I move:
That Dáil Éireann reaffirms its confidence in the Taoiseach and the Government.
The form of this parliamentary debate is a vote of confidence in the Government but the real issue posed in the debate is whether this House can have more confidence in the Government or in the Opposition. This raises immediately the questions of how the Opposition behaved in office and how they have performed over the past four years. Let us look at the record.
When in Government, the Opposition built up public borrowing to a point where in one year it was equivalent to one-fifth of the total output of this country. No person or country can borrow at such a rate without the most disastrous consequences. Public expenditure was then on a trend which, if continued, would have meant that the Government would have absorbed every penny of national output. We were spending abroad £115 for every £100 we earned there. That excess is a measure of the rate at which we were heading for national bankruptcy. Inflation was at levels it had reached only once before, at the height of the first oil crisis. At over 20 per cent, it meant that money was halving in value every four years or so. Wages and other incomes just could not keep pace.
Unemployment was increasing at a rate of over 40,000 a year which, if maintained would soon have produced a scene of total social and economic collapse.
At the end of 1982 our relations with our nearest neighbour were to say the least frigid, so frigid that there could be no hope of any development in relation to Northern Ireland, no hope of movement towards the reconciliation which is so necessary if peace and stability are to be established there and friendly relations established throughout the island.
I know that the Opposition dislike intensely any reference to their record in Government, or to the condition in which they left our economy and our people when they were defeated first in mid-1981 and again, after a brief interval, at the end of 1982. Every conceivable propaganda effort has been put into discouraging us from referring back to that period of four to five years ago. It is the constant contention of the Opposition that the past is irrelevant, that the question of where this Government started from must be ignored, and that our performance must be seen in splendid isolation from the real world in which we found ourselves when we took over the reins of Government from Fianna Fáil.
This simply will not wash. The Opposition can justify their return to office only on the basis of two considerations, their performance when last in Government and their performance during five years of Opposition. The 1977-81 Fianna Fáil Government with a 20-seat majority was a calamitous failure. The second Fianna Fáil Government in 1982 was a disaster that ended in disgrace.
Even Fianna Fáil's best friends do not claim on their behalf that they have been an effective or constructive Opposition. In the vast majority of serious debates critical analysis of the Government's proposals has been largely left to the Government's own backbenchers. This has certainly raised the quality of debate in both Houses, and has made for much more interesting and stimulating parliamentary sessions than has been the case in the past.
The contrast between the lively and critical debates initiated on this side of the House on many issues and the generally fairly pathetic efforts of the Opposition have been widely noted by the media and by public opinion, and I need not dwell on this contrast. There have, of course, been individual honourable exceptions to this, but far too few to convince any impartial observer of the parliamentary scene that today's Fianna Fáil Front Bench has the capacity to offer an effective alternative Government.
Even Magill magazine, which no-one could accuse of being over-friendly to or uncritical of the present Government, has, in its current issue, the headline, “Yes, The Alternative Government Could Be Worse”. In the body of that article it is stated bluntly of the Opposition spokesmen that, only five could rank of adequate calibre for ministerial office, apart from the Leader of the Opposition himself, although, somewhat curiously, only four are named in the article. This out of a total of 39 Members of the Opposition who are in shadow posts.
However, I do not propose to embarrass the Opposition by dwelling on this point; it speaks for itself so eloquently that it requires no embellishment from me. What I want to pay more attention to is the contrast between the condition in which Fianna Fáil left this country, both in mid-1981 and at the end of 1982, and the position in which we find ourselves today.
There are of course a number of different ways in which our performance can be measured. Many see unemployment as one of these, although I believe this is largely incorrect. For when one looks at the unemployment figures for the last seven years one is struck by the extent to which changes of Government have appeared totally irrelevant to the upward trend. It was in September 1979, barely two years after Fianna Fáil had come into Government, that unemployment began to rise from a figure of 82,500 a rise that has continued since then.
During the seven years since autumn 1979 the rate of growth in unemployment has peaked twice at the beginning of 1981 the level was almost 40 per cent higher than a year earlier and in early 1983 the annual increase actually reached 43,000.
Since early 1983 the rate of growth of unemployment has steadily declined, to a figure of less than 3,000, or barely 1 per cent, in the last 12 months, although part of this reduction had undoubtedly reflected a rise in emigration. There really are no political points to be made on this subject. The underlying cause of unemployment has been the effective stagnation of the world economy for most of the period since the second oil crisis, and the exceptional demographic position in Ireland where the number of young people seeking employment is so much higher than in other developed countries.
The truth is that the upward surge in unemployment, latterly partially substituted by emigration, has been an endemic feature of our economy throughout the past seven years, under four Governments, and it is time that we stopped trying to score off each other in relation to a problem as tragic as this and in respect of which really effective action will require the co-operation of all political parties. What we need to do is to set aside propaganda consideration in the interest of making common cause so as to create more favourable conditions for the generation of employment and for steps to mitigate the impact of unemployment.
Most of the underlying causes of unemployment lie outside this country, as we all know, and there is no more point in my trying to blame Fianna Fáil because the rise started when they were in office than there would be any point in their stating the obvious fact that after seven years of continuous increase, the figure is now much higher than it was at the beginning. What we have to do, both of us, is to get away from this futile point-scoring and seek common ground in terms of making such changes as are within our own control in this country, so as to mitigate the impact of unemployment, most especially by removing any domestic obstacles to employment creation.
At my party's Ard Fheis I made some concrete suggestions in this regard some of which I know are potentially controversial. I would hope that, however much we may disagree in other matters in this debate, it may be possible for the ideas that I put forward to be looked at objectively in the interest of the common good. Some of the changes I have suggested could become really effective only if there were a bi-partisan approach to them.
Neither of our parties is individually responsible for the present unemployment situation and neither of our parties can be really effective on their own in trying to reduce its impact both upon older workers who have lost their jobs and young people who cannot even secure an initial toe-hold in the labour market.
I want to turn now, however, to matters that are more clearly in our control and where policies that different Governments have pursued have produced different results. No one can deny, or ignore, what has been happening in relation to inflation here. Four-and-a-half years ago consumer prices were rising at a rate of 21 per cent or well over twice the average in the developed countries as a whole at that time.
That disparity in inflation rates was, unarguably the product of our own decision in this country. It was attributable in particular to the unrestrained growth in income both in the public and private sectors that had taken place during the immediately preceding years 1980 and 1981, which had pushed up or prices far faster than elsewhere. Instead of seeking to restrain this disastrous development the Government of the day gave it every encouragement, boosting the public service pay bill by 35 per cent in the single year 1980, a year in which all control in this sector was lost by a Government whose irresponsibility in this matter has no parallel at any other period in the history of the State.
Since we came into office at the end of 1982 we have set about tackling this problem, and have, I contend, been outstandingly successful. In the other developed countries inflation has fallen by 6 percentage points, from 9 per cent to 3 per cent; in Ireland it has fallen by 18 percentage points, from 21 per cent to the same figure of 3 per cent. This has not happened by chance. This has happened because the Government have pursued responsible policies on the public finances, the exchange rate and incomes. We have persistently preached the message that pay restraint is necessary for lower inflation and higher employment. We have put across the point that unrealistic pay demands are ultimately self-defeating.
It is an undeniable fact that in four years the Government have reduced the rate of inflation three times as fast as in other developed countries. The result of this success in curbing inflation has been that, whereas in mid-1982 pay increases in average industrial earnings of 12-13 per cent were associated with an actual fall of 8 per cent in the average workers' purchasing power because inflation was running at so much higher a rate, the current position is that money income increases of about 6 per cent are giving workers this year significant real income growth, probably of the order of 3 per cent or — in view of the major tax reductions in this year's budget, perhaps nearer to 4 per cent.
There are those who will fault me for having cited so many figures in the course of making this point, but I believe that a mere assertion that we had achieved such remarkable results, not backed up by the actual figures, might fail to carry full conviction and I think that it is of great importance that our people should appreciate just what has been achieved — just what a Government can achieve — when they tackle a problem that has been allowed to get completely out of control by their predecessors.
Closely connected with this is the question of competitiveness, our ability in terms of our unit wage costs to match our competitors. Back in 1981 and 1982 our unit wage costs in terms of our own currency were rising by about 10 per cent per year. We were visibly pricing ourselves out of our own market, and out of other people's markets. The shelves of our supermarkets were filling up with foreign goods, replacing Irish goods that had formerly been able to hold their own. The substitution of Irish products by imports was destroying employment and certainly contributed to the exceptionally high level of unemployment at that time, although as I have said earlier the primary reasons for the growth in unemployment then as since lie outside our shores.
We do not yet have equivalent figures for the current year, but we know from the figures published in the Central Bank bulletin that last year our unit wage costs rose only fractionally, by half-a-percent. As a result in 1985 we gained a lot of ground on our main competitors. If we can keep this up our order books will grow and we must keep it up.
That improvement in our competitiveness, that turn round in the whole position in regard to competitiveness is a most crucial achievement, for on it depends our capacity to turn around the rise in unemployment and emigration by increasing employment here once again after the prolonged period during which employment in manufacturing has declined.
In what I have said so far I have been referring to matters that affect our people very directly — to unemployment and emigration, to increases in consumer prices, to declines and increases in the purchasing power of workers' pay packets and to our competitiveness vis-à-vis our neighbours.
There are other matters also which are much more difficult for us to come to grips with as individuals, but which are also of vital importance to us all.
When we came into office in 1981 the State had a balance of payments deficit equivalent to 15 per cent of our national output. That means, quite simply, that we were not merely consuming the equivalent of what we were producing at home, in our own country, but 15 per cent more besides. This was a degree of overspending which no country could sustain for any period without a serious collapse.
We were heading for a catastrophe.
In 1982, after our Government had taken tough measures, both in our supplementary budget of 1981 and in the 1982 budget on which we were defeated, but which, in a modified form, was reintroduced by Fianna Fáil in March of that year, the rate of overspending abroad had been reduced from 15 per cent to just over 10 per cent — still frighteningly high. This year the margin of overspending abroad has been cut to less than 2 per cent — an amount which for a country at our stage of development, needing to import machinery and equipment and to attract foreign investment from abroad in new industrial enterprises, is a tolerable one, although I do not suggest that we should not be complacent about this.
No one can doubt the enormous progress that has been made in five years, during which we have almost wiped out our external overspending.
There remains the question of the public finances — the area of greatest difficulty for us, now and for many years past and, I fear, also for many years to come.
In this area too we have made real progress, although it is less impressive and less satisfactory than in the other areas I have mentioned.
The best and most complete measure of what is happening in the public finance area is the public sector borrowing requirement — the total amount borrowed by the Exchequer, whether for current or capital purposes, together with the borrowings of State enterprises. It is this figure, related to our total national output, that measures most completely and accurately the extent to which our public finances are within control or out of control.
I want to resort to several further figures designed to illustrate just what has happened in this area during the past nine years.
When the National Coalition Government left office in 1977 total public sector borrowing was the equivalent of one-eighth of our national output. By increasing the volume of spending by half between 1977 and 1982 without raising the necessary taxes to meet, Fianna Fáil increased borrowing indiscriminately and left us all to try to pick up the pieces.
Four years later by 1981 this figure had risen to £2,200 million, or the equivalent of over one-fifth of our national output — as a result of a combination of three factors: Fianna Fáil in those four years had doubled the current budget deficit, they increased by two-thirds borrowing by the Exchequer for capital purposes and increased by two-thirds borrowing by State enterprises — all these in terms of the proportion that this borrowing bore to our national output.
That expresses as simply as one can the record of the Fianna Fáil Government who were in power between 1977 and 1981.
That left us facing an appalling crisis, one which has still not gone away and has only partially been resolved. No country can sustain a position where its public spending is on such a scale that it has to borrow the equivalent of one-fifth of its national output in order to supplement the yield from taxation any more than an individual could year after year live 20 per cent beyond his or her means and hope to survive. That way lies the road to ruin — and we were well down that road in 1981 when our Government took office.
Indeed it has to be said that the fact that the level of public sector borrowing represented "only" one-fifth of our national output, and not well over a quarter, was due solely to the prompt and tough action which our Government took in July, 1981 and again in January, 1982. The figures given to me when I took office on 1 July 1981 showed that without the action we took the position in both 1981 and 1982 would have been far worse — one-third worse in 1982.
I must for a few minutes, however, go into the question of our public finances a little more closely, to contrast the performance of Fianna Fáil in the years immediately after 1978, with what we have achieved since we started our present term of office.
Between 1979 and 1982 the out-turn of the current budget deficit was on average almost three-fifths higher than the deficit the Fianna Fáil Government had estimated each year at budget time.
Compare those figures with our results in each of the last three years. The margin of error in the current budget deficit itself in these years has ranged between 5 and 7 per cent — in one year on the right side. Taking the three years together, the average error has been only 2 per cent, as against three-fifths under Fianna Fáil.
In relation to the total amount of revenue and expenditure taken together, since errors and changes can occur on either side, the margin of error in each of these three years has been less than one-half per cent of the total.
Once again I apologise for citing so many figures. But the contrast between the total failure of budget control under Fianna Fáil and the extraordinarily tight control that we achieved in each of the last three years is sufficiently striking — and sufficiently important I believe — to justify this presentation.
This year, as everyone knows, we have faced greater difficulties, and the margin by which the current budget deficit will exceed that planned in the budget is significantly higher than in any of the three preceding years. But the overrun of just over one-eighth contrasts strikingly with the excesses ranging from one-half to four-fifths which Fianna Fáil registered during their closing four years in office.
Moreover the overruns that occurred at that time owed little, so far as I can see, to factors external to our own economy. Certainly Fianna Fáil in those years faced nothing like the problems that we are faced with in the current year when we have had to grapple with a combination of:
(1) The collapse in oil prices, and thus in the rate of inflation and the level of Government revenue, which took place after the budgetary decisions on public service pay and social welfare had been taken,
(2) a drop in non-tax revenue, in particular from Bord Gáis as a result of a combination of lower oil prices and the need to finance the continued operation of Dublin Gas, and
(3) unforeseen additional expenditure in relation to such matters as compensation, for farmers in particular, for the effects of two successive years of exceptionally bad weather.
The great bulk of the overrun in this year's budget deficit — something like two-thirds — emerged during the third quarter of the year, too late for remedial action to have any significant effect on this year's outturn. However, even allowing for the fact that part of the excess in the budget deficit is due to non-recurrent factors, these developments will make it necessary for the Government to take firm action in respect of 1987, and the Government have already announced the limits within which both the current budget deficit and Exchequer borrowing will be maintained next year.
We believe that this announcement was desirable in order to offer reassurance to the financial markets from which the Government have to borrow, markets in which, in the absence of such a clear commitment by the Government, fears could have arisen of an excessive level of borrowing next year, away beyond the reasonable capacity of our own financial sector, combined with reasonable recourse to foreign borrowing, to accommodate.
This reassurance which has already contributed to a 1.25 per cent drop in interest rates, was all the more important in view of the speculative pressures from which we are currently suffering owing to the uncertainties that exist in relation to sterling — pressures that have been having a strong, if quite unjustified, effect upon domestic interest rates.
During the course of this debate the Opposition party will have the opportunity of adding their voice of reassurance on this point if, as two of these parties seem to think, for obviously opposite reasons, they might find themselves in Government through the course of the next year. As there is, at any rate, an element of uncertainty in the political situation for 1987, this would, I believe, be a constructive and statesman-like move — even if, as I expect, it will prove in the event to have been a superfluous one.
So far as possible in the course of my remarks to date I have refrained from provocative attacks on the Opposition, limiting myself to criticism of those areas where, objectively, criticism is unavoidable. This kind of debate can be very unproductive and quite demoralising, for the general public if it descends to the level of a slanging match — and none of us is immune from the temptation to take the debate in this direction, nor from criticism that we have in the past fallen needlessly for this temptation.
It would I think be more constructive, and probably very much more appreciated by the general public, if the occasion of this debate were used to get across, from our very different points of view, just how difficult and how serious is the financial situation of the country. The management of the economy in the last few years has been an extremely difficult task. It has in a very real sense involved walking a tight-rope, as I recently have had occasion to remark, with the ever-present danger of falling off either on one side or the other — of over-deflating the economy by excessive cuts in spending or tax increases on the one hand, or of failing to control the level of borrowing on the other.
It is, of course, possible to make a case for criticising us for leaning too much in one direction or the other but what is really less convincing is an attempt to suggest that we have leant too far in both directions at once, which has sometimes been the burden of less informed criticism of Government policy.
The simple truth is that whatever Government are in office, the problems facing them in present circumstances are formidable. They will not be solved without a much greater degree of public understanding of the scale of our difficulties. I believe that it would be helpful if that much, at least, emerged from this debate.
I want to turn now from this review — a review which I have made as objective as I can — of the relative performance of Fianna Fáil and the present Government during their respective terms of office in respect of what are described by economists as the major macro-economic factors, to other aspects of Government policy in respect of which I believe we have secured significant successes, even in the face of the financial problems that confront us.
The principal socio-economic problems which have confronted us, and which we have sought to tackle, even within the limits of the tight financial constraints facing us are:
(i) the expansion of the educational system to meet the needs of the ever growing number of students,
(ii) the maintenance and improvement of the purchasing power of social payments available to the disadvantaged,
(iii) resolving the local authority housing problem which has been with us since the sixties, and encouraging the expansion of home ownership and the recovery in the house building section of the construction industry,
(iv) developing our primary road infrastructure the neglect of which over a long period has been an impediment to industrial dispersion and economic expansion.
Of course, another Government might have chosen different priorities but these have been ours.
As far as the educational system is concerned, it has within the past four years accommodated 55,000 additional students and the total number employed in the educational sector has been increased by over 3,000. Expansion has, of course, been most rapid in the third-level sector where the numbers of students are now 23 per cent higher than five years ago and where a major expansion of the construction programme, designed to provide additional places, and announced in the national plan, is now well under way. Expansion in this sector has brought us to the point where well over one-quarter of young people now have the opportunity of undertaking third-level education, a figure two-thirds higher than in Britain and slightly higher than in the EC as a whole. For a country whose resources per head are so much lower than in the rest of the European Community, and in which the proportion of young people of an age to participate in education is greater than elsewhere in the EC, this is a remarkable achievement.
So far as social welfare is concerned, the additional payments that have been provided for in recent years in respect of a 12-month period in July, have in every instance exceeded by some margin the increase in the cost of living during the period in question. As a result there has been a relatively consistent improvement in the purchasing power of the incomes of the more disadvantaged members of our community, even at a time when, in the earlier years of the decade, the living standards of those at work were falling as a result of the financial crisis generated by Fianna Fáil in their later years in office.
As far as housing is concerned, the number of people being housed in local authority dwellings has been almost one-quarter higher in recent years than previously, with the result that the average waiting time for local authority housing has been halved. This has been achieved through the operation of the Housing Finance Agency and the £5,000 grant scheme for council tenants, and, far from requiring additional expenditure on local authority housing, has released resources which it has been possible to apply to the house improvement grant scheme, where the multiplier effect of public spending on construction activity is twice as great as in local authority housing.
With 115,000 applications for these grants now received, the total volume of construction activity that will have been generated by this number of applications is conservatively estimated at £350 million, of which about £200 million will fall within the next calendar year. This is in marked contrast to the Opposition's sole contribution to this area of policy — the repetitive promise of £200 million for unspecified construction activity — all to come from the Exchequer.
Finally, the road building programme, which had fallen so much in arrears under Fianna Fáil, has been accelerated to the point where, on present plans, activity next year will be considerably in excess of the planned level. Throughout almost every part of the country significant improvements in our main roads are being achieved, with obvious economic and social benefits.
It is unnecessary for me to detail the many steps that have been taken to encourage investment in enterprise, and co-operation between workers and management through profit-sharing schemes. Measures of this kind have been features of the various Finance Bills which we have introduced and, together with the enterprise allowance scheme, which has already helped 15,000 people to move from unemployment to self-employment, have contributed significantly to reducing the rate of increase of unemployment.
The imaginative social employment scheme, by spreading the overheads of supervision and materials over twice as many people as in a normal environmental works type of scheme, has helped over 10,000 people to break the cycle of long-term unemployment which is so demoralising for those concerned.
I mention these merely as some examples of the kind of imaginative measures which this Government have introduced. The contrast between our many initiatives in these different areas and the obvious stagnation of Fianna Fáil policy-making during their period in Opposition, has been one of the most striking features of political life during these recent years. It provides, I believe, one of the reasons why, when the time comes for people to make up their minds between the present Government and the present Opposition, the pattern of voting will be much less favourable to the Opposition than they now seem to believe.
Thus at the level of individual policies as well as at the level of broad economic policy, this Government, in the face of great odds, have, I believe, merited the confidence of this House, and of our people. But there are other areas also in respect of which the Government's achievements deserve at least a mention in this debate. Other speakers may develop some of these points more fully.
In a number of sectors we have initiated fundamental reviews of policy for the first time in very many years, industrial policy, reform of the public service manpower policy in the form of a rationalisation of the various manpower bodies and reform of the criminal law, which will come fully into effect shortly with the appointment of the new police complaints board.
The whole area of State enterprises, which was in considerable disarray when we took over, has been the subject of intensive remedial action — one result of which can be seen in the sharp reduction in the borrowing requirement for this sector, much of which was going to finance losses incurred, in significant measure, as a result of the faulty policies of our predecessors in Government. In the last five years, since losses have been brought under control, public sector borrowing by State enterprises as a share of our national output has been reduced by no less than 40 per cent.
While all this has been going on, major social reforms have also been introduced, including the introduction of community service as an alternative to prison; an Act to control the misuse of drugs; the establishment of the Office of Ombudsman; the lowering of the age of majority; the elimination of discrimination between men and women in respect of citizenship and domicile; the rationalisation of the law on family planning and the establishment of the Combat Poverty Agency.
Other reforming measures currently under way include the Bill for the housing of the homeless, the Children (Care and Protection) Bill and the Status of Children Bill and measures currently in preparation and shortly to be introduced will include a further Children Bill, legalising the adoption of legitimate children who have been abandoned; a measure for protection of spouses' interest in the family home; measures to establish family courts and to reform the law on marriage and separation and a Bill to extend protection against violence in the home.
Other important measures designed to protect the citizen include the police complaints Bill already referred to and the Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages (Regulation) Bill which will introduce additional control against abuse of telephone tapping in particular — a measure the need for which was unfortunately all too well established during the concluding stages of the last Fianna Fáil administration.
I have touched on only some of the areas of reforming legislation which have been introduced or are under way. Suffice it to say that the last and the present session of the Dáil and Seanad will, I believe, have seen the introduction of a greater volume of reforming legislation than in any other two sessions of the Oireachtas that I can recall.
There are two other areas of achievement that I must also refer to in this debate which relate to the question of confidence in the Government. The first of these concerns Northern Ireland.
The House will recall that, when this Government came into office at the end of 1982, relations between the Irish and British Governments were at their lowest ebb for very many years and the prospect of any progress being made with regard to Northern Ireland seemed to most people to be completely remote. During 1983 while the New Ireland Forum was meeting and drawing up its report we set out to restore a working relationship with the British Government upon which we could build in terms of negotiation of an agreement designed to alter fundamentally the position of Nationalists in Northern Ireland. We succeeded in this objective in November last year and I need not dwell here on the significance of the agreement that was then signed.
The only point I would like to make at this stage is that the perception of the working of the agreement promulgated by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition on television recently — that the only matters being dealt with in the Conference relate to security co-operation — was fundamentally and totally incorrect. The whole range of matters covered by the agreement is under discussion in the Conference and, while I would naturally like to have seen more rapid results in some areas, considerable progress has been made under various headings outlined in the agreement. These include improvements in the administration of justice and in the working of the security forces in Northern Ireland, in relation to discrimination, and in relation to areas which are of great importance to the Northern Nationalists such as the use of the Irish language and a review of measures such as the Flags and Emblems Act — measures that for them are crucial to acceptance of the legitimacy of their identity.
I regret that the agreement has recently been precipitated into the area of public controversy and for my part I accept the validity of Séamus Mallon's concern lest division among ourselves on these issues damage the prospect of peace and stability in Northern Ireland and the achievement of genuine equal treatment for the minority there. I do not, therefore, propose to refer in this debate to the issues recently raised by the Leader of the Opposition and hope that he will take the same account of concern expressed by Séamus Mallon on behalf of Northern Nationalists.
I want to turn now to the question of our participation in the European Community. Within the Community our period in Government has been a critical one for this country in more than one respect. In 1983 and 1984 we faced the extremely difficult negotiation over the milk super-levy, which ended with notable success when we achieved a right to an advantage of 23 per cent vis-à-vis our partners in terms of milk output — giving us the right to increase our output further beyond the increased level we had already achieved in 1983, at a time when our partners were being cut back almost to their 1981 output levels. This achievement was in line with the similar arrangement negotiated in October 1976 by the National Coalition Government that gave us the right to double our fish catch within three years and to continue increasing it thereafter at a time when other countries were being required to reduce their catches of fish.
The super-levy battle was, of course, only one episode in what has proved to be and continues to be a long drawn out battle to maintain the essentials of the Common Agricultural Policy in the face of the enormous financial problems created within the Community by the scale of surpluses of milk products, cereals and, for the moment at least, beef.
In all these discussions we have benefited as a Government from the close relationships we have built up over the years not only through our two parties' participation in the Socialist and Christian Democratic groups in the European Parliament, which between them represent a clear majority of members in that body, but also through the close and friendly bilateral relations we have established with the Heads and Foreign Ministers of other Governments of member states.
These contacts stood us in good stead at a time when the Single European Act was under negotiation. The House will recall the problems that were created in 1981 when the then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Brian Lenihan, conceded at a meeting in Venlo in the Netherlands the examination of matters relating to political co-operation on the basis of what was then described as the "Third Option" namely, the preparation of a new report which would change the nature and expand the scope of political co-operation — an error which was successfully retrieved by Senator Dooge at a subsequent meeting in London.
Building on this success, our Government were able to secure in the Single European Act a clear distinction between co-operation in relation to the political and economic aspects of security — which had always been a function of the system of political co-operation established by the then member states early in the seventies — and the defence area which, in accordance with Article 30(6)(c) of the Single European Act is clearly identified as being a matter to be dealt with in the framework of the Western European Union or the Atlantic Alliance. The problem posed by the position taken up by Fianna Fáil in Venlo in 1981 has thus been resolved in a manner that is satisfactory to Irish interests.
In a brief survey of this kind of the work of this Government it has been possible to refer only to some of the highlights of our activities in the framework of the European Community which, in the period ahead, will be opening up to us new possibilities in the internal market of the Community, of which I hope and believe Irish firms, both in the services and in the industrial sector, will take the fullest advantage.
I think the House will appreciate, in the light of the general review I have undertaken of the performance of this Government in the past four years, just why I believe that the Government are entitled to the confidence of this House and should be accorded the opportunity to conclude their work in the many different areas in which they are engaged in pursuing the national interest.
As I said at the outset, the contrast between the wide-ranging achievements of the Government in the face of extreme difficulties in the financial and economic area, as well as external pressures in relation to matters such as the Common Agricultural Policy, are in striking contrast to the almost total inertia of the Fianna Fáil Party in the Dáil during this period. It is clear that the Leader of the Opposition is a firm believer in the proposition that Opposition parties cannot win elections and that it should be left to Governments to lose them.
We do not, however, intend to oblige him in this respect and I believe that the tactic of lying low and saying nothing, while it may appear as if it serves some purpose during the mid-term period of a Government facing considerable financial and economic difficulties, will receive much less appreciation from the electorate when an election comes. Then Fianna Fáil will be expected both to demonstrate that they have been effective in the performance of their duties as the biggest Opposition party and to put forward clear and cogent alternatives to the policies being pursued by the Government.
I can assure this House that the Government will for their part make very clear just where they stand on the crucial issues facing us. We will not flinch from the measures that will have to be taken to ensure that our current deficit and borrowing remain within the limits we have felt it right to prescribe for ourselves and which, both externally and domestically, we will be expected to observe by those on whom we depend for our borrowing needs.
In this debate it will be for the Opposition to discharge the onus that public and media opinion will place on them to demonstrate the reasons for believing that they have the capacity to achieve more for the country than we have done, something they have totally failed to do hitherto, either in the Dáil or outside. All I can say at this stage is that on the basis of what has happened during the past four years they will in this respect be starting very far behind in the struggle for the public heart and mind. Their belief that power will be handed to them on a plate by the people, simply for the sake of a change, is fundamentally naive.
However, all that is for the future. Our job today and tomorrow is to satisfy the Dáil that our performance gives grounds for an expression of confidence in us that will enable us to continue our work in the months ahead. Much of that work is of vital importance to our country. We have to take the necessary measures to bring the current budget deficit and borrowing down to a level that will not impose an excessive strain on the capacity of our domestic financial markets, or the willingness of external lenders, to provide us with the resources required to supplement Government revenue from taxation and other sources.
We have to approve in this House the Single European Act, which is of such vital importance to the success of our membership of the Community, which, in 1985 contributed net £900 million in the form of transfers across the exchanges in this country — supporting Ireland's agricultural sector on a massive scale as well as providing a very large part of the resources needed for training and employment measures for our young people and for regional development. Approval of this Act will also clear the way for measures to establish fully an internal market by 1992, something that is of particular importance for this country in view of our dependence for our livelihood on exports of goods and services to the European Community.
We also have in our programme a whole range of measures which I have mentioned already dealing with the rights of children and other family matters, legislation in respect of which Fianna Fáil failed to take any initiative during their last two periods in office but to which we, and the people of this State, attach great importance.
There is also a whole series of other reforms to be carried through in areas in respect of which Fianna Fáil have demonstrated no commitment — for example, the new legislation in respect of building societies, in respect of which we look forward to hearing the Opposition's views, the Bill to establish on a permanent basis the National Board for Curriculum and Assessment, the measure to ensure against abuse of interception of postal packages and telecommunications, and many other measures which, if Fianna Fáil were in office, would be unlikely to see the light of day, but the enactment of which is greatly in the public interest.
It is for these reasons that I call on this House to confirm its confidence in this Government so that we may finish the job we set out to do when we took office almost four years ago, at one of the darkest moments in Irish political life.
