I would like to begin by making a political point that I hope will be of some assistance to historians of the National Development Corporation. Speakers from the opposite side, and indeed speakers from the Opposition in the Dáil, have used the name of the Labour Party more often in connection with this Bill than they have used it in any legislation that I have read in recent years. That is perfectly correct and predictable. It is a Labour Party proposal for many years now that there be a National Development Corporation. Having said that, it is also my personal wish, not only as an elected Senator but as a political scientist as well, that there would be far more open discussion of the debates that take place in Cabinet, because if there had been a Labour Party majority in this country and a Labour Government in office I have no doubt that the Bill presently before this House would be in an entirely different form from the Bill which is currently before us. Honesty behoves me to say that. It is interesting to tease out the reason for this. I say it in the fullest respect to the principled people who have become converted to the case for supporting the National Development Corporation in the other House as it passed through and the people who have spoken in favour of it in this House this afternoon.
In considering the Bill we are asked to place our faith in one of two directions. One of those directions could be roughly called the "school of climatology", which has many adherents. It is rather like in the nineteenth century, when there were people who believed that the major cycles of economic recovery and collapse could be explained by moving sunspots. There are people in the country at present who use this phrase "creating a climate for investment". The chain of logic which they seem to advocate is one that if you somehow or other change the climate reluctant capital — and remember we have just been told by Senator Professor Brian Hillery that this country was awash with capital and funds seeking investment — will then automatically find its investment slot. The assumption is that after these investment slots have been filled we will be witnessing another Industrial Revolution, creating the jobs that our young people want, creating the income which is necessary to be expended in order to create the service jobs, and so on.
This "school of climatology" has many adherents. They come mostly from the right. It was not accidental that in the other House one of the sources of information quoted with more frequency than our own Economic and Social Research Institute was, in fact, the Trade Policy Research Institute in London. Its papers were quoted by several speakers. It is the one that has been producing this new orthodoxy. In a review — and I will come back to this in my speech — of a number of European economies the London Institute suggested "Let us go back to the supremacy of the market place and let us create competitiveness and in time the jobs will come". I want to say that I find this thinking to be the most dangerous thinking in the social sciences since the great economic collapse of the 1930s. Certainly, it is the exact same thinking which has on several occasions underpinned the preparation for the resolution of economic difficulties through the mechanism of war.
The second perspective is that we would approach our economic difficulties and our human problems from the perspective of planning. We have, indeed— and I think speakers from both sides in both Houses are correct in identifying a problem in this regard — in this country a hostility to the planning process. I was not yet a student when the first document which came out of the discussions and the work of the late Mr. Seán Lemass and Dr. T.K. Whitaker, then a senior civil servant — and a young one — produced the First Programme for Economic Expansion. The word "programme" was used rather than the word "plan". Indeed, lurking behind that choice of the word "programme" was an antipathy to the word "plan" which had gone across all aspects of Irish culture. We were after two decades during which, for example, when fighting the mother and child scheme in 1951 people had developed the strongest ideological right wing opposition in modern European history to the role of the State. We were restrained from this because of the enormity of emigration, the change which took place in the transition in Government in 1958, and the whole idea of opening up the economy with certain consequences — which I will come back to. The fact was that we inherited an antipathy to the State. It was to some extent of our own choosing. We went ahead in our republic and set up, not a general health system but a private system that was not really private except in so far as it was consumed. With the additional money in your pocket you could live off the State, use tax-payer-provided hospitals, doctors and services. You could pay to be different like you could in the same way in the trains if you had the additional money. You could not invent a train or provide a train, but you could be in a different part of the train because you could use private money to establish a difference between yourself and others in transport. There was a comprehensive hostility to the State. As well as that, there was a social teaching of the major Church which stressed the principle of subsidiarity which makes it difficult even today, for example, for the battered child or the child who is being neglected to secure individual rights in relation to the State's protection, because you have to get past the two great buttressing points of this bourgeois statelet that had called itself a republic — the family and the market place.
All of these transitions and this ideology underpinned most of our thinking. In his distinguished history of the Department of Finance Dr. Fanning stressed the importance of the continuity of the orthodox thinking in fiscal and financial management between the British-administered State and the Irish State. I have looked at these different areas and I have been watching this where it has manifested itself. What was it made these peasants who had thrown off their empire, unique in Europe in not trusting the State? It is, of course, to be answered by historians. What made them amenable to authoritarianism? Why did they need to be told about everything, from a matter of their salvation, to their experence of spirituality, to why they should be grateful to go to a dispensary and consume health service? What was this distrust of the State? It is a good question to ask.
I want to lay the first point about this Bill right where it belongs. This Bill raises a question of ideology, a very fundamental question of ideology, the pervasive ideology of the Right in this country. The people who are opposing this Bill are, I think, from a mixture of motives telling us correctly their worries about different ways in which there might be duplication, and so on. Why did this Bill come so late? Opponents of the Labour Party have asked that. Why did we insist on it? Why did we keep on about it? I remember very well when the first memo about the National Development Corporation was written. I remember the people who opposed it. I remember each vested point of interest that opposed the memo that was prepared in the first Coalition, 1973-77, seeking to bring the National Development Corporation into existence. The people who opposed it were opposed to the planning process. They themselves were inheritors of all of this voodoo about the State which has condemned us like voodoo does, to the sickness of an unmanaged economy, a country that had failed its people. They ran from the country in the boat, some driven, some choosing to go to become a burden on the hospitals, educational institutions and the other services that were being provided by the neighbouring island that we mocked and that was developing a welfare state. Many a mother followed her children to get her dental care in the island that we were supposed to be at war with — at least in our hearts — because they had developed the welfare state.
What is very interesting now is to see the Trade Policy Research Centre in London churning out the material that in Britain would roll back the welfare state and the health care system, and it has reproduced tuberculosis in Britain by abolishing separate wards for TB. It is that body which collects statistics that are misleading. I will come to the quotations used. They are misleading and dishonest. I must say, as a practising academic, that I would be ashamed to put my name to the documents quoted in the other House. For example, they ignore countries like Finland; they ignore the Austrian figures; they are totally selective and the figures are distorted where they are presented.
To come back to our task here, let us listen to the two models we have. We must make a fundamental choice in this country. Senator Honan is right about the crisis that exists in relation to confidence in the political and in the economic system. People are questioning the ability of the political system to respond to the immense social problem that has been created, the ability to provide work, or the ability to provide income for those who now fill the country. Another colleague stated that emigration has returned — an indictment again. It is an indictment of a country that still goes on with this nonsense that the State must be opposed.
Why would they roll back the State? There are three rough models of the State that one can have. There is the residual model of the State about which we heard some comments this afternoon and about which we heard a great deal more in the other House, that is, its notion of the deserving poor. For example, there was the notion in the nineteenth century that conditions should always be a little worse inside the workhouse than they were outside so that there would not be a run on the workhouse and the poor law rate would go up. There is this kind of residual State with minimal interventions.
All around the place the lights are going on. People are saying that the State is wasteful and helping the sick too much. I was reared on this as a child. I remember such statements being made in the fifties when they were opposing people like Dr. Noel Browne and talking about women in Britain who were supposed to have four sets of false teeth and two pairs of spectacles. Later on, I read about the origin of the British welfare state and about the Labour socialist politics that took the children out of the mines. If I had a choice between a woman who had to go blind and toothless or could have two sets of teeth and three pairs of spectacles she could have them all. There is misery about this State that has now found new focal points in practically every sphere of life. It is about time it was taken on. I remember these discussions very well. When we suggested the National Development Corporation, we had a role for it. We saw it as a vehicle of State investment in the context of a planned economy. In the first memo we presented on the document we spoke about different sub-planning commissions which would identify sectoral targets in different parts of the economy and achieve them. We stressed the importance of their not being in conflict with one another, so that, for example, what one would seek to achieve through the use of agencies in the food processing sector would not conflict with other agencies that were already in existence there.
The opponents of this Bill are right to an extent. It is rather like asking converts to become pietistic. The point is that the Irish public have not given a mandate to a Government to plan their economy in the interest of using resources so as to provide employment. It has produced a curious amalgam of populisms. It has now added to these a new foreign-type notion that we will get someone to say what everyone is really feeling in their heart, which is that because I am working and pay tax I should get a little more and retain more of my tax, while ignoring the plight of the unemployed. That feeling is in the country at present. This is what is called progress and democracy or progressive democracy. It is neither. It is regressive, selfish, mindless and backward-looking.
When we come to dealing with problems that are facing us at present, we have to make choices. There is a fundamental difficulty in that regard. If there is no philosophic commitment to the idea of the social and if, for example, we feel that it is not our responsibility to be concerned about the children of the unemployed father who lives next door to us, but that we are talking about the provision of my job, and if we are talking about the education of children next door or down the road, is it not a backwardness in ourselves that we have no concept of the social?
At present, all the speeches on this Bill have a message ringing loud and clear — the private, the private, the private. It is about the privatisation of experience and behind the phrase "Let the market dictate", it is the rule of the strong. Behind phrases such as "The market place" and "When the climate has been restored and investment takes place" is the idea that, once again, we are in a preplanning phase. At the end of the nineteenth century everyone was supposed to be planners. We are leaving all of the destinies of the people and of the children to chance. Why do we do that? Because those who will be left to chance will not be the elite who will take this decision, because they have the time to sip their gins and ask the question "Perhaps the market place is best?" I know people in the Trade Policy Research Centre in London and I know many of these other agencies. They are not the people who come from the coal faces or from the poor, but very often they are people with limited intelligence who are the inheritors of privilege in Britain. It is the same kind of people who are coming out with this nonsense here.
When we proposed the National Development Corporation we did so because we believed that we should, even if we did not get political support for it, make the case for the planned economy. It has been shortened by recent events. Let us think of what is at stake around the world at present. This Bill has focussed a discussion on what we can do ourselves. There are external constraints on the Irish economy that are very real. There are external constraints in relation to aid, debt, trade and credit. For example, 65 per cent of the total export earnings of the Mexican economy will go to pay and service the international debt of Mexico. It is a source of wonder to parliamentarians, those of us who have visited Mexico, when, we look down from a window of a hotel at the slums that surround that city, the most urbanised centre in the world, and consider that 65 per cent of their export earnings go to service their debt, not to repay it. That is reality. It is not my function here this evening to argue. There is a version of economics at stake which argues for the centrality of the existing modes of relationship of aid, debt, trade and credit in the world at present. Unless within the next ten years we have a major international conference on the whole question of debt and of restructuring trade, and on changing the nature of credit institutions, there is no prospect for world recovery. There will be even further debts. There will be a collapse in most of the development aid programmes. We could fall back on the classic conservative market-led response to international economic problems of war and famine. What are we doing in setting up bogey hostilities to the idea of the State taking an initiative in the economy is taking unto ourselves this illness from abroad. The newspapers write, for example, about another State agency. This is the hysteria that has been created. I repeat, to the point of tedium, that this constitutes an ideology which has stood in the way of progress in this country for so long.
There are a number of State agencies mentioned. What is on offer if you do not agree with the National Development Corporation? My distinguished friend and fellow Clareman, Senator Hillery, stated that the country is awash with funds. Yet people do not invest. I could assist him there by suggesting placing a tax on funds that are not invested in industry. Would he support it? There is the shortage of viable projects, but we have 23 agencies assisting the intelligence of Irish private industry. It is said that there must be opportunities for profit. We have been told that the climate for taxation must be put right. I agree that there must be changes in taxation. What will motivate the individualist to think in social terms? What will motivate people who need all this and much more — the dis-establishment of the State? When they have the corpses of the economy around the place they will then be moved to be patriotic and to build up a new Ireland. Some of them may have the brazen cheek to call it a New Republic, making a mockery of even more words than have been used before. If you believe in a sane, rational approach towards the economy, you would need a stronger Bill than this.
I welcome the Bill such as it is. It needs to be very clearly structured from the very beginning to this question which is reasonably asked: "Where will it clash with existing agencies?" The National Development Corporation was always seen not as part of the State infrastructure but as an entity in its own right, with the right and capacity to innovate, to identify niches in the international traded sector, where, for a number of reasons, the private sector had shown neither historically nor now any indication of its capacity to become involved. The private sector is limited by its own tardiness and by the relationship that the financial institutions have with it. If you like, both have a time horizon that is short, a time horizon that will not take risks both equally in relation to the kind of security and collateral which they require for borrowing in credit. They have attitudes which are quite different to other countries in Europe and will not expand and move into these niches. Let us take some of these into account.
Let us turn the question of our youthful population around. Let us say that instead of it being a social problem, it could be turned into an asset. One should be investing in intelligence and taking from that intelligence specialisms that constitute new opportunities. It is not unreasonable to see the National Development Corporation — if it is properly envisaged — buying an entire piece of technological innovation. What Irish company could do that? Look at the Irish companies which have become regarded as the most successful. Part of my existential depression has been the admiration and adulation given to those dreadful Diarmuid MacMorroughs of the "Irish Business World" who have bought shell companies, wrecked good businesses, speculated on the shares, realised their assets and established themselves as some kind of litany of successes in the Irish business world. I should like to name some of them, for example, the Fitzwilton Group. Where are the jobs? I can tell you where the jobs were. Who had to pick up the bill when one job after another went when the companies were realised? The State, of course. There was no question of rolling back the State then to pay the social welfare that these former working people had, who went to work one morning and were told: "Your life is now changed, not that it has changed but we are no longer trading. We are not manufacturing."
What were they doing? They were speculating. The whole record of the Irish business sector in this regard has been that if it wanted to clean up its own stable there was a lot of manure it could have shifted in relation to selling itself as something interested in a viable Irish economy. All the incentives of the State were thrown at these people. The adulation of the media was given to them. They were interviewed on how they reared their children, what kind of wives they liked to marry and what kind of plane they liked to fly. There was grossness in personal behaviour and ignorance — all of this because it had been managed on a "trick of the loop" operation on the Irish stock market, leading, as I have so often quoted, Dr. T.K. Whitaker, a former distinguished member of the House, to express publicly his concern at what was happening to the Irish Stock Exchange in the seventies because of the operation of these people.
That is an aside and it took from my main argument. My argument is that the Irish private sector has not the resources, it has not the borrowing capacity and it has not the equity infrastructural support to become involved in the trading activities, one of which I have mentioned, in the technological sector. Neither has it the marketing expertise nor has it the time horizon which is most important — that is, the ability to be able to last out in a market place in which you want to establish a centre of excellence and a sufficient length of time to perform and to provide the jobs.
To turn away from that sector, there are endless opportunities to which the NDC, when it was originally envisaged, should turn itself. Some of these have been mentioned. The scandal, for example, of exporting our agricultural produce in a raw state with very little value added. There are examples like this staring us in the face. That was not in the trade policy of Denmark which has a State company that now becomes a net importer of food, sending it out again in finished form, for example, sausage meats, cheese products, powdered products. These are all possibilities whereby the scale of the investment — the research and development and the marketing — can be provided by the State with a different time horizon and with a different relationship to equity investment than the private investor.
