When we adjourned last Wednesday I had spoken for about 20 minutes. I had explained to the House that if the Minister's speech had contained nothing except the description of the contents of the Bill I would not have spoken for even 20 minutes because the Bill itself is plainly desirable and overdue. Not only had it been drafted under the Minister's predecessor but it had been introduced and had gone some distance through Second Stage. There would be no necessity, therefore, to hold up the House in regard to the Bill had the Minister not taken the opportunity to speak, in a somewhat larger perspective, about industrial development generally and in particular about the Industrial Development Consortium of which, for the first time, he gave the House and the country details last Wednesday.
I asked the Taoiseach the following morning not to order this item for last Thursday because I wanted to think about this consortium and talk to others about it. I emphasised that that was my only reason and I could not understand why I was ruled out of order in making that request because I understood that representation to the Taoiseach in regard to the Order of Business is properly made on the Order of Business, if not at any other time. However, the point did not arise because the other business on Thursday occupied the day. The Bill is now back here and I want to speak for some time about the consortium.
It has been mentioned by Government speakers on a couple of occasions since the election—by Deputy O'Donoghue, as Minister for Economic Planning and Development on 4th October and by the Minister's Parliamentary Secretary, Deputy Geoghegan-Quinn in reply to a question from Deputy Desmond two weeks ago. But we did not get details of it until now. In order to put it in a political setting I must recall to the House some of the more conspicuous items in the Fianna Fáil election manifesto. Under the heading "Industry and Commerce" in the first part of the manifesto and under the aspect of the pending disastrous unemployment situation unless stern and drastic action were taken the party made the following undertaking:
State Agencies set up to help the various industrial activities will be given a new direction and sense of purpose by——
I am quoting absolutely literally:
——a Séan Lemass type Industrial Development Consortium.
I hope I am not so petty as to begrudge the late Séan Lemass the credit he is entitled to for his achievements as Minister. He does not require any eulogy from me; his devotion and, above all, his practical approach to problems, are well known. At the same time, even the late Séan Lemass was not above making mistakes, and now that his name has been invoked in the context of the consortium I may remind the House that in 1950 he led the opposition of the entire Fianna Fáil Party to the first Industrial Development Authority Bill. He described the Bill which set up this authority, to which Ireland owes the fact that we are not a potato Republic, as "a typical product of the Fine Gael mind".
If it was that, I am proud to repeat those words today, because if there was one development in the last generation which ensured that the decline in agricultural employment, which was steeper here, perhaps, than in other parts of Western Europe, would to some extent at least be taken up by native industry. The Industrial Development Authority ensured that. If there was one thing more than another which ensured that that would be so, it was the IDA, which sprang from the heart and brain of the party to which I belong and which was bitterly opposed by the Deputies opposite who trooped into the lobby against it in July, 1950, led by Éamon de Valera, seconded by Seán Lemass, who called it a product of the Fine Gael mind, and damned it up and down the country for as long and as hard as they could. I am glad and proud that "typical product of the Fine Gael mind" has survived for 27 years the sneers and gibes of men who were not in their first youth when they said these things.
Mr. Séan Lemass was no beardless fledgling when he damned the IDA, but was 50 years of age with 16 years of experience as a Minister behind him. His view was that all that line of country was well looked after by the Department of Industry and Commerce, and that all that was necessary for Irish industrial development would take place in Kildare Street. I do not take away from his achievements, but his performance on that occasion and in this context disqualifies him from being ranked as a standard, beyond dispute or argument, of excellence and wisdom.
Having set the record straight in regard to the IDA, where it sprang from, who were its friends and enemies over the years, let me say in fairness to the memory of the late Taoiseach, I do not believe that he would have been seen dead with the twopenny-halfpenny outfit which this consortium threatens to be. Although I do not dispute that this consortium may do some good, to dignify it, in the context of a revolutionary and radical weapon to combat unemployment, with the appending of the late Séan Lemass's name, is an insult to him which no one on this side of the House has been guilty of. There is an element of sham and pretence about it which the late Séan Lemass would have despised. It is not a consortium at all.
In case anybody in or outside the House does not know it, a consortium, in the ordinary usage of the English language, is a commercial venture in which several persons take part, share risks and pool resources. There is not one iota of that element in the consortium being proposed. The only reason it is being given this title of "consortium" is to make up in weight of words what it otherwise lacks in order to be put in the balance beside the National Development Corporation, which the Labour Party advocated, in and out of Government, and any similar enterprise of a large scale in which the people involved would actively create employment.
From reading the Minister's speech and from the other clues that emerged in the party's manifesto and in other references since the election, one will see that this consortium is really a committee. Committees have their use, but the public have learned that a committee is a way of giving an appearance of being preoccupied with something when nothing is being done. If the Minister is hoping that by christening this thing a "consortium" he will avoid that criticism, I can promise him that as long as I am here he is very much mistaken. This is not a commercial consortium. There is no contribution of moneys or anything else except time from the persons involved. They are not directly going into business; they are not directly empowered to spend money; they have no statutory basis; and, if I understand the Parliamentary Secretary correctly, they will have no authority basis. The consortium has no power apart from whatever prestige its members may give it, which may be considerable. I am not saying that it will have no utility. It ought to have some utility if it is properly operated. I do not damn it in the way that the late Séan Lemass damned the IDA before it got off the ground. But if, as it appears, this is being held out to the people as a major weapon to combat unemployment, it is a sham and a fraud, like so much more of the manifesto.
We can contrast this with the National Development Corporation which Members of the Labour Party advocated during the course of the last Dáil and which was taken up by the party in general during the last election and with which my party in some degree at least agreed. I have no ideological objection one way or the other to a National Development Corporation. I expressed views a couple of times about it which were intended to place a question mark over it, because unless I know what a corporation of this kind will do I cannot judge it. To talk in grand terms about a National Development Corporation is fine, but are there genuine wealth producing economic activities still left undone here? If the answer to that is "yes", then why have they been left undone? Why has private enterprise not grappled with these major economic tasks? If the answer is that these tasks are of such a dimension that they are too big for the private sector, that private capital, although considerable in some instances, is just not big enough to cope with the investment which work of that kind would require, then I freely concede the necessity for a National Development Corporation.
But I have every objection to such a corporation if it will only make paper jobs, or go into unfair competition with private enterprise. There is no doubt that a National Development Corporation run along the right lines, having identified tasks which are beyond private enterprise, and going about those tasks in the right way, as the ESB did in regard to the generation of electricity, as Bord na Móna did in the development of our bogs, would be an asset. It is quite possible that in the offshore area in the future there may be jobs which are beyond private enterprise of a kind that can be mobilised here and it may be that a body such as a National Development Corporation would be the ideal body to deal with the exploitation of the wealth beneath the sea bed. Such a development corporation would be producing visible jobs in a way of which the private sector would have been incapable. To that extent it would be deserving of support. But this consortium does not and cannot create jobs.
What it can do is co-ordinate activity, and to that extent I support it and will watch its progress sympathetically. As one person I consulted put it, it can avoid the unnecessary wrangling that sometimes goes on, it can short-circuit conflicts, it can cut a corner off a triangle, it can make sure that two conflicting strategies are not being applied simultaneously by two different bodies. If it does that, it will justify its existence. It will not be possible to quantify its success in that field in terms of jobs created. The Government, to their credit, are not trying to pretend that unemployment is not a problem—it has been a big issue here over the last few years—but they are not doing much to solve it. Perhaps it is beyond solution by a Government; but to the extent that this is admitted on all sides to be a problem, it is fair to say that whatever chance this consortium may have of easing relations between semi-State bodies involved in the direct creation of employment and in the indirect creation of employment it should have some effect. I hope it will be successful and will justify its having been started.
A Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy—although no doubt with a lot of other things on his mind—should be able to do that co-ordination himself. When he foresees or hears of a conflict coming, or when he sees a knot being tangled up between two or three different agencies, he ought to be able by a few telephone calls to disentangle it. Although I dislike the fraudulent name of this consortium—for the reasons I have given— I do not despair of their being able to do that job in so far as it smoothes industrial development and the problems arising, and in so far as it facilitates relationships between the IDA on the one side and Córas Tráchtála or the Institute for Industrial Research and Standards on the other. Probably they will do a useful job in that respect.
The Minister's words about it went somewhat further than mere co-ordination. If I may quote from column 155 of the Official Report of 2nd November, 1977, he said:
The remit of the consortium will include the following: (a) setting job creation targets and monitoring and reviewing industrial progress in general, with particular reference to job creation and job maintenance; (b) identification of obstacles to growth and suggesting solutions, and (c) co-ordination of activities of existing State agencies to maximise the contribution of these agencies to industrial development.
I must tell the House that any views I have heard on this consortium have not been hostile ones at all. Nevertheless they have all tended spontaneously to the view that the only worthwhile operation that can be expected of this consortium is one of a co-ordinating type. The business of setting job targets and identifying obstacles can be undertaken by the Minister himself. The obstacles to job creation or to industrial growth are known by several bodies here and do not require a committee to put them into some different form of words.
Over and above that there is a certain degree of overlap here. I do not mention this as a criticism of the consortium. But there does appear to be a certain degree of overlap between the first two of these three objectives and some of the duties of the National Economic and Social Council. Incidentally, I note that a couple of the bodies which the Minister envisages for representation on this consortium are at present on the NESC. This may be no harm, but it takes somewhat from what might appear to be the originality of the tasks set for this consortium.
When the Minister comes to reply I daresay I will be asked why I did not make more specific observations on this consortium instead of merely putting it in a perspective unflattering to the Government party. I make one specific criticism of it—I do not mean this in a particularly hostile way but I feel it is apt—it has one serious failing. I do not overlook the fact that it is described specifically as industrial. Of course, it is being sold to the Dáil and to the people as the substitute for or the Fianna Fáil answer to the National Development Corporation which had achieved a certain amount of publicity and attracted a certain amount of attention when promulgated by the Labour Party. There is one very conspicuous difference—apart even from the ones I have mentioned—between what might be a National Development Corporation on the one hand and, in the narrow sense, a purely industrial consortium. It is this: that the former, obviously or potentially, includes agricultural and allied operations and the latter excludes them. Any interpretation of words which would exclude agriculture from industry, except where the context necessitates it, would be idiotic. But that the exclusion of agriculture is intended here is plain from the fact that no agricultural body is envisaged as being represented on this consortium.
If the Minister has in mind that what we need is more and more industrial jobs, in the narrow sense, the production of transportable goods and so on, that is all right; I do not quarrel with it. But what he has in mind is something which is supposed to be an answer to a larger plan of an all-embracing kind. Then I say it has this evident effect: there is no representation, as far as the Minister's speech goes, from agriculture or any sector surrounding agriculture anywhere on it.
The agricultural sector is one the job potential of which is constantly being pressed not only by the farmers themselves but by the Minister for Agriculture. Every week I take up a paper and find that a farmer leader, an IFA leader, the Minister for Agriculture, somebody from the ICMSA or somebody from the general agricultural world is appealing to people not to think of job creation purely in terms of the service sector, or of transportable goods but rather to see the possibility for their creation in agriculture. I know that is not the Minister's remit. If he has been given this baby he will not want to be bothered about agricultural operations.
I have never set myself up as an expert on this, and I hope I do not show my ignorance too blatantly by embarking on the topic. But the degree to which there are job opportunities there or openings, if the thing is properly organised, is evident virtually every week and most recently in an article in The Irish Times of 25th October from which it emerged—if the statements in it are true, which I assume them to be; they were made by the Chairman of the Sugar Company—that over half of the sugar beet processed in the Tuam factory comes from east of the Shannon, although of course beet produced west of the Shannon that much more may reduce the demand for it in the south. The west is an area everyone regards as requiring special treatment; that is agreed on all sides of the House, though I am not exactly sure why. Therefore it is felt that money must be invested there at a higher level, incentives given at a higher level or of a kind that do not exist elsewhere in order to support the west. Yet we find that the Tuam beet factory cannot supply its requirements of sugar beet from the western counties.
Two weeks previously I read, from the leader of the IFA, that in the counties of Galway and Mayo alone there are ten million underdeveloped acres. It seemed to me to be beyond belief, unless there was a misprint involved. Assuming that I am correct, or that he was correct and it was not a misprint, that is a figure which ought to stare any Minister of a Government anxious to tackle unemployment straight in the eye-ball. The fact that the Tuam beet factory cannot get enough beet from the area around it and that therefore its costs increase and the possibilities of offering a good price for the product go down—this is necessitated by their having to haul their supplies from west Cork—and the fact that the two counties which surround the town of Tuam, Mayo just a few miles to the north of it, and Galway, contain ten million under-developed acres, those two factors must stare a Government in the eye-ball if they are serious about combating unemployment; not only being serious about it but willing, as the Tánaiste and the Minister for Economic Planning and Development appeared to be warning us, to take dramatic action of a kind never experienced in the country before in order to put an end to it.
I am waiting with a certain amount of excitement the budget in January until we see what drastic action of a kind never taken before will be offered this House. Any Minister who says that is perfectly right. I agree with the Tánaiste when he says that conventional methods of solving job problems and the conventional drib here and drab there, one little scheme this year and another little scheme next year, will not suffice. He is perfectly right. Even operations of a kind far more wide-ranging, ambitious, startling, experimental and possibly even doomed to failure will be necessary if we are to solve this problem permanently.
When talking to the Stock Exchange on the 13th October the Tánaiste made a speech which I am sure he would not mind my calling remarkable in every other respect—much what one might expect to be given at a professional dinner—but he did have a couple of paragraphs I think were his own. They deserved more attention than they got. He said:
The success of the Government's programme is vital to the nation's future. Indeed the next four years could well determine the kind of nation we are going to be for generations ahead. Our approach to the economic challenges immediately ahead will determine whether Ireland becomes a thriving and progressive European state or a peripheral backwater relying on emigration and handouts from Brussels to solve its chronic social problems.
He went on to say:
The scope and objectives of past economic programmes would be quite inadequate today.
In other words, the kind of operation we have been getting along with—and great credit is due to those involved, such as the Industrial Development Authority—will not do anymore by itself. He said:
Policies aimed simply at "keeping the show on the road", settling perhaps for minor improvements every year are no longer good enough. What is needed is a radical assault on our economic shortcomings.
It is in the context of that kind of cry of alarm—I do not think it is at all contemptible because it is called for and the Minister was right to utter it— I say that the facts relating to agriculture which I have just quoted must stare the Government in the eyeball and must call for an interference in our way of conducting the economy that goes beyond anything we have been able to absorb in the past. Perhaps it goes beyond what people may conventionally think of as their private rights in regard to the management of their own affairs.
I hope no one will accuse me of being a doctrinaire socialist—I am not —but I think any solution within the four corners of justice, humanity and fair play to the problems which all sides of the House agree are greater than they have been for 57 years should be tried. Perhaps it should not be done nationally. Let us experiment in one place for a limited time. Although I know it will not accord with the job expectations of many people, I would not be against an attempt to provide jobs in agriculture in the direct employment of the State by way of a massive land reclamation project of the kind James Dillon launched in 1948, but going far beyond that. I cannot see why we should make schemes for tarmacadaming playgrounds, for fiddling around doing small jobs that end in a few months and that leave young people more depressed at the end of them. Why should we fiddle around with these jobs when the Shannon is there to be drained?
We are not in a situation that is comparable to the other EEC countries. The Belgians have an unemployment rate that is our league— perhaps not quite as bad—somewhere around 8.7 per cent or 8.8 per cent. It is no use telling the Belgians to embark on a large-scale reclamation of their land—their chief natural resource—because every yard is already in use. They have no real work to fall back on, because they are going their hardest as it is. We are in a quite different situation, one that is unique in the EEC, in that we have tens of millions of acres in each of the provinces that are absolutely under-used. Even a "jackeen" who does not know one end of a spade from the other, but who travels from Dublin to Galway can see that.
That will not be acceptable to those people who expected that a vote for Fianna Fáil meant a white collar job for their children. It will not interest them or excite them, but if this Government are serious they will have to look at economic development in the way I have outlined. They will have to look at the jobs that need to be done and at the available labour and they must match those two things. If the Government are afraid to do that, if they are afraid to offend the parents of those who are looking for jobs by giving them anything except a white collar job, they will fail. They will leave the next Government of whatever party with a job that is ten times harder, with a population that is ten times more restive and spoiled than was inherited by this Government.
I have one more suggestion that I hope the Minister will not treat with scorn. I am encouraged to make it because the Taoiseach and the Minister for Economic Planning and Development separately in the past six weeks have picked up a theme that I have often played on myself, namely, enlisting the active support of the people in groups that are small enough to preserve their sense of identity and neighbourliness and of mobilising the groups in some way in pursuit of the programme of ending unemployment and of giving ourselves at last a stable and prosperous country.
On several occasions the Taoiseach and the Minister for Economic Planning and Development have been talking about co-operation and co-operatives. I have a suggestion for them. I put it forward as an experiment that may fail but if that happens we will know not to try it again. I suggest they might identify some parts of the country where socially the ground might seem promising and then set up total co-operatives in these areas that might have an optimum population of 10,000 to 15,000 people. They should feed into the co-operatives not money, because people are conditioned to look for money for everything, but rather they should give them advice. They should send pioneer teams recruited from the semi-State agencies to the areas concerned and leave them there for a few years. We could then see if the town or parish in question could be made after three or four years into a show place, with no emigration or unemployment, with no derelict buildings or under-developed land and where every natural resource is exploited to the full.
We should try this experiment on a small scale; if it cannot be done on such a scale there is no use in talking about it on a large scale. I emphasise that they should be total co-operatives, not just restricted to agriculture or to the conventional sectors where co-operatives have operated in the past. Alternatively, let the Government invite the people in a town or district to set up their own total co-operatives. I realise that I may be stepping on a political minefield here, but the Government should free such co-operatives from all liability for stamp duty or taxation in the process of making them into companies. In other words, the Government should clear the red tape and expense out of the way for that purpose. I do not want this argument confused with the argument about the taxation of co-operatives. When a co-operative becomes an enormous business with a turnover of many millions of pounds it is not in the same situation as the original co-operative, which represents the efforts of a small community trying to lift itself up by its boot straps. Such a co-operative should be free of taxation.
The Government should invite people to see if they can control their destinies and provide jobs for themselves within a community of 10,000 or 15,000 people. What I have suggested may be impracticable; but when I hear the Minister for Finance talking about radical means, about using methods that were never used before, I want to put forward my suggestion. If the experiment fails I will not say anymore about it. The help of the people should be enlisted. In countries such as ours the political parties recklessly compete in issuing promises, all of them tending in the same direction, namely, to remove from the individual the burden that human life represents for everyone in some measure. That is the big defect in a parliamentary democracy, though one that is far outweighed by its virtues—I have no misgivings in that regard.
I am sorry, but I must accuse the party on the far side of this House of being by far the greatest sinners in this regard. When Kevin O'Higgins lay dying he said of that party that they would "play down to the people's weaknesses". Not a word of reproach escaped him for his own death, or for anything else that happened.
They have played down to the people's weaknesses. That is what they have done non-stop for 50 years. I am afraid that the consequences will be that the people will not be in a condition to help themselves and that the Government are not able to do so. Surely the Minister is not under the illusion that he and the Minister for Economic Planning and Development and other Ministers with economic remits are going to succeed in a country like this when countries with enormous accumulations of wealth, experience and legislative power of a kind which we have not got have failed, countries with deeper rooted industrial traditions. The best of luck to them—I do not believe in having a grovelling respect for the foreigner because we do too much of that—but surely it cannot be supposed that by virtue of supporting one party more than another we are going to get a result which the Belgians, Dutch and Germans have not been able to get. The Germans are horrified at their unemployment figures and their inflation rate. They have an inflation mania although their inflation rate is so low that it is something we have not had since the fifties.
The defect in our democratic system is that the people are led to expect that more and more burdens will be taken from them, and that they will become less fit to help themselves. The problem we are talking about cannot be solved by governments. I do not blame Fianna Fáil for not being able to solve the unemployment problem; but I do blame them for defrauding the people into believing that they can solve it. The problem is beyond the wit of a Government, unless supported by strong self-reliant structures among the people. That is something for which the Fianna Fáil Party are mainly responsible. Down the years they have done their best to destroy such structures. Whenever they have seen a man carrying a burden for himself they rushed in and said "We will let you off that. Vote for us and you will not have to pay car tax and rates. Naturally, we will still provide the road for you to drive your car on and the services for which the rates formerly paid." That is tomorrow's problem and will be dealt with in the manner in which the Minister for the Environment is dealing with problems —he thinks about them and hopes for a report that will see him through. That attitude is the chief enemy of economic development and everything else. I believe that the Government have only one hope of solving the problem and that is by getting the people behind them, not politically, but to do it for themselves within the minimum framework in which such a thing is possible.
If you look at the kinds of communities which the Taoiseach and the Minister for Economic Planning and Development had in mind and the kinds of things that go on in these communities, you will be amazed at the degree to which self-reliance and voluntary effort already exist. During the summer I did a study to establish the degree to which localities differed in this regard. I made a survey of some areas based on the existence of certain forms of co-operative initiative. I opened a census of population at random today and noted the following towns. The town of Athy in County Kildare has a credit union, a Macra na Tuaithe guild, an Irish Country Women's Association guild, a local development association, and it has been a competitor for many years in the Tidy Towns Competition. The town of Callan has all these things plus a co-operative society. The towns of Birr, Ballinasloe, Athenry and Loughrea have all these things. In addition to these six criteria of my own, which were arbitrarily chosen, there are innumerable ways in which people voluntarily co-operate. I am only scratching the surface by mentioning these things. There is Civil Defence, the Red Cross, St. John's Ambulance Brigade and the St. Vincent de Paul Society. In every Irish town a great number of people are already engaged in trying to better their conditions.
A Government intent on taking drastic action, or making a drastic experiment, ought to extend that experiment into seeing whether the same can be done on the economic plane as well. I will not accuse Fianna Fáil of shedding their responsibilities if they attempt to do that. If they make an honest attempt to enlist the people in manageable sized communities to form themselves into mechanisms of economic effort they may get somewhere. It may be a failure but I believe it would be worth while to attempt it.
The Bill is one which this party welcomes. The Minister explained the Bill in his speech. I am sorry I told the Minister that he had not mentioned the developing countries in his speech. He had referred to the developing countries but I missed his reference to them. The important sections, apart from that one and the operation of section 5 which brings the functions of the authority under existing financial umbrellas, are 2 and 3. The former is intended to provide capital for mergers and amalgamations of a kind which, had they taken place with this facility in the past, might have avoided some closures and redundancies. A worthwhile provision in section 3 relates to the provision of capital for somebody who is not a businessman but has experience of a kind which makes his success a strong possibility, somebody who has been an executive or an engineer in an existing business and who wants to start off on his own. That is a positive move. Generally, the Bill is overdue but welcome; and this party support it wholeheartedly.
