I am quoting from a document called The Liaison Bulletin. That is an authentic quote. If the Minister were here I would be very glad to repeat it for him.
I am not attempting to score points off the Minister at this stage because I think the situation is dreadfully serious. We want to get at the truth, if we can at all. This is a man who quite clearly, in a cold, intellectual way, using the Swiss watch type of brilliant mind he has, came to this conclusion many years ago. As a serious and deeply-read Marxist, this was his conclusion about capitalism, and I share it; I have shared it for many years. We find him faced with this dilemma, this disastrous situation, as a key Minister, as one of the two serious politicians in this Coalition, the other being, in my view, the Taoiseach.
That is not an exaggeration. They are in debt to the sum of £1,000 million. They have spent money like a band of drunken sailors. There seems to be very little money left to spend. There is this terrible conseqential unemployment growing worse. He comes in with this three-page document as his blueprint for prosperity. It is an extremely conservative right-wing document, basing the whole approach to the re-establishment of prosperity here, the movement towards full employment, on monopoly capitalism, private enterprise capitalism. What has happened to Deputy Keating? Is he saying this is in order to please Fine Gael? Does he believe it? Is he convinced now about the IDA's capacity to create full employment or to deal with the existing unemployment position? Is he seriously intellectually convinced that this rubbish will solve our problems? Or is it simply a rather insolvent and impertinent smokescreen in a kind of dialectical game in which he is involved at present with the Fine Gael Party in the Coalition? Is he trying to put them off the scent? Does he still believe there is only one solution to our social and economic problems and that that is a socialist solution?
He is the Minister who spoke with remarkable eloquence and effect on the question of the Common Market. He forecast precisely this position: the disaster the EEC would mean for this country. He foretold how foolish the advocates of membership of the Common Market would look, that is the Members of the Fine Gael Party and the Fianna Fáil Party. In April, 1972, at col. 796, Vol. 260 of the Dáil Official Report, he said:
Time will tell whether our industry will be able to withstand this free trade. Personally, I am happy to be in the position of having been with others who oppose full membership of the Community and of having been one of those who sounded warning signals on this issue. My regret is that the public memory is so short because I believe the leaders of political and economic thought who declare us to be a developed economy, capable of withstanding this kind of free trade, will look very foolish indeed in five years' time. He was referring to the Taoiseach and his colleagues in the Government. That was 1972. He was a couple of years out. We will forgive him that. These are the colleagues he said are very naïve if they think that capitalism could be made to work and were very foolish for suggesting that Irish industry could survive if we joined the Common Market.
What does Deputy Keating really believe? Does he believe in these proposals he is putting before us? Has he undergone a sea change? Does he really believe in the IDA? Does he really believe we can make good within the EEC and that industry can be made to survive in competition with the enormous cartels of central and western Europe—the Belgians, West Germans, the French? Does he seriously believe that, having given us a list of the most cogent and compelling arguments against the likelihood of this being so?
I do not know how many of the Senators have troubled to read this IDA report. Did Senator Russell read the IDA report? Phenomenal sums of money have been paid out through the IDA. The 1970-74 Review of the Industrial Development Authority Ireland contained in their Annual Report, December, 1974, states:
The IDA from the start established a planning framework for its activities and has continually refined this framework in the intervening years.
The main features of this approach are as follows:
(1) Identifying the economic and social needs both at national and regional level which industrial development must aim to meet and setting objectives and targets consistent with meeting these needs.
Does the Minister seriously believe that the IDA have taken that particular bromide seriously since the State was formed and since their formation? Presumably, the economic and social needs of the community would have been to provide us with enough money for care of old people and so on. Do they believe this? This is the great conflict. Is industry simply an organisation to make profits for the few or is it to create enough wealth, as we socialists would say, for the community as a whole and ensure that they have a high standard of living? This is what I should like the Minister to explain to the House.
Have the IDA organised industry so that we could provide a high level of social care for old people, disabled people; a high standard of care in our health services; a high standard of care in relation to education; a high level of housing and supplying the housing needs of our people; provide for—this last letdown by the Government—equal pay for everyone, no kind of apartheid in relation to male and female within industry? Have they done that? Does the Minister seriously believe that the IDA can do that and will do it? These are questions which should be asked. Is this pious aspiration worth the paper it is written on? Has it any meaning or validity? I do not think so.
The IDA have been operating up to very recently within the situation in which an in-built platform of all parties—the two major parties at any rate—was continued emigration, approximately 50,000 emigrating every year. This, of course, relieved the pressure on employment. Therefore, the IDA were working towards a very restricted objective, they were really not applying themselves to the total unemployment or new employment needs in our community because of continuous emigration, which has now ended primarily on account of the great collapse of the British economy. This creates a completely new situation for the IDA which, in the years December, 1969, to December, 1974, provided the country with a net growth of 5,500 new jobs. It is the one chink appearing in the otherwise wildly euphoric PRO job, which is this report. This may appear disappointing, and it is. It is clear, however, that without the substantial flow of jobs mainly deriving from IDA approved home and overseas projects there would have been a severe constriction of the manufacturing workforce in that period.
Having unloaded heaven only knows how many people on the emigrant market, 30,000, 40,000 or 50,000 a year at the time, they still did not provide the country with anything like full employment or the wealth to make any significant improvement in comparing it to other Western European countries in the social infrastructure in our society. After the years of activity of the IDA the Economic and Social Research Institute survey of industry in October showed that 71 per cent of firms—this is the wonderful industrial arm of the whole job-creating and money-making activity of the State— reported production at present to be the same or lower than in previous months. Eighty per cent of the firms saw no improvement in production in the months ahead. Ninety-three per cent of the firms saw no improvement in orders. Ninety-four per cent of the firms saw no improvement in employment. Thirty-two per cent forecast an active fall, while only 6 per cent predicted a rise in employment.
It is very difficult to add to the load of woe which everyone has had to sustain in recent weeks and months, but surely these facts are a particularly grim foretaste of what will happen to Irish industry in the weeks and months ahead. As a panacea for that disastrous kind of information from Irish industry we receive this silly little inconsequential three-page document from an important development Minister, the Minister for Industry and Commerce—a Labour Minister, too.
There is a peculiar finding in the psychiatry courts, belle indifference, which is found in people who are hysterical. What happens is that they tell you terrifying things about themselves, that they will kill themselves, their mothers or fathers or whatever it may be, and at the same time they sit looking at you with this quiet smile on their faces. Obviously, what they are telling you does not relate at all to what is actually happening. One is really reminded of this kind of condition when one listens to the important Ministers such as Deputy Keating and the Taoiseach. They seem to be totally remote as if there was a thick plate glass window between them and reality. Then we have the absurd proposals from all sides starting with the CII and the Federation of Manufacturers, with each of the Ministers saying that the real solution to the problem will be either not to give equal pay or to have a wage freeze, when there is an urgent need to try to adapt this particular body in a way that will make it work and make it do the job it certainly has not done up to the present time.
One of the strangest things about our society over the last 50 years is that the infantile faith that private enterprise capitalism gives us freedom to operate as we wish and we will create enormous areas of prosperity. I was interested to hear Senator Russell talking about the early days of Irish industries and the inevitable fact that they had to be secondary industries, subsidiaries of foreign industries and so on. But that was not true. The whole basis of Irish industry should have been the then raw material—not to speak of the present wonderful ones—of land, labour and capital, with the best climate in western Europe. I remember reading in an emigration report of a New Zealander talking about the grasslands and saying that how wonderful they would be if they were properly developed. Irish industry should have been based on agricultural food processing industries. People are now talking about the cattle industry and the chemical industry that can be based on cattle and the raw materials for many other industries. Instead of that cattle are all exported on the hoof. We had the primary resources at that time and they were not used. We exported them to other countries, as we now propose to do with our zinc, lead and copper, and then we bought back the wool and leather products.
The whole process of Irish industry since the State was formed has been particularly and consistently inept. The development of the motor car industry, an absurd industry for our society, is now one of the greatest devourers of one of the most expensive of our imports, oil and petrol, as well as absorbing an enormous hire purchase debt—a useless non-productive outlay of money. I am not saying that they should be closed down, but I am sorry for the men and women who work in these industries which are obviously now in the greatest jeopardy when one looks at the position in Great Britain in the Leyland and the Chrysler works. What is going to happen to ours here? There is a dreadful insecurity in working in those kinds of jobs.
The IDA have done nothing significant to change these conditions or reorientate in any significant way this insistence on our acceptance of our role as primary producer in relation to agriculture and fishery, and then, of course, in relation to mining—zinc, lead, gas and oil. This is where the Labour Party Minister, Deputy Keating, has failed so dismally and shamefully. It could be said that his predecessors did not have the same access to the same capital or expert knowledge or technical information. He has all of these things and for some inexplicable reason—I do not understand it and I would have liked, if he were here, to have asked him—he chooses to stay silent on the complete inanity of the proposals included in his three-page Bill and to rely on faith in the IDA to get us out of this very serious economic situation.
As regards faith in private enterprise —and we had it here from Senator Russell—I do not understand these people because they protest their independence and insistence on their continued independence. They do not want any Government interference. We have heard that down through the years: "We want to run our own businesses our own way and we will be better off that way". Yet we see this £100 million from the EEC and this new £200 million. Incidentally, the Minister refers to this small Bill asking for an increase in potential of £200 million, and yet they are lucky if they get £100 million from the new EEC loan, and he calls that a small Bill. He does not bother to really deal with the implications of this new increase in the loan capacity. This money will go to provide grants for industry; it will go to build factories for these industrialists, £10 million went on the last lot; it will go to re-equip and modernise machinery, presumably; it will go on rescue activity; it will go for grants for product and processing development; they will be told to get on with modernising their methods, improving their output; it will go on joint venture programmes—the Irish taking some share in overseas ventures of one kind or another; it will go on establishing overseas industry; it will go on grants under the European Social Fund. If this money is needed and if all this help is needed, where does private enterprise come in? Surely this is public enterprise? We are footing the bill and they take the profit.
We always hear at budget time: "We must have a reduction in taxes as an incentive to increasing production", while they ask for a wage standstill at the same time. But I always understood that the reason a high level of profits was looked for was so that they could expand their industries, modernise industries, train management, train apprentices, train new staff, enter into negotiations for deals with other countries outside Ireland. It seems to me that what we do is we provide this money to provide these free industries for these industrialists and that they do very little else except take great profits out of them. For instance, the IDA paid £13 million approximately to Ferenka which, I understand, is in very serious financial difficulties at the present time.
However, that is not my point. We paid £13 million approximately to Ferenka and we own only 7 per cent of the shares. Why in the name of heavens do we hand away all that money to a foreign-based company, which is not apparently very successful, and have no control whatever beyond this minority shareholding? We have another firm called Snia in Sligo into which we put £7 million in 20 per cent shares. I understand that the total shareholding of the IDA is £1.2 million in a £100 million investment; those are approximate figures. Surely that is absurd, not to exercise control of the operation of these industries if we put so much public money into them.
The Minister, Deputy Keating, knows as well as I do that the driving force in private enterprise is simply the driving force of making profits. They have no social interest at all. They do not care what the old age pension is or how sick people get looked after or whether working class children get a good education beyond an education in a technical college in order to run their machines for them. You can see that now, the way they have stopped investing in Irish industry because the profits are falling. They do not care what happens to the country as long as they do not get hurt in the process. Yet the Minister is implementing what are blatantly conservative Fine Gael policies here without any labour socialist content in them at all, in spite of the fact that at the most recent conference the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and various other unions, moved a resolution that the greatest State control be asserted over the development of our natural resources in the process of industrialisation. Many of these recommendations were by his own party, by his own union. What is the quid pro quo of the Labour membership of the national Coalition. What are we getting out of it—108,000 unemployed, 130,000, 150,000, inflation and a wage standstill and no equal pay for men and women? That is all perfectly reasonable Fine Gael doctrine. I know that dogma. This is common form over the years. They have never believed in anything else, but this is not Labour Party policy and never was.
I am not blaming the Fine Gael people for getting these things for themselves. That is their business. I am blaming the Minister for Industry and Commerce, who is a member of the Labour Party, not only for the rubbish that he is talking now about the likelihood of our survival within the EEC and the likelihood of private enterprise capitalism solving our problems, but of the fact that he and his Labour Party colleagues are silent within the Fine Gael Coalition about these problems which we should now be talking about. They should all be giving the same kind of advice to the people that I am trying to do here and outside just at this very critical time in our history. Nobody in his senses the most infantile illiterate, seriously believes that this Government are going to solve our social and economic problems.
I said the other night that this is a completely new situation. I referred the other night to the new development, the new OPEC-type development in relation to all the other raw materials of industry, manganese, copper, iron ore, phosphates, all these other very important materials. You cannot run industry without them. They are all going to escalate too in price because of various cartels which are being developed among these countries. This is a totally new situation altogether. These old strategems, which never worked anyway even when things were easy to operate, will not solve our problems. Nobody knows that better than the Minister, Deputy Keating, because, as I say, he is a man who has given a lot of thought to and worked very hard at this whole study of the operation of politics and the conflict between capitalism and socialism, labour.
This Bill, this three-page document, makes no attempt whatever to introduce some measure of Government planning. In this three-page document there is no reference whatever to a factor to which the Minister, Deputy Keating, used to refer so frequently when he was a Deputy and when I heard him on many occasions frequently ridicule the then Taoiseach, Deputy Lynch, for his failure to see that one must have a strong public sector in any economy such as ours. In April, 1972, he said:
In fact we are such a tiny and open economy that if you decide to run it without a strong public sector, if you decide to run it in a laissez faire way as we have been doing, there is little that you can do in regard to most of the significant factors.
There was very much more on those lines, ridiculing the then Fianna Fáil Government's failure to do anything about their laissez faire policies. Yet there is not a single word about the Government taking over any kind of control whatever of this seriously ailing economy.
Again, on the same occasion, Deputy Keating, the present Minister for Industry and Commerce, said:
The sort of efforts at planning and at trying to direct and organise growth in our economy and to move towards fuller employment that were respectable in the early sixties now seem totally abondoned and we seem to be responding to the shortest of short-term situation and to have no strategy and no planning at all.
Is it not fair comment to say that this document concerned with the future of employment in our country has no reference whatever to a strategy for planning, a strategy for the introduction of a strong public sector?
What has happened to Deputy Keating? This is the question that keeps coming back to me. Is he on your side of the House or ours? Has he sold out, or is he playing some kind of long-term trick and later on will he surface again as the serious socialist that I once knew him to be? He defended the failure to build the new ships for Irish Shipping in Haulbowline by saying that the Japanese were so much more ready for this kind of thing than we were. As far as shipbuilding is concerned, we should look after our own people in Cork before we consider anybody else. One of the most important steps that one could take is to look to the next shipyard in Ireland which could benefit fellow-Irishmen. If Cork shipyard could not handle a job of this size, what about Belfast? The Government does not seem to include that as part of the country at all. These are the kind of worthwhile gesture which I feel would be of help in dealing with the great differences between us.
Perhaps the Parliamentary Secretary in his reply could give us some explanation for the brevity of his own contribution and the contradiction between his suggestion that we should have a serious debate on the industrial structure of our society and his refusal to engage in that debate himself. There are three main areas in which the Government should involve themselves. I have no trust whatever in the IDA, as presently constituted. I do not believe that they see their job as concerning itself with the total national interest in the broad sense I outlined earlier. The Government should, in considering the question of serious industrialisation, have the three main bases in mind. The first is the base of agriculture, of exporting nothing that is not fully and finally processed. We are a primary producer. The suggestion made by Senator Russell that we have to have industries based on subsidiaries of foreign countries is completely false. We always could have been the primary producer in relation to agriculture and fishing. We heard last night on the "7 Days' " programme that we fish 10 per cent of the potential of our seas around our coasts. I remember well 25 years ago, when I raised this matter with Mr. Dillon, apparently the big impediment was the fact that there were 7,000 inshore fishermen. That was a big lobby then, the preventative to developing a serious trawler fleet. Based on the trawler fleet could be the canning and tinned food industry. We import enormous amounts of fish, exporting most of ours in a raw state. This is squandering our assets in the most irresponsible way and it has gone on. The Minister is in office nearly three years. He had time to do something about it. He should have done something about it. If he could not do anything about it because of the conservative intransigence of the Fine Gael Party, then he should resign. He should not give them the respectability of the Labour component of the present Coalition. He makes the case always that Labour did not get a majority and therefore cannot implement his policies, but neither did Fine Gael get a majority and yet we are implementing their policies. Why do we have their policies and not Labour Party policies? If it is a fact that he cannot get his policies implemented, then he should resign and let us go to the people and tell them that there can be no solution. Surely that should be clear to everybody by now. How long have we to wait? Until we have 200,000 unemployed? Hunger, poverty and our already depressed standard of living—the lowest in Western Europe—is obviously going down very rapidly under this new proposal for a wage freeze if the unions accept it.
Then there is the third matter of raw materials to which the Minister made no reference at all. The magnificent raw materials which I have been speaking about now for about five years—mining, zinc, lead, copper, too, but zinc and lead particularly—what an enormously wealthy country we are now. There is no need at all for the béal bocht put on by the Taoiseach and the Minister for Industry and Commerce. For our size, for our population, we are probably the wealthiest country in the world now. Let the Minister refute that if he wants to. Instead of using the raw materials or, in introducing this Bill, taking the opportunity of saying: "We are going to use our raw materials and in order to do that we are going to build two smelters. Our riches are so enormous apparently that we are going to need two smelters, not one. The downstream industries are a product of these smelters. We would be like some of the middle eastern States then"— instead of that the Parliamentary Secretary is haggling with the problem as all the successive Dublin Governments have done for the last 50 years.
On the Labour component in the Coalition Government, but particularly on the Minister for Industry and Commerce—as I say, Deputy Keating is an erudite politician—there is a very big responsibility. If he allows this terrible development towards a massive attack on all fronts on the living standards of the workers which is involved in the wage freeze, plus the feeding into the economy of increased prices for posts and telegraphs, transport, oil, petrol and the various other proposals which they have in mind, it must lead to a very serious depression in the standard of living. The CII report the other day showed that a man, with two children, unemployed for nine months has already dropped his living standards by 50 per cent. That is a terrible drop in living standards. People on fixed incomes and pension rates dropped by 25 per cent. People can be asked to make sacrifices in time of war or in time of famine or great natural calamity, but this is so unnecessary. Knowing that he is very conservative, I remember asking the Taoiseach—when he was, I think, Minister for Finance—why he allowed this situation to remain when we had this enormous amount of raw materials and great wealth, and asking if we were going to export it and then buy it back at prices fixed by some foreign cartel.
I very much regret not having the opportunity of presenting the Minister with his own comments on industrial organisation in the past. The Minister is now saying that unemployment will rise unless we have some sort of wage freeze and so on.
And there are many detriments in inflation. I am not suggesting that higher wages are not one, but what I am saying is that anyone who says it is the only one is simply a liar.
That statement is in Volume 262, column 1871, of the Official Report of 13th July, 1972. There are many more quotations of that kind, quite offensive quotations from Deputy Keating, who is not usually offensive, deriding the naïvete and innocence of the then Taoiseach for suggesting that the workers were the cause of the trouble. Then it was not a wage freeze, but rather a wage rise which they did not think was high enough. The situation now is much worse. The Minister for Industry and Commerce and the Taoiseach are looking for something quite different— a wage freeze and so on.
The Minister for Industry and Commerce is faced with what is undoubtedly a terribly serious situation. It is a situation which has developed progressively and which quite obviously has been influenced by the oil prices. One of the questions that has occurred to me is why we did not introduce oil rationing. I know it sounds terrible but there is a war on—a war for people's living standards. There should be petrol rationing as if in war time. It is such a costly raw material for such a useless exercise—driving around in motor cars. Are all of these kind of devices, which could probably be had in a socialist-organised State, forbidden to the Minister for Industry and Commerce? It may interest the House to know that the Minister for Industry and Commerce has produced this three-page document and this absured reliance on the IDA which have so failed the country up to now, while at the same time he is mandated by his own conscience to call for—the most recent one—"complete public ownership, control and development of all our resources: the planning and development of downstream industries for metals and gas oil processing; all direct and indirect servicing of these industries to be undertaken by Irish personnel; demands that two production platforms for the State-owned gas field off Kinsale be built in Ireland." Whose side is he on? What is there in this National Coalition for the Labour Party and for those unfortunate people throughout the country who have the faith in us to vote and support us?