The point raised by my colleague, Deputy Reynolds, is symptomatic of the kind of morass into which this Government have sunk in all their dealings. Already there have been a number of major financial scandals that have seriously damaged the credibility of the Government and this whole question of the financing of Bord Telecom and the relationship of their finances to Central Fund financing requires very close investigation.
We had the rather pathetic sight of the Minister for Finance, when introducing his budgetary measures and making his annual economic commentary on the state of the nation, being unable to tell the House of a serious financial drain from this country that has been estimated to be at least £500 million. We have been put in an even more unreal situation with the production of the document we are now debating. This is yet another analysis of a situation that basically only requires effective and positive government. Unfortunately this Government appear to be suffering from a paralysis of analyses, if I might put it like that. We have another analysis on top of quite a few in the past two years but we have not had positive measures or decisions.
This document which is called the national plan is a type of bromide or drug, designed to dull the senses of Labour Party and Fine Gael Deputies in order to maintain an artificial unity in this Dáil while the nation is growing angrier every day. The people who have honourably supported the Labour Party and Fine Gael have a greater sense of the reality of the situation than the Labour Party and the Fine Gael parliamentarians who have sought to insulate themselves from the realities of life. They have cobbled this document together in order to stay on for a few more months. That is all this document is about. It is not about the economic, social and political problems of the nation. It is simply a document designed to produce an artificial unity in this House for the time being. The philosophy behind it is, "sufficient unto the day"— no more and no less.
The mood of anger among the people is not caused by the difficulties facing the Government. The Irish people have always been fair in their assessment of matters of that kind. If a Government are genuinely facing difficulties, the people understand. The mood of anger among the people is caused because of the inability of the Government to face up to the problems and to make an honest effort to tackle them. The Government have made cosmetic attempts to gloss over the problems as if they did not exist and their document contains downright fiction. This has happened also in other documents emanating from the Government.
The main fiction in this document lies in the first sentence. It states that the most serious problem is unemployment and that the first objective of the plan is to increase employment, but some pages later the unemployment figures are given in a separate table and they project a rise in unemployment in the three years from 1984 to 1987. This lip service with regard to tackling the problems of unemployment is shown as a particularly callous kind of hypocrisy because on page 145 of the document Building on Reality table 7-2 sets out the public capital programme for 1984 to 1987. There it is proposed to scale down the public capital programme so that by 1987 it will be 20 per cent below its present level and half the real level proposed by us in November 1982 for the 1983 public capital programme. I ask the Taoiseach in his reply to indicate how there can be any attempt to achieve the main objective in his document which is to increase employment? How can one attempt to deal with the serious problem of unemployment facing the country if at the same time the public capital programme is being drastically cut? It is basic and elementary economics that capital investment in both the public and the private sectors is the key to job creation. There is no other way in which more jobs can be created. One must have a public environment and a public policy which stimulate private investment and can run hand in hand with public capital investment so that the total of the two is sufficient to absorb as large a number of people as possible in gainful employment.
An analysis of this kind leads only to a paralysis of government and it cannot be pretended that it will solve the unemployment problems unless, as a centre piece of that analysis, there is a positive proposal or a series of proposals to raise the level of public and private investment so as to ensure more employment. It is a totally dishonest fabrication and sheer fiction to suggest that the unemployment problem can be met and at the same time the public capital programme be cut as drastically as this. There is not a single line in this document which in any way suggests how the private sector should be stimulated towards private capital investment which is equally essential in order to achieve the objective of lowering the level of unemployment.
As far as the private sector are concerned, there is nothing in the document to foster a revival of confidence in the economy. That is the essential prerequisite, the sine qua non before any real progress can be made. Confidence must be revived in the future of the economy so that the private investor, both at home and abroad, is stimulated to invest in it. There is nothing in this document which suggests how that should be fostered, nurtured and stimulated. In fact, the drain of funds out of this country, which was discovered at a very late stage by the Minister for Finance, is an ongoing factor about which nothing is being done.
I mention one industry where at present there is enormous scope for positive thinking and positive action — that is the construction industry. At present in that industry there are 45,000 people unemployed. There is scope for a unique investment partnership between the State, local authorities, financial institutions, trade unions and the private sector of the industry, which partnership has never been attempted before. This would mobilise all the available skills of workers, tradesmen, management and professional people in the industry. They can be mobilised by concerted and planned action and leadership on the part of the Government. In all these areas there are skills and talents tragically unemployed and untapped. This occurs right across the board — workers, the skilled, the professionals and management. The institutions within the State can provide co-operation if leadership and concern are shown by the State in mobilising such talents. The construction industry is one which presents very few balance of payments problems. The import content is only of the order of 23 per cent, 77 per cent being composed of home raw materials.
The whole question of job opportunities in the growing sector of high technology manufacturing industry and the expanding services sector is practically ignored in the document, although these are the areas which will undoubtedly provide the opportunities of the future for our skilled young workforce, such a unique feature of our sociological set-up at present. Our one great strength is the large skilled young workforce because of the existing excellent training and educational facilities. This is precisely the sort of young workforce which can be absorbed into the high technological and services industries which we in Fianna Fáil were encouraging through the agency of the IDA right through the late seventies. Yet, there are in this document no proposals for a far more intensified drive to provide this type of investment and to give the opportunities of the future to our young workforce.
The export performance of the electronic and pharmaceutical industries established during the period I have mentioned under Fianna Fáil is one of the few things going for the Government, yet they are marking time with respect to these industries. It is not enough to rely on the industries which we brought in between the years 1977 and 1981. It is time this Government stopped their paralysis of analysis, got up off their behinds and got down to the business of bringing in people with the investment required for a massive increase in an area in which we have more than adequately proved ourselves. It is an area of investment in which there are people willing to come and use this country as their base of operations in Western Europe, and particularly within the European Communities.
The only thing stopping that type of investment, as I have heard from these people time and time again, is lack of confidence in a Government which are ideologically disunited and divided. Those who have the money for these investive purposes see no sense in coming into an investment climate created by a Government which lack a consciousness or an orientation with regard to investment policies. Investors of that kind are not interested in Governments which stand still; they are interested in Governments which get up and go, make the necessary decisions and encourage and secure investment.
External investment required for these industries has now practically ceased and I challenge the Minister for Industry to come in here and say otherwise. The rising graph of investment from abroad into such industries located here has fallen drastically because there is an absence of confidence in the economy and an atmosphere which precludes investment here at present. This type of investment will not recommence on the desired scale until this unreal Government, ideologically split from top to bottom, departs from the scene and enables a climate of investment confidence to be restored which will encourage such people to invest here.
A further factor on which there has been a lamentable lack of decision making is the inability of the Government to introduce a rational and equitable tax system. This is deterring investment here and also placing an unfair burden on many of our own people. Yet the Government continue to sleep on the two reports of the Commission on Taxation where a number of practical proposals have been made and approved of in sideways comments by the Taoiseach and various Government Ministers. So far in regard to their adoption and implementation those proposals have been ignored.
Despite the serious matters which have led to a lack of confidence, a diminution of investment, a departure of funds from this country, serious matters which have prevented the Government from embarking on an equitable taxation system, despite those factors which require to be remedied almost immediately, this does not appear to deter the Government from moving off into another strange, mad land in which once again we see a reference in this document to the National Development Corporation. This corporation is peddled yet again for the umpteenth time. It was born out of feverish pre-election activities to smooth over the ideological differences between the proposed two partners.
It emerged at that early stage, and it has been mentioned in every analysis since. It is included again over several pages in this analysis. It has not yet seen the light of day. I should like to hear the Taoiseach say when it will see the light of day, what form it will take, what positive contribution it will make, and whether it will be in any way a departure from the sort of bureaucratic quango which is an excuse for analysts rather than people who want to do positive good and take positive political decisions. It has not yet seen the light of day, and the Fine Gael Party may prevent it from seeing the light of day.
It is mentioned in this analysis, while basic industries which are of real importance in our community and of real importance to the future of the economy get very scanty and meagre mention. I refer to the food industry, the fishing industry, tourism and forestry, four basic industries concerned with the development of our natural resources. They are barely mentioned whereas in our document The Way Forward all those areas are dealt with in great depth and great detail. I will give the House a few figures to bear out my point.
On tourism there are four solid pages of detail in The Way Forward. In this document there is a little over a page of waffle. I was glad to see an editorial in The Irish Times referring to it as such. It is a string of cliches put together without any real effort to tackle an industry in which we have many natural advantages. With selective and positive incentives in the way of tax grants and loan aids we could immediately stimulate employment in tourism and create an atmosphere of expansion which would lead to a very positive enlargement of employment fairly quickly. That is one of the merits of the tourism industry, apart from being an industry in which we have so many natural advantages. It is an area in which fairly rapid employment can be created if the appropriate stimulation is given.
There is no point in talking about a rate of expansion which is what Bord Fáilte talk about which is keeping level with the rate of inflation. That is not enough. There was a far bigger expansion of tourism in the world this year than ever before, and particularly in Europe. We got a smaller share of that cake and, relatively speaking, we did worse than any country in Europe in regard to the tourism business in the past six months. Make no mistake about it. A small increase which is talked about by Bord Fáilte is relatively bad compared with the real export performance of every other country within the European Community and within western Europe generally this year.
All we have in this document is a page of waffle without a single chart, a single statistic, or a single attempt to tackle the problem, apart from an attempt to boast about the increase in business this year which kept pace only with the fall in the value of money, no more and no less. So much for a very important sector of our economy, tourism.
Fisheries merited four-and-a-half pages in The Way Forward. We went into great detail in dealing with aquaculture and further developments of our marine resources outside the traditional fishing methods. Fisheries merited four lines in this document before us. Forestry merited another four or five lines. In our document it got two and a half pages. The food industry was dismissed in a paragraph, probably the major industry with scope for improvement and expansion in the whole agri-industrial area. These are facts.
One area in which we made very positive recommendations in The Way Forward was at page 50 where we made specific reference to import substitution. We made a specific proposal:
Special units will be established in the Departments of Industry and Energy to help achieve a significant increase in the extent to which Irish firms avail of the extensive and growing opportunities for import substitution which exist in the manufacturing sector generally and the building supplies industry respectively.
There is not a single reference to import substitution in this document. We could establish units such as we suggested in The Way Forward. I know the problems with the EEC and there is no point in the Taoiseach parading them for me. Administratively and in our own way by moral persuasion through units of this kind, we could achieve enormous progress in the way of import substitution which could be just as valuable as exports. Yet there is not a line, not a word, about it in this document.
There we have a number of basic areas where, by Government administrative action, something could be achieved. These are areas where decisions could be taken fairly quickly if the Government were serious about their business instead of suffering from the disease of paralysis through analysis. We are seeing the paralysis of the political will caused by the structure of this Government, and by their basic inability to grasp situations, take them on board, go ahead and make the necessary decisions, implement policies and carry out proposals.
The references to another major industry are pathetic. I refer to the references to agriculture.
Here we have some pages of waffle devoted to agriculture. Fianna Fáil have seven very solid pages in The Way Forward devoted to planning for agriculture. I, as Minister for Agriculture, left this Government a legacy of a four year plan for agriculture fully drafted and ready, and all the Government had to do was to implement it. They published it finally a few months ago and it is virtually ignored in the document here. The central message of our four year plan for agriculture is that there must be an investment in agriculture and the most practical way to achieve investment is to raise cattle numbers, the numbers in the national herd, cattle stocks. That is the basic barometer in regard to agriculture. You can quote all sorts of other statistics in regard to agriculture, but fundamentally unless this question of cattle stocks is tackled there is no hope of this Government really getting to grips with our major industry. It is well that the Taoiseach should know — probably he does not; he is not very hot on this area — that the question of cattle stocks is the most sensitive barometer of farmer confidence at the moment and at present the stocks are lower than at any time in the past 12 years, and the trend is downwards. There is no evidence in this document that any thought is being given to any action to provide the investment funds to our farmers to buy the necessary cows and expand their herd to provide this basic dynamic so essential in building up agricultural output.
Here the Taoiseach must bear a heavy load of responsibility, assuming as he does the mantle of credibility in regard to statistics. Page 19 of his document contains a statistic which is totally fictitious. A table there, dealing with output and projection of output in the years 1980-83, states that agricultural output rose by 11 per cent and on the basis of that 11 per cent rise over the past three years there is to be a 10 per cent rise over the years 1984-87. This is a fiction and a fraud. If the Taoiseach refers to his Central Statistics Office he will see that the whole output projections made in that, both in regard to agricultural output and GNP, are totally fraudulent because he has chosen a base in regard to agriculture which is at variance with the base chosen by his own CSO. He provides a base of 11 per cent in that document; in fact, according to the CSO, agricultural net output in the period 1980-83 increased by only 0.12 per cent. That is an important and serious omission and mistake, that you have there a difference between a 0.12 per cent increase in output between 1980 and 1983 and an 11 per cent increase in output in 1983 according to the table in this document. On the basis of that table there is a further 10 per cent in projected increase. Where does the Taoiseach get this figure which makes nonsense out of all the projections in regard to gross national output in that chart?
The real trouble is that the present Government, apart from the whole waffling nature of this document, their penchant for analysis rather than action and the complete paralysis of political will, have lost their way and they do not understand the role of Government. The people in their instinctive way realise now that this Government, in office now for practically two years, are not governing and do not appear to understand what they should be doing in Government. They have long Government meetings, whether in Donnybrook or Merrion Street, in which chit-chat but not decisions are the order of the day.
This Government must realise that what Government is about is making decisions and exercising the power necessary to implement decisions about nothing else. Government certainly is not about indulgence in peripheral affairs like setting up committees. We have had a number of Dáil committees set up. I said when they were established that this was all very desirable in its own way but not really a serious contribution to tackling the nation's problems. Of course, it sounded well, it read well, and the Government proceeded to indulge themselves in committee-making, setting up committees, engaging in the sort of chit-chat that goes on in committees. Generally this Government are behaving like a delinquent debating society, and we have enough of those around the place.
We do not want an Irish Government behaving like a delinquent debating society. Certainly Government is not about a charade of Government presented as being something real by an expensive team of handlers who are designed purely and solely to lull the people into a state of complacency, do a Houdini operation and try to persuade the people that something is there that is not there, that there is a Government there when such is not the case. We have arrived at the day when that has become a substitute for Government, a cosmetic covering, the emperor with no clothes, when all of what is there is a substitute for Government. That is the day when this Government must depart. That is why it is most appropriate that they depart now before the situation becomes worse — not for the Government because it is bad enough for them already, but from the point of view of the people.
There has been much talk here about Dáil reform, the reform of democracy, the creation of a new climate of understanding by the people in our society about what Government is about, what the Dáil is about and so on. We have had plenty of debates about that, but the single most important matter that needs to be resolved in this area is the revival of decision-making by an Irish Government. That is the most important reform and purpose of modern Irish democracy. With Fianna Fáil Governments in the past the emphasis was on decision-making. Government meetings were designed solely to make decisions. Decisions brought into this House for debate and made once they were carried in this House used to be our style of Government and will be so again. Above all, it was never so essential as at present to cut this Gordian knot of complacency, paralysis, chit-chat, analysing, producing White Papers and Green Papers and more documents and recommendations.
We want to break through that log jam and have a Government around the Government table making decisions quickly, explaining to the people and, above all else, exercising the power to carry them out. This Government are incapable of doing that for many reasons. They are incapable because of the personality problem of the Taoiseach. They are incapable because of the basic division between the Labour Party and the Fine Gael Party. They are incapable because fundamentally as a group of people nobody there is willing to take the Government by the scruff of the neck and say that we must carry out our business in the people's interests, instead of trying to view the parade of the business of Government through the rose-tinted spectacles of various points of view prepared, handled, orchestrated and organised by professional people who want to package our Government, like the packaging idea originally reached in the United States. At that time there was the infamous book written by Theodore White on the packaging of a President. That President did not last too long because he met his problems. As sure as night follows day the Government will meet their problems because packaging a Government in a form of tinsel wrapping is no answer at the end of the day. The Government are approaching the end of their day because finally the people have discovered for themselves the type of administration that has been inflicted upon them. The sort of packaging and presentation without action and decisions that we have at present will not continue because we have an intelligent democracy here. The people now realise what is behind the charade that has been inflicted upon them by, in particular, the Taoiseach, his handlers and the Government.
It is necessary that the Government should contemplate their departure as quickly as possible because of their incapacity and inability to make decisions. Only a Government that will embark on the decision-making process will regenerate faith and belief in the nation's progress which is required to restore not only the confidence of our own people in the future, something that is lacking at present, but also the confidence of those friends and investors throughout the world, particularly the US and at home, who have money, ability and skills. Those people would dearly wish to build a prosperous Ireland and help us in our efforts. We want to see all those people taking part in the rebuilding of our nation. However, not alone do we have to restore the confidence of those who voted us here but we must restore the confidence of those who can play a positive role in further enhancing development here so as to provide the type of job creation we need for our young people in the future. It is only through the restoration of such confidence that we can build a prosperous nation that will be free from the incubus and the burden of the worst Government we have had since the foundation of the State.
The time is nigh for a change. There is no point in postponing the day. The temporary postponment the Taoiseach may achieve by producing this fictitious document may gain a few weeks or a few months for him, but when the fall comes it will be greater. The people outside have risen and are on the march. They are fully sustained in the knowledge that there is an alternative Government available to take the place of the Coalition and take the necessary decisions in the national interest. The risen people will speak all the louder if they are thwarted much longer by the Taoiseach's inaction, delay and decision to stick with office with ideologies and ideological friends with whom he does not have anything in common.
I should like to say to the Labour Party that they should not be in power with people with whom they do not have anything in common. The supporters of that party are saying that. The supporters of the Labour Party, and Fianna Fáil supporters, will when the next election comes along ensure that Fine Gael are restored to their minority position in the Dáil. The 55 per cent we achieved in the recent opinion polls will be discarded as part of history because we will be running well ahead with the combination of our supporters and the supporters of the Labour Party. They will work together to eliminate this nefarious influence that has perpetrated itself on Irish public life in the form of an incompetent Taoiseach and an incompetent Fine Gael Party run by handlers and chancers with whom our supporters, supporters in the Labour Party and in the Fianna Fáil Party, will have nothing to do.
