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Dáil Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 3 May 1972

Vol. 260 No. 10

Committee on Finance. - Financial Resolution No. 3: General (Resumed).

Debate resumed on the following motion:
That it is expedient to amend the law relating to customs and inland revenue (including excise) and to make further provision in connection with finance.
—(Minister for Finance.)

When I reported progress last night I was discussing the problem of the financing of the capital programme by borrowing to an extent in this country which is out of line with the practice in most other countries. I was noting the fact that there is a divergence between the methods by which a budget deficit is calculated in the finance accounts and in the national income accounts. From the point of view of national comparison, it is the latter we must use. On the basis of these national accounts where, in our finance accounts sometimes a deficit appears, there emerges a certain surplus. This may seem comforting. But it is only when one compares the kind of budget surplus in the current budget, and the scale of the contribution that this current surplus makes to the capital programme, with the figures in other countries, comparing like with like and employing the same comparative system, the national accounts presentation for this purpose, that one begins to realise how out of line we are with other countries and the extent to which we are and have been engaged in something of a rake's progress in the financing of our capital programme here.

I have been extracting certain figures from the relevant statistical publication. May I comment that here, as elsewhere, we are ill endowed statistically. When I inquired in the Library of this House for the comparative national accounts figures of the OECD, no copy was available. One had to be got from the Department of Finance, but the one the Department of Finance had was an out-of-date copy. I had that morning consulted in the Central Statistics Office Library the 1969 edition, but the Department of Finance had only the 1968 edition. That was a bit disturbing to begin with. Nevertheless, from the figures in the 1969 publication and from some other calculations I did with more up-to-date figures which I got, I have come to the following conclusions as to the extent to which we are out of line with other countries in the financing of our capital programme.

What proportion of the current budget is saved? Going back over five years in this country—because to take one year is unfair and is liable to lead to distortion—one discovers that in that period, using the more generous national accounts criteria, we have on average saved 4 per cent. Current revenue, as defined for national accounts purposes, has exceeded current expenditure by a margin of 4 per cent. In finance accounts terms, there is very little difference at all. Let us compare these figures with those of other countries. In the same five years the proportion of the current budget which was able to be used to finance the capital programme in Switzerland was 33 per cent; in Denmark, 22 per cent; in the Netherlands, 16 per cent; in Norway, 15 per cent; in Sweden and Germany, 14½ per cent; in Austria, 14 per cent; in France, 13½ per cent; in the UK, 10 per cent; in Italy, 8 per cent. There is a certain range of variation here. Switzerland is perhaps the odd man out with a very high figure, but the great bulk of the European countries manage to save between 13½ per cent and 16 per cent of their current revenue, and to set it off against capital expenditure to finance their capital programme in part or in whole in that way. In this country in the same period the figure is 4 per cent. The only country which has a worse performance than ours is Belgium. Italy is the next worst, but they did twice as well as we did. Most European countries save three and a half or four times the proportion of current budget that we have saved over the past five years.

Let us consider the capital budget and how much of it has to be financed by borrowing. In half of the countries for which I have information the capital programme, far from being financed by borrowing, itself involves net lending to the rest of the economy. This is true. In Norway 62½ per cent of the funds available for the capital programme are available to lend out. In Denmark, the figure is 40 per cent; in the UK, 40 per cent; in France, 10 per cent; in Sweden, 15 per cent. All these countries have no question of borrowing for the capital programme. There is no question of net borrowing. In fact, on these national accounts criteria, in all these countries they were able to finance their capital programme from current revenue and from the returns from past investment. There was money to spare to lend out to the economy. The Government were helping to provide additional credit to the economy. In certain countries the situation was different. In Germany last year there was some borrowing to finance 8 per cent of the capital programme. In Ireland the comparable figure is 56 per cent. There is no relationship between our performance and that of other countries.

The Government adverted to this in 1962 and 1963, but did nothing about it. We cannot continue indefinitely on this basis. In saying this, I am not criticising the Government's economic approach to this year's budget. The problem is not that they did the wrong thing or went in the wrong direction, but that they started from the wrong place. Over the last ten years, they should have got themselves into better posture. They should have got the finances of this country into a condition more akin to that of other countries. They should not be in a position where an enormous burden of additional borrowing occurs every year to finance the capital programme, only a small fraction of which is, in fact, financed from current surplus. In saying this, I know that I can be accused of economic orthodoxy. Perhaps nowadays that is something of a crime. Much can be said for economic orthodoxy and social heterodoxy. There is no necessary divergence between trying to run a country in a sane manner and trying to control inflationary pressures and trying to pay, so far as possible, as one goes along. There is no necessary conflict between that and a policy of redistribution of wealth on a scale far beyond anything practised here.

We have gone in for economic heterodoxy, for a policy in regard to our finances which is difficult to defend in terms of what is in the interests of the country. At the same time our social conservatism is without parallel in Europe. We have got everything the wrong way around. I should like to reverse that and have a slightly more orthodox approach to our finances and a very much less orthodox approach to the question of social policy to which I shall be coming back later on.

I want to ask the Minister if in the presentation of our finances accounts we could have a little more consistency. If we cannot have consistency for technical reasons could we have a little more explanation? I have puzzled over the reconciliation of the figures in the central Government capital account, that is, table 2 of the national accounts classification of the budget. I am puzzled over how to reconcile these figures with the capital programme figures. No indication is given as to how the two can be reconciled. There is no relationship between them. No two figures correspond.

Where different presentations are made to Deputies we are entitled to be given some indication as to how the figures reconcile with each other. I doubt if I am the only Deputy who is puzzled in looking at these figures and trying to make head or tail of them. I suspect that many Deputies would find this a difficult task. There is not much point in producing new forms of presentation, themselves helpful, if they are not in some way linked to the figures we have already, and if we are left in mid-air, not knowing how to relate one with the other. I would ask that some attention would be given to that in the future. In trying to look at the problems I am looking at at the moment, I find myself at a loss in this respect.

What is the consequence of the kind of budget we have this year starting from the point from which we started? Despite the fact that in this year's cappital programme there is a much bigger contribution from the State bodies— 25 per cent more—and despite the fact that the Government hope for—and it can only be a hope, an expectation— a 40 per cent increase in the sale of securities, including national loan, and hope for a rise of over 20 per cent in small savings—and some of these hopes may turn out to be a bit optimistic—the budget as now presented involves borrowing from other sources, from banks and foreign borrowing, almost 60 per cent more than last year. That is not a very happy picture. Our finances were not in a very good condition before the budget was presented.

Having made these optimistic assumptions about increases of 20 and 40 and 25 per cent under most of the headings in the capital budget, to be left with a residual to be found from borrowing from the banks and foreign borrowings 60 per cent greater than last year—that is £93.8 million as against £59.2 million—is certainly disturbing. Fundamentally a Government who use fiscal measures to reflate but who never use them to deflate could wreck any economy. That has been the policy of the Fianna Fáil Government for the past ten years and it has got us into the difficult position we are in today.

Turning back to the OECD report, there are some comments in it on which we would like to hear the Minister when he is replying. For example, there is the reference in it to incomes policy. The report says that rapid and forceful reflationary measures—and I suppose the Minister would like us to think that his budget represents rapid and forceful reflationary measures—if they are to achieve the desired results must be preceded by action to bring cost price developments under control.

Could the Minister tell us (a) what action has been taken to bring cost price developments under control or (b) would he confirm that he has ignored flagrantly the advice given in this respect by the OECD? I do not see much of an alternative. The wording here is specific. Either the measures the Minister has taken are not rapid or forceful—that is possible—or if they are, they either have been preceded by action to bring cost price developments under control, in which case we should like to be let into the secret of what these measures are, or he has not taken such steps in which case he has ignored the advice given to him which I would have thought unwise in this case.

Later on the report goes on to say the same thing in slightly different and perhaps slightly vaguer language. It says that a solid and broadly based resumption of growth could come quickly but only if inflationary pressures continue to slacken. I am not too content that they are continuing to slacken. In this report, and in some Government statements, there are remarks to the effect that the increase in the cost of living was slowing down. We are told in the OECD report, which is out of date in this respect, that in the last threequarters of last year the increase in prices was only 8½ per cent as against 10 per cent.

God be with the days when we would regard 8½ per cent as a dangerously inflationary price increase. Now it is a matter of sighs of relief all round, but the sighs of relief should be short-lived because the latest figures for the period February, 1971, to February, 1972, show that we are back on the 10 per cent path again. The claims made frequently in this House by the Minister over the past year, and repeated in the OECD report, obviously prepared some months ago, that we are getting inflation under control, are simply not sustained by the facts. The facts are that there is a 10 per cent increase in the period February to February, as big an increase as we have had even at the height of this inflation, say, 12 months ago.

Speaking of the longer-term growth strategy which the Government should adopt the report said that such strategy is necessary if problems of growth, employment, inflation and external balance are to be dealt with comprehensively and if we are to promote the structural changes required to meet the challenge of EEC entry successfully. I endorse that, but where is the longer-term growth strategy? Where can we find it? In what document? In what publication? In what speech by a Minister?

I know there was a Third Programme some years ago. I shall come back to that later. In fact, I will be coming to it next. If that is the longer-term growth strategy it is now so askew that it cannot carry much conviction. I do not think anybody believes that that programme, in its present condition, will help to promote the structural changes required to meet the challenge of EEC entry successfully. If there is one thing that we are good at in this country, it is avoiding structural changes. If there is one thing the public service is dedicated to, it is avoiding structural changes within the public sector. There is no evidence whatever of any structural changes coming, of any long-term growth strategy for that purpose, or of any attempt to tackle in some coherent way the problems of growth, employment, inflation and external balance. From year to year the Government adjust their policies. There is short-term planning but it is somewhat ineffective in keeping inflation at bay or in avoiding the need for successive deflations every five years. These adjustments are made as and when they are necessary. There is no long-term growth strategy

The nearest thing to it was the full employment report of the NIEC to which the Government's response was to pigeonhole the report, get rid of the NIEC and refuse to appoint a successor body, which is not exactly an encouraging approach to the only people in the country who tried to produce the makings of a long term growth strategy. Indeed, while I am on that subject may I remark that the Government's attitude on this has been petty and puerile. The idea that there can be no such thing as a body in this country to deal with economic planning on which any Member of the Oireachtas sits, and that the Government's monopoly of information must be jealously guarded, is one which we cannot accept, and which we will continue to criticise vigorously. The Government know that there is no basis for this.

I was a member of the general purposes committee of the NIEC for a number of years. The Government know that, in all that time, anything I learned in the course of the work we were doing was kept to myself. I never communicated any information I got to the Opposition party of which I was a member. Confidence was maintained. There was one occasion in the Seanad when the Taoiseach suggested the contrary. He suggested that in what I had said in the Seanad he detected signs of something in a report of which he had a copy but which had not yet been published.

He was not aware—I suppose I cannot expect him to read everything I write; that would be asking rather much of him; he was then Minister for Finance; and when I pointed it out to him he immediately accepted it— that the relevant section of the report arose out of ideas which I had published in an article in The Irish Times several years previously. I was at least entitled in the Seanad to repeat what I had said in my own articles two years earlier. The fact that they had been incorporated in a report of the NIEC was hardly a reason for remaining silent about my own ideas as published in the Press. Apart from that misunderstanding no accusation of this kind was ever made or could ever have been made. In those circumstances for the Government to say that no Member of the Oireachtas may serve on this council, that the council must not come into existence, that the NIEC must not be replaced and that no further consultative work may be carried on, is the kind of attitude that is designed to sabotage national growth.

The Government know very well that the NIEC did useful work in many spheres, useful work for which the Government were grateful at the time. No doubt, some of their work embarrassed the Government, but there were times when the work of the NIEC bolstered and backed-up a weak Government and helped them in their problems. All the Government have done now is to abolish that body and to refuse to replace them on the grounds that they will not have any Member of the Oireachtas having any function in any body of this kind. This is a retrogressive policy. It is a policy that has been pursued single-mindedly by this Government for some years past. It is against the interests of this country and of this Parliament. Persistent attempts to exclude Members of this Parliament from any activities outside in which they might gain experience and make a contribution to the economy outside Parliament are unworthy of this Government. It is something that has never been attempted by any Government and I hope that, when we get this Government out, it will not be attempted by any Government in the future.

Regarding the Third Programme for Economic Expansion I want to consider briefly the performance of this programme to date. We must look at how the economy has performed in recent years. Yesterday I gave some reasons for its poor performance, but let us look and see what really happened. First, when we look to see where growth has occurred in the past three years, we turn to Table A on page 29 of the Department of Finance publication, Review of 1971 and Outlook for 1972, which sets out the sectoral growth rates. Incidentally, may I suggest to the Minister that it would be difficult to find a more cumbersome title for a document than this. Could it not be called “Department of Finance—Progress Report for 1972-73”? The present title is ridiculous and makes it difficult for those of us who have to refer to it often.

In this table we find that in all three sectors growth has been behind target: that in the agricultural sector the total growth in the period of three years has been 4.3 per cent as against the projected figure of 6.3 per cent—that was two-thirds of the projected rate. In industry the growth rate was 13.6 per cent as against 20.9 per cent projected —again, only two-thirds of the projected rate. In the domestic sector the figure was 7.9 per cent as against 10.4 per cent projected.

Therefore, one cannot pinpoint any one sector being responsible and this reflects the fact that what has gone wrong in this period has not been a particular failure of performance in any sector but has been the overall failure of the economy because of mismanagement by the Government, because of the failure to control inflation and failure to introduce any kind of incomes policy at a time when it would have been possible psychologically to do so. Then, there was the consequent need to deflate the economy and the mistake made by this and, indeed, any other Government in the past, in maintaining that deflation for too long. The cumulative effect of these failures has been the slowing down of growth across the board. So much for the outlook side of the programme.

Let us consider exports. Here the picture is somewhat less uniform. We find that the growth rate of exports of agricultural products has been slightly better than foreseen, although this situation has not contributed to an adequate growth rate in agriculture. I suspect that this may be due to a repetition of the persistent failure to appreciate the scale of increased inputs into agriculture required to achieve a given growth outlook. The export figures reflect that share of growth output has required more inputs than was thought likely when the programme was drawn up and, consequently, the added values in that sector have been correspondingly less than target. I suspect that is the reason for the divergency.

In industry, however, the growth of industrial exports has been barely half the planned rate in this period. To some degree this reflects the problems of the British economy. Undoubtedly the stagnation in the British economy during this period, a stagnation that it would have been unreasonable to expect the Government to have foreseen, has led to a short-fall, but I do not think the full short-fall can be accounted for by that. Neither do I think that the slowing down of growth in Britain could account fully for such a remarkable failure as halving the industrial expansion rate. Here, we must have regard to the fact that the inflationary pressures at home, the increases in labour costs which the Government have failed to control, have made us less competitive and that we are seeing some effects of this weakening of competitiveness in the slow growth of industrial exports. I do not wish to overstress this. It is not by any means the main explanation but it is a contributory factor, perhaps to a greater extent than we have realised.

I would ask the Minister to tell us something of the reasons for the permance of the Shannon Industrial Estate which was expected to increase its exports by one-sixth but in respect of which exports have fallen by one-fifth. Precisely what is this due to? Obviously, there are certain industries that are not performing as they were expected to perform. Does this reflect the fact that certain large industries there were hit badly in particular markets? Is there some weakness of a general kind affecting the estate as a whole? If so, is there anything we can do about it? We should not allow to develop a situation in which the Shannon Industrial Estate faces this kind of set-back without having some indication of the reasons and of what action we may take to remedy the situation. It is surprising that more has not been made of this. We are entitled to ask the reason for this pattern.

It is instructive to consider these targets. The purpose of having targets is to be able to go back afterwards and see how performance has been and to try to establish, when performance does not match target, whether there is a defect in the formulation of the target or whether it reflects the fact that something has gone wrong, that our policies have been ineffective or whether it indicates a need to change policy. The main benefit of a system of targets in a mixed economy like ours is that it enables us to review policy and pinpoint those policies that have failed. If there is some problem at Shannon that we can identify now, we ought to be told what it is and what we can do to help. All of us value this industrial estate and we realise the extent of its contribution to the economy. It has the merit also of showing us that it is possible in Ireland to create something new like this, that export industries can be established in a new environment and can succeed. I had a personal involvement in the estate in the early years of its development; and if there is some way in which this House can help them we should do so.

When we turn to imports, we get a rather disturbing picture. This is the one area in which the Government have maintained the target. It is not the target to which I would give priority if I had to choose. Indeed, in the case of producer capital goods the import target has been doubled. I would not worry too much about that. The figure for 1971 which must influence the three year growth pattern is very much influenced by the jumbo jets; but, even allowing for that, if we look at the other figures we find that they are much closer to target than they ought to be when everything else is behind target. In the case of materials for further production the figure is 17.2 per cent as against 19.8 per cent projected. The fact that imports have performed "fairly well"—in inverted commas—and exports badly is not something we can overlook.

Here we have the first concrete signs of the way in which the inflation of costs in this country is likely to erode our competitiveness and, ultimately, undermine the value of our currency. We have gone on too long believing that we can get away with this, believing that it is possible to continue indefinitely inflated costs. We have been misled by the underlying dynamism of our exports. For so long we failed to tap our export potential and when we did so in the 1960s we got a sustained growth of exports. This has misled us into thinking that the inflation of costs has not been hitting us. The truth is that the natural growth of exports in a country like Ireland, which is so underdeveloped as a result of Government inaction in the past, is very high and is such that it can be undermined to a significant degree by excessive cost increases and yet get a continuing growth that is significant. Because we are getting a growth in exports of 21 per cent over three years we could cod ourselves that such growth is adequate. It is not adequate for a developing country like ours. It is far below what we ought to be getting and the fact that it is so low for a country like Ireland indicates that our exports are being undermined by cost increases.

The growing and rapidly growing increase in the import share, which is so well set out and which one can derive so easily from the Industrial Review Table at the back of this report, is another disturbing feature. Taking the years 1966 to 1971 this table shows that in 1966 the share of competing imports in home consumption was 15½ per cent, that is, £104 million out of £650 million. Last year, however, it was over 20 per cent, that is, £227 million out of £1,100 million. An erosion of our position in the home market to the extent of just over 20 per cent in five years is disturbing.

I know there are people who will say this is due to free trade and to some small degree it is, but we should not cod ourselves with that. There is a great danger we shall use free trade as an alibi for our own deficiencies. If you examine the import pattern item by item and take each category of imports, if you divide them into competitive and non-competitive and break them down into imports from Britain and other countries, you can see very clearly that in most categories there is no evidence that the free trade area has had much effect, for the very good reason that in a number of cases the preferential margin possibly was not originally very large.

Whatever the reason, in a number of cases it can be seen that the increased imports that have occurred in this period have been equally if not even more from foreign countries than from Britain. You can hardly attribute an increase in imports to the free trade area if the imports are not coming from Britain but are coming from somewhere else. If one narrows it down to the particular sectors of products in respect of which the import increase is coming from Britain, one finds that the amount involved is quite small in the context of what we are talking about. I think it fair to say that of the five percentage points increase in the import content in these five years you could not attribute more than from 1¼ to 2 percentage points to the freeing of trade. I am not sufficiently expert to narrow it down within that range but adopting two approaches that will yield maximum and minimum figures it lies within that range. Therefore, between 3 and 3¾ percentage points of the five point increase in the import content is attributable to other factors, including the secular trend towards an increase in consumption of imports as living standards rise. However, the secular trend up to 1966 was giving us a half point annual increase.

It is quite evident that if you take out the secular trend towards a higher import content, if you take out the free trade effects of these years, you are left with another factor, something new that has crept in, a factor which is increasing fairly rapidly the import content of home consumption. What that is must be, perhaps, a matter of speculation, but I do not believe it is a coincidence that this new factor leading to a higher import content beyond anything that can be accounted for by other factors such as free trade has happened precisely in the period when our labour costs have risen out of line with the labour costs in other countries, especially in Britain. It is difficult to establish cause and effect in economic matters, but I think it is connected with that.

I believe we have seen here in this period the beginning of a development which could be very serious indeed. One could put figures on it and say that today certainly some £20 million, perhaps £25 million or £30 million worth of goods in this country that have been bought by Irish people are foreign goods that would not have been bought and that Irish goods would have been bought in their places if the cost relationship had been maintained. On the import side it is possible to arrive at a rough calculation of the effects and to say that something like £20 million upwards of home-manufactured goods have been displaced by imports because of the disimprovement in labour costs over and above other factors such as the freeing of trade.

Again on the export side, when one sees a slowing down of growth which again must account for something like £10 million to £20 million, I think one can make an informed judgment that overall the erosion of our cost position in the last few years has cost something like £30 million to £40 million in production. When we convert that into employment we are talking of quite a few thousand jobs, jobs that have been lost in some cases through redundancy, in other cases because people who could have been employed were not employed to produce more because the markets were not there any longer at home or abroad.

In any assessment of the proper trend of future incomes by anybody, employers, trade unions or anybody else, account must be taken of this phenomenon. The trade union movement has a responsibility not only to its present members but to the children of its members, to those who could be its future members, through policies of moderation and income growth to maintain and increase employment. In the last few years there has been a tendency for all the emphasis to be put on higher incomes for those who have jobs, and this has already disemployed quite a few thousand people and led to a failure to employ others who would have been employed in making this £30 million or £40 million worth of goods if there had not been this erosion of our cost structure.

Our trade union movement should feel that its responsibility extends beyond its present membership to those who have not yet entered the labour force, those who have had to exclude themselves from it by emigrating. If its policies took account of the interests of those people and not merely of present employees, this could contribute considerably to the alleviation of emigration and the growth of employment in Ireland.

Is the Deputy not aware that the trade union movement have shown a certain interest in their members and in future members by agreeing to rounds of wage increases which would have been larger had they not gone into employer-management conferences and agreed to figures which, if the stronger unions wanted to press them, would have been much larger?

Yes. A good deal has been done. Undoubtedly the attempt to reach agreement, which was successful last time, and the loyalty with which the trade unions have stuck to the agreements they have made are constructive elements in the situation, but the inflationary pressures have become such that, even with the trade unions acting as responsibly as they have done, they have failed to check the growth in incomes. The wage rounds that have been negotiated have been of such a character, despite the efforts of those concerned, as to run beyond what we can afford and to undermine employment prospects. It is not that those concerned have not tried, but they are faced with great pressures.

Once this cycle starts, once you get any excessive increases in income producing an excessive increase in prices, inevitably workers demand that the wage increases should match the price increases. Can you blame them? Now that we have a 10 per cent price increase in two successive years and a wage round coming up for negotiation after a period of 18 months, it will not be easy for any trade union official to say to workers that they should accept less than 15 per cent for an 18-month period, because to them anything less would appear to undermine their living standards. This can be a vicious cycle which you cannot get out of. I am not seeking to criticise those who have done their best to get out of it. We have all got into this position. We have all created pressures and demands to which the economy has responded, to which employers and trade unions have responded. I would not for one moment fail to pay tribute to the work that has been done, but it is simply inadequate. It is a matter of fact—it is not an accusation—that many thousands of people would be employed here today had incomes not risen to the extent they have. If we can manage to control that in future we can achieve a much faster growth of employment and a reduction in emigration. If we cannot control it, then this spiralling situation of inflation, of falling employment and rising emigration, will continue and get worse. We have a duty here to do something about this situation. We must do all we can to help trade unions to tackle this problem in the way in which they have been trying to tackle it.

Going on to look at the targets I ask: who has lost? Output has not risen at the rate at which it was proposed. We are producing less today than we had proposed to produce and expected to produce. Who then is worse off as a result? Where have the cuts come? They really have not come because what we have done is, to the extent that we have not produced extra, we have simply imported from abroad and increased our external deficit. We have not tightened our belts to correspond to the reduction in the growth of output. In fact, the one thing that is almost dead on target is domestic expenditure. The total amount of domestic expenditure is very close to target and to the extent that we have increased our expenditure at the planned rate and have not increased our output, which is much less than the planned rate, we have a larger external deficit.

But, even within this domestic expenditure which is on target, there are divergences which are interesting and to which attention should be drawn. Who has lost out within this overall growth of total? We have had a rather bigger increase in capital formation, in investment than, in fact, was planned; we have had a bigger increase, too, in the volume of expenditure by the public authorities on what can be called public consumption and because the total domestic expenditure has risen more or less on target, these two have been at the expense of personal consumption. The level of personal consumption in 1971 was lower than planned. Although we did spend the same amount globally, because it cost us more to run the country, the volume of activity involved and the using up of goods and services in running the country outran the target because we failed to control the growth of public expenditure in the public service and failed to keep it on target. The one thing you would think the public services would be able to do is to keep their own expenditure on target. We failed to do that and because we invested more— not a bad thing in itself—there has been a failure to increase living standards at the planned rate.

Incidentally, let me point out that in Table D, the table I am referring to, on page 31, it is a matter of regret that, unlike the other tables, figures are not given either for the annual rate of growth or the total amount of growth from year to year over the three-year period, nor is a figure given comparing the 1971 level of performance with the actual level of expenditure, with the planned amount. All these are carefully suppressed and the table is presented in a way which is designed to make it difficult to see the truth. What is done in the table—if you compare it, for example with Table A, you will see the difference immediately—is to give figures for 1968 and to translate these into percentages of total GNP and then to give what the percentages of the GNP should have been in 1971 and what they actually were.

If one wants to find out what happened one has to go back and find the planned and actual GNP rates, which you can get, of course, in Table A, and then apply to each of these the percentages to find out what the figures are. I do not think Deputies should be put to this kind of detective work. This table should be presented in the same plain language as Table A is presented in. It should not be necessary for me to do all that work and to write in the figures myself in order to find out what I have just told the House, which you could not know unless you did this calculation, that what has happened, in fact, has been that domestic expenditure has been more or less on target but that the public service has spent more on itself, in volume terms, that there has been more capital formation and that consumption is below target.

I hope I have done my calculations correctly—if I have not, the fault lies with those who made it necessary for me to do the calculation—but, as I calculate it, there should have been £828 million personal consumption at 1968 prices; there was £808 million. So, we are about 2½ per cent below. Living standards today are 2½ per cent short of the target. It should not need that kind of arithmetic, or that kind of detective work, to show that. If the Government, through the failure of their policies, have left us 2½ per cent less well off than we should be, O.K. they should have the guts to say so and not suppress and hide this figure in the table. It tells us the output figures all right but when it comes to the expenditure they are carefully hidden.

That is, in fact, what has happened. It is consumption that has been hit and I would like to hear the Minister on the reasons for the excessive growth of public consumption, expenditure in the public service, the using up of goods and services in running the country. Why has that grown more than the target? There are two possible reasons obviously. The first is the public service failed to take adequate account of the increase in its own activities that would be necessary; the planning was bad; or else their control was bad and they have failed to keep this expenditure to the planned level. It should be referred to.

Unfortunately, this debate takes an unhappy form. It is a debate on the budget and we have to talk about the budget and I have spoken about it and I will be returning more precisely to it. It is also a general economic debate in which you talk about the capital programme, in which you talk about the Third Programme and the rest of it. The Minister's opening speech does not tell us anything about these things and very often his speech in reply says even less. It is unsatisfactory.

A debate of this kind should be one in which the Minister comes to the House and discusses the way the national economy has gone, how the Third Programme has evolved, how the economic policies pursued by the Government are working out and in which we discuss them and he comes back at the end and answers. We can make it that kind of debate in part but we have no guarantee that there will be any response from the other side. There certainly is little evidence in the Minister's opening speech that he thinks in these terms. I hope there will be more evidence in his closing speech and I hope the issues I am now raising, which are directly relevant, will be dealt with in the reply but, judging on past performance, I am not confident that they will be.

Other targets are set out in Table 32 to deal with population and employment. They are worth looking at also. The population growth has been rather less than was expected. In view of the fact that the population in April last year was already "benefiting" from the reduction in emigration due to lack of job opportunities in Britain and that some of these people, possibly 10,000 or so at that time, were enforced residents, staying at home unemployed because they could not get jobs elsewhere, the population was artificially boosted by 10,000 or more. It is odd that even with that extra boost of more unemployed sitting at home waiting for jobs to turn up abroad because they could not get employment at home, our population was 39,000 below the target figure. To me that suggests the target may have been too high in the first instance. I am puzzled by such a discrepancy in those circumstances.

Apart from the shortfall in employment, we have other shortfalls here that are worth commenting on. Employment is slightly down on the target. Let us look at unemployment. What unemployment did the Government expect there would be in this country in 1971 when they prepared their Third Programme? According to themselves, they thought there would be 44,000 people unemployed. There were—we are talking of April last year now—68,000. Even a year ago—and it has got worse since—unemployment was more than 50 per cent above the target. That is not a very satisfactory performance. I know that some of it is due to causes outside the Government's control. About 10,000 or so were people who would in the ordinary way have emigrated but who did not do so because they could not get jobs elsewhere. Even allowing for that extraneous factor outside the Government's control, the level of employment is well down on what it ought to be and what the Government planned it to be and what it could have been if different policies had been pursued over those three years.

When one goes on, then, to look at other tables such as the table on page 61 showing the annual growth of the various components of current public expenditure, one again comes across rather remarkable disparities between what has happened and what was planned. I have already referred to the excessive growth of public expenditure, by which I mean, not transfer payments, not subsidies, but the actual cost of running the country, which is directly under the Government's control. Apparently, according to the figures on this page, the Government thought it would cost about 3¾ per cent more each year to run the country, in volume terms, not just money terms, but allowing for price changes. In fact, it cost them 6¾ per cent more—almost double the rate. That is a remarkable miscalculation. To underestimate by 50 per cent the increased cost of doing their own work seems to be a curious error. One would have thought that the one area in which the Government could plan their own affairs would be in their own affairs. I can quite see that when it comes to the general economy, not so much under the Government's own tight control, things can go wrong but when it comes to the public sector, the Government decide how many people are employed, the Government plan how many people to employ and decide whether or not to depart from that plan.

Why was the plan so wrong or why did the Government depart so much from it? It is not because the volume of economic activity has grown so much more rapidly than planned that we need so many more public servants to look after us. On the contrary, all that has happened has been that output has fallen short of performance. Why we should need more volume of public control and public service activity to control less activity in the economy is mysterious. It suggests either very poor planning in that sector or very poor control, or perhaps a bit of both. It is highlighted very much in this table and I would like the Minister to comment on this particularly.

The other thing which is very evident in this table is the failure to make adequate provision in the Third as in the Second Programme for transfer payments which, of course, apply mainly to social welfare benefits. The Government planned to increase these by 6.9 per cent per annum. That was a bit better than in the previous programme in which the Government, back in 1963, planned to reduce the share of transfer payments of national output, to keep them rising more slowly than national output. The difference was not great but there was a difference which ensured that the less well-off benefited less from growth. The proportion of transfer payments planned for 1970 was below the level of 1966. At the time it struck me as curious and it was one of my main criticisms of the Second Programme.

The Government have ignored their own plans in this regard. Transfer payments rose more rapidly and, realistically, in this programme they decided to make some provision for improvement in the transfer payments but they underestimated them. I am not criticising them for going beyond that figure; I think it is right they did so. However, I think the lesson of the Second Programme should have been learned and the provision for transfer payments should have been more adequate. To try to fool themselves and everyone else that a 6.9 per cent annual increase in transfer payments would give a desirable measure of redistribution was ridiculous. The failure to maintain that, and the fact that the figure nearly doubled, at an 11.8 per cent per annum increase, is a measure of the weakness of Government planning in this sector.

With regard to subsidies we have managed to spend less than planned because agriculture progressed rather better than expected. Curiously, national debt interest has risen less than planned, possibly because interest rates have fallen in the last few years. Nothing in the Minister's speech refers to these matters. There is no debate during the year in which any Minister ever tells us about the Third Programme. The Government hide the programme and the results in this book hoping that Deputies will not read it.

These programmes are dropped into the lap of the public every four or seven years and the Government hope nobody will notice them after that. We have prodded them during the years to the point where they now publish a progress report. No adequate progress reports were published on the Second Programme measuring performance against targets but at least we have prodded them into producing these reports now. However, they are too ashamed of the results to refer to them. There should be a debate every year on the economic programme in which the Minister could tell us why he underestimated the need for transfer payments to such a degree, and why public service expenditure has risen at double the planned rate. These are not unimportant matters that can be brushed aside. They are matters the Dáil should debate. A debate needs two sides; I can raise matters here but it is not a debate if the Minister does not refer to these matters in his open ing speech or develop them in his closing speech. I hope I have prodded him into doing this by these remarks so that we may have a genuine economic debate.

With regard to the public capital programme, the deficiencies of Government planning mesmerise me. The Government provided a little more in the capital programme for housing, health and education. However, having provided the money they did not spend it. The Government's antipathy to spending money on housing, in particular, the manner in which they have held down the housing programme to half the rate obtaining in Northern Ireland and in other European countries, the manner in which the housing backlog has been allowed to grow, with consequent misery for many people, is one of the most extraordinary features of the Government's policy. Even if they were not concerned about the human misery this policy creates, one would have thought that in political terms they would have been sensitive to it. By stressing the need for housing we prodded the Government into making provision for it but they have not spent the money.

In order to hide this from us, or to make it difficult for us to notice it, the Government produce a table of figures. The table contains figures for the years 1968-69 and 1969-70. In 1969-70 there are figures for the actual performance and projection; in 1971-72 there are actual performance figures but the projection is carefully dropped and we are given a projection for 1972-73 to make the comparison difficult. The only purpose of this table is to tell us the performance under these headings against the projections. We do not know why the Government omitted the projection for 1971-72 and inserted figures for 1972-73 but I am making the bold step of interpolating between the projection for 1970-71 and 1972-73 figures halfway between the two on the assumption that I cannot go too far wrong.

My calculations must be close to the projection for 1971-72. I find that the projection for housing, education and health capital expenditure in 1971-72 must have been about £53 million. I base this calculation on the fact that it was £50 million in 1970-71 and £56½ million in 1972-73. However, the Government spent £47.4 million—something like 11 to 13 per cent less than the planned amount. There has been less spent on education, health and housing. Whatever about health where there may have been spending of the target amount, in the case of housing and education the Government did not spend the money provided.

With regard to education there has been a determined cutback in educational expenditure. There has been a tight control on the capital side; the backlog of school building and university construction is increasing. If the Government had failed to provide for these matters in their programme, if they found difficulty in obtaining extra money, one could understand the problem. However, that is not the case. Under pressure from the Opposition the Government provided the money but they will not spend it. We are entitled to know why money is not spent which is provided for in the programme. There must be some reason for this but no hint is given. The matter is never referred to by any Minister; in fact, Ministers never come in here and tell us how their performance compares with the programme. Indeed, for the whole row of benches over there the programme does not exist. As far as they are concerned it is produced, it is dropped in our laps, and they forget all about it.

I remember some years ago the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries mentioned a target figure for cattle output in one of their reports. I remember finding such a reference in one year but apart from that when the Ministers produce their Estimates in this House the programme does not exist. I believe many of the Ministers do not know the programme exists, they never inquire what money is set aside for them. They think only in terms of the annual budget and they are quite unaware that money is provided for many items in the programme.

Naturally I do not know what happens at Government meetings but in talking to Ministers, either publicly or privately, I have not got the impression that, for instance, the Minister for Local Government will bang the table and demand that he should have whatever money is set aside for his Department in the programme. Somehow I do not think Cabinet meetings work like that. Ministers appear to put the programme out of their minds and they speak in old-fashioned terms about the annual budget. I do not think economic planning has ever impinged on the Government or that it means anything to them. Yet, it is meant to be the over-all control of the economy, of economic growth and planning. It is the weapon by which a co-ordinated and economic policy is pursued but it does not seem to play any part in the minds of the Government.

It is interesting to note that this underspending applies also to other buildings and construction. On the capital side the social programme is comprised under the headings of housing, education and health and there are other items under building construction. The economic part of the programme is under agriculture, forestry, fisheries, industry, fuel, power, telecommunications. Under those headings the Government have spent more than planned but, as has been the practice of this Government for 15 years, they have played down the social capital side and have not even spent what they allocated for this purpose.

I know it is a fiction to talk of the Government allocating money as if the Government had anything to do with preparing the programme but they put their names to it. I presume the matter comes up at some Government meeting and the programme is passed round the table before it is put away for the next four years. Formally it is their responsibility but, having set the money aside by endorsing the programme, they are careful never to spend the money if it is on social capital.

This Government came to office 15 years ago when there was a belief that there had been overspending on the social capital side. The whole philosophy of the First Programme was to divert spending into productive investment and growth. To some degree that policy was justified. We cannot now, looking back, believe the things that were then said about our social capital needs having been fulfilled; that was nonsense, of course, but nonetheless a shift in emphasis towards productive investment was necessary to get economic growth going. I am afraid that this Government, coming to power at that time, became so bogged down in the concept of economic growth and the need to stimulate it and were so mesmerised by the idea that the Coalition Government had overspent on housing and hospitals because of their concern for the needs of the people, that they got stuck in this mould. They are still playing the same old record of 1957 in their minds at Cabinet meetings, still thinking in terms that this country cannot afford social capital expenditure. Even when their own public servants set aside the money the Government will not spend it. There is still the old hair-shirt mentality that we must be careful not to spend on the social capital side; it could be dangerous.

This Government do not realise that they have presided over 15 years of economic growth—much thanks to them, but they have. They were in a period when, while the growth rate may have been inadequate at least it was a period of expansion in which extra resources became available, during which, as a result of economic growth, new social problems were created—congestion in the cities and the housing problem getting worse. Yet, after 15 years the Government still do not provide 60 per cent of the volume of local authority housing that was being provided 20 years ago. That is a figure which bears repetition. I am not one to refer back to the past; I do not believe it helps in debates here to quote backwards and forwards, who did what in 1957 or in 1922, but it is legitimate to bring forward certain facts, not to make party claims for one party or another but to make a valid economic point. To me it is a valid economic point that the Government in power in 1950 —the inter-Party Government; I am not stressing that—built 8,000 local authority houses. If in that year we could afford, without bankrupting the country, and we did not do that, to build 8,000 local authority houses then today, when the country's national output is two-thirds higher than in 1950, why are we building only 5,000?

That cannot be justified. As a result of that failure and the determined policy of the Government to keep down local authority building and to put the whole emphasis on private sector building there is misery in the cities that need not and should not exist, misery which we can afford to alleviate and will not alleviate so long as this Government remain there because they are a Government born in the misery of 1957 and were never able to visualise what economic growth means or to plan for it or even to take advantage of it. In that respect, as in certain others, the Government have outlived their usefulness. Certainly, when one sees these figures and the record of what they have done with their provisions for spending on housing and education and health one can see that they are a Government bankrupt in ideas and in any social concern, unwilling even to make use of the resources at their command to alleviate these social problems.

In another form the figures are presented later on in the last of the tables to which I wish to refer the House, the table on social development on page 66. This figure represents the total public expenditure under various headings. I take it this is public expenditure, both capital and current; it is not entirely clear to me but perhaps I have not read the text closely enough. Let us look at what has happened over this period between 1968 and 1972 when the Government planned to increase spending on education by 8½ per cent per annum. They have not increased it by even 5 per cent. The cut-back on educational spending, taking public and private together, has been something of the order of 40 per cent. They are underspending by 40 per cent their own provision for education. We know how it is done—by issuing instructions to hold back capital expenditure, not to build schools or provide the extra school places which are needed.

On health, they have overspent. Here, there has either been under-provision in the original plan for a 5 per cent annual growth rate or failure to control expenditure. Some of us suspect the latter. When we see some things like the 50 per cent increase in voluntary hospital charges there is something wrong. Nothing should ever increase by 50 per cent in one year. We know we are in a period of inflation which the Government have unleashed on the country; we know that consumer prices are rising by 10 per cent per annum but when bus charges go up 50 per cent, as happened I think last year, and hospital charges go up by 50 per cent, something is wrong. There is some lack of control when increases of that magnitude occur. The health figure here is certainly disturbing.

When we come back to housing and sanitary services the Government had a modest plan for a 5.1 per cent annual increase in the volume of provision for housing and sanitary services. Instead, they cut this back to 2.8 per cent per annum. Here, when we look at the overall picture for housing, as when we look at housing and the general social capital provision heading in the capital programme, we see the same thing, a cut-back under housing and sanitary services. This is the record of this Government which they will be forced, if they issue a progress report in this form, to reveal, a policy of making certain provisions, not seriously nor with any intent to carry them through and then cutting them back but always concentrating their cuts in the social sphere and, above all, in education and housing. It is in those areas that the heavy hand of this Government falls and it is in those areas that they are not spending the money which they provided themselves.

That is the Government's record in the Third Programme. I have adhered strictly to the facts. I have taken every figure from the Government's own publication. They may have been in my words at times but there has been no misrepresentation, no attempt to distort, just the bare facts of what the Government have done and not done. It is a record of which any Government should rightly be ashamed.

When we look at the budget itself we see again the failure to appreciate the reality of the social problem. When we look at the amounts provided under the heading of social benefits, most of the increases are in the range of 10-12 per cent. For those over 80, it is more because there are very few over 80 and the Government can afford to do more and hope to get credit in that particular area. I am glad they did but the fact that they had to confine the larger increases to those over 80 does not encourage us very much. For the ordinary person on unemployment assistance or the deserted wife, or a widow on a non-contributory basis, or an old age pensioner, what increase was given? The basic increase was from £4.65 to £5.15 which is as near as could be to 10 per cent. What was the increase in the cost of living last year? 10 per cent.

The Government's policy in this budget has been to keep these people at the existing level with no share in national growth such as it has been, and it has been very poor in the past two years under this Government. No part of that increase goes to those people. They are to be given just enough to compensate for the increase in the cost of living but no more. There is no question of them getting any share. It is all very well for the wealthy; they can get away with it. Indeed, the tax relief benefits everybody—not just those who are well-off —if they are sufficiently well-off to pay taxation. They will get more but for the people on social benefit there is just enough to keep them where they were a year ago. They must not be allowed to get their heads above water or at any stage to be even 3, 4 or 5 per cent better off than they were last year. None of the increment in growth is to be allocated to them. That is the record; I am not exaggerating; those are the facts. Anybody can calculate that from £4.65 to £5.15 is an increase of 10 per cent.

Anybody can see that the consumer price index has risen by 10 per cent in precisely this period, from February to February, and these are the figures we have got. That means a nil improvement in living standards for these people.

This is the budget about which they are trumpeting on the Government side of the House, saying that it is a wonderful budget doing wonderful things. If all the Government can do is keep old age pensioners at the same level as they were before without increasing taxation, if that is the height of their imagination and if that is a wonderful Fianna Fáil budget, I think it is a bad Fianna Fáil budget.

I think there is need for a fundamental review of our whole social welfare system. As it stands at the moment it is full of holes. It is riddled with them and we are trying to patch them. The provision for deserted wives is a patching-up operation. God knows they badly needed it. That stops only one hole. There are others.

There are people living on very small fixed incomes which do not rise at all, people whose living standards are continually declining. There are women living on their own in this country earning the very meagre wages given to women in this country. We have already committed ourselves to equal pay for equal work and I do not intend to comment on it at this stage. I am talking about single women workers who are not girls living at home with their parents. They are living in private rented accommodation paid for out of their wages. I have had a look at figures for women workers. The latest I could get were those for 1968 but if you project them forward to the present time you will get a realistic picture. Almost 40 per cent of adult women workers, almost half of all women workers, are living on wages of £12 per week or less.

What do we do for such women? First of all, even in this year more than half of those women are paying income tax. Do they get anything in return for what they give to the State? No. If they survive to the age of 65 they may end up in old people's accommodation but until they reach that magic age there is no public accommodation in this city for them because under the present Government's system of providing housing in this city no single person can get accommodation, no married couple can get accommodation, no married couple with one child can get accommodation and when a married couple have a second child they are exiled to Ballymun and to nowhere else, and it is only when they reach the stage of having a third child that they have any hope of getting decent public accommodation elsewhere.

But the single woman at the bottom of the heap can never get accommodation. She has to find a room for herself somewhere, private accommodation. She will not get that room today except in the range of £4 to £6 a week. She finds it hard enough to get it in that range. If she takes a room in a collapsing tenement in which she may fear for her life, as I know from the Fenian Street incident, there will be cracks in the walls which may give rise perhaps to unreasoning fears of collapse. She can see the daylight coming through the walls. In such a building she might get a room at £4 a week. If she does not she is paying £5 or £6 a week out of what is left of her £12 after paying income tax. Half of those women pay income tax on that wage. Remember we are talking about 40 per cent of all adult women workers in the country in the under £12 group, half of whom are paying income tax, none of whom can get any housing whatsoever, none of whom will get housing for less than £4 a week unless they happen to have inherited a corporation flat from parents. Perhaps an only child might be so lucky but if there are other children in the family who are married they are more likely to get hold of the accommodation.

The women I am talking about are not in that category. They have to find their own accommodation and this will take between one-third or half of their income, indeed more than that if we take what is left after they pay income tax. That is the way we treat our women workers in this country. At no stage do we tackle their problems. First of all we do not relieve them of tax. We make no distinction between the girl who has a job at £8 or £10 a week living with her parents, who pays her bit of tax, comes home and has some money to spend, and the woman who has to accommodate herself. There is no income tax provision for that. Secondly, we absolutely refuse to house her. We tell her she can live her whole life to the age of 65 and we will never house her under present policy.

That policy has gone on a long time. Fifteen years is a long time and it is 15 years since such a woman in this city could possibly get housing. It was at the end of the days of the inter-Party Government when housing was available. We admit there was very high emigration and I do not deny that was a factor in it. Such a woman might have got accommodation then but she could not in the last 15 years, and for the foreseeable future she cannot. Nobody in this House can tell her she has any hope of ever getting housing accommodation. She has to find her own accommodation and pay exorbitant rent in a market where accommodation is short and where the Government do not even encourage the provision of private accommodation for renting. In the peculiar way the rent control operates, it discourages it.

Is there any way such a woman can be helped? Not if she has a job. If she is sick, yes, but if she is healthy she gets nothing. She is not a widow or a deserted wife. There is no social system for such a person. Home assistance —I doubt it. I doubt whether if she goes to a home assistance officer she will get much help if she has a job paying £12 a week. There is no way out for her. We have her trapped in a situation in which there is no hope of ever getting out. No scheme we have makes any provision for such a person. The tragedy is that is only one example. I could give many others.

The truth is that our social welfare system is a patchwork which has been higgledy-piggledy put together over 50 years to meet ad hoc problems here and there. As I have said, it is riddled with holes and in those holes live people in misery and there is not the slightest sign of anything being done to get them out. I will come later to the description of the Department of Social Welfare in the Devlin Report. They are described as the Department which, whatever they do, they have nothing to do with welfare—they are concerned with handling social security payments.

What we must have in order to deal with such situations is some kind of minimum incomes scheme. We must now tackle the problem of poverty not in this patchwork way, leaving all these holes, but on the basis that, whatever else we do, we will ensure that everybody in the country has a certain minimum amount on which he can live. If we cannot provide our people with accommodation, if our system is so incapable of adjusting itself to the need to fit them into public accommodation, then minimum income will have to take account of rent so that if people are paying exorbitant rents they will have to be helped to pay them. In Britain under a Tory Government that is being done but under our Torier than Tory Government there is no thought of it.

There will have to be a system of minimum incomes. In Britain it is a supplementary benefit scheme. Then, whether it is a single woman on a low wage paying a high rent or somebody on a small fixed income, everybody must be assured of a certain basic minimum to live on.

We have got the pensioners as well. They may face the same problems but many of them will be in corporation accommodation at low rents. There are, of course, some pensioners who are not in such accommodation and who cannot get it, but there is at least a scheme to provide accommodation for them. It has broken down in the last year or two. I remember the time when if you found an old lady living on her own in a collapsing dwelling and if you went to the corporation they could fit her in in a matter of days. That has come to an end because the backlog has become so enormous and there has been total failure to cope with it. I have not been able to find accommodation for an elderly person for some time past. However, there is a decent scheme and perhaps we will get back to the point where there is some hope for such people.

There are the groups for whom there is no hope. We must have both an adequate housing system, which we will not have as long as this Government are there—I am utterly convinced of that because I am as cynical about the Government's attitude to housing as they are towards housing —but we must also have a different approach to our welfare scheme. Indeed what we need is a completely different approach to the redistribution of income. We have got stuck in a rut with this system, and I use the word system in inverted commas because to call the haphazard jumble of schemes a system is to pay it a compliment it does not deserve. It has been virtually unchanged for decades. In the 15 years of Fianna Fáil rule the only reforms I can recall are the retirement pensions, introduced very early on, which had been planned by the previous Government, and the occupational injuries scheme. Of course recently, because of pressure from us, we got the deserted wives scheme.

Apart from these there have been no changes at all. The old system of redistribution remains without any real alterations. Why? Standing back from the political situation and forgetting about which Government are in power and who is to blame, the fundamental reason is because Governments, any Government, feel constrained by the problem of raising additional money through taxation. Basically, redistribution is something which should be possible in any society on any scale the society considers necessary. It ought to be possible to achieve any redistribution of income that you want by provisions for taxation and transfer payments. If we have not got that here it is because on the one hand of the pressure of vested interests, those who have. Those who have jobs do not want to give up some of the money they earn to help those who have not.

It is not just the pressures from vested interests. It is because money has to be raised by taxation and if you look at taxes you are faced with the fact that if you increase income tax you will affect the incentive to work and if you increase expenditure taxes you will inflate prices, thereby pushing wage claims. They are the constraints that are standing in the way of a policy of redistribution, a policy of the kind which many people would like to see. Indeed many would be prepared to contribute towards it. However, because of these technical limitations which we have not been able to get over we have not been able to achieve an adequate system of redistribution.

I think we have to consider tackling this problem in a number of different ways. There must be more selectivity. I know that selectivity is a bad word and I know that means test is a bad term. Funnily enough, there is one means test that we do not object to, that we do not find humiliating—the income tax means test. When we fill up an income tax form, declare our income and a certain sum is taken from us we resent paying the tax but we do not feel humiliated because more tax or less tax is taken from us than from somebody else. I never heard anybody complain that he was not taxed as much as somebody else and humiliated and discriminated in that way. It is not a point of view which is normal among the general public.

Selectivity through the tax system is completely accepted and I think we have to use it more ingeniously. I will say for this Government that they have taken up an idea which we put forward in our social policy in 1969 of linking the two children's allowance systems by at least trying to ensure that some of the increases in children's allowances are adjusted or taken back in the case of income tax payers by adjustments in the income tax child allowance. That is the kind of policy which we want to see and which we have proposed.

We could, perhaps, be more ingenious about this. We have to bear in mind the fact that of the total amount of money that is raised in this country for redistribution and transfer a lot of it finds its way back into the pockets of the people who initially contributed. I see no great benefit in a tax system which takes some hundreds of pounds off Mr. X in income tax and then gives him some hundreds of pounds back in the form of university fee reductions, the grants system to universities that enables fees to be reduced from £500 to £100, so that if I am well enough off to pay a £100 fee I get access to the Government's £400 contribution to reduce the cost. If I have not got the £100 fee, I do not.

That is a discriminatory system. The effect of this system of direct grants to universities discriminates in favour of the middle classes and that is why it is carried on so long here. It suits the middle classes. That is a system under which I am taxed. The money taken off me is paid to the universities. They reduce their fees and I get my children into the university at a fraction of what the full fee is. That system under which money goes round in a circle and back to me is very nice for me but it is a very inefficient system.

Of course, because a fair proportion of the money raised in taxation pursues this circular course the level of taxation must be higher than it need be. If all the people who are getting money back, as well as paying income tax, whether through mortgage interest, the university fee system or whatever it may be, did not get the money back and did not get the tax taken off them, if the two were netted out of the system, the level of taxation would be lower and we would not be faced with the people saying: "Oh, you cannot increase taxes any further, they are so high already."

The system under which we take more money off people than we need to transfer to the less privileged, give it back to the same people and then say: "Of course, the level of taxation is so high that we cannot increase it for the sake of the poor" is a lunatic system. You could not describe it as anything else. It is the system we have in this country but we have an endless list of methods of transferring income, endless taxes taking money from us, endless ways of giving money back to us. Nobody knows how much an individual gives and gets and the individual himself does not know it. Most people, in fact, with children in university are quite unaware of the fact that they are benefiting to the tune of £400 per child through the university grant system. If you tell them they are inclined to resent the thought that they are getting anything back.

The biggest social welfare beneficiaries in this country are, in fact, not the poor. They do not get much out of this system. Those who are the biggest beneficiaries are those with a couple of children in the university. If they can fork out £100 a year they will get £400 per child. It is the effect of the system, the way it works. That kind of system where the biggest transfer payments are to the well-to-do and the smallest to the poor is a topsy-turvy system which we should not tolerate. Yet, we carry on with it and nobody finds anything odd about it. In fact, I am regarded as rather eccentric at times for drawing attention to this phenomenon so ingrained have we become in relation to our conservative and middle-class prejudices in favour of the existing system of distribution.

We have to rethink this system. We have to try to net out of it those transfers which go round in circles, try to reduce the burden of taxation caused by taking money from people to give back to the same people and thereby leave room for increases in tax again to the level they were at previously to produce more money to be distributed. That is the first point.

Secondly, we have to give more attention to the taxation of capital. Our present system of taxing capital through death duties is a very peculiar system. It has all the demerits that a tax can have. It is haphazard in its incidence. It can hit a family three times in a year or once in eighty years. That is a bad system of tax. It is so arranged that it is paid on average only every 29 years. The amount paid is so large when it is paid that the incentive to avoid it is enormous and the opportunities for avoidance are great. As a result, a large proportion of the tax is avoided. An economist in Britain some years ago estimated that two-thirds of estate duties are not evaded but avoided by perfectly legal methods of putting money into trust for the next generation. These avoidance systems are of benefit only to the very rich. I understand that for those whose capital is under £100,000 the disadvantages of tying it up in a trust are such and the dangers, perhaps, are such, if one is depending on this for an income, that most company lawyers advise against it.

When you have got more than £100,000 then avoidance comes into its own and it is for the very rich that it operates and it is the very rich who do not pay. The moderately rich, if you can call people with £100,000 moderately rich, have to pay estate duties.

Once you get over that figure a good company lawyer will tell you that you would be a fool to pay estate duties, that it is a waste of time. You may want to leave a moderate sum so that it is not too obvious that you have avoided it. When particulars of an estate are published and there is a nice figure of £50,000 or so people will ask: "Was the owner not well-off?" You salt the other £350,000 away through an avoidance system. The system of taxation which is open to that under which the richer you are the more you can avoid and which nobody over £100,000 need pay the tax is a mad system of taxation to begin with.

We need to reconsider that system and to find another way around it. I have sympathy with many people paying death duties, such as the small farmer and the shopkeeper whose property may have to be divided up on death because of the system and the way it operates. We have to try to get around that problem. I have sympathy, above all, with the wife who is faced with paying estate duty on her husband's estate. No widow should have to pay estate duty. These are areas in which reform is needed to alleviate. I have no sympathy with those who pay no estate duty: they avoid it all because they are rich enough. The one legitimate source of revenue for this State above all is the people who are not now paying taxes they should be paying. If we can screw the money out of them—they are very few people but they are very wealthy people—we should do so. Quite a bit of money could be secured in that way. We have to apply our minds to that and see how capital and capital gains can be taxed more effectively.

Thirdly, when it comes to income tax one sees the difficulty of the disincentive effect. In the past we have been tempted to talk about income tax and surtax as having a disincentive effect on the manager, the particularly wealthy person. This is a psychological delusion. The man who is paying surtax at the maximum rate of 16s in the £ is the man who will almost certainly be undertaking an activity so congenial that, no matter what you tax him at, he will go on doing it. I do not think a man at that level is much worried about the disincentive effect. There can be a very disincentive effect at the level of the worker on the factory floor who is doing some overtime and finds something more than a quarter of what he earns is taken off him. This is especially so in the case of women workers, who may be less strongly motivated to work and may not need the money so much if they are living at home, as is the case of many girls.

The disincentive effect of income taxation at the level of the worker is already a serious problem. It is not easy to see how one tackles it. While I think we should attempt to make our income taxes more progressive, I am not convinced that we could not get more out of them by a reform system in which they would hit less hard in certain areas and hit harder where people can afford to pay more. I think adjustments are possible.

That leaves us with expenditure taxes. Here I think an enlightened social policy could be pursued. The difficulty about expenditure taxes is that, if you increase expenditure taxes, it pushes up prices. If you push up prices there is a demand for more wages, and that reaction is an understandable one. Could we not consider earmarking an expenditure tax, such as a value added tax, to finance social expenditure—although earmarking is out of fashion it has certain possible advantages—in such a way that any increase in that tax would go only for the purpose of improving social welfare? The trade unions would know if expenditure taxes were increased that the whole of that benefit would accrue to the social welfare categories. Would it not be possible to negotiate some kind of agreement that to the extent that the cost of living is increased at any time by an expenditure tax, because the whole of that would be going for social purposes, that it would not be used as a basis for a wage claim? If we could negotiate something of that kind we would see the possibility of moving into a period where redistribution could be much more effective than it is today. There should be some attempt also to get more in income tax from those who can afford to pay more while alleviating the impact of income tax on some who are paying more than their share. We will not get enough for a radical change in our system of redistribution unless we can break out of this problem on the expenditure tax side. Only such taxation can yield enough without disincentive effects to give the kind of money needed for an adequate redistribution policy. The moneys can only be used in that way if they are earmarked for social purposes and there is agreement with the trade unions to accept them for that purpose. This is the kind of policy we should be pursuing. We must consider our redistribution policy completely.

The level of poverty in this country today in many sectors is something which is intolerable and which is causing social unrest which, if left to fester, could undermine our society. Paradoxically, many of the people who are now talking about doing something about it are motivated by a reason which has nothing at all to do with social welfare. There will be curious irony if, after 50 years of social neglect, the stimulation to do something about this neglect comes from the possibility of reunification. People are beginning to talk about the need to raise our social welfare benefits to the Northern Ireland level in order to remove an obstacle to reunification. I am entirely in favour of this. I know we must move in that direction for this purpose and my heart is with those who are speaking in these terms. There are other reasons also. There are fundamental social reasons why it is necessary, but if the prospect of reunification gives an added impetus to this process, let us be glad of it and make use of it as an additional motivation. If we can kill two birds with one stone and bring about reunification by offering better prospects to the people of Northern Ireland so that they will not lose out too much if they join us or, ultimately, not lose at all and, at the same time, alleviate distress in this country, these are the lines we should pursue.

We must re-think our whole attitude to social policy. It must be based on getting away from the poor law mentality which meant that if somebody is out of work or sick he must be given the minimum for survival. I wonder whether, if we stood back from ourselves and from the last 50 years of social welfare, and thought out how society should be organised, what answer would the average person among us give, if he were not brainwashed into a system of being used to widows' pensions of £5.50 a week, and came fresh to the whole problem?

Let us consider this case: a man is married, with a wife and three children, and earning £30 per week. Perhaps he keeps a couple of pounds for himself and, basically, so far as the wife and children are concerned they benefit from the greater part of that income in the form of the amount spent on food, clothing and the environment of the home. Directly or indirectly, they benefit from £20 one way or the other. The man dies. On what possible grounds of equity do we then decide to reduce by two-thirds the living standards of that woman and children? We are used to thinking in these terms. In fact, we think of how good we are to give her anything. We pat ourselves on the back for giving about £7 to a deserted wife or a widow with three children. We think that we are giving her something. Society as a whole is saying to this woman: "You have lost your husband and for that crime which you have committed we will reduce your living standards by two-thirds." Looked at from any point of view, of common sense or Christianity, had we not become used to such a system because it has grown out of the poor law, Victorian system, it would be utterly intolerable to us now.

We must try to create a society in which the living standards of women and children are not dependent upon whether a husband lives or dies, is well or ill. Surely this is so in equity, common justice and Christianity. Our sights must be raised. We must get away from the caveman morality, that if one has not got a man to go out and hunt and bring home a deer, it is too bad for his wife and children and they can starve in the cave. The whole of our western European society is based on the concept of a man working and earning and keeping his family. Incomes depend on work, not upon need. Five thousand years ago that was sensible enough, but as time has gone on it is extraordinary that society accepts that standards of living should be based solely on whether women and children have a man capable of earning for them. It is extraordinary that society should accept that as a criteria of living standards for the weaker groups of the community. It goes back to the basic idea of a society where everything depends on having a man to go out and work and hunt for you. That is caveman morality. One hundred years hence people will look back at the end of the caveman period when people's lives and living standards depended, in the case of women and children, on having a man to work for them. That attitude of mind is deeply ingrained because man has had to struggle for so long to scrape a living from the land. We are finding it hard to get beyond and above that standard. We must try to do so.

Our lack of consciousness of poverty is appalling. One of the many dramatic failures in communication today is that so many decent people feel that there is no real poverty in Ireland. I have met such people and sat opposite them at the dinner table. They expressed disbelief in the existence of poverty and said it could not happen in a modern, welfare State. I tried to explain the conditions in which one-quarter of our people live. I was regarded as a crank or as somebody telling stories for entertainment at the dinner table. These were possibly stupid and anachronistic people but they were not necessarily bad people. They never had to go into a slum tenement to see the conditions under which people live. If we cannot communicate to the bulk of right-thinking, good-living people the conditions under which other people live, and alert their social consciences, then we are not doing our job. We have not done our job in this House for 50 years past. Too much complacency exists today about the social conditions in our midst. Irish politicians over the past 50 years have not done their job.

What the eye does not see the heart does not grieve over.

The eye is very careful not to see some things.

If you do not go where they are, you will not see them.

The conference in Kilkenny some time ago on poverty published an assessment that about one-quarter of our people, by any reasonable standards, live in poverty. We can argue about the percentage of our people living in such conditions, but hundreds of thousands of our people are living in poverty in a society in which there are enough resources, if they were spread around properly. Nobody need live in poverty if there was a moral system of distribution, informed by Christian morality.

The conference in Kilkenny was a million miles away from this House with its cosy assumptions that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. It is a pity that every Deputy did not hear what was said and did not hear of poverty in its new guise and not as in the old clichés in this House. If only every Deputy had been able to hear Bishop Birch speaking of the problems which he came across in looking after his people, they would have benefited. Politicians should go on a retreat at regular intervals, not an old "hell and damnation" retreat, but a retreat to revitalise their drowsy social conscience. We all need it. I found that conference a profound experience, a spiritual experience, if you like, because it brought home to me, in a way which even in my experience as a TD in some of the poorer parts of Dublin it had not been brought home to me sufficiently, the scale of the problem, and the extent to which so many people are working with goodwill to alleviate it, and the extent to which they are frustrated by the system we have built up and perpetuated.

At every level, at every point, they are frustrated. They are frustrated by Government Departments carrying out their duty to protect the public purse, their bureaucratic duty. It is their job to act impartially, and to carry out their functions. I am not blaming them. I am not criticising them. It is their job to protect the public interest and to prevent money being wasted or lost. In carrying out their functions they find themselves incapable of acting with humanity within this bureaucratic system. All those who are engaged in trying to alleviate poverty come up against this. We all know it individually in our work in dealing with our constituents. All those at the conference felt it.

There was a sense of frustration. How could they change things? Obviously change can only be effected politically. The only way you can change the system is by political decisions. They look to the politicians. They did not see very many politicians there. There were some but a very small proportion of the total. Only a certain number were invited, no doubt, and there were a few there. They look to politicians to change the system. They feel frustrated and they feel we are not doing anything. We feel the frustration—and not just in the Opposition; I think that in the backbenches on the other side of this House they feel it too. We are all in the clutches of a bureaucratic system which seems incapable of responding to human needs. None of us seems to be able to surmount it, and to get above it.

If we do not, the price will have to be paid in time. It may take time. Ours are patient people, not easily aroused, and resistant to agitation. They are too easily content with their lot. Perhaps the influence of religion has been to make people take lying down what they should, perhaps, take standing up and fighting. I do not mean fighting with violence, but fighting against injustice by agitation and by refusing to accept their lot.

We in this House so often feel ourselves incapable of changing anything, that we come eventually to accept the status quo. We are bowed down by the pressures of so many interests. The interests we have to face are largely the haves, the well organised. That is changing, of course. Now there are groups like the widows lobbying us and they are beginning to have effect. We are doing things for the widows, and other groups like that, which we did not do a few years ago, because they are getting up off their knees and making demands. There is also the example of the State pensioners looking for parity. These groups are beginning to have influence.

Until recently it was the powerful groups in the community only, the haves, who had this influence. There are still many groups, many people, many individuals, who are not in a position to exert influence upon us. As we face all these lobbies we tend to respond to the pressures upon us from those who come with a good case, well made out, and who write us and pester us with letters and generate movement of opinion. In our parties then we begin to talk about them, and in this House we begin to talk about them, and eventually the Government do something about them. That is the way the system works. It is beginning to work for some of these underprivileged groups, but not for all.

There is no organisation for deserted wives. They have got something now. The policies we put forward had their effect and the Government have made some provision for them, miserable though it is. They have not got a lobby to press for better conditions and to press their aims. Deserted wives, of their very nature, are individuals, not a group. There is no easy way for them to come together and find out about each other's problems. Indeed their problems are ones which they tend to keep to themselves in many cases. We do not get the pressure from them which we get from other groups.

What about the people who live in the conditions of Benburb Street, Corporation Street and Hollyfield Buildings, who are ground down by the system and alienated from the system. Because they have not been able to cope with the system they are incapable of organising themselves. They are the least likely in the community ever to organise and have leadership. They lack the qualities of leadership. Because they have not got the "go" in them to succeed, life has got them down. They have failed to make the grade under the pressures of society. There is no lobby for them. There are no tenants' associations in these places and, because there are not, they are the people we neglect.

We listen to NATO. We may not always do what NATO wants but we listen to powerful groups on behalf of tenants, and rightly so, because they have grievances to which we should listen. We do not hear the voices of the really submerged groups who lose out in the competition for our attention. The real underprivileged have no voice but ours on their behalf, and ours is so often raised for those well enough organised to lobby us that we fail to raise it on behalf of those who need our support.

The problems of poverty are multiple. The poverty of lack of income is the obvious one. I have dealt with income maintenance already and the need to tackle it from a different point of view: the safety net to catch the people who fall through the holes in the present system. There is also the poverty of environment, the brutalising environment of areas like Corporation Street, Benburb Street and Hollyfield Buildings and, indeed, the brutalising environment of Ballymun where we have put thousands of people to live in conditions which of their nature are dehumanising and demoralising. Of course many good people survive. The strong survive. People with strong character will survive even in those conditions.

The flats themselves are comfortable but those who cannot easily stand up to pressures find it very hard to live in the conditions they are put into. Take the case of a pregnant wife on the 17th floor when the lift is out of action and she is worrying about what will happen. It would take a strong-minded woman not to worry in those conditions. She may be coming towards the end of her pregnancy. Her labour pains may start and she is worried about how she will get down the stairs, or how will a doctor get up to her, if she is living in a flat completely cut off, with none of the friendly gregarious neighbourliness of the blocks of flats in the central city areas with all their defects. At least people are brought together there.

If her husband is out all day and she is left in isolation with her children in a couple of rooms on an upper floor, what effect will that have on her? Very serious social problems can result from this and are resulting from this. A society is growing up there which is in many respects completely alienated. We have created it. We have not just allowed it to happen as in Benburb Street. We have created it positively by a total failure to appreciate problems of social psychology and lack of proper planning. We are responsible for these plans. The Minister and this House, acting with goodwill, but with a total lack of imagination, planned this project. The Government approved it and the corporation approved it and because we all approved it this situation has been created.

There are other problems of poverty as well as the poverty of lack of income and the poverty of brutalising environment in the kind of places where we put together all the people who are not able to make out in society instead of spreading them around, a few here and a few there, where their neighbours can help them, our policy being that people who cannot pay rent must have substandard accommodation. They are the weak people in society. There may be problems of alcoholism or character defects on the part of the father and the mother and children are condemned to Benburb Street or Hollyfield Buildings. The woman who marries a man who turns out to be an alcoholic will pay the penalty and her children will pay the penalty. It is not that man's fault but it is certainly a lot less the wife's and the children's fault. Yet they are the ones we penalise. We send them to these penal settlements where there are no neighbours able to help them, because the other people there have also failed to make the grade and cannot cope with the system. They are the people who have not been able to survive.

There is also the problem of loneliness. There is the loneliness of the old age pensioner. There is the loneliness of the isolated small farmer scraping out a living on small farm without enough to eat. There are problems of poverty of which we know little.

One of the interesting papers of Kilkenny was by the American sociologist, Eileen Kane. One of the things she said to me was illuminating to me as a city dweller who has only a limited knowledge of country life. She said that the most difficult thing to find out in any social survey in Ireland is what is eaten by rural people. It is a very sensitive area. So many of them are so poor that they are living on a very poor diet to which they will not admit and to admit to eating certain foods and not being able to afford others is, apparently, in parts of rural Ireland, an admission which diminishes people in their own eyes and, they fear, in the eyes of their neighbours. Therefore, when a survey is carried out for the purpose of ascertaining the kind of diet that people have in rural Ireland we cannot get a result. There are foods which, apparently, got a bad name at a time of the Famine because they were eaten only by the very poor. People will not admit to eating these foods today. There is this poverty in a country with the highest consumption of food per head in the world. There are many people in rural Ireland, where food is grown, who do not have enough to eat and who, for reasons of self-respect, will not admit the fact.

That is a problem of poverty which we have not begun to tackle. It is one of which I was unaware until it was drawn to my attention in that particular paper. How can we arouse ourselves to tackle in unorthodox ways these problems of poverty to break out of the mould of convention, of routine? How can the public conscience be aroused sufficiently to bring us to do our duty, to create pressures sufficient to outweigh the pressures of other stronger interests? This is one of the major political issues. Perhaps it is the major political issue of our time. It is one that is all too little discussed. As I have said, the prospects of reunification with Northern Ireland may give an extra impetus to the problem; and from the point of view of social progress I am glad of that prospect as well as being glad of it from the point of view of now having some prospect of reunification at some point in the foreseeable future.

One way or other, whatever the impetus and from wherever it may come, there must be a political commitment to the underprivileged and to the provision of adequate housing. We in Fine Gael have common ground with the Labour Party in decrying the complacency of the Government. This must be made a political issue. I know there are people who say that any major social issue should not be a political one, that it must be above politics. So many issues in this country are above politics that nothing is ever done. Change comes about through conflict in the political arena and those who say that, for instance, education or social welfare should be above politics, do not understand what politics are about. Possibly, they are thinking of an ideal world but not of a real world. Change comes about when some politicians become interested sufficiently to press an issue so hard that they embarrass their opponents into taking action on it or they go so far that when they get into Government they are bound to implement their commitments.

The issue of poverty is not one that we can take out of politics. It must be central to Irish politics and must be brought into Irish politics in a way that it has not been brought in up to now. If we do not do that politics are meaningless. If we are to continue shadow-boxing, re-fighting past battles or throwing the insults of 1922 or of 1956 or 1967 across the House, we are wasting our time and many of us would not be in politics if we thought that was all that would be done. We could find better ways of utilising our time.

It seems to me that in this budget debate it is time to raise these issues, to bring the debate to the level of real issues and to get away for a moment from the niggling matters in which sometimes we become bogged down. However, I will return now to the niggling matters because they cannot be overlooked. There are anomalies in relation to this budget. There are anomalies regarding taxation and in my position as spokesman for finance for this party I would be failing in my duty if I failed to raise these anomalies. I would be failing in my duty, too, if I allowed myself to become solely involved in raising the question of anomalies in company taxation and did not tackle the fundamental problems which have not been tackled by this budget. The budget increases social benefits by 10 per cent but prices are rising by 10 per cent. Therefore, in social terms this is a non-budget. It is only right, therefore, that this occasion should be used to draw attention to these problems so as to try to put some kind of impetus behind social reform and to commit at least some of us in this House to the fundamental social changes that are needed.

It is the philosophy of this party that a measure of orthodoxy in economic affairs, which I support, is compatible with great unorthodoxy in social affairs. We have a willingness to reform the social structure, to tackle vested interests and to approach social problems in a new and much more fundamental way than has been done in the past. There is a tendency to think that people are either left or right. You cannot categorise people so. I believe that the market system has a vital part to play in any modern society. Does that make me a right-winger? I believe that our social structure must be reformed and that, if we do not reform it, we will founder eventually because of discontent. The discontent of our people will not be kept under control all the time. The time will come when it will reach the point where it will overflow. That time is now imminent. We can continue in our bourgeois way letting things run for another few years but social evils cannot be left in existence indefinitely in the modern world where people are becoming alert to their rights. Thank God for that. In a country in one third of which a revolution is taking place— which is not, incidentally, purely a sectarian revolution, or a purely political revolution but is partly also a social revolution—we cannot cut ourselves off and maintain a tidy little bourgeois state in two-thirds of our island, carrying on comfortably with our traditional social policy. Therefore, in the economics sphere we must endeavour to keep our country in good order, we must try to eliminate inflation, try to pay our way and try to avoid the kind of mistakes that were made in the past in the economics sphere. This is compatible with a new and revolutionary approach to the social problems of our country.

I suppose much of what I have said will be dubbed by people on the extreme left or on the left generally as reformist because I have been talking of trying to reform this society without changing basically its structure. I believe it is possible to do that. I may be proved wrong. It may not be possible. Perhaps we may fail; perhaps our system is so self-complacent that we shall not reform it in time and that eventually we shall founder. I do not believe so and it is our duty to secure the reform that will make it unnecessary for our system of government and of society to be overturned. However, I do not think that that reform can be solely at the level of redistribution.

There is one other matter I want to raise before going back to the anomalies of the budget, that is, the whole question of the way property is owned in our country. This is a matter that must be reconsidered. The involvement of workers in some way and to some degree of ownership in the businesses in which they are engaged is something we must look towards. The idea of industrial democracy is one that is taking shape in the minds of people in many European countries. It is not a revolutionary idea. Neither is it an extreme left wing idea. Germany, after all, is the country in Western Europe in which industrial democracy is most advanced and Germany is regarded by many people as the most orthodox capitalist economy in Western Europe. Again one cannot classify in terms of left or right. In relation to industrial democracy, Germany is on the extreme left; in terms of economic orthodoxy, she is on the extreme right. We must get away from these simplifications and attempts to categorise different countries and individuals in these terms.

We must think seriously of this question of industrial democracy. I believe and hope that we are about to join a Community within which the idea of industrial democracy is gaining ground. Indeed, in the past few weeks a mission came to this country from the Community to talk to us about industrial democracy here and to ask us what are our attitudes and what progress we are making. We put up a rather poor show in terms of making progress. I talked to these people and told them some of the ideas which my party have put forward regarding industrial democracy and the first tentative steps to which we have committed ourselves in our policy. They asked me if I knew of the Danish trade union's scheme. When I told them that I did not they promised to send me a copy. Yesterday I received the promised document which seems to be an interesting one and which I commend to the House. I hope to have another opportunity to raise it and have it discussed here. Our spokesman on labour would wish to have a discussion on it at some point. It is a scheme under which it is proposed that in the first year a sum of money equal to 1 per cent of wages is set aside for a fund giving workers a share in the ownership of the Danish economy. Each year thereafter for eight years that share will be increased by a half per cent. That does not place an impossible burden on the economy or on industry: 1 per cent in the first year and an extra half per cent each year. At the end of that period a sum of money equal to 5 per cent of wages, will be set aside in a fund which will be owned by the workers together and in which every worker will have an equal share, including civil servants, not just workers in productive industry but even those working in a non-profitmaking sector like the Civil Service.

This money will be used to invest in industry, to take shares in industry in such a way that over a time a significant proportion of industry would be owned by this fund on behalf of the workers. The calculations in this report show—and I have not attempted to validate them; I can only presume the Danish trade union movement is capable of doing its figures right—that in quite a short period, something like 12 years, the share of Danish industry owned by the workers on this basis would, through this mechanism, become as high as one-half of the present total level of capitalisation of Danish industry and services together. I have not got the figures in front of me but I think the present capitalisation of the Danish industry is something like 60,000 million kroner, and that after ten or 12 years the workers' ownership would be 30,000 million kroner. In the meantime, the total capitalisation will have increased; I do not mean they will actually have a half share at that point.

These figures illustrate that a relatively small amount of money set aside in this way imposing no extreme burden on the economy could over a period produce a fund through which workers, all sharing equally, would own a very large share of industry without at any stage having disrupted the working of the existing capitalist system. I can only mention this to the House, because I have only glanced through this document once, but this in the kind of thing we should be looking at, particularly from the point of view of the EEC. Let us remember that in the EEC the commitment to industrial democracy is starting at the top, that within the European company statute, which is at present under consideration and must, I think, be adopted fairly soon, there is provision for one-third worker-directors on the supervisory board of every European company. Therefore, any company in Europe which wants to achieve European company status, giving it a legal status simultaneously in all the countries of the Community, and many Europeon companies must achieve that if they are to compete against American companies through their subsidiaries in European countries, must pay the price of that element of industrial democracy, one-third workers' representatives on the board, unless two-thirds of the workers say they do not want representation, a curious clause to put in but apparently to meet trade union sensitivity in some countries, trade unions fearing industrial democracy in some countries and welcoming it in others.

In a community which has that commitment to industrial democracy, in which countries like Germany have a system under which in all the larger companies there is one-third worker participation on the supervisory boards and in a community in which there is a movement, as in Denmark, towards this kind of ownership of shares by workers in the whole of the Danish economy, we just cannot opt out and decide to maintain indefinitely a pure capitalist system or our particular brand of semi-pure capitalism here, and ignore these developments.

Therefore, as well as rethinking our whole attitude to the redistribution of wealth, we need to rethink our attitude to industrial democracy. To do that we need to change the Government, because, whereas on this side of the House there are parties dedicated to introducing industrial democracy in some form—I am not saying our policy and that of the Labour Party are the same, but both of us are committed to taking steps in this direction—there is not a glimmer of interest in industrial democracy on the other side of the House. We have never heard any speeches on it, or heard any Minister refer to it. It just does not feature in the Fianna Fáil philosophy, such as it is at this stage. Here as elsewhere a change of Government will be needed if we are going to make progress in the direction in which progress has to be made in order to create a valid society in this country.

Let me turn now to some of the anomalies in this budget. There is the problem of married women working which has not been dealt with adequately. First of all, a married couple should get a double tax allowance rather than a tax allowance less than double the single allowance. The present system provides an incentive not to get married, not that it is important in a country where the institution of marriage is held in high respect, thank God; it would need more than a small financial incentive to make people live in sin, whatever other reason they might have for it, but I do not think it is right that we should provide this incentive. The Civil Service is the area where the incentive to do so is paramount, because if a woman in the Civil Service gets married up to this point of time, she loses her job. If, however, she decides not to get married but to cohabit, something which in the State of Wisconsin is illegal and punishable under the criminal law of that State, she is perfectly all right where the Civil Service is concerned until the third illegitimate child; then they draw a line. This is a very moral country and faced even with this temptation, most girls in the Civil Service who decide to form a union with somebody get married and give up their jobs and do not take the opportunities provided by this curious system. However, it is totally antisocial. The Minister is committed to making a change and will he please make it quickly?

A woman civil servant got married. resigned and was taken on again temporarily on a fee basis, because the Minister was not prepared to allow her even to continue temporarily pending the new arrangements being made. We know that this curious provision in the Civil Service is going to be dropped and that women will be allowed to remain in the Civil Service after marriage. Would the Minister not have enough sense, if any girls in the Civil Service are getting married and want to remain on, to let them stay on without going through this nonsense of resigning and being taken on again on a fee basis, and let them be restored to their position with full continuity of pension, incremental and other rights? I hope Deputy Mrs. Lynch will support me in this and will make representations to her co-Deputy in her constituency in this matter and pursue him until he takes action. I am sure she is with me on this matter.

I was talking not so much of that but of the tax allowance position. As part of introducing justice for women in this country there should be a double tax allowance for a married couple and the tax allowance of £74 which a married woman is allowed before tax is payable should be increased, perhaps in the first instance, to something like £125. If that were the case the overall effect would be to relieve the tax position of such a person significantly.

I mentioned earlier the inequity of a system under which estate duties are paid by a wife when her husband dies. I believe the taxation of capital in some form is essential to prevent the accumulation of wealth in too few hands, and we all know it is in too few hands. We had this recent paper by Mr. Patrick Lyons of Trinity College, not, as Deputy Barry Desmond said, a member of either the Fine Gael Party or the Labour Party—he did not specify which party he is associated with—in which he drew attention to the fact that, on the basis of very incomplete estate duty figures, 71 per cent of the wealth of this country is owned by 5 per cent of the people. I believe, myself, that as a basis of calculation it is inadequate because of the avoidance problem and that his figures must considerably understate the degree of concentration of wealth.

There is no evidence that this concentration of wealth is diminishing. In fact, our system of taxation of capital is inadequate to prevent an increasing concentration of wealth in too few hands. We must have an adequate system and our capital taxation in this area must be reviewed to make it more effective for that purpose. What is required is a system which prevents wealth accumulating from generation to generation. It is the transmission of wealth from one generation to the next which leads to this concentration in too few hands. It is not an adequate system of capital taxation.

There is no case whatever for taxing the transmission of capital between a man and his wife, who are normally of the same generation. I do not understand what principle is applied here. The whole purpose of taxation of capital is a social purpose, the prevention of the accumulation of wealth in too few hands from one generation to the next. How did the wife ever get involved? In what circumstances and why were estate duties ever applied to money moving between a husband and wife on the husband's death or vice versa? Husband and wife are treated not as two people for income tax purposes but when one of them dies they are treated very quickly as two people and as two people of different generations too.

The whole business of death duties on property transferring to a wife on the husband's death and vice versa should be eliminated. Our exemption limit at the moment—the Minister seems to be rather proud that he is increasing it—is half the British one, I understand—£7,500 as against £15,000. There should not be any exemption limit. There should simply be no duty paid as between husband and wife.

Incidentally, for a widow and I think it is two children, our exemption limit is £17,750 as against £30,000. I am not sure of the number of children. I have not the figures in front of me. But, again, the Irish figure, whether it is for a widow on her own or a widow with children, is in each case about half the British figure in an area where there should be no duty paid at all.

Another problem affecting widows is the capitalisation of the non-commutable benefit pension scheme. I have raised this matter persistently in the other House and here and have got nowhere. I raised it originally because I came across it in my own case. Quite a few years ago I decided to take out an insurance policy that cost £100 a year—not an enormous sum of money. It was an incomes policy under which I would get nothing if I survived but if I died my wife would have a pension, so-called. The sum was diminishing from £1,500 to £1,000 a year as the children came of age and were no longer a responsibility of hers. It seemed to me a useful form of insurance. I might, of course, survive and get nothing out of it but £100 a year seemed to me a reasonable price to pay for a measure of security for my wife and children. Some years later I came to make a will, to revise the very simple will I had made originally. I did not expect any tax problems. I am not a person much in the way of net assets. There have been times when I thought I was a man of net liabilities rather than net assets but I think I am just about on the assets side at the moment.

Lucky man.

Yes, well, that is taking into account the value of my house which I cannot sell without having nowhere to live but, including it, I think I have just about net assets. Otherwise I would be very much a man of net liabilities. Not having much in the way of net assets, I went to make my will without a thought in the world about estate duty. The last thing I thought of was that I would be one of these people caught for estate duty. I discovered I was in the third highest estate duty bracket, that because of the fact that this pension, so-called, was, in fact, a lump sum payable in instalments over 40 years or something, and the nominal lump sum was so large— £45,000—a lump sum my wife would never see, of course; she would only get £1,000 a year. Here was I leaving a vast estate of £45,000, up in the third highest estate duty bracket, and my wife was going to have to pay on this vast estate one-third—£15,000 she was to find. Where was she to find it? There was no capital from which to find that kind of sum.

I must say that I was rather cross with the insurance company for not having made this clear to me. All they could say was, "Ah, they will fix it up all right. There is some system under which they commute it. Her pension would be reduced by one-third and in that way the money would be found for the estate duty". In other words, the pension they were selling me was only two-thirds of the pension that I thought I was getting. I do not know if it was their fault or not but that is the position.

I have raised this in the other House with the former Minister, Deputy Haughey, and I have raised it here with the present Minister, Deputy Colley. There is always some good revenue reason produced for doing nothing about it—"this system could be used by rich people to evade".

Never mind the rich people. Could we just have the system changed for the poor people, the people who have not got any assets, who simply want their wives to have a pension when they die, people who can afford £50 or £100 a year to achieve a modicum of security for their wives? Could the present tax system be changed so as to allow that and if you have to exclude people who have other assets of more than £10,000 or £20,000 or whatever you like, exclude them but do let us make a change to get over this particular problem which creates this extraordinary position as regards pensions. It is very good for the ego to find that one is in this high estate duty bracket but I could do without the ego and would prefer to have the comfort of feeling that my wife would have a pension.

Moving from the personal tax side and the problems of widows—and there are other problems of widows to be tackled but I do not want to go into them all; I wanted to deal with ones that have not been raised previously in the debate—moving now to certain economic matters, in regard to mergers and amalgamations, the Government very often welcome these. Of course there can be mergers which can threaten to create a monopoly. The Government would be concerned about these. But many mergers and amalgamations are desirable to achieve rationalisation in industry, especially in the face of increased competition.

I understand that the expenses of such a merger have to come out of taxed income and are not treated as legitimate business expense. If the Government are in favour, as they have repeatedly said they are, of mergers and amalgamations in principle, where they do not create a monopoly situation, why are they discouraging them by this curious tax provision? Could the Minister consider in this year's Finance Bill making provision to get around that? Entering the EEC, as we are, we ought to be trying to make our industry as efficient as possible and not discouraging moves that may lead to greater efficiency. This is something that should be looked at.

This provision, I understand, makes amalgamation of professional firms and partnerships almost impossible. Indeed, our tax arrangements seem to make the withdrawal or retiral of partners from a partnership very difficult because such retiral creates an artificial tax situation. The whole question of taxation of partnerships needs to be looked at because of the problems it poses.

We also have a system here which, I understand, is contrary to practice in the UK in regard to the treatment of losses of a group of companies, a system which encourages artificial accountancy devices and encourages avoidance. There is not much point in having any provision in taxation which is easily and simply avoided and the avoidance of which leads to the creation of artificial situations. Unless you are going to be able to stop avoidance there is no point in having a particular tax provision. You either go ahead and tighten up so as to stop avoidance or you abolish the provision. There is no point in having a position where people can easily avoid and do so by creating artificial positions, when it is worth their while to proliferate imaginary companies and so on. We should in our tax code try to avoid that kind of position.

I speak here without, in some of these areas, expert knowledge. The Parliamentary Secretary will appreciate that when it comes to tax law you either are or are not a tax expert. I am emphatically not a tax expert and in matters of this kind, certainly at this early stage in my duties as spokesman on finance in the Opposition benches, I can only communicate points that have been put to me and which seem to me to be prima facie valid. I cannot myself pronounce on them with the kind of authority I would like to pronounce on these matters. I am not in a position to do so.

It has been put to me that interest on debentures or mortgages is not allowed against corporation profits tax unless the debt is repayable within three months and that because of this curious provision in this country many loans of, say, up to 20 years have to be expressed as repayable in three months although nobody has any intention of their being repayable in three months. That is all right in our own cosy society. We all know, apparently, in Ireland, that when you say it is repayable in three months it means 20 years. As long as we all know that that is what it means it does not matter very much although why we should go in for this curious semantic device, I do not know. Foreigners can get confused. There are literal-minded foreigners who come to this country or who are engaged in financial dealings in this country and when they are told something is repayable in three months they have an uneasy feeling that it might be repayable in three months and when they are assured that the words do not mean what they say, they may get an interesting impression of this country but they may not be entirely convinced. I think a tax provision of the kind we have here which leads to this very artificial situation which could inhibit foreign borrowing in cases where it is desirable is one which could usefully be got rid of.

Another tax provision which has peculiar effects is the one which limits the payment, in director-controlled companies, to directors of a sum not more than £4,000, that is, not more than that amount can be allowed as chargeable against corporation profits tax. The purpose of that I see and I am sure it is a very good thing, but when it can be avoided by simply proliferating companies—if a man wants £12,000, he simply invents two new companies which apparently is the practice in these matters—there is not much point in it. Either you tighten up on this, if possible, or you abolish it, and, again, there is no point in having this provision when it can be so easily avoided that it is meaningless. Here we are so out of line with the rest of Europe that OECD very properly comments that we need to do something more about it. These are just some of the points on company taxation which have been put to me. I hope I am expressing the difficulties correctly and if I am not, the Minister will no doubt put me right when he comes to reply.

I want to turn now from the area of the budget and what it does not do, the anomalies in the tax system and so forth, to certain questions of policy. I want to deal briefly, first of all, with manpower policy merely to draw attention to a reference in a recent OECD report which is worth referring to. In this report under the heading "Medium Term Issues", there are several points made, one of them being the excessive rates of cost and price increases. Another comment made, a comment which I made myself and, indeed, I should have at the time bolstered up my remarks by reference to the OECD report, is the suggestion that greater use should be made of the public sector as a source of savings. This is the point I was making about the failure to have adequate public authority savings in the current budget to finance the capital programme.

The third point they mention as a problem is "Regional and manpower policies insufficiently developed to meet the needs of more rapid, industrial expansion". International organisations, when they comment on member countries, do so in muted terms. One reads between the lines. They do not usually say something like "the present Fianna Fáil Government has made a right hames of things" or "The total failure to devise any regional policy over ten years is a reason for getting rid of them". That is not the way, you understand, that international organisations talk. They just say very politely and nicely that regional and manpower policies are insufficiently developed to meet the needs of more rapid industrial expansion; but I am permitted, not being in such a body, to translate that into plain English and it is that in this country this Government have failed to make anything like adequate progress under these headings.

I do not propose to dwell on the question of manpower policies beyond pointing out the pace at which we have introduced industrial training facilities: even though the Department concerned is new it is an active Department and well staffed, but it has been desperately slow and still has not got to the point at which there is any significant retraining of redundant workers. The excuses made for this are pretty pitiful. I just do not believe that no redundant workers ever want to be retrained. If the Minister is short of industrial workers looking for retraining, I can find a few in my constituency who are redundant, in despair and who would very much like to be retrained. Yet we have not attempted to do so. The whole idea behind the manpower policy as we originally envisaged it when some of us met together at the seminar in Malahide in November of 1963 was to think in terms of coping with problems of redundancy and retraining. We have now a system under which young workers are trained— and we are glad to have it; there is not enough of it—but under which no redundant workers are retrained at all and it is not believable that none of them want to be retrained or are not capable of being retrained.

We are different from every other country in the world. In other countries the problems of redundancy are met in part but not in total by retraining of the workers concerned and I am convinced that in this country also —and we have more than our share of redundancy at the moment so that we are not short of candidates—that is not the problem—if this problem were properly tackled a lot could be done. There are deficiencies in the pace of development of training and the failure to adjust these facilities to cater for the problems of redundant workers, but beyond saying that, I do not propose to dwell on it further because I want to deal with two other areas of policy—regional policy and public service policy, the latter at some length because we are reaching the point now at which the public service Department is to be established. I will be referring to regional policy again briefly in the context of the EEC but I want to deal with it now more as a home issue.

First of all, we have the fact that after nine years from the time when a regional policy, or the basis of a regional policy, was propounded by the Committee on Industrial Organisation, we are still waiting for it. Rumour has it that the Government are going to unveil it after nine years. We have to be clear that we are not going to survive in or out of the EEC, in any conditions, if it takes nine years from the point when policies are first brought forward—unanimously, be it said—by civil servants, different Government Departments, trade unionists and managements and the point at which the Government implement them. That pace of change is simply too slow for survival and a political party in Government and a public service which operates at that pace are simply going to be swept aside and the country they run, as they do run it, is going to be swept aside in the modern world, if unable to adjust to change more rapidly than that.

The second point is that I do not think we have begun to think in terms of a genuine regional policy here. I know I am in difficulties here because I am anticipating the Government policy about to be unveiled. I do not know what is in it—I have not got a clue. Beyond hearing that it is to incorporate the various regional plans which the IDA have put together, I know nothing about it. I have not even heard any rumours about the contents and, perhaps, it can be shown that I am doing an injustice to it. Let me describe what a regional policy needs to be in the context of the EEC and let Deputies measure against that whatever the Government produce. Perhaps it will measure up to it, and good luck to them if it does. If it does not, that policy will need to be rethought before the link is dry on it. In the EEC there is a commitment in the Preamble to the Treaty to mitigate the backwardness of the less favoured regions and to achieve a process of catching up so that those areas which are behind in living standards will over a measurable period of time catch up with the rest. That is a serious commitment, a commitment which the Community itself has not yet fulfilled completely by any means, but what can be said is that it is making a little more progress towards it than we are.

It is a commitment which in the years ahead is going to have increasing importance because, let us be clear about it, this Community is committed to developing an economic and monetary policy which is unworkable in the medium or long term, and I think even in the short term, unless the different regions of the Community are reasonably close together in living standards and in rates of growth—the strains would be too great, political strains and economic strains—and as the commitment to the economic and monetary policy is now a fairly powerful one and as the forces pressing in that direction are very strong, as, indeed, the working of the common agricultural policy on which so much depends itself depends on solving these problems in the field of economic and monetary policy, I think it is fair to say that the impetus behind that policy is very great, and I do not think, and I think all the experts in this field agree, that it is possible to have such a policy without an adequate regional policy which involves a commitment to bring up the level of living standards in the backward areas towards and reasonably close to those of the richer areas of the Community. You will never achieve complete homogeneity. There will always be some disparities, but these would indeed be, if the whole system is to work, relatively small.

What does that mean? First of all, it means that in each region there must be an attempt to assess the living standards and what is the rate of output per head and secondly, what rate of growth will be necessary to bring that region up to around the Community level within a measurable period of time. Inevitably there is imprecision in my formulation; when I say "around" I am not saying how close to and when I say "measurable" I am not defining the length of time. However, that is the kind of principle behind what we are talking about. The period might be anything from ten to 25 years but I am sure it will be within a generation. Many people would say within ten years but I think that is unrealistic.

What kind of growth will be necessary in that region to achieve that? The growth could be sharp, even spectacular. We could be talking of growth rates of 7 per cent, 8 per cent or 9 per cent in some regions if they are to catch up with the rest of the Community within 20 years. Having established the kind of growth necessary, it will be necessary to try to assess the kind of capital investment, what resources would be necessary to achieve that growth in that region. The sums involved may be massive—for some regions they may run into hundreds of millions of pounds. That is the kind of framework of a regional policy in the Community. Anything less is incapable of measuring up to the needs of an economic and monetary policy; anything that does not measure up to those needs will be inadequate because this kind of economic and monetary policy will come about. The commitment is there and the forces working towards it are powerful ones.

Have we begun to think in these terms, never mind to do the work? Is the regional policy which the Government will produce in the next few days going to produce targets for growth in these kind of terms for the different regions of Ireland, designed to achieve raising of living standards to some kind of Community level within a measurable period of time? Does this policy assess the volume of capital investment needed for this? Is this the approach that will be adopted by the Government? We must wait and see, but somehow I doubt it. What we have been doing with regard to a regional policy is merely tinkering around with the subject. We have not been thinking about it in European terms because, in a curious way, many of the activities of the public service and the Government seem to have proceeded on the implied assumption that we would not join the EEC. There has been an extraordinary failure to adapt policies to the EEC if they are not involved immediately in negotiations of one kind or another. Many of the Government Departments are proceeding as if the EEC did not exist; certainly the pace at which they are working and the direction in which they are moving does not show much recognition of the total implications of membership of the Community.

Perhaps after May 10th all will be different. Perhaps after that magic date if the vote is "yes"—and we believe it will be—all will change and Ministers will be alert to the problems and orientated towards the kind of changes needed to bring their policies into line with the possibilities and potentialities of membership. Unfortunately that has not happened yet in many Departments and one would not need to be very close to the Government or the public service to know it has not happened. It certainly has not occurred in the sphere of regional policy.

The effects of this failure on our part are far reaching. First, there has been a total failure to achieve any kind of catching up. We have not yet got the figures for 1969 for Irish county incomes. For the period 1960-1965 which is in the middle of the Government's tenure of office and for which they must accept full responsibility, the increase in output per head in the west of Ireland, apart from Ulster, was 17 per cent; in the country as a whole it was 20 per cent to 21 per cent. In the only period for which we have figures growth in the west was slower than in the rest of the country.

How did this compare with other countries? I commend to the House a publication which I received from the Community a few months ago, shortly before it was published. It is entitled L'Evolution Regionale dans le Communante—Bilan Analytique. It is a formidable volume and, unfortunately, at this stage like many other communications it is in French only. However, it sets out tables of figures and one would not need much French to read them.

The table consists of a list of provinces; there is a heading showing the years 1960-69 and the note "Communante=100." This table shows the best estimates the Community have available for the output per head in current money terms for every province and region of every Community country for the years 1960-69. To be meaningful the table needs some adjustment because the amounts are in current money terms; if you want to find out the real growth, the volume of increase in output, and the raising of living standards that occurred, you have to adjust for the price changes in those countries.

I have done this adjustment to try to discover what has happened. In each of these countries the poorest areas have been achieving the fastest growth rate and the richest parts less rapid growth. I realise it is not customary in this House to demonstrate one's points visually—I do not know what the Rules of Order say about this but I hope they will not forbid me to turn this piece of paper towards the House. I realise that Members cannot read it but perhaps the Chair might rule a large placard out of order——

The Deputy should have brought in a blackboard.

What I have here are two hand-drawn maps of Italy, drawn with the inconsiderable expertise I have always shown in drawing. The first map refers to the year 1960 and refers to the standard of living in that country. It divides Italy into three categories: areas which had a standard of living that was average or above average; areas where it was 20 per cent below average; areas where it was 20-50 per cent below average; and areas where it was more than 50 per cent below average. The map shows that the intensity of shading increases as you go further south; the whole of southern Italy is shown as well below average in living standards in 1960.

The second map shows changes in living standards for 1960-69. I have set out four categories: below average; average growth; 20 per cent above average; 20-35 per cent above average; and more than 35 per cent above average. I have shaded the areas accordingly. There is a remarkable correspondence between the provinces in that the same areas are shaded in both maps.

The area which had the fastest growth rate between 1960-69 was the Province of Basilicata in what I will describe as the "instep" of Italy. That province was one of the two poorest provinces in 1960 but it had the fastest growth rate in Italy in the period 1960-69. This pattern is repeated in many countries; the poorest provinces have the fastest growth rate and the rich areas in the north and north-west have the slowest growth rate.

In Germany that pattern is repeated; the poorest regions have developed faster than the rich areas of Hamburg and Bremen. The same is to be found in Belgium where the poorest province—Limburg—had the fastest growth rate. The French figures are not useful for this purpose because there has only been one study of regional incomes and output in France for 1962 and there are no figures showing progress in this respect. The figures used here are merely GNP in these two years allocated according to the 1962 formula. They do not, therefore, show the change that has occurred. All we know is that when we look at the other tables here for emigration, or migration from regions of France, the poorest areas of France have very large reductions in emigration over this period and, I think, in unemployment.

Do they show the injections of capital into these regions?

No. In this respect the publication is defective. One would like to have a more complete picture of that kind but it is confined largely to employment, demographic data and to the results.

I think that the Deputy's colleague, Deputy Ryan, said on the radio last night that £700 million had been injected into southern Italy. It takes very large capital injections to get growth in these areas.

Indeed, yes. That is the point in what I am saying. If you want to step up growth in poorer areas the injection of capital will be immense. The figure mentioned, I am sure, is correct but I do not know whether it represents money from the European Investment Bank—which I suspect it does—supplementing the Italian Government's own transfer of capital. At this stage in the life of the Community a large part of the success in treating regional problems derives from the national policies of member countries helped by the Community rather than directly by Community policy, although, of course, in a country like Italy, whose expansion has been so accelerated by membership of EEC, the extra resources generated within it as a whole have made more resources available for transfer which have then been further supplemented from the European Investment Bank, the Community Fund. That is how this mechanism works.

The point is that in all these countries you have the same phenomenon, much faster growth in the poorer areas than in the richer ones. In the case of France one can only infer this from the figures for emigration and employment. In the case of the Netherlands there is no conclusive pattern. I did think that in the figures for the period from 1960 to 1965 which I looked at and wrote about a couple of years ago, there was some evidence that the poorest provinces in the north had faster growth rates but the figures we have here do not show any conclusive trend. It must be said that the disparity between regional incomes in Holland is very small in the first instance so that there is not much room for a catching-up process from those that are poorer to those that are richer. This can only arise where there are large disparities and for this reason the results are somewhat inconclusive.

By and large, the picture is a clear one. What is very clear to me is the contrast with this country where, under the present Government, the growth of our poorest regions has been slower than in the rest of the country. Contrasting that with what has been achieved in the Community as a result of the national policies of member states, aided to some degree—especially in the case of Italy—by assistance from Community funds one finds a far faster growth in the poorer rather than in the richer areas. This, in the case of Italy, is so spectacular that in the poorest province, Basilicata, there was a doubling of living standards in nine years whereas in the two richest provinces in the north-west, in Valle d'Aosta and Liguria and Genoa and north of Turin, the growth was only 35 per cent.

We can see from these countries what a well thought-out national regional policy can do, especially if assisted by membership of the Community and by the stimulus of the economic growth it provides especially to a poor country like Italy which has benefited most with the aid of Community funds. I do not think the contrast between what they have achieved and what we have not achieved is explicable solely in EEC terms. The absence of an adequate regional policy in this country and the absence of an adequate commitment to such a policy, the sedulous avoidance of a regional policy by the Government over nine years have contributed to the situation where the west is falling further behind, not merely in absolute terms but even in its rate of growth, because it must be said that in the Community, even though growth is faster in the poorest areas, in some cases the level to which growth is being added is so low that even a faster rate of growth may still leave a widening of the gap in absolute terms for a period until the lower growth rate begins to achieve the process of catching up.

But here it is not a question that the growth rate of Connaught is not rising by a big enough margin over the rest of the country to achieve a catching-up in absolute terms; the problem is that under this Government it has been slower and that is true, indeed, for the whole west of Ireland. I do not want, at this moment, to get involved in the EEC as such although it must be relevant to refer to it in this context, but what I am concerned about is the failure to produce a regional policy in Ireland and the failure to think in terms of a regional policy. The effects are pretty disastrous. The House should know that we are not taken very seriously in Brussels in this respect. You cannot mouth platitudes about regional policy while having none and expect to get away with it. We are not dealing in Brussels with amateurs in these matters but with people who are serious about what they are talking about. They know our Government are not serious and that we have not got a regional policy.

Without a regional policy we shall not benefit from the Community's regional policy as it evolves. The Community, through the European Investment Bank, will help projects if we have them—but have we? Have we reached the stage of knowing where we want to put anything? The one principle on which this Government have worked for ten years is not to have a policy of growth centres, not to be selective in policy but to allow industrialists to go wherever they want, even if they ruin the countryside in the process. The idea of trying to build up certain parts of the country by providing these growth centres to revivify a region is one which the Government have sedulously avoided because of the possible political disadvantage in being selective and the fact that if it was ever known that the Government had encouraged an industry to go to point X, at points A, B, C, D and the rest of the alphabet twice over, people would complain: "Why did you not give it to us?" We all know that would be the reaction. Everybody would complain if they did not benefit. As long as the Government refuse to grasp that nettle and are frightened of doing so, so long will there be inadequate growth in this country. You cannot have growth without a measure of selection. You cannot expect to have large male-employing industries scattered around the country if you have no infrastructure for them. We know that for very large male-employing industries there is no place in Ireland which has the labour force at present, within a reasonable distance of even 20 miles because the density of population is so low, because we have not got the major centres. There is not the infrastructure for housing or for educational facilities and we are not building them up because to do so would involve selection and selection would be politically unpopular.

So, we enter the EEC with all its opportunities, with the European Investment Bank available, with the new regional policy adopted in principle last October with a commitment to adopt it fully next October, and its resources available to us from 1st January next, with the officials of the Commission willing and interested to come and help us and provide us with the assistance we need, but we have nothing to offer. They would be willing to help us; the funds are there, but where will they invest them? We have not got a regional policy. But they will not throw money away. They will not prepare plans for us. This Community, unlike this Government, believes in devolution. It is not their job to prepare regional policy but the job of the region and the Government. They would prefer if the region itself did the job but at least it is a matter for all the regions and the national Government, not for them. If a Government or a region does not have a plan, if it has not worked out what kind of growth rate it needs to catch up, if it has not assessed the capital requirements, if it has not plans for the development of an infrastructure for the scale of industrial investment needed, then it will not get the help to achieve that result. The days of the haphazard business of letting things drift and hoping for the best, avoiding political inconveniences and unpopularity are gone. If we are to have this Government pursuing that kind of policy, then in the EEC we really will lose out.

That is one of many reasons why coincidental with our entry to EEC, we need a change of Government. I hope the Taoiseach will recognise this fact and that when the referendum result is announced he will decide to go to the country and give the people an opportunity of choosing which Government they want, whether they want to continue with a tired Government who have failed to cope with our problems, who cannot even understand their nature, or whether they are willing to give a mandate to a new Government with people in it who know what the problems are and have the competence to do something about them.

So much for regional policy, except to say that there have been reports in our newspapers for some time past that this country might get the regional policy commissionership. From my experience of Brussels they are not fools and I think it is highly improbable that the regional policy commissionership would go to the one country in Europe that has not got a regional policy. The fact that we have shown ourselves incapable of understanding what a regional policy is about, never mind devising one, is not the best qualification for getting the job, a job which if we had done our homework would have put us in a position to exert great influence favourable to this country. Naturally, an Irishman in that job would be orientated to the kind of problems we have and the shape and colour of the policy that would emerge would have relevance particularly to our problems. Even if such a man were trying not to be too influenced by his background he must be helpful to us.

I doubt if such an appointment will be the outcome. Of course, if one of the people mentioned at the moment as the possible Government nominee turned out to be so, that settles that issue very quickly. However, even if a Minister more competent—I was tempted to say a less incompetent Minister—were nominated by the Government, I doubt if even the most favoured candidate among the members of our Government would ever get this appointment. If we do not get the post we know where the blame lies. It cannot lie with the Opposition. It lies with the Government who neglected to reach a policy and who have left us entering the Common Market naked as far as a regional policy is concerned.

Let me now turn to the public service and in particular to the Devlin Report. I was about to refer to its implementation, but I intend to speak about its non-implementation. In preparing my notes for this debate I went to some articles I wrote about the Devlin Report and the thing which struck me most forcibly is the date of the presentation of the report, September, 1969. I had thought that it was in 1970. I had not realised it was 2½ years since it was presented, but then that is not an abnormal period for this Government to take between the presentation of a report and doing something about it.

We were told more than a year ago that something was being done about it. Let us go back to 1969 when the report was presented. There were Government changes in May, 1970. We were told that Deputy Haughey was not in favour of some of these proposals, that he did not favour a new Department of the Public Service. There was certain amusement on the part of many people when the new Minister arrived. Some people said he would do the very opposite to what Deputy Haughey had announced. For whatever reason, the new Minister announced that he was in favour of the proposed new Department. Whatever motivated the Minister, he had a genuine commitment to the idea and he indicated his interest. That was in May, 1970. The months have passed and nothing has been done.

The necessary Bill is not a difficult one to draft. The form of Bill setting up Government Departments is laid down by precedent and hallowed by tradition. The last one was the Department of Labour. It is all set out there —delete "manpower" insert "personnel". It is a question of deciding which functions in the Department of Finance are to be put in and which deleted. It would not require much thought to do that. It might be necessary to have a couple of meetings to determine marginal responsibilities, but the division of functions as between the Department of Finance and the new Department are so clear-cut that it should not cause difficulties. Indeed, the Department of Finance are already so sub-divided that it makes the breakdown a fairly simple operation.

We were told then, more than a year ago, that this enormously difficult process of writing down these few things on a piece of paper and dividing the Department of Finance, already divided, in a way which lends itself to departmental sub-division, would be done and that the Bill would be introduced. In reply to Questions in the House we were told we would have it in April, not 1972 but 1971. Nothing happened. I raised the matter in the House from time to time and I raised it privately with Ministers because so much depends on this because of the urgency of reforms in the public service. A Government seriously interested in running the country efficiently would have wanted, when they got the Devlin Report, to get the job done as quickly as possible.

Was the delay because there was not Parliamentary time? We are not talking about a Committee Stage Bill but of a Bill to which I do not think anyone would be thinking of amendments. The form of the Bill is almost automatic. It is only a question of listing the particular functions. We are talking about a Bill which would have a Second Stage debate. In the whole of the Parliamentary year from April of last year could we not have found time for it? Is the reform of the public service of so little importance that it does not rate even a day of our time? Are we content simply to let this matter drift on?

I have found a total lack of any sense of urgency on the part of the Government on this matter. I have found the Taoiseach and his Ministers looking at me blankly when I have raised it in the House. When I raised it with them outside the House I found incomprehension. I could understand the Opposition possibly feeling that the reform of the public service is not a matter to which they should give much time—there are not many votes in it —but that a Government should care so little and that we should be pressing them to get on with their job is something very serious. That is a feature of the Government—total inertia and loss of grip. We have had two lost years in which an enormous amount needed to be done. The record of legislation has been deplorable in the last three years, not because of the Opposition, not because we have been holding things up and running debates on indefinitely. Indeed, on a number of occasions we have suggested ways of speeding things up and we have suggested ways to speed things up. There have been moments of tension when we did not feel very co-operative.

In this field of public service reform the job is an urgent one. There is only one thing which the Government have done and I congratulate them for it. About a year ago I suggested that in view of the delay in bringing the Bill before us and in view of the urgency of getting on with the reforms, the Minister should at least advertise the three announced positions and get on with making the appointments. I suggested the appointment in the first instance of a member of the Department of Finance until the transfer takes place. I think the Minister's first reaction to that suggestion was that it could not be done. However, I am glad that my suggestion bore fruit. The Minister decided to go ahead.

I am not, however, encouraged by reports of reactions in the public service to the appointments made. It would appear that the idea of advertising two of these three posts outside the public service was greeted with dissatisfaction. The idea that a monopoly of all posts in the public service should be held by existing public servants is still strong. The fact that one of the two appointments went to somebody outside would appear to have been resented by some people. I am concerned that there should have been that reaction. We will not achieve reforms in the public service easily if there is not a more positive approach within the public service.

Let us remember there has not been a reform in the public service of any kind since before the State was founded. I understand that the last change made in the structure of the public service was the creation of the post of staff officer by the British in 1920. Since then nothing has changed. It must be a record. There can hardly be many countries in which more than half of the 20th century has passed with the public structure totally unchanged. Here there has not been a change even in the grading system. A lot has happened in the world since 1920 but the public service, built in the 1920 British mould with all its good features, ensuring integrity, has remained unchanged. However, the problems have changed. The educational system in this country has changed and educational opportunity has changed but very little has changed in the recruitment in the public service, in the grading system and the promotional system in the public service. It is all as if nothing had happened, as if the world were still in that halcyon pre-1914 era, halcyon for those who did not happen to be at the bottom of the heap.

The Minister, in the budget, announced his acceptance in principle of the idea of creating this new structure recommended by Devlin in the public service, that is, a policy-making aireacht and then executive agencies carrying out the executive functions at another level. I am glad of this. This innovation is one which I think received generous support when it was announced. It will, of course, create great problems for this House. We have been accustomed to a system of complete Ministerial responsibility. We have had too little regard to the inhibitions this places on the carrying out of some executive functions. We have been too concerned jealously to regard our privileges, even in areas where these may be too much of an impediment to the effective, efficient and flexible carrying out of duties. It is right that we should review this position and that we should now consider where the line should be drawn between functions which, while they will require the general supervision of the Dáil, may not need to be under quite such tight control of accountability and functions which must continue to be totally within the sphere of accountability to this Assembly.

The proposal for the aireacht and underneath it executive agencies carrying out executive functions is one which in principle seems good. It raises a few issues. First of all, is it to happen? I do not want to be sceptical of the Minister's intentions but it was only in the Third Programme for Economic Expansion that we were told that every Department would have a development unit, that the development unit in Education was a success and the idea would spread. Where are these development units? Have they crept up on us silently? Is it the case now that every Department has a development unit, that nobody has told us in this House or has it not happened? I simply do not know. It is curious that we were not informed. If they have been created, if there are development units working away successfully, one would think that some Minister at some time would have mentioned this, would have claimed credit for it and said how well it was working. One would have thought that at some cumann dinner the matter would have been referred to. I have heard nothing about it. Perhaps I was not listening to the right man. I suspect that innovation has not got any further, that it has been sat on and quashed within the public service, like many other proposals. If that is the case I hope that the Minister's decision about the new aireacht will have a better fate than appears to have met the development unit proposal. If I am misinformed and if development units have been established the Minister in his reply should tell us. The public and the House would be glad to know that this has been happening and that good has been done by stealth.

The Minister told us that the aireachts were to be set up in a number of selected Departments. Which Departments and what is the basis of selection? I am not quarrelling with the idea of a number of selected Departments. I accept the argument, which I think was put forward in an article in the current issue of Administration, that it may be a mistake to try to do too much too quickly and if you try to set off this new system in every Department at once there may not be the expertise to do the job and you may want to learn by experience. I agree there is a case for moving slowly as long as we move, but it is two and a half years since the proposal was put forward.

I would like the Minister to tell us what Departments have been selected and perhaps something about the reason they were chosen. It is also clear that this has implications for Ministerial responsibility. If the aireachts are to be established then the executive work of these Departments will devolve on executive agencies. In precisely what way will Ministerial responsibility to the Dáil be affected and to what extent will control of the Dáil be diminished? I know in this House there will be divided views. I am sure I have colleagues on these benches who will be very concerned if there is a diminution of Ministerial responsibility. I am not necessarily speaking for everybody in this House or for my party in saying that I think we have to accept this in some form.

The Minister must tell us what is involved. He must tell us the extent to which, in his view, it is necessary to modify the system of Ministerial responsibility to this House. He should not ignore this, let things ride in the hope that nobody will raise it and nobody will notice it. He should tell us more about this.

The establishment of this new system will not solve all the problems in the public service. The problems which were set out in the Devlin Report were numerous. The report very properly set out as well the problems, weaknesses and deficiences in the public service, its strength. I have mentioned one, integrity. I mention another, efficiency. We are accustomed in this House and in our dealings with Government Departments, to a level of competence, not speed in work. The concept of doing things quickly is something which does not seem to exist much in the public service. Perhaps the system of Ministerial responsibility goes against it. If everything that has to be done has to go up through the hierarchy—it is a long hierarchy—to the Minister and all the way down again, speed is hardly a likely result of that system. Certainly competence and accuracy are so that we can rely on the information given to us, not necessarily by Ministers who may put their own gloss on it, but information in official publications.

There are many strengths in our public service which we can build on. If it did not have these strengths we would notice it. I am afraid we take them for granted, unused as we are to the concept of corruption in the public service. Whatever about elements of corruption in other parts of life we assume that the public service is incorrupt. It is taken for granted but in a lot of other countries it is not taken for granted. You cannot rely on public servants in some countries, even in European countries, which have not been free from corruptive influences. In Ireland we assume that this is the case. That is a great blessing and a great strength.

The Devlin Report brought out weaknesses and it spoke of the lack of necessary staff support in planning, finance, organisation and in personnel. What has been done about this? The proposal two and a half years later to set up aireachts in selected Departments does not answer the kind of problem mentioned here. Is the strengthening and provision of staff support in these four areas of planning, finance, organisation and personnel to occur only where the aireachts are established or is work in progress? Will it be initiated to ensure that adequate staff support of these kinds is available in all Departments? We should be told this.

The Devlin Report said about some of these functions that they either have no place in the Government Departments concerned or they are discharged by people who lack adequate training. Is something being done to train people or to secure trained people? It was said also that higher officials in the public service often lack training in the techniques of modern administration. I know, possibly better than other Members of the House because of my involvement in it, of the work of the Institute of Public Administration. I know it has not always had the co-operation of parts of the public service. There are Departments which have notably co-operated with it, but it is the local authority service which has proved most co-operative. There have been times when some Departments in the public service have been not just not co-operating but the lack of co-operation has been a positive force in some Departments.

Relations between the institute and the Department of Finance in regard to training have not always been easy. Problems have had to be overcome. I hope these will be sorted out. When we hear that higher officials lack training in the techniques of modern administration ten years after the institute was established one wonders whose fault it is. It may be in part that the institute did not provide the right kind of courses. However, I think the fault lies not so much on the part of the institute as on the part of the public service, unconscious at times of its own weaknesses and oversensitive to any suggestion that it has weaknesses and that there is need for change or need for improvement.

The Devlin Report also spoke of the lack of any overall organisation in management service, of the barriers of class and grade, the problem posed by the parallel structure of administrators and professionals. It criticised over-strict control of local bodies, something which we re-echo in this House. It criticised the inability and unwillingness of Government Departments to give any kind of autonomy to local bodies and to give any kind of genuine devolution of authority. This is something of which we are all critical. We sometimes feel that the Civil Service, staffed as it is by people of total integrity, believes that there are not other people of integrity in the country and when it is dealing with other bodies, particularly local bodies, that they must be carefully watched. The local authority service is staffed also by people of integrity and people of ability.

I do not think one can make such distinctions as seem to be made by the type of control exercised by the Department of Local Government over local authorities. They claim to have eased these controls over the years. The Devlin Report mentions this. In spite of all the easing that went on in the 1960s some of the control mechanisms mentioned in that report suggest a neurotic concern to ensure that everything is done precisely as the people in the Custom House want it.

I recall one area in which a project had to be approved four times by the Department of Local Government at four different stages before it went through. This indicates a neurosis so deep that one wonders whether we do not need an organisational psychiatrist to examine the Department to see why they have this deep distrust of the people in the local authority service. The Devlin Report also spoke of the lack of co-ordination and the out-of-date selection procedures which prevent the attraction of talent in the same way as it was attracted in the past. I find the whole area of recruitment disturbing. Not much has been done about it. Reference is also made to the barriers to the flow of talent between organisations, and to the problems in connection with seniority, and the possibility of jumping grades.

I have been in correspondence with the Department of Finance in regard to a particular case where there was a question of jumping grades, and I must admit that I am defeated by the arguments put forward. I may go back again on it, but there is not time in life to pursue these matters as fully as one should. Most extraordinary arguments are put forward to ensure that a man in a particular grade may never be promoted to a level at which he might be able to make a useful contribution, without overcoming a series of hurdles placed at intervals of seven or ten years. If a man is put into the wrong grade at the beginning, his case is hopeless. The man I am concerned with is one who because of unfortunate circumstances outside his control found himself without employment. He had wide experience in a managerial and supervisory capacity but he was forced, in order to provide for himself and his wife, to take a job as a messenger. He could get nothing else but, by virtue of having taken the job as messenger, he is now precluded from all kinds of posts in the public service. If he had not sullied his hands on messenger work he would have been all right, but once he is there on such work he can only apply for particular jobs. The analogy given to me in correspondence about this particular man is that a private cannot expect to become a colonel in an army.

I would expect this man to have some reasonable process of promotion, but that is not open to him. Regardless of his qualifications and experience, because he took the job of messenger in the public service, he cannot be considered for any other job. The authorities are not concerned about whether he is qualified or not. They are just concerned with the fact that he is in a particular grade. This is a form of class distinction which I find unacceptable. I endorse what is said in the Devlin Report about the barriers to the flow of talent and the inability to jump grades.

The number of grades in the public service seem to me to be beyond what could reasonably be required in any organisation, even as hierarchical as our Civil Service. The report refers to the absence of appeals against ministerial decisions. This is an important area to which we will have to refer again. The report also refers to the built-in resistance to change, the lack of any continuous reappraisal or assessment of priorities, and the lack of any costing of programmes. Although my notes may be a little uncertain on this, I have here a reference to "vested interests securing the survival of organisations and activities regardless of their value". I do not recall the words "vested interests" in the report, but the thought in that particular sentence is certainly embedded in the report, even if in slightly different language.

We have had some curious illustrations of this. We had the illustration of the placement service, where the matter was eventually referred to a departmental committee which drew up a report which, with some simplification, but not unfairly, can be said to read somewhat as follows: "Our job is to assess where the placement service should be and to see whether it should be under different auspices." All three Departments got together and drew up a report and in an extraordinary, ingenious way, and in a manner which the Parliamentary Secretary described in the Seanad as "spotty and illogical", which criticism of a Civil Service report is unusual in origin and wording, the committee arrived at the conclusion that all the relevant functions happened to be carried out by precisely the right Department and that, despite all the argument they started out with, no change was needed. In that instance, although the Government at first accepted the report, following a Seanad debate, when the Parliamentary Secretary recognised that the report was simply a cover-up for everybody and went back to the Taoiseach, the whole system was changed and put under different auspices. That was a classical example of the Civil Service so organising its views as to achieve the result that nothing should be changed. The arguments put forward and the skill with which logical fallacies were perpetrated certainly did credit to the ingenuity of the people concerned, but the deep conservatism and the organisational conservatism and the determination to keep the existing structure does not augur well for the reforming instinct of this institution. That does not seem to be present in the Civil Service or, indeed, in the present Government who have depended for too long on the Civil Service.

The relationship between the Government and the Civil Service must now have become so close that the Government find it hard to stand back and see the problems, because they are so enmeshed in the system. The Devlin Report also went on to talk of overlapping and duplication in individual Departments and the lack of co-ordination between Departments. Comment was made on ad hoc decisions and on unnecessary supervision. There was a long list of criticism covering practically every Department. The only Department which escaped unscathed was the Department of Finance. I have already referred to the Department of Social Welfare. It is the Department of Social Welfare in name only, because it does not deal with social welfare. It has few welfare functions. It never developed such functions. They had no comprehension of welfare planning and no picture of the overall need. I believe that since the report was published the Department have improved and that social planning is now going on there. The Minister has so claimed. The Government are such now that lights are hidden under bushels until Ministers attend dinners and unveil the lights. I do not know whether there has been a radical change in the Department of Social Welfare, but I have been told that changes are taking place, and that some of the things said in the past are no longer valid. This may be true but I have no means of knowing except gossip, and I should not be dependent on that for an assessment of the performance of a Department of State.

The report mentions the fragmentation at every level of the social welfare service. A poor family have to deal with very many different bodies. This is absurd. As a public representative, dealing with the problems of a poor family I find myself totally bogged down in the different interests concerned. How any ordinary individual, any unemployed person and his wife, any person in ill-health, or a deserted wife, is expected to cope with a system of this kind, I cannot imagine.

I have one case of a deserted wife at the moment and I must be dealing with five different agencies on her behalf in different branches of the corporation and different Departments. It is almost a fulltime job looking after her, never mind the rest of the work I have to do, because she has been so neglected in so many ways, and she has so many problems of income maintenance, of the condition of the house, that the number of issues raised by her problem require a lot of attention. She cannot cope. She does not know where to go or who to get on to. She has to rely on her public representative. The system should not be like that.

There should be one person to whom she could go other than a TD who has other functions to perform. Not all of us perform our other functions to adequately because we are trying to do an amateur social welfare job at the same time. There should be one person to whom she could go who would cope with the problems of her rent arrears, who would talk to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul to sort out her immediate problems, who would deal with the corporation to get agreement on the way the rent arrears should be paid, who would get on to the relevant department in the corporation to see about the mice and rats, who would get on to another department of the corporation to deal with the windows that have been knocked out and have not been replaced, who would apply to the Housing Department to get a house of a more adequate size and type in another area for her and her family, who would get on to the assistance people to get an increase in her social assistance. That is not the complete list. There are several other things as well.

Such a person should have somebody in her area to whom she could turn, somebody with the function of dealing with those things, somebody who has the expert knowledge and who knows precisely who to get on to, and who is on old boy network terms with the rat officer of the corporation, or the rodent inspector, or whoever it may be. People should not be left at the mercy of TDs. We do our best, but inevitably what we do is patchy. We cannot provide a comprehensive service. We cannot track down all the cases. There is nobody in an area whose job it is to know what all the cases are. There is nobody whose job it is to ensure that these things are followed up. Very often we are inefficient individually. We cannot get around to different things. People are left waiting because, not only is the bureaucratic system slow, but very often the TD is so overburdened with work that he is slow too. It is only a part-time job for him and he has other commitments.

These aspects of social welfare are divided between the local authorities, the Department of Social Welfare, the Department of Labour—redundancy compensation is another aspect of some of these problems—the Department of Health and the regional health board. This fragmentation is impossible from the consumer point of view. One of the major administrative problems we have to tackle is to reorganise administration so that the social welfare administration works through a single field officer for all the services, so that our industrial services work through a single field officer who is able to deal as a GP with the problems of industry and call in the specialist services, and the same thing should happen at the agricultural level. This is impossible because of fragmentation and because, as is stated here, Government Departments are so completely independent. There are some good quotations on that.

Mr. J. Lenehan

Would there be any hope of putting a knob on him so that we could turn him off?

We are accustomed to these constructive suggestions and the Deputy always signals his appearance in the House with some comment of this kind. Otherwise, one might not notice his presence. Whether that would be a loss is a matter of opinion. On the point of the independence of Government Departments the report states that their first impression tended towards the view that there was not one Civil Service but 16. That is a fairly astringent comment. The next comment is even more astringent. They say that on further examination some substance remained for this view. It was not just a first impression. They also said that there is a general tendency towards a coherently operated overall policy. I am glad to hear it. There is not a coherently operated overall policy but there is a general tendency in that direction. If we wait a few decades it might turn up.

In the meantime we are dealing with bodies which are totally independent and the co-ordination of whose activities at field level, at the level of the consumer, whether he be the individual person with a social welfare problem, or industry or agriculture, poses an apparently insuperable problem. Other criticisms made include, in regard to the Department of Industry and Commerce, the lack of industrial experience in the industrial reorganisation branch illustrating a point to which I shall come back, the question of recruitment and the problem of a public service adapting itself to specialised needs which grow up in a community as the decades pass when those in it must all enter at or before approximately the age of 21 or 22 and where there is no injection of talent from outside.

There is criticism also of the organisation of work in the Office of Public Works. I do not want to waste time going through the individual Departments but the comments are certainly worth reading, and they are ones which we should be following up individually in the different Departments with which we are concerned. Unhappily for me, the Department of Finance came out almost unscathed so that, in my own departmental responsibility, as spokesman I have not got very many criticisms to make. That does not mean that in their organisation as a public service the Department of Finance come out unscathed because, in a sense, all the criticisms of the public service which the report contains ultimately reflect back on the Department of Finance whose job it has been to run the public service. In their own operations the Department are exempt from criticism.

On the question of recruitment the problems raised are very serious indeed. The lack of mobility is referred to. Ultimately the problem here is the system under which within the public service the person is recruited as an executive officer, or as an administrative officer, and that is that. After that there is no more entry. If you try to think in terms of an analogy with any other outside body you realise that such a system would not be tolerated easily. The idea that the only talent you need is the talent brought in at that age and that, regardless of the complexities of the new problems that arise, you must cope with them with the people who came in at that age, at that level, with the educational qualifications they had, and that you cannot in any circumstances take in somebody from outside with a specialised knowledge or skill, would be regarded outside the public service as eccentric to the point of dangerous absurdity. Yet it is a rooted principle in the public service.

One can understand that in any body there is a desire to maintain the promotional pattern and civil servants have a right from their own point of view to be concerned that people are not brought in over their heads. This report rightly recommends a change in pension provisions to enable people to leave the Civil Service to encourage outward mobility. This is right. Many civil servants have abilities of a more entrepreneurial character than the Civil Service itself provides opportunities for. Many of them might find a better place for their talents outside the public service and yet the pension system may be such as to discourage them from moving after a certain age. People can find out quite late in life that they are square pegs in round holes. The hole may get rounder and the square may get squarer as time goes on.

Anything which encourages people to change is good but a report which recommends improvement in outward mobility and which does not recommend the corollary of inward mobility is defective in this respect. I will not say that here I find the Devlin Report spotty and illogical, to use the Parliamentary Secretary's terms about the inter-departmental report on manpower policy, but I find it unconvincing when it refers to the need to make provision for short term entry and for consultants, but does not refer to any possibility of people being recruited as permanent officials after the AO level and age. While it makes provision for outward mobility for civil servants, it seems to me not to draw the logical conclusion from its own premises. Moreover there is the problem that for a long time the Civil Service have had great difficulty in recruiting. The volume of recruitment and, indeed, the quality of recruitment have suffered as a result. The report gives many apt illustrations. In 1968, for instance, it was found necessary to go down the list to the six hundredth applicant in order to get 56 executive officers. This suggests a resistance to employment in the Civil Service which is disturbing.

I do not think that the effects of the educational revolution, especially now with the availability of university grants and of what is called free secondary education, have been exploited. Up to some years ago the Civil Service was one of the main outlets for talent in this country. Many people who, in other circumstances would have gone to university, joined the Civil Service. The level of entry was very high but now, when there are opportunities available so freely for third level education, the proportion of able people who opt not to have third level education, but to go direct into the Civil Service on leaving school is inevitably much smaller. Therefore, the level of talent available to the Civil Service, when its main recruitment entry is still at executive officer level, is very small. That system of recruitment is now an anachronism. The report tells us that in 1968 there was an extra competition with a higher age limit. There were 231 applicants for the executive officer posts, 38 qualified but 28 of those were in the Civil Service already and of the other ten, five had not been to a university, two were undergraduates and three were graduates. Even with that additional competition and raised age level the actual intake from outside was very limited.

We are told that in 1968 half those offered administrative officer appointments refused them and that half the appointments made were to people who were in the Civil Service already. During the years 1966 to 1968 the report tells us that the averages intake at administrative officer level was only seven each year from outside. This was the situation in a Civil Service of 15,000 people, excluding the Garda, the Army and the Post Office. Moreover, there is the problem that many of those who joined the Civil Service do not stay. About five years ago I had a class of eight MA students, all of them people of ability. Of seven of these who applied for Civil Service posts, five were accepted. So far as I am aware, only one of them has remained. The others stayed there only for about a year or a year and a half.

There is something wrong somewhere when any body find it so difficult to recruit people and so difficult to keep them. It is difficult to establish what is wrong. It is a matter that needs to be studied in some depth. Some young people give as an excuse that they are not prepared to go through the hypocrisy of the Irish language test, even if they have the Irish language. In some cases that may be genuine. There is the problem also of the organisation of work in the Civil Service which does not seem capable of being organised in such a way as to give responsibility of the kind which people believe their years and education entitle them to. Of course, very often young people expect more in this respect than they get; but it is fair to say that the proportion of young people entering other employments who are dissatisfied with the responsibility given to them is much smaller than in the case of the Civil Service. It is obvious that, even if the expectations of young people may be too high, the frustration in the Civil Service is much more marked than in other bodies and that young people in the Civil Service become discouraged when they find themselves doing routine work far below what they judge to be within their competence. This may be due in some cases to overconfidence on their part, but the disparity between the turnover of entrants to the Civil Service and entrants to other jobs is sufficiently marked as to be a matter which should give rise to concern.

We have also what is perhaps the most disturbing of facts, that is, that of 97 people promoted to assistant principal shortly before the report was drawn up, only 5 per cent had been to a university before they entered the Civil Service and 60 per cent had not had any university education. When one bears in mind that today, of young people leaving school, rather more than 5 per cent are receiving a university education, there is something odd about a country in which the proportion of people with a given level of education in the highest job in the Civil Service is lower than it is in the general body of people leaving school. I am not imputing that university education has unique merits. Indeed, a Civil Service which consisted only of people who had been to university would be a curious and, I suspect, a rather ineffective body but there must be a proportion in all things.

Given the high proportion of talented people who go on now to receive a third level education, that such a small proportion of these find their way into the Civil Service, that so few of those stay, and that the Civil Service now has to go so far down in the list of applicants to get people willing to take the positions at any education level, the situation is disturbing and cannot be ignored. It is a situation that cannot be left to one side simply because to tackle it would mean disturbing established practices or of disturbing particular vested interests. There is too much at stake here and the problem must be tackled energetically. A Government that have allowed the creation of a Department of the Public Service on the recommendation of this Devlin Report to wait for two and a half years could not be said to be tackling the problem energetically.

Somebody entering the public service today, if he is to be capable of contributing to the running of this country not only in this century but in the next—because a person entering the service today at 20 years of age will be there for 45 years and that will be the year 2017—must be a person of high intelligence and of adaptability because, unless he can adapt to changing problems and to new techniques, he will not be able to keep up. He will have to be able to understand techniques such as cost benefit analysis, systems analysis, automatic data processing and management accountancy. Some kind of third level education will be needed in the future for people who will have to cope with these problems.

The weakness regarding Devlin is that the report does not grasp the nettle in the sense that it does not make it clear that it will be necessary to have some element of entry into the permanent Civil Service at a level higher than that of administrative officer and that you cannot exclude any importation of talent into a body of this kind when so many new problems are arising for which, inevitably, people in the Civil Service will not have an aptitude. Of course people can be sent on training courses and that will be the answer in many instances if people are flexible and adaptable and keep themselves young in mind and body but there are problems that arise which require not merely skills acquired at training courses but which require also experience in the actual work. To exclude by definition any people with practical experience of industry or of agriculture, of any of the service sectors or of academic life from the public service is necessarily to weaken its ability to cope with the problems.

The Civil Service has a high reputation to maintain. Most of us in our experience of the public service have been struck by the competence of the people with whom we deal. In dealing with people at a reasonably high level in the Civil Service one rarely meets a person who does not know his job. They are well briefed and understand the problems concerned. In fact, they nearly always get the better of one, and that is a good test. However, this is not as true now as it has been in the past. In the last three years I have noticed a new and disturbing tendency creeping in. I have noticed vocational bodies in Ireland now beginning to employ new skills so that when they come to grips with the Civil Service, the level of competence on the Civil Service side is not as high as in those outside. Even though they have much more time to familiarise themselves with files than perhaps have the people from outside with whom they are dealing, they are not always able to cope. A change has been coming about in the relative intellectual relationship between the Civil Service and those who are dealing with it, and this change is not to the advantage of the Civil Service. In the interests of the country it is right that there should be an element of intellectual dominance in the public service to deal with private interests. We do not wish to have a position where private interests can get the better of the public service because of a lack of competence in the public service. That has not been the case in the past. In fact, it has been the other way around. There has been too little talent outside so that sometimes the public service had it all its own way and there was virtually no effective dialogue. That is now being reversed and the inadequacy of the talent going into the Civil Service is beginning to create problems that must be tackled.

There are many other problems to which the Devlin Report refers and with which I have not time to deal. There is the question of decentralisation, devolution of authority, the question of regionalism dealt with in that very interesting and thought-provoking appendix by Mr. Tom Barrington of the Institute of Public Administration. There is the suggestion that greater use should be made of the universities and research centres. There are many ideas of this kind which need to be discussed, and if this were a debate on the Civil Service I would dwell on them longer, but as it is not I shall leave the public service at that point. However, I look forward to the debate on the Ministers' and Secretaries' Bill that will be introduced and which will deal with the departments of the public service. I shall look forward to hearing the Minister's ideas and to hearing a constructive debate in this House in which the views of public representatives on the Civil Service and what needs to be done to help it to fulfil its functions effectively can be put forward.

I want to return now to the last topic with which I shall be dealing, namely, the question of the EEC. I think it would be wrong in an economic debate of this nature, coming as it does a week before the referendum, not to take advantage of this opportunity to say something on this subject. Some of the arguments that have been made need to be displayed again to make sure people are getting the full picture.

In considering how he should vote in this referendum the proverbial man in the street could look perhaps, to several different criteria. He could reasonably look at the existing Community and ask: Are the people in that Community satisfied? Have they done well or not? That is a reasonable test to apply, although not the only test, in trying to make up one's mind. The obvious answer to that question is that the Community has been a damn sight more successful economically than we have. Of course, the countries concerned, except Italy, started off in a better position than we, but Italy was in a similar position to us. Its living standards in 1958 were at the same level as ours. I know living standard comparisons between countries are difficult. I am not falling into the trap into which some of the anti-EEC protagonists in the debate have fallen in making comparisons based on exchange rates, which tell you nothing. If you make comparisons on the basis of exchange rates you find that Spain is very cheap and Germany is very dear. What that tells you I do not know, other than that exchange rates do not represent purchasing power parities.

Some years ago in attempting to make an assessment of living standards in different countries I made use of a volume published in 1966 by the OECD which brings together different attempts to measure purchasing power parities in different countries, to make adjustments for the fact that some countries have dear and some have cheap currencies, that in some countries the cost of living seems to be lower, and that the official exchange rate in other countries seems to be higher. Using these and applying to these figures for a particular year—I think 1960 was the year for which I got the data—the indices of volume of private consumption per head backwards and forwards over the years, I have been able to get some kind of measure not only of the relative level of living standards in these countries, in purely material terms of course, but also the rate of change. I have a very unaesthetic graph in front of me which shows that the United States living standards are much higher than those of most European countries. I have not got Sweden on my list here but I think it comes close to the United States; otherwise European countries are much below. It shows also that in 1950 of the countries I have listed here, which include the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, France, Germany, The Netherlands and Italy—in other words, it includes, Britain, Ireland the EEC countries and the United States—the United Kingdom had by far the highest living standards. Britain is a country in which growth has been slow. Therefore, although in 1950 its living standards were approximately 30 per cent higher than those of France and about 60 per cent higher than those of Germany, by about 1962 to 1964, those countries had caught up and have since passed Britain out. Today the living standards of these countries are significantly higher than those of Britain; their growth has been more dynamic.

In 1950 Italy's living standards were lower than Ireland's, because we went through a period of almost total stagnation, slow growth up to 1955, then a collapse, so that between 1952 and 1958 there was really no growth at all in living standards in this country, a period which happily bridges two administrations and is not, therefore, attributable to one Government rather than to another. I always think that attempts to assess the responsibility of Governments and what happened in the 1950s are bound to be fruitless, as they change every three years, and given that most decisions of Government take about three years to take effect, you would probably get nearer to an assessment of responsibility by blaming each Government for the things that happened when it was not in office instead of blaming it for the things that happened when it was in office.

By 1958 Italy, whose economy was expanding, not as rapidly as since in the EEC but, nevertheless, expanding, had caught up with this country. Since then it has moved rapidly ahead so that today living standards in Italy are, perhaps, a quarter to one-third higher than here. It is relevant to consider that the countries we are joining are, by and large, countries of more rapid economic growth and that France and Germany, whose living standards were much lower than those of Britain and even before membership significantly lower, have caught up and passed out Britain. Italy, whose living standards when the Community was founded were at the same level as ours is now well ahead of us. These factors are not of themselves conclusive but they are indicative.

Again one can ask: what is the attitude of the people in this Community to it? Various public opinion polls help to test this, but there are other measures of opinion. If this Community were not working out, if the relations between countries were strained, if people were feeling they no longer had a say in their own decisions, that they were being organised by bureaucrats at a distance, then one would expect to find in the Community a movement against the EEC, a movement of dissatisfaction and dissent. You would expect to find parties or groups within parties agitating against the changes, agitating to get back to greater national control, agitating against the movement towards greater economic and political integration.

Do we find that? No. There is only one party in these countries which is not strongly in favour of membership, the communist party, and the communist party has changed its attitude. The communist trade unions participate constructively in the work of the economic and social committees of the Communities. The Italian communists play their part in the European Parliament and the French communists would if they were let, but owing to the peculiar system by which the European Parliament is elected in France, they are not let. The communists, therefore, although they are not exactly as enthusiastic about some aspects of the Community, now accept it, and then all other parties accept it. As a Dutch socialist who was speaking at a meeting here two years ago said in reply to Deputy Justin Keating on that occasion, there is not even the left wing of a socialist party on the Continent that is against membership; and there are no right wings of conservative parties that are against membership.

I think it is a test of how the Community has worked that there is no political movement of any kind in any country against it. There is no measure of dissatisfaction. The public opinion polls in all these countries produce reaction ranging from lack of interest in some cases, a feeling that it does not matter very much or has not affected them very much, to, in many cases, a strong feeling of approval. Again, these facts, if not conclusive, are at least indicative. The Irish people, in making up their minds whether or not to join the Community, must be legitimately influenced by how that Community has performed, how it is seen by the people who live within it and whether there is opposition to or support for it in these countries.

Another test to be applied by the people in this referendum is a domestic one. I am leaving over for the moment the arguments for and against; I am just thinking of other criteria to be applied. It is fair to ask who is in favour and who is against, and, of the people in favour or against, what would their motivation be? Do you feel the motivation of particular groups is in the national interest or could it be influenced by something else? Are they genuine or are they politically motivated in their views?

I will not dare to speak for the Government on this as to why they are in favour. That is a matter they can do themselves. I do not want in any way to criticise them or to commend them in the matter. They can speak for themselves. I can only say for my own party that nothing could be more inconvenient for Fine Gael than to find themselves on the same side as Fianna Fáil. Any idea that this party have any interest in supporting EEC membership for political reasons is obviously absurd. Political interests would dictate that we would oppose it, had we been so dishonest and irresponsible as to do so. But, inconvenient though it is, there is a time when party interest cannot take precedence over the national interest. It would be utterly irresponsible for this party to do the kind of Harold Wilson act, especially in a country where the matter is being decided, not by the Government in power, as Harold Wilson knew was basically the case in Britain, but by the people; "Do not be utterly irresponsible for a political party like Fine Gael, for reasons of political convenience, to have turned around and told the people: "Do not join. It is bad for you", knowing the consequence could well have been, would have been, indeed, disastrous. As I think it is clear this referendum could not be won without Fine Gael support, would be lost if Fine Gael were against it; in this issue we hold the balance of power.

I am not saying that every Fine Gael person will vote the way the party say. Of course, they will not. Many people will make up their own minds. Many people will cross party boundaries. But there are many people, supporters of every party, who will feel that that party have given thought to the subject and will respect their view—the same is true of the Labour Party—and they will be guided by that party. If the people in our party who will tend to be guided by our advice had been advised differently and voted differently accordingly, the result could be very different on May 10th from the result that we will see. For Fine Gael to have risked the consequences of that for motives of political advantage would have been totally wrong. Nobody can accuse us of being politically motivated. We may be right or we may be wrong in favouring membership. That is a matter on which people will be entitled to their views but we are patently honest in supporting membership and patently lacking in any political motivation or any arrière-pensee. We are simply concerned with what is good for the people.

There are the farming organisations, the rural organisations. They have a strong economic interest. I am not suggesting that they are all necessarily motivated by what they think is good for the spiritual interests of Ireland. The farming bodies are clearly economically orientated vocational bodies concerned with the economic interest of their members. But, we are concerned here in part with what is in the economic interest of this country. It seems to me it is highly improbable that all the farming organisations would be campaigning around the country as hotly and as energetically as the political parties for membership if they believed it would be damaging for farmers. The idea that they are all so incompetent or stupid that they have misread the signs or have got the wrong end of the stick is farfetched.

Clearly, farming organisations have only one interest in this matter, the interest of their members. They are pursuing that and they believe that lies in entry and that is fairly conclusive proof, apart from any other argument that one could put forward, that membership would be good for Irish agriculture.

What about industry? The same is true for industry. The Confederation of Irish Industry favour membership. Again I am not suggesting that the members are dominated by altruistic considerations, that they are concerned necessarily about what is good for Ireland politically, but their judgment is one which is relevant when one comes to consider what are the industrial effects of membership. The Confederation of Irish Industry have a very broad membership and, indeed, owe their origins to the protected section of Irish industry. They have only in recent years drawn into themselves the support of some of the older established industries or some of the newly established industries— by older established I mean antedating protection; by newly established I mean the new foreign industries, export orientated, that have come here in recent years. This federation is one whose central body of membership consists of the firms that benefited from protection and their major concern and preoccupation must be with these firms. It is inconceivable that such a body, well-equipped and staffed to evaluate the problem, could have decided on membership and their members could have supported them in favouring membership if membership were bad for industry.

Indeed, in this matter there are many workers who will rightly follow the view of their employers rather than the views of their trade unions. Last night in this House Deputy Andrews and Deputy O'Donovan clashed on this matter. I thought they were at crosspurposes and at one point I said something with that in view but as they both seemed to be about to turn on me I hastily opted out of the dialogue and waited for it to finish.

A worker in an export industry or in any industry, when he is concerned about his job. will tend to listen to what his employer says because his employer has a common interest with him on this point, rather than to a trade union. If the trade union express the contrary view and seem to be influenced by political considerations, ideological considerations, he will, I think, have regard to what his employer says, not because he thinks his employer is worried about him or is concerned with his interests; on the contrary, it is because he can rely on his employer to be motivated—I do not want to be crude or cruel—solely by economic self-interest. He knows that his employer is not going to do something that will jeopardise his business for the sake of making a political point. He can rely on his employer to be governed by economic self-interest and if his employer, in terms of his economic self-interest, says "Our industry needs membership," he can be pretty sure that his employer is not codding him and trying to fool him into a course of action which will undermine the firm.

He may not feel the same about the trade union who have to consider wider matters, who have an ideological orientation and who can be influenced by considerations other than the interests of the workers in that firm. After all, the trade union decision was taken at a congress of delegates. I do not think they had got the views of their members. Certainly, in the case of one major union the members do not seem to have been consulted. They made their decision by a narrow majority. That does not mean, therefore, that because they took such a decision on a narrow majority, in every firm in Ireland the economic interests of members must be against membership. Knowing that and knowing that the view of the trade union movement is a global view for the whole country, that it is influenced by ideological considerations, not purely the economic ones, the individual worker will tend to be guided by his boss in the matter because he can rely on his boss to be concerned with his own economic self-interest and in this instance that will be the interest of the worker primarily.

Deputy Andrews may have expressed himself badly in his speech. I do not know. Deputy O'Donovan was being a bit harsh in suggesting that a bad old tradition was being revised in employers telling their workers. It would be irresponsible of an employer not to tell his workers, in fairness, what the consequences of going in or staying out would be. If I were a worker I should greatly resent it if my employer failed to disclose to me what the effects on the business or the firm would be. So much for that point.

When one looks over the field, in terms of the organisations that are expressing views—those that are necessarily disinterested as Fine Gael are on this occasion, acting against their own interest, those who are concerned with economic interests in particular sectors and who are in a position to evaluate that interest and who will not be guided by anything other than the sectional interest—you will get a fairly good indication of what the effects of membership will be. It is fair to say that if Fine Gael are in favour of membership then we genuinely believe that this is for the good of the country. You may think we are mad but that is our genuine view. If you look to farming and you find all the farming organisations in favour, then it is fair to assume, if you have not got the time and the ability to assess the prospects for each farm product individually, that it must be good for farming.

If the Confederation of Irish Industry are in favour of membership, it is fair to assume that overall it must be good for industry because, in fact, industrial employment is inseparable from industrial output. The idea of some kind of dichotomy between bosses and workers here is absurd. If industry believes it will prosper then employment will prosper. You cannot divide the two on this issue. Whether the workers get their fair share of the loot is another matter. The employers will try to make sure that they do not. The unions will make sure that they do. That is a different question. In regard to the survival of the industry and of employment, the views of the employers and the views of management in industry will probably be the best assessment of it. Because it is self-interested, it is in a sense politically disinterested, if I may propound a paradox.

Again, when one looks further afield to the opponents, it stretches credulity a bit to believe that bodies like the two Sinn Féin and the Communist Party of Ireland, dedicated to the creation of conditions in this country propitious to revolution, would be pressing people to vote "No" because they think that membership will be bad for business and bad for prosperity. I hesitate to think what would be the fate of the Communist Party in meeting the communist parties of the world, if they ever now meet together, if it were to be found out to be pursuing a policy against the interests of the Communist Party. If, in fact, the Communist Party were advocating that we should stay out of the EEC because the Communist Party believed that membership would be bad for the economy here, it would be betraying its principles and its purpose. The whole purpose of the Communist Party is to achieve power by revolution in the face of popular dissatisfaction. Its job is to maximise dissatisfaction.

We may disagree with them in that and we may take a different view as to how the changes should be achieved, but it is a valid ideological viewpoint they work from and their job is to decide in any given instance what course of action is likely to lead to a situation which will create conditions propitious for a revolution and create popular dissatisfaction and give them their chance. Presumably they evaluated this position. They must have looked at it, must have looked at membership and have decided, if they are in any way logical, that joining the Community would make this country prosperous and there would be less chance for them, whereas if we stayed out, there would be difficulties and they might have a chance. The suggestion that they acted the other way around, against their own interests, that the main purpose of the Communist Party is to create conditions unpropitious to revolution and eliminate their own chances of ever succeeding is to argue a degree of illogic in the Communist Party which I find hard to credit. They are people motivated by logic, their own logic. We may not accept their premise but at least their method of thought is logical and their own logic dictates that they should oppose membership, if they think it is going to be good for this country and its economy.

The same a fortiori is true of the two Sinn Féin groups. It would be somewhat odd if the Sinn Féin groups who are again concerned to achieve a social revolution here and who are pursuing a dedicated campaign throughout the country to persuade people that we must stay out or the country will become prosperous and the Sinn Féin revolutionary efforts will thus be foiled—I am open to conviction that Sinn Féin are so irrational that they are setting out to undermine their position. I do not believe it of the Communist Party but possibly members of Sinn Féin are so oddly irrational that they are now breaking their necks around the country trying to convince the people we should stay out because they are fearful lest if we are not in conditions will be created which will be so bad economically that they may benefit. That is a degree of irrationality which is improbable. I suppose it is possible in a group who do not show much signs of rationality but it is a rather strange interpretation to put on their behaviour. I think the public can assume—there is some indication in today's public opinion poll that they can—that if the Communist Party and the two Sinn Féin groups are against membership, it must be good for this economy. Any other assumption would be necessarily somewhat strained. I leave out of account the position of the Labour Party because their position is that they oppose membership and have done so by and large by a process of honest argument. They have been selective in their arguments, as we no doubt have, but most of them in any event have avoided the major distortions and untruths which have emanated from other opponents of membership. They have tried to fight an honest campaign and it is a good thing that there should be such a campaign.

It would be unfortunate if all three parties agreed and the Irish people did not have the benefit of the various arguments being put to them. I am not including them in the comments I have made. The Labour Party are fulfilling a very useful function. I respect their position and the way they have run the campaign by and large. I am not commenting on the Government party, but so far as Fine Gael are concerned, the Confederation of Irish Industry, the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers, the IFA and the rural organisations are concerned the position they have taken up should influence people in their decision. In so far as Sinn Féin and the Communist Party are concerned, people should have regard to the line they have taken and draw their own conclusions as to what must be the motivation of such revolutionary groups. I am not reflecting on them. They are entitled to their view that the country would be the better for a revolution. I do not share the view but it is a legitimate view. I am only saying that I pay them the respect of believing that if that is their view, they will pursue it logically and coherently and their position on membership must be because they fear the beneficial effects on our economy and the whole social system in Ireland. So much for that criterion.

Coming to the arguments themselves, I shall not dwell too long on any one because the House has heard some of them before but there are one or two matters to which I should like to draw attention because they may be helpful in the dialogue proceeding in the country at present. So far as agriculture is concerned, it seems to me that there are rather fundamental reasons why membership is beneficial to agriculture. I know that one can argue whether the present farm price level of the EEC should be maintained or not. This must be a matter of opinion because nobody can know. I may believe that it is not going to be greatly eroded in the years ahead, while others may believe it will, but certain things can be said that are sufficiently fundamental that the accidental effects of events to be faced in the years ahead are unlikely to change. The first of these is climate. This country has a mild climate, a damp climate, which helps grass to grow. The same is true of most of Britain and parts of the north western coast—Normandy, Brittany and parts of the northern coast of France, Belgium, and Holland and parts of Germany. There are areas where that is true, but for the majority of the Community climatic conditions are not favourable for growing grass or anything like it is here. There are very few parts of the Continent geographically which are as favourable as here and in most parts of the EEC conditions are less favourable. Logically, given these climatic conditions, inevitably the costs of producing beef and milk must be higher in the Community and the price that has to be paid in order to elicit a given volume of production to meet the demands of the Community must be higher. In this country if you scratch the land virtually cows spring up and give milk; the grass grows and you cannot help it. I am not saying that we could not manage it properly and I am not saying that we do, but conditions are such that production of beef, milk and mutton is very low cost. In this Community at any given moment the price level for climatic reasons which are fundamental and unchangeable must always tend to be high by our standards. Any price they fix that will yield any kind of supply-demand relationship, any kind of balance in demand and supply, must be a price very attractive to us.

If it is going to produce enough in this whole Community, it must favour us. That is something very fundamental and any talk about pressure from industrial countries to reduce prices alters that fundamental climatic relationship. It is something new. Hitherto we have been orientated towards the British market. In Britain, conditions—the growth of grass—are not that different from here. The prices that have to be paid to get sufficient beef and milk produced from the land are not that different from ours. They are higher but not enormously different. They are nothing like as high as they are on the Continent. We are now for the first time joining a Community in which our natural advantage of our low cost production of these products is going to come face to face with the situation where the price level is and must be a good deal higher than anything we have been used to.

The second and very fundamental point is the ending of British exploitation of this country through their agricultural price policy. This comes to an end when they join. They lose the power to discriminate and must pay our farmers the same as they pay their own farmers and the British practice which in one way or another has operated very strongly for about 20 years and, indeed, 150 years, in many ways which discriminated in favour of their farmers against ours has to come to an end and the ending of this form of exploitation marks a new relationship with Britain, and the fact that the relationship will no longer be bilateral but multilateral within the framework of ten countries changes the quality of this relationship. There can never be, no matter how much goodwill, friendliness and liberality on the part of a larger country, an equitable satisfactory relationship bilaterally as between two countries so divergent in size— a population ratio of 20 to 1 and a GNP relation of 35 to 1—so divergent in their economic patterns and interests, between a country like Britain which is so enormously industrialised, being one of the oldest industrial countries in Europe, and a country like Ireland which is still so much agricultural. Inevitably, any bilateral relationship must be less unequal.

I have criticised the terms of the Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement here and outside from the time it was first introduced. They are unequal terms, unfair terms to us, which gave Britain the advantages several times what we reap from it. Some of that was due, I believe, sincerely, to the unfortunate bargaining position the Government got into, and the way it was negotiated and agreed. But even with the best will in the world, even if they had been in a better bargaining position, any agreement was bound to have been somewhat to our disadvantage. Britain was bound to get more out of it because our bargaining relationship is so weak and I do not think there is any possibility of that relationship being ever satisfactory. It is only within the framework of a larger Community with a balance between large and small countries, within which the Anglo-Irish relationship is subsumed in a larger and multi-lateral relationship that we can hope.

There has been some talk in recent times about special relationships, about developing a new triangular relationship between Ireland, North and South, and Britain and having a special close relationship within the context of the EEC. I must say that I do not like the sound of it. People may feel that there is good reason in putting this forward, that it may help towards reunification, and that it may be necessary for us to have a special relationship for a period particularly with regard to the phasing out of British subsidies in social welfare.

I do not think that a relationship between these two islands which is special and bilateral can ever be satisfactory. It is only in the context of a wider community that Anglo-Irish relations will become normal. In the EEC Britain can no longer use legal power to exploit us. It is not that Britain, any more than any other country, seeks to exploit her neighbours. It is the law of nature that if one country is larger than another and is in a trading relationship with it is will tend to use that power when it is not operating within the framework of a community law. If we were Britain and if Britain were Ireland I am sure we would exploit her as much as she now exploits us. I make no judgement or criticism—I simply state a fact. The relationship is a neo-colonialist one, it is one of exploitation. By the law of nature it must remain such until it is changed within a wider community where it is no longer legally possible for it to take that form and within which the complex interactions and interests of ten countries will involve us in so many different alliances and issues that the polarised relationship between Ireland and Britain will no longer be a feature of the two countries.

These are two fundamental reasons why the position of Irish agriculture will be transformed by membership. These changes are fundamental and they need to be understood by people if they are to understand properly the benefits of membership. A curious feature of this campaign has been the reluctance of many people in favour of membership to tell the country how great can be the advantages. I think this is because of a feeling that the Irish people are a cynical people and they are inclined to doubt Greeks bearing gifts. If you tell them there will be great benefits they will assume that there must be something wrong and that you are trying to fool them. In a curious way this has encouraged many politicians to put the emphasis not on the benefits of membership but on the losses if we stay out. There is a feeling that if you tell the Irish people there will be great difficulties ahead they will feel at home because they will know where they are. However, the idea of benefits is a strange, dangerous, even subversive thought.

Those of us who have stressed the benefits have found ourselves criticised for taking a line that may not be too popular. As a result, people generally have underestimated the effects of membership. The change involved is so fundamental and creates a situation so different from anything we have experienced that we lack the imagination to grasp its significance and we lack the courage to quantify it. I tried various quantifications but I have never had the courage to set my sights beyond 1978. After that date we will be in a position for the first time really to exploit the potential of our land and the scale of benefits will be so tremendous that I am afraid I would strain the imagination of my listeners if I told them what I thought of the benefits. Therefore, I have confined myself to looking only as far as 1978.

Even if farmers do not produce more, the benefits will be enormous. Farmers' incomes will rise by something approaching two-thirds even if they do not produce additional amounts. Even on that limited assumption of no increase in output, the benefits with the multiplier effects on wage and salary incomes in industry and services are measurable in tens of millions of pounds.

When one begins to think in terms of the effect of guaranteed access to markets and higher prices one arrives at figures that are probably beyond the imagination of most Irish rural people. Irish rural people are inured to a market situation which has been unsatisfactory for many generations. For three generations they have owned the land; in this time they have had some good moments but they have been followed by evil days. Those folk memories remain. Behind it all lies the folk memory of the Famine, still not extinct in rural Ireland. This has had demoralising effects and in many ways it has made us a pessimistic people—not so much fearing the worst as expecting the worst. At times we almost welcome it because it is a familiar friend.

On the industrial side the most important point is that we will have free trade anyway. I was delighted when my friend Deputy Keating on the radio with me several months ago confirmed this was his view and he was good enough to confirm it in this House in a debate a few days later. Of course, he qualified it by saying that by free trade he was talking about tariffs and quotas being removed and that outside the EEC we would have freedom to do other things to help industry which we could not do inside the Community.

What is conceded by him on behalf of his party—but not by others less honest who are opposed to our entry to the EEC—is that if we remain outside we will have to consider the effects on the 350,000 jobs in export industries with regard to the imposition of tariffs in the British market. Therefore, we will be obliged to seek a free trade agreement if we remain outside and get what access we can to the British market to preserve these jobs although this means giving free trade in return. Whether we join the Community or not we face free trade. If we do not join we will seek a free trade agreement. I believe we will get one, but I do not think it will be as easily achieved as Deputy Keating and his friends have suggested. Many Members will have seen The Irish Press headline——

I think the Deputy is abusing his position as a Member of this House. He spoke in this debate last night; he commenced speaking today at 4 p.m. and it is now 8.20 p.m. It is bad for procedure if some Deputy such as Deputy FitzGerald is allowed to take over discussion completely. It is about time we changed the regulations.

There is no limit regarding the time a Deputy may speak. Deputy FitzGerald.

It is unfair that some Deputies monopolise the time of this House in the way it has happened here.

I have never monopolised time in this House in any debate of a limited character. In such a case I have always spoken with, for me, unaccustomed brevity. However, when the debate is open-ended and when it is on such a wide scale I felt it open to me——

There are other Members in the House as well as the Deputy.

There are times when people like myself and Deputy Keating feel the need to speak at some length and I am sure the Deputy would not wish to muzzle either of us, especially on a matter as important as the EEC.

That is democracy. We could look up the records of the Labour Party and add up all their speeches.

I have not equalled Deputy Keating's record although I am coming close to it. I am not consciously seeking to pass it by any means. I am trying to deal as rapidly as I can with the issues raised. I am sorry to have upset Deputy Murphy for whom I have great respect.

I do not accept the right of anyone to take six hours to make a speech. There are others who wish to make their contribution.

I would ask Deputy FitzGerald to develop the point regarding an associate agreement. That is an important point and Deputy Murphy does not wish Deputy FitzGerald to pursue that point. I would ask the Deputy to develop that point.

I thought the Labour Party believed in free speech.

If at any point Deputy Murphy considers I am waffling, being repetitious, talking in airy terms, or failing to make concrete points——

The Deputy dealt with the EEC at 7 p.m.

The Chair is the judge of that.

Deputy Murphy's attention must have wandered. At about 7 o'clock I dealt with the question of regional policy in Ireland and I referred to aspects of regional policy in the EEC. At the moment I am dealing with quite different matters. I should not dream of being repetitious and if the Deputy finds me talking of any aspect of the EEC and saying anything I have said previously the Deputy should, of course, draw my attention to it and I shall be guided by the Chair. I was dealing with the question of industry facing free trade. I believe it would be possible for us, outside the Community, to get an agreement. I do not believe the terms would be as easy as have been suggested because, as we see from The Irish Press of last Saturday: “Brussels Rules Out Farm Deal: Market Shock For Associates.” The kind of terms we would get in a free trade agreement are not those we would like to see. In an article earlier in the week on the same subject in The Irish Times an account was given of the kind of terms for industrial products which the EEC was prepared to concede to the EFTA countries. I was rather taken aback. I had naively assumed that it would be easy enough to get a free trade agreement for industrial products. I had rather naively believed what Deputy Keating said on the subject and assumed he was right. It now transpires this is not the case at all, that for all products the transitional period the EEC wants is eight years—that is for most products—and for sensitive products such as paper they will not allow them in for anything under 12 years without tariff, and there will be no freeing of trade for the first three years.

It happened that very night I was speaking at a meeting in Clondalkin. I drew the attention of the people there to the kind of attitude we might meet if we stayed outside and sought an industrial free trade agreement. It is by no means open and shut that we could get free trade just like that. But, having said that, although there clearly could be a very serious disruption of our export trade for up to 12 years if we had to face tariffs in the British market in this period, temporarily, it is clear that eventually, after that period, we would be likely to get free trade for industrial products. Of course, we would have to concede free trade in return. This is the point which I am trying to make and which Deputy Keating concedes. This is of vital importance. It means that the entire debate about industrial redundancy is, in fact, relevant, not because it is not a vast human problem, nor because it is not something which we should face, not because we have tackled it adequately but because it is something which happens whether we are in or out. We face redundancy in industries catering for the home market which are incapable of surviving competition.

I think it right that we should try to assess the magnitude of this. I shall do so briefly, and, having done so, I want to point out that it is in a sense strictly irrelevant to the question of joining or not. But let us consider the implications of membership for industry. I have here the final report of the Committee on Industrial Organisation of which I was a member. Among the signatures at the end of it I find P. Alexander, Irish Congress of Trade Unions; the late J. Conroy, Irish Congress of Trade Unions; the late J. Larkin, Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the very hale and hearty assistant secretary, D. Nevin. There were signatures from the other groups, myself included. This was the final report after 2,500,000 words of work we put in on the subject of the impact on Irish industry of free trade.

All these reports were unanimous with one exception, the general report on redundancy, where there was disagreement between the two sides on who should pay. That was very understandable between employers and workers. On every other issue the reports were unanimous and were all signed by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions representatives. These reports include, individually and collectively in this final report and collectively also in this Brock synthesis of the first 22 reports, a qualified assessment of the effects of free trade. What was this qualification? The figure given was that with preparations for free trade redundancy might reach about 10,000 during the transitional period. In fact, this final report does not itself directly quantify the effects of redundancy, I think, if inadequate preparations were made but, in conjunction with the Catherine Brock report covering the first 22 industries, it is possible to calculate that CIO's cumulative or aggregate view of redundancy in the event of no preparation whatever being made would have been a figure of about 25,000.

Here we have the collective view of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the Confederation of Irish Industry, the Federated Union of Employers, the Department of Industry and Commerce, the Department of Finance, endorsing the views of the survey teams which visited each individual firm in most industries and produced their assessments. The view was that redundancy would be between 10,000 and 25,000 depending on the degree of preparation. Has anything happened since to modify this view? Yes, I think four things have happened. The first is that instead of having free trade by December, 1969, we are not having it until December, 1977, eight extra years. That is extra time to prepare and surely must help to minimise the problem of redundancy rather than otherwise. Again, we have spent £75 million on adaptation; that is the total sum including adaptation grants spent on adaptation of Irish industry to free trade. I do not say that all that money was necessarily well spent; I am sure some of it went on propping up industries that will not, in fact, survive but we could not have spent it without achieving some improvement in the position, without staving off some redundancy, without helping some firms to prepare for free trade. That money must have had some positive effect.

Thirdly, the agreement negotiated by the Government contains provisions protecting the vehicle assembly industry until 1985. I have a personal interest in this because I was in Brussels in connection with the vehicle assembly industry two years ago and went to see the relevant official in the industries division on the subject. I spoke about the problems of vehicle assembly and I was pleasantly surprised to find a willingness on his part to concede the possibility of special terms for our industry if our Government presented the case in any particular way. My first move when I left him was to go to the Irish Embassy and report precisely what was said to me so that it would help the Government in negotiating the arrangements. As a result of the subsequent negotiations we have this arrangement under which the assembly industry is protected until 1985.

This means there can be no redundancy in that industry during the transitional period up to 1977 which is our immediate concern. I shall return to the question of what happens vehicle assembly after that. That reduces redundancy but not by very much because the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in its rather curious publication suggests that 4,500 people are engaged in vehicle assembly. They have fallen into an old trap—perhaps, rather willingly—of assuming that a very high proportion of those in what is described, in the sense of industrial production, as "the vehicle assembly and repairing industry" are doing assembly work. The Committee on Industrial Organisation investigated that at the time.

Each firm was visited and a proportion of employment in assembly and repair was sorted out and what we discovered was that the total number of people engaged in vehicle assembly in 1964 or, perhaps, 1963, was, I think, 1,700. There were also some hundreds, perhaps 600, in ancillary industries supplying parts and I think the total was 2,100—I have not got the exact figure—but it was just over 2,000 persons engaged in vehicle assembly out of 5,000 or 6,000 engaged in vehicle assembly and repair. Since then, output has not increased; it was stabilised about the 1965 level and employment must be about the same as it was then. So, when congress talks about 4,500 jobs in this industry there are not 4,500 engaged in vehicle assembly and the real figure cannot be much different from the 2,000 which we established at that time.

I am not saying that the exemption of this industry from free trade during the transitional period makes a big difference but there are a couple of thousand jobs there which cannot be affected in this period and that must reduce the figure by at least 2,000. Again, as the Labour Party have rightly pointed out we have already suffered some industrial redundancy through the free trade area agreement. I believe they tend to exaggerate this. I believe that most of the redundancy which has occurred to date is attributable to economic stagnation in recent years. That view, incidentally, is confirmed by the OECD report which makes the same assessments as I have been making in this matter. From the detailed studies I have done, examining each industry individually, together with the trend of imports and the increased import content of home consumption and employment in the different sectors, I have come to the conclusion that the scale of redundancy to date caused by free trade is probably of the order of 3,000 to 3,500, offset, it must be said, by several thousand additional jobs created in connection with the removal of the synthetic fibre tariff which has given us additional exports to Britain of something approaching £2 million a year cumulatively since 1965.

The net redundancy due to the free trade agreement to date is, therefore, probably about 1,500. But the point I want to make is that something like 3,000 or 3,500 of the redundancies projected by the CIO have happened; they cannot happen twice. We have had them already. Therefore, in assessing the likely effects of membership we have this most authoritative survey, the result of individual surveys of every industry likely to be affected by free trade, endorsed by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions unanimously with not a dissenting voice in the matter.

We know what the effect would have been had we joined the EEC in 1963 or 1964 with a transition period to the end of 1969. We know it would have meant 10,000 jobs with preparation for membership or 25,000 jobs without. Since then we have had eight more years to prepare, £75 million spent, and 3,500 redundancies have occurred already. May I ask how then can the ICTU, never mind the leaders of the Labour Party, tell us there will will be 35,000 jobs redundant in free trade conditions? It just does not add up. I prefer the impartial view of the ICTU in this document I have here to the view they feel obliged now to put forward for political reasons in this campaign. As between the two I know which to believe.

I would think myself, in the light of all those figures, that the redundancy effects are measurable down to the order of, perhaps, 10,000, perhaps, a bit more, perhaps, a bit less. It would be difficult to make a case for a higher figure. Anybody who says it is 35,000 is talking nonsense.

Of course, supreme evidence that the Labour Party do not at this point believe their own figure is the fact that Deputy Keating has advocated free trade, because the 35,000 jobs in industry which would be affected by losing access to the British market are much more important than the jobs that would be lost through the freeing of trade alone. If Deputy Keating believes that in general free trade conditions 35,000 jobs would be lost at home he would not be saying we should have free trade to save 35,000 jobs in the export trade. On the contrary, he would be saying we must not have a free trade agreement. It is quite obvious that at this time the Labour Party do not believe the ICTU figures but feel obliged to stand over them because of solidarity between the two organisations, and we can sympathise with that.

In any event, whatever the figures are they are, strictly speaking, irrelevant because as Deputy Keating has made so clear we face free trade anyway and, therefore, the question of the scale of redundancies is not an issue which should affect the way people will vote on Wednesday. I agree that people will not be rational. I agree that trying to put these arguments in a rational form will not influence everybody because such people will be affected by irrational considerations. Nevertheless, my job here is to put the rational facts before the House and before the Irish people to the extent that they will get through in the newspapers tomorrow. I have to do my job and hope that some of the arguments I have put forward will make an impact.

I wish now to deal with some of the arguments against membership. I will deal with them briefly. In deference to Deputy Murphy's sensitivity to repetition, I will refrain from saying anything more about a regional policy. I will just make one point that I have not made before, and that is that the argument that in the EEC the enormous outflow of capital, draining away to the centre and bringing the workers with it, is not sustainable in face of the facts. It sounds grand to anybody not well versed in economics. It sounds rather sophisticated, the kind of thing one might expect to happen.

We must realise that we are part of a single capital market with Britain and the only restraint on capital between ourselves and Britain is the British restraint on capital coming in here. There is no restraint on capital going out of this country. In this single capital market is the enormous pool of the rich south-east of Britain, part of this golden triangle which we often hear of from those benches. In this single capital market how is capital flowing? Is is flowing outwards from this benighted country to that golden triangle area from Birmingham down to Dover? Not at all. It is pouring into this country at a rate which we cannot control.

In the past three years the net capital inflow—the excess of inflow over outflow—has been £230 million and the Central Bank has been making vain efforts to stop the money coming in. Their latest report makes ineffective excuses for its failure to stop £30 to £35 million coming in through the non-associated banks who had been told not to import any capital last year. In a country which has this massive inflow of capital, which cannot stop the money coming in, which is part of a single capital market with one of the largest industrial countries in the world, it does not make sense to be told that if we join Europe and if there are fewer restrictions than now as far as capital between ourselves and Europe, the capital will flow out. What the Europeans call free capital markets are what we call restrictions. Their free capital market does not include any free movement in short term funds or deposits such as we have between Ireland and Britain and between the North and South. We are joining with them in a relationship which will involve far more restrictions on the movement of capital than we had with Britain alone. Why in such circumstances the capital inflow to this country should suddenly become an outflow I cannot understand.

Of course, if it were the argument that the capital coming into this country was flowing to protected industries and that with the removal of protection it would not come in any more, there would be a logical case. But it is not. I doubt very much if much of the £230 million which came in here in the past three years came to protected industries which were about to lose their protection. Capitalists may not be nice people but they are certainly rational and the last place they would invest money in is in the Irish protected industries within three years of the ending of protection. Wherever the money is going it is not going there. Therefore, the removal of protection will certainly not affect the inflow of capital to this country.

The facts are that this is a developing economy and in the world today a developing economy, especially one that can offer incentives to industrial growth as we can, and will continue to offer it, is one that attracts capital. We are a country with a labour force available, with capacity for production far beyond what we have attained and with our industrial incentives, with our tax reliefs, which uniquely in Europe we will have, which no other EEC country has available, we will be in a position to attract capital on a larger scale than ever before. There is no question of our ability to do so being reduced. We are not losing any of the attractions we have. We still keep the industrial grants and the tax reliefs. The only change is that people setting up industries in this country in the future will have a market of 260 million people instead of one of 56 million. That change will not lead to an outflow of capital but rather will lead to an expansion of the inflow of capital.

I should like to deal with some other points. The misrepresentations on land purchase have been spun out to such an extent that I do not think anybody believes this any more. Everybody knows that within the EEC we will have the power to operate our own land reform policies. Everybody knows we will have the power to buy up any land coming on the market to ensure it gets into the hands of other small farmers in the area. People are beginning to know the fact that in the new EEC farm policy, of which I have the only copy available in this country up to recently—I got it in Brussels three weeks ago—the Community require that a farmer who gets a pension must hand over his land to other small farmers in the area. If he dreamt of selling it to a speculator, the Commission would be down on him like a ton of bricks and he would lose his pension. So much for the argument that we have to let German speculators in to buy our land. Perhaps we might want to, maybe we would like to, maybe it would suit some of our farmers to make a good deal with a German speculator, but the Commission will not let him. If he does it he will lose his pension.

Perhaps that is not a good point. Perhaps people will be annoyed with it. Maybe there are small farmers who will say they do not like a Community which will not allow them to sell their land to German speculators, but let us have an end to the nonsense that we will not be allowed to control land purchase within the Community when that is one of the primary requirements of the land policy. The land may be handed over to an approved auctioneer who must sell the land to another small farmer in the area whose income is below that of a non-agricultural worker. If the farmer does not sell it or lease it in such conditions, he will lose his pension. I need not dwell on it further because I do not think anybody believes that nonsense anymore.

The whole small farm issue has been stood on its head. Few areas of EEC policy have been the subject of such colossal misrepresentation in Ireland as the Mansholt Plan. Back in 1968 all kinds of plans were prepared and shot down by wily politicians who in the EEC as in Ireland know there are no votes in policies that put small farmers off the land. The assumption that, alone, Irish politicians are so motivated and that in the EEC politicians can deliberately and happily expel small farmers from the land and still get elected is a naive assumption. Others are like us in this respect. We are no different from them and the sort of farm policy that emerged from the decision of the Council of Ministers on 24th March is one which confines aid to the small farmers.

If there are farmers in Deputy Murphy's constituency whose incomes are above that of agricultural workers in the area and who believe their incomes will remain above that in the EEC, let them not come looking for assistance from the Commission because that type of large farmer will not get any joy out of the Commission. The only people who can get assistance through the EEC farm plan are people whose farms are such that their incomes are below the level of the average income of a non-agricultural worker in their area or who are threatened with falling below that. Mark you, our Government are free to provide assistance for the farmers if they wish to do so but they must not provide loans at interest rates below 5 per cent to any farmer who does not fall into this category. Loans with interest rates down to 2 per cent, loans of up to £15,000 aided by the Community to the tune of 55 per cent are available only to small farmers. So much for the talk of Mansholt. One of the many examples of unparalleled dishonesty in this campaign has been the treatment of the Mansholt Plan. We have heard a little less about it in the last couple of weeks, since this document emerged.

I am glad I was able to get a copy in Brussels. For some technical reason it has not yet been published by the Council of Ministers. The communiqué published after the meeting was so garbled that nobody could make anything out of it. Indeed, when I went to the Council of Ministers office to get a copy the man I met—perhaps it may have had something to do with the translation—was upset when I said that the translation was not very clear. We have the text here and we know what it contains. It is fortunate we have got it in time to nail this particular lie.

Then we have the question of prices. This is probably the most sensitive issue in the campaign, the one where I think the anti-Market propaganda has been most successful because it has hit a sensitive vein in people's minds. There is no doubt in a country with a 10 per cent consumer price inflation for two or three years that any talk of higher prices worries people. There is no doubt that it has had the effect of making people feel that in the EEC prices will rise fast.

On my way into the House today I gave a lift to a resident of the Pearse Street area and she said that students were leaving in leaflets in the flats. Those leaflets stated that a pound of tea would go up to over £1 and that would be a terrible situation. It would be if it were true, but as we all know tea is totally unaffected by membership. This is one of the many totally and consciously dishonest distortions in this campaign. We have the "Vote No" leaflet. I am not blaming the Labour Party with regard to prices because they on that issue have a better record than some of their inadvertent allies in this campaign.

Deputy Murphy is in favour of EEC. Do not misjudge him.

I appreciate this is true of most members of the Labour Party but I have to address them collectively in this matter.

That is not so. Deputy FitzGerald is monopolising the time here. I understand we will not be on this debate tomorrow. Probably he intends to go on until 10.30 so that some of his arguments cannot be refuted.

I should point out, in fairness to myself, in coming to speak to this debate I asked the relevant representative of the Labour Party if there were any other speakers to come, because it was my function to close the debate. I was assured there were none. I am rather disconcerted to find that there is somebody from the Labour Party, contrary to the assurance I was given, that I was to be the last speaker on my side. I am sorry for the confusion in that. I will try to conclude as rapidly as I can, but this is an important debate. It is important that these facts be put. There are some to which I have given some thought and I would like to present my facts to the House and, incidentally, to the nation.

Six hours is a reasonable time in which to present them to the House.

It is a reasonably big subject. I have not much more to say, so I hope I will not detain the Deputy much longer.

Who is the author of this leaflet?

This is one from the Common Market Study Group. It is the Common Market Defence Campaign.

Is that Dr. Monk Gibbon's one?

This is the one he has repudiated. This one has a marvellous selection of misstatements in it. The first is:

Food prices would go up by about £3.50 a week for the average household.

I have gone over this two or three times. I have taken the household budget prior to 1965-66. I have updated the quantities by reference to the table of quantities of foodstuffs consumed, as far as one can. I have updated the prices by reference to the consumer price index. I have recalculated the expenditure on that basis and I have tried to assess what portion of the budget of the average Irish household would be affected. The significant price increases in beef, mutton, cheese and butter affect 5½ per cent of the expenditure of the average household. As these prices will rise to the farmer by 50 to 55 per cent at retail stage they could hardly rise by more than 40 per cent because a significant part of the retail price is of course the distribution margin. An increase of 40 per cent on 5½ per cent of the budget is something like 2¼ per cent increase in the cost of living spread over six years.

There are other products which are affected less notably. At the outside I think the figure would be 3 per cent to 3½ per cent. May I say the Government have done themselves no service here by rather exaggerating in their White Paper the effects of food price increases. They are perhaps being cautious and are perhaps anxious to be fair. When it comes to the other side they have totally failed to make the point that these increases will be largely offset by the effect of the removal of tariffs. The purpose of tariffs in any country, as Deputy Murphy will appreciate, is to push up the price of imports and to enable manufacturers at home to charge more than the competitive price because they are not able to operate efficiently in a small market. The logical corollary of that is that, if you remove tariffs, prices must be favourably affected.

We have a study which gives us some indication of what the scale of these effects may be. Edward Nevin, the economist, often quoted by the anti-EEC people in another context, did a study of prices in Ireland some years ago which showed that the effect of industrial protection in Ireland was to raise the average of import prices by 25 per cent and the average of domestic prices of protected goods by about 7 per cent to 8 per cent. If one, therefore, adjusts the proportion of the household budget which consists of goods which are protected, which is about one-fourth of the household budget, by those amounts, you get a reduction in the cost of living as a result of the freeing of trade of something like 2 per cent to 2½ per cent. You get an increase because of food prices of perhaps 3 per cent to 3½ per cent. The net effect of membership on the cost of living is therefore about 1 per cent spread over six years. As against that in the first year we get the remission of the agricultural subsidies, which enables us to release £30 million to improve social welfare benefits.

In a country where the total volume of personal consumption is about £1,500 million that is a 2 per cent improvement in living standards overnight through that £30 million remission. Therefore, EEC membership as far as this country is concerned means a 2 per cent improvement in living standards in the first year and a 1 per cent erosion of that thereafter. That leaves out of account all the benefits of membership in increased output and productivity, and just takes the effect of prices and subsequent price changes. That states as briefly as I can the price effects.

The £3.50 a week is utter nonsense. The figure is less than a third of that, as I calculated it most carefully myself. I have never relied on Government figures here. I have done my own calculations and I want to be able to stand over them. I can tell the House that the figure of £3.50 is exaggerated threefold and takes no account of the benefits of tariffs being removed.

There are other statements here, tendentious perhaps, some rather untrue, such as:

Would anything be cheaper in the EEC? Oh, yes, imported spirits, motor cars and refrigerators.

Are those the only imported goods? It is not true because motor cars will not be cheaper; they are still protected. This exaggerates the effect. Are they the only goods which are protected? What about clothing and household goods, the many packaged foodstuffs and so on, cosmetics? All these things are protected. Then it goes on to say:

Membership means abandoning tariff protection in the home market.

Our membership does not mean that. British membership means that. Whether we go in or stay out we face it because Britain is joining. That is the situation. It further states:

It means an end to industrial incentives and tax reliefs.

It means nothing of the kind. Our industrial incentives and tax reliefs have been protected by the Government negotiation and are unaffected. That is simply a lie.

The next thing it states is:

Declining demand as the number of farmers diminish due to the Mansholt Plan.

The Mansholt Plan gives more farmers 50 per cent to 55 per cent price increases and gives them the sole right to financial aids from the Community and indeed in many respects from the Irish Government. They will be helped, not hindered, by the Mansholt Plan. Then it goes on complaining about the drop in foreign firms coming here as the advantageous grants and tax reliefs will not be allowed in the EEC. They are allowed and indeed, as we know, the IDA have firms waiting for a favourable decision on May 10th involving employment of 6,000 people.

We are also told by them that we will have to surrender our traditional neutrality. We all know that is a lie, that neutrality is unaffected by membership. These are three economic Treaties and any decision on neutrality must be the subject of a further Treaty to be signed by our Government, to be brought to this House. If it involves anything to do with levying armies, anything to do with declaring war, it would have to be brought back to the people, who alone have the right to decide these matters, a right unaffected by this referendum.

We are told that in most matters Ireland would have no power of veto, that we would have a tiny influence in these bodies. In fact, on all matters at this stage we have a power of veto. That could change if the majority voting system comes in. If it comes in our voice would be five times that to which our population entitles us. We, together with four of the other five small countries, could jointly with 13 per cent of the population, even with this majority voting system, veto any decision of the Council of Ministers so favourable is the system to the smaller countries.

We are asked is there an alternative to the EEC? Most definitely, yes. There is no reason why we should not do the same as Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Cyprus, Iceland, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Finland. This is what is said. It is also said that if Britain joins these countries will conclude a simple association agreement and trade treaty. I have discussed already the kind of trade treaty that they will get. The industrial terms will not be all that favourable, but they also flatly refuse to allow in beef or milk from these countries and want them to take EEC beef and milk. We would be in a bad state if they asked us to take EEC milk and beef. That is the kind of fate in store for us if we do not vote "Yes". None of the countries mentioned is an exporter of temperate foodstuffs or a country with pastoral agriculture. There is no comparision between them and us. If we had no agricultural exports, should we wish for it politically, we could afford economically to sign a trade agreement.

We are pre-eminently in Europe the pastoral exporters of beef, milk, mutton and lamb. Our position is totally different from that of the countries mentioned. The protection of our country requires entry to the EEC. No trade agreement would be satisfactory because this country will not share the benefits of the agricultural policy if we remain outside. Special terms were given to New Zealand following great pressure from Great Britain. No mention is made in this document of the phasing out of New Zealand butter exports. There is to be a period of reduction by 30 per cent over five years and there is no guarantee thereafter. EEC tariffs are said to be the lowest in the world, amounting to 7½ per cent last year. That, of course, is only an average. It is a phoney average.

I am concerned about our woollen carpet factories which face a 24 per cent tariff. Our clothing and textile firms will face tariffs of 15 to 17 per cent. The tariff on electrical bulbs, which are exported from Solus Teoranta at the rate of £1 million worth per annum to Britain, is 12½ per cent. The tariff on synthetic fibres which are manufactured in Bray is between 9 and 11 per cent. These tariffs are placed on the final value of the goods. If the tariff was added in the factory it would be twice as high. In fact, to the average textile manufacturer a 17 per cent tariff means 34 per cent in all. It would be necessary to reduce wages by 40 per cent to bridge that gap. A policy involving a reduction in wages would not commend itself to the trade unions after the referendum is over.

Reference is made to New Zealand. This pamphlet does not tell the people that New Zealand have to phase out dairy exports. I could comment for a long time on the dishonesties in the pamphlet. I want to discontinue the debate on membership at the moment. I believe the result of the referendum will be favourable. After that, we have a lot of work to do. I wish to say a few words about such work.

There was a sterile debate on the referendum. This is a pity. Figures were tossed backwards and forwards debating the pros and cons of entry in the one country in Europe where the case for entry is so overwhelming. There is no country at present a member of the EEC where the benefits of membership are as clearcut as they would be in Ireland. There is no applicant either for whom the benefits are so clear. We have been in a curious position where we have been exploited by Britain. We alone, because of our exceptional position in regard to products in the agricultural sphere, can benefit on a massive scale. We are unique in this. The position is different for any other country.

The question of Britain's membership is a balance of gains and losses which is hard to make up. I could not attempt to assess whether Britain would gain or lose economically. I believe this is unquantifiable. Britain's decision is based on political considerations more than on economic ones. The same is true of other countries. We alone of all these countries can and must stay economically because of our position. It is a pity that we have wasted so much time on the pros and cons of entry. We should be preparing for membership and discussing the real issues after we join. It is a tragedy that we should waste so much time. The level of the debate has been low. We have allowed ourselves to be dragged down to an absurdly low level of debate. The things which we should be discussing today are not the kind of things which we have been discussing.

We should be discussing matters like the institutional reform of the community and the Vedel Report, in which Senator Mary Robinson has played such a prominent part. There is need to discuss the urgency for direct elections and the problems posed for this House by the membership of a Community where ten members of this House will be joining and working in that Parliament. The membership of that Parliament, as I understand it, absorbs three-quarters of the time of anyone who joins it and plays his part. Two things can happen on the 1st January next if we do not have direct elections. Members of this House will join that Parliament and give the time which the interests of this country require. They will give their time not only to the Parliament but to the Committees involved. With 13 Committees and ten Members there will be a big load to be spread amongst them. The Deputies involved will not be seen in this country for three weeks out of every four weeks. What chances will they have at the next election? Either that will be the situation or, alternatively, Deputies will go along to the meetings occasionally and not attend the committee meetings but come back home and mind their constituencies. What are we going to do about it? Ireland could be neglected.

Are we going to leave the matter to superannuated Deputies, going out the next time and not wanting to be re-elected? Are the interests of Ireland to be confined to the sexagenarians or the septuagenarians? Are we going to find some ingenious way around this dilemma? Are we going to allow our interests to be neglected? Are we going to press strongly for direct elections as soon as possible and find some way of ensuring that this happens? Are we to arrange our own direct elections? I do not know how we will get around the problem otherwise. I fear for the interests of this country if our representation in that Parliament is going to be effected in the way I have mentioned. Other countries do not have our system of nursing their constituencies as we do. In other countries the Deputies must look after their constituencies but they do not spend as much time in their constituencies as we do in order to make sure of re-election.

This will cause an appalling dilemma for this Parliament as from 1st January next. We should be discussing this kind of thing. We should be discussing the various provisions of the Vedel Report and the proposals and recommendations in it. We have not begun to discuss these matters. Should the European Parliament have a role in the appointment of the President of the Commission? How quickly and how best can we implement Article 138 on direct elections? How can we secure co-operation between the President of the Council and the President of the Commission in agreeing on a programme of action and planning Community policies to ensure that the Council and the Commission work together? How do we strengthen the role of the European Parliament by transforming its consultative power? Should this be done by giving it a suspensive veto on decisions? Which decisions should it have a suspensive veto on? How do we forge stronger links between the European Parliament and the National Parliament? Should there be joint committees of the European and National Parliaments? These are the issues we should be discussing. We will have to talk about them when the referendum is over.

There is also the whole question of monetary and economic policy. We should be discussing also regional policies. We have not begun to assess the possibilities and potentialities of the Community's regional policy for this country. In all this, we need to break out of our inward looking-ness and to get out of the frame of mind which this referendum has got us into. I have been deeply depressed by much of what I have heard. It seems to me that we are reverting back to the kind of inward looking-ness which was the curse of this country until the fifties. The one good thing that happened in Ireland at the end of the fifties was that we rejected that. We turned our back on the kind of attitude that the protectionism of that period gave rise to, the distortion of the concept of Sinn Féin. It was distorted in the early decades of this State from meaning standing on our own and being self-reliant in keeping ourselves to ourselves and away from the rest of the world. That was a complete distortion of the concept of Sinn Féin which did us such damage.

We have heard much in the past few weeks of the old kind of attitude that we must build a wall around ourselves and protect ourselves from the world outside, and cut ourselves off from other interests, that we are too weak and too poor, that we are too weak in spirit as well as in body to stand up to the pressures. We heard in this House the level of argument from two Deputies, one in this party and one in the Labour Party, that you have to get up early in the morning in the EEC and that would not suit this country. That is the level of argument in this House and in the country on the subject. I sometimes fear that we will have difficulties in holding our own in Europe if that kind of begrudging mentality, that kind of inferiority complex which runs through so much of the anti-EEC campaign, is to inform us in the future.

I look forward to membership in the spirit of the Social Democratic Parties of the Community. Since we have in this House a social democratic party who have departed from the spirit of social democracy—temporarily I believe! I believe they will return to it after 10th May—I feel that it is up to me to put to the House the views of the Social Democratic Parties of Europe as we have not heard them from those benches. Let me tell the House something about the Resolution of the Eighth Congress of the Social Democratic Parties in the European Community of 28th, 29th and 30th June, 1971. Let us hear what European social democrats think, in marked contrast to the Irish and British social democrats, or one wing of them:

The Eighth Congress of the Social Democratic Parties in the European Community:

—hopes that equally satisfactory terms will be negotiated for the membership of the other applicant countries...

That is, ourselves, as well as Britain. It expresses its conviction:

... that once the European Economic Community is enlarged the Social Democratic Parties of the present applicant countries will be able, together with the other Social Democratic parties of the Community, to work more effectively:

—to implement policies which may lead to a fairer distribution of income and wealth within the EEC;

—to organise a system of democratic control of concentrations of economic power...

These are the things which they say we will be better able to do inside the Community, and they are inside it. They are the social democratic parties inside it. They know what can be done and they have called on the social democratic parties in this country to join with them. This social democratic party is doing so and that party will, I hope, do so after 10th May. The resolution goes on:

—to enable the various members to face more effectively the problems of regional decay....

They believe that our regional problems can be better faced inside the EEC. It goes on:

—to ensure that trade between all the developed countries continues to expand;

—to assist the developing countries in their economic progress....

Deputy Keating has told us that this is a neo-colonialist imperialist plot and that we must stay out of it because we would tarnish our virginity in some way, and virgin we are as regards aids to the developing countries. We give damn all and they give on an extensive scale, but we must have nothing to do with these exploiting countries. The social democratic parties of these countries believe that inside the Community we can assist the developing countries in their economic progress. They believe also that inside we can promote commercial, scientific and technical co-operation between western and eastern Europe, thus furthering a lasting detente between east and west. These are the kind of things the European social democratic parties believe can be done if we join with them in doing them. Unfortunately one of the parties here have not taken that view.

Beyond that they believe that only the closest integration of these countries can achieve these things. They believe in the internationalist spirit of the socialist movement which, I am afraid, has evaporated in this country and in Britain for years past. The resolution states:

The Social Democratic delegates find that the ideas and practical objectives shared by the Social Democratic parties in the Community can best be carried into effect through the most comprehensive form of European integration.

The Deputy is going too fast for us. He should go a little slower.

The little Irelanders amongst our socialists here do not feel this. The resolution goes on:

They strongly reaffirm their conviction that the integration process begun with the ECSC Treaty and the EEC and Euratom Treaties must be continued through the economic and monetary union to its ultimate completion in the "United States of Europe" in the form of a federal State.

That is the spirit of social democracy in Europe. When we join will our social democratic party over there continue to try to sabotage this progress? I do not think so. They will see that they have been on the wrong path for some weeks and months past. They will see that their colleagues in Europe have the right spirit and they will join with their colleagues in Europe, as we will join with them, in moving along this path. The resolution states:

If Social Democrats are united it will not be possible for the shape of the Community to be determined by those social and economic forces which democratic socialism has always fought in a spirit of international solidarity.

That is the fighting spirit. There is no inferiority complex there. There is no fear that the big, bad capitalists will eat you up. They are inside and they know what can be done. They know what social democracy can achieve, and they know that if we join we will strengthen them, some of us anyway. I hope all of us will from the Opposition benches. I have no great faith in much help for social democracy from the far side of the House but I believe that we on this side of the House have something to offer and I believe we will offer it.

Let the debate end. Let us have our vote. Let us get down then to considering these problems in a different spirit altogether. Let us forget the bickerings we have had on the subject. Let us get together to achieve monetary and economic union, the regional policy, the reform of the institutions and the creation of a social democratic Europe. That is what we stand for in this part of this side of the House and I hope that before long it is what the whole of this side of the House will stand for.

We have had a rather lengthy contribution from one of our doctors, Deputy Dr. Garret FitzGerald. He dealt at length with the question of our proposed entry into the European Economic Community. As this is a vital question I propose to address myself to it for some time. I should like to say at the outset that my aims and my objectives were that the people should be given a factual appraisal of what they will be voting on, on Wednesday next. I wanted them to be able to assess the facts and make up their own minds. That factual appraisal was not given in the contribution which has just concluded. I am surprised. My opinion of Deputy FitzGerald was much higher when he commenced his contribution than it was when he concluded it. I am not being uncharitable.

Deputy FitzGerald is a very brilliant man and I am sure he is conversant with the facts. I have been to Europe on several occasions as well as Deputy FitzGerald. I have gathered facts. I have assimilated them as best I can and I have reached certain conclusions. Apart altogether from party ties I have reached these conclusions on my own estimation. I do not come along to take part in a debate with lengthy written statements—which I think are contrary to the regulations of the House—as some Deputies are wont to do. The only people who have a right to bring in written statements and read them to the House are Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries.

I am sorry if I have annoyed the Deputy with quotations from the resolutions of the social democratic parties. I thought quotations were in order.

Deputy FitzGerald may be in order in giving lengthy quotations.

Of course he was in order under the Ceann Comhairle and the Leas-Cheann Comhairle.

It is rather unusual to see Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael welded together.

It will not last. There is another week to go.

And the Deputy.

I do not want to digress from the question before the House which is membership of the Community. In the early fifties as a member of the Council of Europe I recollect statements made by some of the prominent statesmen of Europe at that time. I recollect statements from Mr. Schuman and other eminent statesmen and their message was the necessity for the coming together of Western Europe. This was the view of the parliamentarians of Western Europe in general. My understanding of what was uppermost in the minds of these people in the early fifties was that there was a need to take steps so as to avoid future wars between Germany and the other countries of Western Europe, particularly the smaller countries. Every statesman in Western Europe at that time was anxious that the ravages of the wars of 1914-1918 and of 1939-45 would not be repeated. They were not concerned greatly as to what form of association should be established. What they needed was some kind of relationship that would lead to friendliness among their countries.

It all started with the establishment of the Coal and Steel Community.

The basis for the formation of the Community was a sound one and it was my opinion at the time that the founding fathers were doing the right thing in trying to avoid future conflicts.

The Community was not established for the purpose of avoiding future conflicts.

I am asserting that it was that which was uppermost in the minds of these people at that time. I had the opportunity of conversing with them then. Naturally we here were in a much different position from them in so far as wars and conflicts were concerned. We had been spared the ravages of the two world wars so that that consideration did not arise in our case. Also, we were an island on the shelf of Europe and our way of life was very different from the way of life on the Continent. So far as our traditions and way of life were concerned we had nothing in common with other Europeans, be they western or eastern Europeans.

The Deputy has admitted that he was a member of the Council of Europe. Was that not agreement?

It was there that I got my information so that I am in a position to state that our traditions and culture have nothing in common with those other people. I shall elaborate on that point.

Each of us hopes one day to go to Heaven but we must wait until after death to go there. However, Deputy FitzGerald painted a picture for us here this evening of another heaven— a common market. I have nothing against western Europeans but I am not prepared to accept Deputy FitzGerald's description of this other heaven. I must say, though, that in the early part of his contribution, the Deputy was depressing to listen to when dealing with the future of our economy. I had in mind asking him to read this booklet that I have here because for propaganda purposes, there is nothing to equal it. It is a summary of the kind of contribution that we have had from Deputy FitzGerald. I have no wish to be unfair to anybody but the people are being given a false impression of the actual situation regarding the common market. It is not my purpose here to denigrate Europe but, being the speaker following Deputy FitzGerald, I consider it my duty to refer to the many inconsistencies in his contribution and to point out that some of what he said regarding the social benefits within the EEC are not at all similar to those contained in the booklets produced by the EEC.

I am sure that the booklets produced by the Community would weigh more than 3 cwt. They are factual appraisals of the situation and cover agriculture in all its aspects as well as covering industrial development, regional policy, the inflow and outflow of capital, social assistance and every other field of public activity. I have pleaded on many occasions here that such booklets should be made available to the people in order to help them make up their minds rather than to be feeding them with the type of propaganda that they are receiving from both sides here.

The entire 3 cwt. of them?

I am saying that although there was that huge quantity of publications none of them have reached the Irish people. Admittedly some of the books are weighty and could not be sent conveniently to the people but some are quite small. One I have here is entitled "Agriculture— 1980". This was not published by Fine Gael. Neither was it published by the Fianna Fáil propaganda machine or from public funds: it was published by the European Commission.

Anyone listening to Deputy FitzGerald a while ago would think there were no problems for Irish farmers once they entered the EEC. I would like the position to be this. It is accepted now by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael that Ireland must sell itself to some group, that we can no longer exist on our own. There may be some justification for saying that it is difficult for countries to live in isolation. It has been said that we have joined organisations in the past, the United Nations, the Council of Europe and so on. However, the joining of such movements was far different from joining this movement, which is more like a marriage. I bring in the term "marriage" because it is so difficult to have it dissolved; I do not think they have introduced divorce so far as membership is concerned. The only conclusion one could come to is that we are for sale, and Germany, France, Belgium and our old enemy England are the best group of buyers we could find.

And Luxembourg.

Yes, Luxembourg.

Which one of the Six would the Deputy say was bought?

Our products are for sale.

I am entitled to explain to the best of my ability this grouping together of the Six and to say I believe they were quite right in doing so, mainly for reasons which I do not think it is necessary for me to reiterate at present. This is a peculiar situation. The Germans are good people but at the same time they are tough. We know what happened in 1939-45. They were not very soft, and they are the people who will be pumping millions into us now. Thank God it is not something else they will be pumping into us. These European countries have been engaged in wars. They are not easy to deal with and I am sure they have far greater worries than thinking about how best to help poor old Ireland.

Mention has been made of alternatives. When we were for sale we got a bad group of auctioneers to sell us. When we wanted to join we went over to them and said: "For God's sake take us in or else we are lost." I think that is a fair summary of our approach to Europe. We did that, of course, on the day following Britain's application for membership.

I was hoping it was a quotation.

It is a fair summary.

We would not impose any conditions on them. Was there any other market when we were for sale?

I rule that out. I have made my position quite clear. Has Deputy Briscoe any other market in mind? What about the United States if we were not able to keep on the move ourselves? Could we have applied there if we were to founder? No. There would be a danger that we would be subject to bombing because of our membership of the States, and there may have been other deficiencies. I do not know. The one thing I do know is that we have a long tradition of friendship with the people of the United States. Many millions of Irish-Americans reside there. We have far more association with them than we have with Europe.

The arguments put forward in some of the booklets and by Deputy FitzGerald is that we shall not suffer any disadvantages. So far as membership commitments are concerned, if war should break out, Ireland will withdraw within her own shores and we shall bury our heads in the sand until such time as trouble is over and then move out again. We are going to share only in the advantages, not in the disadvantages.

One thing our approach to the EEC has brought about is this get-together from the right and the left here. That is a kind of riddle. If anyone was asked could he conceive how Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil could get together, he would find it difficult to provide an answer. I solved this riddle very well by listening to Deputy FitzGerald. Everyone remembers the late Taoiseach telling us about the benefits of the EEC, about the 100,000 jobs and so forth. There was this feeling that here was an opportunity to try to curry favour with the farmers of Ireland. Prices of farm products would be 50 per cent higher and if Fianna Fáil were to let Fine Gael make the move the farming population could change over to them. On the other hand, if Fine Gael were to let Fianna Fáil make it, the same position could apply. The two parties decided that they must try to win the agricultural vote in Ireland. Consequently, Fianna Fáil were afraid to make any demands on the EEC and said: "Take us in. We are ready." They were afraid that if they made any demands which any Government would be justified in making on behalf of an island such as ours, Fine Gael would take over from them. That is why we threw up our hands and asked to be taken in. "Once we are here we will try to get what we can from you."

When the Minister visited Brussels after making that statement, what kind of terms and conditions would he expect to get? We begged to be taken in. We have an inferiority complex. We are a small nation out in the Atlantic. We have nothing to offer. We were just like a beggerman coming to the door begging to be taken in. That is not in accordance with the tradition of this country and it is one of the reasons why I have opposed entry in the most forceful terms that I can command.

Agriculture has changed a great deal. I would prefer to take up the time of the House reading from the Commissions' booklets rather than from this document with the black cover. This is a very serious question which will be determined on Wednesday next. It has been put to the people in a very forceful way by the Taoiseach, by Deputy Cosgrave, by Ministers of State and others that many advantages are in store for the agricultural community. I should like to see that happening but let us read and dissect some of the statements made by the Commission in the booklet issued by them.

Could the Deputy give the date of that?

Yes—Agriculture 1980. It must be the present date because it deals with the position up to the end of 1970. It is produced by the information bureau.

I am trying to find out was it published before the common agricultural policy was signed.

The Deputy has more time than I have.

Was it soon before the common agricultural policy was signed?

I will read it for the Deputy. The Deputy can get a copy.

What is the date of publication?

Wait a minute until I see. Do not take up my time. I presume 1971. There is a great deal of small print. I usually welcome interruptions but it is rather late now— 9.35. The revolution in Community farming is dealt with on this page. This was published in all the papers. There is little use in taking too much time on it. There are so many articles to read that I have not time now. These are the ones published by the Government and I presume the Fine Gael Party represented by Deputy FitzGerald was sitting in with the people who compiled these documents.

The Common Market executive body, the European Commission, has proposed a revolutionary ten year reform plan to help modernise the present basis of farming in the six European Community countries and to give farmers adequate income based on minimum production units of 200 to 300 acres for grain and root crops, 40-60 cows for dairy farming; 150-200 head of cattle for beef and veal production; 100,000 chickens for poultry producers; 10,000 laying hens for egg production. The radical restructuring of farming, the Commission believe, can be achieved only by carrying out a massive integrated programme throughout the Six—Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands —which, by 1980, should pension off 2,500,000 farmers, provide new industrial and service jobs for 2,500,000 farmers.

Bear in mind our position as against the job opportunities over there which I will be referring to later on. They propose to take about 12½ million acres out of agricultural production. I quote:

If farmers and the Community members are agreed to carry out this programme the Commission is confident that by 1980 the present acute surplus of dairy produce, sugar and some other products will be replaced by a reasonable balance between supply and demand. The taxpayer will be spared the mounting burdens of price support. The Community farmers will be more efficient and prosperous than ever before.

What do they say about the actual numbers in farming?

In 1950 within this present Six the numbers engaged in farming was 20 million.

Their policy was to reduce that. They made good headway. In 1960, it was 15 million; in 1970 it was 10 million and the projected number for 1980 is 5 million. Percentagewise, 28 per cent of the European population was engaged in agricultural production in 1950; 21 per cent in 1960; 14 per cent in 1970 and 6 per cent in 1980.

Apart altogether from this drastic reduction which they say is for the benefit of the Community because by this massive reduction they hope to have bigger farming units—the bigger the unit, the better—and big economic units, according to them, and I assume they are correct because it is selfevident—will provide agricultural products at a much cheaper rate than small holdings such as the type of holdings we have in Ireland, many of them uneconomic holdings—big units such as outlined on page 1 are likely to achieve cheaper food.

When the farming population will decline to 6 per cent of the entire population, the corollary is that there will be a proportionate decline in their political significance, so that by 1980 the agricultural vote in Europe will be relatively an insignificant one. This is in contrast to what Deputy FitzGerald has been telling us. I must deal later on with the allowances the farmers will receive. Now I quote from page 8:

Reshaping the structure of farming is fundamental to the future development of the common agricultural policy. It must therefore be conceived in Community terms but be carried out by the member Governments. The Council of Ministers of the Six would confirm the aims of the programme and how to achieve them—

It is not individual Governments; it is the Council of Ministers—

The Council's overall policy decisions would be binding upon member states but it would be the responsibility of the individual member states to enact national legislation to carry out decisions taken at Community level.

There is no question of an individual voice on this question. The Council of Ministers lay down the law and individual Governments carry out that law. That is clearly set down and that is one of the articles we are accepting.

Provided that the Ministers agree.

Once they agree. When the law is set down, it must be carried out and I am referring now to laws dealing with agriculture. I want to quote another short passage. This is no propaganda on my part because I am endeavouring to be quite factual and this is what I have been in all my comments throughout this campaign; I am quite prepared to listen to any argument against the arguments I have quoted here, which are not made by me but by the Commission and I am surprised at the level of argument put forward by Deputy FitzGerald because I would have expected much more from him.

This passage is:

Of 5,000,000 people now living on the land who are expected to leave over the next ten years, half will be elderly people——

Half will be fellows, I suppose, over 50 years of age—

——for whom social benefits must be provided. The other half will need work and the authorities will have to help in creating new jobs.

Before moving on to another section of this book which I should like to quote, I want to ask how can we be assured that jobs will be provided in the west of Ireland for our farmers who will become redundant? Some farmers on the Continent can continue much longer than our small farmers in free competition, when all props are taken from them. Everybody knows that the Commission's objective is to weed out uneconomic inadequate units, whether farming or industrial—weed them out and do not continue propping them up. I pose this question to the responsible Commission: How will jobs be provided for the farming community and others likely to become redundant in Ireland? If there were alternative employment made available to them within their own regions, I would not say anything out of place. I assume that a small farmer would continue with his holding and go out and earn from the industrial development, just as a number of them do at present.

Here is the Commissioner's statement, an exact summary of it: he said that while they had no regional policy but would be formulating one at a later stage—this is two years ago—he did not see anything wrong with the idea of establishing industries in towns. When it came to defining a town, the Commissioner's definition was a place where 50,000 or more people lived, so that according to the Commissioner's definition of a town, we have only two in this part of the country, that is, Dublin, and the other one, Cork. I would not be in this House for 21 years, were it not for the farming vote. Without that section of support, which I have consistently got from the members of the farming community in Cork south-west, I would not be here and it indicates clearly to me that so far as they are concerned, and I am separating them from other sections, industrial workers of any other kind, it is my bounden duty to help and assist, and, as a Member of this House, to advise them to the best of my capacity. I have done that as best I could over the years and I shall continue to do it.

This brings me to another matter. I raised questions here with the Ministers for Agriculture and Fisheries and Social Welfare regarding the present direct payments to a number of farmers and I got a most inconclusive letter from the Minister for Social Welfare. The Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries refuted the assertion in a few short sentences by saying that he did not think membership of the EEC would make any difference, but as a member of a Labour Party delegation on three occasions, I availed myself of the opportunities afforded by such visits to Brussels to ask some questions which I thought pertinent. I must say that the members of the Commission and their chief executives were more courteous and I think more honest and straightforward in their statements, and I must express my appreciation of the way in which all Parties have been treated in Brussels— courtesy, civility, full and frank discussion and questions answered, irrespective of whether the answer was favourable or unfavourable.

I put this question to the relevant Commissioner, an Italian, who was dealing with this particular social aspect. He told me, and this is open to be refuted by any Member of the House, that there was no precedent within the Six in any part of the existing Community for direct payments from public funds to able-bodied farmers, on the ground that their present level of income was inadequate in relation to the type of system that operated here in Ireland, a land valuation system. I wanted to get that information quite clear. While there was no precedent, he said he could not visualise the Community in any circumstances giving direct aids to farmers in the form of unemployment assistance or any other associated assistance under the headings under which it was payable here. There might be some question of giving it as a form of charity or home assistance. This was, of course, when the transitional period would expire.

I asked him then if after the expiration of the transitional period, which has now been set down as 1978, the Irish Government from their own resources provided this kind of help, would it be within the Community's regulations. His answer was certainly not, that that kind of help, if it were paid at all, could only be paid with the Community's permission. It was not a matter for an individual Government but a matter for the Community, the Council of Ministers and the Commission. It certainly would not be a matter for an individual government. Although we have had 50 years of freedom, a number of our farmers must get this kind of assistance in order to exist in any reasonable standard.

The yardstick for measuring this assistance, which is payable from Donegal to Cork, is to calculate income on a land valuation basis, irrespective of the amount of stock or animals the farmer might have on the land. This meant that the social welfare officer was much involved in investigations and there was no incentive to try to increase production and to improve the holding. That system obtains in the west, north-west and south-west areas of the country. These people must attend at a Garda station at least once a week to get their money. If the laws are not changed this kind of State aid will cease. What will the farmers do then? Will alternative aid be provided? The Commissioner said he saw no reason why alternative employment should not be provided but in towns of 50,000 or more population——

In years to come the fact will be thrown back at you that you advised the farmers——

I am not advising anyone. I am merely giving facts. Each individual is entitled to vote as he wishes.

The Deputy will vote "Yes"?

I will vote "No".

That will be important at the next general election.

Was the Parliamentary Secretary present when I spoke about the sell-out? I tried to get my question answered long before the referendum discussion. In west-Cork a farmer with £20 land valuation last year got £109 from the State in the form of rate subsidy—the same applies in other areas. The rates payable to the county council on his holding were £109; it is proportionately lower in the case of people with smaller holdings and subventions are payable to people with higher rated holdings. This year the rates will be £130 but instead of paying it himself public funds will pay the amount for the farmer. I tried to find out from the Minister for Local Government if this kind of direct subvention is in order in the Community, within this heaven on earth, as it was so aptly described today by Deputy FitzGerald. I am not putting up personal arguments, I am only quoting from documents——

Rates are local taxation.

Deputies will have an opportunity of making their own speeches. Deputy Murphy should be allowed to make a speech without interruption.

There is a document entitled Agricultural in Reform within the Community which is a most elaborate document; I tried to get it circulated among the farming community but I failed to do so. Under the heading of “Dairy products” it is stated:

The Commission has therefore proposed a system of subsidies for the 1969-70 and 1970-71 seasons, in order to give farmers an incentive to abandon dairy farming and to slaughter their dairy cows. The Commission estimates that as a result of these subsidies an extra 250,000 dairy cows would be slaughtered during each of these two seasons, cutting the annual output of butter by 30,000 tons.

But even this would not be enough. By 1973, butter stocks would be rising again. A balance can be established only by reducing dairy herds by three million cows between now and 1976. Such a drastic reduction is bound to alter the pattern of Community farming. It can be carried out only as part of a programme that considers all the human aspects involved. The Commission is none the less convinced that farming must be reorganised if a durable balance between output and sales is to be achieved.

The Commission proposes:

an average subsidy of £125/$300 for each dairy cow slaughtered—

In the earlier days it was £80, but I am sure the Department have all these facts—

—to qualify for the subsidy, the farmer must have at least two dairy cows and must slaughter his entire dairy herd. The Commission estimates that 250,000 cows—about 125,000 tons of meat—would be slaughtered annually. The principle of a slaughter subsidy was accepted by the Council on May 13, 1969 and detailed approval was expected in June.

That was approved in May, 1969.

The situation is changed now.

We are the people who are going to sell our dairy products. We have our beef incentive bonus scheme but it seems these people have the same trouble.

Can the Deputy state how much he would pay for a calf?

I will deal with that but possibly it will not help the case the Deputy is trying to make. The prices obtained for calves here are as high as in the Community. I will quote further from the document:

These changes would result in lower prices for dairy products made of milk with a fat content of more than 3.7 per cent, and higher prices for other dairy products. These steps should cut back expenditure on dairy products to £104m/$205m by 1980.

The implication in Deputy FitzGerald's statements, and in the statements made by the Government, is that there is an unlimited market for dairy products. Our farmers, particularly those in the south, specialise in dairy products. The propaganda by the Government and Fine Gael in this campaign has suggested to the farmers that there is no question regarding this matter likely to arise in the future. The position is something better today than it was some time ago but Europeans are not consumers of dairy products. Milk and butter consumption is low and cheese consumption relatively low. All the indications are that the market is limited and that the Commission, in a business-like way, are taking steps to abolish overproduction of particular products.

The farmers' associations and the creamery milk suppliers do not agree with you.

As a Deputy, I shall say what I have in mind until the people withdraw——

The farmers' leaders do not agree with you.

The Deputy must be allowed to make his own statement.

I have not drawn my conclusions yet. Unfortunately, the clock is against me. Possibly I would not go into this sort of detail but bad example was given earlier.

Coming to pensions and the sale of land which Deputy FitzGerald mentioned, I shall omit reference to farmers protest meetings and the difficulties confronting farming organisation on the Continent in their attempt to get higher prices for their products. It is a great thing that through the Labour Party mainly if not entirely we have an opportunity of giving a factual appraisal of many aspects of the Community. The people should have the best available information; unfortunately, we have not the money or the means to present the facts to them as other parties have and therefore we are limited in what we can achieve. Quoting again from this booklet it is said that farmers could receive an annual allowance if they allow their land to be developed under the programme. For those aged 65 and over the allowance would be £420 per annum, less their old age pension. That is the 1969 figure.

He wrote this two years ago.

For farmers aged between 55 and 65 the allowance would rise from £275 at 55 to about £420 at 60 and would stay at that level until the beneficiary was entitled to the old age pension.

There were many changes since then.

The changes were no greater than they are here in two years. It is no harm to give an indication which shows the trend, the thought and the evaluation of the Commission in putting down this type of figure. We have our own scheme here for years and very few have availed of it: and while I have not the actual figures I believe our scheme is much more liberal and advantageous. Despite that, I do not think that the number of those who availed of it on average has reached three figures so far. A bright picture has been painted about helping the small farmer to build up his holding by a Commission agency which would buy land for sale adjacent to the holding. I did not know that Deputy FitzGerald was so well acquainted with land matters until I heard him discourse at great length on this subject. We must bear in mind that the number of farmers is to be drastically reduced and so it is reasonable to assume that the same pattern would apply here. Deputy FitzGerald told us that the Commission agency would give from £250 to £420 a year pension to a farmer who would lease or sell his land, granted in the two years since, there may be some increase in that £250.

There have been many changes since 1969.

The land would then go to an industrious farmer. Now, let me give my version of what I think the case would be. Despite this documentation produced by Deputy FitzGerald this question is not finalised but it is hoped it will be finalised in the not-so-distant future which, acording to my information, is in three or four years at most and certainly, if we become members of EEC, before the expiration of the transition period. It is proposed that a farmer may, if he decides, sell his land or give it to Commission's agency—it will not be an Irish agency —that he will get the pension as set out.

In March, 1971, not 1969.

The Deputy is entitled to make his case.

The Deputy is using out-of-date information intended to mislead the House.

The position is that it can be corrected.

I said there was a proportionate increase in the allowance. On the question of the sale of land, the agency will buy it and give the farmer this pension but should he decide to put it on the open market, when this levelling-off process will take place—and it is the view of existing members of the Community that it should take place at the earliest possible date—a man from Germany will be just as much entitled to compete at the public or private sale of that land— do not laugh, Sir Anthony——

I told the Deputy that this morning.

Deputy Murphy, to continue.

Deputy FitzGerald treated this matter as a joke: it is no joke. Do not mind the leaflet the Government agency sent along. Anybody who knows anything about the Commission—we were in Brussels a few times—knows that it is the aim to have political unity at an early date. It is also the aim to have the right to buy and sell land within the Community. A man living in Luxembourg will have the right to buy land in Ireland, and vice versa. A man from Luxembourg or a man from Ireland will have the right to compete for a piece of land in Germany——

It must be in accordance with the development plan laid down by the Community.

It deals only with farmers leaving their land under the pension scheme, as outlined in this book. I am giving this as a factual appraisal of the picture. We were in Germany two years ago and I can say that the position is much more favourable to Germans coming to Ireland to buy up land than it is to Irishmen going to Germany. For instance, we found that language problems do not arise as far as the Germans are concerned. On the other hand, this would prove a great obstacle for Irishmen going to Germany. Most of the people we met in Germany had a good working knowledge of English, and from discussions with some of them I concluded that with the present position in Germany, where there is very little land left to buy and where the prices are exceptionally high for any there is, when we have free trade arrangements there will be a big influx of Germans here buying up a sizeable chunk of the land of Ireland.

The Deputy has an inferiority complex.

It is the Government who have it. They are on sale.

Why did the Germans not buy land in France?

Deputy Murphy must be permitted to continue.

I will go back to the fifties. Then, the promoters of the Common Market estimated that it would take at least 20 years before they would get over their teething difficulties, that the reforms then suggested would take some time before it would be possible to implement them. The land situation has not been resolved yet to such an extent that a national of one country can buy land in another. I know that what I am saying is true. I have read it in authoritative sources. Any difficulties in regard to the purchase of land will be removed. That is the objective of the Community. That comes from authoritative sources.

The position is that since March, 1971, the objective of the Community is to aid small farmers.

Will Deputies please allow Deputy Murphy to continue? They can answer him when they are making their contributions.

I just wanted to refer him to the White Paper on the budget.

Unlike what is happening today when the Land Commission can put a stop on the sale of a holding and say to a farmer: "You will not be allowed to sell this on the open market", in EEC conditions that cannot happen and it does not matter whether the man who is buying the land already has 2,000 acres or 3,000 acres—he will be allowed to buy anyway.

For two years no foreigner will be allowed to buy land.

Interruptions are not in order.

It is on page 22 of the White Paper Access to the European Communities.

Have we looked at what is on the agenda?

The Deputy is two years out of date.

I will have to repeat myself once more. Deputy Lemass asserts that I am trying to mislead when I say that land purchase will be quite free.

It is not.

Not at the present time but it is on the agenda. It is, to quote an Irish Department, under active consideration to remove all obstacles in this respect. Eventually there will be complete freedom of sale for a person in any country in the EEC to buy land anywhere within the Community, irrespective of nationality. The regulations are not yet firmly laid down.

I thought we were discussing the budget.

I did not turn this into an EEC debate. It was the Deputy who spoke before me who did that.

Deputies must avoid speaking to one another and address the Chair. The Chair will not interrupt the Deputy.

That is what I should like. During the past hour I have been dealing with the agricultural position as I see it and giving a fair appraisal. I am well aware of the brainwashing that has been going on.

That is not true.

I have been asserting that the Government, our firm of auctioneers who are selling our country into Europe, did a bad job.

That is not true.

The Deputy wants to keep our small farmers slaves to the quota system.

The small farmer will be wiped out.

That is not true.

It was the votes of small farmers that put me here, the small farmers whom Deputy Briscoe is trying to sell out.

That is not true.

These interruptions are not in order.

I have figures giving the projected decline in the number of small farmers in the Community. By 1980 they will be only 6 per cent of the total population.

The Deputy has gone back to the 1969 document. The Mansholt Plan has been modified considerably since then.

Here it is.

What is it?

What is projected in that document is that the agricultural population within the Six by 1980 will have declined to 6 per cent of the total population. I am so concerned because it is reasonable to assume that the same rate of decline will take place in this country. I am anxious that the small farmers will not be swept away. The props they have at the present time will be taken from them.

That is not true.

Has the Deputy got the original French text?

I have not had the same opportunity as Deputy FitzGerald who had six hours to address himself to this. I want to avail of the few minutes I have left to make my own speech.

There is nothing to stop the Deputy from availing of the same length of time.

Deputy Murphy without interruption.

I do not want to be unfair to Deputy FitzGerald but I do not regard him as infallible.

That is very sad.

These remarks are liable to become personal. The Deputies should allow Deputy Murphy to make his speech.

He spoke about Dr. Mansholt, the socialist president of the Commission, the statements he has made and the policy which he has laid down which are so beneficial to Ireland.

The policy adopted by the Council of Ministers is the reverse of the Mansholt policy.

He is the president. It is a pity during the time given to the Deputy, when he painted such a bright picture of Europe, that he omitted the embroidery when covering Europe.

I never embroider.

Is Dr. Mansholt not the man who feels, so far as social benefits are concerned, that big families should be cut adrift from such aids?

He belongs to that school of thought.

Dr. Mansholt's name is most used by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael today in support of the referendum campaign. As I am sure Deputy FitzGerald is aware, Dr. Mansholt has submitted a memorandum on family planning.

That is his personal view. Why does the Deputy not submit his?

Deputy Murphy without interruption.

He has said that social benefits should be cut away from big families in order to force them to keep their numbers down to a reasonable level. I do not know what Dr. Mansholt regards as a reasonable level.

I am concerned with the policy adopted by the Council of Ministers not the personal views of Dr. Mansholt or Deputy Murphy.

Time is against me tonight.

Will the Deputy not be up tomorrow?

I will but I understand this debate is not being proceeded with tomorrow.

After Questions tomorrow.

It is not ordered.

I know it is not on tomorrow morning. What about next week?

There will be an intervening election.

Deputy Murphy should be allowed to make his speech in the time remaining to him.

I should like to say to Deputy FitzGerald that any remarks I have made are in no way personal. I am trying to give a fair view on this question. From any platform on which I have spoken I have given my views and it is up to the people to decide whether they should vote "Yes" or "No". Every individual in the State has that right. I said in the Deputy's absence that we did very badly as far as the negotiations are concerned. Britain are coming out better than we are.

What sort of dealings had we with Britain in earlier days?

Down the years we bought two pounds of goods for every pound the EEC countries bought from us. The view was expressed that if we voted ourselves out of the EEC we would be doomed, that these monsters would put up tariff barriers.

What happened between 1933 and 1937? We could not sell our beef anywhere.

That is the greatest fallacy of all time.

The Parliamentary Secretary should allow Deputy Murphy to make his speech.

Let Deputy Murphy tell us about the neo-colonialist exploiters.

They buy our bullocks because we buy their washing machines. They have in mind a federation of states something like the United States of America.

The United States of Europe.

My view is that these barriers would not rise up against us. We would get the special treatment that I have no doubt would be available for us if we had bargained for it. As an island we are to Europe what Beare Island or Cape Clear are to Ireland. I live quite adjacent to islands off the coast of Ireland and they get special concessions from the Irish Government because they are islands and their people have many disadvantages.

They did not get these concessions in the 1930s.

Does the Parliamentary Secretary think that England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland or Europe would say: "Crush these fellows out there on the Atlantic"?

The Deputy has great faith in these people and their philosophy and goodwill.

Nobody owes us anything.

It is not a question of owing us anything. It is a question that they would not leave us outside their group. Their objective is to build up a federation of west European states. I do not believe they are the type of monster that Deputy FitzGerald has told us they are, that would squeeze you by the throat when you are out.

Progress reported; Committee to sit again.
The Dáil adjourned at 10.30 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Thursday 4th May, 1972.
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