I welcome this opportunity to make a few comments on the budget. A budget which does not engender some emotion, be they conflicting emotions of anger or of jubilation, is fundamentally flawed. A budget which sets out to offer solutions to crisis economic situations must, and should, have blood on the shirt; this budget had nothing.
The country is teetering on the brink of total collapse with £3 billion lost in reserves. That has come about because of our costly brand of macho-patriotism in refusing not to devalue in time, our slow reflex action in anticipating the markets and countering the intense international pressure from our so-called partners in relation to scarce jobs and our shrinking job pool due to our inherently weak industrial and job situation. We are vulnerable because the headquarters of so many of our industries are based overseas and they go at the shortest possible notice. Our massive unemployment queues — means that we have the most educated dole queues in the world. The Government's response to those problems has been very poor and too little too late.
With 300,000 people unemployed, the Digital disaster last week, coupled with the closures in Carlow, the big fear is that this country is in free-fall and that recent economic disasters could very well be the tip of the iceberg. What was required, as Deputy Yates rightly said, was a dynamic, adventurous and imaginative budget to try to achieve the necessary economic lift. Instead of a dynamic, energising budget we have what resembles a flat pint of Guinness which was left lying overnight, it was dull, stale, tasteless and insipid. The public reaction, apart from the media reaction, tells the tale.
The budget achieved, almost the impossible, it pleased almost nobody. The only kudos I have seen were in last Sunday's newspapers from "Marietta". The full page advertisements read: "Marietta thanks Bertie". This was in response to the decision of the Minister for Finance, Deputy Ahern, to reduce value-added-tax on non-chocolate biscuits. I do not know what kind of paroxysms "Marietta" would have got into if the Minister for Finance had also reduced VAT on chocolate coated biscuits.
The Government, at the start of its term of office, has made a fatal error, it has failed to bite the bullet. Despite its insulation of a huge majority with 101 seats it has shirked the golden opportunity to be bold and radical. It has postponed any tough effective decisions and has gone for a bland exercise of simply treading water. The last thing this country needs in its current state of paralysis is a holding operation, like Mr. Micawber hanging around waiting for something to happen. For a Government that is fundamentally brittle and unstable, because of the inability of certain members of the junior partner to take the heat of the kitchen, the postponement of the difficult decisions at the start is fatal. When the general public were receptive and conditioned to tough decisions that was the time to have bitten the bullet. This is the rock on which this Government will perish.
The increase in value-added-tax on building materials is extremely damaging to a proven high density employer, a traditional area which has given long service in terms of employment. What we needed was a stimulus, not a deterrent, not further depressants or disincentives. While the additional 2,300 local authority housing starts are welcome they will only make a marginal difference. I never cease to wonder at the tunnel vision of people who dismiss and discard ideas and schemes because they look no further than the top line cost.
I distinctly recall that in the early eighties the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition introduced a very imaginative scheme, the house improvement grants scheme. They gave grants of up to £8,000 to refurbish, reconstruct and renovate dwellings. Thousands of tradesmen were lured out of the black economy in order to register for VAT and qualify for work under the scheme. The vast majority of them gave up the dole. Builders providers flourished and paid their various taxes. There was a buzz and an energy everywhere. Yet, on assuming office in 1987 one of the first actions of the Fianna Fáil Government was to scuttle the entire project because of the blinkered advice — in my opinion — of some economist who told that Government it was costing too much. I am convinced that if a cost/benefit analysis had been carried out on that scheme it would have shown that the benefits far out-weigh the costs and disadvantages, and that worthwhile decisions were taken resulting in net benefit to the economy.
Two weeks ago the Taoiseach told the House that we imported 181,000 tonnes of timber in the nine month period up to September 1992. What startled me was that we are now a substantial net exporter of timber. In that same period we exported 480,000 tonnes of timber, raw and unprocessed. That industry employed nobody other than the people who cut down the trees, drove the timber to the ports and loaded it on the ships. We are crying out for indigenous industry here. We have huge areas of land under afforestation with thousands of hectares coming on steam. We have a potential industry based on a growing and guaranteed supply of local resources, capable of providing up to 500 jobs at a minimum at the production level, yet we are not answering the market which this indigenous raw material can produce and fill by giving to the world market a very expensive much in demand oriental strandboard. At a minimum there are 500 jobs in wood pulp processing and timber processing staring us in the face and yet there is not a solitary mention of that either in the Programme for a Partnership Government or in the Budget Statement.
I am amused, and disappointed, at the token recognition in the speech of the Minister for Finance of the role of small businesses. The Minister was eloquent and, indeed, elegant in his choice of words. He told us:
I am conscious of the vital role played by small firms, especially those in the export sectors.
He went on to tell us:
If we are to make headway in employment we need more people in small enterprises.
Does the Minister not realise that the entire system conspires and militates against small enterprises and stuns and kills off small businesses? Does he not realise that every single day jobs are being lost, people are being thrown on the dole queue and generations of old retail businesses are being literally mowed down, going to the wall and being cannibalised by the spread of the monopoly chainstores throughout the country? I have no doubt that in another ten years the small and medium-sized retail outlets will have disappeared because of competition and monopolies and because competition and monopoly legislation is a joke.
I must say I resent the comments made in the Dáil last week by the Minister for Enterprise and Employment in reply to a question from me. He said that there was absolutely no evidence to support the view that supermarket chains were responsible for the largescale closure of small retail outlets. He went on to quote an authoritative newspaper article which suggested that the closures had occurred simply because these outlets were inefficient or had high borrowings. I would strongly contest this viewpoint. These businesses are not inefficient; they are thrifty, provident and run by prople who have been the backbone of Irish business life for decades. They are now being dumped unceremoniously overboard by a Government which has little sympathy for them, which will not lift a finger to help them and which refuses to invoke the protective legislation which exists. These businesses simply cannot compete with the large supermarket giants who believe they are entitled to demand and get a minimum of three months' credit, who can bulk buy huge quantities of materials, who can import huge quantities of cheap goods from Third World countries and who pay low wages to thousands of part-time staff. What I am saying is that unless somebody calls a halt pretty soon then the entire small business landscape of this country will be wiped clean overnight.
For a small country we are very pretentious and have an enormous capacity to think big and to accept other people's definitions of what they think would be good for us. We are witnessing the last generation of small farmers because milk quotas, cattle quotas and now sheep quotas make size the very determinant of survival. We are closing down small butcher shops and bakeries because EC directives have set down elaborate standards which I doubt very much are being enforced in other member states. The result is that a whole way of life is being done away with. We are proud to be Irish in Europe but when I see the huge bureaucracy we have established and employed in this country to police the dictates from Brussels, I honestly believe that at times we are slaves to European regulations.
We have to invest in education. I further believe we have to face the fact that we are creating an under-class. Irish society is growing more polarised between the haves and have nots, between the rich and the poor. There is a large and growing group who are not merely less well off but who feel alienated from society, owing nothing to society, not taxes, civil obedience or a sense of community. At the other end of the scale we have to acknowledge that those who are fortunate enough to get to college and are able to get employment in Europe and in English speaking countries are well capable of holding their own. However, the tragedy is that we are the subject of the old law, that the poorer countries of the world must subsidise the rich with their most precious possessions — their fully grown, highly educated and most gifted children. The sad reality is that the bright, energetic and most highly qualified are usually the very people who will be first at Dublin and Shannon for the plane to the United Kingdom, the United States or Australia.
The Minister for Education was characterised in a newspaper article last Tuesday as lacking in what George Bush once called "this vision thing". Perhaps it is true, perhaps it is untrue, perhaps it is not fair — it is too early to judge. I honestly think that in the short term many of the people involved in education would trade the division for a little more precision. Quite honestly, I do not know why the Minister for Finance bothered to insert anything about education in his budget speech. I cannot understand why the Minister for Education decided to call a press conference on the evening of the budget to explain the section on education. Tonight the Minister spoke about major reform. All I know is that there were only five and a half lines in the section dealing with education. What the Minister did was draw attention to the pitiful additional allocation for education. Listening to the Minister for Finance one was left with the distinct impression on the night of the budget that there was cause for jubilation, that the Government was providing an additional £3.3 million to what was mentioned in the Estimates which were published the previous weeks. However, when one examines the figures one finds that this sum is not additional at all; it is the same money merely recycled.
Let us look at what it is supposed to do. It is supposed to provide 900 extra VTOS places and set up a fund for career guidance counselling at second level. Like the Minister for Education, I welcome the 900 VTOS places. This will help many people who missed the boat on the first occasion; it will provide second chance education, but God help the people who will be waiting for the residue in terms of career guidance counselling. Tonight we know the full facts. The figure involved, the residue, will be £200,000. According to the Minister, the money will be for materials. I wish to say to the Minister that we have enough materials. What we want at this stage is not materials, rather we want personnel, hands on involvement, advice on a person to person, eyeball to eyeball, pupil to teacher basis in the classhall. There is no money for that. It is a scandal that not a single child in any school with less than 350 pupils in any part of this country has access to career guidance counselling at a time when he or she is making lifelong career choice decisions.
In the wake of the OECD report, which showed that Irish education is operating on a shoe string, particularly in the context of the quality of school buildings, I think the Minister would have to concede that it is most disappointing that the very most she could wring out of the Minister for Finance, over and above the figure for last year for primary school buildings, was £1.8 million. The sum of £1.8 million would not build a decent primary school for 400-500 students, let alone put roofs on substandard buildings or provide toilets for some of the stone age classhalls and schools throughout the length and breadth of the country. This is not acceptable. I honestly hoped when the Labour Party put down its marker on assuming office that it wanted the Education portfolio, that this would be a signal that that party was going to make its presence felt. I further hoped that after all its public posturing about supporting all things public, Labour would avail of the opportunity in the first budget introduced by the new Government to make a clear statement of a return to the principle of free education at both primary and secondary levels. The Minister must be aware that free education is now a myth, it is a thing of the past. Deputy Shortall stated that the capitation scheme works well. I think the capitation scheme is appalling. It is only £28 per student, and it has been like that for years.
