I move motion No. 3:
That Regulations I, II and III set out at paragraph 3 of the Unemployment Assistance (Employment Period) (No. 2) Order, 1971 (S.I. No. 142 of 1971) be and are hereby annulled.
The shock announcement, or should one say the disclosure, that the Employment Period Order was made was typical of Government blundering. As yet, we have not had any good reason from the Minister for Social Welfare, from his Department or from the Government Information Bureau why the order was made on 1st April. The House will recall that another Minister for Finance, Deputy Haughey, scrapped entirely the Employment Period Order for 1967 in his Budget proposals. It is significant that the present Minister for Social Welfare was dealing with social welfare at that time. I do not know whether there was pressure by the present Minister for Finance on the Minister for Social Welfare to agree to the reintroduction of this Employment Period Order.
However, the injustice of this order was recognised by practically every section of the community, except I suppose that small clique who believe that people should not be paid unemployment assistance in the circumstances. There was an immediate reaction by the trade union movement particularly and the press, representing I assume the viewpoint of all sections of the community. There was this outcry but during a period of 24 or 36 hours no reason was given by the Government Information Bureau to the press and the other news media and there was no information from the Minister or his Department.
It is somewhat cynical that the order was made on April fools' day because it appears to me to be an attempt to make fools of unfortunate people who now have no means whatever. It is typical of the blundering of the Department that the news was made known not by any public pronouncement; as far as we are aware it was made known as a result of a leak in Limerick city. This was discovered by Deputy Coughlan who immediately got in touch with the Department of Social Welfare and complained about the matter. During all this time for some reason or another the Minister made no statement whatsoever. The first statement we had, so far as I know was in an interview during or after the news on radio on 9th of this month. In that interview the Minister said that the part of the order that applied to urban areas was being withdrawn and that the part of the order which related to rural areas was being retained.
There are quite a few questions for the Minister to answer on this matter. I cannot find, as yet, a real definition of an urban area. So far as I know, for the purposes of the Social Welfare and Social Assistance Acts, an urban area is an area with a population of 7,000 or more. I do not know if this is correct but this would mean that towns like Gorey and Enniscorthy, to mention two in my own constituency—other Deputies can mention other areas with a population of less than 7,000—if they are to come under the amended employment period order, will suffer hardship. In his contribution to this debate the Minister must give us clarification on that part of the order and define what is meant by an urban area.
The Minister has a lot of explaining and clearing up to do because he said that the order was wrongly drafted. Who drafted the order wrongly? Is this intended as a slight on some member of the Civil Service in the Department of Social Welfare? I believe this was an absolute try on and, if there had not been this outcry in the Press and from the community as a whole, the Minister and the Government would have gone ahead with it. If that is not so, it appears that the Minister did not read the order. If he did not read the order before he signed it, I do not believe he is worthy to hold the office of Minister for Social Welfare. I do not believe it is good enough to blame an officer of his Department, by inference or innuendo, for not having put a proper draft before him. Usually Ministers in this House defend rather than condemn officers of their own Departments, but the Minister is now casting some suspicion—or to use a well-known phrase there is now a shadow of suspicion—on some civil servant or civil servants in the Department of Social Welfare. This is scandalous behaviour. It looks like a rebuke to some un-named civil servant.
Ex-Deputy Kevin Boland, ex-Minister for Local Government, ex-Minister for Social Welfare and ex- a few other things, knows the mind of his former colleagues in the Government and he described the first attempt to introduce the Employment Period Order as a try on, as I did, and indeed it was. He is fairly experienced and expert in the art of government and the art of politics and he described this as government by kite flying. He knows his colleagues. We have many examples of kite flyers in the Fianna Fáil front benches and some of the ex-Ministers, including ex-Deputy Kevin Boland, were expert at government by kite flying. There is no doubt in my mind, and there is no doubt in the mind of ex-Deputy Boland, that if they could have got away with it they would have done it.
We suspect two motives in relation to the first Employment Period Order, first, that there is pressure by the Minister for Finance on the Minister for Social Welfare to save £1.35 million as was said yesterday—we do not know whether these figures are right or wrong—or secondly to give a false picture of the unemployment figure in this part of the country. If it was to save £1.35 million, or £1.6 million as the Minister for Finance said, it is a mean type of economising on the poorest section of the community. The Minister will have to be more explicit in his contribution this morning about the amount of money involved and the number of people involved. I do not know if he was fully briefed yesterday in his reply to the question asked by a Member of this party but there is room for further clarification.
We were told yesterday by the Minister that the amended Order, that is the Order relating to those who live in the non-urban areas, will mean a saving to the Exchequer of £1.2 million and that it will affect 13,000 people. These figures must also be reconciled because there appears to be a contradiction between them and the figures given by the Minister in reply to supplementary questions yesterday. In that reply the Minister said £1.35 million would be saved but in the Book of Estimates it appears that a saving of £1.6 million was anticipated.
I said that the second possible motive was to give a false picture of the unemployment figures. At present we have the unenviable record of having the highest unemployment rate in Western Europe. This is not a good image for the Minister for Foreign Affairs in his negotiations on our application for membership of the EEC. The Minister is proposing to cut off 13,000 people from the unemployment figure in a situation where we had 70,126 people unemployed on 8th April and 25,713 of them on unemployment assistance. This is the highest figure for this part of the year for very many years. The motive may have been to impress the EEC countries in our negotiations for membership. In the third quarter of 1969, unemployment was at the figure of 6.5 per cent and that had risen to 7.8 per cent in the third quarter of 1970. I cannot be contradicted when I say we have the highest unemployment rate in Western Europe and the idea may have been to try to change that picture.
The Government are cutting people off from unemployment assistance at a time when we have redundancies all over the country and closures of factories in many parts of the country due again, may I say, to the ineptitude and blundering of the Government and the bad agreement they made six years ago with the British, the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Area Agreement. That disastrous agreement has been responsible for an increase in unemployment, for redundancies and for closures of factories.
The Minister must tell us this morning what is to happen to these people. They will have no employment and no source of income whatsoever. The Minister acts in a dual capacity in this House. He is also Minister for Labour and, as Minister for Labour, has a responsibility to provide work not only for these 13,000 people but for the 70,126 people unemployed at present. The assumption by the Minister, by the members of the Government and the members of the Fianna Fáil Party appears to be that there is work. There was a rather cynical and uninformed comment by the Minister for Social Welfare who is also Minister for Labour at an annual dinner of the Fianna Fáil Party at Kilnaleck, County Cavan. I wish to quote from the Irish Times where he is reported within the last week or ten days as having said at that dinner:
The problem of the dole was a major one and had to be tackled. While an ideal solution might not be readily forthcoming it should not be impossible to devise a scheme to ensure that the millions of pounds now being paid out in dole would be devoted to productive purposes.
He talks about millions being paid out to those who are in receipt of the dole. There are not millions being paid out and this is a filthy innuendo to people who would like to believe that there are workers who are getting money for nothing and that millions are being spent on those who have to line up at the employment exchanges in order to seek work and to qualify for a few pounds per year. We do not treat our unemployed as generously as that paragraph in the Minister's speech would suggest. I quote further:
Mr. Brennan said he hoped that by devoting this money——
These millions
——to productive purposes it would be possible to give to the persons receiving this money an opportunity to rid themselves of the stigma attached to the present system.
The Minister should first have had his scheme for using these millions to give employment rather than cut them off and say that we will have some sort of solution afterwards. He is reported as saying in the same speech:
The Government was fully alive to the hardship this order might cause and in consequence had made an extra £500,000 available for local improvement schemes to be spent in the west.
How much extra employment would that give? Perhaps the Minister would tell us when he intervenes in this debate. Of course he ignores entirely the rest of the country. An unemployed man who does not qualify for assistance in Cork is just as hungry as an unemployed man who has no assistance in Galway, Donegal, Louth, Meath, Limerick or any other county. Therefore if the Minister is thinking of introducing some alternative scheme or if he is thinking of providing employment for people, he should think not of one part of the country but of the whole of the Twenty-six Counties.
I recall that in the Dáil recently, in reply to a question, the Minister told Deputy Tully that workers were being brought back from Britain for retraining and implied—maybe said directly in the same reply—that workers who are signing on at our employment exchanges are unemployable. The Minister has a duty to the House and to the country to explain what he meant when he replied to Deputy Tully in those terms.
What is to happen to these people? Where do they get money on which to live? Who will give them money for food, clothes and rent? Where will the single man in a cottage on his own get money for his smoke, for a bottle of stout? Or are there some people in the front benches or the back benches of the Government party who believe they are not entitled to food or to money for rent, that they are not entitled to a smoke or to a bottle of stout? I am sure most members of the Fianna Fáil Party, as have other parties, as have my own party, have had dozens of these people coming to them, as I have had over the last week, asking what will happen to them, where will they get money. Are they being starved out of this country so that they will emigrate to Britain?
What about the single man who lives on his own and whose parents have died? What is he to do? He has no dependants. He will not get unemployment assistance and he certainly will not get home assistance. What about the single man such as approached me over the week-end? He lives with his widowed sister who gets £4 10s per week. Are the two of them expected to live on £4 10s per week or has the Minister a job to offer them down in County Wexford? What about the single man who is living with his widowed mother? Would she be regarded as a dependant or must the two of them live on the widow's pension which the mother receives?
It is no reply to say the local authority has a responsibility for those people who have no income and who are not entitled to any payments from the Department of Social Welfare by way of welfare benefits or assistance. In many counties the aim—and it would appear to be succeeding—seems to be to reduce home assistance. Many local authorities have struck their rate. There is no provision for extra home assistance and there is no indication that a special rate will be struck so that these thousands of people who now have no money will be provided for. Will this employment period order continue next year? If it does the public assistance authorities will have to increase the rate in order to provide for people who have no means. I can say this as far as members of the Labour Party who are on local authorities are concerned in any case; I do not know what the attitude of other parties in the Dáil will be.
I do not know whether on next Tuesday the Minister for Finance will, as I suggested in a recent speech, introduce particularly for these people a form of national assistance such as is operated in Britain at the present time. If that is not done it will mean starvation or emigration for those people who have been cut off from unemployment assistance. Would the Minister or someone else in the Fianna Fáil Party give us an indication as to where these people will get employment from 14th April, 1971, to 16th November, 1971? The Minister may say: "The employment period order was there when you were Minister for Social Welfare." There may have been some justification for it at that time. There may have been some justification for it years ago but the justification for it went when the ex-Minister for Finance scrapped the order in his Budget speech of 1967. Some years ago, as Deputy Tully reminded me, when there was the spring planting, when there was the summer haymaking and the autumn harvesting, there was employment for some people in rural Ireland. There was a prospect then of getting some insurance stamps. There may have been some justification when there were many more employed at road work by the various county councils than there are today; when there was more forestry work and when there were more employed with Bord na Móna. We recognise, as it appears the Minister for Finance in the Fianna Fáil Government in 1967 recognised, that the rapid growth of the use of farm machinery, the rapid growth of road making machinery and the rapid use of machinery in turf production have all minimised and reduced greatly the prospects of employment in rural Ireland. What are these people expected to do? They are expected to do what a lot of big farmers would wish them to do and that is to stand around at the cross roads and wait until they are beckoned and told that there is available a half-day's work or maybe two or three day's work. They are expected to be available all day until such time as some of these big farmers hire them for a few hours. There is no continuous work in rural Ireland for these people from the 16th April to the 16th November. The Minister must readily admit that there is still an average of 9,000 or 10,000 people leaving Ireland every year as there have been for a number of years past. These people leave because there is no work for them here. Yet, we have the Minister suggesting and implying that there may be work for them. Because so many people have not been able to obtain work, they have had to have recourse to unemployment assistance.
It has been suggested that we in the trade union movement and in the Labour Party were satisfied when that part of the order which applied to the urban areas was to be scrapped. I want to tell the Minister that so far as we are concerned we are opposed to this amended order in the same way as we were opposed to the first disastrous order made on the 1st April. We were outraged when, by way of leak, we heard this news and we are still outraged with the amended order.
I appeal to the members of Fianna Fáil, and particularly those who live in rural areas, to speak up now and let the Minister for Social Welfare know what are their views. I appeal to them to ask the Minister what is to happen to these 13,000 people who will not now have any income. Are they to starve or to emigrate?
The Minister claimed that the first order was a mistake, I suggest that he should be big enough to say now that the second order was a mistake also. We do not believe that the first order was a mistake; rather, we believe it was a kite-flying effort, a try-on. It was provided for in the Book of Estimates but the Government yielded to public pressure and indignation in respect of those in the urban areas. We ask that the same be done in respect of those in rural areas. In my view and in the view of my colleagues, this order, if allowed stand, will cause misery to thousands of our people who so badly need more help and not more hardship