Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Friday, 20 Jul 1945

Vol. 97 No. 26

Appropriation Bill, 1945—Second Stage (Resumed).

General Mulcahy

While the banks had a reduced annual income of £13,332 as a result of that transaction, they had certain receipts, because they lent the money either to the Dublin Corporation or to the Government at a certain rate. If they lent it to the Government at a rate of 3 per cent., then they had, as a result of the income on Government securities, £30,000 coming into them which, placed against the loss of £13,332, gave them a net annual profit of £16,668. If their loan was made to the Government at 2 per cent., they had an income from their additional Government securities of £20,000, which, placed against the previous loss of £13,332, left the banks with a gross profit of £6,668.

I have stated that, when the public lent £1,000,000 to the Government, the banking system had a net loss of income of £3,333, and when the banks themselves lent to the Government, even at 2 per cent., they had a profit of £6,668. I ask the assistance of the Minister and the Department of Finance in indicating whether that is right or not. What is wrong in that calculation? If we establish the arguments that are made there as correct, then we can proceed to superimpose on that any other facts that arise out of such a transaction. I isolate it completely for the purpose of having it clearly examined and for the purpose of seeing where the arguments are wrong. I do not think it can be demonstrated that they are, but I think it is essential for us to say to one another: "Here is a thing we agree happens, when the banks lend money to the Government, on the one hand, and the people lend money to the Government on the other".

I have shown that in the early part of 1939 the standing committee declined to underwrite a loan of £2,000,000 for the Dublin Corporation. Then, having dragged it out for a couple of months, and having, to my mind, injured the credit of the Dublin Corporation in the finance market, they agreed to underwrite a loan of £1,500,000, which was not all taken up. The standing committee of the banks had to take up £650,000. If the public had lent, at no matter what rate of interest, the £2,000,000 originally asked for by the Dublin Corporation, the banking system here would have lost a good income. It would not have killed the banks; it is simply one of the ordinary things that happens to the banking system. But they would have lost a certain amount of money. On the other hand, when the banks lent £650,000 to the Dublin Corporation, which was supposed to be a bankrupt concern whose loan to the extent of £2,000,000 could not be underwritten by the banks—when they lent them £650,000 at what amounted to 4.1 per cent., the banks made a profit of £19,000 a year out of this bankrupt concern. I ask the Minister to examine the case I have made with regard to the loan, under two alternative conditions, of £1,000,000 to the Government or to a public body.

There is another aspect that also requires examination. The same report in paragraph 652 says:—

"We assume the adoption of a building programme of 2,300 dwellings per annum for 20 years, on capital borrowed at 3 per cent. for a 60-year repayment period, and we estimate the financial effects to be as under...."

Later, on the question of the capital cost, in paragraph 660 the report says:—

"The total capital expenditure involved would be, therefore, for 20 years £22,135,000."

Let us take that figure for the moment. That capital will be borrowed under circumstances in which the Dublin Corporation, it is assumed, would pay 3 per cent. for the money over a 60-year repayment period. All the money that we have borrowed in the past for housing purposes has been borrowed over a period of 35 years.

There is a difference in the amount of money that is paid as an annuity for a loan borrowed for 35 years or borrowed for 60 years. If the Minister will refer to any of the general tables dealing with these matters, he will see that for £100 borrowed at 3 per cent. for 35 years, the annuity required to pay off capital and interest over the period of 35 years would be £4 13s. 1d. If the repayment is to take place over 60 years, the annual amount would be £3 12s. 3¼d. The Minister will find that if he was borrowing money at 3 per cent. over 35 years, on the one hand, and over 60 years on the other hand, the total amount he would have to pay to redeem the 35 years' loan would be £162 17s. 11d., by way of principal and interest, whereas if he were borrowing over 60 years he, or the local body, would have to repay £220 8s. 6¼d. That is to say, that he would have to pay £57 10s. 7½d. more when borrowing over a period of 60 years than if he were borrowing over a period of 35 years.

If we take it that the Dublin Corporation will have, over 20 years, a capital expenditure of £22,135,000, then somebody in Dublin will have unnecessarily to pay out over those 20 years, by way of additional interest charges alone, a sum of £17,727,000, an amount greater than the whole of State grant and the whole amount of capital which it is contemplated will be given by the State for housing plans in the City of Dublin.

When we consider the arguments that have been included in the report, based on costs, I think the houses will cost very much more. It is shown in appendices 21 and 22 that flats in the City of Dublin in 1939 cost on the average £913 and cottages £620. If we are to be able to get our houses built even at 1939 costs, it is going to cost us more. The total capital expenditure for a 20-years programme in Dublin would be £31,000,000 and the excess interest paid in borrowing for the 60 years as against 35 years would be £18,000,000. The report on building indicates that unless steps are taken pretty quickly to get started, valuable opportunities will be lost and we may not be able to get our programme started at all. The report on the postwar building programme at page 9 says:—

"The successful determination of these two elements of the building programme, namely, the best initial effort and the best rate of development, is of paramount importance to the future of the building industry. Unless there is an effective start, opportunities may be lost which can never be recovered".

Unless we get clear immediately as to the principles upon which we are going to finance housing carried out by local authorities there can be no reasonable or quick start which will ensure systematic continuity of the building of houses.

The cost of money is of the highest importance in connection with housing, so that these points have to be examined urgently and at once: the rate the Government are going to adopt as a policy in respect of payment for money and the period over which the Government are going to borrow. It is very difficult not to comment in a general way on it, but all our purposes would be better served if these matters were examined in a practical and detached way as early as possible. There is a very considerable amount of additional money in circulation, and, so long as that additional money is in circulation, it will be making claims of one kind or another. There is a tendency for the population to fall, a tendency for the national income to become static and a tendency, because of the greater amount of money in circulation, and particularly idle money, which does not know what to do with itself, to make very considerable claims on the people. I do not think that persons holding idle money should be given the opportunity of making additional claims on the national income, which would reduce the amount of national income available for those who are workers.

In that connection, and just by way of suggestion, I should like to refer the Minister to a paragraph on page 34 of The Economist of 14th July, 1945, which, rather in connection with a different matter but nevertheless with a bearing on the distribution of the national income, says:—

"The primary need now is to re-establish in the ordinary man's mind the idea that there is a direct connection between his own output and his own income. If the unions..."

—that is, the trade unions—

"...would join in a campaign of industrial education of this kind— similar to the war-time drive for production—then, as was suggested in The Economist's Election Manifesto, some sort of solemn treaty should be concluded with them guaranteeing that the lion's share of any benefit from increased productivity should go to the wage earner. The lion's share is not the whole—the wealth-producing capital must be remunerated sufficiently to maintain its flow—nor would it be right that any benefits of increased productivity in an industry should go exclusively to the wage earners in that particular industry, who may have had little to do with it and may deserve a bonus no better than the workers in other industries less susceptible of technical improvement. Some part of the benefits of technical progress must be allowed to go, by lower prices, to the generality of consumers. But the principle does mean that a demonstration must be made at all times that the ordinary man is the main beneficiary of the fruits of progress and that they are not squandered on the capitalist or the rentier.”

That does not bear directly on what we are discussing here, but I quote it in order to emphasise that producers, whether workers or people with capital which they are using in a productive way — increasing employment and increasing production— cannot afford to have merely idle money demanding such rates of interest as will raise the cost of houses and take substantial sums—small individually, but substantial in the aggregate—out of the pockets of people who are the real workers in the country.

There is a definite problem to be faced there and I think we can face it effectively and with understanding only if we isolate, in the way I endeavoured to isolate them in March last, and in which I again endeavour now, some of the important aspects of the transactions which have to take place in the lending of money, examine them carefully and openly and are enabled to come to a common understanding on them. The Minister, when speaking on his Estimate, seemed not to have quite grasped either what I was at or the spirit in which I was arguing. I ask him now to refer to the things I have said here to-day and to the matters I put before him on 14th March last. I can communicate with him, and put the matter on paper for him, and would be glad to receive any comment from him on the case put up here and, if necessary, follow it up either by correspondence or by further examination from my point of view.

Mr. O'Donnell

I must confess to a great ignorance of finance. I got a cheque book about 30 years ago and never had an hour's peace since. You cannot do without finance, and, to get finance, you must have exports. According to that very interesting fictitious story by Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe had no exports and his life was very primitive as a result. Many humourists have dealt with finance. Mark Twain gave a very good description of it on his return from the South Sea Islands. I understand that 90 per cent. of the inhabitants of these islands are naked, and, being asked what was the principal industry of the islands, he replied "Taking in each other's washing". A similar reply is credited to a Dublin jarvey when bringing an American visitor around the city in the years before we started the factories. We had only Guinness' brewery and a few distilleries and the jarvey's reply to the American was: "Taking in each other's washing". That was right to a great extent, but, in the past 25 years, we have started many industries. I lived in this city for many years. I have watched these industries grow apace.

I am glad that the position has changed from the day when, if one wanted a pair of thongs, or a pair of laces or a tin of blacking for one's boots, one had to buy a foreign product. Yet we are not exporting much of the home-manufactured products. Our exports are still confined to such products as stout, whiskey, poplin and things of that kind. We may yet come to the point at which we shall be able to produce goods in some of our new factories which we can export. I hope we shall. We have still to depend on agriculture to supply the bulk of our exports. I was struck by the fact published in yesterday's papers that Denmark can get only 25 per cent. more for butter than she was getting in the pre-war days and the boats and ships are going back empty from England. She can get not coal. Thereby hangs a tale. Europe is coalless from Norway to Italy. All these countries want coal. Thank God, we are bogmen and that we have an adequate supply of turf. I hope I may prove to be a false prophet but personally I do not think that we shall see much more coal than we are getting at present for the next five or six years —household coal at any rate. It may be just as well.

Can we not do something to help the old cow? The cow is the bedrock of Irish farming. I know that butter is subsidised and that that subsidy is coming back to the farmer, but our exports are still largely the products of the cow. Some Deputies here may sneer at the bullock, but I do not. I am too old to sneer at anything. Our friend, Deputy Mulcahy, made a census some years ago in which he proved that there was more employment provided in County Limerick from the tillage point of view than in County Wexford, which is called the model county.

I doubt if there is any model county in Ireland. In my native county, in the lighter lands of South Tipperary, we challenge their record. We are always able to carry on a fair amount of tillage. There is more employment provided in the cattle-rearing counties than anywhere else. I do not live in the Golden Vale but, up to some years ago, I milked 32 cows. I am now down to 18 largely because I could not get an economic price for milk. There are many causes responsible for that.

I know I am addressing myself to the Minister for Finance, whom I heard in Clonmel at a food production meeting some time ago. He amazed us all there with his knowledge of agriculture. I take it he is a farmer. As I say, he amazed the Tipperary farmers with his knowledge of farming and I know he is sympathetic to agriculture. I say definitely that the whole basis of agriculture is the cow. A writer described her as the bedrock of Irish farming and the foster-mother of humanity. On her depend the pig industry, the fowl industry and many other branches of agriculture which supply us with an exportable surplus. She is certainly the mainstay of agriculture, particularly in County Limerick and in the heavier lands in my native county, in the Golden Vale, which extends from east of Cashel to the City of Limerick to a width of ten or 15 miles, 20 miles in some places. Up to the last thraneen the cow is fed in that area. You have men there each milking ten or 15 cows morning and night. They may not work so hard during the midday. In the lighter lands we would work perhaps a little harder at midday. But in the Golden Vale and the heavier parts of Tipperary these milkers are very useful men. I wonder if we could cash-in on that economy? Denmark is not able to supply all the butter that is needed, and butter will be needed.

I was glad to see statements which were reported to have been made by the Minister for Industry and Commerce and the Minister, for Agriculture at some function yesterday. In one of these the Minister for Agriculture announced that there had been an increase in the production of beet and butter. All that makes for easier finance but I doubt if there has been any great increase in the production of beet. Last year was a particularly bad year for beet. We have the spectre of starving Europe before us and I was glad to see that a sum of £3,000,000 is being provided for relief. I did not like to intervene in the debate in which the Taoiseach spoke but I was glad to see that the item of sugar was mentioned. Some letters have appeared in the Press from which it would appear that some people are perturbed by the decrease in the ration of sugar coming on the threshing season. I certainly should like to help starving Europe. I should like to sacrifice a spoon of sugar at each meal to give it to youngsters in starving Europe but we have youngsters in Ireland too for whom we ought to care.

Seas and fences will not keep out the typhus that we are told is raging in Europe. We all remember the outbreak of the Black Plague which finished the previous war in Europe. They were fighting to the last man in the last ditch, to the last days of October 1918, but one fortnight later the treaty of peace was signed. The unfortunate soldiers died like flies in the trenches of the Black Plague. That plague eventually reached this country and I know one church in Clonmel to which 15 bodies were brought one night. We are very lucky if we escape from the latest plague because as I have said, seas or boundary fences will not keep out plague, unless you have the people fed. I certainly say that we must get sugar. Sugar next to flour is a great asset in feeding the young. I put figures before the Minister for Agriculture here before based on a price of £4 5s. 0d. for beet grown adjacent to a factory.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

I do not like to interrupt the Deputy's interesting discourse, but I should like him to come back now to the Appropriation Bill.

Mr. O'Donnell

I am sorry if I have been out of order. I shall not develop the point further, but I would suggest that if you increase the price of sugar from 6d. to 7½d. or 7¼d. per lb. you would have plenty of sugar to give to Europe and to barter for many other goods. I bow, however, to your ruling Sir. In reply to a question in this House, we were told that £435,685 came in here for greyhounds last year. I know a young fellow who bought three dogs for £10 each and, inside 18 months, he got £196 for the three of them. He never had a "bob" in his life; he got the £30 from his uncle to buy the dogs. It is a good thing to get money in here by any legitimate method. I would not suggest that Ireland is going to the dogs, but a large proportion of our population is visiting the greyhound tracks.

With regard to this £400,000,000 invested principally in the Colonies— Deputy Mulcahy is better up in those matters than I am—that money went out under the British Government. It has been going out for hundreds of years. It went out under the present Government and the previous Government. Anyone who is lucky enough to have a little deposit in the bank gets 1 per cent. on it. If you go up to £500 or £600 or £700, I understand that the bank manager gives you a hint about a little investment. If there are ten depositors with £200, that comes to £2,000, and although the bank manager is not supposed to recommend investments I understand that he does it on the quiet. That money goes out at 5 per cent. or 6 per cent., and there is not a city or colony in the world that has not been developed at the expense of Irish money.

I remember that some years ago a loan for £2,000,000 was floated, I think, in an Australian city, and it was subscribed twice over in 48 hours. There was a flotation in Uganda about 30 years ago—I think the sum was £10,000,000—and £2,000,000 of that came to Ireland and was subscribed twice over in 48 hours. Some time afterwards there was a little flotation for the Congested Districts Board in the West of Ireland, and the Tory Government in power would not give it. After about four months they did. They were shamed into it, in his own inimitable way by Tim Healy, who said:—

"I object to that. They could give it to Uganda, but they will not give it to the Congested Districts Board in the West of Ireland".

That £400,000,000 is spread all over Europe, Asia and the Colonies, and here we are with our country undeveloped. Can anything be done about it? The Minister for Finance should put on his considering cap. Where did that money come from? We export whiskey, stout and a few poplin ties. Guinness' could not get good enough barley in Ireland up to five years ago. It was not good enough for the palate of the native until it could be grown nowhere else. Yet, they are making the finest drink in the world. It is good enough now. Guinness' can make stout from Irish barley at the moment. I suggest that Guinness' stout as well as whiskey and everything we export come from the Irish agriculturist. I would suggest that that whole £400,000,000 comes off the soil of Ireland. I would suggest that the Irish farmers own that £400,000,000. They worked 12 hours a day to produce the goods, as against the eight hours a day of the town and city worker, and I would suggest that that money should not be allowed out while the country is undeveloped. The Minister for Finance and his financial experts should get thinking about that. That is the groundwork of financial success in this country. I have not even an elementary knowledge of those matters, but that sum of £400,000,000 has been hitting me in the eye from the time I got my first cheque book, or, perhaps, long before that. I should like to see it made the subject of thought. I would suggest a better price for the beet, and also that the greyhounds should be looked after. Perhaps that is more a matter for the Minister for Agriculture, but it is also one for co-operation between the two Departments. I would also suggest that, in connection with the now-famous Tully farm, something might be done in regard to greyhounds. I would say finally that the Minister struck me as being agriculture-minded by his pronouncement in Clonmel.

Minister for Finance (Mr. Aiken)

I do not know what we can do about the millions that went to Uganda when Deputy O'Donnell was young. Deputy Mulcahy was back here again to-day with the two questions which he put to my predecessor. It is true to say that, if you extend the number of years over which a loan is repayable, the total interest paid over the longer period will be greater than that which would have been paid had the loan been for a shorter period. It is also true that another aspect of that statement is that the annual charges for sinking fund and interest are less for the longer period than they are for the shorter period. I have no doubt, in regard to Deputy Mulcahy's calculations of the very much larger sum that would be repayable by the Dublin Corporation if the improvements were financed by a 3 per cent. loan repayable in 60 years, that the total sum paid back by the citizens over that 60 years would be much greater than if the loan were for 35 years, but, as between the two terms of years, the effect would be about £1 per £100 on cost of a house.

On this other question, the Deputy has failed again to-day to give all the data upon which he bases his various assumptions; at least there are one or two more assumptions that he would have to make before his figures could be checked. He spoke, both on the last occasion and to-day, as if all the commercial banks in this country were one system, one bank. There are, as a matter of fact, five or six commercial banks, and if Deputy Mulcahy's £1,000,000 came from one of those banks, if say, the Bank of Ireland advanced to the Dublin Corporation £1,000,000, it would have the effect— unless that £1,000,000 came back into its coffers again over the cashier's counter—of creating deposits in other banks, perhaps, which would have to be payable by the Bank of Ireland out of its liquid cash resources, or out of its capital resources which it had liquefied. Does the Deputy want us to make calculation as if this £1,000,000 came from the Bank of Ireland alone?

General Mulcahy

I do not. I could have asked that in the last three months.

Mr. Aiken

I am asking the Deputy now, and I am approaching this in the spirit in which the Deputy spoke to-day. Does he want us to make the calculation as if that figure were divided by six, a quota being taken by each of the six commercial banks, or in what way does he assume that the £1,000,000 ought to be divided up among the various banks? I suggest that is a factor which would have to be taken into account when considering what would happen if £1,000,000 were advanced by the banks to the Dublin Corporation for the building of houses.

General Mulcahy

I fully appreciate what the Banks' Standing Committee would do if they loaned £650,000 to the Dublin Corporation. That ought to be a simple matter.

Mr. Aiken

There are a couple more assumptions that would have to be taken into account and I am not in a position to fill in the gap.

General Mulcahy

I wonder would the Minister undertake to consider the matter systematically?

Mr. Aiken

I am considering the matter and I am interested in it, because I think this new development with regard to housing is going to be most important. Deputy McGilligan, when speaking here to-day, was quite brilliant, as he usually is, in examining one aspect of the subject without, however, doing very much to enlighten us in regard to the total problem. He often reminds me, when I see him scintillating, of a fire-fly which sparkles very brilliantly without, at the same time, giving out sufficient light to show the difficulties of the terrain over which it flies. This country, like every other country in the world, is facing certain difficulties in the post-war period. It is facing certain difficulties with regard to trade, and unless the various countries can agree on something approaching absolute reciprocity in trade, then you are going to have deficits as between one country with another, and, also, surpluses. Wherever there is a deficit there has to be a surplus in the hands of the opposite country. Whether some nations are going to be content to continue to be in a deficit position, and whether other nations are prepared to advance them loans to allow them to get into that position, I cannot foretell. At the present time you have this Bretton Woods Conference which, I think, has outlined a certain procedure for international trade and finance in the future. That has not yet been accepted.

General Mulcahy

Except by the Senate of the United States Government to-day.

Mr. Aiken

If that is so, that is one step. Whether other countries would agree that, what is acceptable to the United States Government with its peculiar position in the financial world at the moment, would be of benefit to them, without some adjustment being made beforehand in regard to the general position of debts, I am not able to say. However, I should think that within a reasonable period of time, within say the next six months or a year, we are going to see upon what basis international trade is to take place: whether there is going to be any elasticity as between the debtor and creditor nations, and whether nations that are in deficit will have to tighten up and effect exchange control in as tight a way as Deputy McGilligan anticipates the British are going to do, I do not know. That may or may not happen, but we may take it that if the world is to go back to the 1939 position, so far as international trading affairs are concerned, then we are facing another period of very tight exchange control.

Deputy McGilligan's assumption is that the British are going to freeze the sterling balances in London as tightly as, say, the Argentine Government froze balances in that country for years before the war, or as the Germans froze foreign balances in their country for many years before the war. That may be so, but there is also one other aspect of that problem, and that is that the Germans, the Argentinos and certain other countries with their complete and tight exchange control in operation for many years before the last war were in a different position from the British. Neither Germany, the Argentine nor Russia was a financial centre of the world, and when Deputy McGilligan was talking yesterday and to-day about England's difficulty in balancing her books of international trade after the war, and pointed out that she would have to double her visible exports in order to do so, he left out of account one big factor by which Britain balanced her books prior to the last war, namely, the profit she made on being the centre of international finance, insurance and so forth. If the British Government want—I do not know whether they will or not— to continue to remain as an important medium or centre of international exchange and finance, they will have to get back to the position when their pound will be made freely available to those who want to purchase it, and when the purchaser will have the right to transfer those pounds to any of his creditors. I do not know whether that is going to come about or not, but at any rate it is one of the factors that makes me hesitate to agree with Deputy McGilligan that the sterling balances which we have accumulated in London will be worth nothing after the war. It was, generally speaking, because that was the theme of the approach which Deputy McGilligan made to this question on the last occasion that the Taoiseach and the Minister for Local Government referred to his speech as being mischievous. Yesterday, he questioned me as to whether he had ever said that we had got nothing from the mass of sterling balances that we had built up in London. Here are his exact words from the Dáil Debates, column 2004, of the 5th July:—

"In the background there is the immense mass of several hundred million pounds sterling, not one shilling of which we have been able to cash-in for goods we required during the past four years."

That just was not true. Of the immense mass of millions of pounds that we built up and which we have increased during the war, we were, in fact, able to use £78,000,000 to buy goods which we imported during this last five years from countries other than the United Kingdom. We have been able to do at least that much with it. How much more we are going to be able to do with it I do not know, but naturally, having that amount of credit built up abroad, we hope, for the sake of our people, that we will be able to use it for their benefit and for the things we want to do when the war is over and the supply position becomes somewhat easier.

Deputy McGilligan, on that point, should remember, no matter what suspicions he might have of the British on a political matter, that when it comes to business and finance, it just pays the British to be honest. It has paid them to be honest in questions of trade and to get the reputation for it. I think a complete repudiation of all the moneys that they owe to the various countries would not pay them if they mean to remain in international trade, and particularly if they mean in any way to redress some of their visible adverse trade balances with what are called invisible exports—the profits of international trading. I do not think it would pay them to do it.

Let us take the worst. Let us take, for the sake of argument, Deputy McGilligan's assumption that whatever surplus assets we have in sterling funds in London are worth nothing, what are we to do about it? Deputy McGilligan, while he is advancing, I am glad to say, in political and economic thinking since the bad old days when he had some responsibility for the government of the country, says that in the event which he postulates we must rely upon increasing our exports or on tightening our belt —that is, if we are to maintain the standard of living which we had prior to the war. There is still another way which may contribute to lightening the burden on our people in that eventuality and which Deputy McGilligan, to-day, yesterday and all the time, ignores as completely as he did 15 or 20 years ago, and that is the fact that, if we cannot export more to pay for imports, our best policy is to try to produce these goods, or substitutes for them, ourselves.

I am not decrying an attempt to export on a reasonable basis for goods that we can easily import but, if we can help it, we must not allow ourselves again to get into the position in which we were ten or 15 years ago in which we were depending on foreign countries for everything. Deputy McGilligan quite rightly stresses the difficulty we would be in to-day, to buy even the amount of necessities of life that we are compelled to import, if we could not export and if our former profits of international trade were not available for us wherewith to purchase the things we require; but he ignored altogether, in regard to the list of trade statistics that he got, that if his old policy had been continued, instead of wanting exports or sterling balances to buy in £20,000,000 or £30,000,000, we would have been wanting exports or sterling balances to buy twice that much, and wanting them to buy things of absolute necessity to keep our people alive.

Bad and all as the Fianna Fáil Government have been, we have at least in these last 12 years led the people in a campaign which left us less dependent upon exports and upon sterling balances and, if we are still left dependent upon exports and sterling balances for some of the necessities of life, it is not the fault of Fianna Fáil and I think that Fianna Fáil, when you take all the circumstances into consideration, and one circumstance in particular, did not do too badly. That one particular circumstance is that, not only had we to deal with all the physical difficulties of getting proper wheat-seed, getting the farmers to sow the wheat, and getting the people to produce the turf, and so on, but we had to deal with the befogged mind of the Opposition Parties that were still dominated by the maxims of the Manchester school of 100 years ago. Thank goodness, at least they have dropped some of that fog and are prepared to consider an approach to life and to economic matters somewhat in keeping with the Fianna Fáil policy, which has produced a certain amount of the goods that the Irish people required to give them a reasonable standard of living.

General Mulcahy

And put tens of thousands of our people off the land.

Mr. Aiken

The Deputy should go on to use the same old cry, "and is reducing our sterling balances". There is no Fianna Fáil supporter claiming that, with all the difficulties, and particularly the difficulties of treating with a befogged and ignorant Opposition, we were able to create a paradise in this country. We were not able to do it but, with all our difficulties, we did at least this much that, whereas we were depending for about £70,000,000 or £80,000,000 of imports in order to keep our people alive, under the Fine Gael régime, when we were depending on foreigners to supply us with every grain of bread that we ate, we got into the position in which we were able to exist on the low standard of imports that we had during this war. That is a big advance. I doubt— and will continue to doubt—the conversion of the Fine Gael members to any modern thinking in relation to modern problems if they do not admit at least that it was a good job that in 1939 we had made the advance towards self-sufficiency that we had made. I do not want people to go out on platforms to praise the Taoiseach or the Minister for Agriculture for the advance, but at least let them not be repeating the old catch cries they used when there were opposing the measures we were taking here.

I do not want to go into all the details with which Deputy McGilligan dealt during his two hours' speech, as we are at the end of the session and I am sure Deputies would like to get home. I am not quite as pessimistic as Deputy McGilligan is about the future of our trade. I am hoping that the world has got some little sense as a result of the war and that we are not going back to the bad old days, either here or in other countries, when a hopeless view was taken of the production of goods which people badly required, while at the same time there were plenty of men and machines idle. Deputy McGilligan was talking about England's visible export trade in the pre-war years amounting to only £500,000,000. For the last five years, she has had a visible export balance of somewhere around £3,000,000,000, in war goods which she dropped on her enemies without getting any return. I am hoping that these countries will see that, if they can create that amount of goods and dump them in the sea or dump them in foreign countries, they can at least produce, with the same machines and the same men, sufficient consumable goods to enable the people to live on a fairly high standard of living and even to improve it.

The quotation which Deputy McGilligan gave from the American Secretary Vinson was an expression somewhat along those lines, that with modern machinery and modern technical knowledge, there is a possibility of improving the standard of life, if we are enable to distribute the products. That is the problem facing practically every country in the world, over the long term. However, for the immediate post-war years and for some years to come our difficulty is not how to distribute the surplus products but how to ration out fairly the deficit in products. The idea Deputy McGilligan seems to have is that you can cure such a situation by pouring out more money. I think that would only lead to disaster, when you have a fixed quantity of goods. Simply pouring out more money will not cure the problem of distribution but may make it worse still.

Question put and agreed to.

Agreed to take the remaining stages now.