with less heat and less prejudice than they have done in the past. One of the most astonishing things, which surprised me during the election, is that if one considers that there is an emergency within our community, as I think there is an emergency with unemployment, education, health, housing, all these problems to be dealt with, and they have not been dealt with in the last 12 years, then, surely, you must consider the two priorities, the interests of the majority of the people on the one hand and the interests of the wealthy minority on the other hand. On which side do we belong? We should belong on the side of the mass interests of the people rather than on the side of the minority interests of the wealthy few. I would say that in Fianna Fáil's early days, and this is why they held support for so long, they were a radical, liberal party and won mass trade union support because of the things they did at that time. There was an attempt to distribute income by way of social services in an equitable way. Long since they have left that role. At one time they did win because they had that interest at the time. It seems to me now we are facing precisely the same dilemma again— the priority of interests, the priority of rights, the right of private property against the rights of the sick, the aged, the disabled, the homeless, the illiterate child, the emigrant, the unemployed. These are the equations the new Ministers must consider and come to some conclusion on how they are to relate them to the needs of the community here in our society.
Take the question of public ownership. I have considerable admiration for certain aspects of the work of Deputy Seán Lemass when he was a Minister here. When he was faced with an emergency he definitely turned to this smear word "nationalisation," to public ownership, to solve his problem during the emergency years during which he nationalised everything. I am astonished that the Fianna Fáil Party should turn to the Labour movement and attempt to traduce us because we talked about it because there is more nationalisation, more public ownership, to the credit of the Fianna Fáil Party than there is to any other party in Ireland. At the same time, Fianna Fáil used a misrepresentation of this magnificent idea of public ownership in order to brand us as Communists when Fianna Fáil knew quite well that we were not Communists.
In regard to this whole concept of public ownership, it seems to me remarkable that the Fianna Fáil Party—Deputy Colley, in particular, seems to want to take on the Republican robe, and so on—should be so happy that our industry is now controlled from Scandinavian countries, Japan—Weston and the distributors there—Germany, Holland, France— Potez—and so on, and the chains of national banks — American and British. How, then, can you condemn—these smear tactics—as alien the idea of socialism? Who owns Ireland today— the Germans, Japanese, British, Americans, Scandinavians, French——
