I found Senator Garret's rhetorical question "Where do we go from here?" most hopeful. A related series of asides indicated, perhaps hopefully, although I somewhat more dismally think that he might not have been so serious, a commitment by his party to the notion of economic planning. Such a confusion has come to typify contributions from that side of the House. On the second last occasion on which I spoke here I said that it would be of great benefit to all of us if we had some points of clarification. Are the Opposition, who see the remedy to all our ills in their return to power, in favour of balancing the books or are they in favour of deficit budgeting? Sometimes those Members suggest that we can reduce taxation and, at the same time, balance the books and reduce foreign borrowing. I am at a loss to understand how one can claim to be consistent in an attack on borrowing to meet, for example, social welfare payments and at the same time suggest that living standards will be increased all round.
When the Labour Party initiated a debate on the necessity for coherent economic planning it was attacked. Yet, later in the week the Government were attacked for not having an economic plan. Are budgets to be deficit budgets or are they to create revenue surplus? Are we to have planning or are we not to have planning? As regards sections of the community which are not taxed already, they are not to be taxed. Yet, without the plan and without new sources of revenue everybody is going to receive more. I am trying to see some semblance of sanity in all of this confusion. One thing occurs to me. Perhaps the Fianna Fáil Party are going to improve the quality of life, that is, that we will abandon traditional economic assumptions and will ask people to take less but to remember that in so far as we have removed the present Government all is really well.
I want to say some simple things about the issues raised under the Finance Bill. First of all, I do not subscribe to the simplistic mentality that you can work your way out of an economic recession by changing personnel in charge of revenue distribution and redistribution in the same way as one changes the position of a footballer on the pitch. It is interesting, when people have decried the lack of contributions on this side of the House, that the only recipe they have offered is, in the words of Senator Garrett: "For God's sake, get out of power! Let us back." This was preceded by an onslaught—and I thought that that was going to be somewhat encouraging in some respects—that the present Government had no policy on agriculture or finance and that they had a policy in industry of wrecking jobs.
I thought the House was then going to hear what Fianna Fáil policy in agriculture, industry, science, technology and public expenditure would be. Being a person of long memory, I remembered what a Fianna Fáil politician told me on one occasion. He said "Your party is out of power and mine is in power because we don't need any of these ologies, isms, plans or policies." I knew, in fact, although I hoped the House would hear something new, that it was the old fox that was there after all; the fox that can say with one bark, "Planning is good", and then when it suits "Planning should be avoided" and on another occasion "We must reduce taxation but we should not increase revenue". This apparent confusion need not delay the House too long. While people have criticised decisions made by the Government, there is one thing clearly transparent, that is, that the lack of any alternative policy is probably the single greatest asset of the Government.
If I might expand on Senator Garret's points, he suggested that "It is ye who have done this and it is ye who have done that". As somebody who has been involved in the teaching of economics for a brief period, I would make the point that these reductionist kind of arguments serve very little purpose. I do not think that Fianna Fáil, in some of the mistakes they made, inflicted them on the people through any personal sense of malice. Rather, I feel it is this—something which will not be agreed with by the majority of the people, as I am frequently reminded— that it is not the group of people who form the Cabinet of the day who inflict social or economic ills on an economy or on a society; it is forces, more precisely market forces, which dictate levels of investment and of employment. This is because a system which links a particular kind of relationship between labour and investment has brought about the present economic crisis.
The Irish economic crisis, let us be clear on this, cannot be considered in isolation. At present in Nairobi the fourth meeting of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development is seeing one of the most interesting confrontations that has yet taken place: a confrontation between the world of the rich and the world of the poor. John Armstrong of The Irish Times, only two days ago could write a report which clearly stated that the 77 poorest countries paid over $1 billion annually to the developed countries for the use of patents and some developed technologies. When the amount of aid given by the developed world to underdeveloped countries, those 77 countries, is put into ratio, one can see that it is but a tiny fraction of what is being extracted from the Third World in terms of resources and real wealth.
These principles which have brought about a world crisis and a world confrontation between people who believe in a certain kind of economic system and those who believe in an alternative are reflected in the economic crisis which affects this country. It is a crisis between those countries which possess resources and those countries which have not only extracted— extracted at deep personal cost— resources from the Third World but have in their expenditure and their usage created a very vulgar and wasteful society in the western world. Therefore, any consideration of the Irish economy —the last speaker invited the House to consider the economy generally—and the position in which it finds itself involves, inevitably, a consideration of the present state of the world economy. Here, as I have stated, the principles are basically the same. To put it in more human terms, it has been the indiscriminate exploitative extraction by the industrialised countries, as we know them today, of basic raw materials and their employment in wasteful and undignified commodity products.
That has brought about and is sustaining famine in the Third World. Inevitably, any of us who are participating in societies which sustain those economic systems are partners—we are not independent and we are not isolated. Our consumption pattern and the greed of the western developed nations is the primary source of the deprivation, the hunger and the famine of the other part of the world which has been gutted for its real wealth over centuries. It is interesting, that it is in 1976, at the fourth conference of UNCTAD, that this confrontation has taken place.
If the House needs further evidence that a single nation today is no longer in control of its economic instruments, I suggest this: my own reaction to the proceedings of the UNCTAD conference is that frequently Government initiatives have had to be tapered to take cognisance of the demands of multinational corporations. In other words, even though nations meet, the greed of the multinational corporations cannot be curbed. Therefore one might say that the international capitalist system, founded as it is on the expansion of such multinational corporations, has no political monitor or control. The single greatest challenge facing all of us in the international community is to redress that position.
Coming to Ireland's case, I want to reiterate some points. I believe that the Finance Bill as such is a limited instrument in what it can do if we retain the traditional concept of economics. What the Finance Bill can set out to do is to gather revenue and distribute it in a particular way. One thing that is patently clear is that the pressure of Labour members of the Government is evident, for example, in the manner in which the living standards of those drawing social welfare payments have been protected to some extent. There has been an increase in expenditure on social welfare from £91 million to £142 million. I do not suggest that that is sufficient to either eliminate poverty in our society or to reduce genuine distress. What I am saying, in so far as redistribution is being made, is that an attempt is being made to try and hold up that vulnerable section of the community, a vulnerable section of the community that is frequently treated with abuse by those who do not understand their plight. It is often forgotten that those who, for example, find themselves unemployed have for the greater portion of their lives contributed with their labour to our present society.
In speaking on the Finance Bill and accepting the necessity for economic planning it is not sufficient—I wish Senator Garrett was here because I would grant him a point on this—for a person contributing to a debate on the economy to ask the House to believe that Fianna Fáil might do better. On the other hand, to simply say: "We are going better than when Fianna Fáil were in power", would be insufficient.
In the last 12 months there has been public demand for the concept of planning. The concept of planning— and future Finance Bills will reflect this, I hope—is the opposite of some of the principles upon which present economics is based. For example, the economic base of power in the present system, as it works, is based on the ability through ownership and control over means of production to determine the distribution and disposition of the surplus that is generated in production itself. That is, those who have power largely conferred through ownership of the means of production decide to exercise that power as if they were distributing the results of economic growth in the same way as they would distribute a residuum. We should be more optimstic and constructive in the debate. We should not only speak about the necessity for a plan but we should speak about the implications of having planning at all.
There is, whether we like it or not, a direct contradiction between the concept of planning and the kind of ad hoc distribution of revenue surpluses which have gone on until now. For example, budgets in the history of this State have been surrounded by mystery. It was as if the Minister, having gathered a certain amount of revenue, could dispose of it in a number of ways and one would have to exercise guess-work as to where it was to be spent. The minimal acceptance of the concept of planning means that one articulates social goals and stresses that the wealth generated in the community will go towards the relief of social distress, the answering of social needs and will serve social goals. This eliminates the element of mystery for the conscious purpose of creating a just society. In that case production—manipulation of resources—is no longer dictated by the forces of the commodity market. In that case, one is controlling, in so far as one is using the economy instrumentally, the kind of society one wants. As the world economic crisis has begun to be analysed, we should realise that the economic order that is in crisis is an undignified order, an order at world level that provoked a massive confrontation between those in greatest need and those who accumulated resources through greed. At a national level, we have to realise that the resources of this country must be used in the interests of the community in general.
What happens if one wants to change a society? Any socialist who believes in economic planning must be prepared to move forward to a structure of economic relationships in which money-market criteria are no longer dominant. The criteria must instead be direct satisfaction of social needs, and this implies a number of things, particularly the democratisation of decision-making. Let us consider, as we discuss the Finance Bill and the requirements of finance in general, what our financial instruments have to serve. It has been pointed out to us in one document after another, particularly by Professor Brendan Walsh of the Economic and Social Research Institute, the magnitude of the task which faces us socially in the years ahead. Ireland's population is likely to increase at a far greater rate than that of the other member countries of the European Community. That population growth will take place among the younger age group. Emigration having slowed up and the natural increase having stabilised, we can now look forward to a growth in the active population in Ireland in the next decade of 17 per cent. The comparable percentages for the same period in other member countries would be: 16.1 per cent for the Netherlands, 11.3 per cent for Italy, 8.4 per cent in France, 6.6 per cent in Belgium, 3.2 per cent in the United Kingdom, 2.8 per cent in Denmark and 0.6 per cent in West Germany. This huge increase in population will automatically bring with it the responsibilities and obligations of job creation if people are to contribute to society.
The necessity for a plan can be seen immediately It has been demonstrated again and again that whatever has been attempted in the past is markedly insufficient to make up the number of jobs that are required for these huge population increases. This means that it is not financial measures as such that will require the greatest change but the introduction of new financial institutions. In other words, the kind of relationship of production to capital acquisition which we allowed to dominate in the past and which created this vulgar waste-making society and still sustains it, will simply be not on. We will have to ensure that revenue gathered from future resources will be used in such a way that it will answer the demands of social need. One of the primary elements of social need is the right to work.
A demand for economic planning in general for the purpose of the achievement of social goals, a social need that has been demonstrated by independent scholarship, means that we have to be serious about both our future financial institutional requirements and our financial measures. It is markedly insufficient simply to stand up in a debate and say: "If we were there we would do better". That is no answer to anyone looking forward to the planning of our society, to answering social need as it will manifest itself in the years ahead.
Senator Garrett mentioned something which might unfortunately be a cultural characteristic of this island. He drew on that great word "Ye", whoever they might be—I am not sure whether it includes the Divinity or several divinities, or whether they are real people—and said: "Ye closed down 1,081 factories since March, 1973". I remind the House of my remarks at the beginning of this speech that it is not the individuals of the day who closes down factories and eliminates jobs but rather market forces which are linked to a private enterprise economy and which are participating in a world economic order that is dominated more and more by the profit motive and is falling under the pressure of the multinationals rather than of national states.
What then of the future? This House would have done much better if it had bravely said something like this: The base from which revenue can be gathered in this country at present has definite limits to it. There are limits as to the levels of taxation that one can put on that base itself. I reject altogether the principles of collection that have dominated until now. I have suggested that the economy be consciously managed around the attainment of social goals rather than the Minister of the day be distributing revenue from the residuum of growth.
I should like to put some further questions to people who might want to participate in this debate concerning the financing of our country at present and economic head. It is sometimes said that what is necessary is the return to economic growth, but I raise the point, quite unashamedly that there is a deeper question—economic growth for whom? Does the demand, the simplistic demand "Return to economic growth" mean by those who make it that we are happy with the distribution of the existing products of growth? Remember we could return to growth. It is conceivable we could achieve a growth rate, and the disparities in our society between those who possess wealth and those who are poor could grow, and grow very much indeed. Therefore we should be taking advantage of the economic crisis and seeing, as I have seen, the economy mismanagement as instrumental for the achievement of social purposes and socially debated goals, and within that notion of the management of the economic instrument, the notion of the attainment of growth as a minor instrument. All of this is extremely important if we are to move forward.
It is very well worth while in a time like this to look at the structure of our consumer behaviour. I argue that there are many aspects of consumer demand at present time which might generate revenue in the short term but which in the long term are not to the benefit of the world community in general. Many consumer practices that have grown up and that have been sustained through advertising in our western society are directly inimical to the interests of the world community as a whole. It is consumer vulgarity in the western world which is the other side of the coin of famine in the Third World.
We might too look at the nature of our dependency. In discussing, for example, income we need to ensure that there is quite a difference in a revenue measure which will affect the income of somebody who is an extremely wealthy person and a measure which will affect the income of somebody who is just buying the basic necessities of life. Quite a difference arises. To move forward then at the invitation of Senator Garrett, I suggest that there is this merit in one of his suggestions. He asked—I do not agree with him—that the money spent on social welfare be reallocated in the manner in which he suggests it could be done so easily.
One thing we might look at in the short term—and I emphasise it is short term—is the manner in which savings have continued to accumulate while investment has not taken place at the same rate. This has meant that surpluses have risen within the commercial banking sector. At the same time we are aware of the level of unemployment wavering something around 118,000. We are also aware that very many public infrastructural schemes have been planned and designed, particularly since the financing of a great proportion of them was removed to central funds. These three terms taken together—the existence of worth-while social infrastructural projects, the accumulation of commercial banks' surplus and the high level of unemployment—would mean plans in the very short term, would probably result in the creation of sure jobs and would not in the short term have an inflationary effect.
This would, however, not be an answer to the long-term reorientating of our economic structure which must be shifted from the idea of production for profit or, if a related corollary, production of commodities for market consumption which will generate profits. Rather must we speak about production for use by those who are in need. It is that kind of thinking which lies in the Labour Party's insistence on a debate at the present time on the future of the economy, on the necessity of economic planning.
We might rather in simpler language say this. We want to rescue future generations from the indiscriminate and harsh effects of market forces and enable the Government of the day, through their financial instruments and institutions, to answer social need and consciously to improve our society. Our demand for planning therefore implies advanced production techniques and answering of social need.
In a speech which was given yesterday and reported the speaker said that one can answer some of our economic ills by increasing productivity and that an increase in productivity will bring about an increase in revenue. But things are not as simple as that. Productivity in the narrowest sense means pursuit of the production of exchange values without regard to the consequences. The guiding principle is not the social need of which I have been speaking, not the most effective use of resources to meet social needs and social aims, but the production of exchangeable, saleable and marketable commodities to create the greatest profit.
Indeed many people, without realising what they are doing, tacitly support the politics of the market economy. They do so not because they are forced but because tacitly they are induced through advertising and through the subtle operations of the market mechanism to scramble for commodities that do not answer their real needs in the best fashion. This is an example of ad hoc consumption, an example of what happens where there is no social plan, where there has been no debate about the purposes of the use of resources in general.
I doubt very much if we can expect reasonably to raise much more revenue from the structures we have at present in society. It is obvious that if it is a primary social aim that one has the right to work one must also take Professor Walsh's figure, that thousands of young people will need employment. The private sector is not able to meet that demand. Here again I opened with the principles of confusion among the many spokesmen of Fianna Fáil. I wish to goodness that they would make up their mind whether they believe that the private sector can——