I may be permitted to say very briefly a few words, before being strictly relevant to the matter now before the House. It is simply to say that it has been the greatest honour that has been done to me to have been elected to a House of the Irish Parliament, and I am sure that in expressing this sentiment I am feeling something that is shared by all those here today for the first time. We come to this House along very different routes.
Some come through nomination: they are the wise virgins who have kept their lamps well trimmed and have known the shrines before which to place these lamps; others are the merely distinguished, those who have been selected by the two universities, who have been intelligent in the selection of their parents and who owe, through accident of birth, the good fortune of having the great qualities that bring them here today. I came here as one of the rest of the Senators along the most arduous route, where the performances of one's parents, particularly perhaps one's grandparents, and the geographical distribution of their various descendants, were very important, but we are really the heroes of this Assembly because I suppose the Cuchulainn effort was merely a dryrun for the Panel election system.
The Restrictive Trade Practices (Confirmation of Order) Bill, 1968, which comes today for consideration by the Seanad, is designed to deal with practices that are objectionable in my view from a number of viewpoints. They are designed to prevent unfair trading, to stop men being deprived of the opportunity of employing their initiative and talent in the places where they wish to employ that initiative and direct that talent; they limit the scope of competition by their operation; they raise prices and costs. They are, in fact, for those who wish to defend, preserve and develop the existing system, one of the greatest obstacles to its preservation and development. Those practices are operated by the possessors of wealth, power and influence in order to exact a toll on the general community.
I see the objection to them under two headings. First is the objection in terms of economic cost. To an extent that has unfortunately not been measured in the report made by the Fair Trade Commission to the Minister, there have been no attempts to employ modern techniques and to establish the extent to which they add to costs. I think it may perhaps be an unfortunate consequence of the development of macro-economics, the thinking about economic aggregates in the last 15 or 20 years, that the eyes of the people guiding this community in Government and in Opposition may have been taken away from consideration of equally important matters, such as we are considering here today.
The effect of any of these practices, if it be unfairly to raise prices, is seriously to damage the economy because it transfers resources from people of enterprise who with these resources could make them fructify for the benefit of the community. I take the approach of every Member of the Seanad to be that of concern for the welfare of the community and with no particular interest in any association with which he might have a connection.
In addition to the economic objection to unfair trading, there is the more grave objection of the injustice done, the immeasurable injustice, when people are forced to pay more than they ought to those who have contrived by association with others to exact tolls from the community. A very great thinker in the history of this field, some would say the father of economic thought, Adam Smith, said that no group of people engaged in trade meet together even for merriment and diversion but they are not engaged in some kind of conspiracy against the public interest and are likely to happen on some means of enhancing prices at the expense of the public interest, of the common good, the common good that pays the price where the common good is not served for the weakest members of the community. Funds are not available to help those who need that help, the rate of growth is not achieved by the power the community would otherwise achieve were it not for this injustice and unfair enrichment.
This is probably the shared view of this Assembly. I may discover otherwise in the course of the debate but I understand from the Minister that this is his view and that this thinking lay behind the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1953. While remaining strictly relevant, I may be permitted to criticise some of the terms of the report and one aspect of the Order and also have a look at the procedure which lay behind the Bill which is now before us. If injustice has been done and is being done, I think this point should be made and I should like to make it with the Minister here. It is not yet law.
These injustices are identified with those in the 1967 report. They were reported on 16th November, 1967. Strangely, the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1953, requires the Minister if he is not going to adopt the report, to make an Order to this effect within three months of his not adopting it— the three months period, by virtue of an amendment of the 1959 Act, only being counted if three days meeting of Dáil and Seanad take place in each month. I do not understand why the legislature decided the Minister needed more time to adopt the Order than he needed to reject it, but he was given more time and he certainly took it. He did not make the Order until 10th April, 1968, and the Second Reading and other Stages of the Bill were not taken until 16th April, 1969.
Now, on 5th November, 1969, we are considering the Bill in the Seanad. Two years have passed. What degree of injustice has been done by that failure to cope with a failure discerned two years ago? What has been the cost to the community? I do not claim competence in this field, but we have an estimate in the report of the retail of the goods affected by this Order; £3 million approximately was the retail value of goods affected in 1965.
We are so used to hundreds of millions of pounds that we forget the importance of millions or of hundreds of thousands.
The years 1966, 1967, 1968 and 1969 have all passed and there has been a growth in productivity in those years and in the values developed. There has been an affluent society which has enabled people to go further in buying jewellery and watches, and we may presume that the values of the articles that have passed undetected and uncontrolled are considerably in excess of £6 million. I wonder as a result of this how much productive resources has gone into mortmain, has gone into the hands and pockets of people to whom it should not have gone as a result of this failure by the Government and the Minister who is charged with this matter to deal with it.
I do not go so far as perhaps some might to adopt the words of Proudhon, that property is theft, but property resulting from the practice of injustice is theft, and if the findings of this report are to be accepted by the two Houses of Parliament — they have been accepted already by Dáil Éireann — a good deal of thievery has been done and injustice permitted. This is the type of thing to which insufficient attention has been given and the importance of it has been insufficiently measured but it is the sort of thing which should not have happened.
May I ask you to look at what the Minister said in Dáil Éireann as reported in volume 239, column 1620?
As regards retail prices, I am satisfied that the terms of the Order and in particular the provisions of Article 7, will be sufficient to ensure a fair and competitive retail price mechanism.
This is a statement by the Minister. He has said it. It is an ipse dixit. But he does not give any reasons for his satisfaction. I think he might be invited to do so this day or in the course of this debate, because the report which has impressed him so much that he has adopted every single recommendation, states in paragraph 45:
There is evidence that the present system of recommended or suggested retail prices for watches and clocks has an influence on retail prices. One consequence is that price competition between retail jewellers is lessened.
This is a finding based on evidence before the Commission. Paragraph 49 states:
The practices on the part of manufacturers and wholesalers of recommending or suggesting retail prices for watches and clocks should cease.
This practice as a result of this Order will not cease if this Order be enacted, and if we accept the proposition which has been reiterated for 16 years, a proposition on which I have considerable personal doubt because of its very significant implication, the proposition that this kind of order which it is proposed to confirm may not be amended by the Oireachtas but may be accepted or rejected as it stands. If this is the position then if this Seanad passes this Order a recommendation without any evidence which should not be accepted cannot be rejected. I find it difficult — I am not going to press this point any more than to mention it — to understand how to reconcile repeated statements that there is no power to amend an Order with Article 20 of the Constitution:
Every Bill initiated in and passed by Dáil Éireann shall be sent to Seanad Éireann and may unless it be a Money Bill be amended by Seanad Éireann and Dáil Éireann shall consider any such amendment.
I invite the Minister to tell us how we can operate in this House the power of amendment given to us under Article 20, sub-Article (1) if we are not permitted to amend but must accept or reject the Order which is offered to us.
Article 7 which the Minister relies on as being sufficient to prevent price rises only prohibits the supplier from withholding goods because of the prices offered by the retailer. I have reservations about that. This prohibition is the only sanction against price rises, but in practice there are other kinds of pressure, moral and otherwise. There can be all sorts of pressures brought to bear on people to keep their prices in line with others.
I share with the Minister some of the obvious prejudice which he has against trade associations, but I must refer to the failure of the Minister to make an Order which adopts the clear recommendation based on evidence of the Commission—in fact I think that this Commission has insufficiently distinguished between trinkets, jewellery and watches. There is, it seems to me, a very great distinction between precious stones put together in a particular way to look gorgeous on your neck or wherever else you would like to wear them and the watches and clocks which are instruments of marvellous precision, wonderful achievements of the human race, matters of the most delicate and sophisticated refinement designed to attune to the movements of the human body.
There is a strong case for treating watches and clocks, the most sophisticated ones which really are valuable, differently from ordinary jewellery. It is not, I think, wrong to say that over the years our workshops have been obsolete, and I would like to pay tribute to the Minister and his Department for participating in a measure which has done or is attempting to do something to improve that, namely the establishment of the Irish-Swiss Institute of Horology. It is very important for this country that we should develop particular skills in all the different fields where we can, particularly when we think that with regard to watches and clocks it has been estimated that in the value of a watch or a clock 95 per cent is of labour, and that could be 95 per cent of Irish labour.
I agree with the Commission that it is not a matter for a trade association to determine whether people have a workshop which is adequate to supply the service, after-service and care that these sophisticated human achievements should receive, but there is a strong case—and I would invite the Minister to consider this—for his Department to make appropriate Orders with regard to the qualifications that workshops attain and the obligations of repair and after-service that should be imposed not by authority of a trade association but by the Minister concerned with the community.
With regard to the report, I find in it a disappointing lack of evidence of the development of any body of expertise. I mentioned the lack of the application of modern techniques with regard to the establishment of costs. It is very interesting to reflects, and it cannot be irrelevant to this debate, that this Order relates to a process which began 16 years ago under the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1953.
I do not claim to have given a wholly exhaustive consideration to this matter, but I think that in the 16 years as far as I can see we are now dealing with the tenth Bill, and in the course of the debate introducing the Bill which was enacted in 1953 the then Minister for Industry and Commerce, retired now to other fields, listed a considerable number of commodities which have not been the subject of any orders, and I think that the time may well have arrived for the community to consider whether there is not in fact an immediate necessity to deal with this type of injustice, this type of economic ill-health.
The current cost of the Fair Trade Commission is £30,000 per annum. That is a fair bit of money. Based on current prices—I have not and do not purport to offer the total cost of the Fair Trade Commission to the community, to the taxpayer—that is, over 16 years, nearly £500,000. That would erect a few hundred houses for people who need them. Are we getting value for money? There is provision in the Act for prosecutions. Have there been many prosecutions? I feel the Seanad would be interested to hear whether there have been many prosecutions.
This Commission are obliged by section 10 to consider, to keep under review, the operation of Orders made under the section which we are here proposing to operate by this Bill. Have the Commision considered the operation of those orders? Have the Commission reported to the Minister? Is the Minister prepared to tell the House whether those Orders, which have been made with regard to those various matters, have, in fact, been working well and are adequate?
