——in repeating points already made or treading ground already trodden by others. I should like to express my absolute disappointment and regret that, in face of conditions as they exist here to-day, we have such a lack of appreciation of these difficult and unpleasant facts by Government. We are living in conditions in which, in a comparatively small number of years, we have exported 250,000 of the youth of the country—the males first, and, in recent years, the females—practically every one of these 250,000 people who have left us being between the ages of 20 and 30. Of these 250,000 people, 99 per cent. have gone to a country where there are no factors of attraction, where there are no ties of friendship and no ties of kinship or relationship, a type of emigration completely dissimilar from the old-time emigration which was so generally deplored and particularly from within the ranks of the Fianna Fáil Party.
In the past, we had emigration to America—we had the attraction from abroad, with brothers, sisters and kinsmen inducing those at home to go out there. To go out to a country where they would be amongst their own friends, amongst their own relatives, amongst their own co-religionists, where Irish functions, Irish dances and céilidhes were the events of the week and where they would come in contact with their clergy as frequently as they do here at home. But when that type of emigration was going on in fairly modest numbers, the Taoiseach, the Minister for Finance and everyone who ornaments or decorates the benches opposite were denouncing the system which made it possible for so many people to emigrate to that country, often referred to as the Greater Ireland beyond the seas.
One of the big factors in that type of emigration was the attraction from abroad, the inducement to go there. The amount of emigration in those years was completely insignificant as compared with the emigration in recent years. The emigration in recent years has been emigration to a country where there is no attraction and no inducement, where they will live amongst black strangers, amongst people who were our traditional enemies, amongst people with a different outlook and a different religion, where few if any of them, and those few only rarely, see a clergyman or any function which is common to their own people and their own country. It is a type of emigration produced not by attraction from abroad, but by pressure from behind, by the pressure of economic distress here, driving them out so as to use a position abroad amongst black strangers to help those who remain at home.
In that set of circumstances and seven years after it began to become a really serious hæmorrhage, when in fact the damage is done, when the economic conditions here and the appallingly high cost of living have driven so many abroad, the Government come in here with proposals which are introduced with the speeches to which we listened. I listened to the Taoiseach and I read the Taoiseach: I listened to the Minister for Finance and I read the Minister for Finance ; and I put these two speeches on one side and the speech delivered by the Minister for Industry and Commerce on the other. The speech of the Taoiseach showed complete bankruptcy of statesmanship and showed, if taken with the speech delivered by the Minister for Industry and Commerce, anything but candour and anything but a desire to take the Dáil and the country into his confidence. It was a speech which was characteristic in so far as it was vague and woolly, in so far as it said nothing positively, nothing clearly and nothing definitely, and all vague and misleading in so far it threw up a completely false alibi for the conditions which exist at present and the failure of Government to tackle, to grapple with and to correct these conditions.
We had that speech of the Taoiseach introduced, one-fifth of it pointing out that our lack of production as compared with the amount of paper money, as happened in other countries, was due to the diversion of manpower into war, the production of ordinary articles of commerce having been discarded in order to produce the weapons and materials of war. It was a speech which, as Deputy McGilligan said, could have been made from the Front Bench of the British House of Commons, which could have been made by any statesman in any of the warring nations and which would have been definitely and strictly applicable and true in every respect. Applying that speech and that type of argument to conditions in this country is definitely misleading and definitely unworthy of delivery from the particular bench from which it was delivered.
The Taoiseach knows as well as I do that so far as war production went, from the beginning to the end of the war, we never produced as much as one .22 bullet in this country, not even one bullet of the smallest calibre. It is true that we wasted a lot of money on the purchase of arms and armaments and explosives which were produced by the diversion of manpower in other countries from other productive sources into armaments in these countries; it is true that we purchased explosives, arms and armaments mainly from Great Britian, but also to a great extent in Czechoslovakia, thus diverting the manpower of Britain and Czechoslovakia from the production of essential goods to the production of armaments. But there was not one human being in this country diverted from normal production into the production of armaments.
So far as that is an alibi or apologia for the complete and utter failure of the Government to grapple in time with the very serious conditions here, it is completely dishonest. It is true that our Ministers strutted the stage during the six years of war as Irish Hitlers and Napoleons and that we spent a lot of money on pomp and ceremony. We had more military uniforms of different designs, types, colours and shapes in the streets of Dublin than would be found in London or Berlin at the height of the war. It was certainly very entertaining to be playing at war, but war did not divert the energies of any person in this country. We spent a lot of money on that play-acting, but we fought no war, we were engaged in no war.
We took advantage of the war to increase our Budgets and our taxes, to get more and more money out of the pockets of the people, but not one sixpence of all the extra taxes or the moneys collected from the people did we direct towards greater production. We had no defence to plan, no war to fight; we had nothing to do—the Taoiseach and his team had nothing to do—but to mind our own business, to build up our own country, to develop our resources and to make perfect our plans for the grabbing of post-war trade when the war ended, when other countries were dazed and crippled from their energies and sacrifices during that war.
We were told during all those years that the Government were seriously engaged on magnificent, but secret, plans that were to be disclosed at the end of the war—plans for greater production, for full employment, for making this a happy land in which people would be quite contented. Now we have the culmination of all these plans, we have the results of all the secret plottings that were so hush-hush at one time. What is the result of the whole thing? The Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance, perturbed at the cost of living and determined to shut the stable door when the horse has gone, propose to subsidise to a very limited extent some of the absolute essentials in the homes of our people. These include flour, sugar and tea, and they propose to get the money to subsidise that group of foodstuffs so as to help the people in their homes out of the pockets of the very same people. They advise us to stagger along, to carry the burden, to tighten our belts and to face difficulties with the same characteristic courage as we faced them in the past.
Everyone is to make a sacrifice, to carry extra burdens, to tighten his belt, but we must not include the Government administration. There must be no economy there, there must not be a reduction of even £1 in their expenditure. But everybody who smokes a pipe or a cigarette, everybody who drinks a pint, has to make a sacrifice. The mad extravagance that was undertaken under the camouflage of war is to go merrily on. There will not be a contribution of even £1 by way of economy from any Government Department towards the subsidisation of food. They are looking for £5,000,000 to subsidise three lines of food—in a word, nearly the equivalent of the increased cost of the Irish Civil Service as between 1936 and 1946.
I addressed question to certain Ministers in recent months. In one question I asked the Minister the cost of the Civil Service in 1930, 1933, 1939 and 1946. I find in round figures that the Civil Service has increased in cost during those years by £4,000,000 a year; in other words, if the same Civil Service would do us to-day as did the Government's predecessors in office, we could give all the subsidies outlined in this Supplementary Budget without placing a farthing tax on anybody.
I asked the Minister for Defence on the same occasion to give us the cost of the Army during the periods 1930-1931 and 1946-1947, two years of peace. We found that in the year 1930-1931 the Army efficiently doing the work of a peace-time Army in this country in a year of peace cost less than £1,000,000 —it was actually £900,000 odd—and in the present year a peace-time Army for the same territory but for a smaller population will cost over £3,000,000. There, between two State services, the Army and the Civil Service, since the Government took over, you have had increased demands on the taxpayers of nearly £7,000,000 a year and you have the subsidies that we are giving here to-day, which amount to £5,000,000. The whole lot of them could be met, and to a 50 per cent. greater extent, if it were not for the really lunatic expenditure and extravagance of Government.
We put on top of that the kind of rash, ill-considered or unconsidered expenditure that is taking place in other domains of Government expenditure— magnificent buildings, luxury hotels, the last word in extravagance at our air terminals, a greater fleet of buildings in Dublin Castle for a greater number of civil servants, millions more going in that direction.
The point I am trying to make is that when you are up against tough and difficult conditions there is no good in asking the other fellow to make all the sacrifices or carry the full burden. If we get an example of unbridled extravagance, of lavish expenditure by Government, unequalled in the history of this State and unequalled, in comparison to size and wealth, in the history of any State in modern times, then it is not fair to turn to the public and to bleed them for any new penny that is required. Elsewhere, where subsidisation of food was the policy and where big sums of money were required, the masses of the people certainly had to contribute; but alongside of that there were always proposals for economy in Government expenditure. Here we have a plan outlined to us which we are asked to accept. The full cost of subsidisation for the foods named is to be collected through new taxes; and no suggestion is made of any economy on the part of the Government. We do that before the echo of the noise that was made by multiplying the number of Government Departments has died away, increasing the cost and increasing the demands on the pockets of the taxpayers.
The speeches made by the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance were entirely unreal and to a great extent non-applicable to conditions in this country as they were or are. The whole foundation of those speeches was a false and dishonest one. It was based on the assumption, which we were to accept as a fact, that it was the diversion of our energies, etc., into war channels that led to the present very serious position. The present very serious position has arisen by the casual negligence of the gentlemen opposite to do business in a businesslike way for the past seven years. We are paying now, and paying dearly, for the bungling and incompetence of an administration that is stale and lazy and aged, and that should have been out of that long ago. They floated along through recent years by blaming everything on the war that we were not in, and that touched us only remotely. The war was just the Dáil cat that was blamed for every bit of mess on the carpet here; and the mess on the carpet here was every year costing more and more millions.
Now we have proposals before us to divert a number of millions of pounds into subsidising tea, flour, and sugar. Those millions of pounds are to be got by taxes on certain commodities—mainly, beer and spirits, tobacco and entertainment. In so far as the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance related their statements to the proposals, they linked them up with the cost of living index figure. It is not the index figure that has driven any housewife distracted. It is the actual cost of living of the household. There is no good in assuming that there are some items in the normal household weekly expenditure that are not as real as others. There is no good in jauntily coming in here and saying to the man who has got into a certain habit in life: "Oh, you can give up your pipe or your pint." You might as well say to another fellow: "You can given up your bread, your tea or your meat." There is not one of these things I have mentioned that is an essential of life. There are races of people as healthy as we are, that never see tea or eat meat.
Meat, tea, bread, tobacco and beer are only just habits acquired; but there is no good in any one of us, Minister or anyone else, pretending or presuming that these habits have not been acquired and that they can be discarded like an old coat. I say this, and say it as a doctor—that if a person has got on in life and has been a moderate or moderately heavy smoker all his life, it is definitely more dangerous for him to give up tobacco than to give up bread or tea. If a person has been taking a certain amount of alcohol at more or less regular periods, each day for a great number of years, and has reached a certain point in life, it is not wise, in the interest of health or life, for him to discard that particular habit. Where the position is reached that the actual cost of living—whether the articles figure on the cost-of-living index or not—has broken the heart of the bravest man of moderate means, you are not facing up to that situation by subsidising one household article by taxing another household article. One is an ingredient in the make-up of an ordinary household just as much as the other. If you were to analyse things further and forget that any commodity, either fluid or solid, can be abused to excess, you find that more people go to their graves from excessive eating than from excessive drinking. It is no use for a Minister for Finance or Taoiseach to say, in a happy-go-lucky way: "Oh, if they do not want to pay these taxes, they can just cut out tobacco or beer." Some people never touch them; other people do; but that is not facing up to the problem.
The fact of the matter is that if you tax tea, every household will buy as much tea as heretofore if they can possibly find the money, and all you have done is to put a new tax on the household. If you tax tobacco, before the Budget is a month old, the people will be smoking as much tobacco as a month ago and you have merely piled a new tax on their back. If you tax beer, after the first 48 hours of reaction the working man will take his pint next week as he did last week, and all you have done is to put on another revenue tax of 3d. a pint on that poor man.
My argument was that the cost of these subsidies could be met without reducing or interfering with the efficiency of the State, by economies in Government services, reasonable economies by cutting out luxury and lavish expenditure and by having services of a size and extent commensurate with the wealth of the nation, with the size of the nation and with the amount of work to be done, services of reasonable proportions such as they were in the past.
So far I have referred to the presentation of the cases made by the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance, namely, the case of trying to control or meet the increased cost-of-living index figure. Neither the Taoiseach nor the Minister for Finance ever mentioned the word dollar. Both of them went in very wide circles around the word dollar. The word dollar at the moment is associated in the public mind with Great Britain and with Great Britain's difficulties, and the Taoiseach certainly, and the Minister for Finance more certainly, could never be associated with Britain or with any of Britain's difficulties. Because of that political complication we got an entirely one-sided unfounded presentation of the case put up by the Taoiseach and by the Minister for Finance. Fortunately there was a third Minister who intervened in the debate and the third Minister is a man who has been facing difficulties and has in his own way been doing genuine work in a genuine way.
One of his characteristics is that he does not balk at difficulties and is occasionally particularly blunt and candid. What is the case that he made? Was it the same as the case made by the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance? Very far from it. The Minister for Industry and Commerce came in here and told us that in fact this Budget was not so much to save money as to save dollars. He is a man who has been in discussion with the British Ministries across the way. Anyone can subscribe to the soundness of the proposals, in so far as half the proposals aimed at either saving dollars or securing dollars. He tells us that the tax on tobacco may yield nothing, but if it cuts the consumption of tobacco that is all right and we are saving dollars, and likewise if people drink less whiskey or have to do without that outstanding article, which is most readily convertible to dollars. Why was it that only the accidental intervention late in the debate by the Minister for Industry and Commerce gave us the truth of the whole matter? Why this woolly evasiveness from the head of the Government? Why was not a written statement circulated giving us all the facts, whether pleasant or unpleasant? That would have been one step forward. The shiftiness of Government leadership is one of the greatest curses which this country suffers or has suffered for a very great number of years.
But there was one thing common to the three speeches and that was the throwing up of their hands in complete surrender in regard to the control of prices. We have absolute unanimity from the three speakers on three things: one, that they had failed and could not succeed in controlling prices; secondly, that they did not intend to control profits and, thirdly, that there would not be one penny of the extra money required for the subsidy found by Government economy. There were three things common to the three Ministerial statements.
I think it is nothing short of a disgrace, as we are facing a period of acute difficulty, of shortage of supplies, of pegging down wages, of pegging down salaries, that not one of them is prepared to say that in spite of what is being done, the cost of living will not continue to rise and that in that situation there should be economy in the Government and a determination, if prices cannot be controlled, that the person whose function it is to do it should go out and somebody else get in. Other countries have control of prices. This kind of talk from the Minister for Industry and Commerce that people in business and in certain lines of industry are not making an excessive profit or more profit than normally deceives nobody. None of us is living in a monastery; none of us is living that kind of cloistered existence; there is none of us that has not friends and relations in different lines of trade and they make no secret of the profits in their particular line of goods, and then the Minister comes along and talks about the margins of profit in this country being lower than in England or than heretofore! If he believes what he is saying we must believe that every trader is able to put two fingers in his two eyes when they are discussing business. We are living on the same earth that he is and not one of the Deputies does not know that people in certain lines of business in this country who were comparatively poor at the outbreak of war are now the most opulent men in their counties to-day. The same thing is true in the counties and in the city. By common consent there has been a confession and an admission that they cannot control prices.
I remember well the day that we were asked from that very bench to give authority for that terrible mandate of pegging down wages and salaries. We gave it with doubt, with reluctance and with suspicion, but we were told that the only weapon they wanted in their hands in addition to what they had already got, in order to peg down prices, was the power to peg down wages and that if they got that power there would be no rise in prices. Has the Minister for Finance any recollection of this declaration, or any picture of how fraudulently these powers were operated and of the impossible position into which the country was marched? Now we are told in effect that prices cannot be controlled and will not be controlled and that we will have to face still further rises in prices, but that we may, possibly, be able to keep down prices somewhat nearer the present level if there is a further reintroduction of powers to pin down wages. We had this discussion related to costs. One would imagine, from hearing the Government spokesmen, that only two factors went to make up the price of any finished article—the cost of materials and the cost of labour. I have never heard any Government spokesman since the first day of the outbreak of war make any reference to the third factor—possibly, the biggest factor. I refer to the overhead charges on an industry or business which, of course, have to be borne by the consumer. We have had a lot of play made regarding wages and the vicious spiral that follows on increased wages. We have had a play of words around the cost of raw materials. We have been told how, if raw materials are in short supply, the price shoots up. But there has never been any reference to the third and, in my opinion, the biggest factor—the overhead charges, represented by the weight of taxation and the weight of rates. In regard to price control, it may be true that you cannot control one of the three angles of that triangle —the cost of the raw material. If our raw material comes from outside, we cannot control the price. You just have to pay it if you want the article.
The second item is the cost of labour. You have controlled that very efficiently—no matter what the effect on the people—through your standstill Order. Was an attempt ever made to control the third item? Remember, in customs and excise duties alone, the Government is raking in £22,000,000 a year. This £22,000,000 a year represents taxes on the commodities that are bought by the public. When these commodities reach the public, they not only have to pay that sum of £22,000,000, added to the price, but they must pay the trader's profit on that sum of £22,000,000. Would it ever occur to the Minister for Finance or the Minister for Industry and Commerce, when exercising their brains as to the hopelessness of keeping down the price of commodities, that, at least, a contributory factor to the increased price of commodities is the excessively high weight of taxation on the individual business and the direct tax, by way of customs duty, on the individual item? Is there any evidence of determination on the part of Government to get out of the bad habit of easy spending, of extravagant and lavish expenditure? If I could see any evidence that the Government proposed to tighten its belt as well as that of the ordinary man in the street, that they were prepared to say that for every £ of the £4,000,000 they are extracting from the motor owner, the man who drinks alcohol, the smoker and the person who sells certain lines of property they were prepared to contribute another £ by way of Government economy and that next April they would double the sum given for subsidies—for every £ of new taxation a £ would be saved in Government expenditure—then I would admit that there was real appreciation of the gravity of the position.
As regards the necessity for saving dollars and for converting our goods into dollars, was there any common sense in the expenditure of dollars which has taken place? We expended dollars by millions, in a two-handed way, as if dollars came down from the sky with every shower of rain. We got in every type of commodity, in exchange for dollars so lavishly misspent. You have only to walk around the streets, not only of Dublin but of any tiny village, to see filling every shop window, whether it is a grocery shop or a hardware shop or a post office, cornflakes, "tasties" and "cheerios". Our dollars went for that kind of trashy American food and we diverted the people from a far more nourishing type of diet which was native to the country. We destroyed their taste for ordinary Irish stirabout or Irish gruel and gave them the taste of the cocktailer. We diverted them from their normal habits. That type of dollar expenditure was nothing short of criminal. I should like to be told the amount of dollars which went in that kind of nonsense and the amount of dollars spent on nylons and that type of goods. Now we are in the position that we are about to tax pipe-smoking in the hope that the pipe smoker will give it up so as to save a few dollars. A few dollars are to be saved now as against the millions we expended rashly and lavishly in the past 12 months.
I, for one, would urge on the Minister for Finance, if he is ever there again at Budget time, to take the House and the public fully into his confidence, to give all the facts related to the Budget and not to leave it to another Minister, at a later stage in the debate, to paint the real picture and give the full facts. If there is candour from the Government, if there is a frank and courageous facing up to difficulties and if a common effort by the Government and the people is necessary to surmount these difficulties, there will always be a ready response from Dáil Eireann if appeal is made to it.
But we do not want this kind of cheap, wordy, clap-trap, with pious phrases about unity of effort and sacrifice, without interpreting into practice the meaning of unity of effort and sacrifice, the effort being by the taxpayer and the sacrifice being by the taxpayer, with no effort by the Government and no economy by the Government. So long as Bills are presented to the Dáil in that kind of unfrank, dishonest fashion, then I hope they will meet at all times the opposition they deserve.