I was pointing out that they had intervened and I was suggesting a reason for it. I will deal with them later in more detail. The primary point I want to make, and it is plain from the nominations that have been put before us, is that it does not appear to matter a great deal who appear on the front bench of the Government. Nevertheless, an attempt obviously has been made to mend some of the fences which have been broken down so assiduously over the years.
In the nominations he has proposed to us the Taoiseach obviously has taken account of the fact that his party were seriously and substantially divided over his own election. We in this party are no strangers to a split vote on a leadership issue, if anything, split more evenly than the vote which elected the Taoiseach. However, both sides of the split in this party are united in at least one thing, and that is on the nature of the society they want to see here.
The fences have been partially mended but it is a very odd Cabinet. Most Irish Cabinets in the past 10 years or so had a fairly defined look about them. One could hazard an educated guess as to the likely things that would happen when they sat down around a table. One cannot say the same about this Cabinet. It is not necessarily a fault in itself but it is worth mentioning: the majority of the members of this Cabinet had never held Cabinet office before 1977. I am not against the introduction of new blood into the Cabinet, far from it, but that is one thing. New brooms are another, and there is no great evidence of new brooms in this Cabinet.
To all intents and purposes, with one exception to which I will return later, this is a one-man Cabinet. It is the Taoiseach's Cabinet and effectively he is the most important man in it. Of all the faces and names on the front bench which have been proposed to us only one matters, apart from the Taoiseach. Only one person in that Cabinet was in a position to bargain or even to begin to make terms with the new leader and his party. There is only one person in this Cabinet whom the Taoiseach needed more than that person needed the Taoiseach and I will be coming to him in a moment. First, I want to refer in more detail to some of the appointments concerned.
The first name in the order presented to us yesterday is that of Deputy Colley as Minister for Tourism and Transport. We should be mature enough to distinguish personal from political considerations in this House, and when I say that I have sympathy for Deputy Colley it is purely on a personal level. His political fortunes are his own responsibility and always have been, but on a personal level I felt some sympathy for him as I saw him sitting there yesterday as if the marrow had been sucked out of his bones, listening to himself being proposed as Minister for Tourism and Transport, Minister for CIE's overdraft and for giving grants for bed and breakfast places in hotels round the country. His appointment as Tánaiste was a lollipop to sweeten all that. He will, of course, be made Minister for Energy in the future, so we have been told, and that is no small responsibility. However, in the meantime he is to be given a position which corresponds only too closely with the substantal decline in his political fortunes. Deputy Colley has been Minister for Finance for many years and I and other Deputies on this side of the House have reason to know that, even though we disagree fundamentally with his economic strategy and his analysis of the economic problems facing our country, he knew his stuff backwards and there was no more clever or punctilious adversary in this House during the long Committee Stages of a Finance Bill than Deputy Colley. He has talents which I believe will not be utilised by this Government in this area and effectively he has been put out to grass. In his initial press conference the Taoiseach told us that Deputy Colley had promised him either his support or co-operation—I am not quite sure which word he used. It is a pity that the rules of the House prevent Deputy Colley from addressing us because we on this side of the House would like to know whether this promise of support and co-operation was made to the Taoiseach before or after he made that announcement on television.
The reason that I have spent some time on Deputy Colley's history in Finance is that one has to contrast his handling of that Department with what we can expect from his successor, Deputy O'Kennedy. There could not have been any more deliberate snub to the previous Government than the axing of Deputy Colley from Finance and his replacement by Deputy O'Kennedy coupled with the abolition of the Department of Economic Planning and Development. When the Department of Economic Planning and Development were set up the man who was their Minister for two-and-a-half years made some very telling points from that side of the House when we were criticising the detail of the creation of the Department and argued, for example, that this was the first major piece of administrative reform which had been effected for many years and that the previous Government had made no significant changes in this regard. The Labour Party believe profoundly in economic planning and development, and if we disagreed with the incumbent of that office in his targets, his strategy and his approaches it was not because we disagreed with the concept. We would see the abolition of that Department as a retrograde step. More than that, we would see their re-incorporation in the Department of Finance, from whom they were forever trying to escape, under the aegis of Deputy O'Kennedy as a very clear sign that the real Minister for Finance in this Government will be the Taoiseach himself. It is a truism that any Taoiseach would like to control to a reasonable degree the Department of Finance, but seldom has control been exercised so nakedly as by the putting into this key, major Department of a man who, for all his gifts, is a political lightweight.
We are asked now to ratify Deputy Lenihan as Minister for Foreign Affairs. One thing that can be said for Deputy Lenihan is that he is a survivor. I can imagine him giving free lessons to crews in the next Fastnet race. He has often described himself as the socialist in the Cabinet. One thing I will say for him is that in contra-distinction to many of us, there is not an ounce of malice in the man. However, he has one political liability and that is an inborn, innate, inability to say "no" to anybody. This has led him into more political scrapes than I can remember. He is now to be put into a position where he will be required, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, to say "no" very loudly and very often in the interests of this country. I hope for the sake of all of us that he will find the courage to say "no".
I have known Deputy Faulkner for many years, both professionally when I was a journalist interested in education and he was Minister for Education and since then in the other House and here. He has a reputation, which is deserved, of being an extremely hard-working Minister who may lack vision but who does not lack integrity. He is a loyal man whom any Taoiseach would like to have at his back. He has sometimes in the past and even in the present administration been at least as much sinned against as sinning. However, he has the problem in that even on the odd occasion on which he adopts the correct line and policy, he finds it almost impossible to convince the public, let alone anybody here, that this is what he is doing. One has the distinct impression of Deputy Faulkner that if he were a dove and sent out from the Ark by Noah and found an olive branch, he would be so tired by the time he got here that he would sit on the olive branch rather than bring it back. However, the Defence portfolio may not be the worst place for Deputy Faulkner. He was the focus of considerable discontent and hard feeling during his tenure of office in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. He is one of the very few of the existing Ministers that I would wish well in his new appointment.
Another of the survivors is Deputy Gerry Collins who is to remain in his position as Minister for Justice. Like many other Fianna Fáil Ministers, Deputy Collins' speciality has nothing to do with policies but everything to do with winning elections. This has been his forte ever since his student days at UCD where he was some years senior to me. He is a man who, efficiently and perhaps even ruthlessly, will do what he is told. He might be regarded as the mercenary of the Government. He is not interested in policy of any description. Rather, he is interested in keeping his job and in doing what he is told.
Deputy Collins has two specialities of which no doubt we shall experience more in this House. First, he has an air of injured innocence which can cover up the most extraordinary faux pas and slips of administration. Secondly, he has a special kind of basso profundo voice which he adopts in answer to the most damaging of questions at Question Time. It is sad to think that, among other things, he will be remembered largely for his decision to open the institution known as Loughan House.
Deputy Barrett is with us again as Minister for the Environment but I do not propose to deal in detail with him because Deputy Quinn will be taking the opportunity of dwelling on the matter of his retention in this Department. Deputy Barrett's tenure of office in the Department of the Environment has been little short of disastrous. Deputy Tully and others have pointed to the slowing down in finance for local authority housing but whether one considers the position regarding local authority housing or regarding private housing, one can see in this Minister a very graphic example of the hamfistedness with which the Government have approached the task of economic national reconstruction. Deputy Barrett has had a particular responsibility for a key area in national reconstruction and regeneration, that is, the growth of the housing industry, but what the Deputy did not recognise was that the housing industry is a very complex part of our economy which needs very tentative handling if it is to produce the best results. The way Deputy Barrett approached the housing construction section of our economy can be compared with a tinker chasing a race horse with an ash plant. The Deputy pumped money into the housing sector of the economy but he pumped this money in at the demand end, thinking and hoping—and I give him credit for this—that the supply end of the economy would meet the demand which had thus been fuelled financially.
However, we all know what exists at the supply end of the housing sector of industry. At the demand end of the housing sector there exists a system of acute profiteering based on land speculation and a large number of builders who know a good thing when they see it and what they saw in the shape of Deputy Barrett appearing on the horizon brandishing £1,000 grants, was a once-and-for-all, never-to-be-taken again opportunity to add even further to their speculative profits and they were able to do that because of the overall approach of the Government of which Deputy Barrett was and is to remain a member. That was the approach, that people who own their own land and build houses can make unacceptable levels of profit at the expense of people who need a roof over their heads. When there is no control of the price or of the supply of building land, the obvious result of pumping more money into the demand end of the housing sector is a squeeze, with supply not meeting demand, so that prices increase, the building societies' average loans increase and the amount of these societies' finance available for the purpose of further houses is decreased.
The insensitive and even carefree way with which this vital sector of the economy was approached by Deputy Barrett gives us no reason to be confident that he will be able to do anything serious about this area in the future.
Admittedly, towards the end of his recent tenure of office, Deputy Barrett by way of the Building Societies' Bill and a number of other pieces of legislation, has been making half-hearted attempts to close the stable door but the horse has bolted and is way out there half way to the horizon.
Deputy Gene Fitzgerald is to be reappointed as Minister for Labour. It is totally relevant to examine the contribution he has made to industry and to industrial relations during his two and a half years in office. There have been several phases in his tenure of this key ministry. The first was one of almost total invisibility. Labour disputes could rock the country but the only labour disputes in which Deputy Fitzgerald was even remotely interested in intervening had a conspicuous contiguity to the city and county of Cork. Then came the Euro elections and a severe boot in the rear was administered to Deputy Fitzgerald and to other Ministers by way of the voting in those elections and also in the local elections. Suddenly, there was a frenetic burst of activity from Deputy Fitzgerald on each and every industrial dispute. However, there is a problem here, as my colleague Deputy O'Leary was not slow to remark while he was on the other side of the House, that is, that realistically there is a limit to the number of disputes in which the Minister for Labour can intervene and to the number of disputes in which he ought to interevene. Trade unions, just as much as employers, are rightly jealous of their own prerogatives in the area of negotiation, of bargaining and industrial action. It would be a poor Minister for Labour who would seek to intervene in every dispute before the accepted channels of negotiation had been exhausted but there will be exceptional cases in which he ought to intervene earlier.
Deputy Fitzgerald faced with criticism, both public and private, about his inactivity in his job, adopted this technique of a flurry of activity which when analysed was totally empty of content. Since then almost every major industrial dispute which has hit the headlines has been accompanied by a little paragraph somewhere in the story to the effect that: The Minister for Labour in a statement just issued is very worried about the situation and is keeping in close touch with it. This is all we have had. Part of the problem is that it encourages people to think that solving strikes is the only function of a Minister for Labour. Nothing could be further from the truth. The function of solving strikes is primarily a matter for the negotiators concerned. The primary function of a Minister for Labour should be to investigate, strengthen, refurbish and develop where necessary the law on industrial relations.
In contrast to the period of office of the previous Government, when seven major pieces of industrial legislation were passed in this House, the record of Deputy Fitzgerald is pitiful. We have had the appointment of a Commission on Industrial Relations which, as Deputy Mitchell said last night, has been hamstrung by the absence of one of its vital partners. It is more important than ever before that the overall law on industrial relations should be looked at. Our fundamental law is still the 1906 Act. As a number of people, including most, particularly many teachers, have found to their cost in the past few years, there are huge groups of workers who are not afforded the basic protection of the 1906 Act when they engage in an official industrial dispute against their employers. I believe the proposals to update this law were under active consideration when Fianna Fáil took office. Given the past record of Deputy Fitzgerald in the Department of Labour, I doubt if we can expect any decision or action or new legislation of a positive kind from him in the next two years. In fact, the only indication we have had of any forthcoming legislation in the industrial area has been a suggestion by the Taoiseach that something might have to be done and it was said in a context which made it clear, certainly as far as I was concerned, that he was less concerned about extending the protection of trade union legislation to workers than about restricting it.
In relation to Deputy Wilson the former Minister for Education, now to be Minister for Education again, it can be said that for a man whose speciality is keeping a high profile at times he kept a most extraordinary low profile in the past week. I never once saw in public print an indication of any threat to his position as Minister for Education. This is perhaps the greatest triumph of his career to date.
The fact is Deputy Wilson came to office loaded with a number of very expensive election promises in the Fianna Fáil manifesto and he had to be goaded remorselessly from this side of the House before he could deliver on some of the most basic promises. He had to be goaded into raising the higher education grants, which he had promised to raise immediately, by a motion put forward from these benches and which was accepted shamefacedly by him in October 1978. He had to be goaded into providing more finance for primary schools. He made some extraordinary mistakes of judgment and many of his promises simply have not materialised. What happened to the 600 trained graduate teachers who were supposed to flood into our schools? Did one-third of them ever stand up in front of a class? What happened to the 600 secretarial assistants for primary and secondary schools who were supposed to take the burden off the backs of so many of the principal teachers? Today, two years after the scheme was introduced, barely one-third of the 600 jobs have been filled and I suspect the same is true of the scheme in relation to caretakers which was announced in this year's budget.
When the sums are done and if it is found that Deputy Wilson has achieved even the bare minimum of what he has promised it will be a great surprise. Some of the key things still remain to be delivered—legislation in relation to universities and, above all, the White Paper on Education. When Deputy Wilson first came to this House as Minister I said we would support him in his effort to get money, provided he spent it in the right way. He is in charge of a difficult Department, one that needs £450 million each year just in order to keep the show on the road. I do not know if we can draw confidence from the fact that in a recent article in a student newspaper in University College, Dublin, he paid tribute to the then Minister for Health and said that their interests were never really at variance when it came to bargaining for money around the Cabinet table.
As I have said I will leave the new Ministers to the judgment of this House at another time in relation to the performance of their duties. Before concluding I wish to comment on one of the key members of the Cabinet and, as I said, the only person the Taoiseach actually had to include, namely, Deputy O'Malley. Deputy Colley was a spent force politically after Friday. Deputy O'Malley was not. So it was that the Taoiseach had to include Deputy O'Malley in his Cabinet if he was to avoid a very real danger of a focus of opposition to himself and to his policies developing outside the Cabinet room. I believe this was the reason Deputy O'Malley was included, that it was the reason why Deputy O'Malley, if anyone was in a position to do so, was able to impose some kind of conditions on his appointment and was probably able to bargain with his leader.
The importance of Deputy O'Malley is not just that he is an able and hard-working man—which he is—but that he represents for the business community here the acceptable face of Irish capitalism. As I said at length last night, I believe the Taoiseach himself and his supporters do not represent the acceptable face of Irish capitalism. This is the importance of Deputy O'Malley. During a budget debate a Government backbencher, Deputy Leydon, used the phrase "the unacceptable face of capitalism" to define the excessive profits being made by the banking system. He seemed to be unaware that the phrase had been used by a British Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, and not by anyone on the left side of the political spectrum. Of course it could not be uttered by anyone on the left side of the political spectrum for the simple reason that it implies that capitalism has an acceptable face. We do not believe it has but in so far as there are people who believe it has, Deputy O'Malley is their spokesman. He is a man almost unique on the Government benches who cannot only use a word such as "ideology" but who knows what it means when he uses it. Left outside the Cabinet he could have been a powerful focus of opposition. I tend to believe that had Deputy Colley withdrawn his nomination and put his troops behind Deputy O'Malley we might be discussing a different Cabinet today.
I should like to refer to a quotation from one of Deputy O'Malley's speeches which has a very ironic ring today and which I am sure he now regrets. As reported in the Irish Independent of 26 January 1976, Deputy O'Malley, then in Opposition, said:
...men of violence in our land were doing far less harm to it—"serious and all as is the damage they are doing—than the outspoken people now in Government who are progressively destroying the economic and democratic fabric of our society."
"What our people should be warned about is that we are now fast approaching the day in the Republic when our economy will break down completely. The resultant chaos which will arise when public servants and social welfare recipients can no longer be paid will allow great freedom of action to anarchists and extremists of all kinds to overthrow our institutions and establish some sort of totalitarian regime..."
That was only in 1976, three-and-a-half years ago. If ever words deserved to be eaten they should be eaten today by Deputy O'Malley.
It is a hotch-potch of a Cabinet. It will be judged effectively at the time of the General Election, not on the characteristics of any one of its members but on the leadership which it has or has not been given.
Before I conclude I should like to say that I do not find it difficult to understand, for reasons which have been hinted at in the public prints and which were mean and unworthy, that Deputy Jim Gibbons should have been so unceremoniously axed from the position of Minister for Agriculture. I am unaware of anything that Deputy Gibbons did during his tenure of office in that Department which justified his dismissal. Deputy Gibbons had a special obsession with the Labour Party. He believed that it was dedicated to the overthrow of Irish society and the common agricultural policy; indeed, at times it was difficult to know which he considered the worst thing that could happen. He was an honest man by his lights and he did not deserve the fate meted out to him.
