I had little to add at the point at which the House rose last night. In fact, I have only three additional points to make. First of all, in summing up my own contribution, I want to make it quite clear to Deputies on both sides of the House that the reservations which I have expressed about the manner in which our application for entry to the EEC has been conducted, do not derive from any dyed-in-wool obscurantist attitude towards the EEC nor do they derive from any belief that the classic tariff barriers of protected industry can be sustained in the 1970s and the 1980s. I do not think that is so.
The Government are correct to reactivate our application for membership of the Common Market. They are correct to do so because, as has been pointed out by other Deputies in this debate, there is absolutely no alternative. I feel very strongly that, given the inescapable and perhaps regrettable fact that whatever the British do we have to do as well, we should approach the negotiations for entry with a degree of caution and frankness which has not been demonstrated by the Government over the past ten years since the topic first arose.
If I may revert again to the contribution made by Deputy Carter last night, he said to the House that the nub of Dr. Mansholt's policy, of which he appeared to express approval, was that it is better to plan for what is happening rather than to let events take their course. Unknowingly, perhaps, Deputy Carter was enunciating one of the finest and most clear-cut and crystal-clear idiomatic statements ever made in this House. It is better to plan for what is happening rather than to let events take their course. Enunciated there was a phrase or a sentence worthy of Sir Boyle Roche. Since the inevitable will happen it is better to appear to plan so that when one arrives at it, one can say one expected to arrive there. In this fine, rather unexpected epigrammatical way, Deputy Carter summed up the nature of Government planning on this as on many other issues. It is that if one is going to fall off a cliff it is best to have left behind a will saying one intended to do so in the first instance.
If this is planning all I can say is that it is not planning in conformity with any concept of economic planning that I have encountered in my life. Therefore, I ask the Government to remember that when it is conceptualising its attitude towards the inevitable it is dealing not with some bright future for everybody, in which there will be lots of joy and jam, but with a highly dangerous volatile situation in which the jobs of Irish workers and Irish farmers will be seriously affected.
May I say quite clearly that my own reservations—that is all that they are —about EEC are concerned with the mundane facts of the employment of Irish workers. In the seven or eight years since this issue was first enunciated I do not believe adequate preparations have been made to equip Irish industry to sustain its part in a competitive market. It may seem a small point to make here but in my own constituency of Dublin North West there are considerable industrial concentrations in Cabra and Finglas. Ordinary people work there, ordinary people living in small corporation houses doing their best to rear their children and give them a start in life. Already, under the influence of the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement some of these people have been affected and have lost their jobs. I have met these people who have been told at the age of 55 or 60 that £300 or £400 from the Minister for Labour is the most they can anticipate as a consequence of the workings of the free market.
I do not think we have the right to play ducks and drakes with the stability of employment of these ordinary people. I ask the Minister for External Affairs, to state at the conclusion of the debate what steps are being taken to guarantee the livelihood of these ordinary people. I accept that change is inevitable in the industrial sphere with the coming of free trade and the Common Market but what is not inevitable is that small people, ordinary workers, should be hurt. I see no evidence since the semi-demise of the CIO, and with the pathetic inadequacy of the ordinary payments now offered to redundant workers, that these people are being adequately prepared or catered for. They have their rights. They work in industries built up, I admit, under a Fianna Fáil administration, under the great—and I use the word deliberately—architect of protection in this country, the former Deputy Seán Lemass. If the Government are now to dismantle the protective barriers which for 30 years have given these people their livelihoods it should make quite clear to them what assurance it can give of the continuance of their employment.
It is a cliché to quote Connolly but my favourite dictum of Connolly's is: "Ireland without her people means nothing to me". I agree with that totally and I do not care if there is a fast buck for capitalism in this country; if the price of it is that the kind of people who live and work in my constituency can seek their job opportunities in Dusseldorf and Stuttgart in the future, it is not good enough. I have no doctrine, hard-line anti-Common Market attitude in saying that these people have a right to be protected.
A great question mark hangs over the jobs of Irish industrial workers in the city of Dublin and elsewhere. Will they be subjected to the kind of thing that will happen in the car assembly industry, for example? Will they find that the laws of private enterprise economics wipe out their livelihoods in the way car assembly will be wiped out, at no cost to the car assemblers, the owners of the firms, because they can look forward to a rosy future as distributors of assembled vehicles, for example, while their workers cannot look forward to this future? These are the small people that I am concerned with.
Good luck to the Government in its negotiations if it is prepared to dig in its heels in Europe and make quite clear that the minimum number of Irish workers will be made redundant by this step into Europe and that those who are made redundant will be adequately protected. I see no suggestion in the Government's euphoric me-tooism towards the British application to console me with the belief that these people will be looked after. I should prefer to see the Government go into EEC and admit the weakness of the Irish economy because I think its optimism and ambition in representing our economy as a developed one is dangerous to the livelihoods of Irish people.
The Treaty of Rome makes provision for developing—that is the polite word about our economy—economies. It should be the task of the Government to wring every possible concession related to the Irish situation out of EEC. If it has to admit the weaknesses of our economy in order to do this it would play a more honourable and a tactically more constructive role if it did admit these weaknesses. I see no suggestion that they are prepared to do this and while I bow to the inevitable, like Deputy Carter, I can neither glory in it nor describe it as a function of sophisticated planning.
This debate yet again, as so many other debates here have done, exposes the total lack on the Government side of a concept of what will constitute Ireland in the future. I return to what perhaps is one of my hobby horses, the thinking contained in the Buchanan Report. Is Ireland to be the kind of country envisaged in that report? Is it to be a kind of concentration based on a conurbation in Dublin and a couple of other regional development centres? Are we turning our back on the small farmer, on the small man in industry? Is God and Fianna Fáil—two concepts which are not always identical, although in this House it is frequently suggested that they are—on the side of the big battalions? Is this the kind of Ireland we are moving into? I see no sign in Government thinking on this matter that they have a concept of Ireland which they are prepared to defend in Europe. The Minister for Finance, sitting there rather weariedly listening to me, shares, I know, many of my aspirations for the small farmer and the small industry in Ireland, as he showed when he was in Industry and Commerce. Can he defend these people or offer them safeguards when we encounter this blast of free trade?
Let me say that I am not totally negative in my attitude to this proposition. The Common Market will undoubtedly present opportunities to Ireland: these opportunities can be grasped if our negotiations are advanced intelligently, if the appropriate safeguards are sought and if the appropriate incentives and disincentives are used to accelerate the pace of growth in Irish Industry. I should not like my contribution, which inevitably has had to concentrate on the dangers implicit in Government policy, to appear to have a hostile attitude to the entire concept of the European Economic Community—far from it. As I say, it is inevitable that we should enter this if Britain does and there are opportunities for us in it that I think might be usefully taken and, perhaps, opportunities of greater happiness and greater employment for the Irish people, particularly in agriculture. I have no hostility to the concept as such: all I say is that these opportunities will only be taken if the Government negotiate toughly and separately from the negotiators of Great Britain.
I see no suggestion in Government policy to date that they are prepared to do this. Consequently, I view the prospect of our entry with qualified misgiving. Let us accept the inevitable, but let us send over to Europe the kind of team which is concerned, first of all, not with the safeguarding of the profits of Irish industrialists but with the safeguarding of the job opportunities, security and happiness of ordinary Irish men and women who 30 years ago were told they were right to take employment in protected industries. Secondly, let us send over a team qualified in economic, professional and ideological terms to defend the interests of this nation. I do not think the tenor of the Government arguments or the quality of the rather ramshackle team which recent events have caused them to assemble suggest that that kind of bargaining which is needed by Ireland will take place.