Even the most cursory examination of the section in the Minister's budget speech on youth employment or unemployment revealed it to be by far the most dishonest part of this extraordinarily serious proposal we are discussing here today. We are told that with £5 million the Government will succeed in creating 5,000 jobs. This would be job creation at the cheapest rate for a decade. When we examine the proposals in detail we realise that what will be created here and what will be called jobs will not be real jobs of the sort that people can hold and get married and raise a family on, but mere temporary expedients designed to reduce on a shortterm basis the numbers on the live register. This becomes obvious when we look at the composition of the 5,000 jobs we are now told we will see over the next 12 months. It is obvious that the majority of these are going to come from short-time AnCO courses.
I can foresee from the Minister's budget speech about 120 real jobs for building apprentices, perhaps 700 for community youth projects and 100 or 150 for the extra instructors required by AnCO to process the increased number of young people taking training courses. AnCO are doing a splendid job of training and retraining people of all ages, but it is a perversion of their function to assume that just because the people they train or retrain leave the unemployment register, in some cases for periods as short as three weeks, what has thereby been created is a job. What we will have is a couple of thousand extra young people trained or retrained through AnCO. It is to be hoped that this will increase the chances they will have of getting a real job, but it does not guarantee this, and nothing that the Government seem prepared to do will guarantee it. At the end of the 12 months starting from the date of the Minister's budget speech the number of those 5,000 people who will be back on the unemployment register after having been off it for very brief periods of time will be very large indeed.
I now turn to some of the detailed implications of the decision to remove the wealth tax, and I would like to begin by nailing one of the myths that are part of common political discourse, especially on the Government benches in this House. That myth is that incentive is something that exists only in private industry, that incentive exists only where there are substantial, not to say gross financial rewards for it. The history of the entire public service in this country gives the lie to that argument. The history of the many profitable and efficient State and semi-State organisations gives the lie to the myth that incentive is something which is the exclusive prerogative of the private sector in industry. Had it not been for the not so benign neglect of some of these public institutions by successive Fianna Fáil Governments we would have a far more vigorous and healthy public sector today, one which might justifiably be used as a basis for considerable and job-creating industrial expansion. Even in the attenuated form of the public service, the State and semi-State companies have shown that they can produce incentive and maintain it on wage and salary levels which are considerably below the levels of the sort of income that is virtually guaranteed to the people whom this wealth tax proposals is designed to facilitate. About 5,000 individuals or corporations of one kind or another are paying wealth tax and the most recent available figures indicate that the average payment is about £2,000. If the Government abolish the wealth tax they will not be just giving these people, these trusts and these funds £2,000 in 1978; they will be giving them at least £2,000 in 1979 and probably considerably more in the years to come. It is not merely £2,000; it is £2,000 a year added to by inflation, by speculation and by all the sins of the higher echelons of property and income. I was intrigued by one of the Minister's phrases when he referred to the fact that Fianna Fáil have no place in their philosophy for irresponsible speculation. That is fine when you read it the first time.
When you read it the second time you ask what is responsible speculation, because presumably Fianna Fáil are in favour of that. The wealth tax proposal is one of the most regressive that has been introduced in this budget. The Minister alleged that it was because this tax was introduced that there was a falling off in confidence and incentive for the wealthier members of our society. I remember the same being argued at great length in the other House. This plaint continued for some years until in the last budget put in by the previous Government the marginal tax rates at the upper end of the scale were sharply reduced from 77 per cent to 60 per cent and suddenly all the murmurings about the wealth tax disappeared. It seemed obvious that it was the marginal tax rate rather than the wealth tax as such which was the major problem in this regard.
Incentives need thinking about, and careful thinking. They do not need the kind of crude surgery that is being applied to them in this budget. I stress that it is being applied in such a way and with such implications as to down-grade and write off the very extra-ordinary and dedicated work done by generations of public servants since the foundation of this State. I suspect that the single fact that the tax was so small in its yield may have contributed to the Government's belief that they could get away with abolishing it.
Let us look at the figures. I agree the tax was small. A year or so ago it was producing only £6 million. This year, the year in which it is being abolished, it is producing only £8.5 million. But which tax has increased its take by almost 50 per cent in a period of 12 or 18 months? Granted, it was started on a small base, but inflation and increased real wealth obviously were bringing more estates into the wealth tax category, and there was a real possibility that the wealth tax in the very near future, had it been left there by a socially responsible Government, would have begun to bite.
I believe one of the fundamental reasons for the abolition of the wealth tax is to allow Fianna Fáil to replenish their war chest. It does not have to have been the subject matter of a prior commitment before the Government were changed. It formed no part specifically of the Fianna Fáil manifesto, but the beauty of it is that it follows as night follows day that the persons who benefit from the removal of this tax will no doubt seek to reward, in however niggardly a fashion, the persons who are directly responsible for the benefits that will accrue from it. If there is to be £8.5 million knocking around in the pockets of a number of private individuals this year which was not there last year, how much of that money will find its way into the campaign funds of the Government party? This points more sharply than ever to the need to have a radical look at the financing of political activity here.
I should like to turn to the social aspects of the budget, and like other speakers from these benches I have found it extraordinary that some of the most disadvantaged sectors of our population have done so extraordinarily badly out of it. It is an attempt by the administration to create a coalition of the "haves" and the "might-haves" against the "have-nots". I was intrigued to read in one of our daily newspapers an allegation that by securing a 10 per cent increase for certain categories of social welfare recipients, the Minister for Social Welfare had secured a coup. If I were the Minister for Social Welfare it is a coup I could well do without because it is unlikely at the very least that it will match inflation, and it ignores several substantial categories of social welfare recipients, so much so indeed that we have had the spectacle, unprecedented I think in this country, of the St. Vincent de Paul organisation taking up the cudgels in public print to berate the Government for lack of social responsibility. In a statement published in The Irish Times yesterday it is noted that the society are gravely concerned that the Government has not given sufficient attention to the needs of families on low incomes and especially those who have to rely solely on social welfare payments. The society has calculated that the budget would give least benefit to families of above average size on low incomes.
The society went on to say:
Even after the ten per cent increase in social welfare payments, people on low incomes, and especially large families, will have fallen further behind those on higher incomes. The increases in the tax allowances, the savings through the abolition of rates and of motor tax will not mean more cash in the pockets of the poorest families.
That is a simple, logical, factual indictment of what the Government have done in this budget. It is a budget that has seriously affected members of large families and, I need hardly add, women, especially the ultimate in this disenfranchised category, married women who are working. They have had no increase in tax-free allowances; there is no change in the restrictions on married women and their qualifications in respect of unemployment assistance, and much of the investment in the job area, doubtful though it is, will be in areas in which employment is naturally preponderantly male. However, it is in relation to poor families that some of the most telling criticisms can be made. According to Mr. Brian Nolan of the Central Bank, whose paper, Income and Distribution in Ireland, was read to the Social and Statistical Enquiry Society of Ireland and reported in last Friday's Irish Independent:
Of every £100 of wealth created in this country £1.50 goes to the poorest ten per cent of Irish households and £26.80 goes to the richest ten per cent of Irish households.
To put it in even cruder terms, the income of the top ten per cent in the scale is 20 times that of those at the bottom of the scale. There is no way that one can look at this budget and not say that this differential will be more sharply increased. That is a logical extension of what the Government have done.
The late Seán Lemass used to say, to some effect, that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that, no doubt, is part of the now threadbare philosophy of the Government. I would point out that the important thing, if one is to benefit from this sort of economic activity, is that you have to be in a boat in the first place and there are substantial strata in our society who have not the price of a pair of welling-tons not to talk of the price of a boat, and the rising tide that will float some of the boats will engulf those unfortunate people who are unable to provide themselves with the means of flotation. It is on the basis of this extraordinary set of financial provisions, which undoubtedly will benefit many people but at considerable cost to the long-term welfare of the economy as a whole, that the organised workforce of the country are asked to base their response to the Government's call for incomes moderation. On their present showing, the organised workforce have so far been extraordinarily responsible in the face of what can only be regarded as amazing provocation, because—and this is often forgotten—our organised workforce do not regard themselves solely as spokesmen for their own interests and particularly for the interests of their underprivileged, the socially deprived.
The Government have set before us shifting sands of economic options and are asking the workforce and the employers to take a firm stand on it. If this budget comes anywhere near to success—I doubt if it will—it will only be because about 20 lucky chances simultaneously will have gone right for the Government, most of them out of the control of the Government because their origins and major effects are outside the country.
