May I at the outset and on the occasion of my first appearance in the Seanad since you have been elected to the Chair offer you, Sir, my congratulations on your elevation to this office of great importance and responsibility. It is still for me personally a pleasure, and indeed very instructive, to go back over the records of this House and read the contributions which were made by your illustrious father. That you will now be carrying on a family tradition of service to the Seanad as its Cathaoirleach is something in which I think all of us take a great pride.
In mentioning your father may I hope that in regard to your occupancy of the Chair you shall have some peace there. I hope that there will not be many occasions for you to observe that midnight's all a glimmer whatever about noon occasionally being a purple glow. Finally may I express the hope that during your time here in the Seanad the Seanad will be a place where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
There was some talk here about productivity in the House. I feel that many of those who spoke about productivity proceeded with subsequent behaviour in a manner which could hardly have been described as productive. I, as a Minister coming here to the Seanad, would greatly welcome productive and constructive debate, because I think that the Seanad can make a very useful contribution to the issues of the day, and I feel that in the membership of the Seanad we have people who are capable of being of considerable assistance to the Government in grappling with the issues and problems which confront it.
I would not think, however, that on this particular occasion the Seanad has fully availed itself of the opportunity presented to it by the debate on the Appropriation Bill and I think that perhaps the speeches have covered far too wide a field. Certainly, for my part, I have been bemused by so many different subjects and topics that whatever few coherent thoughts I began with when I came in here have more or less evaporated by now. I regret that a number of Senators could not apparently resist the opportunity to engage in party politics and personal attack. I have become increasingly intrigued in recent years to observe how the academics who come among us here in the Seanad seem to concentrate mainly on this personality type of political debate. One would imagine that if we are to get impartial and objective discussion and examination of issues in a broad way that we would get it from the academics. Unfortunately, that is just not so. It would be interesting to probe the reason why this should be, it may be something inherent in their way of life. However, it is something which the rest of us continually observe with interest.
I want to assure the House that a great deal of the matters which have been raised here are being actively considered by the Government. In regard to some of them, decisions have already been taken although they may not have been announced so that if I do not deal with a particular topic or aspect I hope the Senator who raised it will accept that I am not ignoring it. There are other matters which are the particular responsibility of particular Ministers and because of their fundamental importance in the policy of the particular Minister it is not really proper that I should make more than a passing reference to them because I would only, at the best, be dealing at second hand with something that is of very considerable importance.
One of the points that was raised early in the debate was the question of giving more State aid for bodies which are assisting our emigrants in Britain. The Government, as the House knows, have provided a sum of £10,000 to the Department of Labour to assist the voluntary organisations which are working in this field. The Minister for Labour has set up a fairly widely representative committee to advise him on how this money and any further moneys which would be made available for his purpose should be disposed if. This committee will help the National Manpower Service here also in its work and I feel that there is a great deal that can be done immediately in getting our people back from Britain to this country. There are many areas of this country where there is a shortage of labour generally or a small shortage of a particular type of labour. I know that the Department of Labour propose to enter into this field of advising our people in Britain who have particular skills of opportunities which are available to them here and we hope that as time goes on there will be perhaps a continuing flow of migration back to this country.
Somebody mentioned legal aid. I should like to deal with this because I was the Minister for Justice who introduced legal aid. At present of course it is only available in criminal cases and I have no recent information as to how it is working out in that area as a scheme. The question of extending it to civil cases will be a major one. It would, I believe — apart from any question of principle as to whether it would be a good thing or not or whether it would encourage vexatious litigation — be quite costly and perhaps the Department of Justice have other priorities though I would feel that the ultimate objective must be an extension of free legal aid in a limited, sensible and rational way into the civil field.
A number of Senators spoke about the situation of widows and asked some particular questions about the present position. In so far as civil servants who became members of the new scheme for widows in the public service are concerned the grants are being made in the normal way as the claims arise. With regard to the ex gratia scheme which applies to the widows of civil servants whose husbands were never in a position to qualify for the new scheme the position is that we have decided to make these ex gratia payments available or to give effect to that as from 1st October, 1969. We are working diligently on getting these payments made and I am sure Senators will appreciate that this is a fairly difficult task. Many of these people died many, many years ago and it is difficult to trace them and to verify them. It may be some time before every case is cleared up but we are doing everything we can to get it into full operation as quickly as possible. Indeed if any Senator is aware of a particular case I would welcome information from him about it and help to get it cleared up.
Somebody asked about the extension of this scheme to the widows of teachers. This has, in fact, already been done. A separate scheme, but similar, has been arranged for national and secondary teachers. Vocational teachers are, of course, included in the general scheme for local authority officers which was authorised by the Minister for Local Government last month.
There has been a considerable amount of discussion here during the last few days on education. Education is such a specialised field that I am sure the Seanad would not expect me to do much more than co-relate all the various points of view that have been brought forward and transmit them to my colleague, the Minister for Education, for his consideration.
Perhaps I might mention one particular matter that has been raised, that is the merger. I could say a great deal on this subject but I want to point out that it is a pretty fundamental part of educational policy and therefore better dealt with on some suitable occasion by the Minister for Education himself. I do want to endorse very much what Senator Farrell said at an early stage. I thought it was a very commonsense comment though Senator Sheehy Skeffington sought to confuse the issue later. Senator Farrell said that what the ordinary person really wanted was to get value for money in our university education system. I submit that is the primary community requirement.
Every Senator in this House knows that the expanding demands which are being made on our resources throughout the whole spectrum of Government activity will take us all our time to meet. Having to set aside every year increasing resources in practically every direction that Senators consider desirable — health, education, hospitals, schools, industrial development, agriculture and so on — the total of our annual capital programme now is quite intimidating and it is making very considerable inroads on our resources to keep financing that capital programme. In that situation we cannot afford any wasteful allocation of our resources. We must make sure that we get the best possible value for the capital we are prepared to invest in our development. To my mind that is at the nub of the development of university education. We are not wealthy enough to afford the unnecessary duplication of facilities and that must be the paramount question we keep before our minds when looking at the problem of development of our universities and the question of the merger.
Quite frankly, I was a little disappointed to see the reaction of a very considerable number of people in our academic life to the question of the merger. There are many in this community who believe that the Irish universities have not made the contributions they should have to the building up of our nation, who believe that when we were endeavouring to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps the universities did not play the part we might have expected of them.
The bringing forward of this great new concept will provide the Irish universities with an opportunity once and for all to dispel that feeling, if there is any validity in it. I would have expected them to approach the problem in a forward-looking way, with magnanimity and generosity, but I fear that the ordinary man-in-the-street thinks he has been let down by the academics in this matter. Instead of the sort of approach he was entitled to expect, there seemed to be a rush to man the particular academic barricades and in many directions there seemed to be a desire to defend a particular piece of academic real estate, status and prestige in different sections. I may be wrong about this but it is a view I hold, which I hope events may prove wrong. Perhaps I could not have got a better illustration of what I think about this than the fact that Senator Sheehy Skeffington in this House was prepared to offer us, as an example of something tremendous, the two particular faculties that had been swapping extern examiners for a number of years.
I listened to Senator Dunne with interest and respect. He mentioned his personal dilemma; I want to assure him, if it is any help to him, that in my eyes he will always be a sturdy and courageous trade union leader rather than a mere member of the Labour Party. Any time I sat around a table with him I never had any difficulty in finding a great deal of common ground but I would have hoped for perhaps a different emphasis in his approach on this occasion. It is not very realistic for us in this House to talk in terms of trade unions defending themselves and of attacks on the trade unions, I do not think that is a matter of realistic politics today. Most of us know that over large areas unions or individual groups decide the level of their own remuneration. I should have preferred, perhaps optimistically, if we spoke today about the lower-paid worker and the weaker sections of the community, as it is with this area we must concern ourselves more in the future. I want to make this point as firmly as I can — every time a strong, well-organised group of workers or trade unionists demands and gets an increase in income which is totally out of line with national production then it is the poorer section that slips down the line with less prospect of ever getting its rightful place in the sun.
I had really hoped that this year we would have been able to achieve something significant in this respect. We began the early part of the year with discussions which centred very much on the problem of the lower-paid workers and the weaker sections of the community. We spoke, in fact, of making 1969 the year of the lower-paid worker. In finalising the public service agreement and, indeed, the budget, the strategy of which was closely related to that public service pay agreement, we set a very useful headline. I am afraid that the effort has petered out and I would not be surprised if the statisticians were able to tell us at the end of 1969 that the lower-paid worker is relatively worse off than he was at the start. I am not sure of this but I am very much afraid this is the case. I would suggest to Senator Dunne and his colleagues in Congress, who I know are concerned about this problem, that there is, perhaps, scope for further consideration and co-operation between Congress and the Government on this issue and that what we failed to do in 1969 we might be able to do in 1970, or at least to make a significant contribution towards a real improvement in the conditions of the lower-paid workers. I want, through Senator Dunne, to assure Congress that the Government stand ready to enter into constructive and meaningful discussions on this subject.
Reference was made to the status of women in Irish life and I wish to assure the Senators who spoke on this that there is no need to harry the Government on this issue. In recent years the Government has been directing increasing attention to this aspect of our community life and I think I can fairly claim we have been approaching it in a humanitarian and sympathetic way. I believe we are about to take a really historic step forward in the establishment of this commission, which will go into the question in a fundamental way.
I was a little disappointed by the Senator who spoke about the commission being discredited. It has not yet been established; its terms of reference have not been set; the personnel who will act on it have not been decided and I really think that a comment of this sort is, to say the least, premature. Reference was made to a reply I gave in the Dáil in this matter. That reply was very carefully framed; I indicated quite clearly that, while equal pay for equal work was no doubt a matter the commission would have to deal with, the establishment of the commission in no way prevented a continuation of the principle of public service negotiations which we inaugurated last year whereby no differentiation was made in the increases granted.
I think this commission will be vital for the future of Irishwomen and I hope it may be given every chance to work and that no attempt will be made to cut the ground from under its feet before it starts. Of course it will have to concern itself with the question of equal pay but it will also have to concern itself with other matters and there will be many women who will regard other things as being of much greater importance than equal pay because there are a great number of women to whom equal pay does not matter. Let us not have any confusion of issues at this stage.
With regard to getting this commission set up we should all try to make sure that it is successful and that as a result of its efforts a significant contribution will be made not just to the status of women in society but to the betterment of Irish society as a whole. Nobody should be under any illusions about equal pay or should try to be glib about it. It is a major issue and of very considerable economic significance. Nobody in the Government is in any way opposed to equal pay in principle. It is simply a question of practicality.
Allied, perhaps, to the question of the status of women in our society is the question of old people which was raised by Senator Gallanagh and others. We have been making progress in this field and in my own constituency I see many encouraging things happening. For instance, I see quite a number of very pleasant little community centres where old people can live not only in great comfort but in great dignity. I am aware that there is a great deal of splendid voluntary effort by way of Meals on Wheels and so on and there are a lot of dedicated volunteers working in this field.
I am sure the Senators will also admit that we in the various Departments of Government have been generally developing a human and humanitarian philosophy in our approach to this aspect of our community life. I said recently that I think it is possible for a small nation to be great in the way that it provides solutions for its community problems. The value or standing of a nation should not be judged by the size of its gross national product. It can show greatness in other ways and I would like to see us regarded as, perhaps, to a great degree, civilised in the humanity and compassion with which we treat the weaker sections of our community and especially the old because, whatever we may say, practically every other section has the hope and the opportunity of bettering itself perhaps through its own efforts but the old must rely on us.
Much has been made of the Devlin Report and I have not much more to add to what I have been saying in response to questions in the Dáil. This is a splendid report. It is one of the most searching and careful reports we have had for a long time and I am happy to take this opportunity to pay tribute to those who compiled it. However, it is a very serious fundamental document and the changes which it suggests are of a very far-reaching nature indeed. It consists in practically turning our existing civil service machinery upside-down and we cannot, as a Government, even if we wished to, rush into decisions on this report.
Perhaps we are not even equipped as we stand to take the decisions on the report. We may have to develop our civil service techniques further before we can validly test some of the recommendations which have been put forward by that report. The report would require careful and accurate scrutiny by the Government and by senior members of the public service but we are looking on it as one of the major tasks confronting the present Government.
Strangely enough, there has not been a great deal of discussion on the general economic situation although Senators have adverted to different aspects of it. We must, of course, at this time look at our economic situation in the light of what is happening abroad. I am not sure if it has yet been announced that some of my colleagues and I will be going to London to have discussions on the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Area Agreement with our British counterparts. We will be examining the workings of the Agreement in great detail and our discussions will have to be in the light of the recent developments in regard to the European Economic Community. At the present time, we must look on our own particular economic situation both from the internal and from the external point of view.
Perhaps the most important aspect of our internal situation is the problem of inflation. As Senators know, I have given the figure of 8 per cent as the inflation we had in the 12 months to August last. That is a very serious figure and one which must give everyone in the community who has responsibility in any area serious food for thought. I know that we are in a worldwide inflationary situation and that we are importing a great deal of our inflation but there is nothing we can do about that.
Nevertheless, we must make a real effort to get this situation under control and there is no point in anyone blaming anybody else or accusing others of being responsible for it. In every sphere we must try to bring about a situation where incomes do not go so far ahead of national production that inflation is inevitable. That is a spiral which if we once get into it there is no knowing where it will end. I believe there is not yet somehow a sufficient realisation among the ordinary workers that a wage increase or an income increase, no matter how large or how attractive it may be in money terms, if it is more than the community can afford it is only an illusion in the long term and that we will have a situation where everybody will be trying to insure themselves against mounting inflation.
Of course, that ultimately leads to complete chaos and collapse and a collapse brought about by working under inflationary pressure. It is the workers and the poorer sections who suffer most. Perhaps it is regrettable but it is true that the capitalist can always find some way of protecting his interests in that sort of situation. It is terribly important that whatever any of us can do at the present time should be done to try and get this fundamental truth established that we in the community can only take out of it what in effect we put in it.
In my Department every year we are prepared at the beginning of the year to state clearly and categorically what our estimate of the national growth for the year ahead will be. It is only reasonable that everybody should base their income and their expectations of income demand on the basis of actual growth and on nothing else. In so far as anybody takes more out of the pool than is justified then in effect they are, as I said at the beginning, really only hurting those who cannot fight as vigorously for their share.
I want to pay a tribute to the public service for their very enlightened approach to this matter last year when the agreement was entered into and I would hope the headline which they set on that occasion could be followed throughout the community because it would bring splendid results in growth, more in employment and increasing prosperity; I also want to pay tribute to the public service committee of congress for the initiative they took.
Allied, of course, to our inflationary situation — and perhaps a direct reflection of it — is the balance of payments deficit which we are encountering at the present time. I am sure the Senators by now are very familiar with the figures but, if not, I will repeat them.
In deciding on our general plan for this year, 1969, we anticipated a balance of payments deficit of £55 million and we said: "That is a pretty considerable balance of payments deficit. It is not one we would be prepared to tolerate indefinitely year after year but in the circumstances in this particular year we are prepared to live with it." Fortunately all the indications are that it will turn out to have been what we projected. There may have to be an adjustment of about £4½ million in respect of the sale of aircraft. That is only a technical adjustment and is of no particular economic significance. So, in fact, 1969 will have almost worked out in this regard very much as we anticipated and planned for; but what is disturbing is that whereas £55 million could be accepted as a tolerable figure for one year it looks now as if it may project itself, and perhaps even be increased, in 1970.
This is something to which we must again direct the most careful attention and which must influence us very much in our approach to all our economic affairs in the coming year. Again, if 1970 sees, on a broad scale, income increases of the nature we experienced in 1969 then undoubtedly we will have a balance of payments deficit bigger than that in 1969 and undoubtedly much larger than we could with any satisfaction contemplate. That is the situation we find facing us now in the closing weeks of 1969. It was a good year, economically. We kept up a a fairly steady rate of growth, four per cent or four and a half per cent. It is difficult to know precisely yet.
We continued to export very satisfactorily indeed. One of the really redeeming features about our whole situation is a continuing rise in our export potential. As I say our exports continued to rise in 1969 at a satisfactory rate but, unfortunately, we have this inflationary pressure at home, excessive consumption leading to the continuing and unhealthy deficit in our balance of payments. Fortunately, of course, the balance of payments does not bring itself so brutally to our notice because we still have a very satisfactory inflow of capital into the country which enables us to ride out those balance of payments deficits. Nevertheless, all of us must get down during 1970 to see what we can do to ensure that the inflationary spiral inside the country is halted and that our balance of payments is brought back to tolerable limits.
I want to assure Senator Boland, after the excellent contribution which he made here this afternoon, that I will remember his name for the rest of this Seanad. I apologise if I cannot deal with all the various points he made but I assure him and all the other Senators likewise, in so far as they have made particular points in relation to the activities of particular Departments, that I will convey those to my colleagues for their consideration and hopefully for suitable and appropriate action.