There was absolutely nothing in Deputy Lynch's speech which could be demonstrated to be referable to anything the Minister actually proposed. There is no hint in his speech to show that anyone, the think-tank or anyone else, ever sat down with the speech, which was available from four o'clock the previous day, and threw even 20 words together about what the Minister proposed. That is the kind of Opposition we have got, and that is the party which will offer itself at the next election as an alternative Government.
I want to make it clear that my remarks are not intended as an assault on Deputy Lynch, because I believe any other Opposition spokesman would have behaved in the same way. I say all this to underpin my basic plea that this kind of think-tank— particularly in the economic field in which all Governments and all Oppositions are at present in the dark to some extent, because we do not know quite what has overtaken us, and even the economic experts disagree—that this kind of ritual debating ding-dong is out of date. We ought not to fall over backwards paying tribute to it and talking grandly and pompously about the dignity of the House and what the people expect of us and so on. The people certainly expect things of the Dáil, and more particularly of the Government, and are frequently disappointed in their expectations. But I cannot believe the people give a curse whether we debate this budget for six minutes, six hours or 600 hours. I do not think they care, and we should not go through the idiotic pretence of supposing they do.
I have already referred to the absolute innocence of any reference of a concrete nature to the Minister's actual proposals in Deputy Lynch's speech. I now will refer to the feebleness of an Opposition which will stuff into their leader's speech, as though it were an authority which would carry the speech on its back, quotations from the newspapers. A schoolboy in a debate might very well suppose that, if he could find an apposite quotation from the editorial of that day's paper, it would carry a couple of paragraphs of his speech and win him favour with the adjudicator for having done his homework. But what are we to make of a Leader of an Opposition who was Taoiseach for seven years, before that was Minister for Finance and before that was Minister for Industry and Commerce, who is one of three of four men who know most about the Irish economy, who in the course of a ritual speech, which must have been prepared long before the debate began, made at least three respectful references to Press comment on the Minister's budget? He must have his own comments on the budget. Who are these nameless commentators he is relying on? Deputy Lynch probably knows 40 times more about the economy and fiscal measures than the people he is so respectfully quoting. It is the feebleness of his speech that I am complaining about.
At column 802, Volume 287, of the Official Report he says:
The Minister appears to have recognised the problem which he created himself in this way with his proposal to introduce a price index which would include tax increases. That has received very adverse comment in at least one leading article in today's newspapers.
Dear me! We have all received adverse comment in the daily newspapers from time to time. What kind of an inclusion is that in the budget speech barring a crisis, the main speech of the year of the Leader of the Opposition? What kind of material is that? Are we supposed to fall over backwards because the writer of a leading article in one of today's papers has commented adversely on what we have done? Of what value is that comment compared with a personal comment of a Leader of the Opposition? In the same column he says:
Some estimates suggest that the overall deflation resulting from the budget could add up to—I heard this in an economic comment on the radio this morning—20,000 more people in the ranks of the unemployed.
He tells us what he heard when casually listening to the wireless that morning and treats it as though it was of the slightest importance here. He does not even give us the man's name although he probably was named on the radio. At column 795 he says:
The one unwelcome result we appear to have obtained from this debt finance spending has been the dangerously high level of inflation. Two days ago the Irish Independent in its second leader under the heading “What Policy” had this to say:
and then we heard a tract from the Irish Independent.
Like other newspapers, the Irish Independent has extremely competent people on its economic staff who are well able to produce economic comment; and of course, if you know who is writing the material, it deserves as much attention as that person's reputation and training have earned for him. But what is one to make of a Leader of an Opposition who packs out his speech, or is allowed to do so by his party, with comments casually picked up from the day's newspapers or the radio? It is possible that the members of his party who are trying to sink him wish this kind of material on him. It is possible that some of his bitterest enemies are in the think-tank and push speeches on him of which he should be ashamed and which he should not deliver. As I said, that is a possibility and I hope for his sake it is not true, but it should be looked at.
There is not a great deal to get one's teeth into in Deputy Lynch's budget speech. While, on the one hand, he pays the Minister a tribute for deciding to pay for day-to-day spending by taxation, on the other hand he complains in very general terms, without actually commenting on any individual impost, about taxation. That type of comment is no use. We do not want to hear it. It is only wasting the time of this House and the people watching us. Of what is he in favour? Is he in favour of taxation? He appears to be when he commends the Minister for deciding to try to pay more of the day-to-day expenditure by taxation. Why then complain about taxation at the end of his speech? He does not say that tax should be imposed on any particular sector which the Minister has let off scot free. He complains about its incidence on the motoring public.
Most of us are motorists and we will all feel the effects of the new taxes. We will all grumble and then forget them, as taxation increases usually are forgotten and have been under all Governments. Some businesses may be seriously hit. It is no use telling us that motorists will resent this tax. We knew that before the budget was introduced. We did not need Deputy Lynch to tell us. We do not want to have to listen to Deputy after Deputy telling us that we are savaging the motorist. We know the motorist is hard hit but what we want to know is this: if we let off the motorist where will we get the money? From whom would the Opposition like us to extract the money? That is what we want to know and that is the only kind of talk about which the people care.
The moaning about taxation is uninteresting and irrelevant. Nobody wants to be bothered with it unless it is accompanied by a suggestion on where Deputy Lynch and his party would wish this burden to fall. He commends the Minister for paying his way by taxation but complains against one of the major fields of impost which the Minister proposed. Where else will this taxation fall?
This morning I listened to Deputy Wilson and, as far as I could make out through the roars, he seemed to be complaining about the Government relying on improvements in social welfare levels since they took office to win by-elections. He seemed to be saying that the Government would be singing a different song now because of the mechanism for reducing the number of people in receipt of what is familiarly known as the "smallholders dole". How does he square what he said this morning with what his leader said at column 809 last Thursday? Deputy Lynch said:
Some attempt was made to regularise unemployment assistance to some people who could afford to do without it. That is commendable.
I do not criticise Deputy Lynch for putting this in gentle language, but essentially what he was saying is that it is commendable to reduce the number of people on the dole. Will he go down and say that in Bangor Erris? No, he will not—if he did, people would respect him for it. That essentially is the reason why budget debates of the type we have had here since I came to this House three years ago seem to me to be so valueless.
So far as the Opposition are concerned it is simply an exercise, absolutely predictable, pre-cooked and pre-digested, thought out in advance, whinging and whining. The present Opposition are not unique in that; no doubt the same criticism might have been levelled at us before the change of Government. There was no suggestion about what ought to have been done instead of the disagreeable things this budget does and most budgets do. There was no suggestion about where the health burden might have been allowed to fall. Deputy Lynch said before sitting down that he had intended dealing with other points in the budget and I do not know why he abandoned them because—perhaps I am wrong— I think he spoke for less than an hour. These are the very points we wanted to hear. The ritual condemnation of the Government's alleged mismanagement of this and that is heard every day—at Question Time, in Private Members' business and so on. We want to hear what a Fianna Fáil budget would be like had they been in office now. That we did not hear and that is why I write off their claim to return to Government and manage the economy. I discount it as of no weight.
At the same time I confess that I agreed with a couple of Deputy Lynch's points. They were not specifically directed against the budget. I agree with the mildly conservative line he appeared to take in the latter part of his speech and with the soft spot he evidently—and rightly, in my view— has for self-reliance and private enterprise. I have attacked his speech, not himself personally, but I do not want to finish without saying that I agree that the number of house owners in the country should be increased rather than depressed and that it is the job of a Government as far as possible to do that. That is my own view. I agree with most of what he said about recruitment of community effort particularly with young people, in order to approach national problems. If Deputy Lynch and his party were to devote more time to considering how the ideas latent in both these very brief arguments could be sold to the people and incorporated in a serious political programme it would be more valuable and would attract much more interest and perhaps more political support.
My own reflection on this budget and on previous budgets, including Fianna Fáil budgets, is a very general one, not an economist's reflection since I am not an economist. It seems to me that governments, possibly through the accumulation of generations of democratic existence which carries with it the constant effort to attract political support and, in a sense perhaps, buy votes, have saddled themselves with tasks that I feel —not just now but under Fianna Fáil also—in some respects are almost beyond them.
We talk glibly about how the Irish people will respond but there is no conscious entity known as the Irish people. The Irish people is a collection of several million individual consciousnesses but there is no conscious entity which will react or respond in any way analogous to an individual reacting or responding to a particular need. I think the kind of response a government seeks in seeking wage restraints and so on is not likely to be generated by appeals to a mass of people. I have the deepest sympathy for the Government's appeals in this regard as I had for previous Government appeals. I hoped they would be successful but there is the weakness in appeals of this kind that an individual is the person that is listening, not a collectivity. The individual has only one wage claim and feels that his claim will not do anybody any harm and will not bring the country to its knees. We are without institutions and structures—much as I dislike that lunchtime seminar word—without mechanisms which create or tend to create communal or national consciousness of this kind. In wartime or in response to some serious crisis of that kind you get something approaching a response like that but not, I think, to an economic situation, serious though it is, which, from the individual's—perhaps the uninstructed individual's—point of view, does not seem to change much from day to day.
The individual, apart from feeling that the concession of his claim will not do any great harm, also feels fairly powerless to help. He may have goodwill in regard to helping his country in an economic difficulty but feels perhaps that any effort he can make will be lost, absorbed and forgotten in the generality of people who are either not working at all or even working against him. Speaking above party lines I feel that it is for that reason that Governments here will sooner or later have to take a look with a very long perspective at their way of regulating the economy and their way of allowing it to be supposed by the people that the prosperity of the economy and the happiness of society are things over which the Government have a very strong and powerful degree of control. The degree of control any Government have over the economy or society is very limited but I do not think control is impossible to achieve. It is possible to achieve and has been achieved. I am sorry to say the examples are all in countries that have tyrannies and where I would not wish to live, countries I should never like this country to copy.
There are societies, little though I admire them as regards their failure to concede freedom of speech, in which via authoritarian ways people are made to think differently about how societies work, and the way they live and a certain different kind of consciousness is generated in which it is possible to recruit the energy of the people into a conscious economic and social operation. We miss these mechanisms here. I am not far away here from Deputy Lynch's thought when he mentioned communities in saying that I believe that the way that is most congenial to Irish people for providing these institutions is to concentrate on the community, possibly even in a rather small community and give that community some sense of responsibility for its own economic and social future. Most communities in Ireland, look essentially to Dublin for the provision of a factory. There may be, and often is, a very strong degree of local initiative involved but essentially Dublin is regarded as a necessary piece of the pattern of economic development and social development— Dublin must provide grants for factories, investigate the potentialities of the area from the point of view of employment, must provide the school and school buses and so on.
That role is one which Governments up to this have willingly assumed and, I suppose, recruited political support by doing so. The acquiescence of successive Governments in all of this work is reaching an impossible point. Deputy Cunningham may be about to say that I fear this Government are not able to dispose of these tasks, but that is not what I mean. During the last generation Governments generally have reached the point of leaving the individual or the small community quite powerless to do anything in regard to their economic or social future. In that way Governments have deprived themselves of the most powerful weapon of economic and social progress, namely, the effort which the individual or the community can put into their own future. What I am saying is nothing new. It has been said before many times but it is a relevant reflection in the context of the budget statements and at a time of very severe difficulty, a difficulty that is shared by other countries also. At a time when comment both inside and outside this House seems so impotent, so irrelevant, would it have made any difference to our economic and social prosperity if the Minister had drafted his imposts differently? He must operate within the conventional framework which he inherited. Had he proposed an alternative scheme can anyone say that it would have resulted in solving the unemployment problem, in providing houses for all those who need them, in reducing the inflation rate to zero? Nobody can point to an alternative scheme that would have achieved these aims in such times of difficulty as we are experiencing.
In the kind of world in which we live there is a limit to what Governments can do in regard to budgeting, and that is why I say more responsibility must be given to the individual, to communities, be they small or otherwise, to help them to evolve in a way that will give them the opportunity of controlling and shaping their economic destinies but with all the necessary help that central Government can provide. Central Government, though, must never appear to assume total responsibility for the achieving or non-achieving of prosperity and happiness.
In conclusion I ask again that the earlier part of my speech not be taken as a personal attack on the Leader of the Opposition. I should be very sorry were anyone to take it in that sense but his speech of Thursday last showed how impotent are this Opposition or how impotent any Opposition might be, in their criticism of budget proposals.
The Minister carries a heavy burden by reason of his office but I suppose this could have been said of all his predecessors during their periods in office. However, the Minister has weathered well the past few years. I wish him every success in respect of his proposals.
