I move:
That Seanad Éireann notes the supply services and purposes to which sums have been appropriated in the Appropriation Act, 1981.
Appropriation Act, 1981: Motion.
I second the motion.
Before I call on the Minister of State on item No. 1, I may say for the guidance of Senators that the scope of the debate on it is the expenditure as detailed in the Appropriation Act, 1981. Discussion of a general nature on expenditure and financial policies, including taxation, is also permitted. It is not in order, however, to discuss details of taxation or any particular tax such as would be appropriate to be debated on a Finance Bill. The period to which the debate relates is that covered by the Appropriation Act.
This motion gives us an opportunity to discuss the Appropriation Act, 1981, which was passed without debate at the last sitting. As Senators are aware, the purpose of the Appropriation Act is to give statutory authority for expenditure on the supply services — in other words, the annual spending of the various Government Departments.
The total figure for 1981 is almost £4,370 million, £560 million for capital and £3,300 million for current services. This is a major outlay by any standards and much of it is vitally necessary for our economic and social progress. It represents, inter alia, the cost of State aid for industrial and agricultural development, investment in infrastructure and the cost of education, health and other welfare services. The question we must ask ourselves, however, is whether we can afford this level of spending and whether all our public programmes are cost effective.
Certainly we cannot afford this level of spending if we have to finance it from an ever-increasing level of borrowing. When the budget was presented to Dáil Éireann in January 1981, the then Minister for Finance stated that the Exchequer borrowing requirement for the year would be £1,300 million or 13 per cent of GNP. In fact it would have exceeded £1,970 million were it not for the initial steps taken in the July budget to put the national finances in order. More worrying still, the current budget deficit which adds little, if anything, of permanent value to the economy was scheduled to be cut to £515 million or 5¼ per cent of GNP in the budget of January 1981. In the event, it turned out to amount to £823 million or 8 per cent of GNP even after the impact on it of the stabilisation measures of July last are taken into account. This is the highest level, either absolutely or relative to GNP ever recorded in the history of the State.
Some of our critics say that the present Government are obsessed with the problems of public finance and the balance of payments deficit. We are; we have to be, because if we do not do anything to bring these down to more tolerable levels, others will do it for us and they will not be sensitive to the needs of the economy or to the aspirations of our people in doing it. We must keep the economy out of the clutches of our foreign creditors and to do that we must demonstrate clearly that we are capable of managing our own affairs. That in turn requires that we reduce, and keep on reducing, both the budget and payments deficits.
I would like to direct attention to another aspect of the figures before us, that is the extent of Supplementary Estimates. This is a recurring theme. How can any Government pretend to have a good financial system when, as happened in 1981, Supplementary Estimates reached a total of almost £600 million? On the current supply services alone, Supplementary Estimates amounted to over 18 per cent of the original provision.
As Senators know, the details of the 1981 appropriations are given in the schedule. In summary, the main items may be classified as follows:
Agriculture, £261 million; Industry, Commerce and Energy, £308 million; Transport and Communications, £503 million; Housing, £116 million; Education, £700 million; Health and welfare, £1,468 million; Garda and Defence, £336 million.
I refer, of course, to the amounts voted in the Appropriation Act. To get a better picture of public spending we would have to include non-voted capital expenditure of over £1,300 million which, in the main, represents investment by the State-sponsored bodies and by local authorities.
In relation to the last two headings which I have just mentioned, namely Health and Welfare and Garda and Defence, it is worth pointing our two facts. In 1981, we spent nearly £260 million on unemployment-related expenditure. The annual average number of persons on the live register in 1981 was about 128,000. Of the expenditure of £336 million on the security forces in 1981, some £90 million could be attributed to the continuing Border security situation.
The Estimates for 1982 were, as Senators know, published this morning. I do not propose to discuss them in the context of this debate. In any event it would not be proper to do so in advance of the budget statement next Wednesday.
What I do want to stress, however, is that we shall press ahead with our programme for financial reforms designed to up-date the processes for allocation of public moneys and the review of public spending programmes. Members of this House will, in common with Members of the Dáil, have received copies of the Government's discussion paper "A Better Way to Plan the Nation's Finances", which outlines the Government's proposals for reform. Arrangements are being made for an early debate of these proposals in the Lower House.
As the Dáil has been informed, it is our hope that these proposals, which concern the procedures of that House most closely, will be considered and responded to, not just from the standpoint of party political advantage, but from the concern which I know is shared on all sides to achieve better control of the public finances.
The Government are also determined to tackle the structural deficiencies in the economy, including the imbalance in public finances. Later in the year we propose to publish a national plan directed at this task. The Government's planning will focus on improving our competitiveness, on intensifying our export drive and on other ways of achieving a better balance between exports and imports. Another vital issue is, of course, bridging the gap between Government current expenditure and revenue. A third element will be the reform of the public service with a view to improving efficiency.
Finally, while I do not wish to pontificate to this distinguished House, I think that, as public representatives, we must give leadership in our approach to public finance. We must explain the realities. Sooner or later we will have to balance the books and we may have to take some painful though positive action along the way. That is what good accounting is all about, whether in business or in Government. Accordingly, I look forward to a stimulating debate on the Appropriation Act, 1981, and thank the House for giving me the opportunity to make these comments at this stage.
Before I call Senator Honan, I would like to say that it has been agreed to adjourn for lunch from 1 p.m. until 2.30 p.m.
I welcome the Minister of State to this House. It is the responsibility of the Minister for Finance to be here but since his appointment, the Minister of State, Deputy Desmond has been a much more realistic and probably a far better Minister. If this Government last long enough, I presume he will be promoted.
I welcome this debate but I will ask a question first. Will the speeches made here today or tomorrow be taken seriously by any Minister of State or by the Government as a whole? Is this just an exercise of letting Senators let off steam? We seem to have little power and we are not taken seriously by some sections of the other House. What we say here should be listened to. Some Ministers have done so in the past. I know this Minister will do so, but will his colleagues?
The first point I will make concerns the youth and our young population. We should have confidence in them rather than feel that they are a halter around our necks. The youth are not impressed with our style of bringing in Bills, such as the Youth Employment Agency Bill, and appointing boards of directors. I am waiting with interest to learn the composition of that board of directors to see how many of them will have a clue about our youth. I still believe the same amount of finance will be given back into the field of youth, regardless of that Bill. However, I welcome that Bill with certain reservations.
Young people have become disillusioned with politicians and with quite a bit of the legislation going through the Houses. If you talk or serve with them, as I have the privilege of doing, they will tell you that unless there are pressure groups no legislation will be introduced. I am not confining that to the present Cabinet. We in Government were also inclined to bring in legislation because of pressure. I do not think legislation brought into either House under pressure ever proved to be good legislation.
I will mention now all the promises made by this famous Coalition and the progress they have made in their seven months in office. When in Opposition you can tell the Government what to do and how to run the country. But when in office it is not quite as easy to do all the things you said from the other side of the House need to be done. When Fianna Fáil left Government I understand we had 120,000 unemployed. The figure quoted yesterday evening was 141,000. So we now have 21,000 more unemployed. I would like to say more on that, but the Minister of State, Deputy Desmond, educated me yesterday evening. I listened to him with attention when he said nobody should score points, because everybody should look seriously at how this unemployment problem could be solved. He is one of the few Ministers in the Coalition Government to whom I listen. I do not listen to too many of them, but I am sure he does not care if I listen to him.
I ask the Tánaiste to stop throwing in the towel. In The Irish Times of 21 November 1981 not alone was he telling us today's figure, but he was telling us how many more would be unemployed in the months to come. What an attitude for a Deputy Prime Minister to adopt. I was amazed because I did not think he was an immature politician at his stage. Politicians usually do not throw in the towel too quickly. I do not have to go too far from where I am standing to prove that. He said the Government can fall on the unemployment question. If he went down the country he would be told about a few more aspects in relation to which the Government might be put out of office.
I want to make reference to the magnificent job the Coalition did in providing jobs for the boys. They could teach us a lesson. They appointed special advisers, press officers, information personnel. You name it, they made the jobs. What did it cost this nation to repay this faceless, magnificent team who helped Fine Gael to get into power? Labour, who were foolish enough to go into Coalition with them, may pay the price in the future, but I hope not. I do not admit that we have any faults, but I do admit that we never looked after the people who put us into power. We were in Government for a long time, but if you look at the nation today you will see that many top jobs are held by people who support the other political parties. A Fine Gael TD from Cork said lately that he wanted more action and more money, less talk and fewer promises.
Now that Fine Gael and Labour are in Government, what have we got? When we were in Government they could tell us what we were not doing. There was a man on "The Late Late Show" who could run the whole country on his own but he could not even get elected to the confraternity if he tried. I criticise "The Late Late Show" for giving him a platform and not giving an equal amount of time to politicians. Our image is low enough at the moment and RTE should not give politics a worse image than it has. The said gentleman would not even be elected to the confraternity. These hurlers on the ditch are fabulous people. They would run this country and Europe also though they would not be able to get enough votes to be elected to an urban council. It is relatively easy to score points but much more difficult to produce policies.
I think the Senator has demonstrated that very well.
The Senator can make his speech later. The people I am talking of know how hard it is to implement policies. I am sure they will produce some, that is if they survive.
I will only make reference to one of the promises, that is the famous £9.60. It is now going to be paid but it is extraordinary that the Government had to advertise again in the papers asking people to apply for money. I do not think that ever happened before. In the end they only got 19,000 applications out of a possible 350,000 applicants. In other words, 331,000 women realised they had been conned before the election with this famous £9.60 and, consequently, did not bother to apply.
The question of exports is very important. It is a matter with which the Minister of State is very concerned. He referred yesterday to entrepreneurs in industry. I happened to have two brothers directly involved in a firm to which he was referring but I would not describe them as entrepreneurs. About 35 years ago they set up their own firm but if they had not been dedicated to their native area they would not have continued. This was a family firm. They were committed to the interests of the south Tipperary, Kilkenny and Waterford areas. I cannot imagine foreigners continuing to commit themselves in that way and working as hard as my brothers worked.
Management must be prepared to involve themselves totally in their industries. I am speaking from personal experience of a firm that unfortunately I am not in but into which has gone 35 years of hard work. That is the only answer to success in Irish industry. That firm export their products to Germany and other places. They have to go to those places to promote their radiators. They have to sell hard and at the right price. The quality must be right, too, and delivery must be on time. It is similar to an army situation whereby if the chief of staff and his senior officers are right, you do not always have to be looking over your shoulder to know if the sergeants and corporals are coming behind you and serving. If we do not seriously concern ourselves about our exports we could have another 90,000 to 100,000 jobs vulnerable. Our exports are not just industrial. The agriculture field is very important too and one which I am deeply concerned about at the moment, coming from rural Ireland.
As I serve in the local authority housing area I ask the Minister if he would be so kind as to take a look at the enormous legal costs involved on acquiring land and houses? The money which was allocated in the Housing Bill is tremendously expensive, very high-cost money. People cannot afford the exorbitant legal costs. There are people who are not in a position to use political muscle. I refer to such persons as the handicapped, for instance, who cannot go out and march in support of their modest demands on the community. They are left behind. I appreciate what has been done in this field but it is not at all adequate or equal to what has been done in other fields. If it were not for the efforts of those of us who serve voluntarily they would be left even further behind. I have been involved in this area for the past 18 years. The resources required to develop and make significant changes in the service for mentally and physically handicapped persons must come now from the Government. We need funds as well as plans. We might get our needs and priorities right in doling out the resources.
I would ask the Minister of State to ask his colleague, the Minister for Health, who is an excellent Minister, if she would see her way to having an eight to a ten-year plan for the mentally handicapped.
I know the money is not there. I am big enough to say it is not there, but if we commence to plan now, when the money comes on stream the Government of the day may be able to put more money into the field to serve these people. There was a good deal of emphasis on the handicapped during the Year of the Disabled but for them every year is the same.
I must pay tribute to the Army, the Air Corps the ESB, the hospitals, the doctors and the Garda for their work in the recent bad weather. I congratulate the Minister for Defence on the way he went about his business and in conjunction with the Chief of Staff did what had to be done. The Minister has personal experience of what Army life is all about. He acted very sensibly during this difficult time.
I should like to pay tribute to the Army. Whatever the crisis may be, whether it is frost, snow, oil or the Border it is the Army who are called on. I would ask the Minister for Finance to provide in the budget for whatever moneys are required by the Minister for Defence for the Army. In past budgets it was the pattern of Governments that if there was a cut to be made it was made in the area of defence. This Ministry was often recognised in past Cabinets as a junior Ministry whereas it is a most important portfolio. I say to the Minister for Finance, for God's sake and for the sake of this nation give the Minister for Defence the money he needs for the Army and the Air Corps.
I want to refer to the extraordinary situation in which the nation found itself in the crisis. We had no Taoiseach, no Tánaiste and no President when the crisis struck. The Leader of Fianna Fáil was accused of scoring points when he made reference to the three of them being out of the country. I did not think that the three of them should be out of the country. Two days afterwards we had the crisis. It was a good job that we had a Minister for Defence of the calibre that he is. We had nobody running the country. It is marvellous that it could be run without any of them. Then the Tánaiste came back and got a taste of being Leader. I suppose he will not get any further.
Everyone in public life should recognise our — I would not go as far as using the word "crisis" which the Minister, Deputy Desmond, used — financial problems. Instead of scoring points against each other we should work together to try to correct those problems, for the betterment of this nation which we all sincerely and dearly love.
I concur wholeheartedly with the closing remarks of Senator Honan. I should like to congratulate the Minister of State for his admirably terse introduction to this debate which was extremely low key but put very much in context the motion before us and the problems which are facing the country. It has been the case in the past that the debate on the Appropriation Bill in the Seanad has been the opportunity for a discussion on the background to the Bill and the financial management of the country, given the fact we are discussing such staggering sums of money, which are raised from the taxpayers. Unfortunately the sums raised are not enough to meet the way this country thinks it must be run. In other years—and I have taken the opportunity to look at Appropriation Bill debates in the last few years — we have had some extremely fine discussions on economic policies generally and the background to existing financial situations. However, I do not feel either capable or willing to involve myself in a long history which has led to our present difficult situation.
I should like to quote from a speech made to the nation on 9 January 1980, almost two years ago, which could be the speech any of us might make today. That speech sums up the financial policies and philosophies which lie behind the present policies of this Government. The interesting thing is that this speech was not made by a member of this Government; it was made by a former Taoiseach. In that speech, which was reported in full in the following day's newspapers, a man was addressing the nation, he was the person who we felt was going to take the country by the scruff of the neck and set it back on the right road. You might say that the country held its breath because something new had appeared on the scene. The Opposition at the time felt, though they did not say it, that they now had an opponent more formidable than ever before and that this was going to be an impossible man to beat. In that speech we were urged to embark on a new departure in the management of our financial structures and of the country generally. In ringing tones we were told that, as a community, we were living way beyond our means and at a rate which was not justified by the amount of goods and services we were producing. He said we had been borrowing enormous amounts of money at a rate which just could not continue, that it was far too high a rate and that we would have to cut down on Government spending. There was going to be an enormous programme to attack the whole problem of industrial relations. We were going to have some reality. He said we should make 1980 the year in which we would find a better way of doing things.
In last year's debate on the Appropriation Bill the opening speech from the Opposition side of the House was made by the now Deputy, then Senator Paul Connaughton. I want to quote one sentence from his contribution, which was given in his usual colourful style, with a couple of mixed metaphors, but which is a fairly clear and fluent summing up of the situation at the end of a year, the beginning of which was marked by such a stirring call to action. As reported at column 672, volume 95, of the Official Report of 18 December 1980, Senator Connaughton said:
In the last budget, the Government showed the white feather.... The Taoiseach in his wisdom saw fit to hide his head and allow the tornado to blow through.
As the Minister of State mentioned in his opening remarks, far too high a proportion of the moneys we are now discussing in the Appropriation Act has come from borrowing. In the last few years borrowing became a way of life in this country. It did not start in the last two years, of course. It began some considerable time ago and has gradually been let slide. It was momentarily halted in 1977 and then received a huge boost when Fianna Fáil came into power. Government borrowing could be fairly described as our main growth industry. It is quite clear that no economist worth his salt doubts that the evil day of reckoning has finally arrived. Three simple figures will illustrate what I mean.
I do not intend to launch into a lot of figures in this debate because one can get rather punch drunk on figures. These are the figures as given in the Central Bank quarterly report to December 1981, which we have just received. Table 6, page 8 of the appendix to that report shows that our total external debt on 31 December 1979 was £1,542 million. That was nine short days before the speech urging us to change our ways was made by the former Taoiseach. On 31 December 1980 our total external debt was £2,207 million. On 31 December 1981 our total external debt was £3,725 million. In two short years our total foreign debt more than doubled from an already unacceptable high level. Those figures really sum it all up in terms of where we are in our borrowing.
I believe there is a new mood in the Opposition party. There is a new questioning of financial policy and a new sense of responsibility in the Opposition party. It is absolutely essential that we all get down to encouraging responsibility in our own groups and welcoming it when we see it in other groups. One of the reasons for that is the fact that our financial situation has been allowed to get into the state it is in now. We should reflect on our responsibilities as part of the political process which manages or tries to manage this country. We should reflect on what contribution financial management has made to the degree of cynicism about politics and politicians which is undoubtedly abroad, and which was referred to fleetingly by Senator Honan. There is an alarming degree of cynicism and rejection of Irish politics and politicians. We should reflect on what blame for that attaches to us all. We should look for the faults in the system which make for the kind of financial mismanagement which has brought us to the state we are in.
The Minister of State mentioned the programme published by the Government for a better way to manage the nation's finances. That sort of programme must be taken extremely seriously and must be acted upon in a cross-party manner so that we will never have to face the people again in this situation. The financial mismanagement has been a sort of performance by politicians in front of voters. It has been a sort of competition between daring and prudence. It seems to me that in the past considerable number of years prudence has never won. The reason it has never won is that the rewards of daring are immediate in terms of political power and all the gratification that brings. The rewards of prudence are not so attractive. The penalties for the daring of political parties are not being paid in the here and now. They will be paid by future generations. It is time to call a halt to that kind of fantastic dance.
The respect for politics and politicians which I believe is at an all-time low is reflected in serious political comment as well as in a lack of serious political comment. I omit political satire which sometimes is confused with political comment. Political satire has its place in the strongest and best run societies. It may annoy or amuse us depending on who is on the receiving end. Serious political comment — of which there is very little — finds politics wanting, and the lack of serious political comment is in itself a comment on our political system.
Senator Honan mentioned a recent television programme. I did not see it but I have had many reports on it. When one hears comments on a major programme on television one realises how subjective people are because one usually gets widely varying points of view which would make one wonder if they were all watching the same programme. Like Senator Honan I was politically engaged that evening and could not watch it but, to my amazement, there seems to be an extraordinary degree of unanimity in the reports about that programme on which there was outright condemnation of politics, politicians and the system. Apparently there was a rather weak response from the politicians there. I do not know who they were. It would seem to me that if the response was weak it is because there are very few answers. Our recent history — and I do not mean just the past couple of years — has brought the political situation to a point where it is difficult to defend. Perhaps RTE might make a videotape of that programme available to all of us here so that we might get a whiff of some kind of reality, or at least an indication of the question marks which were planted in people's minds by that programme.
I believe 1982 sees the political system on trial. I hope 1982 will also see the beginning of new standards in managing our public affairs. This is necessary because of the crisis of the present proportions. I want to quote from The Irish Times of Tuesday 19 January 1982:
The crisis which has brought about this watershed is the effective bankruptcy of the Government of the Republic of Ireland. One definition of a bankrupt is a person who cannot meet the interest payments on his debts, let alone repay them. For the past year, this has been true of the Government. For the past twelve months the Minister for Finance has been compelled to borrow to pay interest on our foreign debts. This is the first time a native Irish Government has found itself in this position since the foundation of the State. Other crises have of course come and passed but this is a new kind of crisis — a financial crisis.
The aim and purpose of our efforts can be summed up quite simply: to regain our national economic independence in order to solve our principal economic problem ourselves. That principal economic problem is, of course, unemployment. Servicing foreign debt drastically reduces a government's freedom of action. It drastically reduces a government's freedom of action to promote economic activity at home and so reduce unemployment. I believe that what we must be about is regaining our economic independence.
I would like to mention some details in the Appropriation Act. The remarks which I have been making about the status of politicians in the public eye brings me to the item for salaries and expenses of the Houses of the Oireachtas. I believe very strongly that part of the battle to restore the credibility of parliamentary democracy in Ireland must be fought in this House. Senator Honan questioned whether any notice would be taken of anything that Senators said today but I would like to say to the Senator that at least let us make sure that we take notice ourselves of what is said today. If we achieved even that much it would be a great step forward.
It seems to me that this House is in need of reform, it is in need of modernisation of procedures and new procedures. The way the House proceeds and the way it is selected needs to be looked at. The principle at stake here is the credibility of parliamentary democracy. We see every day quite clearly the disastrous consequences either of negation of parliamentary democracy or the consequences of an extremely weak democratic system. In this House just before Christmas we debated the breakdown of ordinary life in Poland and we have had brought home to us the tragedies existing in El Salvador. There are many other parts of the world who have met head on the problems of a breakdown of parliamentary democracy caused by weakness among politicians and lack of leadership.
On the Seanad Order Paper there is a motion in the names of Senators Ross and John A. Murphy. The motion reads:
That Seanad Éireann is of the opinion that the powers and functions of the Seanad and the methods of election of its members are in need of urgent review.
Because that motion is on the Order Paper I do not intend to speak at length about the Seanad itself except to say that I hope it will be found possible very soon to take that motion and to debate it. Every Member of this House has a responsibility towards Irish democracy to consider reforms and new ideas which will make the Seanad a distinctly valuable arm of the Oireachtas, with a strong individual character and with an unmistakable contribution to make to Irish democracy. I am quite sure that there are many Senators on all sides of this House who have ideas and thoughts on this matter. This is the 14th Seanad since the Constitution set up this House in 1937 and I hope that the 14th Seanad will be the one which broke through into modernisation, into reality, into new ideas. I would like to invite every Senator in the House to make a contribution towards the revitalisation of the Seanad. Our achievement in development of this House will be the measure of our seriousness as politicians and the measure of our worthiness to be described as Senators.
I would like to make a passing reference to the figure here for the salaries and expenses of the Central Statistics Office which carried out the census. All of us are looking forward with great interest to the results of the recent census. I add my voice once more to those who ask for a more realistic view of marital breakdown in this country by including a further category of "Separated" in the column "Marital Status". Surely it is not very much to ask that we should know from a census how many marriages have broken down and how many people are separated. We have made this plea before and when in opposition many Members of this House called for this to be done. I hope this Government will see that it is done.
Senator Honan mentioned briefly the recent weather crisis. In mentioning the Minister for Finance's figures here, I believe it was an extremely suitable and realistic gesture to give double fuel vouchers for the month of January. That was a good response to a situation which caused the most hardship to old people. It was extremely heartening to see the response of ordinary people in this country to the plight of the elderly who live alone. I am sure public representatives found that when they took the responsibility on themselves to look into the position of old people they found that neighbours, friends and relatives in the area had already visited those people and made sure they were being looked after. I congratulate the media in that respect; they made a very strong point right from the beginning of reminding people that the really vulnerable were the elderly who lived alone.
I would also like to mention the question of the famous £9.60. I do not agree with the figure of 19,000 women applying for the allowance. The final figure will be in the region of 45,000 to 50,000 people; it is above 40,000 at the moment.
I have had discussions with officials in the Department regarding that number. They say that an outstandingly huge number applying for it would have brought the figure to about 80,000 for a new scheme which was not very clearly understood by a great number of people. They had hoped before the weather crisis that the final series of advertisements would have brought the figure up somewhere in the region of 50,000 to 60,000. The bad weather intervened and the Sunday newspapers which carried the final advertisements were received by an average of 30 per cent of the population. I have made inquiries about a possible renewal of the extension date but a further extension has not been found to be possible because of the time limit in getting the information tabulated and ready for the beginning of the tax year. However, I understand there has been an informal extension, that the 14 January date which was the closing date, will not be rigidly adhered to by the Department, that women may continue to send in the forms and that the Department will adopt a lenient approach.
That should hardly be necessary.
I was not responsible for the 250,000 tons of snow that fell. On several occasions recently I have taken part in radio programmes on this question. My office has been inundated by requests for this form. I can hardly keep pace with the inquiries being made. It is true to say that the officials were right in their assessment of a new scheme being slow to get off the ground. Having said that, I want to put it on record that the proposal to give the £9.60 was never sold by the Fine Gael Party as a present from the Government to the housewives of this country. When I was selling the general idea of a change of government from door to door in the constituency in which I worked during the general election campaign I made it quite clear that the scheme involved a simple transfer, on an optional basis, that if the wife wished to have a transfer of her husband's tax credit to herself, it would be for her to exercise the option. The vast majority of women to whom I spoke or chatted on their doorsteps, many accompanied by their husbands, said: yes they understood that. Some felt: no, they would not bother, they did not really see the necessity for it. Others were rather pleased with the idea, they grasped the idea quite clearly that for the first time in this country a wife was deemed to have a right to some part of the family income, that for the first time here the married person's tax allowance — given to breadwinners because they are married — was the property of the other spouse, if that spouse wished to claim it. I was always quite clear on the exact gesture involved there. I believe it was a significant and worthwhile one. The fact that it has caused so much debate and elicited the most extraordinary series of advertisements from the present Opposition when they were fighting their losing battle in the election was sufficient proof that it stung. They proceeded to insert advertisements saying: the Government are robbing Peter to pay Paula, making it quite clear that Fianna Fáil did not consider that women had any right to family income. This was a colossal blunder and was subsequently admitted to be so by Fianna Fáil people.
I am quite happy about the £9.60 scheme. I believe it was an absolutely right thing to do. I fully understand the thinking behind it. I believe it constituted a new departure. The fact that a huge proportion of the married women of Ireland have not applied for it seems to reflect the fact that a great many of our married women felt that while they understood the gesture — and I believe voted for the Government because of that gesture — it did not necessarily apply to them. I hope that a large proportion of the people applying for that £9.60 will be the people with a very low income who stand to gain overall from the scheme. I hope there will be ways in which the proportion of women applying for the scheme from that group can be ascertained because we tried to emhpasise that point continuously.
I should like to mention the Attorney-General's Office. In doing so perhaps it should be coupled with the Government's constitutional crusade. When we met last October the first thing we did in this House was to have a debate on certain ideas which had been put forward by the Taoiseach, ideas concerning a change of direction vis-à-vis our thinking about ourselves and about the North of Ireland. I believe that was an outstandingly good and useful debate. Indeed I believe the Taoiseach's contribution to that debate was an historic one. The reaction from people in the North of Ireland was extremely instructive and I believe marked a step forward in our relations with the Northern part of this country, that it constituted a step forward, a breakthrough — which will be realised only gradually — towards a reconciliation of the two parts of this island. The question has been raised whether the so-called constitutional crusade has come to a full stop. I believe that any fears in that respect are groundless. Indeed the Attorney-General's first step in setting up the Constitutional Review Committee should constitute sufficient proof of that. Like many people in Ireland, I deplored the omission of any representative of one half of this country on that Constitutional Review Committee when it was set up.
The Government, quite rightly, rectified that error and appointed a distinguished woman lawyer to the committee. However, I hope that constitutional reform will never be seen either by the Government or the people as something that a small group of lawyers will effect by themselves. A Constitutional Review Committee must purely consist of a group of lawyers who will examine the mechanics of constitutional reform. Obviously, the question of constitutional reform is an extremely wide one, one which constitutes a social matter of the greatest importance which must involve far more than a small group of lawyers working behind closed doors. The Attorney-General has made it clear in a recent radio interview that he sees the involvement of much wider sections of society in that constitutional reform.
I want to advert briefly to the office of the Minister for Justice and applaud the fact that in the Appropriation Act, 1981, there is no money for the provision of a scaffold in Ireland. We passed a Bill abolishing the death penalty in this House. I congratulate the Minister for Justice, not only on having brought that Bill before us but on standing over it since under severe pressure. The whole question of crime and punishment and of prisons is not a simple matter of saying to society: the way to get rid of crime is to put its perpetrators behind closed doors. That is quite obvious. In the appalling escalation of crime of all kinds here we must remind ourselves that there is a whole range of crime — which I might describe as middle-class crime — which is, if you like, far more socially acceptable than, say, somebody throwing a brick through a car window and stealing a handbag. I refer to tax avoidance, to sharp business practices, to the extraordinary attitude of society, and the criminal system, towards the drunken driver. Those are anti-social crimes, crimes which do as much damage to the fabric of society as the vandal or petty criminal who is an easy scapegoat for the ills of society.
In regard to expenses in connection with prisons, I hope we are not talking about a prison for 100 women in this country, which would be a joke. The average number of women imprisoned at any one time is 24. The vast majority of those women are in prison for very short periods for minor crimes such as drunkenness, prostitution and petty shop-lifting. To consider building a brand new prison with accommodation for 100 prisoners at a cost of something like £8 million is and always was an absolutely ludicrous way of looking at the problem of female crime. I sincerely hope the Minister for Justice is not considering embarking on that course.
The Minister for the Environment brought before us an extremely important Bill — the Housing Finance Agency Bill — which represents an imaginative and dramatic breakthrough in our housing problems. We must take note of that step forward and wish the Department of the Environment well in implementing that Bill. One matter which it is necessary to mention and which involves the Department of the Environment's enormous expenditure of taxpayers' money is the whole question of the control of land prices. Again, there are motions on the Seanad Order Paper in this respect and I hope that they will be given a very full debate in this House before very long.
We would prefer the Bill.
I am sure that we would prefer the Bill, indeed. I hope that the whole question of the control of land prices will be tackled. Extraordinary and quite unjustifiable profits from the taxpayers' pocket are used to provide housing. I hope that, once and for all, this Government will grasp that nettle and bring before us legislation on this matter.
I want to mention a very important area of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, that of RTE. The time has come when we must ask ourselves when are we going to make the breakthrough into rationalisation of the air waves. There was a time, and I admit it quite freely, when I believed that RTE should have the monopoly of our air waves. I am not a subscriber to the view that it is a mortal sin for politicians to change their minds. I have changed my mind, having studied the question a little more closely over the last few years. Can we afford RTE 2 television? Why should taxpayers' money in the form of a £45 licence fee pay for the provision of pop music all day long on RTE 2 when other radio stations are providing a very good service in an uncontrolled manner?
The Government should face up to the whole question of independent commercial broadcasting and set up very quickly an independent broadcasting authority. Genuine, controlled radio stations should be allowed to operate all over this country, controlled in such a way that we will know what is going on, and they should be answerable to the Government. There should be an independent broadcasting authority of extremely responsible people in control of this burgeoning activity, because Ireland has reached the age of independent commercial broadcasting whether we like it or not and whether RTE like it or not. RTE 2 television has not proved to be what it was intended to be and a whole new look needs to be taken at both radio and television, to see what role privatisation has in this area. It is time action was taken.
One area in the field of foreign affairs must be mentioned. Recently I had the honour to attend a meeting of the Women's Political Association in Dublin, which was addressed by Madame Simone Veil, who yesterday finished her term of office as President of the European Parliament. She made a very strong speech detailing her worry about the condition of women in the European Community. Ireland has a role to play in making sure that the structures dealing with the whole question of women in the European Community are updated. The advent of Greece, Spain and Portugal to full membership will put an enormous strain on the existing offices dealing with specific women's areas. I hope that the impetus given to these areas by our first Commissioner, now President Hillery, will be carried through by our present Commissioner and that our Minister for Foreign Affairs will also push very hard for this improvement.
Madame Veil said, "We cannot overlook the fact that in all the countries of the European Economic Community the rate of female unemployment is much higher than that of male unemployment, nor can one overlook the respective proportions of men and women in the least skilled, and hence least well-paid, jobs." This has, obviously, been said very often, but it must be mentioned again and continue to be mentioned. There was a small encouraging development in the direct elections to the European Parliament in that the 69 women who were elected to the European Parliament denote a higher percentage of female representation than in any parliament except Denmark's. That was certainly one hopeful sign. That is still, of course, an extremely and unacceptably small percentage.
Unfortunately, the other EEC institutions have not followed suit and have not reflected that advance made by the European Parliament. Despite widespread wishes expressed on the renewal of the Commission on the last occasion, it was not found possible to appoint even one woman to the European Commission. We still have, at the top and directing the affairs of the EEC, an all-male body. The general secretariat of the Parliament is increasing daily and out of approximately 3,000 staff, there are virtually no women in posts of responsibility. The same situation exists in the Commission in Brussels where there is only one woman director general and two women directors, out of a staff of 8,000.
It is an extraordinary comment on the running of the European Community that it should so blatantly avoid putting its own house in order as to the whole question of affirmative action for women at the higher levels. Our Minister for Foreign Affairs has a responsibility, for the sake of the women of this country as well as for the women of other countries, to make sure that the procedures are strengthened for reform in women's areas and to make sure that the specific offices dealing with women's affairs are greatly increased in number and given far more powers.
This Government have confidence in the young people of Ireland. We should all have enormous confidence in the country in general. We have so many natural advantages both in our people and in our climate, in our geography, in our position in Europe, in our industrial base, in the fact that we share the major commercial language. While expressing this confidence we also have to admit that there are many things that have to be put right here. Even in an extremely well ordered society without our severe problems there are always many things to be put right. In Ireland at the moment there are more things to be put right than there would usually be because of the disorder we have allowed ourselves to get into. I detect a change in the public mood. I detect a willingness on the part of people to listen to what the problems are. If that willingness to listen can be harnessed we may make a breakthrough. The extent to which a changing public's perception is harnessed now will be a measure of the capacity of politicians of all parties. The Opposition and the Government share a responsibility to harness this changing public perception and to go along with it in the most honest manner and, above all to keep our integrity.
There are going to be real but difficult choices placed before the people. Earlier I said that I believe the Opposition have a feeling of responsibility. I also believe that the parties in Government and the Independents in politics have a feeling of responsibility now. There is no doubt that if any major political movement or influential group in society pretends that there is an easy way out of our problems, the people will not respond. They will reject all politics and we would be on a very slippery slope if that happened. A restatement by Government and Opposition of the problems facing the country and the proposed solutions is what is needed now. We must underline the gravity of the present situation while not ceasing to remind the people that we can get ourselves out of these problems if we work together.
It was not in my intention to refer to a political side of things which has already been touched on by Senator Honan and which has been elaborated on in detail by Senator Hussey. That is the £9.60 for housewives. Senator Honan quoted from The Irish Press of 9 December 1981, that, at that stage 19,000 women out of the 350,000 eligible had applied for the £9.60. We accept from Senator Hussey that that figure has increased and will possibly finish at 45,000. Senator Hussey has tried to make the case that this has been a success for the Government. But 45,000 is less than 14 per cent of those eligible. It could not possibly be argued that that is a success for the Government. I would say that it is a failure. It was a con job from the word go. It was a deceitful gimmick and even if 45,000 housewives apply for it that is a total loss of face for the Government. Whilst I accept what Senator Hussey has said in regard to her canvass in her area, I cannot say the same for the other areas, certainly my own town. It was sold as if a cheque for £9.60 would be delivered to housewives on the following Monday after the election; it was sold to support the Fine Gael candidate — not the Labour candidate as the Coalition candidate — and it has now proved a hopeless gimmick that the housewives have seen through.
I am surprised that anyone could try to make a case out of this failure.
I will move on to the area of health. The Government who cut back on the health services are totally irresponsible. Hospitals, doctors and surgeons are, unfortunately, necessary and I hope that no cutback will take place in this particular area. In my own Midland Health Board area there was a loss of 160 jobs, which is most unfortunate. I hope that the health boards will receive whatever money is necessary to keep the services going in the years ahead. On a local level, in Athlone we are very concerned that our hospital, which is only a district hospital, has not been upgraded in some way. We in Athlone are asking the Minister and the health boards and Comhairle na nOspidéal that the orthopaedic unit be set up in the building already established in Athlone which is an excellent building structurally and one which we are extremely proud of because in its limited capacity it has served the people very well. I hope that when the time comes the Minister will give serious consideration to setting up an orthopaedic unit in our Midland Health Board region. The building is already there. The cost of providing a building in some other county of the Midland Health Board area would be approximately £8 million. There is a building there and what we are saying is, use it and put the orthopaedic unit there.
I read recently that the Mater Hospital in Dublin have asked for £1 million to enable them to carry out more heart surgery in that hospital. I had a heart operation and would like to compliment all the people in the Mater for the great work they are doing. If this money would enable them to do 1,000 extra operations per year it would be well spent. I appeal to the Minister when she gives out grants to earmark £1 million immediately for that fine institution. Heart disease and heart operations are on the increase in Ireland. Our way of living generally is contributing to that. If that kind of money were made available for Cork and particularly the Mater Hospital it would be money well spent.
With regard to units for child leukaemia sufferers, I read recently that a mere £100,000 can save the lives of eight out of ten child leukaemia sufferers. If that is the case — and this has been said by an eminent medical person — the Minister for Health should have no choice but to give that £100,000 for the immediate provision of that unit. Any parent who has a child with leukaemia would consider £100,000 to be a ridiculously low figure. If it can save, as the top medical people say, eight out of ten lives, it is money well spent and must be seen as a priority in the Department of Health.
The question of roads always interests public representatives. The Estimate last year provided £84 million. As the traffic increases the need for better roads is obvious. The very fact that now tax is back on motor cars would indicate that there is a real case for increasing the figure of £84 million. The relief road and bridge for Athlone are obviously vital for that town but it is a national problem really. It is the gateway to the west. Anybody who travels regularly from Dublin to Galway or from Galway to Dublin must know the chaos that traffic jams create at the bridge and in Athlone generally. Athlone has been at the top of the priority list for road expenditure. This project is a priority. The programme of roads for the 1980s clearly mentions Athlone. We hope we will continue to get money until the work is completed whether it takes two years, five years or seven years. It must be done and money must continue to pour into the bridge and the relief road for Athlone, otherwise people will simply stop moving from Galway to Dublin and vice-versa.
Housing is always important. There should not be any cutbacks in housing. The local authority housing problem continues to be a very real problem. The programme in this regard should not be interfered with in any way. Again on a local issue, we have a Beechfield scheme of 26 houses and the second stage of a midland marine scheme in Athlone. We hope that money will be available when we need it for these important works. Building a house is important for a family, not to mention the fact that it will give much needed employment, not just in County Westmeath but throughout the length and breadth of Ireland.
I understand that this year the increase for services for local authorities will be 15 per cent. While it might seem generous enough inflation is running at something like 23 per cent. It is most unfair that local authorities have to provide for, say, the upkeep of courthouses in which they have no real involvement. They must pay for drainage schemes, VECs and other statutory demands over which they have no control. This should be looked at when the Minister for the Environment is considering his programme of refinancing for local authorities. It does not make sense that, for example, an area of north Kerry should have to provide for a drainage scheme in south Kerry or in Westmeath where we are providing for drainage of the River Inny. The Inny barely touches Westmeath yet we have to hand out something like £62,000 per annum and we are not told where or how it is spent. We just have to provide it. People in Westmeath hardly know that the Inny exists. Why are all these items part of the expenditure programme for a local authority? It is time these items were taken away from the estimates for local authorities and that the local authorities should deal with matters clearly under their control and nothing else.
Tourism is important and I should like to see a further input into the tourist area. The River Shannon has boating and fishing amenities which are probably the best in the world. I hope that over the years it will continue to flourish in this regard. Local authorities are discharging raw sewage into the River Shannon, which is not very pleasant. It would cost many millions of pounds to eliminate this problem. That cannot come from local authorities, it must come from central funds. Possibly it is something the appropriate Minister will look at in the years ahead.
The area of health should not be interfered with in any way. More money, if possible, should be given to local authorities. The questions of power and control of local authorities and whether local democracy can continue in the way it has in the past, are all important and much finance will be needed in this area.
I would like to welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Finance to the House and to thank him for his opening speech in relation to this Bill. I know the Minister in question very well at this stage as a party colleague, and it gave him no pleasure to be able to make the devastating analysis of the economic and fiscal performance of the last twelve months. Indeed he was extremely abstemious in the way in which he presented what could be a damaging case. I would also like to refer to the speech made by the Leader of the House, Senator Hussey, and to end with what I think is the plea implicit in the appeal of the Minister, Deputy Desmond, to this House in his opening speech.
The Leader of the House said that 1982 would be the year in which our political system would go on trial. Another quote of hers was that the young people of Ireland along with the vast majority of the population generally had become disillusioned with Irish politics and Irish politicians. She concurred with the optimistic sentiments of Senator Honan regarding the future of this country and the faith that the politicians of her political party have in the young people of Ireland. It is quite obvious that both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have an unbounded faith in the young people of Ireland, unlimited indeed. They proceeded in their election manifestoes in 1977 and 1981 to saddle them with an enormous debt which only the young people will be able to repay because we will all be long dead and gone. That is the first effective measure of the faith that the established political parties and their manifestoes have in the young people of Ireland. Unfortunately many young people are beginning to realise that.
Senator Honan said that young people have become disillusioned with politicians. As a comparatively young person and relatively young politician in this House I have become considerably disillusioned with the young people. On getting the vote at 18 in 1973 which they first exercised in the 1977 election, they, a generation better educated than we were, better fed and housed than previous generations and with access to more media and more information, were bought off with pop songs, paper hats and hot air balloons. We should not be too surprised at that because when the young people got the vote in America in 1968 they rushed to the poles and elected Mr. Richard Nixon as their President. In Britain when the voting age was lowered to 18, their first democratic wise choice was to elect Mr. Edward Heath and the Conservative Party. The fact that the young people in this country similarly elected conservative governments should explode the myth that young people, because they are young people, will somehow or other provide us with a refreshing approach to the problems of this country. Similarly, on the second point that Senator Hussey made, the belief that a woman because she is a woman will improve the standing of all women in society is rather naive.
I never said that.
The Senator should be allowed to continue.
She did not say it, but it was implicit in the arithmetical comparisons that because women were not in certain positions the position of women was downgraded.
The men have not improved it.
As the Leader of the House and my party know, I pursue social and economic justice for all classes and both sexes. It is naive simply to present it in terms of just one gender or another. Lest anybody should have any doubt about that, I suggest that the role of some women in politics as women has not led to the improvement of the position of women in a way that many of us would uphold. I do not wish to divert down that track, but the core of what I am going to say to the House today is that if we continue to be preoccupied with quantity rather than quality then we will fail in the task in front of us, that of trying to resolve the problems of this country.
The Leader of the House rightly drew our attention to the necessity to respond in this House and in the Oireachtas to the way in which we try to run this democracy. It is particularly appropriate now that the Minister of State, Deputy Desmond, and his senior colleague, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Bruton, are both personally responsible in their own respective parties for drafting the only serious documents that relate to the reform of the Oireachtas, both Dáil and Seanad. I hope that we will see some serious movement towards implementing such reports and not simply update them or talk about them. In that context I welcome warmly the report published by the Minister's Department A Better Way to Plan the Nation's Finances. Until we have that kind of system and this democratic assembly has the power to question in advance expenditure which will be obtained either by way of taxes or loans for which ultimately this legislature will itself be responsible, until we can become involved before the decision is taken rather than being used as rubber stamps by the Government of the day afterwards, parliamentary democracy in this country is at serious risk.
Having participated in that programme to which Senator Hussey referred, I believe that the option in terms of Irish politics will be similar to what has happened in America where approximately only 50 per cent of those eligible to vote in the last presidential election bothered to exercise their franchise. Many people in this country will opt out of the democratic process because of their disillusionment with it. We as politicians are not exercising the kind of formal powers that we are alleged to have and supposedly have in this House. We are doing it because of the god of party loyalty, and elsewhere in the rooms of this building at the moment party loyalty is being given a new definition, a new twist and perhaps producing a new sacrificial lamb also.
As Members of the Seanad or the Dáil, we have little or no possibility of evaluating in advance the extent of Government expenditure or its effectiveness. We have fallen into the trap over time of simply calling for more money as if more money by its own account would somehow or other improve the situation. Senator Fallon, who spoke just before myself, talked, as did the Leader of the House, purely in quantitative terms. As far as the Leader of the House was concerned, if more women were involved in the Commission staff in the EEC the position of women would be better. As far as Senator Fallon was concerned, if £1 million was made available for the health system and for the hospital in Athlone, then things would be better in Athlone. There is no logical follow-through to those conclusions. There is no logical correlation between the assertion and the conclusion which each of them draws. We are spending millions of pounds on our health services. It is arguable that in some cases we are as a nation less healthy now than we were ten years ago. We, as democratic representatives, are supposed to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of expenditure, but we never get a chance to so do. That evaluation takes place behind the closed doors of the Government Departments irrespective of what combination of parties happens to be in office. Is it any wonder that the public have relegated us to the status of messenger boys and decorative figures at annual dinners and dinner-dances? That is more accurately representative of our role than as serious commentators and serious guardians of the nation's finances.
If these criticisms sound harsh, let us ask ourselves why it is that seven months after the establishment of this Oireachtas and four months after the first meeting of this House we still do not have one joint committee of the Oireachtas formally established. Why is it that in relation to the semi-State bodies, who perhaps more than anybody else have been profligate in the way in which they have spent money, we have not established the committee? Is it the task of the Leader of the House to do it? Is it the task of the largest party in the House, the Fine Gael Party, or the Labour Party or the Leader of the Opposition who had a distinguished role in that committee in the last Oireachtas? Can we take ourselves seriously in this debate if we do not avail of the powers that we already have, limited as they are?
On The Late Late Show on Saturday, 16 January 1982 the economists frequently referred to the scandal of the Marino Point NET expenditure. It is clearly arguable that if the committee on semi-State bodies had been presented with that proposal in the early seventies before it was embarked on and if they had access to the kind of private reservations that were expressed in the minutes of the Department of Finance, some of the questions would have been put to the chief executive and staff in relation to NET and Marino Point and particularly in regard to the nature of the open-ended contract they handed to Kellogg International. If ever there was a licence to print money, that certainly was. Yet we as the Oireachtas have not established that committee and there is literally no defence for its non-establishment.
The powers of the EEC Committee are somewhat limited, but in terms of consultation with organisations, professional groups, representative groups, consumer groups, trade unions and the Confederation of Irish Industry and the IFA, it is the one direct line they have to Members in the Oireachtas in a structured pattern and, secondly and more importantly, it is the one direct line that we as public representatives in the Oireachtas have to civil servants in Government Departments. The Labour Party and I have been pressing in this House to have that committee established. We eventually got the motion moved in this House with great reluctance from the Government and inexplicable delay and it still has to go through the other House. There are staff in Kildare Street sitting around assembling material for us to read, selecting and editing and rearranging and generally filling in the time. Yet they have to bear the brunt of the criticism that there is wastage and inefficiency in the public sector. This is where the inefficiency starts.
The gnomes of Zurich are not preventing us from effecting these reforms. There is no IMF directive preventing the Oireachtas from reforming itself. There is no section in the Treaty of Rome that prevents us from carrying out these kinds of reforms within our own society. There is no external constraint whatsoever and yet we fail to do so. Is it any wonder that both Senator Honan and the Leader of the House, Senator Hussey, can stand up and say the Irish public are getting somewhat disillusioned with Irish politicians? I am disillusioned with Irish politicians, disillusioned with the response of this House.
I have referred to the two standing committees for which there was a precedent. What about the much vaunted committees on marriage reform and youth and the one for which we got half agreement from one House but not from the other, so far, on development cooperation?
This Act and the opening comments of the Minister of State concern exclusively the comparison between what was estimated and what was required and the direction in which it was allocated. Until such time as politicians are presented with cost-benefit analyses of proposals for expenditure in advance of their implementation or commitment, we will simply get into the pig trough of our respective constituents and argue in favour of five extra miles of road at this end of the county or ten extra hospital beds here or two more primary schools at the top part of the townland and so on. We will reduce politics, as we have succeeded in doing over the last ten years, to an auction of goodies to the public bought with the money of the children of the public. Ultimately our children will have to pay.
I would hope that in the response of the Minister of State, Deputy Desmond, his own clear commitment and that of his senior colleague, Deputy Bruton, to this process of Oireachtas reform will get some airing, because the exercise we are conducting today is somewhat meaningless. We cannot rewrite this. We cannot regret the money wasted on Knock airport. We cannot regret the money wasted or misused in other parts of the public sector. More important, we cannot discuss the millions of pounds that have been wasted by private industry in the form of grants for which nobody ever seems to be accountable. If the role of the Oireachtas is to evaluate, scrutinise and safeguard the whole expenditure of the nation's finance, then we simply have not given ourselves the effective parliamentary machinery to do the task. In the one instance when we have given ourselves the machinery — the committee on semi-State bodies — we have been uniquely negligent in failing to move on it. I am sorry that the Leader of the House is not here to take that charge because as the representative of the Government she must at the end of the day carry total responsibility for the failure of the Government to move on the matter. I do not wish to be negative about that, but I am amazed at the quiet response from the Fianna Fáil side in relation to this issue.
Getting the right structures of Government and of the Oireachtas is the beginning of the resolution of the problem. The second part of that resolution is selecting the correct political and economic policy. The Leader of the House said in her closing comments that any political party that now tried to suggest that there is a simple, straightforward, easy answer to the problems confronting this country would get their just reward from the public and particularly from the young people. It comes as a pleasant surprise to learn of the late conversion of Fianna Fáil and of Fine Gael to this realisation after they bought the votes of successive Irish populations at different elections on gimmicks which purported to be easy solutions. I would concur wholeheartedly with Senator Fallon when he described the way in which the £9.60 was paraded at the doorsteps by Fine Gael canvassers in the last election. Lest I might be accused of some degree of bitterness or bad grace in this regard, that is not the case. I recognise that it was a political gimmick that worked. I recognise that the abolition of rates was a political gimmick that worked. Regrettably the benefit of providing office for the incumbent is very shortlived, as Deputy Martin O'Donoghue can appreciate, but the damage to us is very permanent. It is the thing we all have to live with.
There is an alternative way to utilise the wealth of this country to secure the future for all of us. I believe it rests not easily and not comfortably and certainly not in any existing blueprint but it rests undoubtedly in the realm of firm economic planning based on an evaluation of the available capital to the State and the private sector, the selection of those sections of the economy that can sustain investment and achieve over a period of time the desired objectives that society has for itself both in relation to that kind of employment we wish to create and to the kind of wealth we wish to create.
The historic task facing this State at this time is not, as it has been in many developed western democracies in Europe, that of simply redistributing existing wealth. I believe and my party believe — we have argued for a long time on this — that the historic task facing this country at the moment is the net creation of wealth and the utilisation of the resources of the State to do that in a planned, coherent and rational way. It is quite evident from the system of monitoring and evaluation which we have that we cannot do it as an Oireachtas. It would appear from the performance of the Government in their Departments and in the State companies that to date they have not maximised the potential for wealth creation, given the level of expenditure in capital form at least that was there. If we want to try to have a socialist plan of production that could attempt to create a series of long-term perspectives with review periods to monitor how effective, how efficient or how on target the plan will be we will need to provide a national economic plan.
There is an acceptance in this country of the concept of planning, co-ordination and directing resources to those areas that need them most and that will produce the maximum return to the best benefit of all. The first and second economic programmes broke through an extraordinary prejudice, particularly in the business community, which prevailed up until 1958 and 1959.
We need to go further now. I believe we can go much further utilising the existing powers the State has. I do not believe in the rhetorical need for some of the sweeping nationalisation of industry and particularly of the credit financial institutions. I believe the existing powers of the Central Bank, properly utilised, could in the immediate present give us sufficient powers and give the Government, which had a clear plan of action, sufficient powers to direct investment into areas where that investment was deemed to be highly productive and would yield a conspicuous and clear return.
I hope, having requested the Minister of State to respond to the question of Oireachtas reform in his reply, that he might turn his attention to the question of the national economic development plan, to which the Government are committed, when this House might possibly see it, if we could have a coherent debate about it and if, indeed, at the end of that, unlike the exercise in economic treatises, which were published by the Department of Economic Planning and Development, we would actually have a structured set of committees in this House and the other House that could, in conjunction with the public sector, both in the semi-State companies, the Departments and the private sector, look at just how effective on the ground the achievement of the objectives of that plan actually were.
I would like to come back to the appeal to youth that was made by the Leader of the House and by Senator Honan, this marvellous confirmation that the politicians believe in the young people of Ireland, the declaration of faith about how they will save us because they are now perceived as a new pressure group who can exercise some kind of impact on the political system, that, therefore they have got to be massaged and flattered.
The young people have an enormous problem because they are inheriting an extremely difficult situation. At the same time, there is no question that this generation of Irish people are the most privileged generation of Irish people to have ever lived in this land, going back 200, 300 or 400 years. Across the board, there is no question in my mind that we are in most recent times the most privileged generation with the best opportunities, difficulties and all notwithstanding. If the esteemed female — since female is now an important word in the vocabulary of this House — Senator from Fianna Fáil and the esteemed Senator from Fine Gael and Leader of this House, have so much faith in the young people of this country and in their desire to become involved in the political process and in their desire to understand the operation of the political process, I would make one final request that perhaps the two esteemed Senators could explain coherently, directly and with the resources of this House, to the same young people what is the fundamental difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. It is that conundrum that frequently confuses most of the young people who look at Irish politics and who, with the sweep of a hand, dismiss them as being all the same. If the young people could get from both esteemed Senators an historical analysis of why the Sinn Féin Party divided in the first place, why they remain divided and why they have so far failed to recoalesce, it might remove some of the confusion that many young people have in relation to politics.
That is hardly appropriate on the motion on the Appropriation Act.
No, but since young people were invoked in such an extraordinary way it is appropriate, as I have some pretensions to being half young at this stage to respond on their behalf with a little bit of clarity to those people who seem to have so much faith in them. Obviously, having made the point somewhat lightly, the fact remains that part of the rejection of politics in this country not just by young people but by many sections of our society, is because they do not see the difference in any of the politicians. The role of the politician is somewhat minimised as a consequence.
I would like to conclude by saying I welcome the presence of the Minister of State here. I have made a specific appeal in relation to the reform of the procedures of the Oireachtas in relation to the question of finance and financial expenditure. I would like to see what the Minister of State, in particular, envisages as the next step to the implementation of the aspirations and proposals contained in the document produced by his Department "A Better Way to Plan the Nation's Finances".
I welcome the opportunity to speak briefly on the motion on the Appropriation Act, 1981, and, like Senator Quinn, I welcome the presence in the House of the Minister of State at the Department of Finance, Deputy Barry Desmond.
It is regrettable that this debate did not take place before the end of 1981. There has been a tendency in recent years, irrespective of what Government were in power, to pass the Appropriation Bill before the end of the year without debate, and then have this type of postmortem in January. I hope in future we can arrange our affairs better and have the debate on this issue, which is of fundamental importance, takes place in the month of December. One of the problems of discussing this matter at this late stage is that we are on the threshold of the introduction of the budget by the Minister for Finance. Whatever leverage Senators have in the deliberations of the Minister and the support he is getting his Minister of State in preparing that budget, it is obviously limited if the debate takes place in this House in the middle of January. This is a fundamental point. I hope that, when the reform of the Oireachtas procedure takes place, cognisance will be taken of this matter and that the debate on the economy will take place early in December.
The Minister's speech made salutory reading. The speeches made by the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance in recent months have paved the way for next weeks budget. Much of what will be in the budget is an open secret. Various public opinion polls over the last few months have shown that we are in what can be described as a very serious financial position and that the solution demands Government action in the national interest. In the short-term this will be quite unpalatable to many sectors of the community; but, if it is not taken, the country will suffer. If we had not taken action last July, we would have not a near crisis situation but a catastrophic situation.
We are talking about the finances of this country against the background of our budget deficit, which in January 1981 was running at about £515 million, or 5¼ per cent of our gross national product. However, the reality was nearly double that figure. Even allowing for the July budget, the reality was a figure of £823 million. The figures for Government borrowing are stark. The estimates in the January 1981 budget amounted to £1,300 million, about 13 per cent of our GNP. Had the necessary action not been taken in July the level of Government borrowing would have been about £2,000 million, instead of £1,300 million. These figures were produced against a background of trying to mobilise people to play their part in the national plan, to recognise the difficulties that existed and to encourage the private sector to invest. The lead from the Government has been totally unacceptable. If the private sector in the area of industrial development or in the farm- ing community arranged matters in such a way that their costs were 50 per cent more than their estimates for a year, they would face bankruptcy or liquidation. The reality for the nation is as simple as it is for the individual. This is the crucial issue.
Inflation is running at a high figure and the banks must have confidence in the country. The threat hanging over all of us is the devaluation of the Irish punt. All these matters are interrelated. In terms of borrowing the matter is quite simple. The Government must make some effort to tackle these issues. If deficits are not narrowed the banks will put the squeeze on with, inevitably, higher interest rates and the devaluation of the punt if the floodgates remain open. If this devaluation occurs and if the balance of payments deficits continue at an even higher rate, because devaluation implies a lower value for goods being exported and higher prices for imports and less competitiveness on international markets — and this country is more dependent on the international market place than most other countries; there is a near total dependence on international trade — our competitive position will become eroded and we will end up like Iceland, Israel, Brazil and other South American countries where inflation is running at about 110 per cent per annum.
This cannot be allowed to happen. I support the position of this Government which was set out by the Taoiseach and various Ministers in recent months and, regardless of how tough the measures are, if I feel they are necessary in the long term interests of this country I will back them. Inflation is the key, and inflation is part of this package. I do not know if the ordinary man or woman in the street knows how much inflation erodes competitiveness and affects future work opportunities. One of the problems is that while the cost of living is rising there is a natural lobby in every sector of the community to protect the interests of its members in seeking in respect of wages a deal which relates to cost of living increases when of course it is a spiral. In a sense the more successful the various lobbies are in protecting their members and in lobbying for wage increases the more danger there is of putting at risk the interests of that element of the population which is least protected and which does not have organisational support. While there is concern for the workers who are actually working in the work place, it is difficult to get people excited about protecting the interests of those who are unemployed or of future generations of young people.
I would just like to make one or two points on the relevance of inflation and of how important it is to contain it in the interest of our people. I will give just two small examples which I worked out while Senator Quinn was speaking. Take, for example, the inflationary position that has existed in West Germany for the last five to six years, when their rate of inflation was 3½, 4, 5 and 6 per cent, I suppose averaging around a 4 per cent factor, which we will call 5 per cent. Then take another country, such as Britain or Ireland, where inflation is running at about 20 per cent. If you relate the position of Ireland to the international market place and the absolute necessity for competitiveness in the international market place, without which we cannot develop our industries, sell our agricultural produce or encourage the Americans, Germans, Japanese, French or the British to build their manufacturing plants here, we find that the pattern of erosion runs something like this. Take even a three- or four-year period and take it at two levels, at the level of capital investment by the public sector or by the private sector; take a base investment of £1 million in a project this year and take into account the inflation factor from 1982 to 1985 — in other words, only three years beyond this year. If you put in a 20 per cent inflation factor on £1 million — and this has been the average in this country and in Britain — you end up with a £1 million project in 1982 costing about £1,750,000 in 1985. If you apply the 5 per cent inflation factor for four years you end up with the same project with a base line of £1 million in 1982 costing in 1985 £1.155 million. This simple example gives some indication of the evil inflation is in the economy and the extent to which it erodes competitiveness, job opportunities and job possibilities for the future. There are also, of course, other evils related to it, such as the positive disincentive to save money. Why should anybody in a country with an inflation level running at 20 per cent save a penny? The sensible policy is to lash it out and spend it while money has a certain limited value. The State cannot begin to encourage the citizens of this State to save a button unless we curtail inflation.
There is, of course, the wage question also. This is a vicious spiral. If you take a base wage factor of £100 in 1982 and again see what it does with the same difference of 20 per cent inflation as against 5 per cent inflation. With a 20 per cent factor on a £100 wage base in 1985 it would be £173. The same base of £100 in 1982 with a 5 per cent factor would be £116 in 1985. That is the reality in so far as people in the street are concerned. This is the root evil and must be contained. If it is contained, regardless of the price that has to be paid by Government or by the people, and if we can begin to re-establish competitiveness — and we have immense advantages of a country of learning, of distinct talents, of flair and a country speaking the English language, which is very useful in the commercial world, a country with very particular and special links with the United States of America and in another sense with Britain and Europe — the potential is there and the opportunity is there. But that opportunity will not be there for future generations unless this Government at this time takes that action.
Politically this issue is of such significance that it is not any longer a question of the penultimate issue, which is normally the overriding issue for any Government, that is, the issue of political survival and the issue of the re-election of its members individually and collectively to Government. The issue is wider than that. There is a very distinct principle at stake at this time. It behoves the Government to take the necessary action regardless of the political consequences and regardless of the type of reaction it might invoke. If these decisions are taken this Government will retain credibility. There is also another issue. Against the stark background we have painted of the position within this country, the corollary is that, if we do not take this action, it will show inconsistency. For such inconsistency I believe the people would be right to throw our Government out of office.
I read an article recently which was produced by a firm of chartered accountants here. This showed that the level of Government borrowing per individual is running at about four times the level of borrowing per individual in Poland. I will not remind you of how difficult the Polish position is, the debt position and the reneging on repayments on principal and interest to world bankers. On a per capita basis the level of borrowing here is four times greater than that in Poland. For each person working here in 1981 there was a Government borrowing level of £7,690. We have the largest current budget deficit of any country in Europe. Two-thirds of all our income tax is going to repay foreign debt. It is against this background that action must be taken.
We have been talking about employment and unemployment. The words "Thatcherism" and "monetarism" are very fashionable. There are suggestions that you apply a doctrinaire financial policy and you create unemployment. This is totally unrelated to anything done by the right honourable lady in Britain. It is totally unrelated to any question of economic policy as preached in universities by the Keynesians or any of the others. This is a simple attempt to meet an extremely difficult position and to defend the central interests of this country. The unemployment issue, to my mind, is central to the problem. If difficult measures have an effect on the employment sector, that will certainly create problems. But the more central issue is this: what will happen in employment if this action is not taken? If we do not correct the imbalance, if we do not correct the balance of payments deficit, if we do not get the inflation situation right, and if we do not head off the possibility of devaluation, what will happen to employment then? People who have reached the age of, say, 40, and who are in employment will be retiring in 15 to 20 years but what will happen to future generations? Unless we contain the situation, there is a horrific future, whereas there can be immense opportunities if a different approach is adopted. That is the approach which I will take some pleasure in supporting, regardless of how unpalatable some of those measures may be.
Sitting suspended at 1 p.m. and resumed at 2.30 p.m.
I welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion. I wish to speak first on the sums of money allocated to education. We have, by various methods, been precluded in this House from speaking about a subject relating to education which is very important, the measures introduced by the Minister for Education, Deputy John Boland. He said one was cost-cutting and the other was of educational benefit to the children. I refute both points. It cannot be cost-cutting because the Minister followed it up, when it appeared that the measure would be defeated, by promising that there would be pre-school education in deprived areas but he did not enumerate the areas or what sort of schools would be provided. The country is wondering what precisely is meant.
Meanwhile we have parents who wish to enrol children for nursery pre-school education which is now the first cycle of primary education. I question the financial wisdom of the move recently introduced. I abhor the method used whereby votes were got for this measure. The sum of £1 million is promised for pre-school education. It would be far better if this £1 million was put into the present primary school system. In the debate on this measure in the Dáil there were horrific pictures painted by a few Deputies about the Dickensian attitudes in some primary schools, but that is not the case.
Speaking on a programme, "Women Today", the Minister for Education stated that there were some areas in which the ideal situation did not exist for pre-school children. We send our children to school at a younger age than in any other European country, but there are more relevant factors. In Germany formal education begins at six years of age and 70 per cent of three to six year olds have places in kindergartens. In Belgium there is educational provision for 90 per cent of the two and a half to five year olds. In Denmark formal schooling begins at seven. Three out of every four children attend from the age of three a State kindergarten school. In the Netherlands 95 per cent of four to six year olds go to nursery schools and there are plans there to integrate nursery and primary education. In 1982, the most beneficial and cost-cutting exercise the Minister for Education should engage in under the heading of education would be to leave the choice to the parents. There is nobody press ganging parents to bring four year old children to school. The Plowden Report on Education which is regarded as the definitive treatise on education, states that it should be a matter of the receptivity of each child and the choice of each parent. What has happened here is particularly obnoxious because it was done without any prior consultation with the parents and the teacher body. It was then passed in the Dáil by a very slender majority and people are very angry. It is a discriminatory move against women and affects children in large urban built-up areas and in rural schools.
This is a very retrograde step and one which will have widespread repercussions throughout the country. I appeal, even at this stage, to the Minister for Education, through the Minister of State, to forget about it and tear up the circular. Let the children who want to go to school do so. We have a long tradition of learning. Studies have shown that the child from the age of three to six is at its most receptive. The primary school curriculum is geared towards that child. Children love going to school and there is no such thing as a Dickensian attitude as was stated in the Dáil. The days are long gone when school was a dreaded place. Whilst on the surface this measure may appear to have saved finance, in the long-term it will not.
I question why education was singled out. Is it because four year olds would not shout about it? Education is something which you cannot quantify, you cannot say in this year this was the GNP, this was the result of education, this is what we got from so much investment. In the years to come any shortcoming or cut-backs in education will affect the fabric of this society and young people. Many people say that children are leaving school too early at 17. Indeed they are, but that does not mean they do not go to school at four. There should be a six year cycle in second level but the earlier a child can start, if he or she wishes to start, the better.
I wish to touch briefly on the £9.60 a week which was one of the Fine Gael carrots in the 1981 election. Lest it be construed by some Members of this House that I am against women getting anything, that is far from the case. Women who will benefit should go ahead and apply. Why was this measure sold as something infinitely desirable that would be realised quickly? I know that many Members, Deputy John Kelly, Senator Gemma Hussey and Deputy Nuala Fennell and others, beat their chests and said, "Oh no, we did not sell it like that, we sold it as a straight tax transfer credit." Be that as it may, the general feminine perception of the £9.60 was that the following week Mrs. X, with her pram and her babies, would go to the post office or bank and £9.60 would be handed out to her and thereafter each week £9.60 would accrue. Fine Gael must take the blame for the fact that an illusion grew from this. There is no point in denying it. The package was swallowed, hook, line and sinker.
Here and in other for a throughout the land it is said that Fianna Fáil are the party of promises. The fattest carrot ever held out to the electorate was this £9.60. There is a saying that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. The collective fury of the women of Ireland will be heaped upon the people who held out that carrot which turned out to be an empty promise.
The point was made by some Government spokespersons that it would benefit the woman whose husband is niggardly or parsimonious with his money. There are many such people, sadly, in all walks of life and in all countries. The point is that she is the person who will not benefit. I know such cases. The parsimonious male will say: "Here is your money, dear, less whatever you got each week from this great Government." She will find herself back where she started. The chickens will come home to roost in regard to that promise. I should like to put it on the record that there is this illusion that we are the baddies and they are the goodies who will put everything to right.
Hear, Hear.
Without interruption, please. That is not the case. I will not call it a fraud but an illusion and an ephemeral dream which was put before every woman in Ireland. It has now proved to be a nightmare and will be a continuing nightmare. Meanwhile the implementation of this package will cost a great deal of money. We have not heard that. I wonder will mistakes be made in reckoning its cost. Recently the Minister for Finance said on the radio: "We made a mistake in our earlier reckonings." For people in Government mistakes of that type are not on, particularly in the running of our financial affairs.
Before I proceed to my next point I should like to take up a point made by Senator Quinn this morning when he took to task two female Senators, Senator Honan and Senator Hussey. He said both of them had espoused the cause of youth and had appealed passionately to the youth of Ireland to come to grips with their political ambitions and aspirations. He said that was very important because they are female Senators. I do not think he spoke magnanimously. Perhaps I was wrong but I detected in his voice a note of sarcasm. He said in the world today females are very important but Senators would need to have been here to hear him. He asked what is the difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and he repeated his question three times. The esteemed Senator should get the relevant constitutions of the various parties, including his own party, the Labour Party, and read through them. He should not throw out rhetorical questions when he can do that. There are very many differences which I could list. If he really wishes to get an answer to his question he should go to the two esteemed female Senators he mentioned and ask them, or read the constitutions of their parties.
Another matter I wish to speak about is the allocation for housing by the Department of the Environment last year. In this House we gave a general welcome to the Housing Finance Agency Bill. I should like to make the point to the Minister of State at the Department of Finance that there is much media speculation as to whether there will be a cutback or a stopping of the tax relief on mortgage payments. I do not know if it is too late to do anything about it, or whether it has already been put in motion. Perhaps not. I ask the Government not to do that please. As a member of a local authority I know this relief has far-reaching benefits for young couples in Ireland today. A couple take out a £14,000 loan and they wonder will they be able to pay it back. They go into the question with somebody who is well versed in taxation matters and they figure out that they will get so much off their tax. They go ahead. Many of them put up with quite stringent circumstances for three, four or five years because they want to own their own home.
We spoke about this before Christmas and it may be seen as a peculiarly Irish tendency. I see it as a very correct and right approach. It is one of the reasons why our society is still relatively stable. In Ireland the incidence of home ownership is extremely high, be it a small terraced house or a castle. Many people have a legitimate desire to own their own home, to go in through their own front door and out the back door to their patch of garden. Even in the very bad old days of the famine and the quarter acre, and so on, you had a chance to get your own small cottage. I do not want to see any measure brought in which will take away or detract from this very desirable element of home ownership. Many young couples living on small incomes could never afford to buy their own homes if they did not have this additional incentive.
To remove this tax relief would have the effect of throwing more and more people on to the local authority housing list and making more and more people dependent on State funds to provide them with housing. I am taking this opportunity to make that point to the Minister of State. I feel very strongly about it. I live in a very populous urban area. I deal with many young couples and I know they have read about this in the papers and they are worried about it. They are wondering if it is true and what will happen. I want to ask the Minister of State if it is going to happen. If not, that is fine. It should not happen.
They are the three points I wanted to speak about: education, housing and the £9.60 per week. Much has been said about doom and gloom. Much has been made of the hard times we are going through. We are indeed, and nobody wants to raise false expectations. I have met many young people who are becoming disenchanted with what they are reading every day in the papers. Let us have some leadership for the future in Ireland, not forgetting our present difficulties. I wish the Government would show a sense of purpose and a sense of leadership. I welcome the Minister of State. Indeed he is a friend from old times in Athlone.
An Leas-Chathaoirleach
If Senator Whitaker wishes to speak he has the floor now.
I defer to Senator McGuinness.
May I begin by thanking Senator Whitaker for his kind act in deferring to me and allowing me to speak now. I hope he will be given an opportunity straightaway afterwards.
The debate on the Appropriation Act motion is generally accepted to be a fairly wide ranging debate in which people can deal with matters arising under various Government Departments. In general I accept the economic difficulties under which the Government are working at present. I know there are enormous problems to be tackled and that there is the necessity to hold down Government spending as far as possible. I accept also the necessity of dealing with the problem of deficits, of international debt and so on. This is quite clear to us all. but we must be very careful how we go about the cutting of expenditure. Because there is an emergency at present one can accept that emergency measures may be taken, such as the present complete ban on recruitment to the public service. But these must be seen as very short-term emergency measures because there are, no doubt, plenty of areas within Government Departments in which, if one looked at them with a cold eye, expenditure could be cut, where perhaps there are too many people employed to do the work they are supposed to be doing and where recruitment could be cut down. But there are other areas where just to impose a blanket ban on recruitment and a blanket cut-down on public expenditure can mean the refusal to deal with issues which are priorities, which have been accepted by the Government parties as things which must be dealt with and which could leave the Government in an ambiguous position, having said they will deal with certain issues, even setting up bodies to deal with certain issues and then refusing those bodies even the most basic tools to carry out their tasks.
I will deal with at least one example of this later. What is needed is not just saying: "You cannot replace anyone within the public service no matter what." What is needed now, if you accept that ban for a couple of months, is to take a good hard look at each Department and see where the people are really needed. Sometimes if one seeks to move someone from one area of work to another one can come up against union difficulties. But I would appeal to the unions in the public service to look at this in a reasonable fashion and to realise that to a very large extent their members are protected in their work compared with the person in commercial employment or the self-employed. They have something to contribute towards the national welfare, towards the common good, by seeing that the priority areas are staffed and that areas which are not perhaps quite so much a priority could spare staff. Time should not be wasted in passing pieces of paper from one person to another, which is an administrative disease which grows both in the public service and in private enterprise, where it gets big enough. Once administration enters in one must watch this tendency to merely pass pieces of paper one to another and not to make dicisions. I would appeal to those involved in the public service that in a difficult situation there be a certain flexibility of approach so that we can deal with areas, many of which have been referred to by other Senators, that are priority areas and put our work into them. The Government's task is to decide which are these priority areas and to put their limited resources into them.
There is one particular example of this I would give. I must in a sense, declare an interest in this. I refer to the setting up of the National Council for the Aged. This is in a sense related to the National Social Service Council of which I am chairman. Therefore, to be fair, I should declare an interest in it. The idea in setting up a National Council for the Aged was that the difficulties of elderly people, who are very often the poorest and most deprived section of our population, should be dealt with. As far as I can understand the position in regard to the finances of the Department of Health, this body has been set up. But, because of this ban on recruitment it will not be given even one single person to staff it, not even one secretary will be allowed to service this body. If this is the case it is a face-facing exercise only. What is the good of setting up a body which is going to be a mere talking-shop if they have not got any staff whatsoever to carry out their legitimate purposes? The position, as far as I understand it, is that, even if within the budget of the National Social Service Council we could find the money by rearranging our work, if we could find the money to recruit someone else, we would not even be allowed do so because there is a total ban on recruitment. In this area — and I am certain that this is happening in other areas as well — a whole promising priority can fall to the ground because you have a blanket ban and you do not look to see what exactly you are doing.
I understand there is a certain commitment to the reactivation of the programme to combat poverty. But our aged people are often also our poor. With a relatively modest expenditure of money we could help them in the short term as well as in the long term. As I understand the combat poverty campaign — certainly as it was in its previous incarnation — it was a very long-term process, a necessary process of research and so on, but a long-term one. But people need help immediately as well and need to have present anomalies ironed out.
I shall pass from the Department of Health to the Department of Justice. As far as I can recollect this is a matter I raised on the Appropriation Bill last year. It is something that has not changed very greatly but rather has become more acute. Again this is an area in which some kind of priorities must be established. We have seen several public statements recently about the incredible delays incurred in court time, the long time it takes litigants to get their cases to the High Court. A Bill passed here recently, now enacted, will appoint more High Court judges. No doubt that will be a help. But within the Department of Justice it must be understood a great deal more clearly than it appears to be now that it is not enough to appoint a High Court judge. A judge cannot sit without registrar. Very often in a case that might be going to appeal a judge cannot sit without a shorthand-writer. What would we say if we were told that we could not have our excellent reporters here, that the Seanad would have to sit without a reporter? The same thing applies in a court. A court cannot always sit without a reporter. What is needed to shorten the delays in the court procedure very often is not more judges but more registrars and more staff. The staff of the Central Office in the Four Courts at present are working in acute, difficult conditions, overcrowding and so on.
I think some eight to ten years ago the Department acquired the old Four Courts Hotel, which was then demolished and left as a hole in the ground. This was supposed to provide new court offices under the Department of Justice. I understand from a recent series of articles in The Irish Times that even the very planning permission — I know that a Department of State does not really need planning permission — the plans themselves have not been submitted to the local authority and that there seems to be no move at all on this. The court registrars showed me their offices because they felt so strongly about this whole area. There is insufficient back-up staff. There is no use blaming the system or the judges if you do not give them the people to help them to act.
I am aware, of course, that the actual state of the court buildings is the responsibility of the local authorities and not the responsibility of the Department of Justice. I was very pleased to see that the Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Deputy Spring, to whom I would like to offer my hopes for his complete recovery as soon as possible and his return to work, publicly stated that he would not bring in the changes of jurisdiction which we passed in this House and in the Dáil in the Courts Act last year until he could guarantee that there would be a proper system and proper courthouses to operate it. I would like to encourage him in his resolution and to back him in what he had to say about that. I hope he will take another look at the whole area of the jurisdiction of the courts, particularly in regard to family law cases and the custody of children cases and I ask that the back-up for preventive action and back-up for remedial action should be provided.
As regards the Department of Education, I should like to echo what Senator O'Rourke said about the change in the entry age to the national schools. This was obviously taken as a rather hasty decision and I object very strongly to the fact that this House is apparently not to be allowed to discuss this matter on Private Members' motions, a motion put down by the Fianna Fáil Party and a motion put down by myself and Senator Honan. It appears to be on the flimsy excuse that it may be the subject of court action but no one is able to tell us whether a writ has been issued. This was clearly taken as a kind of lightning decision, that we will save a lot of money by changing the school entry age and the Government have been back-pedalling ever since on this decision. They have back-pedalled to the extent of saying they will spend a certain amount of money on providing pre-school education instead, which means they will lose out on the saving of money. They have also been back-pedalling on the issue which was raised as to how this would affect the schools which are managed by the minority religious groups — the Protestant schools throughout the country which are going to be particularly hard hit by this measure. I welcome the fact that the Minister for Education has said he will try to mitigate the effect to some extent on the Protestant schools but nevertheless this is an area of expenditure in which the Government would have been much better advised simply to leave the entry age as it was. There are many rural areas and deprived areas where pre-school education is not provided because at present pre-school education is, to a large extent, a commercial proposition and unless the Department of Education are prepared to back it to a very large extent it will continue to operate very successfully in middle-class suburban areas where there are many children whose parents can afford to pay. It will be far less effectively operative in deprived urban areas and in scattered rural areas. I support Senator O'Rourke in a number of points she made on this matter.
One other Department, and perhaps this is rather an old chestnut, that I would like to refer to is the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. We have had all sort of problems over the years about the Department; we have set up new boards to deal with the problems and so on but still the same problems seem to be with us. They were probably due to bad planning in the past, to a failure to realise that telecommunications was a fast developing area and that there would be a large expansion here. Again, I suggest that if we are going to create effective employment creation schemes, if we are going to encourage either native industries or any foreign industrialists to come to this country, we have to be able to offer them a reasonable communications system. A situation where hundreds of telephones in the centre of Dublin have been out of order for a month is just beyond the beyond. I know the weather has been bad and I know we have had the Christmas holidays but do we really have to have a situation where major offices in the city week after week are putting advertisements in the papers saying, "We apologise for the fact that our telephones have not been working since 14 December"? One has personal experience of these difficulties of communication; one begins to wish one worked in some area which required no communication outside the office because one reaches a stage of absolute desperation and frustration. I am sure Senators on all sides of the House have gone through this, when one might be able perhaps to communicate with people at a great distance, and you would find it a lot easier to ring Hong Kong from Blackrock than to ring Dún Laoghaire. This is a priority area. No matter what kind of blanket cut we have in expenditure, we cannot allow this desperate situation to go on because neither our exporters, our internal traders, or our professions nor anyone else can function properly without any kind of communication.
In reference to the situation under housing, the issue of the tax relief on mortgages has been raised. Many couples will be hard hit if they are not allowed the previous measure of tax relief on their mortgages. There have been a number of public scandals within the housing area; I refer to the number of derelict sites in the city of Dublin and the way in which developers are able to manipulate the use of these sites to create capital gains for themselves. I urge the Government to take some action to ensure that these areas be used to provide, at least in part, housing for people rather than derelict sites for developers who wish to make a capital gain out of them. This is destroying our city from an aesthetic point of view; it is working to the detriment of people who are desperately seeking housing in the centre of the city; it is doing nobody any good except a few people who are making a great deal of money out or it. The extension of planning permissions obtained years ago by people who have left sites derelict is something that must be looked into and stopped.
I should like to conclude by going back to the general point, that I accept the need for reduction or management of Government expenditure. It is a question of management and not just a question of saying everyone has to suffer cuts at an equal level. That is fine for a temporary crisis but let us limit that to a certain number of months, not an unlimited amount of time and not for too long a time. In each Department an examination should be made of exactly what the Department are doing so that priorities can be selected and where expenditure is really needed which will do positive good, to spend the money in that way rather than simply saying we will take 10 per cent off everything.
The expenditure covered by the Appropriation Act is a large part, but by no means all, of Government outlay. The Exchequer returns for last year show a total current expenditure of £4,796 million to which must be added expenditure on capital account of £1,818 million, giving a total of £6,614 million. Towards this, revenue provided less than £4,000 million.
Pay accounts for over 40 per cent of public current expenditure. Well over one-third of all employees are in the public sector, broadly understood. The public sector for many years past has been a major source of new jobs. There is no need, therefore, to emphasise the importance of public expenditure as a mainstay of employment.
There is the further consideration that an enormous annual sum has now to be committed to the relief of unemployment — a sum of the order of £250 million in payment of unemployment benefit and unemployment assistance to compensate an unprecedented number of persons, over 140,000, for not having jobs.
It seems to me timely, therefore, to say a few words on the problem of job retention and job creation. This is, and has been since the inception of the State, our major policy preoccupation. We have been trying to secure adequate employment at home at an acceptable rate of remuneration for all who seek it. In recent years this task, in which we have never had complete or sustained success, has been made more acutely difficult by the growing number of young persons joining the search for work each year in competition with the thousands who still have to leave the land, and the alarmingly high number — running to a gross 30,000 last year — whose jobs have folded up because of the recession, loss of competitiveness or other reasons.
It would be useful, perhaps, if I summed up the employment experience of the past 60 years. The total work force today, at nearly 1,200,000, is much the same as it was 60 years ago, but its composition has been transformed. The number engaged in agriculture has dropped, inevitably, from 670,000 to less than a quarter of a million, while the number in industrial employment has risen from fewer than 60,000 to nearly 350,000. There has also been a rise in the number employed in services. As we move up the development scale we may, on the experience of other countries, find that services — especially nowadays information collecting and data processing services — will be providing more employment and that the proportion of the work force employed in industries will tend to stabilise.
We can all accept that jobs depend on what economists call demand but which I will simply call expenditure. This expenditure may be of domestic or foreign origin and it may be public or private but it must be directed to the purchase of Irish goods and services if it is to be effective in creating or preserving jobs in Ireland. Not only that, but the number of jobs it will create and support depends on the cost of each job and this itself depends not just on the wages and salaries demanded, though that is important, but on how efficiently the work is organised and managed, how well the products are made and marketed and the effectiveness of the equipment that serves the workers. Unless all these conditions are right, in other words, unless jobs are oriented towards producing goods and services which will attract a growing internal and external demand in competition with all rivals, a full employment policy will be doomed to failure. As in the 19th century, and for much of the present century, we shall have to endure the consequences of failure — high levels of unemployment and emigration, except that the scope for escape by the emigration route is now much narrower than before. Producing competitive goods and services means keeping in the van of technological advance and achieving the highest standards of excellence in design, quality and reliability. It is significant that the manufactured exports which have been doing best even in recent difficult times are those based on high technology.
I mentioned that expenditure, domestic and external, is the essential prop of employment. I said it could be either private or public. I want now to qualify that by emphasising that voluntary private spending is, at all times, much more healthy and reliable than dependence on the level of Government spending and borrowing. Spontaneous spending by foreigners, resulting in the profitable export of Irish goods and services at the current rate of exchange is far preferable to any artificial attempt to boost home sales just by raising home incomes. The argument that incomes should be increased to stimulate domestic activity falls down when it is remembered that incomes are also production costs. When the costs of domestic goods and services are raised more than those of competing products, domestic sales and jobs must suffer. When our costs are uncompetitive, higher incomes here are increasingly spent on imports and to that extent give no boost to home sales.
The serious constraint on any Keynesian approach to boosting employment has also to be recognised. We are an open economy, deliberately committed to free trade as offering the only prospect of expanding sales sufficiently to meet our aims in regard to employment and living standards. We have seen how expansionary budgetary policies lose much of their impact by spilling over into imports, creating huge deficits in the balance of payments and destabilising our public finances, rather than raising productive activity at home.
As a result of inprudent and improvident resort to expansionary policies, immoderate income increases, inefficient organisation and management, and inadequate investment of a genuinely productive character, we are in the unhappy situation that even the present unsatisfactory level of employment depends precariously on the demand, or expenditure, created by excessive foreign borrowing.
Now how are we going to get out of this bind? Only, it seems to me, by a combination of measures requiring patience and discipline and a willingness of all sectors to co-operate in a well-planned way in the community's interest.
In the past, uncovenanted relief was brought to the balance of payments by high war-time prices for food exports. That happened during World Wars I and II. In peace time, the only comparable relief one could look to is the net benefit from exploitation of a major oil discovery. But no such bonanza is, as yet, even distantly in sight and we must focus on more immediate and tangible objectives.
We can only slow down the present alarming rate of job loss by accepting sub-inflation rates of pay increases for some time ahead — increases no bigger, preferably less, than those occurring in competitor countries. Insistence on more than this will add to the destruction of existing jobs and prevent new ones from coming into being. The inexorable logic of this arises from the fact that we are living beyond our means and must accept some lowering of living standards as part of the corrective process.
Another part of that process, of course, is the curbing and progressive reduction of the current budgetary defi- cit. This would be immensely helped by public sector pay restraint. I am afraid I cannot applaud the recent public service pay proposals as representing adequate recognition of what is needed in this respect. The Estimates information for the current year, 1982, published this morning shows that the total of public service pay and pensions is expected to be 18.3 per cent up on the 1981 total.
It is enough — though it is essential — that progressive steps be taken to eliminate borrowing for current needs and conserve our borrowing potential for capital purposes. It is no less important that what we do spend on capital projects should be spent efficiently, getting good value for money. I have put forward the suggestion on a few occasions that we should experiment with different ways of organising infrastructural work, including a division into units subject to competitive contract — open to workers' cooperatives as well as to private enterprise — in the hope that this might result in faster progress and higher output for a given outlay. I believe in the merit of relating reward more closely to individual output and trying to increase interest and application at desk and work place. If we succeeded in this the scandal of absenteeism might be abated.
Even when we arrive — as I hope we will — at the situation where none of our foreign borrowing is to meet everyday needs, it will still be wrong to use the proceeds to finance unduly costly or inefficient forms of capital outlay. Heavy borrowing for unproductive purposes and high costs per unit of output lead inexorably to financial imbalance, loss of markets and loss of jobs.
Another area which needs more attention — and perhaps a more innovative approach — is the treatment of the unemployed. The cost of unemployment benefit and assistance, as I mentioned earlier, is now of the order of £250 million a year. It has for long worried me that in a country still underdeveloped and deficient in infrastructure, with its roads system inadequate and deteriorating, for example, with so many useful things crying out to be done, and I might add, so many eyesores to be removed, large numbers of people able and willing to work have to be compensated for being idle rather than being employed, even for periods at a time and at standard rates of pay, on work of benefit to the community. This seems to be a reflection on our organisational capacity and I very much hope that the Youth Employment Agency will make an innovative start in trying to overcome this problem. Even if one allows for a considerable number of unfit and unemployable persons amongst those drawing unemployment benefit and assistance, some £150 million a year must still be going to persons genuinely available for work.
As I have said before, I believe that old moulds will have to be broken, as well as exaggerated income expectations discarded, if we are to make any progress towards a solution of the problem of finding lasting and adequately productive employment for the growing number of young people now better educated, more versatile and, no doubt, more impatient than ever before. Regarding expectations, it is quite unrealistic to expect anything other than some fall in real standards for some time ahead. Even after this phase, I would share the view of Terry Baker of the ESRI — one of the so-called Three Wise Men — that most of us must accept that our present living standards can grow very slowly if at all, indeed, that to be able to count on being as well off in a year's time will be a blessing.
It is obviously desirable in such a scene that non-material satisfactions be cultivated and extended, satisfactions of an aesthetic, cultural and environmental kind, including I would hope, the satisfaction of achieving excellence in performance at work and of giving service to the community.
I still have hope that with effective investment, good management of the public finances, of business enterprises and of farming, better organisation of work, pay realism and higher productivity, we shall again in time move forward. But just now we have to undergo an unwelcome readjustment, which I believe we should try to accomplish as quickly as possible.
Ever since the present Government came to office we have been listening to the same tune: do not blame us, blame Fianna Fáil; they left the country in a mess. People are beginning to get a bit tired of this tune as they see inflation at 24 per cent and rising and unemployment at 141,000 and rising. In addition, cutbacks are the order of the day and some of these cutbacks are being made in areas where the policy should be one of investment rather than withdrawal. If we look at the position in just a few areas against the background of rising levels of armed crime in our streets and the dastardly car bomb attack on the State's chief forensic scientist and the murder in the city centre of a payroll security guard, the Minister for Justice is reported in last Saturday's Irish Independent as having ordered huge cutbacks in the provision of aerial equipment to the Garda. On the front page of the following day's Sunday Independent we had a warning from the same Minister that mafia style crime gangs could overrun Irish society in the eighties. When reports such as these are looked at in the context of the Government's decision to push through the Criminal Justice Bill for reasons of political expediency and the admission by the Minister for Justice in the Dáil some weeks ago that in 1982 the Garda force will only be increased by 300, then surely it is no wonder that armed crime is on the increase. Indeed the armed criminals must be highly amused. It is vital that the recruitment of new gardaí should be speeded up and we must have a greater Garda presence on our streets. Otherwise, the prophecy of the Minister for Justice could well become a reality.
As a Senator from the west I must refer to the economic withdrawal from that area. The Connacht regional airport has been abandoned and the decentralisation programme which would have benefited many areas of the west has been thrown overboard. The Tuam Sugar Factory is about to be closed. Major arterial drainage schemes have been put on the long finger and grants for farm development under the farm modernisation scheme have been reduced. Many construction projects too have been shelved and it is estimated that over 500 building workers in the west are now unemployed. As a native of County Roscommon the decisions not to proceed with the new power station at Arigna and the peat briquette factory at Ballyforan are the most regrettable and the most ill-advised decisions of all. The position in the case of Arigna is that supplies of the high grade coal which is used in the existing power station are running out fast. It is estimated that the supplies of this coal will last only about another four years. The Arigna area has, however, large reserves estimated at between 15 million and 20 million tons of low grade coal known as crow coal. This crow coal cannot be used in the existing power station but a decision had been taken to build a new 45 megawatt station designed to burn the crow coal. The reserves of crow coal would be sufficient to keep this station in operation well into the next century. This would mean that the 300 miners at present employed in the mines would be assured of continued employment and 100 new jobs would be provided while, at the same time, we would be using native fuel to supply at least some of our energy needs and reduce our dependence on imported oil.
A decision has been taken to defer this project until 1988-89. If this decision is not reversed, the writing is on the wall for the Arigna area. Mining in the valley will cease. Three hundred jobs will be lost and 300 families will join the dole queue. The social effects will be disastrous for a whole community, a community with a proud tradition of self-help. An industry which has been the life line of a whole area for two or almost two centuries will be no more. If the mining tradition is allowed to die out in this area in four or five years' time it will never be revived. The deferral of this project will inevitably mean the end of coal mining in Arigna.
One of the reasons that has been given for the deferral of this project is that the money to finance it would have to be borrowed. Surely to borrow for an investment such as this makes sound economic sense. What better investment could a Government have than a project which would use native fuel resources, reduce our dependence on imported oil and consequently benefit our balance of payments and, at the same time, safeguard 300 existing jobs and create 100 new ones, all this at a time when it is costing the IDA between £10,000 and £20,000 for each new job they create? I can only hope that the Government will accede to the demand that the decision to defer this project be reversed immediately, a demand which has the support of the elected public representatives for that area irrespective of political affiliation.
The situation as regards the proposed Bord na Móna briquette factory at Ballyforan in south Roscommon is also very serious. When rumours started to circulate that this project was being deferred Deputies Kitt, Callanan and Leyden tabled a question to the Minister for Industry and Energy on the matter to which he replied on 25 November last. The question is No. 421 and I quote from Column 303 of the Dáil Official Report of 25 November 1981:
It is expected that the number of persons to be employed in the Bord na Móna briquette factory at Ballyforan, Ballinasloe, County Galway, when in full production will be of the order of 200 and that the total number to be employed on the Derryfadda bog and in the factory will be of the order of 600.
The bog development programme of Bord na Móna is being re-examined by the board in the light of the board's projected capital needs in 1982 and, accordingly, it is not possible to say until this examination is carried out when work on the factory is likely to commence.
Here again we are talking about the utilisation of native fuel resources and the provision of 600 jobs in a relatively remote rural area.
If we are serious about tackling the unemployment problem or if we are serious about the desirability of developing our own national resources, this project should surely be proceeded with immediately. Unless the Government want to preside over the economic demise of the west, and I am sure they do not, they will have to change their attitude to investment in the west. As everybody knows, the west has the least manufacturing industry and the fewest industrial jobs of any region in the country. Yet, in the past few weeks, a number of factories have closed. The Government must ensure through Fóir Teoranta or otherwise that every effort is made to protect the few jobs we have in that region.
Drainage also, which is of such vital importance to the west, appears to have a very low priority in the Government's spending at present. I have already referred to the shelving of the arterial drainage schemes involving the Boyle river and the Bonet. To make matters worse, the western drainage scheme appears to have ground to a standstill and the feasibility study on the drainage of the Shannon, for which a substantial allocation was forthcoming from the EEC, is not being proceeded with. I understand that there was an allocation of £600,000 forthcoming from the EEC for this study. This would have to be supplemented from the Exchequer and because of that, the feasibility study is not being proceeded with. Vast areas of potentially excellent agricultural land are affected year after year by Shannon flooding and the announcement of this feasibility study had raised hopes in many areas that a solution to the problem would be found.
We heard quite a lot in recent days about the great losses suffered by farmers in a number of counties as a result of the blizzard of two weeks ago. The farmers concerned have my deepest sympathy and I sincerely hope the Government will find ways and means, either through our own resources or by way of assistance from the EEC, to provide compensation in cases where severe losses were suffered. However, the farmers to whom I am referring, the farmers in the Shannon valley who were affected by Shannon flooding — and there were many of them in my own county in the Clonown area adjacent to Athlone and in other areas — suffer considerable losses year after year. Yet nothing of any consequence has been done or is being done to help these people. The south Roscommon area, in spite of numerous representations, has not been designated as severely handicapped under the disadvantaged areas scheme. Now the feasibility study on the drainage of the Shannon on which they pinned so much of their hopes is not being proceeded with because we would have had to provide some £400,000 of the cost involved from our own Exchequer.
I wish to make one final point in relation to education. Notwithstanding the fact that our per pupil expenditure on primary education is by far the lowest in the EEC, we are still taking money out of this sector, apparently to honour commitments which were given in relation to spending on higher education. Everyone knows, as Senator McGuinness said, that the regrettable decision to raise the entry age to primary schools was taken solely for economic reasons, and those who will suffer most as a result of this decision will be our youngest children, especially the many socially deprived children who enter our schools each year. I support everything that Senator O'Rourke and Senator McGuinness said on this matter. I ask the Minister once again to withdraw Circular 24/81 as requested by the Catholic Primary School Managers Association last week.
It gives me great pleasure to talk on the Appropriation Act, 1981. I look forward to the motion being passed although I feel that the electorate would rather forget about the Appropriation Act, 1981. Problems have been growing for many years but last year excelled in bringing a frightening deterioration in our finances, thereby undermining our credibility both at home and abroad. I remind the House that the Department of Health were left short £47 million, and that is one of the most essential areas in Government. The sick and the unemployed would all suffer as a result of this shortage in the Department. The Department of Justice were £16 million short. Eventually they would have no money to pay the Garda, the very people who protect us in our homes today. The other side of the House has been asking for more money to be spent in this area, but there was not enough money last year to meet the wages from week to week. The Department of Defence were £11 million short. We have heard talk about cutbacks. Cutbacks were effected; yet there were shortages to the extent of £35 million in the Department of the Environment last year. The saga goes on and on. Industry was short £14 million, Agriculture, £45 million, Transport and Energy £87 million and Education £10 million. The whole sad story adds up to £740 million.
Undaunted, on assuming office in July the Coalition Cabinet quickly realised the seriousness of the situation, and took corrective action. The hardships that ensued as a direct result can fairly and squarely be laid at the feet of the last administration, who failed to do their sums correctly last January. The 70 per cent difference between Government income and expenditure over the past three years speaks for itself and shows very clearly how our nation's finances were mismanaged over that period. I agree with Senator O'Rourke that the chickens have come home to roost, but this Government's determination to rectify our finances will, I am sure, receive understanding and co-operation from all patriotic people.
The various contributions from Senators contained ideas and questions about various Departments, but my main worry is the Department of Health. The costs of our health services are escalating at a frightening pace. The cost of a bed in a general hospital is rising continually. Although much has been done over the years to modernise our hospitals, much still remains to be done. In the southeastern region Ardkeen new hospital is a priority in our capital programme and we hope that in 1982 at long last we will get the go-ahead for this much-needed project. On the other end of the scale we have a smaller item, another general hospital, the county hospital in Wexford, which does tremendous work under extremely difficult circumstances. Some of our most brilliant surgeons operate in that hospital as well as well-qualified nurses and other expert personnel, but they are all working in deplorable conditions. Everybody in this country should feel thoroughly ashamed of the operating theatres where they work. On the whole, our geriatric hospitals are completely outdated. In many cases, because of their layout, they are uneconomical to run and, I am sorry to say, certainly in my region, some are fire hazards. This leaves us, when we have no capital, with very serious problems for the future of our growing numbers of geriatrics in this region.
It is all a question of money and solutions are hard to find, but in the future we will have to inject more money into the community care programme. We must encourage children to keep their parents at home and we must make it worth their while. We must realise the sacrifice and the difficulties of keeping an elderly parent at home. We must help these people to keep their aged at home because beds in the hospitals are needed for more urgent cases. The geriatric population is growing. Our people are living longer, thank God, but this gives rise to growing problems. This area needs much investigation and it should be a priority in this coming year.
I look forward to the budget in 1982 as I have every confidence that this Government will take the necessary steps to put our country on the road to recovery and thereby give the young people that hope and confidence in the future that they need so badly at the moment.
I would like to say a few words about the general financial situation. It is not easy to comment on the situation generally until the budget has been introduced and the full picture has emerged. The Approporiation Act enables Senators to comment on spending by and the administration of Departments, and that is one of the principal functions it discharges and I will have a few words to say about some of the Departments later. In the meantime I want to make a few comments on the overall financial situation.
We are talking about expenditure for 1981 of £4,370 million. The Estimates for the last year were criticised by Fine Gael and by Labour when they were in Opposition. They characterised this amount of spending — or much of it anyhow — as being spendthrift and irresponsible and leading to the very high rate of borrowing, but the Estimates which have been published today are 16 per cent up on last year. The Government which promised to tackle the financial situation, promised to bring down the cost of running the country and to cut out any unnecessary expenditure have failed in this respect. Not only have they not reduced it but they have brought up the amount to be spent in the coming year by a very substantial percentage. What we are talking about is their Estimate for the year, whereas the figure I mentioned above for 1981 was the Estimate plus the Supplementary Estimates.
Much has been made of the fact that so many Supplementary Estimates had to be brought in, that Fianna Fáil underestimated and did not provide the necessary amount of money. I hope the Senators on the other side of the House who have been making these allegations will all be in a position next year to say that the present Government — if they are still there — did not underestimate in any way. If the Government succeed in doing that, they will probably be doing it for the first time in the history of the State. I do not think there has been any year in the past when a Government were able to foresee exactly what they would spend in the year and there were no Supplementary Estimates. Speakers on the other side of the House have made too much of this in suggesting that a Government should be able to estimate exactly what they will spend during the year. This is rarely, if ever, done and it will be a very great surprise if the present Government do it. Next year I will probably be criticising the Government for underestimating for 1982.
It will be from the other side of the House.
The Government have failed to bring down the Estimates for the year. There are, of course, only two ways in which we can tackle the very serious problems we have at present — the problem of borrowing and the problem of not being able to pay our way. We can do it by bringing down the costs of Government, by bringing down the Estimates, or by providing all the money that is required by taxation, certainly as far as current amounts are concerned.
As regards the first half of this the Government have failed. They have not brought down the Estimates. They are 16 per cent up on 1981 and although we have not seen the budget yet, nobody will deny that to pay for what is provided in the Estimates will necessitate substantial borrowing, far greater than is desirable. This Government are now realising that to do the kind of things that most Governments think are necessary and that the people think are necessary, perhaps mistakenly, necessitates very substantial borrowing. Fianna Fáil when in office found that they had to borrow, and the present Government are now finding that they are in the same position. At this stage after a comparatively short time in office the Government are beginning to understand the financial facts of life. They are beginning to appreciate the difficulties of cutting down the Estimates for the various Departments. They are finding that it is not only impossible to cut down but that it is difficult even to hold the Estimates for Departments. One is not simply talking about theoretical figures, one is talking about cutting down, not providing what is required for health, education or social welfare and many other very desirable purposes. This is one of the facts of life which the Estimates published today show has been faced up to and is now realised by the present Government.
The difficulty of cutting down Estimates and the limited scope for taxation all add up to a position in which borrowing is necessary. What we are talking about is not whether we must borrow but how much we should borrow or how little we can afford to borrow. In saying this I want to make it quite clear that I am not condoning borrowing, that I am not minimising in any way the seriousness of the position in which we find ourselves as a result of the fact that we have borrowed too much in the past. We are now in a position where we are finding it very difficult to extricate ourselves from borrowing too much and getting the finances back into a position where borrowing would be at a reasonable level. There is no doubt whatever in my mind about the seriousness of this position and about the fact that it must be tackled very vigorously.
The publication of the Estimates and the budget, which we cannot predict although we have a fairly good idea of the lines it will take, will show the extent of the problem and will show that there is no easy solution to the problem of matching our expenditure, which certainly seems to be extremely desirable, to the money which can be raised to pay for it. The Government during the last election and since then have given the impression that they would be able to step in to clear up what they call this borrowing mess. This was a hollow claim which has been shown by the Estimates just published and which I am confident will be shown by the budget which will be produced next week.
Fianna Fáil when in office were fully conscious of the danger of excessive borrowing. They were conscious of the need to cut down that borrowing as far as possible but they found it very difficult to put this into practice, just as the present Government are finding now. The suggestion that Fianna Fáil initiated borrowing for non-capital purposes is entirely wrong. Borrowing for non-capital purposes, for current account, was really introduced by the Coalition during the period 1973 to 1977. There was a very small, insignificant amount borrowed for non-capital purposes in the previous year by Fianna Fáil. It was only during the last Coalition Government that borrowing for non-capital purposes was introduced in a big way. It was only then that it became, as far as they were concerned, an accepted way of dealing with the financial situation. All through the Coalition period this borrowing grew and became what seemed to be an accepted way of dealing with the financial situation. It was firmly established by the Coalition at that time. If anybody is to be blamed for it, or wishes to take credit for it, there is no doubt whatever that the Coalition were the people who initiated it and must take responsibility for it.
It is quite true to say that Fianna Fáil continued this borrowing during the period 1977 to 1981. By that time it was very difficult. The budget had got into a situation where it was extremely difficult to avoid borrowing, extremely difficult not to follow on with at least some borrowing for non-capital purposes. There is no doubt that Fianna Fáil should not have borrowed as much as they did. They believed in the early period between 1977 and 1981 that circumstances at that time were such that a certain amount of borrowing was justified. Certainly, with the benefit of hindsight, I think that, although they were justified in borrowing a good deal, they probably overdid borrowing for non-capital purposes during that time. But to give the impression that Fianna Fáil invented non-capital borrowing, that they were the only Government who ever did this and that Fine Gael and Labour are blameless in this regard is totally untrue, totally irresponsible. The sooner the Government stop trying to give that impression and face up to the economic facts of life in the present year the sooner we will find some kind of solution to a problem that has existed for some considerable time and in regard to which no party are entirely blameless.
By the end of next week we will have a clear view of the situation and by then, if the Government are honest enough to admit that their record in regard to borrowing is no better than that of Fianna Fáil, if they are willing to admit that the difficulties of paying for services can make a solution very difficult to achieve, if they are prepared to face up to that fact, then I think all parties can make an effort to solve this problem. It is something in which all parties can play a part. It is too serious a problem for the Government to continue to make cheap and unsustainable political points in regard to borrowing, contending that Fianna Fáil are the only people who were ever responsible for excessive borrowing and that the hands of Fine Gael and Labour are entirely clean in this respect.
I would like to say a few words about the Department of Justice and the administration of the courts. There is, as has been referred to on a number of occasions, a serious backlog of jury action cases. It now goes back approximately three years. Anybody having been involved in an accident and taking proceedings will be lucky now to get into court within about three years. The Government passed a Bill recently increasing the number of judges. This was a welcome contribution to the problem but by itself will not solve the problem. I would like to agree with what Senator McGuinness said about the difficulties which are being created due to a lack of back-up services, the fact that there is not sufficient accommodation for the registrars and other staff. Virtually nothing has been done in the last 40 or 50 years in relation to providing additional courts and accommodation. Some move has been made in the last year but, generally speaking, nothing was done.
There is a very serious shortage of registrars. That is just as serious as a shortage of judges because a judge cannot act without a registrar. One of the judges who was appointed approximately a year-and-a-half ago has not yet been provided with a registrar. He sits only when some other judge is not available or if he can get a registrar from another court. The position in the Chancery Court is that there are two Chancery judges and two Chancery Courts but only one Chancery registrar. This means that that division of the High Court is only working half time because there is not a second registrar available. It seems quite ridiculous and very bad value for the public generally and the State that we should have two judges, but only one registrar.
There has been frequent criticism of the delay in the administration of justice. One area in which one could get swift justice is in cases of judgment by default. In a case where proceedings were commenced and there was no appearance by the defendant then it was possible to go into the High Court office and get judgment by default. But it had to be processed by a registrar. It could be obtained in a matter of days but now, as a result of the scarcity of registrars, this way of obtaining judgment, instead of taking a few days takes up to six months. Instead of the backlog being cleared it is getting worse every day.
There must be some improvement. It is a question of the chicken and the egg. Without accommodation, you cannot have more registrars; if you do not have more registrars, there is not much point in having accommodation. Certainly there is room for a great deal of improvement in the situation. It is not one that needs a huge outlay of money. An additional two or three registrars could make a great improvement in the situation.
There was another matter mentioned by Senator McGuinness — the question of stenographers. There is no regular system in the courts at the moment. A stenographer may come in and offer his services or may not. This can lead to delay and could be solved relatively easily if the Department went about it in the right way.
I referred earlier on to the delay which now takes place in hearing jury actions in respect of people who have been injured in road or factory accidents or elsewhere. These cases constitute a very large proportion of all the proceedings which take place at the present time. This is where probably about two-thirds of the total litigation takes place. A person taking such an action will probably have to wait about three years to get into court. Instead of this position gradually getting better, it is gradually getting worse.
I have on occasion here expressed the view that juries are not really necessary for this kind of action. In Britain they have not had juries for this kind of action for the last 30 years and they are managing very well without them. At present there should be some review of the situation. If we continue to have juries to try these actions, and if we continue as we are at the moment, not only will we never catch up with the backlog but it will gradually get worse. A High Court judge in a lecture recently suggested that juries should be suspended for two or three years while the backlog is being dealt with. Whatever may be the merits of having or not having a jury, proceedings would be much quicker without a jury. This is an excellent suggestion which the Minister for Justice should consider. It would be the only way to solve the backlog and would also be a useful method of experimenting with these proceedings. After a couple of years it might be decided that there was no necessity to reintroduce juries for these actions.
As regards the criminal law, the Minister for Justice stated that he proposes to review some aspects of the law, for instance, in relation to bail, to the right to silence and a number of matters of that kind. It would not be appropriate for me to deal with these matters at length now, but, without going into the merits of the case, or making any judgment, I think they should be reviewed. Times change and problems change. Criminal law has evolved over the centuries and there is no reason why this process of evolution should not continue. We must consider our laws in this respect against the circumstances of the present time and nothing should be sacrosanct in this respect. Society fights a constant battle to survive and to uphold the rule of law. There are times when we can relax to some extent and when we can be liberal in regard to the administration of the law and the laws of the land, and there are other times when it may be necessary to take a harder line. There is reason to believe that we are moving into a time when it would be necessary to take a harder line in regard to the question of our rule of law and the laws which are necessary for this society to survive in present circumstances.
The Defence Forces cost the State a great deal of money. The figure for security for the present year — a combination of the Army and the police force — amounts to 12 per cent of the Estimates. There is no doubt that we need the Defence Forces, who are doing an excellent job in which we can all take pride. The role of the Defence Forces is sometimes rather vague and I wonder whether it is ever considered in an objective way or whether the ad hoc role, what they did last year, is accepted as necessarily being the right thing to do in the coming year and the year after. We tend to go on from year to year letting the Army, the Air Corps and the Naval Service do what they are doing without having a look at what their roles are. At a time when resources are so scarce and when we are so concerned about being able to pay for general services, we should look at what is spent on the Defence Forces, not in the sense of necessarily cutting them but trying to get better value for our money.
What is the role of the Defence Forces? Is it to defend us against attack in case of a world war? Is it to contain the violence in the North which is constantly on the point of spilling over? Is it to ensure that subversives and criminal elements do not undermine the State? Is it to play a part to discharge our obligations in regard to United Nations activities? Or is it a combination of all these, and possibly some other purposes which I have not mentioned?
I suspect it is many years since the Department of Defence, the Government or the Oireachtas really thought in an objective way about the role of the Defence Forces, looked to the future, looked at the forces, looked at the role they have been playing up to now, examined what is required of them and how best they can fulfil that role. This could be done in such a way as to save money and could ensure that such money as is spent on the forces is spent in the best way.
I will take one small and not very significant example of the way things go on without examination. The Army are still occupying a number of barracks in Dublin, some of which were built over 200 years ago. It was appropriate that the Army should have a number of centre city barracks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but it is not necessary now. Any military expert would say that in present circumstances the Defence Forces should be outside the city, perhaps with the exception of one or two barracks. The Army continue to occupy quite a number of barracks, some of which are very old and cost a great deal to maintain. Much of this is unnecessary, and nobody really feels any change should be made.
I would hesitate to suggest another Oireachtas Committee to examine this matter. There are already five or six joint committees and other committees about to be set up, but none has yet been set up. This is difficult to understand. The question should be reviewed by a committee or a group in which the Oireachtas should have some say.
I wish to comment on the tardiness with which the Government are getting around to the question of joint committees. As I said, several have been mentioned, more than ever before, but none has been set up. I would certainly urge the Minister of State who is present and who would have a considerable amount of influence in this respect, to try to ensure that such committees as are announced and have been mentioned be set up as soon as possible.
I should like to preface what I have to say on some individual departmental activities with a general overview of the economic situation. I do not intend to go into a wealth of statistics or to quote the actual amount of borrowing and so on which forms the basis of my argument. Members are well aware of the facts and figures which form the basis of our present problem and a repetition of them merely serves to confuse the issue rather than to present starkly the problems with which we are confronted.
First, a number of speakers in this debate and in a previous debate have mentioned — and I agree 100 per cent with them — that at the heart of all our economic problems is the question of unemployment and unless we solve this problem, both in the short term and in the longer term, in the western world generally the democracy to which we all adhere and the western civilisation into which we were born will not survive the increased unemployment which is signposted in the years ahead in western democracies. I do not believe that democracies can survive unemployment at the rates which now pertain throughout the western democratic system and certainly will not survive the increased unemployment which independent economic commentators suggest is going to come in the future, both to Ireland and to other western democratic countries. Therefore, at the base of everything I say is the overriding need to solve the problem of unemployment and the need to ensure that the people who are in a position to make a contribution to the welfare of the country by working are given the opportunity of doing that, both because they add to the wealth of the country and probably more importantly, because of the self-respect which that employment generates within themselves and the way in which they behave as a result of that employment as useful members of society.
If unemployment is to increase and to become a permanent feature of western democracy we will pay an enormous price and western democracy will be seen to have failed. The economic system on which it is based, which I would term a social democratic system, will be seen to have failed and people will turn to some other system to express the view which the overwhelming majority seem to have, that is, a desire for the useful employment of all citizens. The country and the Government have a part to play in that but in considering this Appropriation Act it is right to recognise that the Government have only a part to play and that the people themselves have a significant part to play as well. The question of the value of work and the importance of the willingness to share work between different members of the community in a fashion which will give employment to those who are out of work now are essential elements of the future success of the survival of Democracy. Those who are at work must be prepared to suffer some reduction in living standards in order to ensure that democracy survives. No Government by spending money in a particular fashion can totally create the conditions in which this will come about. Successive Governments in Ireland have had that as their objective. Where Governments have differed is in the manner in which they sought to implement this and the determination with which they resisted the sectional pressures which are brought to bear on any Government during the course of their term of office to ignore the overall common good and to concentrate at a particular time on the sectional interest making strong and vocal representations.
Anything that the Government can do to reduce unemployment should be done. The most important contribution which the Irish Government can make to our own specific and unique problems is to reduce the level of inflation. The solution of our problems and the traditional methods by which we got our economic affairs in order will not of themselves solve the structural problems to which I referred and which confront western democracy. What I refer to lies outside the scope of this motion. We can certainly contain that problem by solving some of the causes of unemployment and a major cause among those is inflation. It is not that inflation itself is necessarily bad. Many people have made a lot of money out of inflation and indeed those with property make substantial amounts of money out of inflation by reason of the fact that they purchase property at one price and pay back for it in inflated pound notes.
It is not inflation itself that is important but the barrier that inflation puts between ourselves and our ability to sell our goods abroad. We must reasonably request our citizens to resist the temptation to purchase foreign-produced goods that are in competition with goods placed on the Irish market by home producers.
It is because inflation ruins our competitiveness that it is, per se, against the best interest of the country. That is why it is most important, irrespective of our party political differences, that there be a continued effort to bring about that situation in which inflation is seen as a major problem. It is helpful to see that the general mood of the public opinion seems to be moving in favour of what I happen to be saying at present. There is a subtle change of emphasis, but a welcome one, in terms of the approach of the Opposition Party. That change is to be welcomed. Rather than labour the point, we should merely express the hope that if they do get the opportunity of resuming as the Government of the country they will do so in a manner which is not irresponsible but which will ensure that inflation is brought down to a low level and remains at a low level.
It is important also to ensure that the money which is being expended by the Government in preparing for the tax reforms they intend to introduce is well spent. We must understand that inflation is important in regard to production and maintenance. The cost of our products relates to the cost of the services purchased by the firms but overwhelmingly to the cost of the wage bill which the particular firm has to bear. Anything which will create an atmosphere which improves the prospects of winding down the spiral of inflation is to be welcomed. Even though the consumer price index may increase by the implementation of the Government's proposals on tax reform, the actual underlying cost of the manufacture of Irish goods should not be substantially disturbed as a result of that because it will not have an effect on the actual value of workers' wages. They are paying the same amount of tax in a different fashion.
I have been listening to other Senators speaking about the promises and proposals made by the party of which I am a member at the time of the last election. We made certain proposals and it is true that they were attractive to certain sections of the population. They may have been particularly attractive to certain females in the population. It would be an extraordinary state of affairs if the development of our political life was such that a party could not place before the electorate attractive proposals indicating the way in which they intended to run the country during their term in office.
What differentiates our proposals put forward on the last occasion from the proposals which were put forward during the 1977 general election is that we indicated quite clearly that we intended to raise sufficient taxation to pay for these proposals. Therefore we put before the people a number of different options for paying tax. That is significantly different from the proposals which were put before the people in the 1977 general election when it was proposed that certain moneys would be expended and there was no indication where the money would come from to pay for these concessions. Fianna Fáil put forward proposals which were not properly costed. They did not say where the money would come from, but when they got into Government they acted consistently; they implemented their proposals but did not provide money for them. As a result, we have the escalating deficit to which Senator Ryan referred. It is not wrong to promise people that you are going to manage the economy in a particular fashion during your term of office, but it is wrong and irresponsible to pretend that you are going to do it, or to do it in such a way as to increase unnecessarily and without economic benefit the borrowing necessary to meet the deficit on current income and expenditure. That is the difference between what Fianna Fáil said they were going to do, what they actually did and what we said we were going to do. It is too early to say whether we will implement what we proposed. I accept the criticism that if we introduced in the future any of our proposals and did not adequately introduce additional extra taxation to pay for them, we would be guilty of the same error as Fianna Fáil made. I believe we will implement our proposals.
The concept of giving to women working at home their portion of the tax credit of £9.60 has come under considerable scrutiny. Not only has it been discussed by Members of this House but during the last 12 months it has been a matter of great public debate and has been referred to a few times during the debate on this motion. The context of that proposal is that, in so far as it is possible to make adults in the community economically independent, one should do so. If it is considered desirable that there should be a difference between the amount of tax credit or the amount of tax free allowances under the old system which would be given to man who is single and a man who is married, the amount he would get if he was married represents the amount which was being given to him by reason of the fact that he was married and should be under the control of the person for whose benefit it had been given.
I can understand that people feel aggrieved that this in some way might disturb the financial arrangements between husband and wife but these financial arrangements must, from time to time, be shaken up and they will find their own level in due course under the new system. It is an option which is available and it is right and proper that if a relief from taxation is being given by reason of the existence of an adult that adult should, if it is administratively possible, be in a position to control the spending of the money. That is something which their dignity as human beings demands. They have a call on the community for far more than that but, unfortunately, that is all we can afford at the moment. We have got to take account of the economic order in which we live but I do not apologise for saying that if my wife is working at home and looking after our children she is entitled to a measure of economic independence, and that should be a growing economic independence.
That is reconcilable with the different and improved level of education of both men and women. It is also reconcilable with a modern view of women as full, equal partners in society and no longer subservient to their husbands. Socially it is a proper thing. It is administratively difficult and I accept that there will be problems in its implementation but I think it will, in the long run, give a measure of independence to a large number of women who otherwise would not have it.
I would like to mention a number of items which deal with expenditure and the first one is the Revenue Commissioners. The Revenue Commissioners are voted a considerable amount of money each year by the House and they are a most efficient organisation who perform their public duties in an exemplary fashion. I would like to call into question whether the system of levying taxation that we use, in particular for self-employed people, is appropriate and proper, and whether we can give aid and assistance to the Revenue Commissioners to ease their problem and to make their job less onerous in the collection of tax, particularly from those who are self-employed.
Being self-employed myself I do not go along with the idea that self-employed people are avoiding tax in a massive way. However, I recognise that there are considerable advantages in being self-employed and that the criteria and rules which apply to the self-employed are, to some extent, quite different from those which apply to people paying PAYE. That applies in particular to allowable expenses, and it is a matter which should be looked at. In addition, there is a considerable advantage for any self-employed person in that the payment of his or her tax is delayed until the next financial year. The introduction of a voluntary system of payment on a monthly basis for self-employed people — such system to be encouraged by the implementation of penalties in the case of people who do not wish to avail of it — would have considerable merit.
For example, professional people would make the equivalent of a PAYE return for themselves each month and would remit their tax to the Revenue Commissioners. There are a large number of self-employed people who, by nature of their trade, do not know whether they will have any taxable income at the end of the year. In one year they may have no taxable income and of course nobody would expect them to pay tax. There are a large number of professional people in particular who can say with some degree of certainly what their taxable income will be in any year. I do not see any good reason why they should not make periodic payments on a self-assessment basis, on the same basis as if they were PAYE workers.
I should like to develop that point. The system of taxation applicable in the United States of America — I am not suggesting it should be applicable to the PAYE sector in Ireland but to the self-employed — is a system of self-assessment, that is, the onus is placed on the individual taxpayer to consider his or her position and to make a return. In the United States that return is a public document and is subject to public scrutiny. That might be going too far for Ireland at the moment but I do not see any reason why we should not be given the opportunity of self-assessment, or having the onus put on self-employed people to make returns.
That reduces the probability and the possibility of fraudulent returns being made because that declaration has a statutory basis, and a false declaration would be a very serious matter. That idea could be borne in mind and, tied in with the idea of self-employed people paying their taxation on a regular basis — which I do not think would be all that inconvenient for most of them — it would add considerably to the revenue which the Minister for Finance would have at his disposal, because he would have it at his disposal earlier. It would also have the advantage of improving the accuracy and reducing the administrative cost of collecting the taxation of those who are self-employed.
I should like also to refer to the position of the Department of the Environment. It was my privilege and honour to be a member of the board of the National Building Agency between 1973 and 1977. The National Building Agency, who provide houses for local authorities who for one reason or another need that service, provided an excellent service for local authorities during the period 1973 to 1977. The standard of the houses they provided at that time, and indeed since, was exemplary. Their expertise has grown to such an extent that they are making a very significant contribution towards solving the housing shortage.
However, it would be remiss of me not to say that in the earlier days of the National Building Agency — and I am putting no political label on this; it was a factor of international architectural practice — as a result of that international architectural practice certain developments under the aegis of the National Building Agency gave rise to some difficulties. It has been represented to me, and I believe it, that there is considerable need to look again at the standard of accommodation being provided for the tenants of Dublin Corporation through the aegis of the National Building Agency and subsidised, in some cases, by the Department of the Environment in the Ballymun area, particularly in the high-rise accommodation in that area.
The conditions which we all know to exist in high-rise accommodation are a very serious reflection on life in the capital city. I am not speaking about the individuals living there who are a cross-section of the population. I am speaking of the conditions of the actual property in which they reside and the way in which it is maintained or is capable of being maintained. The Department of the Environment shold regard this as being of considerable importance. The dramatic thing to do would be to say that we will not put anyone else in there, but that is too dramatic at the moment. The upgrading of that accommodation, in the light of the knowledge we have now, would be a good idea and would make a significant contribution to improving the quality of life in our capital city.
I should like also to refer to the provision of grants and subsidies to private house purchasers. Grants and subsidies to private house purchasers are made available by the Department and are the subject of proper discussion under this motion. They are made in two ways: the £1,000 which is made available to first-time buyers, and the £3,000 spread over three years which is made available to a certain category of people who, for the sake of discussion, we will call married couples. There is one over-riding consideration which is that persons availing of the grant, whether single or married, whether they are availing of both grant and subsidy or of one of them, would be going into a new house. This is a mistake. I recognise there is an element of encouragement involved in this for the house-building industry. The number of dwellings necessary is a factor of our growing population. To get the same number of houses it is not necessary that all the people going into new houses should be newly-weds.
It is legitimate that, if we changed the structure of the grant, some newly-weds would go into houses which had been built for some time and the people who had been previously in those houses would move on and go into newer accommodation. The effect of making these grants available exclusively to new houses is that no married couple, or no couple about to get married, can even conceive of the possibility of going into anything except a new house, because they stand to lose £4,000 which represents a substantial portion of the difference between what they may borrow and what they would have available and would need to pay for the purchase of the house.
As a result of that, first-time buyers who, by and large, are younger people, be they single or married, are going into new houses and new houses, as we know, are being built on the periphery of our cities and towns, with the result that these estates are made up exclusively of people drawn from one age segment of the population. This gives rise to tremendous problems. It means that with the cycle of life of each house with young people coming in, children being born and schools being provided, all these pressures are coming from every house in that area at the one time. That is not good economic sense. It means that we have to over-provide schools and other facilities during the first ten years of such development. After that attendance at these schools tends to fall off. It is very important that we get into these newer housing areas a mixture of people. The only way we can do that is by making it possible for young people to buy houses which are, for the lack of a better description, secondhand.
There is also a very important psychological aspect involved. We appear to be laying too great an importance on the fact that a person goes into a new house, as if there were something wrong or something less than satisfactory with going into a house which had been occupied previously. As a result not only do we have young people in the newly developed areas but we have an ageing population in the remaining portion of our larger cities and towns. That ageing population, of course, has different needs from those of the younger population. Hence we see people in an area all getting old at the same time, being replaced, when they die, not by young families or by young husbands and wives which would give rise to families in due course, but by the only class of people who can now afford to buy a secondhand house of the semi-detached, three bedroom variety — people who buy them for speculative purposes intending to convert them into flatlets and so on. This gives rise to vast areas of our large towns and cities becoming utterly imbalanced from a population point of view. Any Government should investigate that aspect further. They should consider the problems created by the excessive concentration of grant assistance on our young people, shall we say, the linking of the grant assistance to the young with insistence that they go into a newly-built house. The same grant assistance should be available to the young who choose to live in an older house.
Every public representative is aware of the problems associated with the Department of Social Welfare. They are aware also of the problems associated with the remoteness of the Department of Social Welfare from the ordinary citizen. The Government have in their programme — and I hope they will implement this during their term of office — ideas for the decentralisation of at least some of the functions of the Department of Social Welfare so as to make information available locally. This subject is very much more important than its application to just this Government or the last Government. There are a whole group of people who are entitled to transfer payments under the way in which our society is at present organised. They are really powerless against the bureaucratic machine. They know what they are entitled to, it is only proper that being an educated population they should. But they do not really know how to get through the morass of bureaucracy should anything go wrong within the system and their entitlements do not automatically issue. I recently had an example of that, a case in which somebody had been attempting for four years to get a back payment of children's allowance. The child is now going to university, the children's allowance no longer being relevant. That applicant was able to show me correspondence stretching over a four year period. They were merely being led around in circles. It is wrong that public representatives of all parties — I can speak now as somebody who is not on the treadmill — spend hour after hour making representations on behalf of ordinary people, representations rendered necessary because of the system but which would be better made by the applicants themselves. Indeed they would retain a lot more dignity had they the confidence to so do. It reduces the quality of the individual politician. It swamps him in the day-to-day routine work. We do not provide for a proper ombudsman-type of situation in which action can be taken quickly in respect of routine matters. Local items would constitute the proper concern of public representatives, items on which policy decisions are necessary, making representations to have policy changed, receiving deputations to have policy changed, or making contributions in whichever House of the Oireachtas they happen to be Members.
Mention has been made of the delay with regard to the joint committees of the Oireachtas. I do not want to enter into any public controversy on that matter. In that regard certainly we can say there has been no delay on the part of the Seanad. It is my belief also that there has been no undue delay on the part of the Government side in the Dáil on the matter. As a body the Seanad should exercise its influence through its membership of various other organisations, to ensure that those joint committees are speedily set up. If the responsibility lies with the organisation of which we happen to be members, or if one of our Members happens to be an influential person in that organisation, he or she should not be afraid to take appropriate action in that regard.
I should like to associate myself with the problem outlined by Senators McGuinness and Eoin Ryan on the question of the administration of the High Court. It is realistic to expect that two judges of the High Court be located in Cork or in the Munster area; it would not be necessary that they be located permanently in Cork. That would be improving the position considerably and is something to which I would give my support. But I have a vested interest in that matter. It would serve the interests of justice at large. In doing so it would bring the process of justice closer to the people. The Government should do such things as are within their power to improve the lot of our people, that this very precious thing called democracy that we have can withstand the strains which it will be subjected to inevitably over the next ten years.
It was refreshing to hear Senator O'Leary say in his earlier remarks that the cure for our economy is to reduce inflation, reduce unemployment and so on. Since the Coalition Government came into power they have been responsible for the inflation figure, at present standing at 24 per cent, and for unemployment rising from 122,000 or 123,000 to the November figure of 141,000, which more than likely is now in the region of 150,000. In his remarks today he advocated no cure for rising unemployment. Yet he spoke of the fear of democracy being undermined if we did not do something to create jobs for our young people. It is natural to make comments like that because everybody knows jobs will have to be provided for our youth. They constitute our country's wealth. For long enough our young people were forced to emigrate during the twenties right through to the sixties. They have had an opportunity to remain at home, buy their homes, get a job, raise a family, be close to their near and dear ones. However, in the past six months all these prospects seem to have been swept away once again.
There is constant doom and gloom being broadcast by the present Government that we are in for all sorts of bad things in the future. They are giving no hope whatever to the young people of this country. They say things can and will improve, but every other day there are disimprovements. Unemployment has increased to 150,000 and last Sunday the Tánaiste actually admitted that he expected unemployment this year to reach 160,000. Yet he offered no solution. When Fianna Fáil were in Government, during what could be regarded as a very tough time on the economic front, at least they kept the country steady and stable and they kept the people employed. As soon as the new Government took over, the unemployment figure increased by 20,000 in six months.
The Government are having an extended honeymoon at the moment but how long that will last I do not know. Normally, an incoming Government get about three months of a honeymoon, but this Government seem to be in a more fortunate position and are getting a honeymoon of 12 months or 24 months. I do not know how long the people will accept this.
Senator O'Leary spoke about the promises that his party in particular made to the people before they took office but they were false promises. They offered housewives the famous £9.60. When they asked the housewives to make application only 7 per cent applied. They spoke about changing the tax structure from direct to indirect taxation: that was just within the Fine Gael Party. Yet, at the same time, the Minister sitting with us now disagreed with that policy. Where do we go from here? In the newspapers this morning all we can read about is more taxation. The people whom I represent were expecting a reduction in the rate of income tax from 35 per cent down to 25 per cent in the budget.
I would like to make a few comments on some of the things I would like to see happening that may help to reduce this tidal wave of unemployment. The first point I would like to speak about concerns the local authorities. They could do a lot to create employment in their areas. If local schemes proved viable that would create employment and would lead to an improvement in the infrastructure in the various counties.
Senator Whitaker spoke about the deteriorating state of our national roads. The block grant we get in my county is similar to the block grant we got in 1975, yet costs in the meantime have escalated by 120 or 130 per cent. There is more need to divert some of the revenues from the Department towards the local authorities in the form of block grants to help their infrastructure. I tabled a notice of motion on this matter in the Kerry County Council and also on the General Council of County Councils. I feel that the local authorities should be working in closer co-operation with the Department of Social Welfare. You see the fine healthy young people walking around the country today, having applied for the dole and getting £18 to £20, or, if they are living at home with their parents, they go home with a measly £10 or £11. These young people should be hired by the local authorities and the funds they are getting from the Department of Social Welfare should be channelled to the local authorities to put these people to work building up our infrastructure, our roads, water systems, our sewerage systems. These schemes were built long before there was machinery available and in olden times the only transport was the pony and cart. The schemes could be brought up to proper standards again. The manpower is available for such work. There has been too much emphasis on machinery and ten if not 15 people could be employed for the price of one piece of machinery. I do not want to be thought old-fashioned or anything like that but the cost of purchase and repair of machinery and of gasoline makes it necessary to consider using more manpower.
Then there is the young married man with three to five children who is getting in the region of £70 to £80 if he is on social welfare, or even £90 a week in some cases, from the Department of Social Welfare. This man is looking for work and I cannot see why that money cannot be channelled from the Department of Social Welfare to the local authority who could put this man to work. At least it would give him something to live for. When he wakes up in the morning he has nothing to do only to go down to the social welfare office and then into the nearest pub to drink away his sorrows all day.
The policies that were implemented by the former Government for the infrastructure of this country and in particular by the Leader of that Government, Deputy Haughey, who laid aside £17 million for improvement of the infrastructure, must now be seen as the correct approach. This preaching of doom and gloom will have to stop once and for all. I will give one instance of something which concerns me personally down in County Kerry. Senator Bolger today made a case for a hospital in Wexford. We have a hospital in County Kerry of which we are quite proud. The Tralee hospital is newly built and completely finished at a cost to the taxpayer of £14 million. That hospital is lying idle today, unequipped and unstaffed. At the same time, it is costing the State something in the region of £30,000 a month just to keep it shipshape until the day we get a couple of million pounds to equip it. All it costs to equip the hospital at the moment is £2 million. We see millions squandered day by day but here is just a couple of million pounds that is badly needed for the people in our area and something they have been looking for for the past ten or 15 years. Our old hospital, which has been condemned for the past ten or 15 years as a fire hazard, is still operational and there are 325 people employed there. When our new hospital is operational it will take a thousand people to run it. In this case we could put an additional 750 people to work and I feel that funds should be made available for this.
While we are discussing health I would like to speak about another area, that of institutions for the mentally handicapped. We have a home in Beaufort for mentally handicapped young people. They stay there until the age of 14 or 15 years and the staff must be congratulated on the work they are doing. The finance they get to run this institution is all voluntary and the amount of State aid given is very little. The institution in Killarney for the mentally handicapped, St. Finan's is under the umbrella of the Southern Health Board. The young people coming out of Beaufort at the age of 14 or 15 years are immediately put with adults of 40 to 60 years of age, and they are let roam around in the same environment with nothing to do. We have been looking for necessary funds there for a number of years for Gortroe which has been on the cards for a good number of years. The construction and the running of such a project would give much needed employment. Again, I condemn the Government for the critical water situation in north Kerry. There is flooding every other day.
I live in a tourist county and when the few tourists we get come in the months of June, July and August and September, they have to move out fast because there are no proper water facilities. We sent contracts up to the Department of the Environment six, seven and eight months ago and are still waiting for the go-ahead for these schemes which, again, will give more employment. There were talks of gas links. Senators today spoke about expensive oil bills and the amount taken to run the ESB and all the other major bodies. Bord Gáis will not put forward a proper plan to give gas to all the vital areas in Ireland, not just from Cork to Dublin. The Minister for Industry and Energy, for instance, wants to take it up to Belfast. At the same time, Tarbert power station, which was working to 100 per cent capacity up to a year ago, is now working at something like 10 per cent capacity because it is an oil-fired station. The future of that station is in jeopardy unless we can get gas links to it, which would save existing jobs and possibly create more jobs. There is a shortsightedness about the job situation.
With the exception of one, the ESB, all the semi-State bodies seem to be losing vast sums of money. The Government and the Minister for Finance will have to take a serious look at all these State bodies. As soon as there is a problem, a board is set up. You cannot now start a new company, make it semi-State and let the State pay for it. These will have to be run efficiently and properly. The handouts to all these semi-State bodies will have to stop. CIE had a deficit last year in the region of £95 or £96 million. At the same time, they have the nerve to come along with the McKinsey report and try to tell us down in Kerry that the way to solve their problems is to cut off the only link we have with CIE in Tralee. We are expected to get our train connections at Cork or Limerick. They are talking similarly about Galway, Sligo, Mayo and other rural areas when they should be building new railways, creating more employment, making the rail system more efficient, taking the people off our national road network and putting them on the railways. They should be taking the heavy, articulated trucks off our highways and putting the goods they carry on the railways, but they are thinking backwards. It is high time that the relevant Minister told the people who are responsible for running these companies where to get off.
I have another criticism of the Government. Last Monday we in Kerry got a circular about keeping to a rates increase of 15 per cent. I do not agree that the Government can put a levy on our county when they short-change us of £2 million and tell us to compensate for that somewhere else. The amount of money that they should allow us in striking our rates should take account of the present rate of inflation — 25 per cent. They cannot tie our hands because of problems of their creation. The Government are trying to reintroduce rates by the back door. They want to impose on people on social welfare a water charge, a sewerage charge and a refuse collection charge. While I am in full agreement that people who have industries and who are involved in any kind of large refuse collections should not be depending on the State but that private companies should be set up to remove all their garbage, the State should remove the refuse for the weaker members of the community, of whom we have quite a few in our county. Where is the money from the reintroduction of the car tax? We have all been expecting large cheques from the local authorities in the past five or six months. Are we going to get this money back?
The only achievement of the Government to date is the introduction of the youth scheme. That is the only practical proposal they put before the people, but they come back to the PAYE worker and put another 1 per cent tax on him or her to try to raise finance for this youth scheme. At the same time, the AnCO training centres have been standing out a mile for years. Young people could be trained there and the local authorities could guarantee employment for these young trained people from AnCO. These people, having got their necessary qualifications — whether it is as carpenters, plumbers or fitters — could go about the work of building up our nation.
Our food industry could provide a solution to some of our problems. Senator Whitaker mentioned the number of people leaving our farms to go into industry. We are basically an agricultural country and we should never forget it. We should be addressing our energies to improving the situation in the farm industry. Most of the food which we are eating today is being imported. It is a scandalous situation. The Government should be creating new factories to ensure not alone that we manufacture enough food for ourselves but that we export more food. We have an ideal climate for vegetables, fruit and many other items provided that the necessary funds are made available to get people involved in these industries. There were recent television reports of tons of fish being dumped. Men went out working day and night, thinking they were going to make money, and were told that only so much fish was bought, so they had to dump the surplus. We have the raw materials and there should be processing of these for export, to try to offset our balance of payments.
Senator O'Leary hit out very strongly at our private enterprise section. These people should be given more encouragement because they are the people with the ideas, who will create future employment, no matter how small the industry is, even involving as few as two or three. We had a very successful year of advance factories being built by the IDA, and cluster workshops and so forth. The young people are making whatever they can make and selling their products at home. These people should be given every encouragement.
In all sincerity, I feel that the Government are running this country in the same fashion as they tried to remove the snow from our streets.
The last few contributions from Senators have rightly dwelt on and dealt with standards of living, unemployment and related subjects. Senator Kiely has indicated that the time is opportune for us to get away from gloom and doom. Then he himself went on, as most of us are wont to do, talking in terms of gloom and doom as they relate to the local situation in which he is involved. Of course, this is the problem that most of us have to contend with. We represent particular interests, vested or otherwise, and we seek every opportunity we can to ventilate the views of the constituents we represent, whether within the trade union movement, the political sphere, or otherwise. But I think the time is opportune for us to ask ourselves why it is that a country like this has to continue facing a problem of massive unemployment. Why is it that the Tánaiste recently had to acknowledge that from the way things are going it would appear that within the next six to 12 months unemployment might reach 140,000 or 150,000?
Indeed I said recently too that I could see it hitting 200,000 within the next two or three years unless certain imaginative steps are taken to try to introduce programmes of action to anticipate that type of adverse development and ensure that it does not happen. I acknowledge that that is easily said. That is why I ask what is the problem? Why are we facing this dilemma and cannot put our people to work?
I am satisfied nobody, whether in Fianna Fáil, or Fine Gael, or Sinn Féin the Workers' Party, or the Labour Party, wants to see massive unemployment and social distress; nobody wants to be concerned with the possibility of an uprising out there by people who are disillusioned and disaffected and so concerned about the future that despair takes over and as a consequence we have to employ extra gardaí, build another jail or two, or take other measures to prevent people from giving vent to their despair. It goes a lot deeper than even this business of inflation. If we correct inflation and become more competitive we are away on a hack. The learned people tell us that we can become more competitive only if we control the cost of wages and we can control the wages costs only if we keep wage increases down. They do not talk about the problems of individuals trying to live, even within the system as we understand it. They do not talk about the paucity of expertise in certain areas in respect of design, manufacture, efficiency of marketing, salesmanship and so on, which could contribute much more positively to the sale of goods and services on international markets. Rather, they try to blame workers who are looking for a wage increase to offset the rising cost of living.
Having said that, I want to move on to a broader aspect of this and suggest that there is a factor at work here. No matter what we do about competition in the sense that we talk about it here, no matter what we do about inflation, we are still going to be restrained. I refer to the fact that the multinational companies throughout the world, especially the western world, have so ordered things nowadays that they have forced us into an impossible position. They are transferring not alone their capital and their investment but their design and their research and development from western Europe, from the United States of America, even from Japan, to the Phillipines, to Korea, to Vietnam, to Latin American countries, all areas where wages rates are so low as to make it almost impossible for the western world to compete against the products coming from those areas.
Some Senators may have seen the television programme last night which dealt with this topic. It established quite clearly that there is now this phenomenon of the multinational companies transferring their factories from Europe or from the States to Pakistan or to the Phillipines where the girls are herded together like animals into textile factories and electronics factories and paid 55p per day; the doors are locked; they are unable to get out; in their off duty time they are herded together into hovels and are paying £2 per week out of their £3.50 wages for the joy of spending a couple of hours sleeping on a board. These are terrible conditions — it is slavery. The trade union movement cannot function; it cannot flourish. Indeed when they try to do something about it the workers are imprisoned; they are harassed and their families are harassed. These are in areas under regimes which have the blessing and the goodwill of some of our mighty western powers who at the same time talk about Poland and Afghanistan. They do not talk so much about Turkey. They do not talk so much about El Salvador in the terms that they should be talking about. Nor do they talk about the Phillipines or Taiwan or other areas where workers are so exploited it is unbelievable.
How can the western world then, especially a country like this which is still in the development process, ever compete against that, especially when we bear in mind that the EEC, of which we are a part has, through trade agreements and in other ways, made arrangements with these countries to give them access to European markets to bring the produce, that is being produced unfairly by our standards, into competition with our goods and services? We are in a new ball game now. We are going through some type of revolution in the whole concept of industrial activity, industrial development and economic progress. We have to review very quickly and very seriously where we are going and we have to make some decisions as to what type of infrastructural and industrial activity we should be engaging in, not alone in Ireland but as part and parcel of the whole EEC set-up. As long as we have arrangements made and treaties arrived at because of narrow political motives, clouded with the idea of security where one needs military bases in certain countries and gives them all sorts of conditions and pours in billions of dollars to give them military power to control the unfortunate peasants and the unfortunate industrial workers, we are heading rapidly for some type of international social revolution.
It will be no use talking about Communism or any other "ism" when that happens because it will be too late. After ten or 15 years of repression what answer has the ordinary person except to take force as the way out? It is sometimes difficult to argue against that even though we must all accept that force only breeds more force in the long run. I make the point merely to indicate and emphasise that unless we get control of the new order of things in so far as international investment is concerned we are only codding ourselves here and we will be just carrying on as though we were 20 years back.
Another major area of concern in respect of industrial activity which impinges on our scene is that substantial sums of the available money for investment in industrial, economic and infrastructural development have been taken out of this pool and put into armaments development. The amount of money and the number of people caught up in that area are such that there is less money available for ordinary social development, ordinary economic development. As well as less money being available there are fewer people available. We are taking the expertise, the disciplines and the knowledge and the wonderful talents which many people have away from the ordinary social and economic development areas and concentrating them on the area of mass destruction to the point where some of these multinationals who are involved in this whole armaments business will, one of these days, press the button if for no other reason than to get rid of the massive stocks of armaments and equipment they have built up so they can get back to the idea of starting to create some more. That is not as farfetched as it sounds even though I know I have put it in rather extreme terms. The fantastic sums of money and the fantastic human resources that are being put into these areas of activity and development mean that there is less and less available for ordinary social and economic activity. When one looks at what is happening in Latin America and in other parts of the world in the area of the exploitation of people one can but marvel at the capacity of human beings to suffer, and to suffer for so long.
I agree and I accept that efficiency, even within the scheme of things as it is, is essential if we are to try to improve our lot. I agree also that we need a plan. More than a plan we need action. I must compliment the Minister, Deputy Desmond, on his initiative in this area to get something going soon in the area of economic development and economic programming and planning. I am aware that he has had discussions with interested groups on this. I hope that out of it we get very soon not only the plan but the action which will be paralleled with it.
My final statement in this general area is that when I look around me here in Ireland, especially in Dublin in recent times and see the unhappiness that was reflected in vandalism and other acts during our period of severe winter, I can only say that we have to examine our own consciences and ask why it is that Irish people acted, as many did, like animals. Again we must acknowledge that it is because our social order and our social system is unable to offer the type of hope, the type of encouragement and the type of security to those people that they need for the future.
Senator R. Bruton rose.
Before the Senator starts, I should like to point out that at 5.30 p.m. we are changing to item No. 2, so perhaps he would like to move the adjournment of this debate.
Debate adjourned.