(Dublin North-West): When I started my contribution on this I indicated that I had approached the subject of the Finance Bill from two angles, the national position and the effect that it directly has upon my own constituency of Dublin North-West. The Minister said yesterday that he does not have the figures for unemployment in the Dublin North-West constituency. Indications are that this is four times higher than the national average and that our population under the age of 25 years is twice that of the national average. It is with these figures in mind that special attention should be paid to areas where unemployment and age statistics of this kind indicate the total poverty of opportunity in an area. If we are members of such a large organisation as the EEC I would think that, where there are very special areas of deprivation both imposed and of a natural nature, the EEC should be in a position to help finance solutions to this problem.
During Question Time today the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment indicated to me that he was not aware of ill effects from a health point of view, from a social point of view or from a cultural point of view on families with young children living in high rise flats in Ballymun despite the fact that, as I pointed out to him, of the 3,200 high rise flats, over 600 are occupied by single parent families and that there is an annual migration from these flats of 33 per cent of the occupants per year compared with an average throughout the city of 12.5 per cent. This is nothing short of scandalous. It defeats the total aim with which this type of accommodation was initially built. The highest rate of school absenteeism in the Republic of Ireland occurs in the schools which the children of the high rise flats attend in Ballymun and the highest rate of unemployment in the country exists in the Ballymun area. The highest density of infants is in the Ballymun flats area and the highest concentration of people under the age of 16 is in the Ballymun flats area. The highest number of medical card holders, which can be an adverse indication of the social and economic standing of a family, in the Eastern Health Board area is in the Ballymun flats complex.
With these figures in mind I asked the Minister for the Environment to set up an independent inquiry to ascertain the degree to which people, young children and mothers, are adversely affected in Ballymun — not to see whether they are affected or not but to see to what degree they are affected adversely. Every local authority in Europe knows and every meeting of the world health planning authority that I have attended in Europe since I became a member of the local authority in 1974 has, without one exception, condemned the provision of high rise flats for accommodating young families, yet we have persisted here in this House since 1969, when I became a Member of it, in ignoring the fact that a Government Department — the Department of the Environment, formerly the Department of the Local Government — build these flats and hand them over to the corporation.
What I am proposing is that a committee be set up to investigate the possibility of knocking down these flats and having an emergency housing programme in that area so that people can have a proper house to rear their families in. This might be related to the kind of advice given to successive Governments by economists. A place like Ballymun only creates further housing crisis. By definition it encourages people to have children that perhaps they are not ready for, both economically and physically, so that they can obtain transfers from these flats. We know the second most traumatic thing for a child after the death of a parent is a change of address. Yet most of the children who go into these flats will have changed their address at least five times by the time they are seven years of age and will not have settled into school until they are ten years of age. The crowded isolation and the deprivation that can occur in high rise flats throughout Ireland and the United Kingdom have been very well documented in medical papers and the Department of the Environment should be well aware of these documented medical reports. The Department of the Environment should be well aware of these documented medical reports.
This Finance Bill might lean towards the monetarist policy rather than towards the Keynesian policy of economics and certainly not in my opinion towards the most desirable policy, which is one between those two doctrines, the policy of common sense where one can trim one's sail to the wind, where one can change the line of one's tack. As circumstances prevail we should try to keep our economy in as fluid a state as possible where rapid changes of a small nature can be made as often as necessary.
We all know that economists have misdirected Governments in the past. They have also misdirected health boards and other semi-State bodies. They are not accountable to anybody for the mistakes they make with regular monotony and at horrific expense to Governments and semi-State organisations. One great example of that is the McKinsey report on the health services in the UK which cost an astronomical sum. Five years later they were brought back and paid by the British Government to outline where their first advice had been wrong.
The same firm of economists came to this country. They were paid out of the public purse to set up our health boards. Nobody questioned their decisions. What have we got? We have a series of health boards that are so bureaucratic, so cumbersome and so over-elaborate that one county does not know what the other county is doing in those health board areas. I believe these boards will never function at the optimum the local health authorities functioned at although they may be much easier for a Government Department to document and with the semi-autonomy they propose to have they may not present as much of a problem to the Department of Health as was presented by their predecessor, the efficient local health authorities.
The late Professor George O'Brien who was a Member of the Seanad for many years, said that economics was about scarcity. If we look at our country and at our qualities we will see we are the eighteenth richest country in the world. I cannot see, when we are in that position, why we cannot borrow some more. The average man purchasing a house valued at £40,000, if he got his maximum mortgage, will have to pay approximately 25 per cent of his gross income in mortgage repayments but the second year, the third year and fourth year that initial 25 per cent has become approximately 20 per cent, 17 per cent and less. This means that as his years of ownership go on the percentage out of his gross earnings is less and less.
We have tremendous credit-worthy assets. The latest winner of the Nobel prize for economics is a man called James Tobin, who was nominated recently. This prize was won five years ago by Milton Friedman. The present recipient is a disciple and student of John Maynard Keynes who formulated the Keynesian period of economics, a theory I consider it would be wise of the Government to give further attention to. This theory is that the assets, all tangible buildings which a company can have, are taken into consideration and not just plain and simply the amount of hard cash which a company have in the bank, the amount of investments they might have abroad and the amount of money they owe. I would like to quote from The Irish Times of today's date what the Taoiseach stated in Trinity College last night:
The Taoiseach said the combined effects of wasteful patterns of public expenditure and of the loss of competitiveness by the Irish economy had been retarded growth,——
This is obviously a misprint.
——massive unemployment, falling living standards and, tragically, resumed net emigration. However, he pledged that the Government would never fall prey to any economic doctrine which made unemployment the price of progress. "That price is too high to pay and it need not and will not be paid," he declared.
The Milton Friedman doctrine of economics by definition has unemployment as one of its side effects. If this is an indication that the Government will move more liberally and more expansively then I welcome the Taoiseach's statement at Trinity College last night.
During the sixties and the seventies our economy expanded at a rate of about 4 per cent, 3 per cent being sufficient to maintain employment and to provide a small degree of extra employment. However, in the eighties this has dropped. Our inflation rate has gone over 20 per cent. As we have less than a 2 per cent expansion in our economy this year, next year it could be a minus quantity with all the undesirable side effects. Some people say it is possible to spend your way out of trouble. I believe, with our present rate of inflation we will end up in terrible trouble. The building industry could face increases of up to 30 per cent between January 1982 and January 1983. Much of their materials are now imported. The cost of houses will rocket over the next eighteen months. The cost of the materials that go into the building of those houses and the cost of providing labour to build them will escalate to 13 per cent over the next twelve to eighteen months.
It costs £5,000 to produce an industrial job here. If we are considering providing new jobs for people at that cost out of the taxpayers' money, we must also look at the wastage in existing industries which are becoming computerised and in which the micro-chip has made great inroads so far as employment is concerned. While we are providing more jobs on the one hand, on the other hand there is a wastage of trained personnel. We have to gear ourselves to this. It is an inevitable fact of economic life. We should not attempt to be modern Luddites pretending that this is not an inevitable fact of life particularly in the urban areas of the Republic, and we should plan accordingly.
Some policies introduced recently to try to rectify our economy were possibly 30 to 40 years out of date, and made very little allowance for the inflationary type of economics which prevail particularly the further west one goes in Europe. The rate of inflation is higher throughout the Mediterranean and the western and southern parts of Europe. We are not tremendously well equipped. We have a very bad infrastructure. We have possibly the worst roads in Europe and the worst telephone service. We have the hardest planning laws in Europe. We have a very widespread population. We have the youngest population and at the same time the oldest population in Europe. A high percentage of our population is under the age of 25 years, and a high percentage of our population is over the age of 65 years. The taxation burden is carried by those in between, the burden of providing education, health, defence, security and other services. We have not looked after our old people as well as might have been expected. We must improve and strengthen our family circle to enable elderly people to be looked after better at home.
With dismay one reads that public service employment increased by one-third over the past ten years. There has been an increase of approximately 300,000 employees in the public service. The increase in the labour force was 4 per cent in the same ten years. The cost of pay in the public sector is now £1,900 million, which represents 20 per cent of the national output. We have had this massive increase in bureaucracy with no comparable increase in employment in the industrial sector and no improvement in our balance of payments. One becomes very dubious about where this little ship we are sailing on is travelling to and whether it is heading straight for the rocks. The crew and the captain hope for a favourable wind of change. This is not unique to this Government. It has been the case for almost ten years. It is getting worse and worse and getting closer and closer to the sandbar.
In 1979 public service pay was increased by 25 per cent compared with 15 per cent in the private sector. In 1981 public sector pay increased by 34 per cent compared with 18 per cent in the private sector. A combination of public service pay and repayments on Government borrowing abroad account for three-quarters of every £1 paid in income tax. These are some of the disastrous figures before us today.
The number of unemployed is nearly 130,000. When we look at the Finance Bill we must attempt to see the effects it will have upon the working class in Dublin, their housing, their education and their standard of living. It is certain that their standard of living will drop. The standard of living and purchasing power of a husband, wife and three children living in a local authority house and eanrning an average industrial wage of £6,000 a year will drop under this system. There is no doubt about that.
I want to refer to the way in which these people can obtain credit. It has been said that we cannot get any more credit, that it is dangerous to look for more credit. Wage earners have to subsidise their children in university, in third level education, in secondary schools. Generally teenagers have an earning capacity which can be included in the overall picture. We should consider making school fees and university fees tax deductible to ease the strain imposed upon families. Surely the extra expenses we have to meet by virtue of the fact that we are in a state of civil war present us with very logical arguments to present the our partners in the EEC.
Our economy is potentially viable. Until recently it was expanding at a rate of 3 to 4 per cent which helped us to provide our school leavers with gainful employment. Not so long ago one-third of our national revenue was spent on providing security at the Border, on vital installations, and the Army and the Garda. Our farmers now have their backs to the wall and have almost sold their seed corn. We have to export all our products by sea or by air. Surely all these factors represent a special case which we can present to the EEC for assistance in financing our security forces.
If they can finance our fishery protection vessels and provide us with money to buy more corvettes and minesweepers to protect our fishing stock — fish which they like to eat themselves — they can provide us with money, arms or equipment to assist us in securing the Border and our installations, instead of that cost having to be met directly out of taxpayers' money. We made our contribution abroad in a military sense with our brave troops in the battalions that served overseas on many occasions, notably in the Congo, Cyprus and the Lebanon. Surely we deserve some return, some way in which the financial squeeze we are experiencing as a result of the recession can be alleviated. Surely we can seek this type of aid. Surely our EEC partners will not cut our throats or knife us in the back on a common agricultural policy which was never more needed by our farmers. Our security forces never needed greater subsidisation than they do at present.
B & I have gone bankrupt. CIE are in terrible debt and other industries are going rapidly to the wall. Guinness, our single largest employer, taxpayer, purchaser of barley, exporter, announced plans today to lay off nearly half their work force as a result of modernisation. Such people must be re-absorbed into the work force.
If the EEC are prepared to protect our fish I do not see why they cannot help us protect our country and its security in a monetary way. One way we could ensure our security is by the introduction of a national service for school-leavers. Finland, Norway and Sweden have a national service and we do not hear many complaints from those countries of the quality of person ensuing from a year or one-and-a-half year intensive training and discipline, education and conditioning for after-life that national service automatically provides. The Minister should give this proposition careful consideration at Cabinet level. I am sure he would find agreement to such a proposal in the House, when our country and its people would be that much better for its introduction.
