The provision for share capital, additional benefits by way of grants and repayable advances come under three headings. The question of repayable advances is a matter of urgency and, according to the Minister, the items in the other headings also demand urgent attention in that the available limits are sufficient only until the end of the current financial year. I do not propose to impede the progress of this measure through the House so that the necessary provisions may be made as quickly as possible.
The Bill comes immediately after the Córas Tráchtála provisions. I think the Minister for Finance, later today, will be making further provision for the industrial credit operation. They are all very much in the same group; tending towards the same purpose and arising out of the same causes. As everybody can understand, the extra money is necessary due to inflationary trends and the more costly budgeting resulting therefrom, and to provide for expansion and increased activity.
Shannon Free Airport was a unique experiment in this country; it was one viewed by many people with a good deal of misgivings at the time. With hindsight one can say it was justified; it was worth trying and I think we must have learned a lot from it. I think I am correct in saying that most of the firms setting up at Shannon were foreign. Many of them brought to this country a type of production hitherto unheard of. We had the pleasure of being conducted on tours over the SFADCo organisation or complex of projects a number of times. It was really revealing to see the variety of goods produced there, from textiles to pianos and various other things far removed from anything that I would say home enterprise or any of our own entrepreneurs would have thought of, particularly in so far as we would certainly lack the know-how and perhaps the necessary capital and marketing organisation to justify their production here.
Some doubts have been cast recently on the percentage of foreign industry and of foreign investment coming in. All of us were interested in Father Sweeney's publication, based on university graduate research, into foreign investment in the country and the extent to which foreign industries are rooted here. I never really had any worries about foreign industries coming here. The worst that can be said about them is that a certain amount of outflow of capital results from foreign investment. That is inevitable but the important thing is that they do generate industrial activity which is bound to rub off on local enterprise. Many of these generate a lot of ancillary industries which would not have come into being were they not here. On the whole, I think we have nothing to worry about regarding the influx of foreign industry or foreign capital into this country. In fact, our industrial development might not be nearly as rapid were it left entirely to our own industrial adventurers, who did an excellent job.
Father Sweeney tends to argue in his publication that the fact that they were coming in here in reasonably large numbers had the effect of our own people sitting back and saying: Well that has been done; the need to expand the others was not so evident; necessity, very often, creates a good deal of activity and tends to seek answers; the necessity not being there, the void is being filled by other people coming in. That was the line of reasoning taken in Father Sweeney's report.
Professor Fogarty had a further publication on the same lines which had, I think, very much the same summing up as regards foreign investment. I think Shannon Free Airport, or SFADCo, as the company has come to be known, is a typical example of the benefit to be derived from foreign investment. On the whole, I think foreign industrialists coming into this country did have the effect of getting our own people—who are devoid of any industrial background or tradition—to appreciate what it was possible to do. Irish workers proved to be adaptable in any job at which they were put and this encouraged many of our people who heretofore might not have believed it was possible for people engaged in farming to be adapted to industrial development.
I never had any doubts about this. One of the wonders of my life has always been that our emigrants—I have seen it in my own county where there is perhaps a greater example than in any other; many of my own relatives, immediate and others—when they left the small farms, emigrated to the United States or Australia and went into the highly industrialised towns hardly ever settled down on land. Few of them even took the free acreage offered to them in the bush in Australia in the old days; they preferred to go right to the heart of the industrialised cities. They did prove they were adaptable and many of them became highly skilled. Fortunately, most of them made good and are of tremendous benefit to the countries concerned. I mention that merely as one of the early examples of how Irish labour could be adapted to the skills required in industrial production.
But skills in industry have tended to become more and more technological as time progressed. In setting up the AnCO training centres, we recognise the necessity for more and better training; more "on the job" training, as is being carried out by AnCO, in order to train people in these skills and enable them play their full part in the new industrial development of our country. The time has long since passed when there is much place in our economy for a non-skilled worker. I am not sure if it is in Professor Fogarty's or in Father Sweeney's monograph that there is development of the point that our educational system is based still too much on the academic rather than on technological type training. It has been said so often here, in other Estimate debates where it can be discussed more appropriately, that there is still over-crowding in professions; the old status symbol seems to be attached, unjustifiably, to academic training and the seeking of professional careers rather than the more profitable— much more open, and where many more opportunities exist—technological world. I think our universities and those in charge of our educational system would be doing an excellent job were they to ensure that the slant was towards the technological rather than the academic in our training and, particularly, on the managerial side.
I do not think many professional people find their way into industry and the number taking a science degree is indicative of the demand there is for that type of employment in industry. They have not always the managerial training which is essential and which should be part of their training if they are to apply their professional training to the life they take up in industrial development.
When we talk about a lot of foreigners coming in here to set up industries we should try to ensure that the executive grade is available here, as far as is possible and that the many openings which must inevitably develop and multiply as time goes on are made known and provided for in the training in our colleges and universities. It is in this way that we will have the necessary executive personnel who must be of a very high standard to take their place in the competitive world of manufacturing. By that means only can we provide the necessary personnel to ensure that we will have the people to take over the jobs being filled by foreign enterprises at present. I do not say that foreign enterprises are unwelcome.
This country lacked an industrial know-how and they did not have the capital necessary to develop as we would like. One of the most important things about foreign companies and they are usually companies which are established in different parts of the world, is that they have the marketing organisation to handle any new projects which they set up. That is a tremendous advantage. An Irish company often has to spend a lot of money on market research although they are getting good assistance from the different agencies established here. Nevertheless the fact remains that there is a tendency to grumble about too many foreigners coming in.
The two publications to which I have referred are based on the possibility of an outflow of capital by way of profits from foreign industry and foreign investment which does eventually affect our own balance of payments. If we are to reduce that to the minimum we must prepare our own personnel to take part in industrial development to the maximum extent possible. Too frequently we hear it said rather glibly about the IDA that they are prepared to give grants to foreigners but are not prepared to give grants to locals. This is completely wrong. In fact, the opposite is the truth. When a new industry is being established it has to be screened to the extent that some assurance is obtained that it will not flare up for a time and, after the value of the grants has been exhausted, it will collapse.
Such industries must have a product which is saleable, be capable of producing it and have the marketing organisation to sell it. Sometimes all these qualities are more readily available when a foreign concern moves in and for that reason they seem to get their grants and incentives easier than a native enterprise. It is probably that which has given rise to the feeling that foreigners are treated better than our own people. We have many notable examples of all-Irish sponsored industries doing well here. They are sufficient in number to prove that we have reached the stage of having broken through the question of doubt that sometimes applies to our ability to deal with large-scale industry. This was one of the features we had to fight against in the past. That has been dispelled and there is no doubt any more about the capability of Irish management and the skill of the personnel to make a success of an industry.
The Minister, with his colleague the Minister for Labour, has a very important task and duty to ensure that skilled personnel are made available for new industries. Apart from all the grants and tax reliefs this is one of the greatest incentives to new industries to set up here. They should get it through to the people, young people in particular, that if they do not develop a skill there is very little place for them in the economy of this or any other country. Whenever new centres of training were opened there was criticism from people who rather cynically asked what were we training these people for; was it for emigration. My answer to that was that even if it came to the worst and they had to emigrate they were leaving the country skilled and able to do a better job.
The more we train the better we fit our young people for life. It would be much better than the scramble there is at present in the professions if young people directed their training towards technological training for which there are many more openings and for which many people are better suited.
The Shannon Free Airport Company is mainly a foreign industrial complex and speaking on this gives one an opportunity to refer to the question of training. Those industries came to this country with good reputations throughout the world and this has encouraged others to set up elsewhere in this country. If they were not native they came with skills which were useful. They gave good example which resulted in the training of others here. Generally they gave a much better industrial atmosphere than was here in the early days when we were struggling to get the industrial arm organised.
The increase in industrial exports of manufactured goods has risen from a very low percentage of our total exports to take its place with agriculture and tourism as one of the most important branches of the economy we have. We can look forward to the time when it will fully absorb all the surplus labour that will be available particularly the school-leaving labour force which is the most in demand by new industry. It should be obvious to the unemployed people of this country now that when a new industry moves into an area where there is a large number on the register of unemployed, the number of people signing on at the local exchange is depleted very little as a result of the new industry moving in. The younger people and the skilled and semi-skilled are most in demand.
We made a lot of noises for a time about the importance of getting unemployed people to train in various skills. I do not think we have made much progress in that direction. I tried to get something going in my time and the present Minister has been talking about it. One of the services we can give our unemployed is an opportunity to train in particular skills. There is a shortage of skills in many areas. I was often quite annoyed to find that we had to import welders from abroad for heavy engineering. We went to the unions here, asked them to provide them and they were not available and we had to issue the necessary permits to Europeans to work here on engineering and construction work for which we did not have sufficient qualified personnel. The question of apprenticeship is tied up with this, the number of people admitted to apprenticeship each year, and it is something in which the trade unions have a very important part to play.
The success of Shannon Free Airport was most encouraging to industrail development in the country generally. I would not expect the Minister to tell us off the cuff now but some time perhaps he would let us have information as to the effect of industrial concentration in an area like the Shannon. The Buchanan Report recommended industrial poles and areas of industrial concentration. Many of us from the West of Ireland were not enthusiastic about that suggestion. We believe we have reached a stage where we should consider the social aspect of industrial development just as much as getting men working, machinery moving and exports passing across the sea. There is the question of a livelihood in the areas and environment in which people live and I always felt that, even though it might not lead to rapid development of industry, industry should be brought to the people rather than people brought to the industry. Buchanan stressed the importance of the self-generation of industry by having a concentration of industry in a particular area, that everything grows much more rapidly and the different industries tend to assist each other like a lot of people living in a shanty town where one assists the other. Some time, the Minister might tell us to what extent the Buchanan theory is borne out by the complex of industries at Shannon. Has there been the effective generating of ancillary industries and other services that might not otherwise have come about or have the industries just existed as separate units? The answer would not change my own conviction that industry should, as far as possible, be brought to the people rather than the people to the industry.
I always thought it was a crime to see houses in the West of Ireland being closed up and the people coming into Dublin, going into the building industry here, getting married, living in flats and creating a housing problem in Dublin when many of the concerns they came to work in could have been brought to the west. Sufficient have been brought to justify what I am saying. I was interested in publicity given recently to a scheme in Kerry where a special effort was being made to create off-farm employment. They were aiming at having small farmers coming to work, even part-time, in local industry. If you have an industry in a rural area you can have a sufficient labour force recruited from the local small farms. What they earn in industry, while cutting turf and doing some tillage at week-ends, makes the farms self-supporting. Wherever this is being carried out the small farms seem to improve simultaneously.
Research was done into that by two professors in two towns in Ireland, Tubbercurry and Scariff. Their report was very interesting and enlightening showing the effect which industry has on a small rural village. Industrial development along those lines is something which I would encourage and in which I would like the Minister to take a deep interest. We have a culture of our own in the west of Ireland. We have a beautiful environment. We do not want to send our people into the cities if we can bring employment within reasonable reach of them. I know that many industries that come here must be in a particular area. Perhaps if we insisted on only the type of development I am talking about we might slow down our industrial development and the expansion of industry generally but there is no reason why both things cannot be done side by side. Let those who insist on being in the large provincial centres and the cities remain there but as far as possible a greater incentive should be towards the underdeveloped areas. The 1945 Underdeveloped Areas Act was orientated towards doing that. After a time it was extended to cover other areas and eventually there was almost as much encouragement given to set up industries on the east coast as there was to set them up on the west coast.
There has always been a drift away from the west. The last two census of population showed that population in the east and in the south had greatly increased but while the position had greatly improved in some of the counties on the western seaboard the best we could say was that the decline was less than it had been. This proves the need for decentralisation of industry, and greater incentives given towards encouraging people to bring industry to the west. The Shannon Free Airport Development Scheme was a gigantic effort in that direction. The purpose was to keep Shannon Airport alive but the time may now have come when we should have a few further experiments of a similar type. If the complex of industry is self-generating, and it has all the virtues that Buchanan would attribute to it in his examination of the problem, then it might be worth while trying a few more experiments. I do not wish to deny the east coast of anything they have but we would like to see industry concentrated in other areas.
In many parts of the country we are a little envious of Shannon but we are delighted to see how successful it is. We are all parochial in our outlook and we regret we have not a Shannon Free Airport Development Scheme in our areas. I would like the Minister to let me know if any significant development in industry has been evident in the new area added to the original concept of the Shannon Free Airport area. This takes in all the county of Limerick, Clare and part of Tipperary. I do not know if that has had the effect of more concentration of industry in that area.
The building of new towns in the Shannon area and the facilities for providing houses was a very interesting experiment. When I toured this area I thought better planning could have gone into the siting and greater imagination could have been used in making the town and the built-up areas more attractive. The social side of industry is very important. We might sometimes be blinded by the need to get the wheels turning, the industry going, the exports and a better balance sheet for the nation but the family life of our people and their social life are factors which cannot be overlooked. We have now reached the stage in industrial development where these should play a very important part in any future development of industry so long as it is not overdone to the extent of placing obstacles in the way. As I said, we will not impede the passage of this Bill through the House which makes better provision through the three financial heads for the Shannon Free Airport area.
