During the Second World War the technologists of that day managed to perfect a device with which to counteract the new threat posed to bombing aeroplanes by radar. This device was a great cloud of microscopic metal particles that they used to release from the aeroplanes on bombing raids. The radar devices, being unable to differentiate between one piece of metal and another, were unable to say exactly where the aircraft were and, therefore, unable to direct the anti-aircraft fire to its correct target. This budget serves exactly the same purpose because the Government's financial strategy is to conceal its real implications from the people. In order to do this they have indulged in such sleight of hand as to make it difficult to follow and pin down exactly where they are not doing what they appear to be doing and exactly where they are doing something they do not want us to know about. It is an economic and fiscal equivalent of the three card trick. There are transfers of income and resources flying in all directions faster than the eye can see them travel. It takes persistence and some perspicacity to follow this bewildering pattern of exchanges, but follow it we must, because it is only if we follow it and discover the underlying pattern that we will be able to see exactly how much the Government are trying to achieve and at how little a cost.
I was listening to the car radio on my way into the House this morning. One of the commentators, that estimable broadcaster, Mr. Gay Byrne, opened his 10 o'clock morning programme with a brief reference to the budget. He referred to the fact that the papers were full of the budget and of the speeches that were made last night. "What will it all change?" he asked. "Will Mr. George Colley, the Minister for Finance, stand up and say he was terribly sorry, that he had changed his mind?" It was all very wearying. With all due respect to him, and this is a point of view which is common among the general public, we have to stand up in this House and talk and argue about the budget. This is not because we anticipate a conversion on the part of the Minister for Finance like that of St. Paul on the road to Damascus. We know very well that, give or take a few comments, the Finance Bill, which will be based on the budget, will be passed unchanged. It is our duty to explain, not to the Government benches because they know it all already, but to the people exactly how and why this budget was put together. If we do not explain it to them nobody will.
The strength of the Government is that it controls so much of the basic information in areas which are not under the control of the CSO on which financial and economic decisions are based. If the Government version of benefits and options was the only one to be put forward it would be a very poor day for democracy. That is why we are here today. We are not wasting our time or the salaries the people pay us when we draw attention to the weaknesses, omissions and anti-social elements in the budget. This budget did not spring fully formed from the mind of the Minister for Finance yesterday. It is a budget that has been in preparation for many months. Deputies on this side of the House who had experience of Government, unlike myself, and who had the experience of being in Cabinet will know something of the torture which goes on in a Cabinet room as a budget is being prepared, the real hard choices which have to be made, and the friendships and alliances that are made and broken.
It was instructive during the past few months, especially when the House was in recess, to sit at certain tables in the Dáil restaurant and watch the little groups of Ministers coming back from the pre-budget meetings in Government Buildings. You could see the pattern of alliances being made and broken in front of your eyes. It was tempting to think of Goldsmith's famous line about the village school master that you could "trace the day's disasters in his morning face".
This budget has been prepared over months. It has been presented in enormous detail by all the media to the public over a period of 24 hours. I am not saying it will take us as long to take it apart as it has taken the Government to put it together. Already all the evidence is that even today this budget, which is less than 24 hours old, is showing signs of wear and tear. If anything this budget will shrink in the wash. The desperate hope of this Government is that the budget will resist any serious attack at least until after 7 June, at least until after the local elections and the direct elections to the European Parliament. I can promise the Government this will not happen.
In its simplest form the budget is a balance sheet. Already objections have been raised by responsible commentators outside this House to the degree of emphasis put on the annual event of the budget in one day out of 365 as a method of controlling the nation's finances. It is certainly true to say many decisions which are fundamentally budgetary decisions are now being taken outside the scope of the budget itself. This is not just a factor which this Government have introduced. It is true to some extent of the previous Government and of all Governments.
The context in which we see this budget must be the total financial context in relation to taxation and fiscal policy generally. The Taoiseach recognised that in his speech this morning when he referred to two strictly speaking non-budget items, but items which have a real effect on the performance of the economy and on the options budget makers have in front of them. The first of these to which he referred—and by the manner in which he referred to it, it was obvious that he was sensitive about it—was the question of the reduction of consumer subsidies.
The Taoiseach said:
The most up-to-date assessment is that the effect of the reduction on the consumer price index will be under 0.7 per cent.
With all due respect this kind of statement, this global statistical truth—and I accept it as a global statistical truth—is totally irrelevant to many of the people who have to live in the real world and live with the consequences of the removal of the subsidies he was talking about. I have not gone out looking for information about this. More frequently it has been volunteered to me. I will give the House one simple example of a wage earner in the constituency of the Minister for Economic Planning and Development who buys his butter, milk and eggs every week from a single supplier. The immediate consequences for that man of the removal of subsidies from two of those three products is that his weekly bill with that supplier went up from £6 a week to £8 a week, an increase of 33? per cent to that man in relation to those commodities. He will not be mollified—and why should he be?—to be told that the gross effect, the overall effect, on the CPI will be less than 0.7 per cent. He is concerned about his CPI. He is a consumer and it is his price index that matters to him.
When the Minister for Finance said yesterday that in adopting this strategy he was taking a calculated risk, he was unaware of the huge degree to which he has miscalculated the size of that risk. I want to refer briefly to two other items because they form part of our national balance sheet as well. They are an invisible part, if you like, but they are nonetheless real; the capital gains tax and the wealth tax to which the Taoiseach also referred. I say they are invisible because they are items which either no longer exist or were not bringing in the revenue they would otherwise have brought in. In the case of capital gains tax, revenue has been reduced effectively by 75 per cent.
In so far as the Taoiseach referred directly to the wealth tax his comments deserve attention. Adopting a line which has been fairly common currency on the Government benches for some time he argued:
As one of the poorest countries in Europe, we tried to operate a system of capital taxation, the effect of which was to drive abroad the capital for investment of which the country was starved....
It is about time that this canard was challenged and exposed for the unsupportable statement it is. The frequently repeated allegation on that side of the House is that the wealth tax drove money out of the country. During the debate on the last Finance Bill, in this House I can remember the Minister for Finance attempting to suggest—not very satisfactorily, but in so far as he had any evidence at all he marshalled it to good effect—that the introduction of the wealth tax was followed in some sense by a small outflow of capital.
Apparently the Taoiseach made that statement here this morning either in ignorance of or unwilling to admit to the existence of the latest report of the Central Bank which, referring to the first 11 months of 1978, a period that covers neatly the Government's decision to scrap the wealth tax and collect no more revenue from it, said that during that period there was a sizeable unidentified net capital outflow. The Taoiseach should put that sentence together with his tobacco, however well taxed it may be, into his pipe and smoke it. It cannot be simultaneously true that if there is some capital outflow when the wealth tax is applied, and if there is some capital outflow when the wealth tax is removed, therefore the wealth tax was responsible for the initial capital outflow. The figures the Central Bank gave us are far more cogent than the approximation the Minister for Finance was delivering to us this time last year.
I have spoken about the budget as something which should be considered in context. I have dealt with one context, the horizontal context, if you like, the non-budgetary items which are referred to by all speakers and which are indeed relevant to the country's economy and the Government's fiscal policy. There is another context in which the budget also needs to be looked at, that is, the vertical context. It needs to be looked at in conjunction with the last budget and in conjunction with the next one. The next budget is a long way away and I do not propose to even attempt to go into it.
It is certainly legitimate to compare this budget to the last budget and to ask what were the objectives of each and is there any relationship between the two. Last year the budgetary policy of the Government was stimulatory of the economy in the extreme. Speaking some time ago in the debate on the Green Paper, I believe it was, I charged the Government with having arrived on the scene after the general election in a fire engine and having presumed that because they were travelling in a fire engine there must be a fire to put out and dousing with their equipment something which was already embers.
It is inevitable and irrefutable to say that the stimulation applied to the economy last year by the Government was excessive. This might not be such a bad thing in itself were it not for the fact that it mortgaged the Government's ability to apply a stimulus to the economy when it really needed it.
There is some evidence on the basis of the international trends that we have been experiencing that the economy will need a stimulus towards the end of this year or next year. When that time comes the Government cupboard will be bare. Just how bare it will be is shown by the net situation in this budget and by the total turnaround as compared between this budget and the last one. The net situation in this budget was outlined by the Minister in his speech as follows:
The revenue changes which I have outlined involve tax concessions amounting to £37 million in 1979 and tax and other revenue increases which will bring in an extra £57 million in 1979. This gives a net increase in revenue of £20 million.
A net increase in revenue of £20 million.
That is a cutback budget in any sense of the word. Let us compare it with last year when the result of the same equation gave a positive balance in favour of concessions of £140 million. We have the turnaround from a net £140 million in concessions last year and a net £20 million in extra revenue this year, which is a turnaround of £160 million. How the Government can pretend that this budget will be anything other than severely deflationary I cannot begin to understand. But the Government do not wish to acknowledge or accept this. They even try to persuade us that the opposite is the case.
I turn to the Minister's speech, which reads:
I would not be content even with a neutral budget. The needs of the situation were for a budget which would be stimulatory but not excessively so, ....
How on earth can the Minister, given a total turnaround of £160 million between last year and this year, describe this year's budget as stimulatory? The confused reaction which has so far greeted this budget is only an indication that the people have not bought this line, but are not yet well enough apprised of the details of the budget to realise why they were right not to buy it. They will know soon enough. I predict that when the effect of this budget is taken with the effect of the last and the next two—if there are only two more—and when the sums and the tots have been done on the real transfers of resources that have taken place under this Government and in Fianna Fáil financial and fiscal policies, the Government will be seen to be massively in overdraft.
So far in the Debate there has been a considerable amount of confusion and contradiction about the figures. Deputy Dr. FitzGerald, we have been told, has impugned the reliability of the Public Service by questioning their figures. He rejected that equation and I reject it too. The fact is that public servants will produce figures which are related to anything that their political masters believe to be true. In any situation in which the fundamental assumptions are political, the mere administrative practice of turning political assumptions into hard figures does not make those figures any less political.
We have to remember, too, that when the Minister for Economic Planning and Development comes into this House he does so as a professional politician not as a professional economist. I am sad to see that he has been so critical of the activities and of the forecasts of other professional economists. I sincerely hope that there is no connection between this criticism and the fact that the budget for the ESRI, as outlined in the present Book of Estimates, has been increased by only a miserable 6 per cent for 1979.
Among the figures we have been talking about there is one figure to which I should like to draw the attention of the House and on which the House deserves enlightenment. The Minister for Economic Planning and Development has been predictably critical of the ESRI prognosis that inflation during the next year would run at about 11 per cent. The Government propose to bring inflation down to a year-end rate of 5 per cent and suggest an overall yearly figure of about 7 per cent. I believe that, when you look at the table supplied for our perusal by the Government and at the figures in relation to what the Government propose to borrow, you will see a figure which is more related to an anticipated inflation rate of 11 per cent than to one of 7 per cent. They are preaching one thing at us and doing something else behind the scenes. They are preaching peace and preparing for war. If they are preparing for war it must be because they know it will happen. If inflation does achieve double figures, which is likely but which would not give me joy, it will be in many instances because of Government policy.
In the last couple of days I have had a reply to a parliamentary question to the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy which shows that over the most favourable period that he could pick since the Government came into office price increases, especially of food items, have ranged consistently ahead of the overall CPI. There is even one price increase in five quarters that goes into three figures—111 per cent on one food item. Three-quarters of the food items in the CPI have increased on average during this period by an amount bigger than the average total CPI increase. The Government's response to this, after all the waffle in the manifesto about restructuring the National Prices Commission so that it can do its job properly and protect the people from the hazard of rising prices, is to appoint one extra person to the National Prices Commission and to say that they have no further plans for restructuring it at present.
I should like to refer to incomes, on which we have had a fair share of preaching from the Government. We have been told time and time again that society cannot tolerate any increase which is not matched by productivity. There are a couple of points which I should like to make. First of all, all the evidence of the past two or three years has shown that, given the enormous increases in productivity on the one hand and the relative inflexibility of the live register on the other, productivity must be increased; and it is certainly a matter for argument as to whether or not past productivity has been rewarded adequately up to now in terms of real wages.
Let me give the House another example. What sector of the economy has been the most productive for the past seven or eight years? Beyond any doubt it is the agricultural sector. And who has shared in the productivity of that sector? Have the agricultural labourers shared in the benefits of agricultural productivity to anything like the degree one would have expected, given the solemn assurances about the value of productivity that we hear from the Government side? Of course not. Our agricultural labourers must be one of the most depressed groups of workers in any West European country. They have not seen the benefits of their productivity in their wage packets. They are too small a group, I suspect, even if they were all lumped together in one Dáil constituency, to have any real political leverage in order to give them the right to claim that share of increased productivity. But this is typical: it is precisely the group that does not have leverage that is denied the share even of demonstrable productivity.
The ultimate argument is not just about productivity, because to restrict the benefits of productivity to those who produce is to create an inhumane and unjust society. The ultimate question is one of sharing. The Government are preaching so much to us about productivity that they have forgotten, if they ever knew, how to preach about the value of sharing. The leader of the Labour Party and the Taoiseach crossed swords this morning on the question of the social welfare increases announced in the budget. Although the exchange was somewhat hot tempered, I think it was valuable because it shows the way in which statistics can be misused in order to arrive at comparisons which have only a political function and have no real relevance to the lot of people who live under our social welfare code.
The Taoiseach made several comparisons. For example, he made a comparison between the percentage increase in real terms in social welfare benefits under the Coalition, which was 8.7 per cent, and the percentage in the last two years of this Fianna Fáil Government, which was 12.9 per cent. Of course I accept his figures as accurate but one must compare like with like. There are two comparisons which the Taoiseach did not make because they would have seriously watered down the political value of the comparisons that he did make. The first one he did not make was to compare what happened in 1973-1977, with the overall economic conditions obtaining at that time and the famous 12.9 per cent of the last two years with the economic conditions and the very heavy borrowing in this particular period. The other comparison he did not make—I suspect because the facts are not favourable to his arguments between the percentage increase in real terms during 1973-1977 and the percentage increase in average wages over that period and the corresponding percentages for the last two years of the present Government.
We have had, I think, a 12.9 per cent increase in real terms in two years under this Government. Three-quarters of that or more in last year alone could be accounted for by an increase in the real value of wages of people who are in work. Let us have from the Taoiseach and the Government a comparison between the percentage increase over those four years and the percentage increase in real terms in average wages over that period. Let us have the same comparison for the last two years and let us then see whether the gap between the real purchasing power of the social welfare recipient and of the person who is in work has expanded or diminished.
There is another aspect of the social welfare announcements in the budget which deservès attention. It is the decision to apply a different rate of increase to different recipients of social welfare benefits. I speak in ignorance of whether such a discriminatory feature was ever applied before in terms of social welfare increases or was ever applied to the same extent—which I doubt. I must decry it and I must state this Party's total opposition to it because what it does in one single stroke in this year of 1979 is to bring us back into the days of Queen Victoria when the lords and masters of that society made the distinction which they thought to be relevant and meaningful between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. For some reason in our society today the long-term social welfare recipients are presumed to be more deserving than the short-term recipients. I ask this House what is undeserving about the plight of the wage earner who is involuntarily unemployed? What is undeserving about the plight of the father of a family who has been thrown out of work against his own will because of the structure of society and of the economy, a structure with which Fianna Fáil of all parties has ever been slow to tamper.
These people are innocent. In the Fianna Fáil scheme of things they are guilty until they prove their innocence. We have gone another step back to the Tiny Tim concept of social welfare, the deserving cases and the not quite so deserving cases. If I were a social welfare recipient, whether in the 16 per cent bracket or the 14 per cent bracket, I would reject and rebel against this patronising and inadequate response about real needs. Just how inadequate it is can be seen by reference to some equally important facts that the Government are not anxious to have widely publicised. In the period February 1978 to February 1979 the CPI will show an increase of about 10 per cent whereas food prices will go up by probably 13 or 15 per cent in the same period. This means that last year's 10 per cent increase in social welfare was entirely taken up by inflation. It was a no gain situation. On the other hand, average incomes in 1978 rose by about 9 per cent in real terms and this meant that those on social welfare lost out by about 9 per cent in income compared with those on average earnings.
The implications of this are that the level of social welfare increase necessary in this budget can be formulated as follows: 9 per cent to compensate for the falling behind in 1978, 10 per cent to compensate for expected inflation in 1979, and, if the poor and underprivileged are to be allowed any share at all in growth, 4 to 6 per cent to share in the 1979 growth forecast, even at the Government's level of options. This adds up to a total of about 24 per cent, which is a long way from even the 16 per cent which is the most the Government can provide. There was a very revealing little cameo just after the Minister for Finance sat down after delivering his speech yesterday afternoon, when the Minister for Social Welfare leaned across the Taoiseach—the man for whose resignation he once called—to congratulate the Minister for Finance on his budget speech. I will carry the memory of that little gesture with me for quite a long time.
On the question of taxation, I will deal first with farm taxation. With one exception, the question of the undifferentiated levy on certain food commodities, the sense of outrage expressed on behalf of some representatives of the farming community, leaves me somewhat cold. This is so especially when we remember that already in the VAT Bill the Government have given back to the farming community £17 million, approximately £100 per farmer, an amount of tax that the Minister for Finance told me on the Special Committe he thought was unfair and farmers should not be expected to pay it. We must also bear in mind, especially when we hear complaints about farmers being made to pay for certain services, that the agricultural industry in this country must be almost unique in having the quality of its products tested at public expense. The irony and ambiguity of this can be seen from the fact that, whereas a bacon factory or sausage factory not only cannot have its produce tested at public expense but must keep those products up to certain public health and safety standards and is liable to severe fines and penalties if it refuses to do so, the person who supplies that factory is entitled to a huge range of public service testing facilities free. The consumers of Ireland are by now entitled to expect that one of the most profitable sectors of our economy should at least pay the cost of testing the suitability for public consumption of its own products. The amount to be taken in farming taxation is still inadequate. I do not propose to say any more about it; it is a fact obvious to most people.
The Minister for Finance yesterday went into considerable detail about evasion, but I looked in vain in his speech for any indication of how, apart from appointing extra people to the hardworked and over-pressed Revenue Commissioners, he was going to tackle completely questions of evasion. There are a number of simple structural things that the Minister could do if he really meant business. The Association of Tax Inspectors in their statement recently underlined the fact that we still treat tax evaders with kid gloves. Tax evasion is still socially acceptable. We should ensure that tax evasion is no longer socially acceptable. One way the Minister could encourage this is by publishing the names and details of people who have been found to have evaded tax and who have been penalised for it. The distress caused to families, especially working families, but not only working families, by the publication of the results of court hearings connected with trivial or relatively unimportant offences makes my blood boil when I think of the major offences committed against the poor by people who evade their taxes and who always manage to hide behind a wall of secrecy. Of course, these offences are committed not only against the poor and the social welfare recipients; they are committed also against the taxpayers, the people who have to meet PAYE, the self-employed and the people who make a full and true return of their income and who pay their taxes, and there are people in those categories.
I suggest, as I have suggested previously, that if we had a really honest and open society everybody's tax return should be a public document. This is not an anomaly; in some countries it is the standard and the done thing. I am sure the Taoiseach would have no objection to his tax return being a public document, any more than I would. The reciprocal element of being able to see the tax returns of some of the captains of industry in this country would be a shot in the arm for anybody who wanted to create a more equitable and just society. The salaries of Members of this House are matters of public record. There are other salaries and other perks which are not so public. If what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander then we should have more publicity and more public information about the level of incomes. This might lead to the growth of genuine morality about the level of remuneration that anybody is entitled to expect for his work.
The Minister for Finance made great play of the amount of his tax concessions. He costed them at £30 million. The comparison which he invites in terms of income tax concessions is that he is putting the £30 million which he is giving to us against the £3.5 million that he is taking back in the tax allowance for children. It is a very attractive equation. He is giving ten times as much as he is taking back, but we are never told in this House the basis on which the cost to the State of income tax concessions is calculated. I believe that it is almost uniformly calculated on a basis which is designed to show the Government in power as more generous than mean. I challenge that global estimate in particular terms because it is the only way it can be challenged.
I would like to give the House some details of what exactly this means for people who were looking at the papers this morning and wondering if they were going to get anything out of it. Take the question of a man with three children, earning the average industrial wage and on the standard rate of income tax. It is not an unusual situation. In fact, this kind of family is pivotal in our society; it is almost the standard family. Last year the tax allowances for his three children amounted to £720 which, because he was on the standard rate of tax, was worth £252. This year they will be worth £654 to him which, at the standard rate of tax, will be worth £229. In other words, he is £23 worse off this year in terms of the allowance for his children than he was last year. The Government may say, "What about the increased children's allowances?". Last year that man or his wife would have got £135 in children's allowances. This year the amount will be £174, leaving him with a net benefit so far as children's allowances are concerned of £39. If we subtract £23 from £39 we get £16. The net benefit to that man in the tax year 1979-80 as compared to the tax year 1978-1979 is £16—£5 per child per year. If we divide that sum by months, weeks and days we would need a microscope to see how better off that man will be.
The irony is that if he had a bigger family he would be worse off. If the same calculation is made, the net benefit over the whole year to a married man with five children amounts to £16.50. That is an extra 50p over the whole year for two more children. I do not know how the Minister can talk about this as a concession and expect us to believe that words still have any meaning. If a man is slightly better off he will do slightly worse and if he is slightly poorer he will do slightly better, but this medium family is the critical family in Irish politics and Irish life and on the basis of these figures the alleged concession can be shown to be a complete smokescreen with nothing to recommend it except that it is a smokescreen.
The other thing that must be said about the tax situation is in relation to the Minister's forecast for tax yield. When we look at the tables presented we will note that there has been a squeeze in the tax bands. One of the effects of removing the bottom tax band, which has not been widely adverted to so far, is that a person now hits the 60 per cent tax rate after £6,600 of taxable income whereas before this a person had to reach £7,000 of taxable income before he was hit with the 60 per cent rate. That is a feature of the increased tax take that I think will become more and more evident as the year goes on. There are highly paid industrial workers who are probably coming close to that area of remuneration and this Government may be the first Government to put a well paid industrial worker into the super-tax bracket.
In the paper entitled "Principal Features of Budget Presented to Dáil Éireann" there is a table to which I should like to draw the attention of the House. This table computed the income tax payable, existing and proposed, on earnings of a married couple with two children where the wife is not working and the combined effects of income tax changes and social welfare children's allowances adjustments. We might look in the table at where it starts and ends but I do not think we need look even at the end of the table. We do not have to make a comparison between the man with earnings of £2,250 and the man with earnings of £20,000. It is sufficient to make a comparison between the man on £2,250 and the man on £10,000.
The combined tax saving and increased social welfare children's allowances for the man on £2,250 is £39.20 and for the man on £10,000 it is £139.80. In other words, there is £100 in the difference. Fair enough one might say, it always happens that people who earn more tend to get more, but we should look at the facts behind this comparison. If there is any justice in this world the man on £10,000 would have a tax rate of 60 per cent; in other words, to benefit by £140 he would need a gross increase in income of approximately £350. In gross terms the benefit to that man is £350 whereas the gross benefit to the man on £2,250 is £39.20, the same as his net benefit. The concession to the man on £10,000 is almost ten times as great as that of the man on £2,250.
Another point that deserves to be made is that these tables are based on the idea that there are no changes in income levels. If there is any truth at all in the Minister's extraordinarily optimistic assessment about the levels of yield from income tax in the year ahead, it is that the bunching of the various bands creates a situation in which any increase, no matter how small, will push more and more people into another band of tax. I suspect this may happen and the effect of these alleged concessions will be wiped out a great deal sooner than the Minister hopes.
A number of things must be said in relation to education. We have extra money for job creation which the Department of Education will administer. I am all in favour of the Department getting more money for job creation or for anything else. Although I, too, am critical of mere short-term employment schemes that simply soak up a certain amount of youth unemployment without providing any real long-term jobs, even this is better than nothing at all. However, ultimately the business of the Department of Education is education, not youth employment, and we have to look at the extra money given to the Department of Education in that light.
We are to have 50 adult education officers—long overdue but welcome. We are to have 70 child care experts for special schools—again, long overdue but all the more welcome for that. I am sure we could do with three times that number. We are going to employ 100 young people as youth development officers with voluntary organisations. Apart from that we are to get £2 million for improving the educational services.
The educational budget for this year is more than £390 million. As a percentage of that, £2 million is somewhere marginally above 0.5 per cent. Will there be any discernible improvement in the level of educational services if that is the percentage of the total education budget that is going to be given for improvement? It is a drop in the ocean of what is needed. Not only that, I suspect that it is even less than the Minister for Education got last year. The Minister came into the House last year with his Estimates claiming a global increase of 20 per cent. By the time I was finished with his Estimates and had stripped inflation and teachers salaries out of them, it was down to a great deal less. I came to the conclusion that all he had got in extra terms was £5 million more from the Minister for Economic Planning and Development, for some extra teaching jobs. The Minister in getting £2 million this year is getting less than last year and he probably needs more.
We are told by the Minister that there will be an extra 1,250 teachers in the schools. Unfortunately the Minister's speech on this aspect of educational development is extremely opaque and we do not know for example whether he is double counting, whether he is including the cost of these 1,250 teachers in the £2 million. Neither do we know how many of these teachers would be needed in any case to replace teachers who will retire and to provide teachers for extra children who especially at second level will have to be catered for in any case. We must recall, in addition, that the primary teachers who will be coming into the schools this year entered the colleges during the last year of the National Coalition Government, so it is disingenuous at the least of the Government to claim credit for them. I failed to see any sign in the Minister's speech or in the figures which accompanied it of any substantial real improvement in the education service for the next year. Any indication I have is the opposite. Last year's hand-out of £5 million is now cut by more than half. Anybody who looks at these figures and says that there are no cutbacks in education needs to look at them again.
This budget must be judged in the context of what is happening in this country, in the context of what the Government did yesterday and what they will do in the few short years they have left to govern this country. When that judgment has been made this Government will be found to be massively in overdraft to the people.
