Good. I should like, also, to join Deputy Desmond in welcoming the transfer of CERT to the Minister's field of responsibility and to say on my account what good work this organisation does and how worthy it is of the support and the now extensive financial support which the Minister's Department is giving it. If other of our industries and trades had training organisations doing the kind of work that CERT does and as well as CERT does it, the whole industrial sector would be performing a good deal better than it is able to do at the moment in the absence of training facilities. The idea of the industry organising its own facilities with State assistance in this way is one which is to be particularly commended.
That industry, the hotel and catering industry, has done a good deal of work, incidentally, in a field where the Minister is having, I think, some trouble. While their work is, I am sure, necessarily at a relatively amateurish level compared with the kind of professional work in manpower forecasting which we can expect from the Minister's Department when it eventually gets to grips with that problem, the fact that they have carried out surveys or joined in carrying out surveys in the hotel and catering industry and have tried to use these surveys, even if necessarily at this point of development in a slightly amateurish way, as the basis for forecasting future needs in this sphere, is encouraging. It is something industry should be trying to do in its own way pending the development of a full-scale manpower forecasting service. I shall come back to this again.
Deputy Desmond also suggested that the Irish National Productivity Committee should be transferred to the Minister's Department. I had not thought of this until Deputy Desmond mentioned it but, thinking it over now, it seems to me it might be a good idea. The Minister will be aware that the Irish National Productivity Committee has had a somewhat chequered history. It is now ten years in existence, but it has never fully settled down and become accepted by the other organisations working in related fields. Indeed, continuing doubts exist on both sides of industry as to the functions it is performing and as to whether the money spent on it might not be better deployed by a reorganisation of its activities or by using it, in some instances, in other areas. There is something to be said for bringing the committee's work within the scope of the Minister's responsibility because the Minister could then examine the work of the committee; the work of the committee has not come under sufficient scrutiny by the Department which is at present responsible for it and, because much of its work is in this particular field covered by the Department of Labour—most of its work, one way or the other—it might be possible for the Minister to integrate it and its activities more closely into the general life of Irish industry. There may be difficulties about that It may be that its functions are more related to industrial output and labour problems. This can be argued. There is, of course, a difficulty about the borderline between the Minister's Department and other Departments, and particularly the Department of Industry and Commerce, but Deputy Desmond's suggestion is worthy of consideration.
The Minister spoke about the manpower services. What he said was rather disappointing because here, as in so many other aspects of our national life, the slowness of the pace of action by the Government is disastrous. Six years have elapsed since the question of a manpower policy was first raised. I shall not detain the House with a full account of the tortuous history of that proposal. I detained the other House on that subject several years ago and it is now past history, but I shall refer briefly to it to press the Minister for urgent action in this sphere. After the seminar we had the statement of the NIEC in April, 1964; then we had the report of 1964; then the matter was referred to an interdepartmental committee, whose report was described by the Minister's predecessor, Deputy S. Flanagan, when he was Parliamentary Secretary, as stupid and illogically argued; rather, he thought that was how I was describing it and he said that, if it was, he agreed with me, which is the same thing as saying it himself. The report was negative and, though initially accepted by the Government, it was subsequently rejected after the Seanad debate on manpower policy. We then had the NIEC report condemning it. That was, perhaps, the main contributory factor in having the interdepartmental report considered—the Seanad debate in 1966 and, finally, the decision in July, 1966, after two and a quarter years from the time when the proposal was first made to establish the Department of Labour and the announcement to set up a manpower service.
July, 1966, on my reckoning, is 3? years ago and we were told then that one of the first things would be the setting up of a manpower service once the decision was taken to overturn the proposal that the placement service should remain in the Department of Social Welfare. Now, 3? years later, the Minister tells us that he has a head for the manpower service and this head is now preparing to recruit personnel and is looking for premises around the country. This simply is not good enough, I think. I have a great respect for the Minister's Department. It is one of the best Departments of State. It benefits from being a new Department without any of the traditions which, in some cases, tie down some of the other Departments. It is open-minded and has been in many ways energetic.
What is disappointing is that, when we get a Government Department which is, by any standard, above average in its performance, it moves at a pace which involves taking 3? years to appoint a head of a manpower service, a head who is now preparing to recruit personnel and looking for premises. It is not possible to justify that slow pace of activity in any Department. I think the House will have no difficulty in imagining the pace in other Departments when this is the speed at which the Department of Labour works. But I am glad something has happened. I am glad that someone has been appointed and I am glad that he is looking for personnel and premises around the country. The effort is belated and I urge the Minister to speed up this process. There can be no justification for this slow pace of activity.
Can the Minister imagine what would happen in the private sector if that were the pace of operation? Suppose a large company decided to set up a department to handle a problem and 3? years later it was announced, with apparent pride, that they had actually appointed a man to undertake this activity and he was preparing to recruit personnel. Such a pace would be totally unacceptable and commercially disastrous. But it is apparently accepted in the public service as normal and here is one of our better Departments moving at this pace. This is something that must cause all serious concern. It is something to which we shall have to return when we come to debate the Devlin Report. I hope we will have an extensive debate on that vitally important document.
The Minister referred to his proposal to regulate the activities of employment agencies. I welcome this. I am glad he and his Department have been open to the suggestion that something should be done in this sphere. One of the oddest features of the present Government is its reluctance to act or to introduce regulatory activities where they are clearly needed. I have never understood this. I can understand our differing. We have different ideologies and different viewpoints. The Government is entitled to its different viewpoints and its different ideology but I have never been able to understand what philosophy or ideology underlies the attitude of Government Departments who advise Ministers that it would be a dreadful thing to inspect nursing homes, for instance, or adoption societies, that these are areas of the private sector where, no matter what evidence there may be, they are in a minority of cases.
It is, of course, a minority and, in this country, a very small minority, in which there are malpractices, but the Minister, on the advice of his officials, persistently refuses to do anything. I am glad the Minister has been open-minded in this particular case and I am sure the advice he received from his officials was advice to introduce this change. I hope he will have a word with his colleagues in the Department of Health and the Department of Justice in particular, where smaller problems have arisen, problems in relation to which certain people have taken up entrenched positions; I hope the Minister will have a little chat before or after Cabinet meetings to try to dislodge these people from these positions.
The Minister referred to the assessment of unemployment and the carrying out of manpower surveys. He referred to the Drogheda survey and the value of it because of the information given and the insight as to the true nature of unemployment and the invalidity of so many of the statistics, if one attempts to use them thinking they may be an indication of the people actually looking for work. The Drogheda survey was a very important development in Irish social research and also in the public service because the Irish public service has shown itself —again, I exempt the Minister's Department—quite extraordinarily averse to commissioning research projects or using the assistance it might get from people with research ability, in fact, looking for any assistance outside its own ranks.
There are certain Departments in the public service which have absolutely resisted the offers of assistance from, for example, the Institute of Public Administration and its consultancy service; which have excluded any help from the service; which have forbidden local government agencies, county councils, health authorities and so on, to use the services of this body and which have refused to provide grants for this purpose. This entrenched attitude of resistance to any help from outside, this feeling that they know it all and do not need any help, is one of the biggest obstacles to progress in this country. This attitude is to be found in certain Departments of the public service but by no means in all.
For instance, it is not found in the Department of Finance nor has it been for many years past. Neither is it found in the Department of Labour. I am not in a sense complimenting the present Minister on the fact—it originated before his time—but, through him, I am complimenting his Department on their open-minded attitude to social research, on their willingness to provide funds for it and to get in competent people from outside when they see the necessity for a detailed professional examination of the kind that can best be provided by such people. It is a totally different attitude from that of other Departments. I am sure that, under the present Minister, this enlightened practice, initiated by the former Minister, Deputy Hillery, will continue.
The Drogheda survey had a rather complex history in its initiation. I must say that initial reaction to it within the Department of Industry and Commerce was far from encouraging. The attitude in the Department of Industry and Commerce at that time seemed to be: "There is no problem here to be studied and, if there is, we are studying it and, if there is to be a survey, we want to run it and we do not want anybody from outside to run it in a professional manner"—apparently lest it should disclose something the Department would not want disclosed. It took very considerable pressure to overcome that type of outlook. The NIEC played a professional role. It was overcome. The survey was instituted and taken over by the Minister's Department and, as the Minister said, it was enormously useful.
If the advice in the Department of Industry and Commerce had been taken, that survey would never have taken place. The attitude was that there was no problem, that they had the employment statistics and that all they had to do was simply to pick out the figures from their files. They could not understand that their unemployment statistics, devised for administrative purposes, did not reflect the true character of unemployment here. It was only because their advice was disregarded and the matter was pressed through, through the agency of NIEC, that the survey was carried through with the assistance of the Central Statistics Office. As a result, we have this enormously important document which has given to us a fresh insight into unemployment. The Minister's predecessor was far from content to rely on this single document. He immediately commissioned similar studies on Waterford and Galway in order to establish some kind of basis for assessing the general countrywide validity of unemployment statistics— rightly feeling that we should not base conclusions on what happens in one town.
The Minister said in his speech that these further extensive and expensive surveys will not, perhaps, be continued in that form: I agree. These are pilot surveys to establish the nature of the problem. On the one hand, the Minister will use them as a basis of guidance to set up a proper system of recording the actual availability of people for work and at the same time continue to use social research methods on a smaller scale to examine particular aspects of the problem. This is an entirely proper approach to the matter.
Deputy Dowling also made reference to unemployment. He is right in saying that we in this House bandy about unemployment statistics which often do not reflect the number of people looking for work. We do this because there are no other statistics. If the Government publishers call something "unemployment statistics" which are not anything of the kind, Deputies cannot be condemned for using the figures if they have no other relevant statistics available to them. Nearly half the women in Drogheda registered as unemployed so that they would qualify for maternity benefit. The whole point of registering was that they did not intend to work but to have babies instead. If the Dáil is given figures which are called "unemployment figures" and which purport to be a record of the number of people looking for work, I do not think the Government can blame Deputies for using those figures. If the total is something less than that, it is the fault of the Government for not having initiated a study. It is because they accepted the advice given to them that there was no problem that they find themselves in this position. Deputy Dowling commented only on the fact that these figures include some people who are not looking for work. He did not, as the Minister did, refer to the fact that they exclude young people leaving school and looking for work who should be included in the figures. I think it is fair to make these comments on what Deputy Dowling said in this particular matter.
Moreover—and this is a comment I frequently have to make when talking about unemployment both politically and in academic circles—unemployment in Ireland is not a measure, in any true sense, of how the economy is going. The unemployed in Ireland represent a tiny minority of our labour surplus who do not emigrate. The real measure of our failure is not a figure of 60,000 or 45,000, which is only a drop in the ocean, but, rather, the flow of people from the country every year, a flow which is still running in the region of 15,000 to 20,000. A measure of our failure still to master our problem is that the equivalent of one-quarter of each age group has to emigrate even today. It is a great improvement on the position as it used to be.
We can all recall the time in the period 1954 to 1961—a period which bridges the period of office of more than one Government and, therefore, I am not making a political point— when the average level of emigration was 46,000 which was equivalent to 85 per cent of the school-leavers in this country not that 85 per cent of each year's school-leavers emigrated immediately. We were losing something over half of each generation of school-leavers in that period. Other people who had not emigrated when they left school upped and left because they saw no prospect of employment or a decent life in this country. Now, we have "improved" the position. There is a genuine improvement. Instead of 46,000, it is between 15,000 and 20,000 today. However, we should not be mesmerised by the scale of the improvement.
The achievements of the past are for the record and, no doubt, some of us on either of these benches will get credit from history for improvements which were effected. Our job is not to be complacent about what has been done in the past by either side of this House. The fact is that the level of emigration is still the equivalent of one-quarter of each year's batch of school-leavers. Beside that, unemployment is a drop in the ocean. It is three years' supply of emigrants accumulated here over the past 20, 30 or 40 years. To concentrate unduly on unemployment misses the point. The continuing outflow of emigration is the problem which faces the Minister's Department.
The Minister then went on to speak about manpower forecasting. What he had to say is disappointing but not surprising to anyone who already knew the difficulties the Minister's Department faces in this regard. Many of us—I, myself, particularly—were, perhaps, naïve in our expectations of the kind of result that could be achieved from the application of professional expertise in this field.
I certainly felt it would be possible to get meaningful results, which would be of some practical value, relatively quickly and by setting up a manpower forecasting unit, as advocated by the NIEC since 1964, we would be doing something which would begin to yield results in a measureable space of time, in a year or 18 months. However, this has not been the case. The Minister has explained very fully the difficulties involved. He told us how his professional staff have been in contact with other countries which are finding similar problems and similar difficulties. Clearly this is a more complex problem than I or many others realised. I would suggest that in this instance we should not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. I am very slow to suggest that we should apply anything other than the highest standards; but when you are concerned with matters of practical administration there are times when by waiting until you get perfect or near perfect systems you can fail to achieve the results which could be achieved from something a little less than perfect. I may be wrong and I may still be naive in this but I feel it would be possible to produce some useful data with regard to manpower forecasting of a necessarily crude character without waiting for the perfect system which will take a long time, because if no other country has a perfect system and they are scratching their heads about it we are going to take a few years to produce it.
I wonder, therefore, if we could not cut a few corners and produce something useful. The Minister's Department is concerned with practical administration and practical results and it is right that they should have professional people looking ahead to try to build up a first-class system for the future. Indeed, I have been advocating that for a long time. I would hope that it would be possible, even if a few corners have to be cut, and even if the information that emerges is a little bit crude, to produce something useful. From my own practical experience in relation to the particular problem of the catering industry, which may in some ways be an easier problem than an industrial problem, it seems to me that you can get useful data for forecasting purposes from a fairly simplified form of analysis. I wonder if we are not being a little too perfectionist in this and whether we could not begin to produce something useful.
I note that the Minister referred to the Regional Technical College's Study and said that a model was being produced which might be useful. I look forward to this. I wonder if the Minister would have this published as it emerges. The Minister's Departments has an open-minded view on these things but there are some Department which feel they should lock up everything in case anybody might ever use it against them. Data of this kind could be useful and it should be made available so that the people concerned with the relevant kind of research could examine it and comment on it. It is, perhaps, something that might be presented in a paper to the Statistical Society and from that the Minister might get useful views on the development of this kind of model.
The Minister also referred to a preliminary labour replacement and labour expansion project. I did not understand what this meant and perhaps it is the very thing I was talking about, perhaps it is a slightly crude version of manpower forecasting produced by cutting corners. I would like the Minister to develop this and tell us a little more about it and to say if it also will be made available publicly. It is important that this kind of work should be open to public scrutiny and the opportunity taken to get the views of the experts and people interested in and concerned with these problems.
The Minister also mentioned employment classification—a perennial problem in anything to do with manpower forecasting and statistics. I am very glad that we are moving over to an international classification. Our attitude to the question of the classification of jobs has been very haphazard hitherto and most of the information we have comes from the census of population. There is, of course, a serious problem here. In the census of population we do not hand people an international classification of 4,892 jobs and ask them which they are doing. That is not feasible. The people are not necessarily interviewed by anybody with any expertise and they may not be interviewed at all.
The man who writes down "engineer" for example, cannot have that claim checked and the people in the Statistical Office may be left in doubt as to whether he is a graduate engineer of UCD or a chap who knows how to turn a nut with a spanner. The problem of any classification of employment based on a voluntary return by people describing their jobs in their own words is a very considerable problem and clearly anything we can do to get a more accurate description than we have in the census of population would be useful. The Minister has a big job on hands in trying to get this information.
I was pleased to hear that the redundancy fund has yielded such a handsome surplus to date and that redundancy was less than expected. In a way I am slightly amused because on several occasions I pressed for information about what the expectations were, how many redundant jobs were allowed for, and I failed to get any answer. I thought this was strange because when the Minister fixed the contribution he knew what money that would bring in—knowing how many workers there are it was simple to calculate—and he knew that he was going to get a certain sum of money. Somebody at some stage must have made an estimate in order to arrive at the conclusion that that amount of money would be needed. The persistent refusal to state the expectations of redundancy was impossible to justify. The Minister and his predecessors and others involved should have come clean. Clearly they expected more redundancy than there has been. They were very cautious and made ample financial provision in case things would be worse than seemed likely. It was a relief for the Minister to discover that the volume of redundancy was not as great as had been allowed for.
However, it is not quite as insignificant as the Minister says. He gives a figure of .34 per cent of the working population but that is a slightly misleading figure because the redundancy scheme applies only to part of the population and therefore I do not think he can relate the figures of redundancy to the whole population. However, that is splitting hairs to some extent and the important thing is that at the moment the figure is relatively small. The Minister expressed some optimism that it would remain small but at another point he seemed to be saying that it might not. I hope his optimism is right. I never believed that the freeing of trade would yield the large scale redundancy so frequently forecast by the conservatively minded, cautious, fearful people who want to keep this country cocooned—some of them, rather surprisingly, to be found on the left wing of our politics. Nonetheless, it is a fact that with the freeing of trade, when it becomes effective and it has not yet begun to become effective, as I endeavoured to show recently in an article on the subject, we are going to have more redundancy than we have had. I do not think the Minister would be wise to think that it will remain at its present level. It is fairly constant because the freeing of trade has not begun to have any significant effect, but from next year on, or certainly from 1971 onwards, for the following three or four years, there will be significant redundancy and the fund should be built up to provide some reserves for this purpose. At the same time the scale of the surplus is such that I would not suggest that the whole of it should be kept back for that purpose. I am glad that the Minister is going to introduce some improvements to the scheme and use some of the surplus for this purpose.
I would suggest, although I fear he will refuse this, that he should use some of the surplus to extend the area covered by the scheme to the agricultural sector. It is quite unacceptable that in this country where we talk a lot about agriculture and spend a lot of money on agriculture we regard it as completely alien and separate territory. If a man losses a job and he is an employee then he is entitled to redundancy compensation but if a man finds himself surplus in agriculture, because he happens to be self-employed, he is not entitled to anything. I never understood the reason for these clear-cut distinctions which are made in some areas and not in others. This self-employed man who cannot get redundancy compensation probably draws unemployment assistance.
There is something very illogical about this. If a man's self-employment is not sufficient to preclude him from drawing unemployment assistance, if he is given this extra subsidy, rather peculiarly, because he owns property— a thing I have never quite understood: because he happens to own a farm, he gets unemployment assistance: if he did not own a farm but engaged in some other kind of activity and did not own property he would not be entitled to it; I have never understood the logic of that: the principle of giving to those who have—it should not preclude him from other benefits. Given that we have that system of income-supplementation confined to that area of society I believe it should be general: that income-supplementation to bring people up to the minimum income should not be confined to the agricultural sector. Given that we have that system, and do decide that these people, though self-employed need, and are entitled to that assistance such as unemployment assistance, for example, I do not understand why they should be excluded from the operation of the redundancy scheme.
I see many difficulties about bringing them into the redundancy scheme and providing for retraining but I do not think the difficulties are such that we should exclude them. We must accept that the big area of redundancy in this country is not today and will not be in the future—even perhaps in the difficult years of the early 'seventies—in industry but in agriculture. The decline in the agricultural population is as to about half, probably, attributable to deaths of people who never require retraining, at least not in our sense; they may have to undergo a certain period of preparation after leaving this world. As well as those who leave agriculture through deaths there are others who leave agriculture on their two feet and they generally leave agriculture to go outside this country to Britain, because we do nothing about providing alternative employment for them here. Our placement service is inadequate for this purpose; there is no means of training and there is no redundancy compensation applicable to them. There are great difficulties about extending the scheme in this way but they are difficulties we must face. We cannot in this respect discriminate against the agricultural population. When we discriminate in their favour in other respects, it is completely illogical to discriminate against them in this respect.
I am glad the Minister was able to tell us that he is encouraging research into the question of lack of internal mobility here. It is a remarkable fact, as he has already established from the operation of the redundancy scheme, that people are not mobile from Dublin outwards. Certainly, they are mobile into Dublin from the country but Dublin people are very reluctant to move out into the country. If they move out of Dublin it is usually to Britain they go and not to other jobs in Ireland. Hitherto, this has not been a very major problem because there have not been many jobs for them to move to in Ireland but, as we develop our industrialisation outside Dublin, and if the Government finally plucks up its courage and decides to implement the Buchanan Report and really develop outside Dublin as it ought to do, we shall have many more employment opportunities outside Dublin than there are today.
The problem of the unwillingness of Dublin people to move out to the country is one we shall have to tackle. I think it would require study at a fairly deep level to discover the root cause of it. It seems to me, and it is something over which I have been thinking quite a lot in the past few days, that there is a very deep gap between Dublin and the rest of Ireland, the nature of which we have not understood and, perhaps, do not even think about. A paper which has been published by the Economic and Social Research Institute throws interesting light on this. It shows how in Dublin, while Dubliners born in Dublin provide 80 per cent of the unskilled workers and 75 per cent of all manual workers, they have less than half the higher-paid jobs. In fact, over 60 per cent of managerial and executive jobs are held by people who were not born in Dublin and over 50 per cent of professional and administrative jobs, including the Civil Service, are held by people who were not born in Dublin. The influx to Dublin is an influx of people coming in to take the top jobs to which the native Dubliners do not seem to have access.
