I regret very much that I find myself in disagreement with the general approval which, I admit, seems to have greeted this Bill.
I must also admit it is largely beyond my comprehension that there has not been closer scrutiny of the principles underlying the Bill and of the consequences to which Bills of this nature may lead in the future. The Minister made a very able and lucid speech here last night. It was a minor edition of a more able and more lucid speech which he made in the Dáil some weeks ago. In both those speeches I detect —and I think others have detected—a suggestion that even the Minister himself in his heart of hearts is not so wildly enthusiastic about the principle of this Bill as seems to be assumed. He realises that it will cost a good deal of money and that in extending help—to my mind, in a very undesirable way—to one section of the community, it will press extremely hard on other sections.
So far, neither the Minister nor anyone else has produced the slightest evidence of any general demand for this Bill. I have seen nowhere, except in the reports of speeches in the Dáil, any indication whatever that the people as a whole want this Bill or approve of it or are in the slightest degree enthusiastic about it. Far from such being the case, the reaction of the general bulk of the people is that they really do not care about it and do not particularly want it. Only a small handful of citizens expect to get any real benefit from it, and the majority of the people look upon this Bill as the result of a competition between politicians for popular favour. That competition began as a challenge from one politician to another, the challenge was taken up, and once taken up, there was no escape from the consequences. All Parties seem to rush in to welcome the principles of this Bill in what is, to my mind, an atmosphere of pseudo-enthusiasm.
Another defect I have noticed in the whole discussion of this subject is that it is generally assumed that the Bill meets a great need, that we have before us a clear and definite case, with figures and arguments, to prove that there is great hardship in the country among large sections of our people, arising from the existence amongst us of large families. Well, as Senator Mulcahy pointed out last night, one of the most extraordinary features of the whole discussion of this Bill is the total absence of any statistical basis for it— any figures which would show where the hardship exists, what form the hardship takes, and what would be the general effects of the carrying into operation of the proposed measure. I certainly have seen no indication, beyond the most general statements by the Minister himself, as to what effect this Bill is going to have on the problem of poverty in the country. We all admit that there is a problem of poverty, that there is a large section of the community which is very poor and for which something ought to be done to alleviate its poverty; but, personally, I for one believe that when this Bill has been in operation for 20 years the same problem of poverty will still exist and that, instead of having done anything to alleviate that problem, this measure and similar measures of the kind will have done a great deal to make it worse than it is at the present moment. The whole question is being approached, to my mind, in a very casual way, on the basis of a series of more or less sentimental generalities for which no proof is offered. There has been no attempt to base the discussion on any reasoned arguments whatever.
Another assumption that seems to be tacitly made on all sides is that the principle of the Bill is in line with the social teaching of the Catholic Church: that, in fact, it is called for by that social teaching. On the face of it, that is a very strong argument for such a Bill as this, and it was rather astonishing to me, for one, when I looked into the matter in detail, to find that instead of this Bill, or any Bill based on the principle enshrined in this measure, being in line with Caholic teaching, it goes entirely contrary to Catholic teaching on matters of social policy. I think that that is a point of view from which we ought all to approach this matter, and I would appeal to Senators to read some of the books that have been published dealing with Catholic social principles. I think that if any Senator were to read one of these books he would be astonished to find that the best that these writers can say with regard to such measures is that they are merely a temporary palliative and nothing more: that they do nothing more to grapple with the real social evil that is there all the time, the real evil of unmerited poverty, caused by the maladjustment or defective operation of the social and industrial system. It is widely admitted, and has been stated by all responsible sociologists, that the palliative they provide, involving, as it does, a very great extension of the domain of the State over the domain of the family, is in itself an evil which, if it goes on, will ultimately turn the whole community into a chaotic mass of individuals entirely dependent on the State.
We heard Senator Mulcahy yesterday evening quoting that famous document, the Dáil Democratic Programme of 1918. I had thought that the recent revelations of the Minister for Finance had gone a long way towards killing the value of that document, but apparently they have done nothing to shake its authority in the eyes of Senator Mulcahy. What struck me, however, as I listened to the Senator, was that he seemed to be entirely oblivious to the direction in which his whole series of suggestions are leading. Unquestionably, if we think the matter over, all this doctrine— that it is the State's duty to look after everybody, to interfere between the producer and his work, between the employer and his employee, between the parent and his child, and to ensure to everybody a happy home and a contented mind—all this business of the universal power of the State has, as its essential corollary, the universal submission of the individual to the State, the universal control of every action of the individual and, ultimately, as far as possible, of every thought of the individual, by the State. Now, that may sound extravagant, but the series of suggestions put forward here yesterday evening by Senator Mulcahy were surely extravagant enough to warrant the drawing of that conclusion from them. We are asked to contemplate a future for this country in which our whole community will be turned into paupers, and everybody will look to the State to protect him against everything.
We have the war declarations of President Roosevelt, the Atlantic Charter, and other such illusory documents quoted to us as if they meant anything, in fact, in the circumstances of a country situated as we are at the moment, or as if they are going to mean very much anywhere by the time this war is over. The Senator's argument was that, seeing that President Roosevelt can talk as he can, in the middle of a war situation, a war in which his own country is involved, we ought to be able to do more since we are not involved in the war. The Senator left out the fact that President Roosevelt has to deal with problems in his own country which necessitate that kind of talk, and that, when the war is over, and when the opportunity arises to deal with these problems, the same difficulties and the same consequences will have to be faced in America, in England, on the Continent of Europe, and everywhere else. They will have to meet the same disabilities everywhere, and again it will be a question of allowing personal and individual liberty and freedom for human activity or of turning the whole community into slaves of the State, without any right being given to the individual to dispose of his property or anything else that belongs to him, without any right in the individual so far as the education of his children is concerned, or even so far as the findings of his own conscience are concerned. All these things will have to go by the board if we are to go on with this apocalyptic vision.
Listening to the Senator, I was reminded of a Greek poem in which there is a description of a banquet, and we are told in the poem that those who took part in the banquet were "floating on a sea of lies towards the shore of illusion." Having regard to the rosy future that has been painted here as being likely to be brought about by State action, I cannot help thinking of that poem. I cannot help thinking that we also are in the position of those Greek banqueters—floating on a sea of falsehood towards a shore of illusion which, if we reach it, will be very much less pleasant than we imagine it is going to be.
The Catholic social doctrine on these questions, surely, is that the ideal is a system under which every worker will get a living wage, a wage on which he can support himself and his family in reasonable comfort; and anything short of that is a departure from the Catholic and the Christian social ideal. The true policy in any State is to bring about the ideal, or get as near it as possible, to have such a social system and such a system of taxation, such an organisation of industry and agriculture, that the ideal state of affairs will be arrived at as nearly as possible. If that state of affairs, for any reason, cannot easily be arrived at, then it is admitted that some form of family allowances is very useful as a palliative, as a means of tiding over the period until the best form of society can be brought about.
There are a great many other measures that this State could take in order to bring about a position more closely approaching the Christian ideal than what we have. I suggest we would be far better employed in trying to study what that Christian ideal is and trying to apply it to our own circumstances than in following up this sort of illusory scheme and imagining that, by carrying out any scheme of this kind, we are going to do any real, permanent good. The trouble about all these attempts is that they do not take enough account of the teachings of history. What you are engaged on is trying to cure an evil which has taken several hundred years to develop, a very far-reaching and deep-seated evil. You cannot cure historical evils by vague and airy generalisations, or by State schemes which are founded on the twin pillars of sentimentality and administrative convenience. These evils are not so easily cured as that.
The thing goes further and is far deeper, and there is very little use in our looking across the Irish Sea or towards any of the modern industrial countries for guidance on questions of this kind, because the industrial countries, and particularly England, are themselves the centres from which all these social evils have ultimately sprung. It is the long-continued social and economic revolution that has been going on in England since the end of the 17th century, and in which we are still living, that has led to most of these evils of poverty and mal-distribution of wealth, concentrated the whole wealth of the community in a small number of hands and produced the huge industrial cities, or cities affected as Dublin is by belonging to the industrial environment, with their enormous, helpless populations. It is a long series of historical circumstances that has produced these things and there is no use in our thinking that we can cure such evils as those by simply applying to them some of the agencies that have brought them about.
It has become the fashion in the last 40 or 50 years everywhere to imagine that the State was a kind of universal fairy godmother. For a couple of hundred years before that it was the fashion to deny any economic function at all to the State. All through the early phases of the industrial revolution the State practically abdicated all its functions and refused to recognise that it had any duty to see that justice was done between one man and another or between one class and another. Towards the end of the 19th century, when things were in a bad mess, and when an immense amount of injury and hardship had been inflicted on the unfortunate people, it was recognised that the State had a function and the pendulum swung the other way. Now we are in the full flow of a tendency to make the State responsible for everything, and if the family is in danger, or if there is anything the matter with education or with the way people work or think, we are very easily led to imagine that the State can remedy those defects. I suggest it is worth considering that the State and State machinery are very unsuitable means for remedying any of these defects, even though it is true these defects were mainly caused by inaction on the part of the State for a long time. Over-reliance on the power of the State will not merely fail to cure those evils, but will cause a great many other evils as well.
The two features in this scheme that Senator Mulcahy welcomed were its non-contributory and its universal character. Like Senator Counihan, these are the two features in the scheme to which I take the strongest objection. The non-contributory part of it is not nearly so important as its universality, although it would surely be possible to arrive at some scheme for giving help to the family which might involve not merely contributions from the State and the individual parent, but also contributions from the employer. It would be only just that if the State—that is to say, the community at large—is to be called upon to make up the defects of the wage system, employers as such, the people who have got the greatest benefit from the wage system, should be called upon to make a special contribution for that purpose. It should not be all left to the State. Those who direct and draw profits from the industrial system should be called upon not merely as citizens or taxpayers, but in their capacity as employers, to devise schemes of that kind, and to make contributions to them in order that the social balance, which has been upset by the industrial system, might be redressed.
If there is to be a system of family allowances, I suggest it should not be regarded as a cure or as a permanent part of our social system but as a temporary palliative, a temporary means to redress evils which can only be finally cured by much more drastic treatment. If family allowances are to become part of our social services for a time, they ought to take a form in which there will be contributions to them not merely from the State but from their beneficiaries and from the employers.
The whole idea that people should draw benefits from the State for nothing seems to me to be an entirely vicious idea. In the old days, 40 or 50 years ago, such schemes were unknown. I heard a lot in this debate about large families and about parents struggling to bring up large families in poor circumstances. Senator Mulcahy talked about the hardship involved, the very severe hardship, in large families, when the children grow up. There is no Senator here who cannot well remember the time when there was no help at all from the State for families, large or small; no old age pensions or social services of any kind. It is, of course, admitted that things were very bad then, and they were particularly bad among the working classes of the towns. I was brought up on ten acres of land in a country district when there were no old age pensions, no contributions of any kind whatever from the State coming into the house. There was no help from America or anywhere else. Our family of six was brought up on a small holding in the West of Ireland, largely under the Balfour régime, when things were supposed to be very bad. But we were well brought up and we did not suffer any great hardships. I often think my own children have not as pleasant or happy a childhood as I had in those circumstances.
I cannot help wondering, when I hear all this talk about hardships and poverty, whether a lot of the people who indulge in such talk have any real knowledge themselves of what poverty means. A great many contributions of this sort come from people who have never known what it is to be poor, and who are inclined to look upon everybody that does not live in the way they live as having no life at all. A great deal of this talk, if not most of it, comes from well-to-do people in the cities who have woken up in their middle age to realise that there is a social problem and think that this social problem is that everyone is not as well off as they are. It was possible in those days, when things were a good deal harder for the small farmer than they are at present, and certainly than they have been many times since, to live without old age pensions and such helps. I well remember the period when old age pensions were first introduced. Those independent small farmers in the part of Galway from which I come, looked upon old age pensions with as much aversion as they looked upon the workhouse. Indeed they had that feeling for ten or 15 years afterwards until the war, and the demoralisation which it brought, supervened. You often met cases then where people were entitled to the full old age pension and did not want to draw it.
