The Deputy ought to tell all the ratepayers he is advocating that kind of an increase.
The second point he appeared to be implying is that if the Government put up the money they should have a say in the areas in which it is to be spent. My answer to that is no. I am surprised to hear the Deputy saying that, because I understood one of the great concerns of his party was that this abolition of rates on residential property was going to strike a mortal blow at the autonomy and independence of local authorities. Yet, the Deputy is suggesting that we should interfere with the autonomy and independence of the authorities. We are not doing that. We are saying "here is a formula under which we calculate the amount of money you get" and I put forward the reasons why I think it is a fair and reasonable allocation of money. We let the responsible local authorities decide their priorities and work out the manner in which they want to make use of the funds available to them. Surely that is the approach the Deputy would want to suggest for any responsible spending agency, whether it is a local authority, a Government Department or a private household?
If the Deputy has different theories, in the interest of proceeding with this debate, I do not want him to put them forward now. I suggest he put them forward later and they will be examined. I would be very interested to see such an alternative. In the meantime I suggest that there is not such an alternative viewpoint. It does not appear to be advocated by the Deputy's party. I suggest he is attempting to indulge in a little bit of local point scoring about which he would be best advised to forget.
On the question of indulging in local point scoring, this morning Deputy P. Barry saw fit to refer to me at one stage and to some remarks he claims I made. I did not hear all that he said but I got the substance of it. He accused me of making contradictory claims about the merits of a proposed 5 per cent pay increase coupled with tax cuts as suggested by the Government and of putting forward examples that could be refuted by a first-year economic student. Quite apart from the fact that the Deputy referred to the wrong debate, the only remarks I made to the House were at Question Time. I checked the Official Report and I see that I never got to the point where I gave any examples because there were what is usually referred to as "interruptions". I never finished the examples because people on the Opposition side expressed surprise, concern or whatever other terms are appropriate when they discovered I was saying that the tax cuts in the form of abolition of rates and car tax on vehicles up to 16 h.p. formed part of the package of tax cuts that Fianna Fáil put forward. I am happy to say that in one respect Deputy Barry put the record right this morning because at least he admitted it was in our manifesto and, therefore, that there was nothing new about it.
With regard to confusion in the examples I gave, I am not aware of any such confusion. On different occasions outside the House I gave various examples of the combined effect of a 5 per cent pay rise and various tax cuts, whether income tax reductions, a reduction in the social welfare stamp for lower paid workers or the effect of abolition of rates and car tax. If anybody wants to put forward alternative examples or thinks they are confusing, I would be delighted to see the evidence. In the meantime, just to set the record straight, there were no contradictory examples from me because I never gave them in the House, and certainly I did not give any examples in the debate referred to by the Deputy. Therefore, there is no case to be answered by any economic student that the examples were correct or incorrect.
Deputy Barry gave a peculiar interpretation of economic policy over the past 18 months. He said that in regard to the speech made by the Taoiseach when opening this debate when referring to the development of the economy this year, he could have made a similar speech. He went on to say this was because of the virtuous policies pursued by the Coalition during the last year of their term of office. What were those virtuous policies? Deputy Barry made some vague remarks about the effects of sterling and its associated impact on the economy in 1976. He was talking about the initial forecasts for 1976 being rather pessimistic and the out-turn proving much better. Why did it prove better? It was due to the disastrous fall in sterling. This meant that Irish products, in common with British products, became cheaper on the international markets and both Britain and ourselves benefited in that sense from an export boom in the second part of 1976. This could not have been predicted by any reasonable person at the beginning of that year and no reasonable person would want to predict it. We were facing a calamitous decline in the external value of our currency and some of the adverse consequences of that decline were still with us this year. That gratuitous improvement in our exports in 1976 was not something for which Deputy Barry or any Government could make a claim. It was entirely outside their control and it was a direction of policy movement that we would never have advocated as a Government, that we should look forward to a policy of excessive inflation leading to a severe fall in the external value of our currency as the basis for temporary improvements in the level of our exports output.
We then come to 1977. Deputy Barry told us that everything was marvellous now because the Coalition had spent £100 million in the budget this year in putting the economy on the right track. That was an interesting revelation. Those of us with long memories will recall the origin of the Coalition's budgetary policy of 1977. I recall in September, 1976, when after a very long gestation period, after much agonising and to-ing and fro-ing and changing of colours, what had originally been proposed as a White Paper eventually emerged as a Green Paper on the economy. Prior to that we had published our first version of what might now be called our manifesto. We dealt specifically with some economic proposals. As a result of publishing that document the Government had to move back the publication date for their Green Paper and had to hastily rewrite some of its contents. There was an abrupt change of policy on the part of the Coalition so that what had up to then been all gloom and doom suddenly enabled the Minister for Finance to depart to the Philippines and the Minister for Labour to announce a £50 million package for job creation. In the course of the following two months that £50 million was increased to £100 million in respect of job creation and tax cuts which were associated with the budget this year. We duly acknowledged the paternity of that package when we referred to the budget this year. Our criticism then was that although it was on the right lines it was too little and too late.
