It was a breath of fresh air to hear the motion of Congress read out by Senator Kennedy. Is it not one of the greatest tragedies in the past 40 or 50 years of Irish public life that a Labour Minister should find himself in Government and find that in attempting to introduce a Bill effectively bringing about a wages standstill that he should have to be reminded by his trade union and party colleagues that of course that kind of motion had also been accepted by his own Labour Party in annual conference. Only last night the Dublin Regional Council accepted unanimously that the whole question of the banks is one which should be dealt with once and for all by this Government.
There is no doubt that this whole question of the banks is central to the whole question of the authority, the quality of society and life within that society. As far as I am concerned, it goes back 30 years when I recall the long running farce of the banks and the control of the banks. In those days there was gross exploitation of the bank employees. It first came to my knowledge when an attempt was made to get me to acquiesce to a Government order allowing for the closure of the banks and I declined to do so. It is regrettable to recall that on that occasion, too, the person asking me to consent to what I considered to be a lock-out of the employees was a Labour Leader, the late Deputy Norton.
Over the years I have continued to take a stand on the right of the employee to look for whatever he can get for the only commodity which he has for sale, that is, his labour. It does not matter to me but I regret that the Bank Officials' Association are not a member of Congress, in their own interests. They should be but that is their own business. Quite obviously divided, they can be more easily handled than if united within congress. At the same time, in the great divide between the worker and employer I am on the side of the worker and have been consistently through all the proposals passing through this House whether initiated by the present Government or the Opposition.
Some of my revolutionary socalist colleagues put the rather tenuous argument to me recently that I was wrong to oppose the idea of coalition. The fact of the matter is that this Coalition are disclosing to the public, more rapidly than any other Government or Coalition, the inherent defects in the whole system of monopoly capitalism. All the talk from both Government and Opposition, Senators Eoin Ryan and Alexis Fitzgerald, about the French Revolution and the sound of the tumbrils, is becoming more and more apposite in the context of western monopoly capitalism as we hear of the evolution of Euro-Communism and the advance of very radical views in all the once very conservative countries, particularly Italy. To a certain extent France, Portugal and to some extent Spain, the beginning of what one hopes to be the effect of the collapse of one kind of corrupt western democracy. The western democracies are corrupt and I dissent from Senator Alexis FitzGerald's portrayal of these places as democracies. There is no demoracy in a society in which a literate electorate create a community in which a tiny minority own three-quarters of the wealth of that community. There is obviously something very defective with that society.
For that reason I felt that Senator Alexis FitzGerald was reminiscent of the ladies watching the tumbrils and the gullotine, knitting away happily as they felt the decapitations of the then ruling class, the aristocracy, was in the national interest.
The proposal that this kind of thing is in the national interest seems to me to be equally irrelevant in so far as this will not solve anything. There is a certain amount of sense in Senator Lenihan's point that this Bill is absurd because the proposals in it are totally unworkable. Whatever about leaving it open for some kind of settlement on a national wage level, the attempt to bring it back and to freeze prices at the 1975 level is obviously quite untenable.
The point at the centre of this whole discussion is, of course, this question of attempting to operate a free enterprise economy—to try to operate that in two completely separate and conflicting compartments. On one hand one has the kind of legislation that goes through the House easily with both Government and Opposition consent. That is in relation to the distribution of the enormous wealth involved in our new materials, oil, gas, minerals and raw materials of various kinds.
Last week's amendment to the Sweeps Act gave away very considerable sums without any serious questioning as to the merits of the demands for this great wealth by a handful of private individuals in our society. Quite obviously, no restrictions whatever are placed on the amount of money which can be taken out of these particular enterprises. There are others, of course, which are run on much the same lines. There is the operation of cartels in order to exploit the captive public with price fixing and so on. There is this one attitude to a minority within our society where there is, in fact, free collective bargaining, where there is the dynamic of private enterprise, where people are let loose to make whatever they can. They are patted on the back and encouraged to do this by the whole system. All the papers, The Irish Independent, The Irish Press and The Irish Times will invariably congratulate the industrialist, the merchant prince, the private property exploiter, if they make large profits, if they show big dividends. If they are able to show that they made more than last year they are complimented for their enterprise. On the other hand, we have the worker who is imprisoned within what is now being described as the national norm. To this extent I appreciate the hardships involved in what is called the free-for-all because, obviously, the more powerful unions will get more than the less powerful unions. It seems to me that it is implicit in the acceptance of the concept of private enterprise capitalism, that this selfish driving power force in human relations must be free to everybody.
I do not agree with the private enterprise system, but I find it so confusing, conflicting or hypocritical for a Government to say that they stand or fall on the principles of free enterprise capitalism. When a group within that society, whoever they may be—in this case the bank officials—say: "we have our labour, we are skilled labourers of a particular kind, we are doing the service which we feel should be paid at a particular level, you cannot do it without us", the Government step in and say this must not be so. I have never known them to step in and say that there should be any limitation on the enormous wealth that is made in various other ways.
This whole process of free collective bargaining, free-for-all, is essentially a selfish device and can cause great human unhappiness. As I say, it is an inescapable component of the concept of free enterprise capitalism. It has its educative effect, it has its educative influence in relation to the workers because as they see enormous money being built up on one side and relatively little going to them, this becomes the in-built conflict of capitalism, where wages and salaries are, to the employer, profits going astray and to the employee, profits are wages and salaries going astray, and this brings us to the inevitable conflict.
Up to relatively recently, the pattern nearly always was the overwhelming of the worker within these kinds of conflicts. We eventually had to accept a particular wage norm, fixed for him by the power of Government, the power of the employer, or the fear of unemployment, or the fear of hardship and suffering of one kind or another. To me the turning point in this particular pattern of the worker accepting a dictat from the employer, or from the Government, happened with the maintenance men's dispute, when the worker began to understand that he did not have to take dictation from anybody because simply half a dozen men decided that they would withdraw their services, and within a very short time they closed down the whole enterprise of the society.
The bank officials in the last week have done something similar. As I said this morning, if the Minister for Finance could have got away with his bullying, hectoring, speech of last Thursday week, he would have been very pleased with himself. He felt that there might be a climb-down by the bank officials and that they would not face the very serious hardship which is inseparable from going on strike, a hardship which is greatly increased by the present circumstances that most of these unfortunate people simply will not get work anywhere else because of the shortage of employment, not only here but in Great Britain.
They are taking a very great risk with their own lives, with their own standard of living and the standard of living of those near and dear to them—their own families. This is not the act of an irresponsible section in the community. The bank officials are probably the most staid, stolid and conservative sector in our society. Here are these people at bay, being hunted and pilloried by most people, particularly by Government Ministers, and now being threatened by a Labour Minister with this absurd legislation. It is a most tragic situation because even if one does not go on strike these days, for the average salary man, the average wage earner, life is becoming more and more intolerably harsh. There is a very deliberate and conscious assault being made not only here but in Britain— but that is none of my worries—on the living standards of the white-collar, blue-collar, manual labourers and manual and industrial workers of all kinds to avoid the very thing mentioned by Senator Kennedy, that is, that there should be any serious effective redistribution of wealth in this country.
To some extent, protection was given by the Government to the appalling unemployment figures— 130,000 plus 50,000 youngsters, nearly 200,000. This is horrifying in its implications in human terms of youngsters working so hard and finding that nobody wants their labour. The cushioning which took place as a result of pay-related benefits and redundancy payments of one kind or another, of course, did not lead to any serious redistribution of wealth whatever. It was simply the worker's own money taken from him and redistributed to him in the very clever way of benevolent capitalism. Nobody knows this better than the Labour Ministers in the Cabinet because they have connived at this mean and cynical trick in order to maintain this very conservative Government in power with all their continuing assaults on the unfortunate worker.
One of the things that has always fascinated me is the way in which to a lesser extent than formerly— because, as I say, this establishment by the maintenance men and later by others, including the television people the other day who simply blacked out the television services— there is a growing consciousness amongst the workers. They are very much more powerful than they ever understood. They are beginning to do what Big Jim Larkin said: "They only look powerful because you are on your knees; get up off your knees." They are at last beginning to see that these bullies who bullied them so painfully through the years, are men they can meet and defeat in anything like fair combat. Of course, we are getting that now in the national wage agreement situation because of a new development. National wage agreements have gone on since 1970 and for the first time, a great new union, the Transport and General Workers' Union, have found that they cannot recommend the last national wage agreement to their members. There is a very serious likelihood that there is not going to be a national wage agreement and then we are into the free-for-all situation.
The pomposity of the Labour Minister—I have no quarrel with, and I keep on saying this, with the Fine Gael people at all, Deputies or the Minister because they are fighting their corner with great determination and loyalty to their own people. I admire them for it. I disagree completely with everything they stand for but I admire their adherence to the principles in which they believe and the way they have obviously fought and hunted in the most humiliating manner the Labour members of the Coalition. I am sorry they have been able to do it for the sake of our Labour movement and our Labour Party but, at the same time I have this strange regard or respect for them, that they defend their own people in the way they have continued to defend the interests of their people all over the years. At the same time, we are now finding that there is a growing awareness amongst the ordinary members of both the political parties and the trade union movement that their leadership need not necessarily be infallible and, quite frequently, should not be trusted. In some cases there is this gradual evolution of a consciousness among the workers much more politically literate than they ever were before in their lives. This, of course, is part of the great European movement, the extension of this idea of Euro-communism, Euro-socialism, whatever one likes to call it. If one looks at Portugal, Spain, France or Italy one will see they have one common denominator, the social influence of the Catholic Church over the years of their existence has something in common.
The position now in relation to this Bill is that neither the bank officials nor the grassroots who could not accept and would gladly, I would imagine, have much preferred to accept a national wage agreement simply cannot do it because the Government cannot have it both ways. There is something to be said if one has not the long term interest that I have in the total changing of the society, the upending of private enterprise capitalism, the creation of a socialist workers' republic, which is my ambition. If I had not that I could see that there is a certain amount for peace and stability in a national wage agreement even though I disagree with it because to me it is in conflict with the idea that the worker should take everything he can get from these people. He makes it, he creates it with his labour and it all belongs to him. I do not think any of it should go in the form of profits at all.
However. I can see that there is something to be said for it because some people get hurt and as a reasonably humane person I do not like to see workers getting hurt in long strikes and that is what happens to the workers, not to the employers. Quite clearly, the banks' officials are faced with the blank wall mentioned by Senator McCartin. They are not going to get work elsewhere. They are a poor association and have not got very much money and they are going to face a time of very great hardship. This is something that was clear in the discussions at the ITGWU conference in Killarney. The worker does not lightly go on strike. Nobody in his senses would lightly go on strike because life is so hard as things are with living costs and prices. This, of course, is the key to the failure of the Government. On one hand they lecture the unfortunate employee—and we will see more of this in the next few days— about what he must do. The employee sees a few individuals being facilitated in making enormous sums of money and they are simply looking for enough to keep on eating, to keep on working, to keep on sending their children to school, providing books and clothes for them, to keep a roof over their heads. That is all they are looking for. I have often said it is not for a second yacht or a holiday in Bermuda. These are ordinary working people looking for very simple needs and they cannot provide those needs. Less and less they are finding it possible. I thank God I am not a family man any more. I do not know how a man with three, four or five children, can keep them fed and clothed.
It is the failure of the Government, of the Labour people in the Government to try to persuade the conventional conservative Fine Gael members of the Government that they cannot go on like this, imposing these enormous stresses on the ordinary people and expect them to go on accepting it. They are not going to do it. It is quite evident that they are not going to do it. Because of the clawback taxes referred to by Senator Lenihan, the penal imposition of taxes of various kinds on the workers as well as the continued frightening increase in prices of essential goods—the other day bread again, ESB charges, gas charges, fuel charges, up and up—the people are not being frivolous. They are not being irresponsible. They are simply responding to simple needs of ordinary people who find that in this community which has been under the care of this appalling government—the third National Coalition Government —they are unable to accept dictates like a national wage agreement on one hand or a suggestion like this in this Bill that they accept the July, 1975 agreement.
As I said to Deputy Ryan this morning, one is not sure whether the Government were really playing at debating points or whether they believed what they were saying when trying to exculpate themselves, when they were trying to shift the blame on to somebody else. The Minister for Labour made the hypocritical suggestion that, in fact, the only persons he really—he is hankering back to his good old radical days—wants to hurt are the owners of the banks. He points out that he has not laid a finger on the employees. He talked about the £10,000 fine, imprisonment and all these terrible things that he is going to do to the bank owners. This is the cynical posturing to the Left, to the radical of his youth, that he really intends laying a finger on the really wealthy bank directors. He has no intention of doing that whatsoever because his Fine Gael friends will not allow him to do that but he should not believe for one moment that in saying that he is attempting to penalise the directors of the banks he is not going to inflict any hardship on the employees. Does he seriously hold this view when this is an Act to provide in the national interest for the regulation for a limited period of the remuneration and other terms and conditions of employment of employees of the banks? That is the purpose of the Bill. It is the employees he is getting at, not at the employers. They will make sure of that. He should not treat us with this kind of contempt in providing this kind of a formula—and this is the one thing this Government seem to have been able to do, that famous Mclnerney's Government of all the talents. The one thing they have been able to apply their talents to is finding intricate, specious, hypocritical and cynical formulae for their continuing progressive series of disasters which have been associated with them since they came into power.
If the Minister seriously believes that he is getting away with this kind of hokum he should throw his mind back to a couple of weeks ago when the Labour vote slumped in an urban working-class area, and their wellknown candidate, Senator Halligan, was elected on the fifth count without reaching the quota. That is serious for the Labour Party, because it seems to tie in with the growing awareness of the ordinary people of the irrelevance of these Parliaments which I have been talking about for so many years and on which Senator FitzGerald chided me this morning. What goes on in them is parallel with the lives of the ordinary people. They do not use their power to change society, to change the way of life of our people. What is more serious is that a politically enlightened working-class constituency such as Dublin South West, where there is a very high level of political consciousness should have produced a 55 per cent pole. This is not apathy. I have too much respect for the people there. It was a deliberate decision to withhold their support from Government and Opposition. The result was a calculated decision that we, the political parties, had completely betrayed the democratic idea of attempting to concern ourselves with the welfare of the people as a whole.
The particular injustice of this Bill is directed at the bank officials. This is an attempt to get a cross-section decision affecting everybody equally. It is in conflict with the much-praised in-built factor which they say keeps private enterprise going: the right of each individual to get what he can for his commodity, whether it is industrial goods, products, professional services or his labour. This is particularly obvious in the record of the banks. It is the centre of all our troubles. It is the centre of the success or the failure or the quality of social life, or the standards of living of our people, or in any society. It is the key difference between a socialist society and a capitalist society. It is the attitude to money lending or banks for the use of money.
There was a time when the banks lent money at 3 or 4 per cent and for that reason this has a feeding effect growing through the whole economy. Now the rate is 15, 16 or 17 per cent. There is no limit. Money lending has become usury. There is no doubt about that. Throughout the economy it has been most influential in the consequential increases required by the people in industry, in institutions, in hospitals, people trying to build houses. No matter what one does there is this need for capital. Because the cost of capital is going up, the consequential costs to consumer goods or services is directly related to the cost of money from the banks. The Government have made no attempt whatever to control the initial cost of money. In a recent programme I saw that money for housing in Bulgaria is at the rate of 2 per cent, a nominal rate. This is what it should be. This is one of the great scandals of our society to which the Labour leadership in the present Coalition is a party. That the present Minister should lend his name to this outrageous proposal makes it doubtful that he can ever seriously be accepted at any level in the Labour movement in the years ahead. This kind of thing will stand against him for the rest of his political life.
Those of us who are working in the health services are finding that there is no money for anything nowadays, everything is being cut. It does not change life for us at all but it changes life for the people we are trying to help. The same situation applies to education. There is curtailment of expansion of all kinds of services. We have the appalling situation of a house for old people which cannot be opened because they cannot find the money. This is the universal picture at a time when the total assets of the banks amounts to £4 billion. This is the money at present belonging to the four main Irish banks. We are a poor country and yet we cannot afford to look after the various needs of our society: health, education, care in old age, housing and so on.
What a paradox. What an absurd contradiction. I am not a bit concerned to see Fine Gael taking the line that we are a poor country, that we cannot afford to lay our hands on this money because it is privately owned. The hungry go hungry and the sick go without getting cured, and the homeless go without houses. It is an extraordinarily inhuman and if there is such a thing as Christianity, unchristian attitude to the demands of a society. No wonder Communism is sweeping Europe. We are on the periphery but it will reach us without a doubt. In 1975-76 the accounts of the banks—and I am sure they are among the most fiddled of all accounts of private capital institutions —show a profit figure of £63 million, an increase of 24 per cent. The Minister for Labour is telling the banks that they are not to pay any of this money to their employees. The absurdity of this proposition. How in the name of heaven can even the Fine Gael people stand over this kind of thing? Do not mind one declared socialist who believed that ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange is vested in the workers. Those were the days, the heady days.
The profit per employee last year was in the region of £3,600. This is what they made for the banks, approximately £3,600. Therefore the banks could double these people's salaries and still get by. The money made is approximately £70,000 per branch of a bank and yet these people cannot get any increase. We may talk about private enterprise, the right of the individual to make what he can out of his assets. The £3,600 was the average for all the four banks. The Bank of Ireland made approximately £4,200 per employee and £76,000 per branch, and none of this must brush off onto the unfortunate employee who made the money. If one agrees with the stupid banking system, which I do not, it should be taken into public ownership.
It is outrageous that anybody should make money out of lending money for building houses or hospitals or schools or any of these other things. It is incredible. Fortunately people are rapidly—not half rapidly enough—beginning to accept that. When Senator Kennedy, who is a very conventional member of the congress, reads out that type of resolution advocating public ownership of the bank, one must accept that this idea is becoming pretty widespread and pretty well accepted generally throughout the community.
The profits per branch was £76,000 and the Minister has put an embargo on this money. As far as I can see he would practically take money from the banks if he could. Anyway, the 15 directors of the Bank of Ireland divide £264,000 between them and they get on average £18,000 per director out of that £264,000, a 30 per cent increase over the previous year. Under national wage agreements workers get 4 per cent or 5 per cent if they are lucky. Who wants to defend this kind of privileged society? A Labour Minister? A socialist? What is he in it for? Is he no longer interested in the people and the public who put him in, the people of Ballymun? Has he gone over comletely? Has he sold out altogether? What is he getting, what is the bribe? What is the justification for this betrayal? A young man should not have caved in quite so easily.
This is the kind of situation in which Deputy M. O'Leary, the Minister for Labour, comes in and lectures the bank officials and talks about their moral responsibilities or suggests that they have a moral responsibility to do something or other. He has a moral responsibility to look after the ordinary people. He has a moral responsibility to take some of this money that is in the vaults of the banks and distribute it where it is needed. He certainly has a responsibility to stand up for the rights of the worker in a situation like this, where there is such an obvious disparity between the conditions of service of the minorities which I hope to deal with in my whole contribution, this minority whom the socialist Minister for Labour is now protecting. He has the hypocritical aplomb to say in his speech there are no penalties of any sort directed against bank employees or their representatives.
"I do not want to make an order bringing in this Act", remember? We read about it, did we not? "What do you want me to do?" asked Pilate and they told him and he washed his hands. How long does the Minister for Labour think he is going to go on doing this kind of thing and get away with it? Both the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Labour talked about the national interest. Indeed it has been incorporated in what Senator FitzGerald was saying. There is a lot to be done in the cause of the national interest. There is no good in making a blanket condemnation of this Government and indeed their predecessors. Some of them were better than others, but certainly this Government in the three years of their office have time and time again shown that their only serious interest is in the preservation of the privileged-class-structured society which we have created here during the 50 years of the various Governments, a society of which 5 per cent own three-quarters of the wealth of the country. There is no need in the world for the hardship that is to be faced.
This condition is desperately serious and deteriorating. It is quite obvious the Government, whatever they may have attempted to do, have had no success whatever in controlling inflation. People are frightened to look at their papers or listen to the radio in the morning just because they are terrified of the next increase and at the same time this attempt to freeze wages, the cost of living going up and the decision by the Government, because there is no doubt that this foreshadowed the national wage freeze to which Senator Lenihan referred, I remember Deputy O'Leary supporting me and all of us in the Labour Party in this. Deputy Colley was trying to bring in a wage freeze and we fought it. On another occasion concerning the ESB we fought it again and all said we would go to jail rather than allow Mr. Lemass to do much the same thing to the ESB workers.
However the truth coming through the whole of this position is that the Government are simply putting off the evil day, the likelihood of there being no national wage agreement, the likelihood of the inevitable free-for-all. Senator Kennedy's request is that at least this should not be implemented if there is to be a national wage agreement, that they should at least get what is given in the national wage agreement. In the absence of a national wage agreement then, quite obviously, they must have exactly the same rights as everybody else to get what they can.
I do not know whether the Government Minister is now a helpless prisoner, a captive within this Fine Gael Coalition. He has gone so far it is very difficult to see how he can get out of it. The recent figures show that there is a great evacuation from the labour movement and that it may be inevitable that he must carry on with this Government. and all the chaos instead of getting out and joining in the movement of which he was a member in 1969-70 and pointing out that there is no solution to the social and economic problems of a society within the context of monopoly capitalism: not these days. There was a time when it could be done. With the growing literacy of the people and communications of one kind or another it can no longer be done. The various signs are to be seen—the maintenance workers for one, the recent by-election results another, and the failure of the national wage agreement to be put across in Killarney in spite of the fact that some of the trade union leaders tried to sell the ideas to the workers. There is a growing awareness among the ordinary people that they are not getting a fair deal. Whatever chance they have of taking it from the traditional classical conservatives, Fine Gael and, in recent years I regret to say, Fianna Fáil, they are certainly not going to take it from the present Labour Minister and in particular the Minister for Labour. The best thing that the Minister for Labour could do, in my view, in the national interest is to bring down this Government without delay.
