Might I say at the outset that I am in absolute agreement with Deputy Hickey's references to the shockingly low standard of living of a very large section of our community? I will go even further than Deputy Hickey. He was suggesting that this House was very complacent about that. I am afraid we are, but a lot of other people are complacent about it too and before very much can be done in the direction that Deputy Hickey and a lot of people outside this House would like to see, the great mass of the middle classes of this country will have to be jerked out of their complacency on the subject. Is it not perfectly obvious to anybody who considers the position, who has read the reports Deputy Hickey referred to by the various officers of health dealing with malnutrition in school-children, that are published in the public Press regularly, that 90 per cent. of the people of the country do not take the slightest notice because these cases do not come under their immediate review? If a person agitates to any great extent about it, he is regarded by a large section of the community as a crank. If people do not actually see misery, they salve their consciences by pretending it does not exist.
As far as the question of housing is concerned, it is easy to understand the position in places like Cork City or Dublin City. Deputy Hickey referred to the position of labourers and of the small-farming community, but I would say that in a great number of small towns in rural Ireland the housing conditions are as bad as in any slum in any city. In towns in the rural districts less has been done than anywhere else. While cottage schemes have been carried out to a large extent outside towns in recent years and in towns which happen to have urban councils, in very few cases has there been any attempt to deal with the housing problem in middle-sized towns which are not urbanised. The real difficulty, and the fundamental cause of the trouble, is the cost of building and the question of fixing an economic rent. Everybody understands the difficulty of the local authority. If it wants to carry out a scheme it has to borrow money and pay very dearly for it, but when the houses are built, the type of tenant that needs a house cannot possibly pay a rent that would be regarded as economic to enable that authority to meet all the charges.
You have the unfortunate state of affairs in which people come out of condemned houses for which they were paying, perhaps, 1/- a week and are put into houses for which the rent is 7/- or 8/- a week. Then because of temporary depression, or loss of employment, they find themselves unable to pay that rent and they have to be put out of these houses again. That is creating a desperate problem. It is terrible to think that after councils erect houses for such families, bring them out of condemned buildings and put them into houses that offer them a moderate degree of comfort, through stress of economic circumstances a position arises where these people have to be put out of the houses again because they cannot pay the rent which has been fixed. That is happening perhaps not very often, but fairly regularly in every county in Ireland. We should all like to do something about it, but with all respect, I think that we have not yet got any solution for it. We talk about credit and the provision of money. We all know what we should like to do, but it is very hard to get a solution for it. I frankly admit that I do not feel that I could, at any rate, put forward a scheme at the moment that would solve all these difficulties. I think, however, it would go a long way towards relieving these difficulties if the ordinary middle-class person were educated to the fact that there is a lot of misery and hardship in existence in this country and that such misery and hardship will be there as long as the present economic difficulties prevail. If this war lasts for any considerable time, these things will steadily tend to become worse. I suggest that now is the time when everybody is troubling about his own future, and is getting a broader outlook as regards the social evils that exist, to jerk people out of their complacency and to make it quite clear that the fact that one chooses to shut one's eyes to misery, does not mean that misery does not exist at all.
I was very much surprised to-day at the reception the Minister's Budget got. To look at the headlines in the Press, and particularly in one organ, one would imagine that there had been a reduction of £5,000,000 in taxation. As a matter of fact, one prominent industrialist is reported as describing the Budget as "a damn good Budget". I really wonder what he would consider a damn bad Budget. In my opinion, the only way in which one could describe the Budget is as a completely hopeless Budget, because in the whole 44 pages there was not the slightest indication of what should be done, or what the Government intends to do to ease the present situation. There was merely the complacent attitude: "I am not going to increase taxation. I am going to borrow to meet the deficit. As long as I am doing that, everything is all right, and everybody should be perfectly happy." Actually, here and there throughout the Budget statement, the Minister did occasionally show signs of a deeper appreciation of the realities of the situation than is indicated by this attitude. On page 6 he made reference to the fact that when he brought in his Budget last year he budgeted for a certain figure, but that during the year a number of Supplementary Estimates had been introduced, the aggregate of which fell only a few pounds short of £3,000,000. Are we to expect that this year again we shall get a number of Supplementary Estimates which may again be in the neighbourhood of £3,000,000, because if that be so, the amount of the deficit which the Minister anticipates in this year's Budget is entirely imaginary and illusory? It merely means that we are painting a better picture than is justified by the requirements of our supply services.
There is scarcely a Department in existence at the moment that does not present the House with some Supplementary Estimate in the course of the year. That is a system which has developed of recent years. It is a vicious system, a system which would not be tolerated in any properly controlled business institution. If a professional man or anybody engaged in any line of business planned out his year's work, by saying: "Well I have got to spend only so much" knowing perfectly well but conveniently forgetting that he had to spend much more, or if he sought to justify himself by saying that in five or six months' time he could produce an additional estimate of his requirements, he would soon discover that he was living in a fool's paradise. I wish the Minister for Finance would announce to his colleagues in charge of other Departments that if these Departments did not supply him with a reasonably correct estimate of their requirements at the beginning of the year, he would set his face resolutely against the in-introduction of Supplementary Estimates for these Departments. It is their job to give him a fairly correct estimate of their financial requirements for the year before he prepares his Budget. One can understand that occasionally circumstances will arise which make the introduction of Supplementary Estimates necessary but, as I have said, I think the Minister for Finance should set his face against the growing practice of certain Departments to bring forward Supplementary Estimates in the course of the year, because otherwise he is merely presenting to the people a completely illusory picture in the Budget statement.
As far as the question of employment and emigration is concerned, the Minister in his reference to the Road Fund said that the income would be substantially down this year as compared with last, that it would amount only to £600,000 as against £978,000. At the end of that paragraph he said that when all the liabilities of the fund had been met there would still remain sufficient resources in it to justify parting once more with £100,000 to the Exchequer and that he proposed accordingly to insert a clause for this purpose in the forthcoming Finance Bill. Immediately prior to that statement, he said that some provision would be necessary for road maintenance and improvement grants. That is a matter to which I wish to direct the Minister's attention. For some reason or other, since the emergency started local authorities have neglected to maintain roads properly. Even the principal main roads are beginning to fall rapidly into a state of disrepair. I think Deputies travelling through rural constituencies will have noticed that, for the first four or five months of the year, the main steam-rolled roads which are carrying any volume of traffic, have been rapidly deteriorating. If the necessary repairs are not carried out to these roads, they will be in a shocking condition by the time the war is over. I think there could be no possible objection to money being provided for normal repairs on these roads. I suggest that it is hardly worth the Minister's while to take that £100,000 out of the Road Fund and that he should let it be devoted to its proper purpose, the maintenance of the main roads.
Actually, in the Budget statement the Minister boasted that money had been made available in abundance for projects of all kinds and that no worth-while scheme had failed because of capital starvation. I hope he will be able to justify that statement more in the future than he has in the past because as far as employment is concerned, there are at least two outstanding examples of possibilities of employment that have been entirely ignored by the Government in the presentation of their Estimates. One in particular is the question of afforestation.
At the rate things are happening in this country at the moment, there will not be a good-sized whitethorn bush left in any field in the country in another 12 months' time, if the war lasts. The situation as regards forestry was bad enough up to the present. The country was denuded of its trees during the last war, and practically no attempt has been made over a period of 25 years to remedy the damage that was done in that time, but now we have every tree in the country being cut down for fuel, and very often, as any Deputy who travels round the country must admit, the trees are being cut in a very ugly manner. No attempt is being made to preserve the amenities of the countryside. You see a half-mile or so of nice timber along a road; a man gets a permit to cut the timber there and, instead of cutting every third tree or so, and in that way, trying to preserve the amenities, he cuts a block of about 300 trees out of one patch, leaving an unsightly gap.
In that connection, I doubt very much if the replanting condition is being insisted upon at all, and I defy any Deputy to say that when he was going through the country he has seen even one tree replanted for every ten that had been cut. Any money that could be made available for afforestation would be money well spent, and apart from that it is the type of thing that would give employment in rural areas which will be badly needed when employment on the roads has dropped, as it has already dropped, and when work on the bog schemes is over. The work on the bog schemes, possibly, will finish earlier this year than last year because, from what we learn, the Parliamentary Secretary who is dealing with that matter has learned his lesson from last year: that you cannot keep cutting turf too late in the year. Naturally, when that work stops, the men employed on these schemes will be going back unemployed to the rural districts and small towns, and coming on to the autumn would be the ideal time to put these men to work on afforestation. As far as I know, the one thing that we should not be short of in this country would be trees. There are sufficient nurseries in this country to provide us with the requisite amount of trees for afforestation purposes.
I was very much surprised at one statement of the Minister; he made the statement actually under two different headings. On page 5 of his Budget statement, when he was referring to the position of the State and the issue of money by the State, he said:
"These figures are a reproof to critics, who blame us for lack of initiative in developing our resources, whether local or national. Money has been made available in abundance—and some think, in superabundance—for projects of all kinds. No worth-while scheme has failed because of capital starvation."
Then, on page 21, he speaks of money that came from others, as distinct from money that came directly from the Government, and he went on to say:
"But the money is available and has been sanctioned for many schemes. Finance is, therefore, not the obstacle here, and those who seek to discredit bankers, Finance Ministers and others connected with monetary affairs should take note of this."
I am afraid that the Minister does not agree with the experts of his own Party. There is a very prominent member of the Fianna Fáil Party, a man who, I am quite sure, is almost as well versed in economics as the Minister, and who was responsible for a statement in this House recently, and that statement directly contradicts what the Minister says. In column 1453, of Volume 86 of the Official Debates of 30th April, 1942, during the debate on the Central Bank Bill, Deputy Corry had this to say:—
"I could not agree with the statement made that the banks could not help in that matter. The attitude of the Irish banks during the last 20 years has been definitely anti-agricultural. Any person who is not a farmer and who puts up any kind of hare-brained scheme could get all the money he wanted for it. But, if a farmer wants a loan, he has to bring in the deeds of his farm to the bank and also bring in two securities who have deposits in the bank to the amount of the loan and who will not be allowed to withdraw those deposits until the loan is paid off."
Now, that statement, which is out of the mouth of an expert of the Minister's own Party, refutes the Minister's statement; it is absolutely correct, and there is no doubt about it. The question of credit is a very important matter. I think it was Deputy Davin who asked another Deputy a moment ago what he proposed to do about it, but the question of credit seems to be the strangest question of all in this country. Everybody knows that Deputy Corry was right to a certain extent. Strangely enough, money can be made available for the most peculiar schemes, and what Deputy Corry said about the banks and the agricultural community is also true. The banks would not lend a farmer a £10 note purely on the security of his farm. They would not give him any money at all merely on the security of his farm. During the debate on agriculture I made a reference to the fact that the institution that was set up by the Government to enable farmers to get money for improvements or reproductive work on their farms, was carrying out practically the same tactics as the banks. That was the Agricultural Credit Corporation. Now, that is quite a useful body, but, none the less, it is still hidebound with the same type of prejudice: that the only thing that matters is the question of security, and nothing else.
Mind you, that is not right. You may have a farmer who, at the moment that he is applying for a loan, owing to the condition of his land or scarcity of stock, or something like that, may be definitely non-credit-worthy, but if that farmer were enabled to get £20 or £30, and to get it reasonably quickly, quite possibly he would be as credit-worthy as any of his neighbours in three months' time. The Minister for Agriculture, last year, attempted to explain why it is that these institutions, when they are offering their loans to people and publish advertisements in the public Press inviting people to avail of their terms, advertise that they are prepared to give loans to credit-worthy farmers. Surely, a man who is credit-worthy does not generally need a loan so badly. The man who wants a loan may not, at the moment, be considered credit-worthy in the ordinary sense of the word, and there is a very great difference between the case of the farmer and that of the ordinary business man. The ordinary business man has to be able to balance his accounts periodically or he will go bankrupt, but a farmer can go down much deeper. The farmer has more resilience than the ordinary business man, and he can go down much deeper and come back better, for the simple reason that, actually, the security that he has is worth far more than it is ever regarded as cash. If a farmer has, say, 60 acres of land and 12 or 13 cows, and if he is working the land reasonably well, surely he should be regarded as good for a loan of £100 from the Agricultural Credit Corporation or any other bank, without having to mortgage his farm and, very often, provide outside securities as well, as in the case of the ordinary banks.
If a business man were looking for a loan, the amount of security he would be asked to put up would be nothing in proportion to what the farmer is asked to put up for a loan of £100. The whole tendency seems to be that if you lend money there is the danger that it may not come back. I think the experience of recent years, at any rate, has shown that the actual return to the nation itself, as a result of the money lent for agricultural improvement schemes, and similar schemes, was well worth any risk that might be taken. Just because the money does not come back in one or two cases, that is no reason why the Agricultural Credit Corporation or anybody else should not be prepared to take the ordinary business risk in the case of the other 98 or 99 per cent. Surely, because a few people do not pay back, it is not enough to say that the rest of the people should not get a loan.
Actually, one of the most serious features of the whole position, and one that the Minister glossed over, is the question of unemployment. There are really two questions, unemployment and emigration, because people are leaving this country at a very rapid rate. New types of employment have been created as, for instance, the large turf-cutting schemes in some places, and there is a shortage of agricultural labour occasioned by the movement of these schemes and, possibly, by the attraction of better wages elsewhere. Apart from that, however, we still have this great number of people unemployed in the country, and it appears to be rapidly becoming a fixed number.
It would appear that, no matter what may happen or how many people leave the country or how many new employment schemes are put up, we are still to be left with this kernel of 80,000 or 90,000 unemployed. It is a very sad commentary—I shall go no farther—on the policy of the present Government, because the Minister has said that money has been available in abundant quantity for schemes of all kinds, and I am quite sure that any member of the Government Party would be highly indignant if it were suggested that they had made no attempt to deal with unemployment in the ten years since they came into office, but even if all this money has been available abundantly, the unemployed, like the poor, are still with us, and, like the poor, it would appear as if they will be always with us. So that, actually, after ten years, the situation has not improved in the least. Can the Minister or anybody else in this House envisage, with any kind of calmness at all, what the position here will be when the war ends? As regards the tens of thousands who have left the country to earn a living abroad, what will their position be when they return and find that there is no employment for them? I assume, speaking subject to correction, that they will not be able to draw unemployment benefit. What will their position be, and what will be the position of those who will be going out of employment when a lot of the present temporary schemes come to an end, as well as of those who are at present unemployed? The position, I suggest, will be far worse than any that we have known in our history so far as the unemployment problem is concerned.
There has been a lot of talk about post-war planning. There will be a number of big post-war problems to be faced. It will be much easier to face them if there were some little planning done now. If we cannot improve the unemployment situation with all the extra expenditure represented in this, the biggest Budget that we have ever had presented to us, and with large numbers of our people earning a living abroad at the moment, what is the position going to be when all those people return, and when all the present temporary expedients come to an end when the war is over? The Minister, in his Budget statement, mentioned that attempts were being made to stabilise prices and dividends. I am afraid that statement is not going to improve the temper of certain people who will resent the permitted increase on dividends of from 6 to 9 per cent.
The Minister, I think, will come in for a good deal of criticism in connection with that if he is not able to give a more adequate explanation than that contained in his statement. He also indicated that when the Central Bank Bill becomes an Act, the banks will have to pay a licence fee of £1 a year, but the most that he hopes to get out of it is £8 or £9 a year. That would hardly pay for the paper used in issuing and sending out the licences. The proposal seems a rather extraordinary one, in view of the fact that shopkeepers have to pay licence fees of 5/- and 10/- for various things that they sell.
People carrying on a mixed business may have to pay as much as £1 a year in licence fees. What will they think when they see that a bank is to get a licence for £1 a year, especially when we know what a bank means in the minds of people in the country? The total sum that the Minister estimates to get from the banks in licence fees is paid annually by an attorney practising in a small country town. He has to pay £9 a year so that he may practise his profession. I think that, in view of what the Minister estimates to get from the banks for the licences issued to them, it might be just as well if he gave them the licences for nothing.
If the Minister and his colleagues want to get any kind of calmness restored in the country in regard to the supply position they will have to do something more than they are doing. I do not want to deal now with the bringing in of supplies. What is resented in the country more than anything else is the fact that certain people, apparently, if they have money enough to pay the price can get all the supplies they want. I have heard stories of people paying 25/- for a lb. of tea and 9/- a stone for white flour, but I was inclined to discredit them not having any special knowledge of such transactions. The Department of Supplies, however, has proved to me, by the action it has taken, that such things must be occurring.
Last week the Department fixed the price of white flour. That proved to me, at least, that there was some substance in the stories I had heard. It was suggested in the Press that the reason for doing so was to prevent the sale of white flour, and that the Department would then be in the position to deal with those who were selling it at more than the fixed price. But the actual position in the country is that you have numbers of people clamouring for brown flour and cannot get it. I do not know when I saw white flour, but this Order made by the Department of Supplies would seem to indicate that there is white flour available somewhere in the country. Does anybody think that fixing a price for it is going to stop the sale of it?
The Minister for Finance, in his Budget statement, in the course of his reference to the agricultural industry, said:—
"The development of the home market to the greatest possible extent would appear to afford the best means of tiding the industry over the adverse conditions caused by the war."
That sounds very nice, but it is not as nice as it sounds, because in a number of lines the agricultural industry cannot be further developed in the home market. Take, for example, the bacon industry. It cannot be further developed because there are not sufficient bacon pigs in the country to supply a reasonable demand. What is worse is the way the trade has been handled. In my opinion, there cannot be any further development of that industry, so far as the home market is concerned, for the reason that 75 per cent. of our people cannot afford to pay the retail price for bacon. Bacon, which at one time was a staple article of diet in the ordinary households of this country, has now become a luxury. The only households in the rural districts, at any rate, in which bacon is now regularly used are those where the people themselves keep pigs and kill and cure one for their own use. The retail price of bacon is beyond the means of the average person in the towns and rural districts. Even if the supply of pigs were increased, there would not, I think, be very much more of a demand for bacon in the home market than that which already exists, unless some reasonable relation is established between the price the farmer gets for his pigs and the price the consumer has to pay for the finished product in the form of bacon. For years the farmers have not been satisfied with the price for pigs. The greatest dissatisfaction has prevailed because of the huge gap that existed between the price that they get for their pigs and the prices charged for the bacon manufactured from them.
Yesterday, when some reference was made to the licence fees that shopkeepers will have to pay, one Deputy interjected to say that they could well afford to pay, the suggestion being that if retail prices are high it is the shopkeepers who are at fault. Those who have experience of rural life will, I think, agree with me that at the present time ordinary small shopkeepers have a most miserable existence, for the reason that they are people who were, possibly, never able to carry large stocks. One reason for that is that they had not the necessary reserves of capital. At the present time these shopkeepers are suffering the most horrible torments from their own customers because of the fact that they had not the money or the credit to enable them to lay in large stocks of the various commodities. If they had, they probably would be making money now like some clever people. The Minister for Supplies is responsible for a lot of that torment, because his scheme for the distribution of tea merely means that if a man took the ration cards offered to him by his customers and they amounted to 25 lbs. in the week and his quota from his wholesaler was only 20 lbs., he has to do without the other five lbs. The customers complain and they go to the local investigation officer. He takes their cards and tries to place them with some other shopkeeper. That is not an easy job.
I assume that the quota given out by the wholesalers to the retailers every month is sufficient to meet every half-ounce registered on the ration-cards. If that is so, and there are 20 shops in a particular town whose ration cards exceed their quota, there must be other shops whose quota exceeds the ration cards they hold. I would not be surprised if there were some brainy individuals clever enough to anticipate what was going to happen and having worked out the quota, let us say, at 40 lbs. of tea, were cute enough only to take ration cards for 30 lbs. If the quota per month is equal to the tea required and some retailers have not enough, other retailers must have more.
The simplest way to deal with that is by the scheme which was put before the Minister, namely, the way the sugar ration was dealt with during the last war. The individuals got cards which they took to their retailer. The retailer made a register of the number of people registered with him. He retained the cards and put at the bottom of the register the name of the wholesaler with whom he was dealing. That register was sent to the police barracks and the wholesaler was directed to supply the retailer with the exact amount he required to supply his customers.