What I am saying is that it is quite possible that the price increase rate in the Community's agricultural produce may be less than the inflation rate in member countries, and not just here, because the surplus situation is such that the tendency may be to increase certain farm prices less than the increase in consumer prices in order gradually to phase out the surplus. It is a fact of life that that tendency will be there and farmers cannot expect their price increases in Brussels to be as great as the consumer price in the Community as a whole. It is, of course, our duty to try to keep our price increases down to Community level and that must be our aim and object. It is towards that that we will be making progress in the second half of this year now that we have behind us the bulk of the price increases brought about by the 35 per cent drop in sterling in the 18 months ended October last. That having worked through our system we are moving in now to a period of relative price stability especially with the help of the national wage agreement. It is expected that in the second half of this year we shall move into single figure inflation and then next year to a level of inflation of the kind we were used to before this crisis started. That is the object of our policy and all our efforts must now be bent towards that objective.
Coming to the impact of public opinion on membership of the Community, I think that probably it has not been as positive as would be justified on a straightforward economic analysis because membership has, of course, coincided with a world slump and people do not easily distinguish causes and effects. The last four years have been a difficult period because of the world economic situation and the fact that has coincided with membership of the EEC may confuse some people into thinking there is a relationship between them. It must be said that a large part of the benefits of membership has been concentrated in rural areas and such bad effects as there have been on prices and unemployment have been largely concentrated in urban areas. Other factors which had an impact on public opinion and damped down some of the earlier enthusiasm have been the exceptional slump which affected opinion in farming circles in 1974 and 1975 and, throughout the country generally and disappointment with the regional fund, even though it was not built up in the campaign some people have alleged. The fact is we had a long negotiation about this at the end of which we certainly got a much bigger share of the fund than we started with but still quite inadequate.
Another thing which has made some impact on public opinion of an unfavourable kind in a general way is that there seems to be a lot of national in-fighting in the Community and countries seem to be constantly jockeying for position to their own advantage. I think it is entirely proper for the Irish Government to do this but most improper for other countries to follow suit. If we do not fight our corner with great enthusiasm and vigour we are subject to criticism at home, and that is as it should be, but then the same critic will say that the Community really is not what it was cracked up to be with all these countries trying to get something for themselves. Of course, the same person would be very upset if we were not trying to get what we feel we are entitled to.
Part of the adverse impression of in-fighting in the Community derives from the fact that this kind of conflict situation makes news and is highlighted in the media rather than the cases where results are achieved. One of the curious features of the Community is that most of the results in terms of concrete legislation involving decisions that affect our lives positively are achieved quietly, silently and effectively and emerge at the Council of Ministers at what is called A points, decisions which have been agreed without ever having to come before Ministers even to discuss never mind disagree about or fight over. These never make headlines. In fact, they pass unnoticed by the public and sometimes by ourselves. Some of these decisions are quite important and sometimes one comes across an important decision of which one had not been aware at the time because it was not necessary for that important decision to come up for discussion at Government level.
An area where there is disagreement between countries and where it reaches ministerial level is a great dramatic exercise making headlines in the papers and forming a source of material for our television programmes. The period we have gone through has been one in which the amount of such in-fighting by different countries seeking to safeguard their own interests has probably been greater than normal not merely because of the general world slump, which makes countries more sensitive to even relatively small national interests, but also because, and this is not sufficiently appreciated, these have been very difficult years during which the Community has been adjusting to enlargement.
The original Community was established on the basis of the common interest of the six original members. They did not need a mutton and lamb policy. Mutton and lamb are not eaten to any extent and it was felt that there was no need for such a policy. They did need a fish access policy where they saw other countries joining them because they wanted to get access to their fish, and so a pattern of Community policies emerged reflecting the interest, or lack of interest in some cases, of the six original member countries in the different sectors of the economy.
Then the Community was enlarged. Three new countries joined, two of them islands, one a peninsula, all with different attitudes and approaches to many problems and having different interests. Immediately we are in the position where we find that, in the absence of a mutton and lamb policy, our lamb cannot be exported to France at every period of the year. This is, by all normal standards of what the Community is about, completely against the principle of the Community. But this arrangement as it stands is in the interests of and satisfies the six original members, so we have to fight to get it changed, to fight to get the Community policies modified to meet the needs of an enlarged Community. Then we come into conflict with France on that.
Again in the case of the fish policy, Britain and ourselves find that the policy adopted in 1970 in anticipation of our membership is totally unrelated to our needs and is antipathetical to our interests, and we have to fight to get that changed. Therefore, part of the conflicts that have occurred during these years between member states have been conflicts arising from the adjustments needed to an enlarged Community, and this has again given the impression that the Community is composed of countries pursuing only their own interests and not concerned with general Community interests.
That is a misleading impression but it is not a totally false one, because each country has to have regard to its own interest. It is only by each country fighting its own corner that a balanced policy covering the interest of all will eventually emerge. However, the impression one gets of constant conflicts and of national interests being pursued without any regard to others is in fact false. One of the interesting things about the Community, which is difficult to communicate but which one feels very quickly when one is involved in its processes, is the extent to which there is a Community with its own conventions as well as laws—conventions in a sense of parliamentary conventions rather in the sense of international agreements—conventions unwritten, unspoken and difficult to pin down, under which you may not push a national interest beyond a certain point of unreason; if you do you will evoke such hostility from others that, if it should be a large and important country, you will find it very inconvenient in the period that follows when you come to discuss other matters in which you have an interest.
Therefore, there is a constraint on the operation of national interest. It is a constraint which varies according to the topic; it varies according to the country. It is easier for a large country to get away with pursuing a national interest, perhaps a smallish national interest, than it is for a small country to get away with pursuing even quite a large national interest. There is not complete equality, but all countries are constrained by the need to make the system work by the disastrous effects on all of them if it broke down. None of them therefore can pursue a national interest beyond a certain point. The British Agriculture Minister discovered this in the last few weeks. He tried to get too much at the last meeting and found that that led to such resistance that, whatever his domestic opinion was, whatever his Cabinet told him he ought to try and get, it was simply not possible to improve significantly on the package he had achieved. He had gone as far as anybody was going to allow him to go.
These constraints are there, and they are unseen and unhighlighted. They are not things that people generally are conscious of, but it is the operation of these constraints that prevents the pursuit of national self-interest from breaking down the Community. What is striking about the Community is that, despite the strains imposed by a period of economic difficulties and the problems, on top of that, of adjusting to a large Community, the Community has come through these years battered, not in terribly good shape but still alive and going strong and without any diminution in its achievements obtained before this difficult period. What was called the acquis communantaire has been maintained. There has not been a growth of protectionism. Despite all the pressures, free trade has been maintained with only very minor deviations in exceptional cases within the Community, and the Community is basically unaffected at its roots by all that has happened in this period.
At the same time I would not diminish the failures of the Community in this period. It is important that we should be conscious of them. They are failures at several levels. They are not fatal failures. They have not undermined the Community, but they have certainly prevented it from making progress which all had expected and many had hoped.
The economic setback deriving from the oil crisis has had a bad effect here. It has brought out the innate nationalism of countries more strongly than perhaps otherwise would have been the case. For example, when the oil embargo was imposed, there was a notable lack of solidarity among member states at that time. Countries, instead of realising that only by joining together could they effectively protect themselves from the effects of the oil embargo, selfishly pursued their own interests and only afterwards, on reflecting, realised that that had perhaps been a mistake.
Moreover, the fact that one of the three new member states is one which still thinks as a post-imperial nation state, and which has not psychologically accepted the idea of being part of the Community, has certainly made more difficult progress towards some of the Community's objectives. Within the Community one country, France, has always, since the time the Community started in 1958, been very conscious of its national interest and concerned to protect its national sovereignty, and has been throughout this period unenthusiastic about a significant further evolution towards a political integration or even towards much further economic integration. The hesitations of that country are in some way reinforced by the fact that it has another member state which, with a somewhat similar history of trying to adjust to the period after the end of empire, has found it difficult to accept psychologically all the implications of Community membership. France as a continental country, as a founder member longer in the Community, has less difficulty in accepting the disciplines of the Community as a whole as it is than Britain, but those countries tend to think in terms more of their interests of a nation state, and both have difficulty in realising how much their own interest could in the longer run be better served were they really to pool all their resources with other member countries and to operate genuinely as a Community.
There is also the complicating factor that the long historic rivalry between Britain and France is by no means entirely dead. While both of them tend to pursue rather more national policies than the other member states, that does not mean that they are doing so in harmony or in parallel; occasionally they do so in opposite directions, which complicates the job of the Community in trying to reach agreement on policies.
Our interest in this country lies in strengthening the institutions of the Community with all their defects. This has been a consistent Irish position, respected even by those who take a different viewpoint—for example, I think, by France. Our calculation here is compounded of interest and idealism. I think the idea of working a united Europe is one which commands among many people in Ireland consent and in some instances enthusiasm. We see it as others do, as a longish process. Were it to move too rapidly ahead we, like others, would find this uncomfortable at times. We see the future as lying in a closer political and economic intergration of the Community countries, now perhaps to be further enlarged. Within such a Community moving towards greater integration we are anxious that the institutional structure shall be capable of operating effectively, so that decisions are taken instead of being indefinitely postponed. There also should be a system which will safeguard the genuine interests of member countries, and above all of the smaller and weaker member countries. It has been the experience of those who have been in the Community much longer than we, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg that their interests as smaller smaller countries are best preserved against possible encroachments by larger neighbours through the use of the institutional structure of the Community and above all through the role of the Commission with their exclusive right of initiative. There are times when we could be forgiven for being a little sceptical about this because inevitably from time to time the Commission use the power of initiative in a manner unsatisfactory to a particular country. On several occasions they have used it in a manner certainly unsatisfactory to us. That was true of their original policy proposals for distribution of the regional fund between countries. It has been true of their initial proposals. Is the Deputy shaking his head.
