Deputy Kelly is in possession and he has practically the whole of his time.
Finance Bill, 1980: Second Stage (Resumed).
Question again proposed: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."
It is a little over 24 hours since the Opposition parties were told that by agreement it would be possible to discuss in conjunction with the Second Stage of the Finance Bill the White Paper on the economy which was issued in January and which was part of the planning cycle which the Government announced on their being returned to office in 1977. When I raised on the Order of Business yesterday the propriety of expecting the Opposition, at a little over an hour's notice, to do justice to the White Paper which has been published for four months, but a debate on which had been refused up to this. I was told that I was not really minding my business and that if I had been pursuing it properly I should be ready to debate it at any time. We will see how the Government side are prepared to deal with the White Paper which is supposed to expose the Government's planning strategy.
The Minister for Finance rose to his feet just after what I have described and delivered a speech which made not a single reference to that White Paper. Either this is a debate on Government planning operations or it is not. Either we are allowed and supposed to bring into the scope of the debate what the Government's large scale plans are for the economy, or we are not. I take it that we are supposed to do it because on the Order of Business yesterday the House was told so. Why, then, did the Minister for Finance not refer to it in any shape of form in the course of his speech? The answer is that he was taken by surprise too. The notice was a bit short even for that genius who is supposed to have the economy at his whirling fingertips. It was a bit of a tall order even for him to be expected to defend a White Paper at an hour's notice. Other speakers followed, Deputy Keegan and Deputy Crinion, and as far as they are concerned there is no White Paper. It has been written out of history as though it was something which appeared in an old edition of the Soviet encyclopaedia but which political expediency required future editions to omit.
We were in a sense on notice that this line would be taken about the White Paper because the White Paper carried in a sense, its death wound within itself. It said in its introductory paragraph, and the preface is not signed by anybody that:
Since the White Paper was finalised the international outlook and the domestic situation have worsened, particularly in regard to the price and availability of energy.
In other words, the situation has worsened enough in order to justify this disclaimer being especially printed and put in between being finalised, rolled off the press and published. The White Paper was released generally on 11 January 1980 but it is possible to make an informed guess about when it was finalised because on 4 December the previous Taoiseach was asked by Deputy Cluskey about this White Paper. The report is as follows in volume 317 of the Official Report of 4 December 1979 at column 616:
Mr. Cluskey: When it is proposed to publish the White Paper on the economy?
The Taoiseach: Hopefully next week but certainly very early in the following week.
Mr. Cluskey: Hopefully next week and possibly the week after?
The Taoiseach: Possibly.
The view of the Government, as it was then constituted, was that the latest date on which this might have been expected from the press was not more than ten or 12 days after Deputy Lynch had spoken. I am within my rights in assuming that the thing was finalised when that exchange took place on 4 December. What happened? What international or domestic convulsion occurred between 4 December 1979 and 11 January 1980? Was there another Iranian revolution? Did the Iranian revolution develop a new dimension of unparalleled seriousness? Were the American hostages suddenly seized in that period, and even if they were would it have been possible to read into that an economic dimension for this country that would justify a qualification of this kind in a solemn annual White Paper? What happened in those five weeks? One significant thing happened which I would regard as a serious deterioration in national affairs and that was the change at the top of the Fianna Fáil Party. That was the event, not anything on the international scene or on the domestic economic scene, which obliged this paper to come out carrying an apology for its own existence around its neck.
It is not as if the White Paper, which nobody has taken much notice of, did not contain any gloomy scenario. In fact it is a fairly helpless production and even had it been presided over by Deputy O'Donoghue as a Minister, it would still have been a fairly feeble production, the most feeble of all the ones we have seen since 1977. At least a certain amount of caution had overtaken the Department of Economic Planning and Development and they were willing to outline four alternative scenarios. One was a pretty gloomy one. It was scenario four of paragraph 2.18 of the White Paper.
Finally, a view of economic prospects based on both unfavourable external conditions and the assumption of an inadequate domestic response can be sketched. Such a scenario would involve a rapid movement towards unsustainable external and public sector deficits which would have to be quickly corrected necessitating severer measure than envisaged in the scenario (2).
An average annual growth rate of no more than 0.5 per cent in the period 1983 could be expected while total employment would decline
In other words, this document was produced within —here is another public sector word—the parameters of a bad scenario. This document is supposed to have answers even for this highly unfavourable scenario. It was within those parameters that this little thing with its curious emblem, the only innovation it contains, was supposed to take even that very gloomy scenario in its stride. But, gloomy though it was, it was not gloomy enough for what happened on 7 December when the Fianna Fáil Party, smarting from their defeats in Cork, ran into the desperate expedient of abandoning the affable incompetence associated with their last boss and going for the affable unscrupulousness associated with their present boss, hoping that would save their electoral face. It will not. It was just a pit for Deputy Lynch. More than half the party dug a trap for him, covered the trap with branches and pushed him into it when he was not looking.
The Deputy is in order as long as he is discussing this document but we cannot debate either the present or past leaders of any political party in this debate.
I am trying to identify the devastating event on the international or domestic scene which is alluded to in the introduction to this document as being responsible for the revision of targets. The document contained already a very gloomy scenario indeed, scenario No. 4, and it was within those parameters that it was produced and there was no reason to disclaim this document except that Deputy Haughey wanted a fresh start. He did not want to be encumbered with the plans, good or bad, of the administration which had just got rid of their leader and put him in charge instead.
The paper itself is a vague, bleating paper. It is indefinite and inexact. It expresses vague optimism. It has almost no concrete plans in it. It has even fewer than the next worst White Paper, that of the end of 1978, which at least promised six different points in its course to tighten up State control of tax evasion. Not even that much resolution is displayed by this one. Nonetheless, a couple of things in it are worth nothing, apart from this little emblem on the cover. Let me draw the attention of the House to that. We do not very often get excursions into heraldic adventurousness in this country and I am surprised that when we do it should come from the planning section of the Department of Finance. The State harp is superimposed on a little medallion, as the art historians call it, of green enamel——
An Lean-Cheann Comhairle
The Deputy with his legal mind will agree that that little emblem does not form part of the document.
It is a poor reflection on the genius in that section if that is the best they are able to produce by way of novelty in a White Paper. There is a dimness in this White Paper—although it is not notably more dim than previous ones, it is only a matter of degree—and by no means deserves to be ranked in the same class as the original programme for economic expansion over which Senator Whitaker presided which, humble and unpretentious though it was and written in English and not in Merrion Street jargon, distinctly identified realisable targets most of which were reached subsequently. There is nothing of that kind in this and I have had to remark that about all the White Papers which this Government have produced. I quote from Page 34, paragraph 3.10:
In the natural resource-based industries the main emphasis will be on the processing of beef, timber, daily products and fish.
Let me concentrate on timber and then ask the House to look at page 44 paragraph 3.34. Regarding forestry we read:
New initiatives for the release of land for state afforestation and for the development of partnership arrangements between farmers, financial interests and possibly the State are under consideration.
They were under consideration at the time of Arthur Griffith. Where are these new initiatives? Where will be the focus of this emphasis? We have been hearing for years from everybody except the Department of Forestry about the difficulties which were inherent in the forestry business and the timber processing business. We know what the difficulties are about land acquisition and in regard to the market for chipboard, wood pulp and so on, but this country imports enormous quantities of wooden material. It is the biggest single commodity that we import next to oil, although there is a big gap there. Some of that timber is hardwood which we cannot grow ourselves, but there is an enormous scope here for forest produce and sawmill produce. I am sick of hearing about the difficulty of land acquisition. I know that farmers do not like to part with land and that it cannot be required compulsorily because all that is required is a man with a match to put an end to your investment. One unhinged, malicious compulsory acquiree and your investment is over. I know all that. We are sick of hearing about it and nobody is going to get marks for wisdom by knowing about it.
Umpteen other things have been suggested, for example that the State might lease land from farmers and that the State would pay them not when the forestry comes to fruition in 15 or 20 years' time, or sooner with some of the faster growing species, but would pay them a steady annuity like a rent in regard to this lease. That would cost the State something in the early days but the State would reap the benefit later when the thinnings would arrive and the forest finally would be ready for harvesting. Why is that not happening? Why is there not even a plan about that in this White Paper Investment and National Development 1979-1983? It is pitiable, and the same kind of remarks could be made about the rest of the White Paper.
Another example can be found in the section dealing with the economic infrastructure. There is another darlin' word. Far from infrastructure we were all reared. Anyhow, in a nutshell, it means the roads and the telephones. The roads and the telephones come in for some attention here. There is one useful and interesting suggestion which is not exactly new but I am glad that it has not been lost sight of, and that is in regard to the possibility of replacing the broken electricity connector link with the North of Ireland by a connector link between Wales and Wexford. Leaving that out of it, all that we read in regard to telecommunications is a set of targets. These are targets of a kind about which we heard Deputy Reynolds here a few minutes ago giving a far from creditable performance as a Minister in dealing with Deputy Harte's question. This reminds me of his utterences at his party's Ard Fheis a couple of months ago. Paragraph 4.13 of the White Paper states:
The successful implementation of this programme—
the telecommunications programme
—will result in the achievement of the following minimum standards:
—the meeting of 98 per cent of all telephone applications within two months and 90 per cent within six weeks;
When is it going to result in that? I get many such applications from my constituents. I see Deputy Andrews up there not letting me out of his sight. I am sure that he gets as many representations as I do, if not more from people who have been waiting for four and five years for telephones and who cannot even get a transfer in under three or four years. That is not only from people who are in new housing estates, green field estates that have sprung out of the earth. They are in established zones. All their neighbours have telephones and they are waiting two, three or four years for a telephone. This White Paper is not published once in a millenium. It is supposed to be published annually, and it is supposed to have concrete targets. The Green Paper should appear in the middle of the year, but there was none in 1979, and there is no word as yet of any in 1980.
The Green Paper is thinking aloud, the Government in their leisure wear and their slippers, sitting back in front of a log fire, puffing rings of smoke and talking about how society might be shaped. The White Paper contains the concrete decisions, the tacks, the nails and the bolts. What do we get under infrastructure and telecommunications—these two words which were never used here until five or ten years ago? The promise that it will result in 98 per cent of telephone applications being filled within two months, and 90 per cent within six weeks. When is it to happen?
I would prefer a concrete promise from that Minister or whoever subsequently holds his post that all outstanding telephone applications will be met by the end of this year. I am not asking for two months or six weeks. I want the outstanding ones dealt with, and I want them dealt with now. Even a certain number of zones cannot be promised. It cannot even be said that the outlying Dublin suburbs or, for all I know, the outlying Cork or Limerick suburbs, will benefit from a speeded-up programme.
Where is the reality in talking about a White Paper which is supposed to map out and track national development on the economic plane for the coming year, or so, when you find this kind of raméis in what is supposed to be a White Paper? The road situation is not better. It simply refers to the road development plan for the eighties as published in May 1979. Paragraph 4.21 states that the primary objective of the plan is to make adequate provision for traffic using the national routes with particular emphasis on freight transport, industrial, agricultural and commercial; implementation of the plan will yield a significant improvement in the country's infrastructure of roads. It will, when it gets implemented.
I would far prefer if a document like this would say honestly: "Look, let us keep our feet on the ground. It costs about £3 million per mile to build a dual carriageway these days. We have not got that kind of money, but we will say what our priority is, and this year we will try to build a by-pass for the town of Athlone." I am not saying that because I have any information that it is particularly bad, but I think it is a bad spot. "That will be our achievement for 1980. It is not much but it is something." That is what one would expect to find in a White Paper. It is very relevant to industry. Industry is the sector which has been identified by this Government above all—not that we neglected it; but this Government have gone far out on a limb, as far as ever the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Tourism went with nuclear power—as the one thing which held out hope for full employment and for getting ourselves permanently on a reliable growth path.
Industry is black in the face complaining about the extra costs the state of the roads represents to them. The CII put it in very simple language. They say our competitors are able to travel a distance with their trucks equivalent to the distance from Dublin to Cork in two-and-a-half hours. It takes us three-and-a-half hours or four hours. Our competitors are able to travel a distance equivalent to the distance between Dublin and Galway in an hour-and-three-quarters on their roads. It takes our trucks carrying our raw material imports and our exports nearly twice that length of time and, on Friday afternoons or on wet evenings, it takes far longer than that. That has direct implications for industrial costs. We should not have to lecture the Fianna Fáil Party about that, because they never tire of lecturing us about it. They never tire of bleating and begging the people to do their job for them.
I do not need to emphasise the state of the roads. They are getting worse by the day, not better. Everybody here knows that. I do not suppose I drive a fraction of the mileage you drive, Sir, because you have to drive from Enniscorthy, or which the Minister drives coming from even further. The roads are in a worse condition than they have ever been before. Except that I remember parts of the country where there were no metalled roads, since I was a child I cannot remember a time when the state of the ordinary roads was as bad as it is now. It would not consort with the Fianna Fáil ethos, with the Fianna Fáil soul, to be humble, to be practical, to be realistic and say: "We will do a little at a time and we will tell you now what we will do. If we succeed in doing a bit more than that, we will ask for credit."
That is not the Fianna Fáil mentality. That is not their way of doing things. That is not their style. Their style is to produce something which is all glitter. When the rain and the wind fall on it, the glitter falls off and the rotting cardboard substructure is revealed to the vulgar gaze at last. As long as the glitter is there, it attracts the children and they are there in their T-shirted myriads. There is no one there to clear up the dirty pasteboard afterwards and the eyesores, until every now and again another Government get into office and have to soldier along for a few years making themselves unpopular, as I believe any Government who do their job in this country are fated to do.
The social development which the White Paper mentioned is too large a subject to go on to at the moment, but I will just mention one thing which is very germane to the whole question of industrial and economic development. There is a section on education and training, and rightly so. The report mentions that we suffer very badly here from a lack of skills in certain areas inasmuch as there are many hundreds of jobs vacant for which there are not enough trained Irish people to fill. There is one thing which this section says nothing about to which the Confederation of Irish Industry has more than once drawn attention, that is, our lamentable standard in the teaching and learning of European languages.
I am not saying this as an academic. I am thinking in terms of developing Irish exports and getting jobs for Irish people. In their second last bulletin—I have got only a photocopy here and I cannot read the date—the CII complained about the figures returned by the Department of Education. Of students presenting themselves for leaving certificate in 1977-78 only 3.3 per cent of the boys—in other words 3.3 per cent of some 26,000 students—were learning German. Over half were learning French. I intend no insult to our French friends in saying that, for reasons for which the French are not to blame Germany is a far more important trading partner and investor on the Irish scene than France.
That should not of course be the factor determining either educational policy generally or the course which an individual child takes. Naturally he must be allowed to develop his own bent and follow his own inclinations. I recognise also that traditional patterns have played a part and that a lot of this depends on the availability of teachers. Many people like myself tended to be taught French as the first continental European language. I see the reasons for this all right. All I am saying is that it is lamentable.
As always the situation with the girls is somewhat better. Just as they perform a great deal better in the leaving certificate so their spread of subjects is a great deal better here too. The percentage of girls learning German in school is roughly twice that of the boys, but it is still far too low. It is 6.46 per cent only. The overall total is just 5 per cent. One school leaver in 20 has some competence in the German language. These are only the people who present themselves. I do not know what proportion of them fail. No doubt some of them will fail so probably one could halve that figure to get the number of people who have any serious competence—perhaps one in 40. That simply is no good.
I am not in any sense trying to encourage or make a case for emigration, but I want to remind the House that we are in an economic community one of whose purposes is to provide a free movement of labour as well as capital and trade, in every sense of the word, labour. That is meaningless unless Irish people can go anywhere from Jutland to Sicily to work if they feel like it, and that they will be treated on the same basis as Danes, or Italians, or Germans, or French, or anyone else. There are many attractions in living on the Continent. It is not any longer a case of the Queenstown wake and saying goodbye to a family you knew you would never see again, barring a miracle. You can be back and forth to these places inside a day at a cost, in spite of the passage between Deputy Deasy and the Minister a few minutes ago, which, depending on one's grade at work, represents a week's wages or two week's wages at most.
I call attention to the fact that there will be job opportunities on the Continent for Irish boys and girls who may prefer to work there. Perhaps some people wishing to work on the Continent will wish to visit frequently with their families at home. Perhaps they may even maintain an establishment of their own here but we are not doing anything to help them in this regard. In addition to the Irish school system turning out lamentably poorly educated boys and girls in the continental languages there is this imbalance between people who are relatively less important and those who are relatively more important to us.
To this extent there is involved an important national economic function as well as an educational one. The White Paper has not one word about that and I must say I do not recall any White Paper having mentioned the matter either.
I have passed the two-thirds point in my time, I have an enormous amount of ground still to cover and I am not going to succeed in doing it all but I want to draw attention to the fact that this Finance Bill—since the White Paper has not been expressly disclaimed although we know the realities—must be looked at as ultimately the product of political thinking of which the budget also was an integral part. The White Paper which was supposed to map out the course of the economy for a year ahead and which was published in January together with the budget and now the Finance Bill, are all supposed to belong to a coherent whole, but when we look at the budget and at the Finance Bill which has given effect to it, what do we find? We find, first, the Confederation of Irish Industry are complaining, and complaining in tones which they have not used for many years to my recollection and I believe never used when the National Coalition were there, about the burden which this budget represents for them.
The Minister here yesterday, in introducing the Second Stage of the Finance Bill, awarded a certificate to himself when he talked of achieving these aims of reducing Government borrowing and so on while at the same time protecting the sources of economic growth. The main source has been identified by him and his Government as the industrial sector. That is the main source of economic growth but what does industry say about this budget? They point, first, to the hydrocarbon tax which though estimated variously from one day to the next, has put £45 million or £50 million additional cost on industry. Let us point to Britain. God knows I often complain about the idiocy of always looking over our shoulder at the British, but here unfortunately, unhappily, is a case in which it is possible for reasonable persons to recognise that the British have refrained from inflicting a burden of that kind on their industry. The CII have repeated this. At least we should exempt industries which are highly energy-intensive and which depend on oil but this extra tax represents a very substantial increase in their costs.
The Secretary General of the CII said, as reported in The Irish Times of 19 April, that: a large number of firms are more energy-intensive, that oil accounts for 20 per cent of product cost and that there are a small number of manufacturing firms where oil and electricity together account for over half of total product cost.
For some of these firms the recent tax increases on industrial oils is 5 to 7 per cent of total product cost. This is the sector that Fianna Fáil was going to lift out of depression. It was almost like one of these dramatic semi-political statues that you see in cities in central Europe showing a large maternal female figure beckoning to the sky with one hand while supporting a failing infant with the other. This is Fianna Fáil supporting Irish industry. This is the party who see themselves in that heroic guise.
The CII are black in the face and, of course, they are no different from the rest of the country, about the effect of the credit tightness on business, the effect of the gross Government over-expenditure, all, needless to say, necessitated by this anxiety to buy popularity before the 1977 election and requiring promises on which they had to deliver—as many of them as they were able to deliver on with mere money rather than with brains. The consequence of that grossly excessive public expenditure, grossly excessive swelling in particular in the public service, is that credit for everybody else, even for the productive industrial sector, is very severely tightened. I have given similar figures before and I have some updated ones.
Would the House credit that in spite of all the talk about cutting Government expenditure the civil service has grown since January 1977 by 5,500 workers. It has, presumably, grown by a few more hundred since then. The local authorities have grown in the last 12 months in their employment by 2,000 people. The health boards have grown since June 1977 by nearly 6,000 people. I am all for having as many nurses as we need. I am all for not skimping on anything but all I am observing is that this is being done by and under the authority of a Government who are simultaneously bleating about the necessity for restraint. Where is the restraint? The truth is that they cannot bear an instant of unpopularity. It is like the touch of holy water to the devil to them to feel that they are alienating anybody but of course in the end they have to because the rope runs out. In the end they have to do things like issuing the statement which they issued yesterday in regard to the curtailment of the school bus services. That is deeply unpopular. It is not felt at all in my constituency but it is deeply unpopular in the constituencies which have thin populations and in which there is a rural school bus service on which people have come to depend.
The Confederation of Irish Industry at the same time have repeatedly said that this credit tightness is resulting in job losses, not in job growth, and in redundancies. On 19 April 1980The Irish Times again reported a survey which they had carried out with 500 graduates in business administration courses who were in management jobs throughout Irish industry and the consensus, I am not saying a 100 per cent consensus, but the large consensus among these 500 graduates was that the budget was unlikely to create jobs. Of these people 37 per cent said that the budget would result in an actual reduction of employment in their firms that year. That was the view of nearly two out of five of these business managers. Only 1 per cent said that employment would rise as a result of the budget measures.
That is the budget and this is the Finance Bill on the back of it that we are supposed to accept and support and praise as being an encouragement to our economic growth. Even the builders, and God knows it takes a lot to make that particular horse turn over, are up in arms. Mr. Reynolds, the Chairman of the Construction Industry Federation, is reported today as strongly attacking the stop-go cycle of boom and bust induced in the building industry by erratic Government policies. I know what he means by boom and bust. He said that the extent of ignorance at Government level of the economic importance of the building industry was extraordinary. That is very strong language for a builder about the Fianna Fáil Party.
Today, also, there is an exemplification of exactly what he means in a report on the business page of The Irish Times regarding the calling in of a receiver at Avonree. Here was a thriving little business in Kilkenny with 70 employees making pre-fab houses but the slump in the building industry deliberately produced and provoked by the party represented by Deputy Daly opposite have put those 70 men out of jobs and have closed down that firm as they closed down O'Connor and Bailey and others. The party opposite in their sick greed for power and their Leader in his sick greed to get in and stay in is closing factories and firms down all over this country. There is no depth or bucket of economic recession caused internationally to blame for that on the building side. That excuse was genuinely available to us in 1974-75 and we were laughed at for saying so, but there is no such excuse available today. There is not an international recession at the moment. There are international difficulties, I admit them very freely and I make every allowance for them, but we are not in the trough of a recession now comparable to 1974-75. Yet for the first time since those days seasonally unadjusted unemployment was higher at the end of April than at the end of January. I have got no more recent figures than that, naturally, because we do not have weekly figures any longer. But nonadjusted, in other words, unemployment not discounting the seasonal factor, was actually higher at the end of April than at the end of January. When did that happen before? When is the last year that that happened? It only happened once in the 1970s and that was in the trough of the depression in 1975 when the rise then was a absolute marginal one whereas the rise on this occasion is in the thousands.
The Deputy has 5.5 minutes remaining.
We are not out of the wood even having established that. We have not even painted the extent of the mess in which this Government have left us. It is not given for man to run this country properly and be popular; it cannot be done. Some of the blame for that must be carried by all sides, because we have always treated the people with lollipops, never told them enough of the truth enough of the time, giving them too many easy answers. I cannot disclaim some of the blame for that on my side as well. But there was some limit in our case. We did not rashly make promises which we knew we could not redeem on. We did not throw away manoeuvering room for future years in order to win an election. We could overnight have run up a set of promises which would have been even more extreme and extravagant than the ones made by the party opposite in 1977. But we did not do it even at the cost of going out and I would not do it again even at the cost of going out and being out for ever. I am sorry to be singing this song so often but it cannot be sung often enough. It is tedious and very disagreeable for the people opposite to have to hear. The syndrome which they have called into being—it is a very ugly syndrome and was not present in the same shape or form under the National Coalition—consists in run-away public expenditure which has to be cut back too late and too painfully. Because it has been built up on fantastic borrowings, it is necessarily accompanied by the payment of interest on loans which absorbs almost a quarter of the State's revenue now just to keep down the debt service. That has left us in a situation, combined with the expectations of the public, where there is nothing ahead ultimately, as far as I can see, but a devaluation of the currency. Whether or not that comes about this year most certainly there will be a second and very severe budget with all its deflationary effects and negative effect on employment.
The Minister for Finance in his budget speech in March allocated £100 million for unforeseen or for extra rises in public service pay. Eighty million pounds of that, if I understand the Estimates correctly, has now been bespoken by the increases for which the nurses have been waiting so long. In other words, it is going to cost £80 million to meet the nurses' claims—if they accept it, which is not certain. That leaves £20 million for everybody else. The Minister opposite may not be aware of this, but last month the public service served notice—reported in The Irish Times of 26 April—of a 30 per cent rise right across the board. The old mathematics said that for every one point rise in public service pay the State would have to dig into its pocket for £10 million. That figure has since risen to approximately £15 million, partly because of the higher base and partly because of the greater number of public servants. In other words, that 30 per cent claim—if conceded, and I do not suppose it will—implies additional expenditure of £450 million. I know that Deputy Daly lives in a constituency where money is flung around like chaff on enormous generating stations. Perhaps that does not mean an awful lot to him. But it is a huge amount of money by the standards of this country and is absolutely outside the capacity of this Government to meet. It has put itself in the position where it has simultaneously generated these expectations and left itself incapable of meeting them, or capable of meeting them only by borrowing money in such volume that the productive side of the economy is squeezed for the credit it so desperately needs.
I very much doubt if Deputy Daly would want to hear the rest of what I want to say, or what I would have had to say. I will condense it into a few words. Frankly, I thought when this budget appeared in March that it was intended to keep the option of an election open, because it did have the effect at once of stilling momentarily criticism on the PAYE front. I concede that and nobody would deny it. It represented a substantial concession to a large number of PAYE earners. When I saw that, although it seemed to me that it could not be paid for immediately, I thought to myself: this is intended to keep an election option open. I believe that the Government are backing away from that option because all the other signs are so unfavourable. The net effect is that they have now paid out even more rope, left themselves with even fewer options, given themselves even less money to subsidise products in order to keep some control on the grotesque inflation rate. They have left themselves with less manoeuvring room to allow the private sector credit to expand. They have done all the wrong things and not even for the right reasons. They have done the wrong things for the wrong reason and the devil mend them.
This Finance Bill advances a stage further the many proposals and the taxation changes announced in the 1980 Budget. As the Minister said yesterday, this Bill incorporated also a number of additional concessions.
Now that the dust has settled somewhat on the 1980 Budget, despite what Deputy Kelly has said, the many taxation changes and new concessions announced, the various improvements to which this Bill gives statutory effect—overall the measures have been welcomed by the public. For employees perhaps the most pleasing aspects were the suggested improvements in the income tax code, the various alterations involving higher allowances, income-splitting and the changes in the tax bands. These measures went beyond the expectations of most people—the introduction of income-splitting went even further than the Supreme Court decision.
These concessions and improvements have not yet been passed on to the PAYE earner. Therefore, their benefits have not been felt as yet. The Minister and the Government took very positive action in implementing the concept of income-splitting for all married couples. I contend that that was only right and proper. Otherwise, an injustice would have been perpetrated against the pillar of Irish society, the wife and mother who remains at home to run the house. In recent modern times emphasis has been placed on the role of the working wife, the facilities with which she should be provided in order to look after her children and so on. These have all been covered in depth in recent years. I make no criticism of these. Indeed, in these modern times of inflation, higher home costs and so on the necessity for the wife to work is often enormous. But the position of a wife and mother who remains at home to look after the home and her children—unfortunately a tradition always taken for granted—is a good one. Therefore it is fitting and appropriate that her position has been recognised finally and that the benefit of income-splitting has not been restricted solely to couples with two incomes. The benefit of the tax reliefs will help all households to a considerable degree and will increase substantially in many different ways their purchasing power.
The special commission set up by the Government, as announced in the Minister's budget speech, to examine the whole structure of taxation will be followed with more than normal interest by the public. A very good beginning has been made in the evolvement of equity into the taxation code. In this area the Minister is to be complimented for having moved so quickly and decisively.
This is considered to be fair by the wage earner who felt he was carrying an unfair burden for far too long. It is true to say that most people dislike having to pay income tax, but any fair tax system will be accepted.
The PAYE worker has no room to manoeuvre as far as his tax is concerned. His tax is deducted at source, unlike that of the farmer, the professional, the self-employed and so on. It is unfortunate that the taxation issue resulted in somewhat of a clash between rural and urban, the farmer and the wage earner. Farmers' representatives have repeatedly indicated that they are anxious to pay a fair share of tax. We all accept this, but when a system is devised they all seem to knock it loudly and emphatically. This, in turn, causes cynicism among the PAYE earners which is understandable. If equity is to be seen to be there at all, no other section should seek to choose the system of taxation that they wish or that they want. PAYE workers have never had that privilege or that opportunity and nobody else should.
The savings in the additional taxation allowances will, however, be seriously eroded if the spiral of wage and price increases is to continue. I am seriously concerned, as indeed are most people, at the continued apparent loss of responsibility on the part of a small minority within our community. We are all familiar with the sudden unofficial strike weapon which is now used far too frequently to force big wage settlements. This is the new form of blackmail and is normally directed against a community service, causing a great deal of hardship and inconvenience to everybody.
The Fine Gael front bench spokesman said here today that Government backbenchers were being sent in here to slate and to criticise trade unions. The words used were "a trade union bashing campaign". That remark is typical of the bluffing contributions that come from the benches on the far side of the House. Anybody who has followed the progress of the present Minister for Labour will recall, without any difficulty, the efforts he has continuously made to give trade unions every possible support against those who will ignore their own trade union officials. The Government have at all times bent over backwards to give their unqualified support to strengthening the trade union image.
What this country needs most of all—and this is recognised—is a strong trade union organisation, strong enough to control and if necessary take effective action against those breaking the rules of their own unions, ignoring the decisions taken by officials and generally turning their backs on their own trade unions. Unofficial strikes are the greatest evil in this country today and accounted for 75 to 80 per cent of the work days lost last year. Lock-outs follow on unofficial strikes and cause a general decay and a complete breakdown in relationship between trade union, employer and trade union member.
In situations like this how can we be competitive in attracting foreign industrialists to our country? We need to do our utmost to attract foreigners to invest in this country, to create more jobs. This, however, is extremely difficult in view of recent circumstances. Competition in world markets is stronger than ever before. European countries particularly are competing strongly against each other to attract investment. The IDA have done an extremely good job over the years and have been very successful in attracting industrialists from different parts of the world. When there are so many unofficial strikes, who would blame foreign industrialists for thinking twice before coming into this country to invest their money and to take their chances? What is the answer to the problem? It is difficult to know, but workers and employers must come to a realisation of what is good for the country and for the future and must work together. Otherwise, there is very little prospect of job creation in the future for young people.
As we all know, we have an exceptionally large young population who within a few years will be seeking their first jobs. Those jobs must be created, otherwise our young people must emigrate. The present situation of breakdown in discipline within trade unions means economic suicide. Unless something is done very soon to correct that situation, we shall have difficulties in the not too distant future as far as creation of additional jobs is concerned.
It is often found that those seeking larger increases come from sheltered occupations. They are already in receipt of reasonably good incomes and often with pensionable jobs with no possibility, or little possibility of losing them. I appeal to those workers to reconsider their attitudes, to think of the weaker sections of the community because those are the people who are suffering and who will be the losers in the final analysis.
The Fianna Fáil Government since taking office in 1977 have created in the region of 45,000 new jobs. Quite frequently Opposition Deputies made rather snide remarks in relation to our manifesto and particularly our commitment to creating jobs as contained in that manifesto. Nobody will agree that the Government have failed in this direction. They have created over the past three years the greatest number of jobs ever created in the history of this State. That is some achievement particularly against the background of strong competition from other countries, particularly within the EEC, to attract foreign industrialists. We are not the only country nowadays with incentives for foreigners. They are all over the world and quite often the investor will consider the stability of the work market before making any decisions. This is an important area and something that we should consider.
The Minister yesterday referred to the alarming demands coming to the surface for higher pay rises in excess of that envisaged when the budget was being planned. It is very interesting, indeed, to note that the wage settlement in Sweden this week was 7 per cent. This has been one of the biggest there for several years. We have to consider the type of demands being made here at present of 15 per cent, 20 per cent and perhaps even more. I think that many of our people are in cuckoo land. They must bring their feet down to the ground and accept that increases of that sort are not on.
Our social welfare recipients received quite substantial increases in the budget last February of 25 per cent. These increases can be eroded by price rises. Some control must be put on this. If we are to have higher pay we must have higher prices. One follows the other. You cannot have one without the other. The weaker sector of the community must be protected against higher inflation. I am sure the Minister for Social Welfare will keep this section of our community in mind in the coming months and during next year.
Chapter 6 of the Bill refers to tax relief for companies manufacturing in Ireland and exporting abroad. In this context, no incentive can be too great for manufacturers who are successful in selling to world markets abroad. I feel that one of our greatest failures so far has been the lack of successful impact in selling Irish made goods at present. For some years now, we have had a very strong campaign to promote the sale of Irish goods. It has been stated on many previous occasions that if we were to sell an additional 2½ to 3 per cent of Irish made goods in our stores it would creat an additional 10,000 to 12,000 jobs. Surely such a target is worth while.
It is very difficult to understand why the Irish are not more sensitive to this and put greater effort into purchasing to create these additional jobs. I know that many of our leading stores are doing a very good job to promote the sale of Irish goods but, on the other hand, there are many more very large stores who not only fail to promote in any strong way the sale of Irish goods but do not even display Irish goods. If they display them in a small way they do so in an unattractive way and certainly in a manner that it not attractive to a prospective purchaser. Consequently golden opportunities are lost. It is not possible I understand to take a stronger stand with purchasers and buyers of stores who are dealing in a free enterprise, but I would like to see a stronger programme directed particularly at stores rather than at the shopper. It is all very well directing the campaign at the shopper but if the goods are not available it is difficult to blame the shopper for not purchasing.
Good displays sell goods. The displays must be attractive and the promotion must be there also. There must be a real desire to sell Irish goods. If we can do that we will have gone a good way towards achieving many thousands more jobs for our people at home.
A lot has been said regarding cut-backs to local authorities. The comedy of potholes has probably gone off by now we have heard so much about it. It must be remembered that in this particular year of discreet spending an additional 10 per cent has been given to every local authority in the State. This is somewhat below the rate of inflation but it is not today or yesterday that our roads got into bad condition. Our roads have deteriorated over a number of years.
Many of the Deputies who often criticise the Government for the poor state of roads and cut-backs to local authorities and so on, are local councillors. I suggest that they refer this matter to their local councils because the deterioration of our roads has been happening over a period. If county councils have not been taking this matter up before this budget they have been neglecting their duty at local level. It is all very well to score political points but nowadays the public do not fall for that sort of thing. We must be a little more realistic and a bit more general in our criticism. If we are to have criticism let us have justified criticism not something, as I have mentioned about potholes and pennyhalfpenny things which have been happening for quite some time. The Deputies who have been blaming the Minister for Finance because of the budget this year on the condition of roads and for potholes are following a wrong course.
In the inner city of Dublin which is referred to now and again by various Deputies there are problems. These problems have been there for some years. So far as the housing programme in Dublin is concerned last year nearly 2,000 houses were built by Dublin Corporation. Dublin Corporation would find it extremely difficult to build any more houses even if they had double the grants and double the money. They are bedevilled by labour problems, and I understand that the city council did not spend their full grant. In many councils throughout the country, there was a rush at the last minute to spend what money was left in the kitty. This does not suggest that emergencies have been created by the lack of funds.
The Finance Bill is a good Bill. It seeks to do something genuine for the PAYE earner, it gives additional incentives for harder work and indeed an incentive to everybody, the employer, the worker, and the trade union to use this budget and Government proposals to throw off the old problem that we have been bedevilled with in the past. I appeal to all those particularly in industry to look to the future and to try to make the future brighter for young people. That way, we can have improved economic development which will benefit everybody at the end of the day.
Listining to Deputy Brady I found it difficult to ascertain if he was really serious in some of the comments he made concerning local authorities and the amount of money that was nearly unexpended because they had so much of it, and also in his comments on job creation.
This Bill is concerned with the implementation of the financial resolutions which came before this House in the budget. Since the budget we have had expressions of mixed feelings in respect of the provisions in the budget and the provisions in the Finance Bill. The verdicts on what is contained here are anything but clear cut. They range from a guarded welcome to outside dissatisfaction depending on who is saying what at any given time.
The provisions now being implemented by the Finance Bill were described at various times as a new approach by no less a man than the Taoiseach. Some Fianna Fáil Deputies have described the provisions as having a caring aspect, others defined the budget as having the stamp of social justice. We have had descriptions of its breaking new ground, of its being a new approach and so on. Yet we had statements from the former Taoiseach, Deputy Jack Lynch, and the former Minister for Economic Planning and Development asserting that this budget was nothing more or less than a continuation of the ideas promulgated by them in their time as Taoiseach and Minister for Economic Planning and Development respectively. I fail to see where the logic is to be found in this assertion. The statement made by the latter pair mentioned however is much more accurate than the assertions of new furrow-making and new ground breaking so far as this budget and this Finance Bill are concerned.
The tax concessions lauded by Government speakers, under closer scrutiny do not seem to be what people thought they were when first announced. One of the features of this budget was in the 1979 budget. It took most of the year to discover what was being given and taken away and for people to find out exactly what was contained in these provisions. We are now halfway through this year and many thousands of people are still at a loss to know what exactly the provisions of the budget were and what is contained in the implementation of these measures through the Finance Bill.
The PAYE sector took to the streets last year. We had a reaction to that which initially convinced these people that all their marching was for nothing. Yet as time goes on those same people who felt that they had done something for their members and for themselves a few short months ago are now pointing out that many of the so-called concessions are illusory in so far as they are concerned. The Irish Times on 10 March of this year carried a headline which read “Sleight of Hand Magic in Budget Sums”. Here was a correspondent of a newspaper who had not a political axe to grind giving what he and his paper thought were factual information and a factual assessment of what was contained in the budget. One lesson that could be learned from the facts as ascertained in that article was that a person with an income of £5,000 in 1980, when all the sums have been calculated and an answer has been found, finds himself financially worse off this year than he was in 1979.
As was said from this side of the House from the very beginning when the provisions were made known, the overall strategy contained in the budget seemed to favour the higher income groups to an exorbitant extent. One would expect that in the normal way because if a person has a higher income he would benefit that much more because of that, but those benefits would be in direct ratio to his income. It so happens that under the provisions in this budget now being implemented by the Finance Bill that ratio is weighted heavily in favour of the person in receipt of £14,000 or £15,000 plus per annum. In this country at this time that kind of approach or philosophy cannot be justified or justifiable in any shape or form.
The person with £1,700 now finds himself not liable for income tax. A couple, each with an income, are free of tax up to £3,400. On paper that looks like an improvement, but going further into the details which are thrown up we find that the imposition of indirect taxation quickly erodes illusory concessions which these people thought they had got.
A long established accepted fact which it now would seem was accepted in error was that indirect taxation was an equitable and fair means of extracting revenue from the public. It has been shown scientifically beyond any shadow of doubt that the imposition of indirect taxation across the board is anything but equitable or fair, for the simple reason that it has been shown and proven that it imposes greater hardships on those who are less well able to face this imposition—the less well off, the unemployed, the lower paid, people in receipt of old age pensions and so on. They are obliged to spend a greater portion of their disposable income on essential goods. The person in the higher income bracket will spend his own share on essential goods as he sees fit, but there is a limit beyond which he would not go simply because he does not need to go beyond that limit. At the end of the day anybody looking at the two sets of figures will find that the lower paid person is spending a much greater proportion of his disposable income on essentials than is his better off neighbour. For that reason the imposition of indirect taxation hits him harder.
The one word which comes to mind through the budget and through debates on the Budget is the word "discretionary". This word has taken on added significance in the past couple of months. We were told that the indirect taxation imposed was on non-discretionary items. That is very fine language if it is true. But everybody knows, including the Minister for Finance, that if you have an imposition of indirect taxation on so-called non-discretionary items—petrol was said to be a non-discretionary item—the end result is that you have indirectly a consequential increase in a vast area, in fact on possibly 99 per cent of all other items. This is because of the fuel input into their manufacture, their transport and so on which indirectly hits at the person who can never afford or aspire to owning a car. The taxation of so-called non-discretionary items has the unfortunate indirect result of imposing this severe strain on the finances of people who can least afford to meet that strain.
The income-splitting saga has now gone on since last October. Deputy Brady tried to maintain that it was time that this inequitable system of taxation which did not allow income splitting was terminated. Deputy Brady must know, as does every employee in this country, that it was not the Fianna Fáil Government who introduced income splitting. It was the High Court and subsequently the Supreme Court who did. The Government of the day, which happened to be a Fianna Fáil Government, were forced into a position by law where they had to make this provision and allow this facility to people where a man and his wife were both employed. Making a virtue out of necessity does not cut ice with anybody. It is simply a fact of having had to introduce this facility. The Government had no option in the matter.
My overall view of the budget is that it is weighted in favour of the better-off sections of our community. That is one major fault which must be found with the budget and the Bill that now implements its provisions. The other aspect which one must comment on critically and, indeed criticise severely, is its lack of commitment to employment. Fianna Fáil got into power on a long list of promises, one of which was a drastic reduction in unemployment. To their eternal credit they put on paper what was to them an achievable target in reaching their goal of full employment.
There is a double think here. Deputy Brady has fallen into the same trap as many others in trying to promulgate the idea that targets have been achieved in reducing the unemployment figures, but in fact they have not. The Fianna Fáil manifesto was very categoric in its assertion that it would reduce the unemployment figures by X, Y and Z numbers per annum. A new tune is now being played about job creation which is as far from reducing unemployment figures as one can imagine. One simple example will illustrate what I am talking about.
In 1979, the number of jobs created by the efforts of the IDA amounted to something over 23,600, a very fine achievement in job creation. On the other side of the coin, during 1979 we had 14,900 plus redundancies, giving us a net reduction in unemployment figures of 8,700. That is the important figure for Members of this House and for the people who are looking to us to provide the framework within which they can get jobs. The figure of 8,700 is an achievement, but it is a far cry from the target of fewer unemployed 25,000 set in the manifesto. While it is correct to say that 45,000 jobs have been created since the assumption of power by Fianna Fáil in 1977, let us not confuse that issue with jobs on the ground and people working in them. That is what was promised in 1977 by the Fianna Fáil party who came into power as a result of their promises.
In the budget and in this Bill there is no indication of a continued commitment to that job creation programme. I appreciate that the Government will say they have fallen in bad times, that things are not what they might be, or what they were expected to be by then at the time they made these promises. Surely they should be honest enough to stand up and state what the realistic position is at the moment: they are not reaching their target for employment. There may be valid excuses for that, but a blind denial of the facts will not cod anybody. Things have taken a very serious twist downwards in the recent past. Only last week in this House figures were literally winkled out of a Minister which indicated that the trend in job losses and redundancies has taken a very severe dip for the worst. In fact, for the first three months of this year that dip amounted to a 45 per cent disimprovement in redundancies. That is a very severe trend and there seems to be a degree of whistling past the graveyard by the Government in that regard. They do not admit it is there. If they do, they are not prepared to confront the issue and to find some solution of the problem.
The Conferation of Irish Industry, who are an independent group, publish commentaries on a regular basis on trends in the economy. The most recent figures published show that industrial output expanded by 6.7 per cent in 1979 over 1978. It can also be shown that no growth whatever took place in the latter half of 1979. This can be shown from the figures in the joint report by the CII and the ESRI. The no-growth trend has persisted through the first three months of 1980. This is unfortunate but it must be said. Yet the whistling past the graveyard goes on.
The value of total exports for the first quarter of this year was up by 27.8 per cent vis-à-vis the same period for 1979. But major contributory factors to that increase were in the meat industry and electrical products. If they were taken out, one would have a 16 per cent increase in value. If one applied that to volume one would find there is a very slight increase in the volume of exports.
A further disturbing factor concerning industry is that the total imports increased by 28.6 per cent in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period last year. If fuel is excluded the total imports grew by 22 per cent in value which indicates a very moderate increase in volume. The indications to be drawn from that particular trend is that industries, and we must remember that two-thirds of our total imports are made up of raw materials for industrial production, are not importing raw materials to the same degree as they used to. That does not augur well for our industrial output for the remainder of this year. In fact it has been shown in the same data that there was no growth at all in volume for the month of March in imports which means there was no growth in volume of imports which would be essential to our industrial expansion. That is a matter for serious concern. Yet the requests made to the Government to alleviate some of this pressure, to seek solutions to some of these industrial expansion problems have been ignored.
The expansion and the state of our industry are very closely related to our capacity to employ people. Trends for increasing unemployment and for a reduction in industrial output will go hand-in-hand also. The Minister of State at the Department of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, Deputy Burke, only last week was quoted as saying that of the 1,700 exporting companies about 200 are dangerously marking time. That is an admission by a Minister in a Department whose responsibility it is to ensure that these 200 industries should not be marking time, that steps ought to be taken to get them out of their trouble. We have had a spate of closures, albeit all in vulnerable, sensitive areas, in the past couple of months—textiles, footwear, clothing and so on. In my own area only last week a factory which was in a very healthy state laid off 80 people or half its work force. What I would like to know is what is being done to halt this slide down the slippery slope. Times are tough. We have had industrial problems. When I hear Government backbenchers stating that the Minister for Labour has done a tremendous job since he came into office two-and-a-half years ago, one is forced to put the facts on record. These are that 1979 was the worst year on record for lost man-days through industrial action and today we have flash-points in different areas of the country and in different industrial sectors which could have far-reaching consequences on our future development as a nation. Far be it from me to provoke or incite trouble by people who, in some cases, ought to know better. There is no point in saying that Sweden's solution was found through a 7 per cent increase in wage demands when we are faced with an inflation rate which will possibly be in excess of 20 per cent by the end of this year. The Leader of my party, Deputy FitzGerald, was castigated, and at the time it was stated that he was less than patriotic, when in 1979 he questioned budgetary calculations. Unfortunately, Dr. FitzGerald was proved correct by the end of 1979.
He was again taken to task a few months ago for suggesting that the inflationary input by the budget itself, plus economic and domestic features within the country, would lead this country this year to possibly an inflation rate of 22 per cent. I hope Deputy FitzGerald was wrong but unfortunately as things stand so far this year, I am afraid that Deputy FitzGerald will be proved right.
The industrial expansion of this country is something to which we must look if we are to achieve any degree of affluence or indeed of economic survival in the current economic climate internationally. We have heard repeated requests by interested parties for an undertaking that the Government would underwrite the exchange risk of foreign borrowing. Just as often we have had that request refused on the grounds that it would be inappropriate to expend public moneys on this kind of operation. To my mind the only circumstance in which such expenditure would come about would be through devaluation of the punt. There is vehement denial of any such intention on the part of the Government. Indeed I would hope that they would persist and that this would never happen. But, if there is no devaluation in prospect, then there is no expenditure under this underwriting scheme sought by industry. Therefore the logic escapes me as to why there is such reluctance to underwrite this risk. Even though it is only a small thing it would help to relieve some of the pressure now facing these people—the high cost of interest rates, the imposition of extra duty on industrial oil, which now stands at 7p a gallon. And one must remember that Irish industrialists are competing in the same market place with industrialists from other EEC countries who have not got one cent duty to pay on industrial oil. There is one country in the EEC where there is no duty whatever, others are paying 1p, 2p and 3p. We are top of the league in so far as duty on industrial oil is concerned—7p per gallon as against 5p paid by our neighbours in the UK.
On the cost of oil and energy in general, on the evening of the budget I was amused to see and hear a television commentator describe it as an energy-conscious one. I will give him the benefit of having been in the very heated and excited atmosphere of a TV studio when possibly his better sense ran away with him. The budget may have many characteristics and there may be many adjectives that would describe these adequately but there is one thing that this budget could not be called and that is "energy-conscious". I say this because, prior to the budget, we had the abolition of the one tangible commitment to energy conservation there was, that was, the solid fuel conservation grant. To rub salt into the wounds we had an increase in VAT rating across the board when the 20 per cent rate of interest was increased to 25 per cent.
The Deputy has five minutes remaining.
In that category there were items such as cylinder jackets. This energy-conscious budget increased VAT on one item obviously meant for the conservation of heat in a domestic or an industrial hot water supply. In this country we have something like 800,000 domestic dwellings, of which it is estimated only one-third are adequately insulated. That means that over half a million houses in this country are inadequately insulated at present. Yet this budget imposed extra taxation on what must be regarded as energy-saving, energy-conservation items.
The overall atmosphere at present is one of gloom. This Bill does nothing to dispel that gloom. If there is one thing we need here at present it is confidence. If one looks anywhere around the country at industrialists, farmers, fishermen, any group, one will find that they are just wallowing in semi-darkness, not knowing where they are or where they are going, and nobody can tell them. The job of a government is to lead. I am afraid that is not happening now. I happen to be a member of a local authority. It may appal this House to know that the local authority to which I belong cannot even pay its statutory demands this year to its health board or to the Office of Public Works for maintenance and drainage; they are statutory demands. When I asked the question as to what would happen I was told that both the Department of Health and the OPW would get their pound of flesh next year before the allocation was sent down to us by the Department of the Environment; it will be deducted at base. So heaven help us next year getting what we probably will have to get as an inadequate allocation, minus the deduction made by those people, who have a right in law to do so. But there are certain services grinding to a halt.
Yesterday evening education got a further chop. Of course it was inevitable. But the Minister, Deputy Wilson, has persistently stood there and denied that there is a cut-back in education, when he knows, we all know, anybody who can add two and two knows, that there is a cut-back. Any hope that extra money might become available has now been dispelled in one particular area at least, and a very sensitive one, that is, in school transport. We now have severe cut-backs in school transport. We have allocated £16 million to a service which cost £16.5 million last year. Instead of making up a shortfall to meet increased costs of 20-plus per cent, which is £4.5 to £5 million, the Minister has actually reduced the service to bring it within the ambit of this £16 million expenditure.
The Deputy should conclude now.
I wonder if this is the thin end of the wedge. I know in health we have the same thing. Is this going to permeate the whole area of our activities, this cutting back on services we have had?
I know this Bill has a formal legislative function to provide for the implementation of budgetary provisions. I say, more in sadness than in anger, that the consequences of the actions of a Government who bought their way into power were inevitable. The only sad thing is we are all now reaping the bitter harvest of that foolish act.
I welcome the opportunity to discuss this Bill. As might be anticipated, I do not agree with the measures incorporated in it and shall endeavour to elucidate my objections. The new Government—on the somewhat changed Cabinet in basically the same Government—have changed the strategy of the previous Government to some degree, principally in that, when Deputy Lynch was Taoiseach, we had Government by remote control. Disputes and legislative matters were let drag on without any apparent urgency to solve problems which arose.
Deputy Haughey, as Taoiseach, endeavours to give the impression of being a man who gets things done. He honestly hopes that this reputation will create an impression and result in improved economic performance on the part of the Government and a more balanced situation in industrial relations. We need that balanced situation very badly. Unfortunately, the endeavours so far have been of a stop-gap nature. We have not seen any cohesive or comprehensive plans, especially economic plans, for the years ahead. Policies are designed to solve problems on a very short-time basis and that is not the type of Government which leads to the desired stability and economic progress.
The area with which I deal as spokesman for the Fine Gael Party involves transport, technology and telecommunications. It is an area which has been plagued during the past three year by a whole series of strikes and industrial action, and which have cost the country vast sums of money and probably many new jobs. These areas involving the essential services which are so vital to industry, whether established or intended. Repeatedly, we read of industrialists complaining about our inadequate telecommunication system and about our inadequate road and rail system. We also read about people who had intended to come here but were diverted because of these inadequacies in such basic services. Any Government with such a strong mandate as the present Fianna Fáil Government have should be in a position to provide an adequate telecommunications service and not to allow disputes to erode the confidence of industrialists, and to prohibit industrialists from coming to provide tens of thousands of new jobs.
I welcome the promise made by the Government and, in particular, by the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs of the expenditure of £650 million in an endeavour to bring our telecommunications service up to the existing standard in other parts of the European Economic Community. We wholeheartedly support the type of expenditure envisaged and hope that the announced five year plan will proceed according to schedule. It is poor consolation for people, whether they are private individuals, business people or industrialists, who have to utilise our present telecommunication system to think that £650 million will be spent on improvements when the present system is so utterly inadequate and unworkable in many instances. The public and the industrialists would like to know how soon the present problems will be overcome.
We have had three years of Fiánna Fáil Government and have been promised an improvement consistently during that term. We are now promised a five year plan. Some of us are quite sceptical as to whether that five year plan will materialise. I fully support the plan, because it is what we need. We will be watchdogs in the Dáil to see that that plan is carried out for whatever length of time this Government stays in office—whether it be two months or two years. We have not been unduly critical up to this juncture. We are prepared to give the Government an opportunity to implement those plans and to wait to see if the promised money will be forthcoming and will be spent.
In reply to a Dáil question today the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs told us that £20 million was being spent immediately in providing badly needed additional equipment. That is a start. Of course, if you divide 20 into 650 you come up with something like 32½. That, to me, does not seem to fit in with a five year plan. I would hope that the level of expenditure for 1980 would be in the region of £125 million or £150 million for this very basic facility which, as I stated, is being roundly criticised by industrialists and business people throughout the country.
Industrial estates on the fringes of Dublin city are not being adequately serviced for telecommunications. Every week when I come up to Dublin I am inundated with calls from business people and industrialists who have been advised by the IDA to move out from the congested centre of the city to these new industrial estates on the fringe and they are very sore because many of them have failed to get a telephone installation within a year and in some cases within two years of moving out from the city centre. If the Minister of State or the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs wish to dispute that point I can supply them with names and addresses, facts and figures of people who continuously tell me that their employment factor is being threatened by inadequate communications, by the non-provision of cables for telephone services. That surely is not a good start to the £650 million modernisation scheme about which we read so much.
There is obviously also a need for extra staff in the main exchanges in Dublin because any of us who endeavour to make a call to an exchange in the country operated on a manual basis find that the delays in getting through are inordinate and must surely be due to a lack of manpower at the exchanges in question. This, again, is a matter of finance. I would like to see a major drive to recruit and to train new staff and to provide better working conditions for existing staff. The numerous industrial disputes and strikes within that section, whether they are on a long-term basis such as we had in 1979 or whether they are on a short-term basis such as we had last week with the operators operating the cross-Channel service, indicate that the industrial relations section of this Department leaves a great deal to be desired. We await the fulfilment of this promise of vast sums of money to provide us with as good a telephone service and telex service as in any other part of the EEC.
On the transport front the problems are no less, probably much greater, probably much more long term and obviously requiring much more money than is being given at the moment. If one reads the recently publicised road plan for the eighties one can only applaud the ambitious plans. It is obvious that the money is not being provided to implement those plans because the road work estimates of the various local authorities for 1980 show that the amount being provided this year is in many cases only 50 per cent of the total required to implement that scheme in its embryo stage.
Our roads are totally inadequate. We do not need to be experts to know that. We do not have to go to Britain or the Continent to see the dreadful comparison which our road system makes with national road works and road schemes in other countries. How realistic is this road plan for the 1980s? Is it just another promise or will there be a real effort to carry it out? The figures provided for 1980 indicate that it is only pie in the sky. Not only are we not capable of expanding our road network with the present financial allocations but we are not capable of maintaining them in a proper condition.
I do not want to over-emphasise the point that is made here repeatedly at Question Time when people are asking questions of the Minister for the Environment. It is obvious that the roads are breaking up and deteriorating at a shocking rate. The reason is simple enough. It is not all the Government's fault. The volume of traffic is greater and the size and the weight of the vehicles being carried on this road network are also much greater. The speed at which vehicles are travelling is such that our antiquated system could not possibly hope to stand up to the type of abuse it is receiving. There will have to be vast sums of money injected into our road works.
The Government have been remiss in not seeking EEC aid on any scale up to the present. I know for a fact that the British Government for 1980 have got 15 million units of account from the EEC for infrastructural roadwork schemes. That approximated to something like £30 to £35 million. On the other hand I believe we have not got any money for similar type infrastructural road network from the EEC. I wonder if we have applied at this stage. Our Commissioner in Europe has brought proposals before the Commission for the expenditure of billions of pounds on road networks and rail networks throughout the EEC. The Commission will listen to reasonable proposals for the improvement of these networks, but I am not aware that we have requested money for any such major schemes.
There obviously is a great need for improvement of the main arteries leading from Dublin to the provincial capitals. The roads to Cork, Galway and Belfast, while reasonably good, have very poor sections which need to be updated. The main arterial road to Waterford is a disgrace and urgently needs the expenditure of a considerable amount of money to bring it up to the very basic requirements for a main road. Above all, the structure of the roadways will have to be strengthened, because I am told that a 20-ton truck travelling at speed can do as much damage as approximately 150,000 motor cars doing the same speed. I find that figure incredible but an expert has told me that it is a fact. It is not uncommon when driving along the Naas dual-carriageway to be passed out by a juggernaut travelling at 75,80 or even 85 miles an hour. Therefore, the damage that is being done must be immense. It is long overdue that we implement the laws which exist to see that such traffic be contained within the speed limits specified. I have not seen in the public or local press for many months any prosecutions of laden trucks of that nature for exceeding the statutory speed limit. I would like the Minister for the Environment and the Minister for Justice to pay particular attention to those matters. Our roads are not made for this traffic and we should see that they are given the type of protection which is there by law which is being flouted openly every day.
I am an advocate of private enterprise being involved in all spheres of what is known as the public sector when that private enterprise can give a comparable service and especially when that private enterprise can provide a service at a reduced cost to the State. Many of what we have come to recognise as State-sponsored or semi-State bodies were set up in an economic climate entirely different from that which pertains today. Many of them were set up in the twenties, thirties and forties when economic recession was a by-word. We now live in a day of free enterprise, international trading and buoyant economic markets. We live in a day when businessmen, people with enterprise, can go out and operate systems which could not be operated profitably 30 or 40 years ago. We should change with the times. If our semi-State or State-sponsored bodies have become outmoded and out-dated, have outlived their usefulness, are costing the taxpayers vast quantities of money and the service which they were set up to provide can be provided at no cost to the State in a superior manner by private enterprise, then the time is long overdue to give private enterprise an opportunity to get involved. The Minister opposite is shaking his head.
It would not operate too successfully in the West of Ireland on limited runs.
I have some experience of transport being provided for the public by private operators in the South of Ireland.
The operators in Wexford did not find it such easy going since January.
Those people operate the most meagre provincial runs available because CIE have a monopoly of all the better runs, especially those runs between the major population centres. It is only in those areas where CIE could never even in their days operate economically, that the private operators have been given an opportunity. It defies description and it defies argument how we can snub private operators or how we can deprive them of competing against CIE on the better runs, when they can make a handsome profit on the runs which were abandoned years ago by CIE. It does not make sense. If these people proved themselves in such poor circumstances, on such a bad wicket, why should they not be given an opportunity to provide the same service in areas which are presently loss-making under the auspices of CIE which as a result are costing the taxpayers because CIE is a taxpayers' subvented body? Why should we have to pay through the nose for something which could be provided at no cost at all to the State and, from what I have seen of this kind of operator, in a much more efficient manner?
I know that there would be outcry from the unions represented in CIE. It is only natural that people feel that their position is being threatened if the system is going to be changed. That need not necessarily be the case. All types of guarantees of employment can be given in the event of such a changeover from public to private enterprise. Many of the people who presently would feel endangered if such a proposal were pushed forward would find that their terms of employment and pay would improve dramatically if they were operating in a system run by private enterprise with accompanying guarantees which would have to be given by private enterprise on the assumption of private enterprise of the role presently being operated by the State and semi-State bodies. I do not limit myself to CIE when I speak in this vein.
There are other semi-State bodies which similarly could be examined. Where there is a reasonable case that a State body which is not making a profit could be operated on a non-loss making and possibly on a profit making basis, then it should be investigated. I cannot understand the reticence of successive Governments to probe into this matter. The tip of the iceberg is shown in a report published today by the National Economic and Science Council which points out that there is an inhibiting factor in these State-sponsored bodies, that because of the over-rigid control exercised by the civil service, there is a blunting of initiatives, a blunting of ambition and a resultant reduction in the level of performance by the employees at whatever level. As one goes up in the managerial structure that blunting of ambition and that thwarting of ability is evident. If that continues as it has been over recent years, of course we will have loss-making public bodies. That is all the more reason why people with ability and ambition must be given an opportunity to operate these services.
I am not totally against the operation of those services by semi-State or State-sponsored bodies but in the present climate in which they are being operated I do not see anything but further increased losses and a further reduction in the quality of service. That is what we have had in recent years. From where have the major strikes emanated? They have been in the public sector. There is dissatisfaction obviously with working conditions; there is dissatisfaction with office promotional opportunities; there is dissatisfaction because there must be poor personnel relations and working conditions within those units.
Something drastic will have to be done to improve that situation and the NESC report published today put its finger on the point which is most relevant, that is that initiative is not rewarded in the public sector. If it is not rewarded, one either changes the system or else one does something to see that it is rewarded. That creates problems because one may have to go outside the terms of the relevant national understanding to reward that initiative. It is not an easy problem to overcome. I do not profess to have the answer but it is an area which will have to be explored. We see it all around us, whether it is the local authority engineer or the civil servant in the Department of the Environment or the Office of Public Works. People who inherently probably have the highest standard of education in the State and also the highest level of intelligence are put into jobs which are terribly restrictive where their imagination and their creative abilities are not let run their full range. The frustration of these people is obviously great and you cannot have a very satisfactory working relationship under those circumstances between the people employed in those services and the public with whom they are dealing.
A whole new look will have to be taken at the structure of pay levels and working conditions in this country. We are employing in dead-end jobs people who have abilities which far outreach the importance of the positions they fill. For too long there has been fumbling of the best academic and technological brains of this country into humdrum positions in too many of the major employment sectors or even the public sector be it in State or semi-State bodies. More thought will have to be given to the provision of employment for people with such ability in jobs and positions where they can show their imagination and their initiative. There will have to be proper pay levels for people according to their qualifications and their innate intelligance and not according to the number of years that they are in a job. It is time that these barriers were broken down and that promotion was not automatic and based upon years of service. Highly intelligent young people are inhibited in their efforts to progress and in that inhibition they eventually end up frustrated and merely work out the rest of their days waiting for their pensions and certainly not making any endeavour to show initiative, because that would be construed as kicking over the traces. That is the type of quality which is not invited in the public sector and that is where our problem lies.
Until the Government take the whole situation by the scruff of the neck, improve industrial relations, and put the best people into dealing with personnel relations, matters will not improve and we will have continuing industrial action. We will have simmering discontent among the public at large. We must have a proper pay structure which will ensure that people who have university qualifications, especially on the technological side, are properly recompensed. We must not let people who leave school at 14 years of age and get into very rigmarole jobs eventually end up with wage and salary levels which outstrip the people who have gone to higher institutes of education and universities. I am not saying that people who leave school at 14 as a general rule should not be allowed attain to greater heights, but the pay structures generally are not adequately geared to meet people's qualifications. For instance, some of the present industrial unrest in the country is caused by the very factor—I am sure the Minister of State knows what I am talking about—that qualified people with five or six years' training are being paid less than unqualified people who have walked into jobs probably at 15, 16 or 17 years of age. This present unsatisfactory wage and salary structure will have to be reviewed from top to bottom.
I was talking a little earlier about the need for more latitude for private enterprise. The case I have in mind which was well publicised in today's newspapers is the problem of school transport. How can anybody be so lacking in imagination as to think that when there is a shortage of cash the only way to solve the problem which arises is to reduce services? We the Irish, are supposed to be the most creative, the most flamboyant, and there is no better man than the Minister of State himself——
I am glad to hear the Deputy state that.
——to fulfil that word. The Messiah himself, they say in west Mayo. We pride ourselves as a people with flair, but when it comes to prices or lack of finance the invariable solution is to chop, to reduce the services. The time has come to get away from that simple, stupid solution. If the Minister is, as he claims, the Messiah he might do something magical or supernatural. My suggestion is quite simple, practical and reasonable and does not entail a reduction of services. Why should CIE be allowed to operate a school service when the vehicles they are using to run those services can be utilised only for that one purpose? Is it not time to allow the private sector to work to its full potential in this area? Private operators would gladly take over the running of school transport if given the opportunity and could do so at a reduced figure to that at present being demanded by CIE and there would be no need for a reduction in services. There would be no need to reduce the age for qualification to avail of that service. There would be no need to reduce the distance that the child lived from the relevant school. There would be no need to increase the fee per term. Why are we so lacking in imagination and initiative that we have to carry out those petty, mean little cuts when there is an alternative? Why can CIE buses not be used to carry people to social functions, whether to a football match or to bingo? Why do they have to be parked from ten o'clock in the morning until four o'clock in the evening at the side of the road and thereafter from five o'clock until the following morning at 8.30? Private enterprise is not shackled by the same limitations, so why should it not be allowed to run the school transport system in its entirety? I fail to see the logic. People in the private sector would vie with one another to have the opportunity to run those services for the money which at present is being paid to CIE. If they can do it, then I say by all means let them go ahead.
What about the administrative problems that would be created?
(Interruptions.)
Order.
Our problem at the moment is that we tie ourselves up in knots with administration and red tape——
Is the Deputy saying we should cut it out? Now he is talking about setting up new systems, new structures.
I am talking about structures to replace the present outmoded, unsatisfactory, unworkable and highly unprofitable system. I suppose the majority of the Members of this House are members of local authorities and, whereas barristers and solicitors monopolise this House because they understand legislative measures which are passing through far better than we laymen, when it comes to matters involving the Department of the Environment and, in particular, matters relating to local authorities, Deputies who are members of local authorities are entitled to speak. It is unfortunate that the powers of local authorities have been eroded to such an extent. Power seems to fall back into the hands of the civil servants. That is an erosion of local authority powers which we have seen in recent times, and it continues. As this Government hive off local sources of revenue which return to the local authorities, and are utilised by the local authorities, then the powers of the local authorities become more and more inhibited. Surely it is time for a return to local democracy in the true sense.
(Interruptions.)
Order.
The Minister of State will have opportunity to speak afterwards, which he and his colleague have been slow to do this afternoon. It is a pity that the moneys being funnelled into the Exchequer cannot be applied locally. It is a pity that the local authorities concerned are not given an opportunity to decide how those moneys will be spent. There seems to be too much dictation from the Department. The cutbacks we have had to endure this year in particular make our jobs as local representatives unenviable and difficult in the extreme.
I refer to the provisions in the Estimates which are totally inadequate for local authority housing, for roads, for a local improvement scheme which I believe has a certain significance in the Minister's own constituency.
(Interruptions.)
We have seen a shortfall in the current year in the provision of money for water and for sewerage, not to talk of the elimination of reconstruction and solid fuel conversion grants. It has been a bad year and it will be a bad year for local authorities generally and the people who give so much of their time, so much of their effort to improving conditions for their constituents, their fellow men and fellow women. They are not being given the opportunity to make the very basic facilities of housing, water and sewerage available. There is a vast cut back in local authority housing, and the Government should wake up to the fact that since 1977 there has been a downward trend. There is a threat of large scale unemployment in local authorities. There is a threat that 100 county council workers in Donegal may be let off from their jobs. As well as that, funds for amenity schemes, some of the desirable and necessary little schemes to provide tourist facilities and attract tourists, have been eliminated. This is a very sad state of affairs. What are the people getting in return? The only real movement I have seen as regards finance at local authority level in recent months, and recent weeks, is in the wrong direction—an enormous increase in rents for local authority houses. Up to the present, a major concession was given to recipients of social welfare benefits who rented council houses. This has been eliminated. All local representatives and Deputies have a stream of callers who are being asked to pay twice and three times the rent previously charged. This is a most reprehensible step. I should like the Minister for the Environment to have another look at this huge increase. It has hit hardest the people who can least afford to pay. There is a determined effort to squeeze the last penny out of the poorer classes.
Because of the very limited time available to me my contribution will be brief. I would like to avail of this opportunity, as we discuss the Second Stage of the Finance Bill, to voice a very genuine grievance which is continually coming to my notice as a public representative and continually being conveyed to me by the very many workers who live in the area I represent and who must, of necessity, commute to and from work each day. I speak about the thousands of workers who must either travel by bus or use their cars to travel to work. This is not a new case. It has been made in this House before, but I make no apology for making it again. The grievance is a very real one. It comes to my notice each time I meet a group of workers. No allowance is made under the income tax code to workers in that category, the ordinary industrial service workers, for any form of transport he or she may use to and from their place of employment.
There are those who would have us believe that all workers are in some way militant or over-militant in some cases. They have shown incredible forbearance in the light of this injustice, which I do not lay at the door of any particular Government. It has been there for quite some time and has been raised here in the House already. This year there has been an astronomical increase in petrol prices, brought about by direct action in the budget itself and by forces outside our control. There has been a consequent increase in bus fares. With the very unsatisfactory bus service we have it is a very usual experience for anybody driving on a road leading to one of our major towns or cities to see buses broken down. We have occasion to meet very many of the workers to whom I referred this evening who get on their bus, pay their fare and find after going a few yards or half mile of the road that they are left there to make their way to work, however they may. Then they are docked wages when they get to work. I am personally aware that there are many from whose pay packet up to £10 per week goes on these fares alone. We are all aware that the more favoured sections of the community, higher officials, business executives and so on, if they are not provided with a car, at least have a transport allowance.
Therefore, I do not think it is just that these workers, many of them lowly paid, many of them inadequately paid, should have no concession whatsoever allowed to them in terms of fares so far as their tax is concerned. Nor should they have this basic justice denied to them year after year. I have raised this in the House before. It is a grievance which I come across very often and I feel it is incumbent on me as we discuss the Finance Bill this evening to say once again that I think this year above all others there ought to have been a concession made to this section of the community in so far as taxation allowances are concerned.
The Government have expressed themselves as satisfied with the tax concessions that have been given but I would argue that inflation has taken care of those concessions already. They will not be anything like what they seemed to be when first announced. This particular aspect of workers' taxation is one that ought to be tackled, and it must be tackled for the future if we are to do justice to the hundreds of thousands of people in our society who get no allowance whatsoever for this very necessary cost of transport. It is a particular grievance in the area I represent on the industrial side, in Cork harbour, where so many workers must commute long distances to work and it is one which I am becoming more aware of. Its existence is one which must be taken into account by legislators in Finance Bills of the future. I do not know if it would be too much to expect, where cutbacks have been made in such vital areas, that injustice such as this would be diminished this year.
When I talk about so many vital areas one area that comes to mind is school transport. It is incredible that something so fundamental as eliminating discrimination at its base, which is in education, should be tampered with. School transport was a method to some extent of eliminating some of the discrimination that existed against rural children. It is a service which was never perfect but it should not have been cut back on. Instead, it should have been expanded. It was a very short-sighted view for the Government to tighten up in this area of school transport.
In this year, too, cuts have been made in the whole area of local authority work. I wish to refer particularly to housing. With regard to the total area for which local authorities have responsibility, to limit the increase in expenditure to 10 per cent in a year when inflation is running at 20 per cent must only result in a cutting back of services and there are such cut backs at local authority level in all respects.
This is particularly obvious in the area of housing. In the past year or so I have noted that in schemes that have been begun there is a tendency to produce houses which are not visually up to the standard that was the case up to now. I understand the high cost of housing, I understand the inordinately high cost of land, under the speculative system we have with regard to building land, but I still do not think this is an excuse for producing houses which are jammed more closely together, which have less ground space and which must represent a deterioration in the living standards of the people who live in them. We talked in another debate about violence in our built-up areas. We talked about the quality of life generally there and we talked about the necessity of recreation areas but the hope of realising our ambition at local authority level to build worth-while houses with proper recreational areas for small children looks far from being realised with the present curtailment in money for local authority purposes. The huge numbers of people on the books of the local authorities for every housing scheme that is announced or advertised leads us who are representatives of local authorities to have a very basic realisation of the need for housing that exists not alone in our major cities but throughout the towns and the country areas.
From my own experience at local authority level any scheme that becomes available in the satellite towns, the vastly growing areas around Cork city, will throw up a list of applicants at least three or four times greater than the number of houses. Indeed, it is not unusual to find 200 or 250 applicants for 20 houses. These are not people who want to apply for a local authority house for the purpose of changing their residence. They are people who are in dire need, people living in unfit and overcrowded houses, living in difficult, strained conditions with in-laws, people living in caravans, people who by any stretch of the imagination need houses. We were never satisfied with the extent to which the housing programme was going ahead but there can be no doubt in any of our minds that there is a cutback, and that the starts in housing in the next 12 months will not match even those which took place last year. There is a definite slowing down at all levels with regard to housing and with regard to all activities of local authorities.
The decision of the Government this year to discontinue local improvement grants was very shortsighted and very unjust. I have known since this happened a number of people, most of them elderly couples, who have lived all their lives in vested county council cottages or some similar buildings, the roofs and the structural condition of which have now deteriorated but which the people concerned are not in any position to rectify without the aid of a grant. The grant scheme had a very important social effect. It was a total disregard for the needs of a very vulnerable section of our community to have discontinued that scheme.
We have, too, cutbacks in vital areas such as school buildings, hospitals and so on. It seems to me that in a year when all of that is the order of the day it might be futile to voice once again the demand of workers for cash concessions for their transport to work but I feel it is my duty to do so. It is something that constantly comes to my attention and about which workers themselves are justly aggrieved. I would appeal to those who are framing a taxation system to take that aspect into account and to give the basic justice that is given so freely to the more favoured sections of the community to the average industrial and service worker and to those on low wages who have no other means in this situation of getting to work.
We live in a country where transport is by no means sophisticated. Getting to work from a distance outside a town or centre of industry in many parts of Europe and in many parts of the world is a very simple thing where there is a sophisticated transport system, a single fare payable for any distance one wants to go. Not so here. Here it is an expensive business getting to one's place of work. It makes quite a sizeable impact on the worker's wage packet and it is something for which he should be given consideration when it comes to tax. It is something which workers in the future will demand to be taken into account in their tax assessment.
This Bill gives us an opportunity to speak about many inadequacies we are experiencing at present. Firstly, I would like to refer to the most topical information available, that is in connection with school transport. I can well remember when the school transport buses were introduced. At that time cars were becoming more numerous with greater danger facing our young children. Greater confusion and frustration faced the fathers and mothers. With so many cars using those by-roads and main roads there were still children left without transport, particularly those whose parents could not afford a car. It is frightening to think of our children being at the mercy of so many drivers at present. I am being critical of drivers because I believe that proper precautions are not being taken for children's safety. In the interests of children there should be greater penalties imposed for speeding.
The Minister of State asked what would Deputy Deasy do if he were confronted with the problem of school transport. It is a good question. The reduction in this service is an indication of the present shortage of money. In my wildest dreams I cannot understand how any Government would stoop so low. Before the Minister of State posed the question of where the money would be got I had a suggestion to make. I would be inclined to effect cuts in the Ministerial area. I think five Ministers of State have cost the country £500,000. Nobody requested those Ministers and I do not think they were needed. Can one imagine a man looking out on a bad morning seeing a Minister pass in his State car while his child remains at the mercy of modern traffic because the Government say they have no money. It would be very hard to justify that.
We have not a new Government. We have the old Government, a few Ministers having been demoted, a Taoiseach demoted and that ex-Minister for Economic Planning and Development removed from office. Recently I came across a statement of Deputy O'Donoghue when he said inflation would be 5 per cent in 1979. My recollection is that it was four times that, so that at least there was a fairly good reason for telling that man to take a holiday. But it is unfortunate that our people have to suffer.
Now we find ourselves without a penny in the kitty. First there was the abolition of food subsidies introduced at a time when money was not too plentiful. Never in the history of this State were food subsidies more valuable or more needed than at present.
What about the easement to building societies being given now?
We introduced that first. Let the Minister of State talk away. I love him speaking because he is so candid. I remember him saying that when other legislation was introduced, he would oppose it. He will not oppose this Bill; he is now a Minister of State.
When was that?
About nine months ago.
The Minister has said so much it would be very difficult to pin him to exact dates.
Deputies opposite will hear a great deal more from the Minister of State.
Any Government with a social conscience could not, under any circumstances, go as far as abolishing food subsidies.
I shall deal now with the subject of health. I come four miles from the Regional Hospital at Dooradoyle, County Limerick, where there are numerous people in the corridors without room even for patients' visitors. Can one imagine the embarrassment of those people in corridors, being gazed at as people pass, again because the Government have no money. I would not mind any Government running into difficulties. But these were the people in 1977 with all the answers, the people who told us that there was no problem, that the position then obtaining was only because of a bad Government. I ask you what has become of all their solutions? It is no solution to problems to fire Ministers. It is no good blaming Deputy Gibbons and saying he was the man, or that Deputy O'Donoghue was responsible. That is no answer to our people. All they are concerned with is the fact that the Government have failed them. This is nothing new to Fianna Fáil. I remember in 1973 when we went into the EEC at the top of the league with 73,000. Even at that time it was remembered that the emigrant ship had done a wonderful job in the previous 50 years, people being employed in industries in Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton and elsewhere.
We know what was the situation in 1977 after four years of mismanagement by a Coalition Government.
We went through a rough period but, when we handed over the economy, it was in a good, sound position. At no time did we say we did not want wealth tax.
Deputies opposite cannot make up their minds now what they want.
We want money. I would like to pay a tribute to the IDA who are doing a very good job. Speaking as a rural Deputy I feel more industry should be moved to rural areas. Here the Minister of State will agree with me because there are some in his area. First and foremost it would save a lot of dear petrol about which the Minister used talk at one time. Petrol is now very expensive and it is very difficult for people to commute to and from their place of employment. As a matter of fact it has been proved that it is better for a man to remain at home, drawing the dole than pay for petrol for a journey of over 50 miles a day.
There is another disadvantage in rural Ireland, that is, the lack of an automatic telephone system. In one area of my constituency Newcastlewest, the capital of the county, we have lost a number of industrialists because they had not an adequate telephone service. They had no automatic service. This was particularly acute during the long telephone telecommunications dispute, a time when the Minister's party sat, looked on and did nothing about it. I suggest that the automatic telephone system, if at all possible, be introduced in the near future in the interests of the people and of the industrialists who definitely need it as a very essential service.
I think you will agree that great strides have been made in that particular area of activity. Be fair.
Will someone remove the interrupter? In my own constituency there are industrialists waiting for 12 months for this service and operating a business is made difficult because of the legal implications of delays.
At the moment there was never more violence. In my own city and in Dublin it is not safe to go out at night because of thugs on the street. We had the plans, but what happened? In my own constituency we have the record of the most money being stolen without the culprits being caught—and that four miles from the Minister for Justice's home. There is no protection.
The Deputy should keep to the matter under debate.
Jealousy will get you nowhere.
We come to house prices now. It is impossible for a man with £80 or £100 a week to get married because of the price of houses. There is no control. He will get a loan of £12,000 and he will pay £30 a week repayment. How can you expect that to be an incentive to any man to marry?
It is bigger than the amount the Coalition Government were giving.
There is a big increase in the price of houses. I would like to take you back to the time we were in office. At that time a house cost £7,000.
Precisely.
We were giving £4,500. Therefore, you had £2,250 to make up. What you paid at that time you were paying on a fixed interest. Today you pay £24,000 for a house and you pay 12½ per cent. You are paying treble the amount. The house is gone out of reach. I know well how you feel about it. Then we come to roads. Is there any public representative in this country who could stand up and defend the Government policy on the allocation of grants for the roads? I would like to see what kind of a man he would be. I cannot for the life of me think how any public representative would support this Government. Down in my own place we had no money borrowed. We were doing a good job. We had a great manager. Our manager was so good that the Minister for Labour called him in to do a job for him.
That he could not do himself.
That is not fair.
We have no money for roads. We have holes in the road that would cover children going to school. If the school transport is going to go I do not know what is going to happen the children because they will not have the road to walk on. I know there is no money. Speaking of roads, I am going to say something unusual. It was bad for this country, and this applies to all Governments, that we were so quick to close the railways. I think we were too fast off the mark. The very minute the station was closed the tracks were taken up the following morning. One of the fastest things CIE ever did was to remove the rails. It was a poor day that happened. I would love to see the heavy traffic taken by rail. It would avoid a lot of congestion. It is only right when the money is not available that contribution should be made. That is the only solution.
Strikes are a headache at the moment. There is no doubt about it. I say, in fairness, that the Minister has improved the situation. Over the last four years, the man seemed to be immune to strikes. He is under probation.
The housewife can see how her wages are being eroded. I remember the last election when the shopping basket was taken around. I remember the last Taoiseach going around with a little shopping basket. As a result, he lost his job. The position is that never in the history of the State has a housewife got as hard a deal as she is getting at present. Tax concessions are no good. They are also being eroded. The Minister of State is quite convinced that I am right. He knows, but he san say nothing. If we take a medical card, we find that people are not able to pay for doctors' fees at the moment. In no way can a man with £60 or £70 a week and a wife, pay doctor's bills.
He could.
As a Government they have never lost an opportunity to take wealth from the people. The farmer has suffered more than any segment of the community. I remember 1976, when the £17 allowance was taken by our Government. I remember some of the Deputies—some of them are Ministers of State now—cried crocodile tears and asked "How will the farmer vote?" I know farmers in my own constituency. Farmers who were reasonably comfortable, who had an incentive to develop, went to the bank seeking a loan and were well received by the bank managers. The bank managers held a seminar to teach them how they could borrow money. The bank managers are now having seminars of their own to know if they are going to catch the farmer who cannot pay the rates. That is the present position. I remember what happened when income tax was introduced on a modified scale in 1975. All the rural Deputies were lined up. There is no rural Deputy here tonight. The Minister was picked out here tonight to defend it. The backbenchers are in hiding. I am sorry for the Minister.
Fair play.
As this is my first opportunity in the House, I publicly congratulate the new Minister and wish him well in his job. Having congratulated him and wished him well, may I also say that I would like to give him a little bit of advice? He would be well advised to be a little bit more tolerant and listen more than he is doing. He is not in possession of all the facts and all the details. Perhaps what the Minister would hear might be of some advantage to him. Having said that, I would like, first of all, to mention the portfolio of the Department for which the Minister is responsible. If I am not correct, the Minister may correct me. I believe he is responsible for tourism.
No, I have to correct the Deputy on that. I am responsible for transport.
I thought the Minister was responsible for tourism. I was just going to mention it while he was. I shall switch to transport. We have heard Ministers and speakers generally throughout the country talking about conserving energy, which is a very important matter. I believe that our transport system is geared for nothing else but to waste very expensive energy and needs to be modernised and fully equipped to deal with demands that would be there if they were fully equipped and modernised. This could conserve energy.
I am dealing with CIE buses in particular. I live in an area where a number of people from my town travel to and fro each day to work in Cork city, approximately 25 to 30 miles away. The vast majority of those workers would avail of a transport system, first of all, if it was reliable—it is not because you never know when you got on a bus whether it will reach its destination or whether it will break down—and secondly, if they could bank on its being on time for their job.
In my constituency there are people driving in cars with one or two people in each. If you are travelling to an early train or to an early bus in Cork you will find that the road is very busy with teachers, vets, workers of all sorts going to work, each day driving his or her car. The only reason they do not avail of public transport is because it is not reliable and because the transport system is absolutely chaotic and appalling. We see buses on the road which are not roadworthy. It is a regular feature of every day life to find CIE buses broken down on the roads because they are old crocks. Seats from the buses are placed in front and behind to indicate a breakdown. I mention that to the Minister because he claims he is in charge of transport. He would be well advised to devote his energies to that area which is very much in need of his attention. May I say with all the sincerity in the world that I wish him well because this is certainly an area which demands improvement. This is one of the things to which the Minister and other Ministers have refused to listen. It is important. I am serious about this.
I often hear the Minister for Education publicly and otherwise saying "There are no such cutbacks in my Department". I hear the Minister for the Environment, supported by his Minister of State and by backbench Fianna Fáil Deputies, saying the same thing. Yet everybody in the country is well aware that there are serious cutbacks in all areas, that the services are being restricted every other day because of financial constraints on the people charged with the responsibility of providing those services. The Minister can shake his head and disagree with me if he wishes but that is a statement of fact which everybody knows. One of the things which disturbs me more than anything else is that the most vulnerable are the first to pay. The children being transported to school are the first to pay. The people who are the most vulnerable in every area of services are the people who are the first to pay the piper. That is the disaster and that is the problem in an economic crisis. Surely the Minister cannot deny that.
I can give another example. In Cork County Committee of Agriculture we have received a notice from the Department that as a result of some investigating committee on staff problems all temporary staff must go. We are also informed that certain constraints are imposed on us in relation to the filling of vacancies for permanent staff and that they will go.
This is a very wide debate but I am afraid the Deputy is even getting outside it.
I am giving advice to the Minister. I have a feeling that he is listening for the first time.
I would have taken the Deputy up on his remarks but I was afraid that you would rule me out of order.
It is not easy to get outside the confines of this debate. debate.
The Deputy is quite entertaining but he wants me to listen to a lot of old ráiméis. I am prepared to listen.
The Minister will have to listen without talking. The Deputy, on the debate before the House.
I have been, but at the same time I would like it to be relevant.
I am talking about cuts in the services which the State is providing. I think that that, with all due respects to your ruling, Sir, is relevant.
The Deputy was talking about staff and that sort of thing which does not come under either of the two items before the House, one a taxation measure and the other national development.
Do not be too hard on him.
I am not being hard on him. I would not think of that.
I am saying that when we have restrictions imposed on the services which we provide the people who are the lowest paid, who are the most vulnerable, are the first to suffer. I have given the example of the school-children. I have given the example in the agricultural sphere as well in relation to what I have already mentioned. There is no scarcity in other areas. We had one Minister for Agriculture, we have three now. Can the Government justify that to people down the line when they have informed the local CAO and the county committees of agriculture that they cannot appoint staff? The Minister for Agriculture has been given two more Ministers of State. There are not any restrictions imposed on the appointment of Ministers.
When the first ten Ministers of State were appointed by the Taoiseach the Deputy's leader said: "Have you gone far enough? You should go further".
We will not have that because it does not come under the debate.
It is just another example of how the Deputy and his leader are not on the same wavelength, the same as the wealth tax issue between some of Fine Gael front bench Members and their leader. Would Fine Gael Deputies at least get together some time and have a combined policy statement on something?
Deputy Creed on the legislation. We will have to get all others off the wavelength.
No matter what way the Deputy tries to windowdress the performance of the Taoiseach and the Government the people are well aware of what is happening at the moment and are very much concerned about what I have said that raised the Minister's hackles a bit.
When it comes to the provision of health services the position also is that it is the most vulnerable and those who are most in need, who are the first to suffer, those who are medical card holders, and the recipients of disabled persons maintenance allowances. There are more stringent investigations into their qualifications and they are the first to go. You will never see the CEO or the people in the higher income bracket suffering. It is the same with the local authorities, whom Deputy Harte mentioned today. The curtailment and the retrenchments will start with the roadworkers. You will not see the county manager sacrificing a part of his income because of financial constraints. Neither will you see the county engineer, the assistant county engineers or any one of the staff having to do that. It starts with the unfortunate road worker. That is the worst thing that could happen and it is something to which the Minister would be well advised to listen. I could go on and on like that about education, agriculture, the health services and local government.
I want to deal now with the agricultural industry. No matter on what side of the House we sit and no matter what our occupations in life are, we must accept that our agricultural industry is vital to the economy. It is vital that we would continue to encourage expansion of the industry for the provision of badly-needed jobs. We are not giving the incentives which are necessary. I believe also that the Minister for Agriculture, who is involved in the European scene, has not used sufficient muscle to finalise the farm prices for this year. We are now approaching the end of May and we still have not our farm prices for this year. I believe it is important that confidence is restored to the agricultural industry.
The newspapers saw his performance in Brussels last week on our behalf in a different light.
I would give every support possible to the Minister, but the facts remain. Not alone I but everybody in this party would lend support to the Minister in making sure that he could negotiate the best deal possible in Europe. That is important not alone to the farming community but to the Government, to the Opposition and to everybody concerned. It is very important.
Would the Deputy agree he brought off a miracle last week on our behalf?
I have not seen too many miracles from that side of the House for a long time. The only miracle was the Fianna Fáil manifesto in 1977 which Fianna Fáil will have to answer for if the people get an opportunity——
We are not discussing miracles anyway. Will the Deputy move the adjournment?
You were tempting me.
The Deputy should not talk to the Minister across the House.
I was tempted.
The Minister can be very tempting at times.
Debate adjourned.