It would be quite easy for us on this side to express a desire to assist the Government in the crisis which has arisen, but, before we could do that, we should have to ask ourselves what confidence we had in the Government, and what right they had to our confidence. It was rather amusing to hear the Minister for Finance, speaking on the earlier stages of the Budget, referring to the fact that the speech of the Leader of the Opposition might be likened to the speech he made on the last Budget, and the one before, and the one before that, and that it was simply a question of shouting squandermania on each occasion. As a matter of fact, that was a compliment which the Minister did not realise he was paying to the Leader of the Opposition. It was a perfectly true statement. It is perfectly consistent with the position he took up ever since Fianna Fáil came in and told the House that they were going to save the country millions of pounds, and, instead of that, having millions of pounds piled on. One of the most extraordinary statements made in the whole debate was the speech of the ex-Minister for Finance, when he said that opposition to this Budget was an attack on the neutrality policy which the Government had declared, and those are the reasons we cannot have any confidence in the people who constitute the Government. They ought to be straight with the people, and with the House, and there is no use in the ex-Minister for Finance, or the Minister for Industry and Commerce, endeavouring to drag a red herring across the path in that way.
Everybody knows that it is schoolboy childishness for a Minister to say that opposition to this Budget is an attack upon neutrality, but I suppose it was simply that the Minister was so hard-pushed for some material on which to build a case for this Budget that he had to fall back on nonsense of that sort. We have, right through the administration of this Government, the feeling that there is an extravagant notion permeating their whole policy. I remember hearing a member on the Government Benches declaring, with emphasis and with enthusiasm, that they had killed the 200-acre man in this country, and defying anybody to put him back. I do not think that was anything to boast of, and we have the Minister for Finance declaring that he very much regrets that there are not more wealthy men in this country who would be able to carry the burden. That is true; it is a cause for regret; but an appreciation of that fact has come pretty late in the day to the Government.
If there is anything which would impress us in favour of this Budget, it would be that it was necessary, that the war which has come upon the world, and which so encircles us here, would put fresh burdens on the people; but, in considering that, we must remember that the people in charge of affairs to-day have broken confidence with the people and when we remember the position with regard to the flour millers, the bacon curers, the turf bricquettes, the alcohol factories, the Roscrea factory, and all the silly idiotic things the Government put the people's money into, and which went down, we can have very little confidence that if we give them more money to-day, it is going to be well spent. There is evidence—it has been produced in the House—by a commission set up by the Government themselves that certain people have overcharged the community to an enormous extent, and have done that with the protection of the Government. The figures have been set out and the amounts set out by the Prices Commission would relieve the present burden to a considerable extent, if the Government only put their hands on them. While certain people can get away with loot of that sort, the poor people must be ground down by a new tax on sugar, on tobacco and on beer, and all those other items which, bound together, will surely press very hardly upon the community.
What evidence have we that this increased expenditure is going to be put to good use? Has the Minister told us, has anybody told us, what the new activities of the Army, of the coast watchers and of the new type of marine service which we are setting up will cost? We ought to know, and the people, since they are footing the bill, are entitled to know, what effective machinery the Government propose to set up in connection with this coast watching and marine service. Personally I should be very intrigued to know what steps these coast watchers and other such people will take if they find foreign submarines in our territorial waters.
I heard a story told last week about two men who had been appointed coast watchers. Apparently the best qualification they had for the appointment was that they were strong supporters of the Government. I was told that they were put into some old ruin on the western coast. They had not even glasses to enable them to carry out their duties and the nearest Guards' Barrack was five miles away. These two gentlemen go out to watch from 9 o'clock in the morning until 5 o'clock in the evening. Between 5 o'clock in the evening and 9 o'clock in the morning, anybody and everybody who wants to do so, is welcome to come into our territorial waters and to land on our shores. Between the hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., these two gentlemen, paid at the public expense, were to watch apparently without the aid of glasses. They were asked what they would do if they saw something that they did not understand or that they thought was a submarine and one of them said: "We will tell the Guards." The question was asked: "How will you tell the Guards?" and the answer was: "One of us would go back to the Civic Guards' Barrack". He was then asked how he would get there, if he would walk, or cycle. The reply was: "There is no road back; we would have to walk back five or six miles". The next question asked was: "What would the Guards do?" and the reply given was: "We do not know. We go on at 9 in the morning and we finish at 5 in the evening". Is that a service to which the Minister is asking the people of the country to subscribe? If the people of this country had to subscribe by way of a Supplementary Budget to new services, they ought to be told what the services are and how they are going to affect the country.
Again we have had all this bungling in connection with the A.R.P. services. I do not think I ever heard in all my life so much bungling as there was in connection with that Department. We had an instance of it here in this House when not one Minister on the Front Bench knew who was responsible for the orders given for the black-out. Then it was sought to throw the blame on the people themselves by suggesting that they resorted to the black-out themselves because they heard about it in foreign broadcasts, notwithstanding the fact that the Guards went around in certain places and ordered the people to have a black-out. Apparently that has been finished. At least we have got the lights on again. If that is the kind of service the people of the country are going to get for this Supplementary Budget, then I think everybody has a perfect right to oppose it and ought to oppose it.
There does not appear to be very much left unsaid as far as this Bill is concerned. I just desire to add that although it does not rest with mortals to command success, at the same time mortals very often deserve success. If the Minister and his Government in the past have not succeeded in their efforts, perhaps in some instances there might be some good reasons for that, but on the whole, looking back on the whole programme of the Government, it has consisted mainly of a series of bunglings from the very beginning up to date, and it seems as if we are to have a continuation of that bungling. We have reached a position now in which the Minister says, "What else is there left to tax but sugar?" Surely, that is a sorry situation for the Minister after the Fianna Fáil Government has been seven or eight years in office. We have the unemployment position becoming more acute daily. We are now faced with a position, after seven or eight years of a policy of self-sufficiency, in which the factories established in furtherance of that policy are shown to be dependent almost entirely on raw materials from outside. If we had been really self-sufficient, the war would have given these factories an opportunity of proving themselves, but instead the whole programme went flop when war broke out.
Again we are confronted with a position in which more money is required from the people to spend on services about which we are told nothing. There is, we are told, increased expenditure on the Army, but no details of that expenditure are given. I was informed on my way up from my constituency to Dublin that in one military station between here and Roscommon 500 gallons of petrol are distributed daily for use in that station. Why should we be called upon to pay for expenditure of that kind? I do not think that the Minister or any of the speakers on the Government side have justified this Budget. They find themselves now in a bad position and they have put the country into a bad position. They are surrounded with difficulties into which their own policy has led them. We have at the moment the extraordinary spectacle in this country of a section of our farmers going on strike, a thing that never happened before. I do not want to go into the merits or the demerits of that strike now, but I do say that while you have taxation piled on the country in the way in which the Minister proposes to pile it on now, you are bound to have reactions of this sort. If it was necessary to impose taxation there were other methods which might have been tried. The Minister apparently does not think there were. The Minister took a different road. He has taken a road which is going to press very hard on the poor people of the country and, in my opinion, the case which he has made does not justify this Budget.
