The Minister for Local Government was in possession. He has ten minutes left.
Adjournment of Dáil: Motion (Resumed).
Debate resumed on the following Motion:
That the Dáil at its rising this week do adjourn for the Christmas Recess.
—(The Taoiseach.)
I propose to deal very briefly with a few matters on which I have not touched. With regard to speed limits, I get letters from people all over the country who want to know what I am doing about speed limits in their areas. This is one of the responsibilities I have passed to local authorities and it is they who now decide, in conjunction with the Garda Síochána, when and where speed limits are to be imposed. It is better that someone at local level should make the decision rather than have people from the Custom House going around the country to find out whether or not speed limits should be imposed.
Recently there was some publicity about accidents on the Naas Road and it was suggested I was holding up the sanctioning of traffic lights at a point where at least seven people had been killed over a period. A proposal for public lighting on the Naas Road was received by me in October last and the council were told that the proposals were not satisfactory. There were discussions between the council engineers and officials of my Department and revised proposals were received in the Department this morning. The allocation of money in 1975 has not held up lighting improvements on the Naas Road. A substantial sum was allocated to Kildare County Council for this purpose and the responsibility is the council's and not mine. Having made that comment, it is only fair to say that I consider county councils are doing an excellent job. Occasionally I do not agree with what they do but they are entitled to do what they think is best.
In my opinion the members of local authorities are the salt of the earth, in the main unpaid men and women who spend their time looking after the interests of those who elected them and, indeed, of those too who would not elect them in 100 years. They leave political and other views completely out of their considerations. I do not think they get the credit they deserve. Were they not so dedicated they would not do their work so well. The officials are also dedicated people who carry out the regulations and the instructions given to them in a way which is a credit to all concerned. This is not the position in some other countries and it is something of which we should all be proud.
With regard to itinerants, or travelling people, as they are now called, I have made the point again and again that I consider travelling people are not being treated the way they should be. There are two different types involved. There is the type better known as dealers, usually fairly wealthy people who make a damn nuisance of themselves wherever they go and who have no hesitation in putting their expensive cars and caravans on the side of the road irrespective of how busy that road is. They have no regard for traffic or anything else. They are people for whom I do not have a great deal of sympathy and eventually either the Department of Justice or the Department of Local Government will have to bring in regulations to deal with this menace. They are entitled to make their living and I have no objection to their doing so but they must do it without trampling on the rights of others. When they move on they leave an incredible amount of rubbish behind.
With regard to the second category, we are not, I think, as Christian-minded as we claim to be in regard to these. It saddens me when I find someone objecting to a family being moved into a house. I am speaking now of people who have very little or nothing at all. Sometimes complaints come from neighbours and sometimes they come from people a distance away. Recently arrangements were made with a local committee to have houses built for some of these people in Deputy Faulkner's area and I was surprised to find that people who lived quite a distance away and who tolerated the situation so long as these people were sitting on the side of the road objected strenuously when the local authority proposed building houses for them on practically the same site; the objection was that the houses would interfere with the value of other houses nearly a mile away. This is the kind of thing I am not prepared to accept. There are people who complain when these people are put into a housing scheme; the complaint is the neighbours do not like it.
Let me repeat what I said on a number of occasions: perhaps if our neighbours had a choice they would not have us as neighbours. It cuts both ways. On the question of travelling people causing trouble, it is true that some of them are guilty in this respect but do not some of the settled community cause trouble, too? Some local authorities and some groups are making great efforts in regard to itinerant settlement but all of us should be a little more Christian in our approach to this question.
I have heard much nonsense talked about the rates. I would like to make it clear that there is definite evidence to show that were it not for the fact that health and housing charges have been transferred to central funds, the rates would be much higher this year. It is estimated that they would be, on average, £4 in the £ greater than they are. I am not saying that the rates are not high. They are very high but we have made arrangements to have this matter dealt with and within the next couple of days we expect to have the report of the committee that have been investigating the matter. Then, we will all have the opportunity of deciding whether it will be possible to devise an alternative way of spreading the burden of local taxation. However, let us remember that in 1972-73 the average rate in the £ for the whole country was £6.09 and that in 1975 it is £6.60. Can anybody indicate any charge during the past three years in any part of the western world that has increased by a lesser amount than that? In addition to removing the health and housing charges from the rates, the Government have removed from them the malicious injuries burden and this resulted in a considerable saving to ratepayers in a number of counties.
Taking everything into consideration, 1975 has been a good year in so far as local government is concerned. There has been good employment in local authorities and the housing programme has been much better than most people predicted. In regard to roads there has been a greater amount spent than in any previous year. Although money is tight we hope to be able to keep as close as we can to our targets in respect of the various aspects of the Department in 1976.
The Minister was the third contributor to this debate from the Government side. So far one can only express disappointment at the content of the contributions from that side. What we have had so far is detailed itemisation of what has been done by various people and what is being promised to be done but little reference to the prime needs of our economy. This is the reference one would have hoped for at this time.
The apparent gravity with which the Taoiseach delivered his speech last week left the people stunned. It appeared that for the first time the Government realised the state into which they had allowed the economy to slip during almost three years of ineffective, inefficient and incompetent government, a Government which had their priorities wrong from the beginning, wrong in the sense that propaganda and publicity got the number one spot at the expense of employment in industry, in agriculture, in building and so on. Not once during his entire contribution did the Minister for Local Government refer to the 10,000 additional people who are idle in the building industry compared with this period last year.
When we adjourned for Christmas two years ago—the first Christmas of this Coalition—our unemployment figure was 64,622. Now, as a result of the bungling and mismanagement of the economy, because of the failure of the Government to produce any economic plan, the unemployment figure has reached 109,286, an increase during that three-year period of 44,664 or almost 70 per cent. This figure does not include the 7,000 school leavers who are desperately but unsuccessfully seeking jobs. The seriousness of this situation cannot be over-emphasised. There is no need for me to go into detail to explain the serious problems for the future in so far as our young people are concerned. Thanks to the social conscience of a Fianna Fáil Minister and Government many young people are now educated to a certain standard but at the end of their schooldays they find that there are no opportunities for employment. This situation must have a frustrating and shattering effect on them and, in my opinion, will lead eventually to social discontent and this must be the biggest problem facing us for the future.
What steps are being taken to try to provide opportunities for the school leavers of next year and of 1977 and later? We are told that the number leaving school each year is between 50,000 and 52,000. Some of these go on to further education but we can assume that in each year there will be about 30,000 coming on the labour market. This gives us a labour force that is increasing, perhaps, by between 25,000 and 30,000 a year while at the same time we have a diminishing figure for people at work. The real cancer is the growing unemployment.
Our service sector is already large by international standards. This means that most of the new jobs we need must be provided in manufacturing industry. Therefore, let us look at the situation in that industry. We find that employment has decreased by more than 15,000 jobs in the past year and that the downward trend is continuing. Since June, 1974 the number of people employed in manufacturing industry has decreased by an estimated 18,000. This wipes out all the gains we had achieved in the seven years prior to the last election so that we are back to something like the 1967 situation. The population has been increasing during that time. Since the middle of last year industrial output has fallen by 8 per cent. Obviously, this is the most serious part of our unemployment situation. Taking this into consideration with the situation in the service industry and in building, we realise how serious is our position. The unemployment figure in manufacturing industry is about 13 per cent. It is a serious figure but no positive effort has been made to rectify the matter. I know members of the Government might like to interrupt me and say they introduced measures regarding the employment premium. I will come to that matter later and will explain why it has failed.
The 13 per cent in manufacturing industry is a very significant and frightening figure. In the ten months up to October, 1975, the volume of our manufactured exports was 4 per cent below the 1974 figure. The real fall in GNP for 1975 will be in the region of 3.5 per cent to 4 per cent. We are now in a position that even if the growth rates in output and employment of the earlier part of the decade were resumed immediately it would take about five years to get back to last year's level of employment in manufacturing industry and that was proportionately only half that of our main trading partners.
Having regard to those trends and the delay by the Government to arrest the inflationary situation in a positive way, there is no way that the unemployment figure will not soar to 140,000 and possibly 150,000 people. That is the stark reality of the situation and it cannot be prevented unless the Government finally realise that their policies have been wrong, that their plans have been non-existent and that, as a result, so many people have lost their jobs. This causes upsets and social problems in the home despite any cushioning that may be provided from other sources. The average Irishman is anxious to work but the Government have not done their duty. They have failed miserably in this area.
Let us consider the situation in the private sector where approximately 100,000 workers have not yet received any phase of the present national wage agreement because of the genuine inability of a large sector of the industry to meet such payments. This is where I must lay the blame fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the Government because they created the climate that has brought about that situation. There is no other sector that can accept the responsibility in the same way; the Government are to blame and they must face up to it. This morning the Minister for Labour again told us that the problems were caused by outside factors and by influences from abroad. The Government were told long ago that their inflationary policies would have the effect of creating unemployment.
The climate they have created has inhibited the private sector in three ways. There is an inconsistent kind of price control in operation; there is an escalating wage bill caused by the inflationary measures of the Government; there is increased taxation. The first result is that 100,000 people in the private sector have not got the benefits of the national wage agreement that have been obtained by the public sector and by other sections of the community. Thus, there is the problem of some people falling behind and all I will say to the men who said they would eliminate proverty, are we not creating hardship for very many families?
The other result is an even more serious one in the long-term. It means that this sector is no longer generating profits. I want to make clear that I am not interested in profits just for the sake of profits but I realise that they are necessary in industry if we are to have reinvestment. If this does not happen it is not possible for a company to create more jobs, to re-equip, to modernise and to improve productivity. In addition, we will not be competitive in world markets and this is a point we have heard much about recently. Let me emphasise that the profits I speak about are profits that the country needs. It is not to line anyone's pockets but it is to help industry to equip itself, to provide jobs and to compete in the world markets.
It is a vicious circle where there is a climate created by the Government that is having the effect of throwing many people out of work and keeping back many others in the battle against the cost of living. It is amazing how silent so many people have become on the way costs have increased generally. I can assure the Minister for Local Government that many local authorities are facing a disastrous financial year in 1976——
I heard that before.
The Minister has rarely heard me refer to any of the matters he mentioned in his contribution today.
The word "disastrous" was referred to at least four times last year or the year before.
The Minister has a better memory because I cannot recollect if I used the word. Perhaps I might explain the difficulties that will arise. At the moment local authorities have enormous overdrafts——
The rates are lower than when Fianna Fáil were in power.
I should love to believe that. I notice the Minister made the comment just before he left the House. Obviously he was not going to wait for the answer; I do not blame him because I realise it is an embarrassment to him and his colleagues in Government. The people in the private sector have not been able to obtain benefits under the national wage agreement because of the genuine inability of firms to pay such increases but, at the same time, people in the public sector have been able to avail of all the benefits. Yet, when the Taoiseach and the Leader of the Labour Party made their threatening statements recently that the worker would have to tighten his belt they did not differentiate between those who got the increases and those who lost out in that race. Of course, this is typical of a Government who have floated around like a rudderless ship, with no leadership or guidance, with a complete lack of positive approach. They have failed miserably to help the Irish workers.
Again, I ask, what are the prospects for future school leavers over the next five years. We have to provide for them and the sooner the better. There are a number of ideas that I will put forward later. The social dangers that the present situation can cause can have serious consequences and will guarantee that never again in the history of this country will there be a coalition government composed of either Fine Gael or Labour or both, simply because the people concerned will forever remember the way their careers were thwarted in the infamous period from 1973, hopefully for not very long, of Coalition Government.
Let us consider the Taoiseach's speech last week and the frightening way he portrayed the situation on the television screen. Let us go back to the summer of 1974. The warning signs were there long before then. There was a warning that the policies were dangerous and could only have long term serious results for us. I quote from the Central Bank's comment in July, 1974:
The growing extent to which this rising volume of public expenditure has to be financed by external borrowing is a special cause for concern. At the end of March 1974 about £165 million—
Is it not small by comparison with the present day?
—of external government debt was outstanding as against only £55 million five years before and the indications are that this figure will be in the order of £300 million at least by the end of March, 1975 while that of State bodies will probably have reached some £200 million by the same date.
That was one of the warning signs to the Coalition Government that was completely ignored by them. Another comment made in the autumn of 1974 was:
The economy has been subjected to a series of adverse events. The escalation of food and commodity prices throughout 1973 was followed by the oil crisis with its wide ranging implications for prices, demand and the external deficit and the conclusion of an inflationary third national pay agreement and by a budget in April last—
That is, a budget in April 1974.
which, containing no positive measures to reduce inflation, relied heavily on borrowing to expand domestic activity at ever rising levels of cost.
That, one could say in retrospect, warned the Government of the effect their lack of initiative and lack of courageous action would have on the economy and on the living standards of our people.
The results are there now. The Taoiseach's speech last week was indicative of the concern he now has. If that concern had been evident in the summer of 1974 and the spring of 1975 it would have been more effecttive and would have provided the necessary stimulus to get the wheels of industry moving and to get people back into employment.
It was in the late autumn of 1974 that the Government first spoke of this national partnership. I see nothing wrong with the concept of a national partnership if I thought it represented genuine concern but, from experience, I have become suspicious of this Government, as most Irish people have. One is inclined to associate with the Government publicity, dramatics and a great deal of propaganda. The Taoiseach says now that we are in the worst situation that peace-time Ireland has ever been in. On this side of the House there is one of the most responsible Taoisigh of recent times, our Leader. If the Government or the Taoiseach were sincere in their approach to a national partnership and if they believed that the economy was in a serious condition, it would be very understandable if they approached this responsible former Taoiseach, discussed the situation with him and asked him for his advice, for his support if necessary and the support of his party. No. For publicity reasons, for reasons best known to the Government, this course was not followed.
Belt-tightening has been threatened. On whom? On the ordinary people of Ireland. I want to refer to a few specific items. I understand the Minister for Industry and Commerce will reply to the debate tomorrow evening. I would ask him to intercede in the case of the Cork Shoe Company, Cork who have particular problems at the present time. The important aspect is that that company employs 200 people. There are 200 homes dependent on the future of the company. By a decision last week of a Government agency, Fóir Teoranta, that company is doomed as from 9th January. I would appeal to the Minister for Industry and Commerce to ask Fóir Teoranta to reverse that decision and to consider the financial and social implications.
The financial implications could be favourable in the context of the national economy having regard to what it would cost the State if those 200 people lose their jobs on 9th January. There is a very strong social case to be made for the continuation of this company. After the appointment of a receiver in May, 1975 the employees showed loyalty, interest, co-operation and dedication by improving production in that period. For that reason I make a very strong plea to the Minister—I am sure there are others who will join with me in making that plea—to involve himself and to intercede for the 200 employees who have decided that they will work free, gratis and for nothing to finish the production in hand and to use the stock remaining on closing date. This is an indication as to the type of people they are. The request is made for a period of six months and I would ask the Minister to give it very sympathetic consideration.
There is one matter that concerns me. I have always believed in the policy of buy Irish. It has always been my view that there is no greater patriotism than to buy Irish not only in time of recession but at all times. One must doubt the sincerity of the Government and the Minister for Industry and Commerce who is leading the "Buy Irish" campaign when one sees the areas in which Government and State companies particularly are purchasing outside the State. The effect of that is reduction in employment because State companies should be stopped from buying outside this State. I accept that the budget may be allocated to them at the commencement of a particular year and they might see where £5,000 or £6,000 could be saved by purchasing outside the State. Still, being a State company propped up by the Irish taxpayer, if the overall economic situation were examined in relation to that saving it would be seen very clearly that the saving in the contract placed outside the State could well be a loss to the economy generally. It could also be seen that if this contract was placed with an Irish company, creating more jobs or guaranteeing existing jobs, it would be very beneficial. Can one be blamed for doubting the sincerity of this campaign when we have seen in recent times such a gross breach of this slogan by State companies responsible to the Government?
I will mention a few of those companies, some of which are in my constituency or near it and that of the Leas-Cheann Comhairle as well. We had the issue of the Japanese ships. I want to specifically reply to a point made by the Minister for Industry and Commerce when he contributed to that debate. I did not have the opportunity of replying after him. He charged me with being emotive. I believe I was constructive. The Minister said that the type of boats being ordered by Irish Shipping were sardine tins. There was a comment from that yard that they now want a consignment of tin openers to open the sardine tins. He was referring to the bulk carriers. I accept the point he made that there was not as much employment content in them as there would be in a ferry boat. This would be fine if Verolme Dockyard knew they were getting some type of order, if there were consultations with them and also if they knew the date of the placing of any further orders. The confidence of the workers then would not have been eroded. That is the first point.
Or Fianna Fáil would not have got on the band wagon.
Now the Minister has interrupted in a flippant way, like all his colleagues this morning. I believe he and his colleagues are becoming more irresponsible daily and less concerned with the problems facing us.
I will deal with Verolme and the Deputy in no flippant way.
Now that the Minister has interrupted, I will dwell a few minutes longer on his propaganda outside the gates of Verolme Dockyard during the by-election campaign about 14 months ago. He was encouraged by the officers of Haul-bowline, that he spent long enough with, and then he came to the Verolme Dockyard and promised them this fishery protection vessel.
I did.
Will the Minister let me finish? This was subsequently promised by the Taoiseach. It was kicked around at that stage and it was promised again by the Taoiseach and by a Fine Gael Deputy from north-east Cork. Possibly, as a result of discussions this morning the Minister may have an announcement to make about it. I will welcome it. I will forgive him for interrupting me if he says positively in the House that he has decided to give Verolme the order for the fishery protection vessel. If the Minister puts a date on it on this occasion, I will be happy and he will not hear from me again about it.
I am also concerned about the large quantities of steel imported in some of our major contracts. Some of them are private developments in many parts of the country but others are State developments. We have a steel mills in Cork harbour. The importance of this is that it is Irish. It is strange to me that again we have a State company importing steel. While Irish Shipping went to Japan with their £11 million these people have gone to one of the continental countries to get some of the steel for the new Nítrigin Éireann factory. If this is the case the Government should be rapped on the knuckles for not preventing it because the jobs of Irish workers in Irish Steel Holdings are at stake. In fact, 500 jobs are about to be lost in that firm.
We had a motion on the Order Paper last week stating that a number of companies would be examined by a Joint Committee of the Oireachtas. It included a long list of companies. One of the notable absentees was Irish Life, more than 90 per cent of which is owned by the Minister for Finance. I am surprised that Irish Life are not included in this list. If the rumours circulating are true, it appears to me that Irish Life should have been on this list and somebody would know what is happening in that company. Irish Life are engaged on a major complex in this city and we are told that approximately 3,000 people will be employed in that, although not all by Irish Life. That employment content is larger than the population of many of our Irish towns. Therefore, it seems strange that that company is omitted.
We are now being told that the furniture for that complex is being purchased outside the State. Where is our "Buy Irish" campaign? What about the jobs of Irish workers? What is wrong with our chairs, desks and office furniture? If they are slightly dearer in the long term we should consider which is cheaper for our economy. I have mentioned three or four areas because of the unemployment situation and in each of them, with the possible exception of the first I mentioned, which is a slightly different situation, they are all State bodies buying outside the country. This is harming continuity of employment and shattering the confidence of many of our workers. If a ship, a chair, a press or whatever else it might be can be bought out of the budget of a State company it should be purchased within the country. This would be a positive example to people to buy Irish and support the campaign which the Government are half-heartedly trying to promote. I cannot see how that campaign can succeed if State companies are allowed to continue with this policy, which is harmful to the employment situation.
The premium employment programme was introduced in the House last summer to aid manufacturing industry. After one of our amendments was accepted it was extended to aid agricultural industry. At that time I pointed out to the Minister that in any area where the Government were using their imagination they would have our full support. I complained then and I complain bitterly now that the narrow limits of that scheme—I said it was imaginative and merited support—meant it could never get off the ground properly. Six months later the scheme is obviously a failure in that only approximately 3,000 jobs have been created by it. The Minister told us that 10,000 was the target. I said that I hoped 10,000 was only the first stage and that that figure would be far exceeded. Last week, the day after I had asked a question here about it, the Minister extended the scheme to the processing industry but—something I can never understand particularly in the present climate—he left out the building sector and the service industry sector.
The economics of the situation are that if a man is taken off the live register there is an immediate saving to the Exchequer in not having to pay his social welfare benefit. The £12 premium is being paid from State funds but the State get back the stamp contribution plus any income tax he may be paying in his new job. At all times the State will get back at least 50 per cent and in some cases much more of the pay out. They are making a big saving overall. That is why I cannot understand the Government not covering the building sector and the service industries when any job created or provided is a bonus for the economy. Even at this late stage I appeal to the Government to cover those areas. The building industry is going through its worst depression since the 1956-57 period when the Coalition Government ran out of office as this Government will do in the not-too-distant future when the Exchequer is empty and every State Department run down. This is an area where employment could be aided.
Aids to industry must be strengthened. The type of aid I mentioned in connection with the Cork Shoe Company is the type of aid that must be given in the existing climate. There is no way in which the Minister can refuse to aid that industry to carry on for a further period. Possibly as a long-term solution in the future we must look at the grant payments structure of the IDA. While all industry is welcome, irrespective of its labour content, we must have a greater welcome for and set our sights more on labour intensive industries. The IDA grant structure will have to be directed towards attracting industry giving big employment rather than a high capital industry that does not give as much employment even though it is very welcome in itself. To help not only our industrial employment problem but to create jobs for school leavers of last year and this year as well as the unemployed and the school leavers of future years the emphasis must be on labour intensive industries.
We appealed here to the Minister for Industry and Commerce to protect our shoe and leather and our textile industries before it was too late. He paid little heed and said it was impossible. He set up a monitoring system some months ago but monitoring means little. Why must we be the good boys of Europe? We are within the European Community but it appears to me—I suspect that perhaps some of our Ministers are too committed to Europe—that our priority must be Ireland and the Irish people. I read in the papers today that Britain is now imposing tariffs on shoes and leather and textile goods to protect her economy. There is no comparison between the size of the British home market and our home market. Our numbers are small in the world market. Our loss to some of these nations would not be great at all especially if they are made realise that at present we are twice as bad as regards unemployment as any other country in Europe. Recently we had a tenth country added to the Community in a reply by the Parliamentary Secretary so that we had ten countries there rather than nine in an effort to say that there was somebody worse than ourselves. We are worse than Europe and, in my opinion, positive barriers should be created to aid those two labour intensive industries. I am sure the Minister is concerned about those in his own constituency. In my constituency we have lost textile industries and these labour intensive industries have been lost in many areas.
The Government should look completely across the board, look at all Europe and look at all the areas where we could aid our home-based industries and stop State companies importing. I do not expect they can tell the private sector not to buy outside but at least some barrier can be created to make it less attractive for them to buy outside and encourage labour intensive industries at home.
We must realise that we are no longer an international creditor nation. At 30th September this year the foreign indebtedness of the Government and the State bodies plus the net external liability of the banking system amounted to £802 million. Against this we had official foreign reserves of £572 million. That makes us now an international debtor rather than a creditor nation. The Government speak much too readily and act too tardily. They have done nothing positive to curb our inflationary trend which is undoubtedly the kernel of our present economic problems. They have given no indication of any positive concerted action in the fact of inflation. Everybody is now satisfied that the Government have been the chief contributor to the situation. The record is patently obvious; instead of giving a positive lead the Government have been content to lead from behind. As Nye Bevan said of an English Government in the thirties: "We have had enough of your stupidity in smooth accents." I make the same allegation against the present Government here this evening.
I suppose the easiest way to deal with the remarks of Deputy Gene Fitzgerald in relation to Verolme and the building of a fishery protection vessel would be to deal with them first. The position in relation to the fishery protection vessel was that because that vessel carried a gun it was defined as a warship and that placed this country in a very advantageous position as far as having the work done in Verolme was concerned. If it had not been a warship it would be necessary to include all the shipbuilding companies in the EEC in those asked to tender, and then a decision would have to be made. If preference were given to an Irish company we would have to substantiate the reasons for that preference under EEC rules. In the case of the fishery protection vessel we had that advantage so that we could offer the work to Verolme.
It is quite obvious, however, that when you are in the position of offering work to one preferred client the question of payment arises. If you cannot have tenders from five, six, seven or 17 different companies then you must make sure that the people's money is expended properly and that the maker of the ship does not get too much. That was one of the things that held up the building of the vessel. There has been in my Department very detailed consultation with Mr. Van Der Paol and the top executives of Verolme after Irish Shipping had acted as agents for us in the definition of the various changes from the first fishery protection vessel that were necessary and again argued for us on price. I am glad to tell the House that because of these consultations the price has been satisfactorily reduced and I can now say quite specifically that the ship will be built in Verolme. Deputy Fitzgerald is quite obviously fishing for information in that neck of the woods and asks when. If there is anybody, in my considered opinion, who may have been sinned against in relation to the building of this second fishery protection vessel it is the fishermen, not Verolme. In fact the second vessel has been, to some extent, tailored in time to suit the needs of Verolme workers so that the building that is going on at Verolme will be immediately followed by the building of the second fishery protection vessel. The main work, as those of us who know something about the thing, and occasionally did get our feet wet, which I do not think Deputy Fitzgerald ever did, in this particular type of manufacturing is in the fabrication.
(Interruptions.)
We want to see the people of Verolme follow the work they are on at the present moment with the fishery protection vessel. As well as that there is the question of the stage payments in relation to this vessel. These have all to be fixed to get the most advantageous bargain for the Government, to get the best chance of work, at the time they want it, for the Verolme people. The Government must then see to it that no Verolme worker is disemployed at that stage and the Government will do so. I could not stand up here two or three months ago, when negotiations were at a certain stage in relation to price, and create a situation which might cost the people of this country £100,000, £200,000 or a half million pounds. Of course Fianna Fáil in Cork found that out and they found that proper behaviour by the Government, proper behaviour by me——
That would be something new.
——would immediately demand that I should not stand up and make statements in regard to this vessel which I did not do. Fianna Fáil in Cork jumped on the bandwagon and created a situation in which 1,200 unfortunate, decent Cork people, who did not know, were codded with something as crooked as a Fianna Fáil corkscrew to the extent of walking through the streets of Cork on something that was totally and absolutely unnecessary when the Government were seeing to it that the people in Verolme would be employed on that vessel and that the vessel would be built at a propitious time.
On a point of order, I want to know what grounds the Minister has for saying that a Fianna Fáil corpus organised this?
That is not a point of order.
There is absolutely no truth in it.
The most guilty man is Deputy Fitzgerald himself and I am going to Cork to say so.
The people will judge that, not the Minister.
The Cork people will know now what the situation is and how politically nefarious the Deputy is. That was the position. Negotiations had to be carried on with one firm and one firm only. I am happy that negotiations have reached the stage where I can say that everything is safe, that we will build it there, that the people will not be knocked off because it has not arrived. I say, not as a fact but as an opinion, that the people of Verolme were suited well by our seeing to it that that boat would arrive at the propitious time. If anybody could make a charge against me or the Government it would be the fishermen who might say that to suit the workers of Verolme the boat was delayed for three or four months. That is the exact, truthful position and the behaviour in Cork was despicable and irresponsible.
Talk about the economy for a change.
All I hope is that those people who read what I have said this evening will appraise Deputy Fitzgerald politically.
The Government, on 7th February, 1973, produced a document known as the statement of intent. This was a statement of intent by the parties forming the National Coalition of what would be their efforts in Government. As we will be three years in government in March next I think it is time to examine just how far the Government have got in relation to the statement of intent. The Government are not God Almighty and the Government in those years have fallen on evil times and good times. Good times in certain facets of our economy, evil times in others. The people must judge whether or not that statement of intent was faithfully adhered to and whether it produced results. The statement of intent read:
There has not been a change of Government in this country for 16 years. In the last general election Fianna Fáil were returned to power with one of the biggest majorities ever. Since then the Taoiseach has lost his majority through successive sackings and resignations from his Cabinet and expulsions from his party. It is entirely his fault that he no longer has the mandate to govern and that he has rushed the country into a General Election in such haste as to deprive young people of their newly given right to vote. There is no reason to believe that he would be any more successful if granted a further mandate.
In these circumstances, the only guarantee of strong, stable government capable of dealing with the nation's problems is a National Coalition Government.
It was true at that time, and I suppose remains true today, that the likelihood of Fine Gael producing an overall majority or of Labour producing an overall majority was small indeed. Therefore, the punchline in the last sentence of that paragraph that the only alternative was a National Coalition was a true alternative and the blemish which is called to mind by the preceding sentence, the successive sackings and resignations from the Cabinet, from his party, by Deputy Lynch and the hierarchy of Fianna Fáil drew attention to their ineptitude and their quite impossible right to rule, their failure to produce a credible situation on the right to rule.
Of course, Fianna Fáil must be one of the finest political parties in Europe in many ways. We must admit that. Any other party, from the sackings of 1970, who would have continued until 1973 must be, as far as binding together and Tammany Hall politics are concerned, a marvellous party. They must be to have stayed together over that period. But, just as we must face the hustings in a year or a year-and-a-half, there came the day when they had to face the hustings and the first paragraph of that statement of intent tells why they were not re-elected. It placed on us an absolute responsibility first to see to the security aspect, and we saw to it.
Security is a progressive thing. I made a speech on Monday last at the opening of the new billet block at Dundalk Barracks which brought the numbers there, all ranks, to 330. Today I hope we will take over the new barracks in Monaghan, all ranks, 205. We may face the fact that, as far as security was concerned, we were left barefoot. The expenditure there has been, in my view, paralleled only by the absolute integrity and loyalty of the security forces. I said on Monday and I repeat now in this House that a nation is as a nation wills, that if everybody stopped playing boy scouts and girl guides, if we had every citizen backing the security forces—Gardaí and Army—to the utmost in their information, their voice and their very demeanour, then immediately, and I have no doubt about this, the cancer of subversion would end. But there was no agency of Government, no political party or parties, no agency that could get a majority in Dáil Éireann that had the wish and the will to make that effort over the three years. There was no other such agency except the National Coalition.
The National Coalition has, among its Members, Ministers, for instance, who are known to be violently antisubversive, publicly known to be such, in fact who have been attacked in various places all over the country because of their views in this regard. My colleague, Deputy Cooney, is totally and absolutely committed in that regard. I was committed in that respect also as long ago as 1957 when the funerals—God rest their souls—of Mr. South and Mr. O'Hanlon who had been killed in a raid on Rossleigh Barracks in County Fermanagh were passing through the town of Dundalk. I was attending a county council meeting there. There was a precedent existing in Louth County Council whereby only next-of-kin of officials or members were the recipients of a vote of sympathy; otherwise we would have been passing votes of sympathy all day. On that occasion there were 26 members present. I said: "No, had two boys been killed in a motor accident outside the door of this building as I walked in this morning, there would be no vote of sympathy. Therefore, are we to pass a vote of sympathy to let these armchair generals, these middle-aged geniuses, send young men to their deaths and encourage them to send more?" Mind you, a double think arises here. There are all sorts of views about that sort of thing. Six weeks later I lost my seat at the next general election but it was worth it because it is true today that if the citizens decide that this subversion shall end, then it shall end. The Government's job, first of all, is to lead citizens along that path and, secondly, to provide, in the forefront the Gardaí and Army who will see to it that this is done. They are in the forefront and it is our job to follow them.
I was asked also by a television interviewer on Monday was I satisfied with security. How could I be satisfied with security when there are, as is reported every week, two dead this week, one dead the next week, eight dead the following week? One finds an average over months that adds, perhaps, to something of the order of less than one death per day. I give little thought to whether these deaths occur in Sandy Row or the Falls Road. They are people with families and many of them are fathers and mothers of families. The grief occasioned in that regard is bad but just as bad is the situation of the factories that did not come here because of subversion.
The only sheet anchor this nation has—if they want a political sheet anchor, and they must go to a political sheet anchor because this House is where it all starts and finishes in that regard—is the National Coalition Government. There is nobody else who does not bear the blemish of 1970. There is nobody else to whom they can turn and they are entitled to criticise, perhaps to say that our efforts are not sufficient. But also, in fair play, they are entitled to accept the commitment of the Ministers involved, of the Government and the absolute desire of everybody in the two parties concerned to see to it that there shall be peace.
The statement of intent of 7th February, 1973, then drew attention to the question of protecting the individual. The parties involved asserted, as a first responsibility, the need to protect the liberty and safety of the individual citizen and to uphold the democratic institutions of the State. What I have just been saying would indicate that we are adhering to that promise and that statement of intent.
We then said peace through justice. We recognise a particular duty to promote a peaceful solution in the North which would bring an end to bloodshed, injustice and sectarian divisions. Accordingly, we pledge ourselves to endeavour to secure both those objectives. That we have been doing.
We pledged ourselves to do our very best in relation to prices and that we have done. The National Prices Commission produces reports regularly. Action has been taken by the Minister for Industry and Commerce in every case where he could do so. I am fully aware that the woman out shopping in the morning with her basket finds prices going up far more than she would wish. That is so all over the world but surveillance of prices has been stepped up. Indeed, the work of the Minister for Industry and Commerce in this regard must be lauded by all. It is not his fault if the sheikhs of Arabia make certain decisions. It is not his fault if commodity prices rise all over the world, as they have done. He is doing his job. He has got an independent body in the National Prices Commission, the personnel of that body being selected by the Government, a personnel of the greatest integrity and with the greatest desire to protect the consumer. I would venture to say that we did not in any way take any step that would have increased commodity prices one penny.
The first thing we did, as an earnest of our commitment before the election, was to remove value-added tax from food. It is wise that that should not be forgotten. We said then that the Government would regard the control of price inflation as indispensable and the continuance of national wage agreements. The two parties are convinced that voluntary wage agreements reached at a national level are the best bases for economic development, stability and growth of jobs. Against all the odds we succeeded in having national wage agreements. It has been difficult but they have been produced. In a time of roaring inflation it is true that the results could be almost described—when one takes prices, national wage agreements, the whole economic structure—as possibly less bad than they would have been had these steps not been taken. But it was a statement of intent and it was the adherence to that statement of intent by the National Coalition Government which has brought about a lesser adverse effect than there might otherwise have been. It is right that we should be examined by the people on our statement of intent of 7th February, 1973. In regard to social reform we said:
The elimination of poverty and the ending of social injustice will be a major priority in the next government's programme. It is conservatively estimated that under Fianna Fáil a quarter of our people lived in poverty. The social policy of the new government will bring immediate assistance to those in need and lay the foundations of long term policy that will root out the causes of low incomes, bad housing and poor educational facilities. Special legislation will be passed to deal with the plight of the aged, deprived children, the widowed, orphaned and deserted and the physically and mentally handicapped.
The money saved as a result of EEC membership will be applied by the new Government to a radical improvement of pensions and social benefits such as the payment of old age pensions at an earlier age without a means test to both men and women.
A central feature of this social policy will be a complete reform of the system of financing social services through the introduction of a comprehensive social security system covering all citizens.
We have progressively lowered the old age pension age from 70 to 67 and it is our intention to lower it progressively to 65. Social welfare recipients in general have had a real increase in their living standards. In my own bailiwick the Old IRA pensions were increased by 14 per cent in 1973, by a further 9 per cent in 1974 and a further 29 per cent in 1975. Special allowances paid to persons who served the nation and who are not as well blessed with this world's goods as others are were increased by £23 in 1973, by £16 in 1974 and by £56 a year in 1975. Public service pensions are now brought up annually to the rates in force on 1st July and all pensioners, therefore, enjoy parity with those who have just resigned. It is true that during the year there is erosion and these pensioners are on parity only from 1st July but, even if that is the case, they are still exactly one year better than their counterparts in Britain. We have kept faith there also.
It is only right to put on record increases in social welfare benefits. In 1973 the old age contributory pension for a married couple was increased to £12.35 per week. In 1974 it was increased to £15 a week and, in 1975, because of the erosion, two increases were given—the ordinary increase in April and a cost-of-living increase in October. In the good old Fianna Fáil days—perhaps I should say bad old Fianna Fáil days—pensioners waited until 1st October for any increase. The old age contributory pension for a married couple was £12.35 in 1973, £15 in 1974 and £18.40 a week in 1975. It was £19.35 in October. The qualifying age has been reduced—69 in 1973, 68 in 1974 and 67 in 1975— and it is our intention to go on reducing the age until the normal retirement age of 65 applies not only to the managing director but also to the unfortunate person on social welfare.
Was the age reduced to 65 this year?
No. The Deputy is being mischievous like his colleague sitting beside him. We said we would reduce it progressively and we are doing that.
You know, forecasts like that were made here before.
Fianna Fáil kept it at 70 for years.
I reduced the contributory pension to 65.
The means test for the old age contributory pension has been gradually reduced. Free travel is available to all over 67 years of age. Pay-related benefits were introduced to lessen the impact of unemployment. These are just a few examples that must be borne in mind. They show that social justice has always been in the forefront where this Government are concerned. We played fair and, if there are those who say we did not play fair, to them I say this is a democracy and that is their democratic right. However, I am waiting for anyone to contradict anything I have yet stated in relation to our statement of intent.
The next item in that statement was "Housing Emergency":
The declaration of a housing emergency will be made immediately by the National Coalition Government. Housing output will be increased to 25,000 a year. The Fianna Fáil created shortage of dwellings will also be tackled by providing incentives to secure the fuller utilisation of existing houses. Speculation in building land will be ended in order to lower the cost of houses.
In this period of recession we have managed to build the 25,000 houses a year. Whether or not we will succeed in reaching that figure next year I do not know, but we will certainly strive to achieve it or even do better. The most pleasurable thing about this Government in my constituency is seeing the houses being built in my constituency because, if the houses are there and the people are there, the jobs will follow. If you take tenants out of bad housing conditions and put them into good housing conditions, not alone will you improve family life but you will improve a great deal else. Prospective employers will follow the houses with factories in which employment will be created because willing and good workers will be available.
The next item in the statement of intent referred to rent, rates and taxes and the first sentence under this heading reads:
The unjust aspects of differential rents will be removed and a fair national system of tenant purchase will be introduced.
During his first six months in office the Minister for Local Government changed the various schemes of tenant purchase and there was a fair system introduced which nobody could object to. In respect of the houses we have built the differential rents have been applied fairly.
Was not the promise to remove them?
We said we would remove the unjust aspects of the system. Nobody said anything about differential rents being removed. It is clear that this system is a good one because if, for instance, a man has several children but happens to be unemployed for a period, it is only right that he be on a lower rent than others more fortunate than he. One may disagree with the application of differential rents in specific instances but the concept is right.
We went on to say in our programme that:
Rates will be reduced drastically by transferring health charges and housing subsidies to central taxation and will be replaced progressively by a form of taxation related to the ability of persons to pay.
We have proceeded to remove health charges and housing subsidies from local rates. Had we not done this it is estimated that this year there would have been further increases in the rates of about £1.15, £1.20 and £2.50 in the £. When Fianna Fáil found themselves without their cloak in the week prior to the general election they said that if returned to office they would remove rates in respect of private houses. This created something of a dutch auction in so far as the election was concerned but the people did not fall for it because Fianna Fáil did not say how they proposed replacing those rates.
In regard to death duties we said:
With a view to relieving the heavy and unjust burden on ordinary house purchasers and farmers, the National Coalition Government will abolish estate duties on property passing on death to widows and their children and replace them with taxation confined to the really wealthy and to property passing on death outside the immediate family.
Death duties were abolished on 1st April, 1975 and since then we have not had the application of the taxation designed to replace them—the Capital Acquisitions Tax Bill—the purpose of which is to enable a man to pass to his son or daughter property to the value of £150,000 without it being liable to tax. However, Fianna Fáil have impeded the passage of that Bill through the House. The death duty system left many families, particularly good farming families, in penury not for years but for decades. Its abolition is one of the great successes of this Government and, again, is another area of the 14-point programme in respect of which we have kept faith.
The Minister has referred only to a few of the points. Let us hear about prices and employment.
Time is limited in this debate.
I have referred to that point but if the Deputy wishes me to go over it again, I shall do so on condition that he desist from interrupting me again.
I did not hear the Minister refer to price control.
The Chair has pointed out that this debate is confined in regard to time.
Under the heading "Stopping the Price Rise" we said:
The tragic events in the North have clouded the fact that the economy is in serious trouble because of the indecisiveness of a government distracted by its own internal difficulties.
I did not read that originally. I was kind. The statement continues:
The immediate economic aims of the new Government will be to stabilise prices, halt redundancies and reduce unemployment under a programme of planned economic development. It is essential to control prices if these important economic aims are to be realised. The government will, therefore, immediately introduce strict price control. As an earnest of its good faith in regard to the control of prices the Government will remove VAT from food.
The Government will regard the control of price inflation as indispensable to the continuance of the National Wage Agreements. The two Parties are convinced that voluntary wage agreements reached on a national level are the best basis for economic development, stability and growth in jobs.
As an integral part of its economic and industrial relations policy the new Government will introduce worker participation in State enterprises and the election of worker representatives to State Boards.
I was remiss in not pointing out that we have produced worker participation on boards of State companies.
Under the heading "Farmers and Fishermen" we said:
Small farmers will be helped by curbing non-farmer speculation in agricultural land, a vigorous land reclamation programme, encouragement of long-term leasing of land and low interest loans.
The long-term leasing of land is part of the policy of the Minister for Lands and a scheme in this respect has been started. We said, under the same heading, that:
The government will plan greater investment in harbours and fisheries in order that our fishermen will get the maximum advantage out of the opportunities offered in the EEC.
The amount of money being applied to these projects has increased spectacularly. Before we came to office Fianna Fáil intended abolishing various bodies in local democracies. In this regard we said in our document that:
The National Coalition Government will hold it as a priority at all times that power must be vested in the people and that local government must be made truly democratic and relevant to their needs. This is particularly necessary in the field of planning. Socially harmful property speculation and development will be ended by setting up independent machinery to deal with planning applications and appeals.
The only reason why the planning Bill has not been passed is that Fianna Fáil have obstructed it as they have obstructed every piece of legislation introduced by us so far. They have continued to talk nonsense for no reason other than to impede the Government's implementation of the 14-point programme. We continue to have a situation in which the Minister for Local Government must rule on planning appeals. He does not wish this task to be his but he must undertake it for so long as Fianna Fáil continue to hold up deliberately the machinery for changing the system.
Hear, hear.
Which is it better to be a legislator or an agitator? The entire Fianna Fáil Party have delivered themselves as a bunch of lowly political agitators and they can see no good in any word of a Bill produced by the Government. To get back to our programme on education we said:
In education genuine consultation with parents, school authorities, teachers and students will be introduced. Authority for examinations and courses will be transferred to an independent educational body. The policy of selective compulsion that has proved so disastrous for the Irish language over the last fifty years will be replaced by a genuine policy based on respect for and promotion of the Irish language and culture.
We have our parents' committees and we have scrubbed compulsory Irish but double marks are allowed for the subject in the leaving certificate. No longer will there be a pass or fail in the leaving certificate but the appropriate markings will be indicated in respect of any student sitting for the examination and on that basis he can be judged by a potential employer. We have stirred education in a way that it has never been stirred before.
On the question of the status of women we said that:
Legislation will be introduced to end all forms of discrimination against women.
How long it will take for the removal of all such discrimination is a matter that is in the lap of the gods. Last week I was given the duty of putting through the Seanad, on behalf of the Minister for Labour, the measure relating to the pay of bank officials. I found so far as bank clerks were concerned that discrimination against women will end on 31st December, 1975 and the last instalment of the differential will be paid at the end of the year. I understand that this is happening in many large and wealthy companies in the private sector although I realise there are other concerns who cannot afford to make the necessary changes. Deputy Fitzgerald referred to the footwear industry; there are many operatives who are employed in that industry who live in my constituency and I know that the industry cannot afford to take those steps. I realise that there are problems but the Government have kept faith with their promise. There are a great number of women who can now claim that discrimination is not being shown against them.
The 14-point programme also referred to the review of the television and broadcasting services. It was stated it would be speeded up and that a special examination would be made, as a matter of urgency, of such items as a second TV channel. It also referred to local radio, the provision of piped television and the relationship of the RTE Authority with the Government. Have all these things been done, or have they not?
The programme also referred to tourism and it stated that the Government would carry out a new, dynamic development programme to enable the industry to overcome its present difficulties and get back on the road to progress. There is one thing stopping us on the road to advancement in tourism and that is subversion. The other side of the House let the dog off the leash in 1970. If things were peaceful here tomorrow morning it would be years before people in Bradford, Manchester or somewhere else would decide to take their holiday in Ireland rather than in the south of France, in Devon or Cornwall. Recently I met a man who spends three days each week in Belfast and he told me that it does not worry him to go to that city and that, in any event, he has to go there on business. He told me that formerly he brought his wife and children there on occasions and that they visited various seaside places but now he does not do that because he does not have to. That is what tourism means; a person is not obliged to go to any place if he does not want to. He can stay at home or go anywhere he chooses. We are trying to get tourists to come here. The main reasons for the loss in tourism is first, that the dog was let off the leash in 1970 and, secondly, subversion which we will inexorably, perhaps slowly but deliberately, crush. That is in the mind of every member of the Government and those who support them in the division lobbies.
The 14-point programme also referred to the European Communities. It said that the National Coalition Government will pledge themselves to maximising Ireland's influence within the European Community, to democratising its institutions and to the policy that will assist Irish agriculture and our western and other neglected underdeveloped regions. We have schemes to aid the underprivileged areas, we have the farm modernisation schemes, the scheme relating to the disadvantaged areas and we have the scheme with regard to headage grants. We would be remiss if we did not note that the greatest impact ever made by any Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs was made by the present Minister Deputy FitzGerald. He worked in co-operation with every other Minister, perhaps with me in a very minor way because I do not have that much to do with matters relating to his Department. He worked with the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries and the Minister for Industry and Commerce to a greater extent. With the other Ministers he has worked for the benefit of Ireland. When one has to deal with a large institution such as the EEC in a period of a few years it is not all plain sailing and one does not score a goal every time a boot is put to the ball. However, any fair-minded person must agree that our record in relation to what we said in February, 1973, is good.
The 14-point programme also had a heading entitled "A New Beginning". The programme stated that the two parties recognised that these policy priorities constitute the basis of the legislative programme of the National Coalition Government and that the implementation of these proposals will transform Ireland into a modern, progressive society based on social justice. We have played fair on all of this.
In the last three years we have had our good times and our bad times. On many occasions farmers went to the fair and, while they might not have got the best price for their animals, at least they did the best they could. We were prepared at a time when there was a falling market to fight for the best for the people and, when things were good and the market was rising, we were prepared to take full advantage of that. Before I became Minister I remember nothing the price of ground North African phosphate which is the basis of all phosphatic fertiliser in the country and it was marked at $15 per ton but some months ago it was $79 a ton. That raised the price of the more common type of fertiliser from £30 per ton to £100 per ton. At the same time there was a disastrous drop in the price of cattle.
The current President of the IFA has been drawing conclusions on the basis of farm income in 1973 and 1975. I agree with him on this because 1974 was such a disastrous year, especially with regard to the drop in beef prices abroad, that it would be totally unfair to compare prices in 1974 with those in 1975. To do that he would be putting himself at a grave disadvantage. To show what farmers had to put up with because of the drop in prices in 1974, I quote from the report of the Development Division of the Department of Agriculture with regard to statistical indicators. It stated that with regard to seven to eight cwt. cattle, from 1973 to 1974 the price dropped 22.5 per cent. In December of that year it dropped from £16.24 a cwt. to £11.7 a cwt. The heavier cattle, those from nine to ten cwt., in 1973 to 1974 dropped by 13.5 per cent. There were drops recorded in October of 24.4 per cent and in September of 22.7 per cent. That is the kind of climate in which the Government had to operate, that is the situation in which they had to implement their 14-point programme to which I have referred. The result was that for the first time since 1953 there was a drop in agricultural prices of 3.7 per cent from October, 1973, to October, 1974.
One of the things the Irish farmer does in which he is not often wise is that he lives off his own fat. He may have lost confidence because of this international situation, which was nobody's fault, and which was aggravated by the increase in the price of animal feeding stuffs of 31.3 per cent at the time when there was the drop I have indicated in the price of cattle, in the year 1973-74. That was the most disastrous year for farming it could be possible to have within the EEC, remembering that we have not full powers as yet and will not until July 12 months. The result was that farmers did not have the sort of confidence one would expect them to have and they did not do the sowings and the ploughings, did not keep the extra heifer and the extra cow and did not make the effort that it would have been wise for them personally to make in the year 1975.
While I realise and have drawn attention to the fact at a recent agricultural meeting that the reference in Brussels a few days ago to an increase of 7½ per cent is a reference to an increase in price and not in net income, I would advise every farmer to make every effort in the spring to grow more. If one wants to go back to James Dillon one could say the farmer should have one more sow, one more cow, one more acre under the plough.
It is possible on a farm to have a greater amount of grain and to have the same number of cattle and to make a better effort. The Russians are short of grain. They have bought large quantities in the world markets. That must have an effect on the world price of grain. Therefore, I say, grow more grain this year and keep more cattle this year. I see a bad situation inasmuch as we have had as many as 400,000 to 500,000 cows slaughtered this year. I am advised that some of those cows were not milch cows, that they were cows used for single suckling and may have reached the end of their period. Also, of course, single suckling is not paying.
It would be completely wrong if the cattle population were to drop and the farmer had not the wherewithal to cash in on the situation which will develop because beef prices will remain up. With all these economic indicators set fair, there should be a big expansion in the volume of agricultural production. The farmer who increases production will do a good job for himself and for his country. It seems to have been forgotten, particularly in this House, that 1974 was a very bad farming year. The President of the IFA, Mr. Maher, is perfectly right to compare 1973 as a normal year with 1975 and to disregard 1974.
Agriculture is still the sheet anchor and it has an important part to play in the creation of employment. If agriculture is prosperous, there are more industrial goods purchased. Agricultural goods are processed by Irish labour and sold abroad. Irish agriculture employs more than any other industry. The net export of Irish agriculture per £ sterling is greater than that of any other industry. If we import raw materials to manufacture cloth or for the manufacture of industrial goods for re-export we are largely exporting the product of our people's labour. When we export a bullock, 90 per cent of the money received for that bullock represents net income for the country to be set against our balance of payments and it is money that can be spent at home in a Buy Irish campaign. This sets the cycle in motion again.
Our industrial exports were to some extent affected by the world recession. In 1972 industrial exports were 57.7 per cent of total exports; in 1973, 59 per cent; in the bad year 1974, 63 per cent and in January-June, 1975, 61.1 per cent.
Wage costs per unit of output did increase. That may be because there may be industrialists who are not modernising or it may be that workers are not producing as much as they should. In 1973 wage costs per unit of output increased by 10.9 per cent. That is bad. In 1974 wage costs per unit of output increased by 15.8 per cent. That is worse. When you compare the first half of 1975 with the first half of 1974 you get an increase of 28.2 per cent.
The answer is in the present policy of the Government. Nobody is being asked to make great sacrifices. Everybody is being asked to make haste slowly—festina lente— for a little while. If we do that, the best economic advice we have is that we will emerge from 1976 ready to meet all competition. We have, by whatever agency, certainly not the Government, created for ourselves a situation where wage costs per unit of output have been rising. If we can halt that and create the situation where we will be competitive once again at the end of 1976, then there is nothing to stop us. There is the codicil that we have got to kill this subversion as well. If we can succeed in these twin aims the Government will have done well. The Government will work hard towards the achievement of those twin aims.
The debate has taken an interesting turn in that on the Government side time has been taken up talking about irrelevant matters. Even the Taoiseach, in the absence of any record of achievement, came into the House and gave a recitation of chores which the Government are paid to carry out, things which would happen if no Government were there at all.
We are discussing this Christmas season a situation in Ireland such as was never experienced before. It is in that context that we are anxious to hear particularly from the other side of the House what under heaven are we going to do to get out of it. The Taoiseach went on television recently and left us all trembling in regard to what the future holds. He made some serious statements. He gave us a frightening figure. He pointed out that the country was in deficit to the tune of £980 million. It is in that context that we asked for an Adjournment debate, not to hear Ministers coming in here reciting things that happen in the normal life of a government, like collecting dog licences, looking after the sale of stamps in the post office. The Minister for Local Government mentioned speed limits. We are on the verge of a complete breakdown in the national economy. We have borrowed, we have taxed, we have allowed prices to run amok, we have now reached the point of no return and we are asking the workers to tighten their belts. Despite this the Minister, who has just spoken, had the audacity to say that there is prosperity around the corner.
I am not being personal when I refer to the political gyrations of the Minister for Finance. He recently promised that he would have a plan before Christmas but he did not say which Christmas. Like the Minister for Defence, he comes into the House and puts his mouth into gear before his brain is switched on. We are apt to get statements which are not founded on fact or supported by any logic that would lead us to believe them. The Minister for Defence spent the time allotted to him in the House by reading over what he called a statement of intent but which is nothing other than the famous 14-point programme introduced in February, 1973. He glossed over the two most important points in that programme. He read those points quickly but the points which were effectively telling, so far as anybody gave credence to them at the time, were the solemn pledge by the Coalition to stabilise prices, bring down the cost of living, stop redundancies, reduce unemployment and reduce the local rates.
There is not much point in referring to this complete fraud which was perpetrated on the Irish people as it does not serve much purpose now. We have mentioned it time after time. It is now water under the bridge. It has to do with the credibility of the people who made the promises and it is up to them to wriggle out of it whatever way they can.
We should be discussing the serious situation the economy is in at the present time. What has gone wrong? Where did the Coalition go wrong? Why did they not take action? Those questions are on the lips of every citizen at the present time. If I was asked to give an opinion about where they went wrong, I would say they did not go wrong because they never were right. The panic action we are now being asked to take in a time of crisis is one which could have been obviated if the correct fiscal and monetary policy was pursued in the budgets we have had since the Coalition Government came into power. I have yet to hear an economist who will deny that that is not where things went wrong. Why did the Coalition Government take the advice of the Central Bank now when they did not take it three years ago, when they got the same warning as we got before we left office?
Why is there no economic programme? Why are there no projections to guide the people and give some indication where we are going? Why did the Minister for Finance come in here a few months ago and promise there would be a plan? I spoke at a number of public meetings when I referred to the fact that those involved in the economy were like shepherds in the mist with no indication as to what government thinking was for the future, because they have no plan whatever. A few days after the Minister made the public statement that there would be a plan before Christmas he elaborated in the House, in the course of a discussion, and said that it would be different from Fianna Fáil programmes, that it would give an indication how the set target would be achieved.
The only reference to a plan by the Minister for Labour when he spoke this morning was to ridicule the plans which Fianna Fáil had in the past, the first, second and third programmes for economic expansion. He said they were of little use when they did not in many cases reach the targets set. This was a stupid statement. Everybody is agreed that any economy in any developed or developing country today must have a plan, must have projections and must have a coherent programme. They must have something to aim at if the economy is to make any progress. I do not for a moment hold myself up as an economist but I went to the trouble of looking at the opinions of others regarding this question of planning.
I want to refer particularly to an Adjournment debate in the House on the 14th December, 1972. The motion was by a leading member of the Fine Gael Party and of the Coalition Government on the question of planning. In addition to Deputy Bruton, who raised the matter on the Adjournment, Deputy FitzGerald also spoke eloquently on it. They were seriously worried that the Fianna Fáil programme was due to terminate at the end of December and they were worried why another one was not produced to replace it. They pointed to the dangers inherent in the lack of foresight by Fianna Fáil. As usual Deputy FitzGerald was eloquent in support of the need for a programme and for a plan if the economy was to be guided in any particular direction. I will not delay the House by reading the entire debate but will refer to column 1749 of the Official Report of 14th December, 1972. Deputy FitzGerald spoke in support of the various programmes about which he wrote quite a bit in the course of his career before he became involved in Fine Gael politics.
I admit, that to a large degree most of the programmes have been objective, but the most objective programme necessarily favours the Government in power when it is published...
That was the theme of his speech and the only criticism he had of our programmes at that time was that they were an advantage to the Government. Deputy Bruton and himself pointed out the seriousness of facing the New Year without the new programme having been announced. If as he agreed then, a programme and a plan were necessary and of advantage to the Government in power, what has seriously prevented the present Government from coming up with any type of programme?
In "Economic Development and Planning" there is an article by Dr. FitzGerald in praise mainly of Fianna Fáil programmes. There are articles by most of our leading economists at the time all supporting programming and planning in any economy. They rightly point out that irrespective of whether the targets are reached or not, whether what is set out in the programme is achieved within the time set out, it is still of great importance in that it guides the entire economy in the direction the Government want to go. Targets may not be reached or may be surpassed but the important thing is that everybody, particularly potential investors and those who have invested, should know what the Government projections are and the direction in which to go so that all involved in promoting industrial expansion can plan and work accordingly.
It is particularly important to those whose duty it is to safeguard the integrity of our currency and in that respect I quote from what the Central Bank said in their report covering 1974. On page 10 they said:
It is appropriate that credit policy, being part of general economic policy, should be aligned with the basic economic objectives of the Government.
That is an important statement and they are being very kind. What they are saying is that it is disastrous when the Government operate a policy which is diametrically opposed to what the Central Bank knows is the correct one. It is a most significant statement and its relevance and truth are very apparent to the people tonight.
The Central Bank have only a limited capacity to safeguard the integrity of our currency in the sense of maintaining domestic purchasing power as distinct from its exchange value in relation to sterling. I quote again, from page 8:
Some hold the belief, which tends to paralyse action, that the Irish rate of inflation is automatically determined by external factors because of our open economy and the fixed parity relationship of the Irish pound to the pound sterling.
Whether our Government held that belief or not action was paralysed. Would any speaker on the Government side during this debate tell the people why the action that has become necessary now as a panic measure was not taken two-and-a-half years ago when the dangers of inflation and the action necessary to curb it were as well known as now? Were they content with the appearance of doing things in the belief that the marriage in the National Coalition would not last as long as it did? Why were day-to-day measures taken which actually fuelled the flames of inflation? One of the 14 points that the Minister read for us just now deals specifically with prices and to deal with prices would get to the root of the entire problem because removing the cause of price increases would really be dealing with inflation in the way that some attempt is now being made to deal with it.
What effort was made? First, the same machinery that we had was relied on in spite of the fact that a prior announcement was made that some drastic action would be taken. Many items were released from the control of the National Prices Commission. Then the Government themselves got in on the act and, as employers, they contributed to price increases directly on at least five different occasions, not to mention the serious effect of their tax impositions which could only have disastrous effects on the inflationary spiral at the time. Then we found it necessary to borrow money wherever we could and shovel it into the furnace that was consuming the base of our economy and the potential and capacity from which we should now be rebuilding and taking advantage of the fact that import prices are falling and the devaluation of the Irish £ abroad should give us an advantage in selling abroad.
We have so eroded our competitiveness in the foreign market that even with reduced import prices and the advantage of a devalued Irish £ production is going down. For the first time in the economic history of this or, perhaps, any economy, a reduction in imports is a sign of decay and a stagnant economy rather than the usual good omen it would be at a time like this. It is only an indication that we have been living out of the larder. We have gone farther. We have now eaten the seed that should be germinating to enable us take advantage of conditions of which other countries are taking advantage to restock.
That is the position we have reached and in that serious situation the Leader of the Government goes on television to tell us that the only thing we can do, apart from praying, is to tighten our belts and make no demands for increases. We have been informed, by innuendo at least this evening, that we will have other legislation which will impose restrictions on increases in different sectors of the economy but there is no suggestion that we will have any plan to guide either the people who are in charge of our credit policy, if there is one, or those who might be thinking of investing in the economy here at some stages. They are left wondering what might happen from one day to another.
The basis of any economy and particularly ours for any expansion and any movement towards full employment must be manufacturing industry. The number of people employed in manufacturing industry here is relatively small but it is the one sector on which we must rely for any reduction in unemployment figures. It is estimated that 19 per cent of those at work are in manufacturing industry and I think that includes the processing industry. It is estimated that 18,000 of those have lost their jobs in recent times. Those are factual figures and this is what we have to cope with. That industry has been established on a sound basis and it has a market of 220 million people to which to export. Although our industrial base was only established in recent years it was well established but it has been clubbed into insensibility on a few occasions in the last two-and-a-half years. If we are concerned about expansion and the provision of opportunities for our young people, apart from the 110,000 who are unemployed, we must pay serious attention to the economic base from which we must expand. The services industry is a spin-off from manufacturing industry and it is estimated that every job created in manufacturing makes for another job in the services industry.
What have we done with regard to manufacturing industry? At a time when it needed to be underpinned we took every action to ensure that it was undermined. We raised our costs at every opportunity. We raised ESB charges, postal charges, rates on properties. We created new taxes. We raised the wages of employees which drove them out of employment and brought many firms to liquidation or at least caused them to have liquidity problems which they may not overcome. Whether we have speed limits or not is not terribly relevant if we are to go to the wall due to downright and culpable negligence.
There have been 18,000 people put out of productive employment in manufacturing industry. It is reliably estimated by economists that to provide 20,000 extra jobs per annum requires an investment per annum of £400 million. We were told today that the work force is increasing by about 30,000 per year. We have 110,000 unemployed and an unknown number of school leavers. The Minister recently told us it is much easier now to get one's leaving certificate but after they get the leaving certificate people can get nothing but the boat and there is no work abroad for them either. Where are we to get £400 million to invest in the expansion of the economy at a time when the existing industries cannot find enough money to keep going? How are we to create 20,000 new jobs per year when we are borrowing to pay for shortfalls in estimates in relation to every Department of State? The money we should have available to us to take advantage of the improved situation in the other European countries is being absorbed in the servicing of debts, the repayment and servicing of the most extravagant borrowing that any country has ever indulged in in the history of democracy.
That is the situation in which we find ourselves and about which we will hear nothing from the other side of the House. Where do we go from here? Those other countries that took the necessary action to curb inflation and hold it to the minimum are now in a position to move ahead and while they are so doing we will be lagging behind with a permanent scar as a result of our lack of action or of the wrong action we have been taking all along.
I do not know what the Minister for Industry and Commerce will have to say with regard to the crisis in which we find ourselves when he comes to speak. Probably he will do as other Ministers have done, refer to all the things his Department have been doing during the year. In other words, they were moving; they were not dead and things happened. We have been getting a recitation of this from everybody who comes in here to speak from the other side of the House.
We have been hearing a lot about the "Buy Irish" campaign. The last speaker faithfully made reference to it on a number of occasions. How we can justify asking our people to buy Irish when we buy our boats from Japan is beyond me. There is no excuse that anybody can make in this House that will justify that action at a time when the economy, metaphorically, is on its knees, with our people wondering where we will turn to get out of the recession into which we have been plunged up to the neck. That is only one of a number of instances that have been covered by other speakers here. How can we expect people to go out and buy Irish-made Christmas cards when £500,000 worth of steel for which a Dublin firm have tendered for NET in Cork is handed over to a foreign firm at no more a competitive price, with the displacement of a number of young men working in a factory in this city? How can a Government justify those things if there is something slipping unknown to them? At least it is an indication that they are not seriously bending themselves to the gigantic task inevitably facing them and everybody in the country in the crisis we are now experiencing.
We on this side of the House cannot be blamed for not making known, on every possible occasion, what was likely to happen. The last speaker referred to us as a lot of agitators instead of legislators. There is not much more we can do other than agitate. When we see about to happen what we know will cripple the country in the years ahead, the least we can do is agitate. But an obstinate Government, without a plan, programme or policy, will go merrily along, let things happen and borrow when it is not possible to get the money by any other means, with no regard for the base from which our prosperity must spring the base from which our expansion must be derived, the launching pad from which we take advantage of the improved conditions in the world. We find ourselves now literally mortgaging the future for many years during which we shall be struggling when other countries have regained their feet, have got back on the road to prosperity and overcome the effects of what was referred to as a recession. Every country must deal with inflation in its own way. We were sick and tired listening to the Government telling us that this was due to factors beyond our control. That cliché became sickening. The Central Bank, in the most diplomatic language they could use, frequently harped on the fact that the main factor of inflation was domestically produced, that we were contributing to it here more than could any import prices through culpable negligence in one way, by deliberately creating taxes in another, allowing prices to get out of hand and not having proper control over wage demands and incomes policies.
At present—and everybody in this country knows it to be a fact—certain commodities do not come under the control of the National Prices Commission. When one goes into a store to purchase something it is almost a question of thinking of a number. When one sees an article displayed which one thinks might cost £1, frequently one finds that it costs £5. No attempt is being made to have any price control, nor is there any attempt being made to have an incomes policy. There is no economic planning, no direction as to how we are to progress in the future and no guidance for those who should be investing. Without investment no country can have expansion. It is fine to get up and talk for an hour about social welfare, the amount each individual can get and the attendant conditions. What about the source from which the money must emanate that will be redistributed to our people who, through no fault of theirs, cannot find employment? Are they of no consequence? Was not private enterprise and the enterpreneur-type of individual almost ridiculed in this House when the Government took office? We were being told then how we could not quickly enough get at the abundance of wealth that had to be redistributed.
Fianna Fáil were accused of not taking sufficient and proper action to ensure that the affluent society, as it was being named, would not be made immediately pay everything that could be taken from them with no regard as to how they would recoup themselves and continue to produce wealth for the country. No socialist, no economist, no Government, or member of it, has yet found means of distributing wealth without first creating the means of producing it. Having created the base from which wealth will spring, that base must be carefully nurtured. In a recession it must not be undermined, it must be underpinned and obstacles must not be put in the way to prevent the continuing generation of wealth.
That is where this Government have failed hopelessly and why they are in their present serious position. Perhaps some of them have a vested interest in ensuring that there is an economic crisis. It is well known that socialists have learned that revolution springs from economic crisis. Certainly, the climate has been created for that sort of thing at present. I do not know if our people are fully conscious of the serious position in which we find ourselves. Ministers have come in here one by one and, instead of re-echoing what the Taoiseach said the other evening—and I take it what he said was correct—confirming the warning he issued, they have continued, like the last speaker, to give the impression that everything was all right, that prosperity was just around the corner and there was nothing to worry about. The last speaker said the Government had a tremendous record. Why did the Government not take action at the right time? Why did they not produce a plan? They were very interested in plans before they came into power. In their 14-point programme they said expansion would take place and unemployment would be reduced in a planned economy. These 14 points were just political cosmetics designed only to catch votes.
I am responsible for the preparation and co-ordination of Fianna Fáil policy and planning—I would not attempt to say for its production—but I have learned sufficient in the course of the preparation of that policy to know there are two ways of producing a policy. One is to sit down for ten minutes and write out a list of pious aspirations and the other is to have recourse to the resources available and to the capacity of our people and, on those, to base a possible forecast as to what the future is likely to be in the international field, taking all the relevant factors into consideration and aiming at a policy which will provide a higher standard of living for a growing population. That policy cannot be produced in a night. Policy must be carefully considered. Policy is nothing like the 14-point programme of February, 1973, when everybody knew inflation had the world in its grip. Prices were rising but, remember, in February, 1973, we were holding inflation to a modest 3 per cent per annum. The parties opposite came together in coalition and inside half an hour produced their 14-point programme in which they undertook to reduce prices, stabilise the economy, increase employment and thereby reduce redundancy. They knew perfectly well they could not do these things. Neither had they any intention of doing them.
Now they come in here and present themselves as a credible Government. The Taoiseach announced a national deficit running at £980 million. Things could not have been much worse in the last two-and-a-half years had there been no government at all. Things would have been better had the Government listened to the expert advice available to them. The Central Bank reports used the most diplomatic language possible and, in that language, pointed out the blunders that were made. Couched in ordinary language, the Central Bank report asked: Why the hell did the Government not act before the national wage agreement was negotiated? Why did they not put their cards on the table and have an agreement of the kind that would take the measures being attempted now instead of locking the stable door when the horse had bolted?
These are the things we want explained instead of the irrelevancies to which we have been listening from Ministers up to now. We have had a recitation of what has happened in the last two-and-a-half years. Tell us first of all why action was not taken when it should have been taken before we reached a crisis. Why were prices and wages deliberately allowed to increase when the opposite should have been happening to save the economy, protect jobs and create the basis on which we could now be preparing to move ahead? That is what we want explained.
We also want to know what action will be taken now. Will there be a plan? Will credit policy be such as to give an impetus to productive development, with no barriers in the way of those who generate wealth so that they will be able to compete in foreign markets at a time when import prices are no longer rising and the Irish £ should put our exports in a favourable position on foreign markets? We do not seem to be in a position to take advantage of these things. I doubt if we have ever had a greater demonstration of incompetence and inability. The Government are compounded of elements which will not mix. The ingredients which would engender agreement are missing. They continue hoping, Micawber-like, that something will turn up to prevent the worst happening, that the Government £ will not bounce and that, in the last analysis, is the outcome of a serious situation of the type we are in now. In January we will be faced with a budget which will impose increased taxation on the old reliables. We have been told that there is already a curb on the drawing from bond of cigarettes, tobacco and spirits. In other words, it is known what items are to be taxed further in six week's time. These old reliables must be reaching the stage of diminishing returns. They could not produce sufficient revenue to balance the country's housekeeping account for the year ahead. No doubt many other items will be taxed further also and there will be serious curtailment of some of the most important programmes. This was obvious from what was said by the last speaker in relation to building when he said that we shall have to wait and see what the coming year will bring in this regard.
From where will the money come for productive development or for the creation of the incentive necessary to enable the cattle stocks, which have declined seriously in recent times, to be built up again? What money will we have to ensure that industrialists will expand their plants and that new industries will be established? Where will we find the money for the creation of the necessary protection of those on whom we depend for the expansion of our economy in the years ahead? When the slate has been cleared in those other countries that have looked after their domestic housekeeping properly by keeping their inflationary spirals to a minimum, we will be left with a permanent scar. These are the questions which need answering during this debate.
The reports I have quoted from all indicate that the Government are negligent in their duty and have taken the wrong course. Such reports as that produced by the OECD are based on calculations made by people who have the necessary expertise for the proper examination of the economic system of this or any other country but that was not needed to let us know the situation we are in. During the debate on the first budget introduced by the National Coalition I said that a budget of that type at a time when the inflationary spiral was getting out of hand was wrong. I predicted that if that type of policy were pursued, under the guise of an expansionary policy, it would lead ultimately to further unemployment and eventually to a crisis stage which would necessitate real action having to be taken. In the sixties we had an inflation rate of 3 per cent. We all know that a certain amount of inflation can be good and can result in putting money into the hands of people who otherwise would not have money, that it creates a circulation of money and stimulates purchasing power. It can help a developing country but when it gets out of control and reaches a stage where it endangers employment and the possibility of expansion, it is very serious. For so long as the Government continue to take so much money from the people they must bear the responsibility of manipulating the economy.
Whether it came from Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or anywhere else we have had too much of the attitude of taking credit for what is good but denying responsibility for what is bad. The electorate are sufficiently intelligent to know when politics are being played. I would say to those who would like to see democracy destroyed and find revolution in an economic crisis that they will be disappointed because democracy is sound and the people are the last court.
I have listened to part of Deputy Lynch's speech, the thesis of which was to the effect that the present situation is totally the fault of this Government. Having listened, too, to Deputy Brennan, I ask myself whether it could have been possible that these two gentlemen were in the recent past office holders in government, especially when one has regard to their approach to the substance of this debate which deals primarily with matters economic.
Maybe that is the reason why they are in opposition. Deputy Lynch devoted a good deal of his speech to referring to the OECD economic survery of November, 1975 and Deputy Brennan has admitted that he is the co-relater of such policy or programmes as Fianna Fáil may have and he hardly referred at all to this document. His contribution was made, one would imagine, without any knowledge of what appeared in that report.
If we are going to pass judgment or make a contribution in this debate, a little constructive thinking is necessary. If the present circumstances are the fault of Government policy one would imagine that in between all the verbiage and the hours of speech-making of the Opposition some small, constructive contribution or an alternative suggestion would be made. We have had nothing of that nature from the Opposition so far.
It would be well to remind the Deputies on the Opposition benches that the Government came to power shortly after our accession to the EEC. It is right to say that it was freely admitted by members of Fianna Fáil that they were somewhat unprepared for the advent of EEC. They were responsible for the public service and it was very apparent at the time of our accession to government that very little preparation had been made to prepare the public service for our entry into the EEC.
One cannot consider the present circumstances without taking an overall view of what occurred both prior to and since the Government took up office. One must have regard to the general nature of our economy, the way we produce our goods, the way we export them and the reasons for our imports. I have not heard any reference made to the fact that we are primarily an agricultural exporting country and that basically our imports are of some raw materials but that there is a large percentage of what might be called finished products. It seems to have been lost sight of that virtually a price boom increase in import costs of commodity products hit this country in 1973. We are a country that is highly dependent on external trade, both exports and imports, and if there is an adverse swing in world commodity prices a small country like Ireland will be hit much harder than our fellow members in the EEC. This has become very apparent in view of the recent international trade recession. It has gravely affected Irish exports but I will deal with that and other aspects later in my contribution.
Deputy Brennan made the point that during 1975 there was a moderation in world commodity prices but he did not refer to the situation concerning oil. It has been said in some quarters that there is now on average approximately a 30 per cent lower price in world commodity markets than there was in 1974. However, that is not the full story. Just because commodity prices may decrease in part, that does not necessarily translate itself into the price of the finished product we import. There is some time before these matters take effect.
In 1974 there was a relatively poor market for Irish agricultural products, both from the point of view of price and of market. Basically we were relying on intervention and it is part of the past history of economic thinking here where there was no forward thinking in the marketing of Irish products. This combination of factors —I have only mentioned a few—has had very serious repercussions on our internal price levels. If commodity prices go up it is bound to give rise to a demand for increased wages to allow people to pay for the goods they previously bought so that they can maintain their standard of living. It is a natural reaction by the working and salaried population.
It is said quite freely that our inflation rate is possibly in danger of getting out of step with the European inflation rates. For myself I do not think this is a fair or full judgment of the situation because one must look at the economic relativity of Ireland vis-á-vis our EEC partners. We were not in the EEC prior to 1973. All of us are aware that when we entered the Community prices rose considerably and very fast and that our prices, which previously had been protected behind tariff barriers, had to equate themselves with already existing European prices. If one talks about inflation during the years one must be careful about passing judgment on the real inflation in Irish terms because there was a large element of compensating for a different situation that existed prior to 1973.
There was certainly nothing to be read or heard from Government Ministers in 1972 about preparing ourselves for entry into the EEC. If the Government of the day cannot give the lead it is natural enough that the rest of society will be caught out or will not be prepared for what is coming. There was no excuse for the Government of that day not to warn the public about what they had to face. At that time there was a complete failure to warn the industrial sector of the importance of costings. There was a failure to provide for updating and modernisation, a failure to prepare for European marketing. What we are suffering from now is largely the fruit of those sins of omission by the Government in 1972.
Of course, it is natural enough that the Government in 1972 may not have been able to deal with national problems, not to talk about external problems. They seemed to be primarily oriented to dealing with their own domestic problems in their party and this was freely recognised by the public, as was proved by the results in the last general election. It is interesting to note that the trend of voting to support the present Government in their work has been one of approbation, if one is to judge by the votes in the by-elections that have occurred since February, 1973.
I should like to remind the spokesmen, particularly on labour and industry, on the Opposition benches that at the time of the EEC referendum it was freely said off platforms that there was a likelihood of 20 to 25 per cent of Irish businesses going to the wall under EEC conditions because they would not be able to compete, that they would not be able to stand up in an area of free trade and competition. Those statements have in part proved right though one must admire the resilience of Irish business and Irish labour to stand up to the difficulties that we experienced when we went into the EEC and it was only virtually since the oil crisis that the real damage started.
It is interesting to note that there are certain business or parts of the Irish industrial structure that have suffered more than others. I believe that the difficulties being postponed can be related to the traditional conservatism of Irish business and the way they had of husbanding their resources. This traditional conservatism probably helped initially and had the effect of retaining unused resources and these unused resources have since been applied to keep continuity in business. Probably not wise economic decisions; they carried on as they were before without making the necessary adjustments to face foreign competition.
It is interesting to note, if I am correct in this approach, that production and employment have been specially affected in the older industries such as textiles, clothing, footwear and furniture and that the more modern industries, for instance, chemicals, have fared far better. Indeed, employment in the chemical industry increased in 1974, contrary to the trend in other businesses.
I believe that in the past and even into the present we were possibly not paying sufficient attention to industries that can be linked to agricultural production. The by-products of agriculture hold for this country the best prospect for the future. We have seen that despite difficult economic circumstances the agricultural sector appears to have stood up to the storm of international recession far better than other sectors of production. If we could create more industry allied to the raw materials from agricultural production we would have a very good future. In that development lies the best prospect of dealing with the increased number of persons who will be available for employment in future years.
There is a tremendous multiplier effect of channelling resources in that direction. It would give greatly increased employment; it would certainly assist our balance of payments; it would certainly improve export figures and it would have a continuity that other forms of production do not always have in periods of recession. Because people must eat, there will always be a demand for food. Europe is fast creating a situation where all the countries will have to look carefully at their ability to provide food for their own people.
Might I in passing refer to a matter I have already referred to in this House? It is a matter of pride that in the fish processing industry we are actually exporting a product to Norway and the product that we export to Norway is better than the Norwegians, with all their modern technology, can produce from their own fish. It is a small industry that is doing it but there is, I understand, more or less unlimited demand for this product. Furthermore, the product we are exporting is not a fully-finished product. The processing goes only part of the way to the ultimate finished product. Even at that level we are well ahead of anything that any other fishing nation can produce. This is proved by the fact that Norway will take all that we can produce of that type of material.
It is regrettable that for far too long we have been satisfied to export unprocessed agricultural and fishery products and have allowed other countries to reap the full benefit and profit of the great employment potential plus the finished product price which is greatly in excess of the price the raw material will fetch. I believe we can produce the finished product and that we should channel our resources and any available capital in that direction.
Times change very quickly and there have been very rapid changes in all spheres of Government activity and Government Departments in the last two years. If we are to get the best results from our nation's potential in productivity and native raw materials and so on we must have a careful look at the education of those people who are going into industry. We will have to reassess our educational and training priorities. We have, through AnCO, made very positive steps in that direction. It is interesting to note that the OECD Economic Survey of November, 1975, at page 30, says:
Manpower training has expanded rapidly in recent years and it is considered desirable that this momentum be sustained.
As Deputy Brennan said, experts have made out that report. They have the ability to compare the Irish circumstances with the circumstances of other countries of the OECD. If they make a statement like that there must be something behind it. It shows that the Government have not been lacking in their endeavours in that direction.
There may have been an undue emphasis on the study of Arts by school leavers. Constituents and parents have said to me that they realise that sometimes they have made a mistake in regard to the lines of higher education to which they have directed their children. They come back to the obvious remark: "What did we know about it?" That is fair enough because a lot of parents have children with higher and better education than they got in their time.
I mentioned that there were rapid price adjustments made in 1973 to allow for parity with EEC prices. This had the effect of driving up wage demands. It is well to note that the average earnings in industry rose by 19 per cent in 1974 and also that the production from industry did not rise by that amount. Naturally, as inflation had an effect on prices, when allowed with what I have already said concerning adjustment in prices, there was a slightly vicious circle which contributed to the inflationary price push. This, unfortunately, has had the effect of eroding our competitive margins and has left us with less room for manoeuvre.
It is stated that the volume of consumer spending decreased in 1975 but the actual quantity of cash value does not appear to have done so. A lot of the retailers in family business are not complaining despite the recession effects on people out of industry because we have underpinned the situation by a proper social welfare policy. After all, when one is talking about economics and prices one is also talking about human beings. Economics exist for the benefit of human beings. There is not much use in having a wealthy country if large sectors of the people go in want and do not get the necessities of life. There is certainly a very strong plank for the Government to see that government is for all the people and not for any particular sector.
As a result of recession there is possibly a fairly substantial unused capacity in industry. People point to this as one of the reasons for a lack of investment or a fall in investment. I have not seen anybody carry out any exercise to define the particular area of investment. When I first came into this House a tremendous amount of money was made available for speculative property investment. This was not investment which was for the good of the nation. Investment, which was required and should have been provided in 1972 and prior to that to lay down the infrastructure for the EEC and our entry into that Community, was not channelled into productive spheres, to machinery, factories and know-how. That was apparently a little page that was omitted from the Fianna Fáil programme. We are now paying for that.
One must remember that 1972 was a boom year. It was a good year for business in every part of the world but we failed to take advantage of it due to the inner difficulties of the Fianna Fáil Party. Every Tom, Dick and Harry was jumping on the speculative bandwagon of property buying and selling in 1972. There was not a bank manager in the country who was not belaboured for money for speculative purposes. That type of speculation and investment was no use to the nation and it is well it has disappeared. It was self-defeating. It denied the use of available resources for banks because it was already tied up with these developments. I have heard whispers that certain financial institutions found themselves in serious difficulties as a result of the amount of money they handed out to these speculators. I believe a lot of these financial institutions have now managed partly to rectify their difficulties.
That type of situation is not of any assistance to the economy. Farmers were refused money whilst property developers got it in any quantity they required. The well is not bottomless. Every nation has only a certain amount of cash resources. The money was being buried in this. Some attacks have been made on the taxation policy of the Government but when the profits were made by those speculators that money was not put back into Ireland. It went outside the country. One would think that some of the Fianna Fáil spokesmen were like ostriches who have just taken their heads out of the sand after two-and-a-half years because they do not seem to be aware of the cold and difficult air currents that have blown across the economic spectrum of the world.
There is another facet of membership of the EEC. There is bound to be a large proportion of novel products coming into the country from the EEC. There is always a certain initial novelty attraction and people out of curiosity will buy products they have not seen before. All one has to do is to go into a fashionable ladies boutique and see the names on the garments. When they are shown to women one finds they will opt for some French or Italian name rather than an Irish one. This has a certain false attractiveness. That sort of thing is likely to subside in time because there are many Irish products which are equally good and up to any standard that a continental house can produce.
Deputy Brennan waxed very eloquent that we were supposed to have known all this two-and-a-half years ago, that the signs were there. Did he ever bother to read the pronouncements of the Taoiseach since he came into office? Perhaps Deputy Brennan was out of the country when they were delivered or perhaps the think-tank of the Fianna Fáil Party does not allow the reading of such things. There has been repeated and ample warning given by the Taoiseach in respect of the dangers and difficulties the economy must face up to. The Government are being very careful. In every economic decision they have made they have consulted the parties who are involved in the productive process, the agricultural industry and the unions. Every sector has been consulted. Anybody who reads the reports of the Prices Commission will see that there has been very careful consultation with the interested parties. One would think, listening to the speeches across the House, that the Government were bone headed and just charged ahead in isolation without regard to advice or consultation with the interested sectors of our economy.
I will deal with a matter to which Deputy Brennan referred but he twisted it and tried to use it to show that the fact that we had a depreciated currency should assist us in the export market. I do not know what think-tank he consulted when he compounded that canard. If your currency is depreciating, the price of raw material goes up; your costs go up: and to say that a depreciating currency will assist your exports is to consider only a very small part of the picture. You must first get your raw materials and manufacture them before you get to the stage of export. Deputy Brennan also seemed to forget that export prices for agricultural products moved against Irish interests. That is one of the reasons why we have the adjustments in the green £—to make some compensation in that regard. These matters are glibly ignored by the Opposition. They wail away about their troubles and when they cannot understand them they say: "It must be the fault of the Government."
I notice from reading newspapers circulating outside Dublin that obviously a speech sheet has been handed out to Fianna Fáil Deputies to spread the gospel—repeat it and hand it in to the Press; get the message across as often as you can; if you say it often enough somebody is bound to believe it. One of the great things at the moment is the analysis of the unemployment situation—we are running the country into bankruptcy; unemployment is rising and it is the fault of the Government alone. Many people like to say that the rate of unemployment here is the highest in the EEC. Let us return to relative comparisons and let us go back over the year. Taking certain figures issued recently— I do not have to give them; they are printed and available—one would think that we had the worst record of unemployment in the last two years in the EEC. In actual fact, we came out second best; the only country that did better in the unemployment situation as between 1974 and 1975 was Holland. We were better than Germany; our percentage increase was less than that in Germany, far less than England's and far less than in all the other EEC partners. The only country to do better than we did in containing the unemployment surge rampant in Europe was Holland.
At this stage in our history we are not indulging in the export of human beings at the rate, approximately, of 30,000 per year which is more or less the steady figure that prevailed under Fianna Fáil Governments. When talking of the rate of unemployment one must look at what was the pre-existing unemployment situation. Take 30,000 off the present figures and you are around the average Fianna Fáil figure over the years. That takes in good years, much better years than we have this year when there was international depression, no industrial unemployment, no failure of markets and no oil crisis. These were also years when a great number of people were not deemed eligible for the unemployment register under Fianna Fáil. The categories of those who qualified have been increased.
There has been references to the effect of the budget but it is well to remember that if it were not for the June budget and the adjustments then made to ease the situation, unemployment would have been higher by 15,000 to 20,000. That is no mean achievement for a government plus being able to reduce inflation and actually increase exports over the import figure for the first time since 1945. That has been done in a bad and difficult year as anybody, no matter what his political prejudice may be, must admit. There are records that Opposition spokesmen might well bear in mind when rushing into criticism. I know they must do their job and throw as much flak as possible but if they come in to knock something what will they put in its place? It is no use being completely destructive. Also, the present Government are carrying a security Bill of £120 million per annum to keep law and order. Fianna Fáil never had that bill to meet. We hear glib spokesmen opposite criticising; let us hear what they can say constructively. Then we can have some sort of debate if they are not a bunch of Annie Oakleys seeing who can knock harder than anybody else.
We are, relatively speaking, in the EEC context a poor and only marginally developed country, partly due to our history and partly to economic circumstances and, perhaps, partly to political circumstances internal and external. It seems to me that there is a slight failure on the part of EEC thinkers to realise how necessary the regional development programme is for Ireland and a failure by them properly to appreciate this fact means that Ireland has to borrow to make up the deficiency. It is not of her own making; it is an international situation that has given rise to this necessity and the failure of the EEC properly to appreciate what a regional fund is for, how it should be utilised, where it should be allocated and in what circumstances. We now seem to be fast approaching a situation where money made available from the EEC will be lent and that the grants and subventions are disappearing. This seems to be in complete contradiction of the principles of the EEC and will have serious repercussions on the weaker nations. If a person is prepared to sign on the dotted line as we were, I do not think that is the proper way to deal with weaker nations because they will always have this difficulty in regard to our situation in hard times.
What I am saying is that there is only a certain amount of work that any Irish Government can do to assist this country in hard times. It is fairly clearly stated by implication in this OECD economic survey report on page 28 under the heading: Outlook in 1976:
Developments in the economy in 1976 seem likely to depend to a considerable extent on the strength of external demand.
In other words, they are excluding much assistance by the EEC in our predicament as one of the poor relations. This has also given rise to considerable difficulties. We are a country that is struggling to provide as much employment as possible. We will not have the resources to control inflation to the same extent. We must bear in mind the fact that we have been linked to the pound sterling and a large part of our export market is in England. If England takes off at a high rate of inflation and her inflation rate is higher than ours by at least two points we are bound to be affected. We are bound to suffer. This, in fact, has happened. Our link with sterling and close ties with the British market, both export and import, has not been a help and this has partly contributed to increased wage demands and increased commodity prices. Admittedly, we were able to do something in this regard in the June budget. That budget has also given us some time to stop and think and look at our national housekeeping and the present difficult circumstances and it has brought home to many people, who did not appreciate it previously, that circumstances are difficult and that people will have to contain their demands and take a more realistic attitude to price increases.
We are faced with another difficulty and it is that the recent curbs introduced in England are likely to adversely affect Irish exports to England. In other words, we are getting the worst of the English situation both ways. The weakness of the British economy and, in particular, its exceptional rate of inflation has reacted on the Irish economy with special gravity. The counter inflation programme being implemented by the British Government, if successful, will probably mean that money incomes in Britain will rise considerably more slowly than their prices over the coming year. It is calculated that this will be approximately half the inflation rate. It will mean that consumption and investment in Britain are likely to be affected adversely as a result. This will mean that the British steps taken to improve their situation will bite deeply into our export market there and will very adversely affect us in the short term but in the long term, if their measures are successful, it will be to our benefit. We had to suffer enough from British inflation and its effects on our economy.
Deputy Brennan said that the Government were contributing to inflation and he referred to prices. We reduced the price of food by taking off VAT in June. He said we increased taxes. We have not, so far as essentials are concerned. The wages have been a reflection of increased prices, basically 90 per cent of which, up to a year ago, were reflected by world prices.
People may talk about taxes as being an inhibiting factor to production in the welfare society. I am told it is not popular politically to refer to strikes but I have no inhibition about referring to them and about condemning out of hand unofficial strikes. I would like to see the Irish Congress of Trade Unions taking stronger and more severe steps with members that are affiliated to them who go on unofficial strikes. It is well to remember that there is a thing called sanctity of contract and if you agree to something you try to hold to your bargain and honour it. That does not permit people without any reason or without fair cause or fair notice to withdraw labour and cause unemployment in other sectors of society. It is a selfish attitude. It does nobody any good and it has the effect of imposing an increased tax on the business or enterprise in which the strike takes place. I am not against the right to strike but I am against unofficial strikes, particularly where there is immunity under the Trade Disputes Act for people who strike. It would be well for certain people not to abuse this democratic right that they have. It is an exceptional right, an exceptional privilege, and should not be abused. I am afraid it has been abused all too often in recent times and the figures, when one compares unofficial with official strikes, show an unduly high proportion of unofficial strikes. This means that there is some control going wrong in the trade union world that needs careful looking at. A small country like ours cannot afford the luxury of strikes. When we compare our strike record with that of Japan or Germany it makes very poor reading.
I should like now to refer to the financial facilities for the farming community. I believe the banking fraternity and the financial fraternity are not giving a fair and proper service to the agricultural community. There is no regard to the particular situation existing in agriculture be it today, tomorrow or yesterday. When a farmer borrows he is not able to repay with the same facility as a business. His turnover is far more restricted and usually money being borrowed for agriculture has so many legal strings and expenses attached to it that to borrow money for agricultural enterprise is a great deal more expensive than to borrow money for industry. We are an agricultural country and I would appeal to the banking world to have a more realistic attitude to the lending of money to the Irish farmer. Basically, the Irish farmer is a conservative financial animal. He is prepared to take a far smaller profit than his compatriot in industry or in the labour market. This should be realised and appreciated by the banking fraternity. I see very little evidence that it is at present. There is no comparison between what the average Irish bank offers to the Irish farmer and the facilities offered by the financial institutions on the Continent. Provision of finance for agriculture should be a matter that is possible to arrange in the private sector by private clients going to their bank manager and getting fair treatment.
The land of Ireland is ample security. It will never lose its value. But one would think that in obtaining money of any substance from Irish banks—I am talking about the amount being borrowed—there is frightful difficulty. One cannot progress unless one has the necessary finance to expand and it is badly needed in Irish agriculture. We have plenty of evidence of what the Irish farmer can do for the nation when we are under pressure. This last year has provided ample evidence that, despite their phenomenally increased costings, they stood by the nation, increased their productivity and exports and provided the necessary moneys to give us a favourable balance of trade. It is not right that other sectors of the economy can sit back and criticise. It is time the banking fraternity realised that Irish agriculture has been under considerable pressure in the last few years, due to costings, and that a more reasonable approach should be adopted.
I do not have very much more to say except that if there is any change in taxation law, one should bear in mind the sad mistake made by the Fianna Fáil Minister for Finance in 1952 when he miscalculated the elasticity of demand in applying the tax.
In speaking on this very important debate I should like to point out, first of all, that this is a period of stocktaking. We had some contributions from Government backbenchers as to what we should do. Surely this is a period in which we should assess the progress the Government have made. In that regard, in the industrial field, the Government are guilty of national sabotage. In relation to prices they have been guilty of deliberately misleading our people.
I want to deal with the question of prices first. I am concerned about the Dublin housewife and, indeed, with every housewife in the country. There was no mention of the housewife by any Government spokesman. Probably they do not feel she is worthy of mention. I took time off today to go into a supermarket to examine the situation in relation to the housewife's problems, how she is faced with ever-growing demands for more cash at the counter. I found that five pounds of potatoes cost 35p, which is the equivalent of £156.80 per ton. That is what the Dublin housewife pays for potatoes. Surely there is something wrong here. I found that turnips cost 3½p per 1b, cabbage 12p per head, lettuce 11p per head, cauliflower 23p a head and steak 70p to 90p per 1b. I often wondered why potatoes had different names. The ones I saw today were called Golden Wonders. Now I know why they are so called. The humble spud will certainly be a luxury in a short space of time if these price increases continue.
In the 14-point plan of the Government about which we have heard so much we were promised that every effort would be made to ensure that prices were maintained at a reasonable level. Nobody can say that farm produce produced at home is at a reasonable level. The Government have failed miserably in their responsibility to the families of this nation on that, their first promise. There has been no price stability over the last three years almost since they assumed office. Then we were told they have honoured their 14-point plan. I would ask any reasonable Minister to tell me that they have maintained the prices structure over the last three years. No such effort has been made and the housewives of this country suffer day after day from the ever-increasing spiral in the price of foodstuffs. One could understand increases in imported materials to a substantial degree. But, when it comes to farm produce—when I am positive the farmer is not getting a fair return for his money and the housewife is being bled white—the middlemen who sit in offices up to their knees in carpets milking this country dry are profiting while the Government sit idly by. It is about time the Government woke up and endeavoured to honour their promises in relation to the commodities basic to the table of the average family. Perhaps Ministers are too far removed from our people. Perhaps their concern is not for the housewives of this city. Perhaps it is because of their ability to pay they do not feel the draught felt by many families at present. Remember that was one of the points contained in that 14-point plan they produced prior to the last general election and on which they grossly misled the nation. Many housewives fell for that plan because they believed they were honest men who would implement their promises of price restrictions and the maintenance of price stability. In this single instance we can see how they have misled our people, deliberately lied to them on other occasions, with no intention whatsoever of honouring the pledge they solemnly gave. Had they any honour, they would vacate their seats now and ask the public to decide, because the public have been grossly misled, misinformed and the Government have been complete failures. The Minister for Rising Prices has raised the price of every single commodity in his just three short years in office. Recently it was butter, petrol, bread, flour, every single item, so much so that some people refer to him as selfraising Justin. Everything he did constituted an increase imposed on some section of the community, the man given the job of maintaining price stability.
I heard a housewife say recently that, going to a supermarket now, she would need to bring a wheelbarrowful of £ notes. She said if she went inside and there was a thief outside, he would probably steal the wheelbarrow and leave the £ notes there because they were of no value. That about sums up the situation. We must have regard for the housewife, family food and, indeed, for the children of this nation. We must ensure they get the necessaries of life.
Some people have been fooled by the increases inadequate as they are in social services feeling that with them they would be able to maintain a certain standard of living but, within days of those increases the price spiral recommenced.
We have the pathetic situation now where the promises and the word of Government Ministers is no longer accepted because of the succession of broken promises. I am dealing now only with farm produce in this country. Again, neither the farmer nor the housewife gets a fair crack of the whip. Recently the Government had meetings with the trade unions, the farmers and the captains of industry as they call them. They did not call in the Opposition. They have a job to do and they must either do that job or get out. The first item in the famous 14-point plan was the maintenance of a reasonable price structure. That has not been honoured and they have no intention of honouring it now or in the future.
There has been sabotage of industry. This is not the first occasion a Coalition Government have been guilty of national sabotage. On previous occasions they were also guilty of the same offence. On the first occasion they were guilty in regard to the chassis factory at Inchicore, the short wave station and in relation to a variety of projects which had been under way. They sold the Constellations Aer Lingus had purchased for the trans-Atlantic routes and they thereby deprived Aer Lingus of substantial routes that were not available at a later stage. We do not forget that. The trade unionists do not forget the national sabotage. On the last occasion they deserted the nation in the middle of the night leaving behind 100,000 unemployed. On this occasion they have excelled themselves. They have not yet deserted their posts but there are 109,000 unemployed and 3,500 on short time.
Deputy Dowling said all that in Mayo.
The Deputy voted the other day for oppressive legislation. Let him not interrupt me now.
What happened to you down in Mayo?
In the days of the first Coalition we had Deputy Dillon telling us that in a few years the rabbits would be running around Shannon.
Shannon is all right.
Deputy Coughlan now parades Shannon as an industrial estate in order to seek support.
The industrial estate is a viable proposition.
Our record in relation to industrial development is there for everyone to see. It is not a record of national sabotage. If Deputy Coughlan will keep his mouth shut he will have an opportunity of speaking, if he has the courage to speak, the courage he did not have the other day when he voted for what he called "oppressive legislation" some time ago. He is only a fake. This Government, which Deputy Coughlan supports——
And will go on supporting for a long, long time.
——recently gave to the Japs two ships which could have been built in an Irish shipyard in Verolme. These ships will cost £11½ million. This may be a small sum but we have 109,000 people about whom Deputy Coughlan does not give a damn——
Does he not?
——and had that £11½ million been given to Irish industry valuable employment would have been provided for Irishmen and women. That is what we want done though this National Coalition Government apparently do not want to do it.
We gave them a better job in Verolme.
Deputy Coughlan must cease interrupting.
It is hard to listen to this nonsense.
The trade unionists whom Deputy Coughlan purports to represent protested in Cork against the decision of the Government to allow out of this country this valuable contract and give it to the Japanese. Deputy Donegan, Minister for Defence, said it was a Fianna Fáil caucus organised the protest. That is an insult to the trade unionists in that dockyard and I want to tell the Minister for Defence now that one of his backbenchers, Deputy Hegarty, participated in that protest. Any man who feels the Government are doing wrong has a right to protest and I would say Deputy Hegarty was a more courageous man in participating in that protest than the mouthpiece we are hearing now from the Labour benches who never spoke out against this sabotage.
The Deputy is a sad sight.
I will not be put off.
Acting Chairman
Deputy Coughlan must cease interrupting.
I cannot listen to this nonsense.
Acting Chairman
If the Deputy cannot, then he knows what to do.
He can speak next.
If I do, I will tear you to pieces.
Acting Chairman
The time of each speaker is limited.
I know that and that is why I cannot come in, but I hate listening to this hypocrite.
The contract given to Irish Shipping was one that could be completed in approximately 12 weeks or at the most four months. The building of the two ships given to the Japanese would have guaranteed two years' employment to Irish workers. It may well be that the Labour Party are no longer interested in the Irish workers, no longer interested in ensuring Irish workers have jobs and no longer interested in the development of Irish industry. Our workers are as competent as any Japanese workers to do that particular job and more competent in many ways.
Below away there.
The Deputy interrupts in an effort to cloud the situation but I will not permit him to do that.
Sure, that is what you are doing.
Polly the parrot.
Does Deputy Coughlan want to say something? He did not speak when he should have spoken.
You would not listen to me speaking.
He did not speak on the oppressive measures, as he described them, but he trotted into the lobby to vote for them.
It is a lot of nonsense.
Acting Chairman
If Deputy Coughlan persists, I will be compelled to ask him to leave the House.
Would you not ask this man to talk sense which he is not doing?
I have mentioned Irish Shipping. Collective responsibility was in operation and this was a collective decision. So we were told. I could understand a Fine Gael Minister being responsible for this kind of decision but I cannot understand Deputy Tully, Minister for Local Government, the Tánaiste and Minister for Health and Minister for Social Welfare, Deputy Corish, the Minister for Labour, Deputy O'Leary, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, Deputy Cruise-O'Brien and the Minister for Industry and Commerce, Deputy Keating, being collectively responsible for this sabotage, and sabotage it was, which deprived Irish workers of two years' employment at a time when there are 109,000 on the dole queue and another 20,000 to 30,000 threatened, to say nothing of the school leavers who could not find jobs.
That is not true.
Our policy would be to ensure people get back to work at the earliest possible moment and that jobs are provided for school leavers. We know the Labour Party record now in relation to the unemployed.
That is not true.
Pretty polly.
The Deputy will have an opportunity of speaking, if he takes it. I want now to deal with the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. Recently we had a manufacturing concern, the Creation Group, who had been State aided by the IDA, forced out of production because of taxation imposed by the Revenue Commissioners. In circumstances such as these the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs who is a member of the Labour Party sent labels to Britain to be printed. That is an indication of the concern of the Labour Party for the jobs of Irish workers.
The Deputy should table a question to the Minister who will deal competently with it and who, no doubt, will tear the Deputy to shreds in the same way as he dealt with Deputy Colley last week.
I have questioned the Minister already on this issue and he has admitted that labels were sent to Britain for printing. We have the parrots and pigeons of the Labour Party quacking at Government meetings but disregarding the people who put them into office. Deputy Coughlan is aware that in his area there are substantial factories which are the result of Fianna Fáil effort. He knows, too, that the industrial estate at Shannon as well as industrial estates in other parts of the country are the result of Fianna Fáil effort. We have never shirked responsibility or deserted the Irish workers.
The printing of the labels for the Department of Posts and Telegraphs was not the only Government order to go to Britain. There was, too, the NET contract. The firm which tendered for this £600 contract and which was regarded by the then advisers to NET, Kelloggs, to be worthy of submitting a tender were told by a director of NET that they had been successful but later it was decided to give the contract to a British firm without regard to the 110,000 people who are out of work. Is there any excuse for this sabotage? Is it an effort to drive Irish industry to the ground?
The reason given for the change in the decision on the contract was that the firm had not done this type of job previously. From this we may conclude that the oil rigs which will be built in the future cannot be built by an Irish firm because no Irish firm would have carried out this type of work before. I know that Irish workers, engineers and technicians are capable of reading any blueprint. They are sought the world over. Their ability is evident in such bodies as Bord na Móna, the ESB and elsewhere.
This is a lot of nonsense.
Let not Deputy Coughlan do the parrot. He is sent here to disrupt.
Let him go back to Brendan and do what he is told. He is disgraceful.
Deputy Lalor had enough of this business.
Acting Chairman
The Chair is responsible for order and would ask Deputy Coughlan to remain silent for the remainder of the debate.
With respect——
Acting Chairman
The Chair is interested in the Deputy maintaining silence.
I cannot get common sense.
The Deputy was born without it.
My record is right. Let the Deputy prove his.
Is this the Deputy's only contribution to the debate?
There is no sense to what Fianna Fáil are saying.
Acting Chairman
There is a limit on the time of each speaker and if a Deputy interrupts, he is not being fair to the speaker in possession.
I wish now to deal with another semi-State concern— Irish Life. We are told that they have made arrangements to purchase furniture in England although there are hundreds of Irish workers from the furniture manufacturing industry on the dole queues. Surely the Government should exercise some control in this sort of situation. I urge the trade unions to wake up, to throw off the shackles of the Labour Party, to forget about standing ovations at Labour Party conferences and thereby ensure that there will be jobs for their children and their grandchildren. While the present mob are in power there can be no future for our people. We are told by reliable sources that unemployment figures will increase by another 20,000 or 30,000 but there is no indication from the Government of any effort to solve this problem. Ministers have told us that until such time as they know the full extent of the problem, they cannot produce a plan. In other words, there is no hope for the unemployed.
All that was said in Mayo by Fianna Fáil but they got their answer.
Deputy Esmonde has reminded us that sheets showing the unemployment figures are handed out daily to Fianna Fáil members. It is necessary that this be so if we are to be kept in touch with the situation because by the time the current figure would reach the papers, there would have been an increase. Therefore, the figure has to be amended on the way in order that it is realistic.
Should we give them free beef?
What about the 109,000 people who are unemployed, the 3,500 on short time and the 40,000 school leavers who have no jobs? What about the professional people, the out-workers who are not on the live register? If all these numbers were added there would be a substantial total.
According to the Deputy the whole country is unemployed.
If the Deputy does not care about them he should shut up.
I care about them but the Deputy is only exploiting them.
A terrible tragedy is facing the country. We heard a lot about industrial disputes. Let us look at the situation in relation to industrial disputes during the period when we heard so much about industrial relations and about Ministers working overtime to ensure we had better industrial relations. In 1973 approximately 270,000 man-days were lost as a result of strikes but in 1974 when we had the great Minister for Labour and when other members of the Labour Party were in Government 552,000 man-days were lost as a result of strikes. This shows quite clearly that industrial relations were bad and that the Government did not solve that problem.
In the manufacturing industry, which is the important industry at the moment, in 1974 there were 122 disputes involving 26,500 workers and a loss of 172,000 man-days. In 1973 when Fianna Fáil were leaving office there were only 85 disputes and a total of 71,000 man-days lost. It will be clear from this that in the area of industrial relations, as in the area of housing and in other spheres, the record of the Government is not good.
What is the Government's solution to these problems? It is to set up a committee, a special committee, a research committee, to have a survey team or a working party investigate the matter. I do not know if those bodies all mean the same thing because it is rather confusing. When the Government want to change the image they change the title of the body they set up. They have set up more committees, sub-committees, working parties, research committees and survey teams than the previous seven Governments. They have achieved nothing. All we have are enormous price increases and the present critical state of industry.
Recently the Minister for Labour introduced a statutory wage agreement for the banks. The Taoiseach mentioned this in his speech but it was difficult to understand what he meant. He said:
I want to make it clear now that it is the intention of the Government, if agreement on a pause is reached, to introduce legislation providing for restraint in non-pay income, including dividends, directors' fees and rents similar to that which would apply to pay under the present agreement and the pause.
Apparently, if there is no agreement nothing will be done but I will point out that there are areas other than the banks that must be concerned. Housewives are anxious to ensure that there will be a price freeze. There has been a statutory wage freeze imposed by the Minister for Labour even though he spoke against it on many occasions.
Fianna Fáil were the first to introduce a wage freeze at a time when there was no price freeze.
I should like the Taoiseach to explain exactly what he means by that statement. His attitude and that of the Minister for Labour and other Ministers has been to control the people. In other countries the people are told when to get up, what to do and when to go to bed and that may happen here. That mentality is present in some sections of the Government. When freedom is taken from people the Government move towards controlling them.
The present situation was mishandled by the Government. By fraud they misled trade unionists, the honourable men who endeavoured to negotiate on behalf of workers. They were grossly misled because after substantial negotiation between the workers and employers they were told a different situation now existed, that the economy was about to collapse. All the time the Government had this knowledge but it was not conveyed to those who were making the agreement. This deceit is one reason why they will never be trusted again by honourable trade unionists who are endeavouring to do a good job for the workers. If the true position had been revealed prior to the agreement the position would have been much different. The Government would not have come into the House with legislation that had to be rushed through in a matter of hours in order to ensure that there would be a statutory wage freeze. It is deplorable that an honourable section has been hoodwinked by the Taoiseach and his Ministers and supported by the yes-men on the back benches.
We were told about the amount of legislation put through this House recently and the Bill relating to anti-discrimination was mentioned. Before that Bill was introduced the trumpets were sounded for months but when it was introduced it was found to be a farce and to be completely defective, with a bias against a person who applied for equal pay. Even though amendments were accepted from this side, the main amendment was not accepted and the result was a defective Bill. The Minister now is unable to honour the commitment in relation to equal pay for work of equal value. In his speech the Taoiseach made the following comment:
The Anti-Discrimination (Pay) Act, 1974, provides for equal pay by the 31st December, 1975. The Minister for Labour was presented with a report by the Labour Court yesterday which finds that the obligation to pay equal pay on the due date could result in a significant loss of jobs. The Government have, therefore, decided that amendments to the Act are necessary with effect from 1st January, 1976.
All the assurances given to women workers that they would get equal pay as from 1st January, 1976, have been blown sky-high. I suggest the Minister never had any intention of implementing the Bill. It was introduced as a device so that if there had been an election in the meantime the Government could point to the Bill as a token of their sincerity in giving equal pay. However, we now see that this will not happen. The Bill introduced by the Minister is of no value and it discriminates against the person who puts forward a claim for equal pay——
The Deputy should go back to Ballyfermot——
We have had an orderly debate up to now. The Chair is anxious that it should remain orderly.
The Chair should take Deputy Coughlan out of the political gutter. Political guttersnipes like the Deputy come in here and interrupt Members who are making their speeches. The Deputy would better serve his constituents by staying where he was before he came in in such good humour for interrupting because it is only on those occasions when he is fortified that he comes in here. Get back to where you were and let people who want to make a contribution do so.
Your contribution is negligible.
Order.
This is a betrayal of the worker. Neither the Minister nor the Government ever had an intention of implementing this Bill. It was purely a holding device in case an election came in the meantime. They thought possibly that some people who professed to have guts and courage might do what they said they would do on previous occasions and did not do. They come into the House to interrupt and have not the courage to do what they said they would do on previous occasions.
We were told by the Tánaiste, Deputy Corish, on numerous occasions, about the great free health scheme that people would get. The trumpets were brought out time and again. Handouts from the Government Information Services were flowing freely in relation to this health scheme. As the information was pumped into the media the media swallowed it as they swallowed the anti-discrimination pay Bill and as they swallow all Government Information Services handouts. We knew it was a fake. We knew that this would happen. There has been no free health service. A free health service was promised. When they came to the House and looked for the necessary legislation they got it but they did nothing about it. Again, it was a device to fool the people. If the Government want to test the situation they should go back to the people. A banks Bill recently went through the House. We know the effect of that and what it really means. The bank porter can be jailed and the cleaner can be jailed but the banker is immune from jail as a result of a section of the Bill.
They will not die on hunger strike.
Order.
The Deputy will not die on a thirst strike.
They will not die on hunger strike as they did under Fianna Fáil. They will not be hanged either.
Order. Deputy Dowling, without interruption.
There has been disruption in the agricultural sector because of the dispute with the vets. We are reaching the stage where we will be unable to sell cattle if the position is not resolved in the very near future because there will be no tested herds. A serious situation is developing. We see the fraud and the interrupters and the hecklers. We have dealt with them before. That is their only contribution. If you think you will get into the Limerick Leader tomorrow be heckling, more luck to you but the people had better read what you say.
(Interruptions.)
Order.
How many thousand unemployed are there in Limerick city?
Would Deputy Dowling address his remarks through the Chair?
Ask Deputy Cunningham.
Five thousand.
That is not right.
Has it gone up?
Let the interruptions cease.
The Deputy certainly will not get a standing ovation for his contribution here tonight.
I want to keep these Fianna Fáil boys on the rails.
It is disorderly to interrupt.
I want to deal with another Labour Minister, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs. I have already explained the situation facing industry and recently there was an offer by the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs to hand over portion of our airwaves to the foreigner. We are told from reliable sources in RTE that this would mean 600 jobs. Again, we have a Labour Minister who is not concerned about the employment of Irish people, who would ensure, if he had his way, that a further 600 persons would be in the dole queue. I want to put this question to the Minister for Foreign Affairs who is going to speak: Is it the intention of the Government to ensure that the unemployment figure will rise to 170,000 or 180,000 in order to cure the situation? This is one school of economic thought that was mentioned by a Government Minister on a previous occasion, that as unemployment increases the tension lessens in relation to inflation. If that is the course they are pursuing, fair enough, they are doing a good job in meeting that target but they are doing a very bad job in relation to the people who are in the dole queue.
It appears to me that the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs who sends his labels to be printed in England is not concerned about 600 jobs for Irish workers, is not concerned for Irish men or Irish women. This man is not doing his work or he would know that there are people unemployed. It would appear to me that the only time this man goes into his office is when he wants to raise the price of stamps or the television licence or to get himself on television and that when he comes into this House he feels it beneath him to answer questions. The only substantial contribution he has made is to increase postal, telephone, telegram and television licence charges.
Would Deputy Dowling go on television with the Minister?
Order. If Deputy Coughlan wants to offer, the Chair will facilitate him.
There was a recent television programme where the Minister appeared with Deputy Colley and Deputy Colley showed up the Minister in his true colours, showed him up for what he is, a schoolboy, who appealed to the questioner that Deputy Colley was taking some of his time. This was the childish approach of this childish Minister, like Kojak sucking a lolly.
Order.
This attitude runs right through everything that Minister does and he is a Labour Minister.
I want to deal with the question of housing where we have another Labour Minister, Deputy Tully. There are 30,000 fewer persons employed in the building industry than there were when the Government went into office. The timber yards are full of timber. The cement factory has not made cement available in the quantity that it made it available on previous occasions. The cement company say there are hundreds of thousands of tons of cement that have not been used. The timber merchants' stores are chock-a-block with timber and there are 30,000 fewer employed. The Minister for Local Government tells us that he is building more houses than ever before. He must be building them without cement, without timber, without sand, without men. We would like to know where the houses are so that we could see them.
Come to Limerick.
Where are the houses? You cannot build houses without labour, without cement, without sand, without timber. Where are the houses the Minister is building? Is he using the figures? Is he faking the figures, the starts one year, the completions another year, using the completions or the starts in a particular form to present a particular picture? Let me say this, and our Leader, Deputy Jack Lynch, mentioned it this morning, there has been a change in outlook on the part of the Minister for Local Government in relation to local authority accommodation. Local authority accommodation has been built up in one aspect. We wanted to ensure that the greatest possible number of people would have a stake in this community by owning their homes. I want to quote from a booklet produced by the IDA in relation to private housing which states:
About 70 per cent of all dwellings in Ireland are owner-occupied—one of the highest owner-occupation rates in Europe. The diagram below shows the percentage of total national housing stock which was owner-occupied at a recent census date in a number of European countries.
It is worth noting that we have more people with a stake in the community and we have more people who own their homes. That is a good thing. Assistance should be given to people to ensure that they can have their own homes, that they should not have to go into flats. This proves that Irish men and women are prepared, if the facilities are available, to own their own homes. The percentage of Irish people who own their own homes, is 68.8. The diagram in that booklet gives the following:
|
Country |
Percentage |
|
Austria |
37.7 |
|
Denmark |
45.0 |
|
Finland |
60.5 |
|
France |
41.5 |
|
Germany |
35.3 |
|
Italy |
40.0 |
|
The Netherlands |
29.3 |
|
Norway |
52.8 |
|
Portugal |
44.5 |
|
Sweden |
36.0 |
|
Switzerland |
33.5 |
|
U.K. |
50.0 |
This is a creditable record in relation to home ownership. The drift has been away from home ownership in recent times and there are a number of reasons for this. There are a number of reasons why a Labour Minister does not want people to own their own homes because they have found in other countries, where people have purchased their own homes, where they had a stake in the community, they no longer supported the bullyboys who make all the noise, like Deputy Coughlan has been making here. From 1973 onwards we know the position. The Minister has been pressed on numerous occasions about increasing the loans for house purchase. Again, he has reneged on the people that he made a solemn promise to that the opportunities would be there.
Who is the auctioneer?
I am not and I am not a publican either. Apparently some of the publicans drink more than they sell. There is an undesirable diversion from the promise given that people would own their own homes. In 1973 70 per cent of the people were willing to take that stake in the community. This is an insurance policy in itself. We wanted to ensure that people would have the opportunity to own their own homes. Until such time as the Minister for Local Government wakes up and the back benchers in his party tell him what the people want we will not have an improvement in the situation.
(Interruptions.)
We have heard so much about law and order that I want to deal with this matter. I will not deal any more with housing because we cannot find the houses which are built without sand, cement or timber and without workers. I do not believe that the workers are working three times as hard or the houses are built without sand or cement.
(Interruptions.)
Deputy Dowling without interruption.
It appears that the emphasis on law and order is directed against disturbances north of the Border. I want to give some indication of the situation in the city, how the position has gone out of hand and how the Government and the Attorney General failed to act in relation to people on the housing list or the people who are in rent arrears. In April, 1972, rent arrears in Dublin Corporation amounted to £300,000 but the position in August, 1975, after almost three years of Coalition Government, is that the figure is now £1,554,000. This abnormal jump shows clearly that there is a problem in relation to rent arrears. The highest arrears case is £1,600 for a corporation tenant. There are also others of £1,394 and £1,330. Dublin Corporation are not very concerned about this.
Who organised them in a strike?
I did not. It was organised by supporters of the Deputy's party. People were told by members of the Deputy's party to participate in this strike. Now we see the terrible situation that such a large sum of money is outstanding to Dublin Corporation. Let us see who will pay that money. Increased taxation will be applied to get the additional revenue necessary. The old age pensioner, the widow, the orphan and the unemployed will be forced to make some contribution for the people who will not pay their rent.
Is the Deputy serious?
Order. Deputy Dowling without interruption.
I am. This is a serious situation. It is obvious that the Deputy is not very concerned about the housing of people.
I do not know what people voted for the Deputy? They must all be delinquents.
The Deputy is the biggest delinquent in the House.
Will this personal abuse cease? Deputy Coughlan must restrain himself.
We also have the squatting position where people have jumped the queue and are occupying premises they are not entitled to occupy while there are genuine families on the housing list in overcrowded conditions. There are 681 people squatting in homes in Dublin at the moment while a substantial number of other people are not paying rent. The reason for this is that the Minister for Local Government told them they had two years to pay so nobody paid during the two years. We have the situation where people who are willing and able to pay and want a home are deprived of one while old age pensioners, widows and orphans will be forced to pay out additional taxation to meet this arrears situation. We are told in a report from the principal officer of the housing department that the Attorney General advised they were not to proceed under the Forcible Entry Act but were to proceed under another Act. The Garda will not act now. We see the small number of court proceedings that are taken and we see the terrible problem of people on the waiting list who are entitled to and want homes but who get no support from the Government.
I do not want to interrupt the Deputy, for whom I have great respect and regard, but it was the Fianna Fáil Minister who assured us that the Forcible Entry Act would not be used against Dublin Corporation tenants.
Dublin Corporation endeavoured to use the Forcible Entry Act to ensure that people, who were entitled to accommodation, would get it. I refer to the corporation collectively, the Deputy and I and other members. It is another matter, whether or not the Deputy was there but, collectively, the council decided that the squatting situation must be terminated. What happened? We were told by the Attorney General that we could not proceed in that way—that those people must be left where they are, in other words. We have a serious situation, both in relation to squatting and rent arrears and it has caused unrest and problems for the families entitled to accommodation. To give Deputy O'Connell his due he did fight for the rights of the weaker section at corporation meetings and he supported Fianna Fáil on many occasions when we were defending those rights.
I intervene to advise the Deputy that he has one minute left of the time allotted to him.
I have a lot to say but I have only one minute left and I want to speak about the recent increase in the cost of fuel for central heating. Deputy Tunney made an effort to raise the matter the other day on the Adjournment and he was denied the opportunity. We want to know why supplies were held back for two weeks. The normal delay when one orders central heating fuel is two or three days. One person who ordered fuel on 1st December had it delivered on 13th December, the day after the price increase and had to pay the new rate. We ask the Minister to find out in how many cases were fuel orders filled prior to 13th December and how many after that. It appears to us that fuel supplies were delayed and that substantial profits have found their way into the pockets of the oil companies. We ask the Minister to find out how many fuel deliveries were made on the Saturday morning when the new price became effective, how many were made in the preceding days and how many were made on the following Monday and Tuesday, how long the orders were outstanding and how much injustice was done to housewives of this city who were endeavouring to ensure that they would have a source of heat available.
I do not propose in this debate to speak generally about foreign affairs although there are many things one could usefully discuss about the role this country played in the past year. Instead, I propose to confine my remarks to the situation in Northern Ireland and to what Deputy Dowling in a masterpiece of understatement referred to as "the disturbance" in that part of the country.
The Taoiseach today, in opening this debate, said that we cannot look with disinterest at the plight of our fellow countrymen. We cannot remain indifferent to the pattern of the last six years in part of this island of killings and bombings and tortures, proliferation of protection rackets, the growth of sectarian killings and the suffering in purely human terms to which they contribute. I think that when we speak about this suffering here the dominant consideration in our minds and in the way we express ourselves should be concern for our fellow Irishmen in that part of the country, people who are part of us, who are not external to us or outside us but who are Irish people like ourselves in this island and who are suffering from the violence and the results of the violence over the last six years.
In examining this problem I think what we should try to do is not merely look at its superficial manifestations, not merely try to see what solutions we can find in the immediate and short term. If we are serious about it and want to achieve any real, lasting results we must seek to identify the causes of the problem and seek to eradicate them. The causes of the problem are basically fear and what we might call counter-fear. In what we say we should have regard to this. Nothing we say in this House or outside it should be calculated to raise the temperature in Northern Ireland or to arouse fears already so near the surface. As the Leader of the Opposition said, speaking on 24th October: "When the situation is one where careless words can lead to death just as certainly as calculated acts, then it is a duty on every responsible politician and citizen to resist the temptation to resort to rhetoric or flamboyant oratory."
The ultimate source of the problem is the fear of the Unionist million in Northern Ireland, their fear as a minority in this island, and it is this fear which led them to break away from the Unionists of this island as a whole, resisting home rule and to seek a separate solution, separate from the Unionists of those days in this part of the country. As a result of the policy they then adopted decisions were taken in 1920 and in 1921 which have led to the present political division of Ireland. I think one can say with certainty about that division, and say it in a nonpartisan way, that it did not eradicate the fear of this million people as perhaps they had hoped and expected it would. Instead, that fear remained and manifested itself in the way in which fear does manifest itself when people who are in a state of fear are in a position to exercise control over others whom they fear. It manifested itself in discrimination and in repressive measures against those who had thus become the minority in Northern Ireland. The minority suffered accordingly for over 50 years. They have suffered since through the violence of the past six years and at times I think that the Unionist majority in Northern Ireland take insufficient account of the scale of the suffering of the Nationalist minority there in this latter period. I think that opinion down here is often insufficiently alert, too insensitive to these sufferings. During the last six years they have, at different times, suffered from violence and threats of violence from three different sources, from the Provisional IRA, from the Protestant para-militaries and, at certain periods it must be said also, from the security forces, who in their attempt to control the situation have acted in a manner which, from the point of view of the minority, was certainly repressive.
They suffered from the threat of murder and knee-capping at the hands of the Provisional IRA and other associated, or perhaps I should say, dissociated groups, as they constantly split from each other to murder each other and others as well. They suffered through the sectarian murders of the para-military bodies who still continue to be a cause of fear and it must be said of scandal because of the freedom with which they claim what they call credit for the most appalling atrocities.
Without wishing to interrupt the Minister, I find it difficult to hear him and I should like to hear him.
I am very sorry. Thank you, Deputy. They suffered also from the actions of the security forces at various times and at times they must not have known where to look, seeing violence coming at them from every angle. But the majority are also suffering, not merely from the mindless violence of the Provisional IRA and other similar groups, the indiscriminate violence of the bomb and the all too discriminating violence of individual murders of members of the Protestant majority by the IRA but they also suffer from other psychological factors. They are suffering from the loss of such sense of security as they did have —they had some sense of security though not sufficient to drive out fear— during the 50 years of their dominance from 1920 onwards. They have lost that sense of security. They are also suffering from something even more fundamental, a loss of their sense of identity.
The situation that existed for 50 years was one that allowed them, perhaps, to delude themselves that there was some correspondence between their determination to hang on to control of that area and their loyalty, as they saw it and spoke of it, to Great Britain. However, the events of the last six years have destroyed these illusions and for many of the unionist majority in Northern Ireland there is now a situation where they are not clear where they stand or where they belong. They have not found, in the reactions of Britain, the kind of reactions they hoped and expected to find. They have managed to live throughout those 50 years in the delusion that Britain stood where she stood not merely in the 19th century but in the 17th century. They believe their own myths about the Protestant settlement in late 20th century Britain. The discovery that these are myths has shaken them deeply.
So far they have not been able to find a new sense of identity and this has reinforced the basic fear and sense of insecurity from which they suffer. I freely admit that trying to understand these phenomena as I know Deputy Brugha has tried to do in the many contacts he has had with people of all different political views in Northern Ireland, does not resolve the problem. But not understanding it and showing that one does not understand it, as I am afraid has happened too often in this part of the country, makes its resolution virtually impossible. Every speech made in this House, or outside it, by a political speaker which does not show an understanding of the fears that underlie the problem of Northern Ireland enhances their sense of separateness from us, their sense of isolation. This is true of both sections of the community. Both of them must feel as they read some strange statements emanating from here that they are isolated and separate; they must feel that Partition has eaten deeply into the soul of the south, the south is so unable to understand the North which up to 55 years ago was politically united to it.
Not understanding the problem, therefore, is certainly fatal to a solution and any solution must be based on a true understanding of it. I am afraid that the Opposition have not shown themselves capable of the full understanding that would yield sensitive policies that would be helpful to a good outcome in Northern Ireland, and I speak in, I hope, measured terms. There is a curious paradox that the party of men like Frank Aiken and Seán MacEntee have become so divorced from the North, so unable to understand what is going on there, have become such a southern party. That is not true of all members of the party. I pay ready tribute to Deputy Brugha and his understanding of the problem and of the need to keep in touch with people of all political views and to try to appreciate the problems as they see them.
I am afraid that the Fianna Fáil statement published some time ago does not show the kind of understanding of the problem which would help to resolve it. There is, as far as I am aware, no evidence that, as is implied in the policy statement of Fianna Fáil, sufficient calm and rationality exists in Northern Ireland for a statement of intent to withdraw on the part of Great Britain to produce any positive result or, indeed, to produce anything but a negative result.
It is interesting to note that in all that has been said by Opposition speakers at the time the statement was issued, and since, at no point has any attempt been made to produce evidence to this effect. The nearest thing to an attempt to justify the Fianna Fáil policy in these terms was a bare statement by the Leader of the Opposition on 20th November, a bare assertion not backed up by any attempt at argument. The Leader of the Opposition said that if the British declared their interest in uniting the Irish people then he believed the intransigence would begin to disappear. In dealing with a situation as dangerous to the lives of Irish people as that in Northern Ireland it is not sufficient merely to state such a belief and leave it at that. If one is going to base a policy on an unsubstantiated belief in respect of which not an ounce of evidence has been produced, a belief so clearly against all the evidence of our eyes and ears, then one certainly is taking grave risks with Irish lives.
It must be said that even if there was evidence to back up this belief that a statement of intent would lead to the disappearance of intransigence that one could deduce, one would need to be slow in relying on it when reliance upon it, should it prove illfounded, would have such disastrous consequences. Let us have no illusions about what the consequences would be. All the probabilities are that if the British Government stated their intention to withdraw, even in a phased way, that statement would unleash a completely new situation in Northern Ireland; it would unleash a race to control what would be left behind when Britain left. To stop this it would not be sufficient that the withdrawal should be not precipitated but phased. Much of the defence of the Fianna Fáil statement by Fianna Fáil speakers, such as it has been, has consisted of a denial that they ever proposed a precipitate withdrawal. As I am not aware that anybody ever accused them of proposing a precipitate withdrawal there is not much point in denying what has never been asserted.
We all know that the proposal is that there should be a statement of intent to withdraw in a phased manner. The problem is that that would create immediately a different situation and it requires great confidence in the rationality, calmness and restraint of political forces in Northern Ireland to think that faced with that statement to withdraw in a phased manner none of the political forces would react by seeking to preempt the consequences of that withdrawal and to ensure their own control when the withdrawal took place. No attempt has been made by any speaker on behalf of Fianna Fáil in any speech I read in the papers to validate this assumption that the statement of intent would in this way have this beneficial effect of leading to the disappearance of intransigence and would not have the effect of precipitating a lethal race to power, lethal above all, to the minority.
We owe it to the Opposition to try to understand what their policy is and what it is they are trying to get at although at times I feel they do not understand it very well themselves. They have tried to argue that part of what is involved is that they want to encourage the unity of Ireland by agreement, and so do we all. In the second statement, if the report in The Irish Times of 8th November gives a correct rendering, as I am sure it does, these words were placed in italics; presumably not just by The Irish Times but by the Fianna Fáil Party. The statement was:
I wish to emphasise that the Fianna Fáil statement called, in the first place, on the British Government to encourage the unity of Ireland by agreement.
That is something to which we can all subscribe. The only puzzling thing is, if I may say so, that the statement ignores the fact that such an indication of attitude by the British Government was given at Sunningdale in December, 1973, was secured in that negotiation by our Government. The British Government said:
If in the future the majority of the people of Northern Ireland should indicate a wish to become part of a united Ireland, the British Government would support that wish.
In reading the Fianna Fáil exegesis of their statement, there is a total denial, without any suggestion or hint, that unity should be secured by force. There is an emphasis throughout these statements that unity can only come by consent. Therefore, Fianna Fáil's statement about "encouraging the unity of Ireland by agreement"—they say they want the unity of Ireland by agreement, that they want the British Government to do this—cannot mean anything different from what the British Government did in September, 1973, when they said they would support any wish by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland to become part of a united Ireland. If there is no other basis on which we or the Opposition, if I understand them correctly, would wish reunification to come about other than by agreement and consent, then there are no other terms in which we could speak validly about the British Government's indication of their support for Irish reunification. We have their statement of support for the only kind of reunification we have been thinking about. Then, two years later, to make it the issue that Fianna Fáil want the British Government "to encourage the unity of Ireland by agreement", when they have already agreed to support unity, is to make a dead issue a non-existent issue. If the only problem was to get Britain to say they support the unity of Ireland, the whole problem would have been solved long ago, and it certainly would have been solved at Sunningdale. Unfortunately, there is more to the problem than that.
I also find on reading the initial statement and the supplementary statement on 7th November a curious difference of wording which at best is careless and dangerous and at worst is sinister. I do not think I believe the worst about it. Let us take the initial statement, the relevant phrase is:
Fianna Fáil calls on the British Government to encourage the unity of Ireland by agreement in independence and in harmonious relationship between the two islands, and to this end to declare Britain's commit- ment to implement an ordered withdrawal from her involvement in the Six Counties of Northern Ireland.
That is quite clear. However, that is not what was said on 7th November. What was said on 7th November is curiously different. I will read it, including the words I have already read, continuing the rest of the paragraph:
I wish to emphasise that the Fianna Fáil statement calls in the first place on the British Government to encourage the unity of Ireland by agreement. When the British Government has done this, our statement went on to call on them to implement it by an ordered withdrawal from involvement in Northern Ireland.
It was not to implement an ordered withdrawal, as in the first statement, but "implement it". This grammatically can only mean Irish unity. Therefore, it is not a question of declaring a commitment to implement an ordered withdrawal or to encourage the unity of Ireland by agreement. That is only a first step, to be followed by the British Government implementing unity by an ordered withdrawal. I do not understand the reason for the difference. I hope it is carelessness, but it is a dangerous kind of carelessness because is suggests the aim is not merely that the British should withdraw and allow some mystical process of agreement to emerge without any violence or dissension in the optimistic scenario of the first Fianna Fáil statement, but that Britain herself should implement unity by this withdrawal —not that it be left to Irish people to do it but that Britain should do it. This suggests a considerable confusion of thought on the part of the Opposition in an area in which it is terribly important, as Deputy Lynch said, that anything that is said is in terms which are not oratorical and that do not arouse fear.
I think it should be clear, and is clear from the reactions that took place following the Fianna Fáil statement, that the statement further overheated the atmosphere. These indeed are the words Deputy Brugha used on 9th December when he said that such a declaration—that is, a British declaration of intent to withdraw from Northern Ireland—he would see as "even further overheating the atmosphere", and he added:
The situation is too grave for ordinary people, for anybody in my position, to be making that kind of statement.
The problem is not to overheat the situation but to cool it. Of course, cooling the atmosphere does not bring headlines, does not bring any adrenalin to the veins. It is not a policy which you can shout from the housetops. It is, however, the only policy morally justifiable.
When we come to look at the situation within Northern Ireland we will find that there is agreement among all parties on one thing—I will suggest in a few moments that there is agreement on a number of things—but there is agreement among all that devolution is needed. I do not think anybody in Northern Ireland likes the idea of direct rule, and I can see why. Indeed, I do not think the Ministers who have the job of ruling Northern Ireland directly like it either. There is no doubt that the problems of Northern Ireland are very different from any problems that exist in Britain. The people there have their own way of looking at their problems, and direct rule from London even by Ministers who spend most of their time in Belfast cannot be a satisfactory solution in anything but the short term.
But devolution from which the consent of one section is withheld is unworkable. We know this from experience of 50 years, and above all of the end of the sixties and the early seventies. Therefore, the aim must be, with all necessary patience, to seek to create conditions in which self-government on a basis acceptable to the majority of both sections will emerge and in which the Executive or Government thus emerging in Northern Ireland and the Government here can work together in the common interests of the people of both parts of the country.
Of course, if such a solution is delayed—it has been and it may yet be still further—there is always the temptation to look elsewhere for an answer; there is a natural human tendency to assume that to every problem there is here and now an answer. It is a very dangerous human tendency which sometimes leads people, when they see that certain solutions that have been tried are failing, to look elsewhere on the basis that if solutions A and B fail, there must be some other one that will succeed, and to choose solution C which may be much worse. Sometimes there is not even a solution to a problem in the long term.
Perhaps a solution will be found soon to this problem of providing self-government in Northern Ireland. I hope so, the Government hope so and I know that the House hopes so. The Government will do all that is possible to facilitate it. We must be willing to facilitate such a solution should it in any way seem to be beginning to emerge. We must be willing to facilitate it by looking at any proposal that comes from both sections of the community in Northern Ireland. You may say that to expect any proposal to come from both sections is unduly optimistic, and perhaps it is, but let us not overlook the fact that different sections of the community in Northern Ireland have succeeded in agreeing on certain things. They have agreed, as I have said already, on the need for devolution. None of them likes direct rule. All of them feel there should be a Parliament, an Executive of some kind in Northern Ireland, consisting of Northern Ireland people, responsive to the needs of Northern Ireland and to the people of Northern Ireland. They have agreed on more than that; the politicians of all parties elected to the Convention have agreed—and I shall not dwell on it— on the deficiencies of the Fianna Fáil statement. They have agreed most recently on the desirability of retaining the offices of a chief constable which others, apparently, do not wish to retain. They are agreed too on the economic and social policies needed in Northern Ireland. That is something which has been common ground amongst them. Therefore, let us not assume that it is impossible for the two sections of the community in Northern Ireland to agree on something.
What I am saying is that if they do at any stage show signs of being able to agree on a solution, if they turn to us and ask us here to help them implement that solution and to do things down here that would help towards that end, then I think we must be willing to help even if the things they ask are things that run counter to past positions which we, individually or as parties, have adopted; even if they run against fondly-held Southern beliefs or against local shibboleths in this part of the country.
I believe—and I am sure it is the view of most people in this House— that if there were the lineaments of a solution to be found, if one could see it emerging, that nothing here should stand in the way, that we should be willing to make any changes, legal or constitutional, changes in our way of thought and outlook, that may be necessary to help that solution be put into effect.
Of course, all this may take time. We hope that it may be possible for the politicians who have been tackling this problem in recent months, looking at it again to find a way through the dilemmas that face them, to find a solution in the months ahead. But it may take longer. However long it takes several things are desirable in the interim: first, that direct rule, whether it lasts for months or, as could be necessary, for several years, be as sensitive as possible to the needs of Northern Ireland, that it be open to the views of elected politicians and that political activity should continue at provincial level. There should never be allowed a vacuum in politics in Northern Ireland because, if there were to be a political vacuum—and 12 MPs, or even 20 in Westminster would not fill that vacuum—then it could only be filled by the forces of violence. Direct rule, therefore, whether in the short or long term, must be made sensitive, as sensitive as it can be, to the needs of Northern Ireland and to the people of Northern Ireland.
Secondly, whether the solution takes a short time or a long time to find, in the meantime, it is essential that security measures be taken, North and South, to safeguard lives. As far as I am concerned, a British life is as valuable as an Irish life. But if there are any in this House who think otherwise and who distinguish between lives according to the nationality of those who own them, let me point out that over 95 per cent of the lives lost in Northern Ireland this year have been Irish lives. It is not good enough, I feel, that in this Parliament so little of the thrust of Opposition questions is about, as it should be, what more we can do to save lives in Northern Ireland. That is the kind of pressure this Government should be under. Not that we are not loyally endeavouring to fulfil our obligations in this respect but because this should be the conscientious wish of everyone in this House there should be pressure on us all the time to do better, but that is not always the kind of pressure we get.
We get indignation, indignation which we all share on both sides of the House, about crossings of the Border, sometimes accidentally, perhaps sometimes not, by security forces in the North. But the indignation is selective because, however much we may resent and object to, and however right we are to protest against such incursions when they occur, there is no equivalence between such an incursion and the murder of people in Northern Ireland. Yet the protests are loud in this House if a British patrol strays into the Republic, and I make my protest, certainly, to the British Government to endeavour to prevent such occurrences which, from any point of view, are undesirable. But there is no equivalent volume of indignation against the constant toll of murder in Northern Ireland, no equivalent pressure on us to take more action on this front, to do more to try to prevent a further toll of deaths there.
We, and the Government of the United Kingdom, have an absolute duty to do all in our power to hinder the para-militaries of whatever persuasion, these men who, whether Protestant or Catholic—though how one can apply religious names to them defies understanding—arrogate to themselves the right to murder. There can be no dealings with such people in any civilised, democratic community. Both Governments must do all in their power to apprehend and put out of the way of doing harm members of these organisations. As between the security forces in Northern Ireland—whatever the problems there have been with them over the last six years—and the para-militaries of either brand, there can be no question of a choice for us, no double standards. There must be, and there is, full co-operation between the police forces of the two parts of this country to track down the para-militaries, whether they be UVF or UDA men coming to murder in Dublin or IRA men crossing the Border to murder in Northern Ireland. I make no apology to any Irishman for saying that.
However, I should like to say one brief word on the question of fugitive offenders, brief because the matter has been thoroughly thrashed out in a previous debate. There is one point I should like to make which I think is not sufficiently appreciated in Northern Ireland or in Great Britain. For two years now, almost to this day, the crime of murder and of being an accessory to murder, wherever that murder is carried out, is a crime in our law. If any person commits a murder, or is an accessory to a murder in Great Britain or in Northern Ireland and he comes into this territory, he can be arrested here, tried here, convicted here and sent to prison here. The scope of that provision will be widened when the Bill recently before this House is enacted. But, even without enacting that Bill, that is the law and has been the law for two years. I think I am entitled to make the point. It is a point which I wish were understood better in Northern Ireland, that in two years we have received no requests from the authorities in Northern Ireland or in Britain to arrest any person on a charge of murder or accessory to murder, a murder committed within those two years.
If there are such people in this part of the country, and if there is evidence against them in the hands of the authorities in Great Britain or Northern Ireland, they merely have to produce that evidence and, without going through any abortive procedure of extradition, these people can be tried here. I must say that the fact that we have received no such request, that no such evidence has been submitted to us, seems to me to indicate that there cannot be very many of these murderers in this part of the country, for the very good reason that they are well aware, if they come down here, what can happen them. But I think it is important that this point should be made and should be understood in Great Britain and in Northern Ireland.
In conclusion I would ask that, when we discuss this problem—whether in this or in another debate—there should be honesty in the discussion; there should be an avoidance of double standards. A life is a life whether it is a Protestant or a Catholic life, a British life or an Irish life. Above all, in everything we say and everything we do, we should show our concern for the people of Northern Ireland, whether Catholic or Protestant, who suffered so deeply and who have not always had the kind of deep understanding and sympathy from their fellow Irishmen here which, if the word "Irishman" means anything, they should have had.
Listening to the Minister for Foreign Affairs drawing comparisons between the call recently made by the Fianna Fáil Party and the declaration in the Sunningdale Agreement, making it seem that what appeared in that declaration measured up to the requirement of the recent call from Fianna Fáil absolutely amazed me. The Minister for Foreign Affairs quoted from our policy document and drew attention to the fact that the document had called on the British Government to encourage the unity of Ireland by agreement and he went on to say that commitment by Britain was already written into the Sunningdale Agreement and, by way of comparison, quoted that if the majority of the Irish people wanted unity the British Government would support it.
The majority of the people of Northern Ireland.
If the majority of the people in the North sought unity the British Government would support it. I think the Minister is drawing the long bow if he thinks that commitment and that statement measure up to the requirements of our policy document. Calling on the British Government to encourage the unity of Ireland by agreement and, following that declaration of encouragement, calling on the British Government to declare itself committed to an orderly withdrawal is a completely different thing.
Indeed it is, when you add in the second part, I fully agree.
Deputy Lalor.
Encouragement is a very different thing from support.
Support is stronger.
The Minister, as is his wont, plays with words. I find it rather remarkable that the Minister for Foreign Affairs, the man who appeared regularly on television, the man who contributed regularly to the newspapers, the one man who, in Opposition, had a solution for everything, should say here tonight that there is a dangerous human belief that there is always a solution to a problem.
In the short term.
That was actually a dangerous human belief I had come to start believing, having been brainwashed by Deputy FitzGerald when he was in Opposition. The Minister interjected to correct me; he said "in the short term". As a matter of fact, the Minister had the instant solution for everything. Any problem that came up the Minister for Foreign Affairs went on the "7 Days" programme and, "Bob's your uncle", the problem was resolved before the programme was over. All that was needed was an intelligent Minister in a particular Department. After two-and-a-half years he now admits what the Leader of this party accused the Government of here today, of doing nothing, of coming up with no suggestion even of a solution. The Government now, through their Minister for Foreign Affairs, frankly admit that, as they see it, there is no solution.
Deputies
Hear, hear.
I said nothing of the kind.
They get their publicity material to condemn Fianna Fáil when they suggest a form of solution. We have it on the record now that, so far as the Government are concerned, they have absolutely no solution and we have the unfortunate Taoiseach coming in here this morning talking about a low profile. Mark you, if there is no solution to a problem it is the most natural thing in the world to present a low profile.
When this Government came into office a little over two-and-a-half years ago they had outlined a short few weeks previously what is now mistakenly known as the 14-point programme. In that manifesto the Coalition parties were specific in their promises regarding jobs, prices, redundancies, rents, rates, social reform, taxes, housing, education, agriculture—in fact, the works. Again the solution to all these problems. The Minister for Finance signed his name to that document, the document which specifically said the immediate aim of the new Government would be to stabilise prices. This programme was quoted at length here this afternoon by the Minister for Defence. He unashamedly spelled it out and went on to say they were doing a brilliant job effectively stabilising prices, halting redundancies and reducing unemployment under their programme of planned economic development. The Minister is obviously fully taken up with the work of his Department and it seems to me he is flying so high, literally and metaphorically, he does not know what is going on. He is so out of touch he actually thought the Government had done something in regard to the stabilisation of prices.
I am in a position to talk about this because it was I, as Minister for Industry and Commerce, who set up the National Prices Commission. There had been increases in prices and the Coalition parties said they would stop increases in prices. The hands of the National Prices Commission have not been strengthened in any way. They are following exactly the same formula with one exception. The reports submitted in my time were laid before the House. We were told the amount of the increases recommended and sanctioned subsequently by the Minister, but now there is not so much publicity of the amount sanctioned and, when it is sanctioned, it is sanctioned by the National Prices Commission because the great Marxist could not have it suggested that he allowed prices to increase. On top of that we have the special chapter every month in the National Prices Commission report showing how much the NPC have saved the people by not conceding all the increases sought. We get, too, the monthly statement from the GIS showing how many millions the public would have had to pay over the 12-month period had the full amount sought been conceded. The National Prices Commission were set up at the request of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and at the request of the Confederation of Irish Industry. Both bodies felt that the Minister and the officials in charge of the prices section were not diligent enough in pruning the demands of industrialists and manufacturers for increased prices.
Before the NPC were set up I was subjected continuously to complaints from industrialists who accused the prices section of the Department of being too strict in relation to the granting of what they considered legitimate price increases. This view was often supported by the trade unions in cases where management said that their inability to secure a price increase would lead to loss of jobs.
I agreed to set up the National Prices Commission and they have been doing a good job since. However, it would be well to put on the record that before the commission were set up the relevant officials in the Department had been saving the consumers quite an amount of money.
Hear, hear.
The Minister for Defence talked about how successfully the NPC have effected the stabilisation of prices. I do not think anybody but the Minister can believe that. Today the Taoiseach talked about the cost-of-living index and the manner in which it had become controlled and corrected within the past six months. Generally the Government are congratulating themselves in this regard. Since mid-November they have upped the percentage increase compared with the last quarter to 2.8 per cent but I would draw the attention of the House to the fact that the index based on 100 in mid-November, 1968 is 219.9. That means that our cost-of-living index is now more than 100 per cent higher than it was in 1968. This does not surprise anybody.
At the time of the last general election, mid-February, 1973, the consumer price index read 144.7. That meant that the cost of living had increased by 44.7 per cent between mid-November, 1968, and mid-February, 1973. Let us look at the situation since. The Fianna Fáil Government were criticised for the increase of 44.7 per cent during that four-and-a-half-year period but the situation now is that after two-and-a-half years of Coalition Government there has been an increase in the cost of living of 52 per cent. This represents a much greater increase in half the time. Yet, the Minister for Defence who at one time had pretensions to being Minister for Industry and Commerce, has the audacity to tell the House that the Government have honoured their commitment to stabilise prices.
I wonder when Fianna Fáil last had a 2 per cent increase in six months?
This is another example of the Minister's instant solutions.
It is merely a question.
Deputy Lalor.
The Minister is getting back to the slick question. Here he is again with his short-term solutions. I am talking of an increase during a two-and-a-half-year period which included a three-month period during which there was a drop of 0.8. This indicates how bad is the situation, a situation that has come about because of the failure of the Government to take action sooner, action which 12 months earlier we had advised them to take. It was a case of the glamour boys being in Dublin now and the attitude was: "Why should we believe poor George Colley; did not Deputy Garrett FitzGerald do him down on television in 1973? What would our supporters think if we were to take the advice of such a man? How could such an apparently brilliant person as Deputy FitzGerald who, it was thought, was more fit for Finance than the man fancied for that office, stoop so low as to take advice from the greatest failure of all, Deputy Colley?" However, 12 months later the Government realised their mistake and knew that they would have to accept the advice that had been offered by Deputy Colley. The Minister for Foreign Affairs said at the Government meeting concerned that there was no solution to the problem in the short term.
During the extended period of euphoria which followed the coming into power of this Government the country was damaged economically to such an extent that it will take an extraordinarily long time to correct the situation. The Government have neither the capacity nor the ability to create a climate of recovery. The unemployment figure is frightening. This brings me to the second major point in the Coalition's manifesto, the one relating to the halting of redundancies and of reducing unemployment. On 1st December, 1972—the last December that we were in power —there were 69,900 persons on the live register. I use that date in order to make a comparison with the figure for the 5th December, 1975. Not even the most optimistic of the Government speakers would say that the number has fallen in the 12 days since then.
During 1973 I listened to wonderful speeches even from back benchers on the Government side telling us how they were tackling the unemployment problem. It was a period of euphoria when they were spending the money we had so diligently saved up. In comparison with the 69,000 people unemployed on 1st December, 1972, when we were in office, there were only 64,000 people unemployed on 7th December, 1973. However, when the Government were living on their own fat in the following year the number of unemployed on 6th December, 1974, was 83,534, an increase of 19,000 on the figure for the previous December. The public were still being reasonable; unfortunately, they are still being extremely reasonable.
What about West Mayo?
Of course there are the glib speakers and I will concede that to the Parliamentary Secretary. We now have the "whiz kids". There were 24 or 25 jet-propelled, or State-propelled, front bench spokesmen whizzing around West Mayo. I am a democrat and I accept the decision of the people but that does not prevent me from trying to educate them, from trying to get the message across to them. I am sorry the Minister for Foreign Affairs has left the House because I had a little puzzle for him —it is one of those things that he can do so very quickly.
The situation with regard to unemployment continued to deteriorate and on 5th December, 1975, the number of unemployed jumped from 83,534 to 109,208 and it is still rising. There was an increase of almost 20,000 from December, 1973, to December, 1974, and the Christmas present the Coalition Government have for the people this year will be an unemployment figure of 113,000. That means that about one person in ten is registered as being out of work and I am not including school leavers.
I am sorry the Minister for Local Government is not present. I am sure he knows the situation but he certainly is hiding the facts. When Fianna Fáil left office in February, 1973, there were 13,697 people on the live register out of the building, contracting and construction works industries. However, with the amount of work and money Fianna Fáil had left on hand the number on the live register who were involved in the building industry dropped to 11,259 by mid-July, 1973—a drop of 2,400. The Minister for Local Government found that because we had exercised prudence and balanced the budget that Fianna Fáil had a planned programme and he was able to introduce his crash programme.
When we were in government I remember Deputy O'Connell regularly looked for a debate on what he called "the building crisis". The Minister for Local Government resolved that crisis by creating another. He spent the money in that period and employed an additional 2,400 people. However, according to the latest statistics issued on 17th October, 1975, the number on the live register from the building, contracting and construction works industries was 22,050—double the figure of July, 1973.
Will the Deputy give the figure for October, 1972?
I have not that information. I thought the appropriate figure was the one on the date we left office. I should imagine the number would be less in October because generally the months of January, February and March are the worst periods for unemployment.
The 14-point programme of the Coalition was all about employment. We were told we had some of the greatest geniuses ever to appear on the political scene. Even I half believed the "whiz kids" would stabilise prices, halt redundancies and reduce unemployment. They had been telling me for so long how to do it and they convinced more than half the people that they had the capacity to do the job. I should like to quote from the report of the Confederation of Irish Industry in their Economic Review, autumn 1975. Under the heading of "Building Materials Sector and Production" they stated with regard to housing:
The bulk of this fall has been in the private sector. It is noteworthy that allocations from the public capital programme to the private sector have declined by almost 4 per cent in real terms over the period 1973-74 to 1975, despite a 50 per cent increase in current terms.
The Minister for Local Government tells us we are getting more for our money but we are getting much less. The report also stated that, "another useful indicator of building activity are domestic cement sales". Deputy Dowling tried to get this message across to Deputy Coughlan some time ago but he had some difficulty. The report further stated:
The cement sales show a decrease of approximately 10 per cent for the first nine months of 1975 over the corresponding period for 1974, and are almost 14 per cent down on the same period in 1973.
Fewer people are working and less cement and timber are being used. Still, the Minister for Local Government who projects himself regularly as the one man in the House who has been proved to be honest and to have told the truth says he is telling the truth when he tells us that more houses are being built.
I quote the CII report again:
By far the largest single industry to be hit by unemployment in the 12 months up to the middle of last September——
that is, September, 1975
——has been the building and construction industry and in that period the industry was forced to shed some 8,152 workers.
This confirms the figures I gave. They go on to say:
Of these, 7,251 were employed in general building, construction and repair work. These figures take no account of reduced overtime and short time working.
That is a very important factor. On page 12, under the heading "Outlook", they say:
The present Government has tended to adopt an unyielding attitude to the construction industry, rarely acknowledging that the industry was experiencing difficulties.
I shall not develop that except to say that the Confederation of Irish Industry in their written report in the Economic Review, August 1975, believe as I do that the Minister for Local Government is not coming clean. They have spelt out that the construction industry has been the largest single industry that has been hit. Unemployment in the manufacturing industry at 13 per cent is extremely alarming.
Since January, 1974, the number employed in manufacturing industry has dropped by an estimated 18,000 persons. That has wiped out all the gains we had been making over the last seven years. Industrial output has fallen by 8 per cent since the middle of last year and the position is that even if the growth rates in output and employment achieved in the earlier part of the decade were to be resumed immediately it would take about five years to get back to last year's level of employment in manufacturing industry which was only half of that of our main trading partners.
The changes that have occurred over the last 18 months have highlighted the fundamental weaknesses in the structure of our economy which must now be rectified. First, direct manufacturing costs have risen much more rapidly here than elsewhere. This has obvious implications when we are operating in a large free trade area during a period of recession such as we are going through. Secondly, the cost of overheads services continues to rise rapidly during a period when industry has to cut back output because of falling demand. Thirdly, new commitments for industrial development have slowed considerably because of the rapid decline in profitability and lack of confidence on the part of industrialists. This lack of confidence is one of the major things from which we are suffering at present.
Deputy Dowling referred to the 40,000 school leavers. There is no provision for them. The national work force is probably increasing at the rate of about 30,000 per annum. On the other hand, employment in manufacturing industry has declined by over 15,000 in the last year and this downward trend is continuing and there does not seem to be any sign of a halt to that downward trend.
We are certainly going to reach a figure much greater than 110,000 unemployed. A big problem is that retained earnings in industry are probably down by at least 75 per cent in real terms on 1974.
I do not see how the Government can pull themselves up through the format they are at present adopting in this regard. The published data over the first two quarters of this year in relation to production rates in manufacturing industry show an extremely alarming situation. In the first quarter of this year the volume of manufacturing output was 9½ per cent lower than in the corresponding period in 1964 at a stage when we wanted increased output. In the second quarter there was a similar graph with the volume of manufacturing output at 8.5 per cent lower than in the corresponding period of 1974.
There was one extraordinary feature about the Taoiseach's contribution this morning. I was handed a copy of the Taoiseach's speech this morning. On page 3 of the original version there was to be a statement by the Taoiseach that seasonally adjusted data for output in manufacturing and mining showed that the level of production in the first quarter of 1975 was maintained in the second quarter. That proposed statement, after the words had been printed on page 3, had to be wiped out by his officials on the basis of somebody checking it through before he came into the House and saying, "You cannot say that because you cannot stand over it." It is a good thing that we have one man in the Government who arranges with his officials to cross out something that he cannot stand over. I wish we could say the same for all of them. That was crossed out. It had to be done this morning and I suppose the time factor precluded the printing of a new page.
I want to put on record that the reason why the Taoiseach could not make that statement this morning is that the figure was 8.5 per cent lower than in the corresponding period in 1974. I hope the figures for the third and fourth quarters will not show a similar trend. I am fearful that they will.
There is the shocking situation that almost every firm in the country— there may be a few that are going reasonably well—can report spare production capacity. The clothing, footwear, textile, wood and furniture sectors continue to show alarming increases in unemployment and are being joined in that situation by the metal and engineering sectors which had been hanging on reasonably well up to now.
Against this background the IDA have been struggling to create jobs and to prevent the number of unemployed from increasing disastrously. I have had experience of the work of the IDA and of CTT. I know how dedicated the officials of these bodies are, particularly the overseas representatives who work night and day to attract industry here in order that we will have exports. On the export side a number of firms are succeeding despite the competition that is generated by the inflation from which we are suffering.
A very short time ago when I stood on the other side of the House as Minister for Industry and Commerce and talked in terms of grants and capital development and tried to defend the expenditure of anything from £2,000 to £3,000 on the creation of a job, the knowledgeable people who at that time were on this side of the House could not understand why I could not create jobs at a lesser figure. I am not making any reflection on the Parliamentary Secretary sitting opposite me. I regret that the mathematical genius, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, has left because I wanted him to do this sum. The Taoiseach, this morning, in dealing with the Industrial Development Authority, said:
In the sphere of manufacturing industry, the promotion campaign of the Industrial Development Authority continues to be successful. The job potential of new projects approved this year will be about 17,000 and the total investment involved will amount to about £320 million.
Later on he spoke about having to borrow £700 million to keep the country going. I do not want to go on record as criticising the IDA but I wonder where we are going. I did this quick sum and that is why I was anxious to have the mathematical genius to help me. When I divided £17,000 into £320 million I was frightened at the answer. I got £18,823. The Taoiseach comes into the House, claps himself on the back, compliments the IDA and I presume will compliment the Minister for Industry and Commerce because that part of the Taoiseach's script would have been prepared by the Department of Industry and Commerce.
The Minister for Industry and Commerce is another man who only wanted to get across the House to pull it out of the depths into which the Fianna Fáil fellows put it. The ordinary man down the country wonders how the country can survive with 110,000 unproductive people getting the dole. On the other hand, the Government are borrowing from the Arabs, the Germans or whereever the Minister for Finance can traipse with his valise. We are borrowing large sums in order to spend £18,823 on creating an IDA job. After doing that sum I found later in the Taoiseach's speech what he described as another encouraging feature:
Another encouraging feature of the 1975 performance, despite the recession, is the remarkable level of industrial investment by existing domestic industry.
The Minister for Labour said earlier today that there were some well-off firms who would be paying equal pay to women workers on the 1st January. Obviously he knows all the well-off firms. The Taoiseach went on to say:
In the first eight months of this year the IDA have approved proposals from domestic industry involving a total fixed asset investment of £127 million and a job potential of £5,500.
I again found myself doing my sums. We know from tradition that the poor Irish investor is never as fairly dealt with as the foreign one.
When I was Minister for Industry and Commerce, Deputies, county councillors and even men with proposals to start making concrete blocks, some metal work products or something else used come to me and say: "How is it that it is so hard to get a grant from the Government? If it was a German who was looking for a grant he would only have to walk in and he would be asked how much he wanted." I know that has changed but we are creating 5,500 jobs at a cost of £127 million. After doing my sum I found that while the previous one worked out at £18,823 this worked out at £23,090 to create a job. I hope the Minister for Industry and Commerce will contribute to this debate and I hope the Parliamentary Secretary will convey my query to him.
The Taoiseach opens this debate. I always thought he should reply to it but for some reason or other he does not. I hope, if it is the Minister for Finance who is replying, if he has returned from one of his borrowing expeditions, or the Minister for Industry and Commerce, that this issue can be cleared up. The traditional accepted thing was that it cost £2,000 to £3,000 to create an industrial job in this country. We now find that it costs the figure I just quoted. I am sure the Taoiseach's speech was checked to make sure there was no mistake. This was let through, so it must be the truth. We should be told it is recognised as official policy to spend £23,000 on the creation of an industrial job.
I am fully satisfied that if that type of money was invested in agriculture it would produce a great many more jobs for a lot less money properly invested. The Government should look seriously at this. There is a sympathetic note floating around, which is capitalised on by the Government, that Ireland's economic difficulties have been caused by outside interests. This was an often repeated statement by the Minister for Industry and Commerce until the Taoiseach thought so much of it that he came into the House and said the direct opposite. The apparent legitimacy of this notion, apart from what the Taoiseach said, must fall when we consider that while other European countries have successfully overcome most of their economic difficulties Ireland has gone further and further along the road to economic decline. The dependence that has been displayed by this Government on international governments to do the work this Government were elected to do is now clearly seen to be spineless and a red herring course they have been following.
This evening we had the Minister for Defence blaming the sheiks for having created problems in this regard. The Government are still playing the old game. The Taoiseach, in his report on the Rome Summit meeting, said in the House on the 4th December, 1975:
It is particularly noteworthy that the rate of inflation in Germany in the year to November, 1975 was of the order of 5 or 6 per cent. Our figure is more than three times that level. I cannot emphasise strongly enough the conclusions, reinforced by the discussions in Rome, that we will have no prospect of being able to benefit by the upturn in world trade if we cannot sell what we produce; and this we will most certainly be unable to do unless we can make our prices competitive. Growth, employment and the prosperity of our country depends on this.
The Taoiseach on that day, taken away for once from the euphoria to which I have already referred, of being persuaded at his Cabinet table how well things have gone and how well the Minister for Defence, as he said today, had seen prices stabilise and redundancies and unemployment halted, had to go to Rome to learn that the other countries had come to grips with the situation but that we were away down the line. He had to appear since on television and we had his speech today again reiterating this demand. He found himself today in the position of having to say:
At all events, it seems likely that we may not be able to draw a great deal of benefit from the international recovery until towards the end of next year. It is going to be a tough year and we have to face up to that. We are balanced on the knife edge between even greater depression or—if we act sensibly— recovery.
He goes on to talk in terms of the manner in which they want to act sensibly. He ends with the same old jazz of appeal, appeal, appeal. When will this Government recognise their responsibility and try to put this country back on its feet? Before he went into the appeal he said that the prospective deficit on the current budget is now almost £280 million, more than twice the budgeted figure of £125 million, and the total Government borrowing at home and abroad will be in the order of £700 million as against the £450 million originally intended. The "whiz kids" budgeted for a debt. The Minister for Finance came here last year and pooh-poohed the idea that anybody could be more factual; he was budgeting for a deficit of £450 million and by the end of this year we would be back on an even keel and at the head of the league because we had the Minister for Industry and Commerce regularly saying, every time a question was asked on employment, production or exports: "You must remember that when we took over in March, 1973 the Irish were at the bottom of the table and we are now two or three from the top."
We were being blinded by a most efficient propaganda machine of Government Ministers with very efficient Government Information Services. Now the Taoiseach tells us that unless we do something and pull up our socks, the economy of the country next year—unless something extraordinary happens—will cost £1,300 million. Yesterday we had headlines in the newspapers about a £100 million loan, one-thirteenth part of the bill. We have the doubtful consolation—I think it may be a disaster —that it is people in Europe who are now telling us how we must spend that money. As a member of a former Government and a prospective member of a future one——
You must be joking.
I am very serious. When we were entering Europe I heard Deputy Oliver Flanagan, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Local Government, who opposed entry to the EEC, telling us that if we entered Europe Europeans would be telling us what to do and that we would have to play ball with them because this would only be a kind of county council. We declared that was not so, that we would be our own bosses. The country has now gone so much into pawn as a result of the operations of an inefficient Government that the EEC, even though we boasted so much about our presidency for a six-month period, the people who are our guarantors in Europe in respect of the £100 million that we are borrowing have so little faith in the Coalition Government that part of the specific requirements as regards our getting this loan is that they tell us how to spend it. They know the Government are incapable of spending it properly in the national interest themselves. This is a disaster.
The Deputy has three minutes left.
I should like to repeat that, as our spokesman Deputy Colley has consistently said about the Government's economic approach, this is a crazy paradox. We are borrowing money from the Arabs; we are desperately in need of investment but we steer wealth away with our wealth tax. We need initiative but we frown on enterprise and introduce a capital gains tax. We never needed more productivity so badly and we tax the producers out of existence. I have been studying the working of the Government over the past three years. We had faults but the brazenness of the Government still insisting that they are making a good job of running the country in a situation when their Taoiseach had to say here this morning: "We would need to borrow £1,300 million to keep the country going over the next 12 months"— is hard to beat. I think that is the greatest castigation the Government could ever get.
I have a certain admiration for Deputy Lalor's fort-rightness and his honesty about the defects in the previous Government. I think he would agree that perhaps the greatest defect was that they were in power too long. Any Government that are in power for 16 years in a democratic society are in power too long. I hope that the present Government will not repeat that performance and be in power for 16 years: I would not like to see it. If the public were smart enough they would almost alternate Governments and get the best of all worlds by having one party competing with another.
At present we have an opportunity of reviewing the performance of the Government over the past year, a sad year and a bad year for the country. The country faces a very serious economic situation and there must be agonising moments for the Government, faced with the gloomy prospect of increasing unemployment, decreased production and increasing debt and no real sign of an upturn in the economy. I can appreciate the difficulties.
I heard and read speeches by the Opposition and I confess to a certain feeling of despondency at some of the speeches because it is not good enough that any Opposition party should merely categorise the mistakes made and engage in destructive criticism. I expected—I was sadly disillusioned that the Leader of the Opposition and his spokesmen did not offer—constructive proposals. When we were in Opposition we did offer such proposals. We pointed out what was wrong and showed where the Government were making mistakes or were oblivious of problems and we followed that up with constructive proposals which I may say the Government then accepted.
I was saddened by not hearing constructive criticism from the Opposition today. It is bad for the country that we have an ineffective Opposition —and I am casting no slur on individual members of the Opposition. It is also bad for a Government that there is ineffective Opposition. A Government become very arrogant if they do not have an effective Opposition telling them what to do and unfortunately this is sadly lacking at present. I should like more constructive proposals: if the Government are not doing something the Opposition should let the country see that they could do it. That is the only way to make a Government conscious of the need to govern in the best interests of all. I have criticised the Government and I have been branded for criticising them but on each occasion I put forward constructive proposals. I am not afraid to criticise and to condemn them when I feel they are doing wrong. I always legitimise that by offering constructive proposals over and over again because that is the only way we can get them to meet the needs of the people.
Debate adjourned.
The Dáil adjourned at 10.30 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Thursday, 18th December, 1975.