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Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Tuesday, 21 Mar 1950

Vol. 119 No. 14

Committee on Finance. - Motion by Minister for Finance.

I move:—

That a sum not exceeding £26,710,660 be granted on account for or towards defraying the Charges that will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1951, for certain public services, namely:—

£

1

President's Establishment

3,000

2

Houses of the Oireachtas

62,160

3

Department of the Taoiseach

7,320

4

Central Statistics Office

31,280

5

Comptroller and Auditor-General

10,110

6

Office of the Minister for Finance

51,450

7

Office of the Revenue Commissioners

467,000

8

Office of Public Works

75,200

9

Public Works and Buildings

890,000

10

Employment and Emergency Schemes

318,000

11

Management of Government Stocks

25,600

12

State Laboratory

5,400

13

Civil Service Commission

14,800

14

Irish Tourist Board

10,000

15

Commissions and Special Inquiries

2,450

16

Superannuation and Retired Allowances

315,000

17

Rates on Government Property

80,800

18

Secret Service

2,000

19

Expenses under Electoral Act and the Juries Act

20

Supplementary Agricultural Grants

1,000,000

21

Law Charges

33,000

22

Universities and Colleges

141,000

23

Miscellaneous Expenses

5,100

24

Stationery and Printing

113,500

25

Valuation and Boundary Survey

17,110

26

Ordnance Survey

15,410

27

Agriculture

5,032,000

28

Fisheries

66,000

29

Office of the Minister for Justice

22,850

30

Garda Síochána

1,007,000

31

Prisons

57,870

32

District Court

24,400

33

Circuit Court

33,450

34

Supreme Court and High Court of Justice

25,670

35

Land Registry and Registry of Deeds

26,810

36

Public Record Office

2,510

37

Charitable Donations and Bequests

1,390

38

Local Government

1,635,000

39

Office of the Minister for Education

95,200

40

Primary Education

2,500,000

41

Secondary Education

190,000

42

Technical Instruction

215,000

43

Science and Art

36,000

44

Reformatory and Industrial Schools

85,000

45

Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies

18,000

46

National Gallery

2,850

47

Lands

680,210

48

Forestry

190,000

49

Gaeltacht Services

100,000

50

Industry and Commerce

760,900

51

Transport and Marine Services

123,000

52

Aviation and Meteorological Services

234,000

53

Industrial Commercial Property Registration Office

6,450

54

Posts and Telegraphs

1,895,000

55

Wireless Broadcasting

82,390

56

Defence

1,325,570

57

Army Pensions

289,770

58

External Affairs

119,750

59

European Co-operation

11,600

60

Office of the Minister for Social Welfare

139,900

61

Old Age Pensions

2,382,800

62

Children's Allowances

743,300

63

Unemployment Insurance and Unemployment Assistance

534,000

64

Widows' and Orphans' Pensions

337,360

65

National Health Insurance

160,300

66

Miscellaneous Social Welfare Services

73,730

67

Health

1,725,000

68

General Register Office

6,180

69

Dundrum Asylum

13,000

70

Damage to Property (Neutrality) Compensation

2,760

71

Transition Development Fund

TOTAL

£26,710,660

The certain public services referred to in the motion are set out in the White Paper that is in the hands of Deputies and they are reproduced on to-day's Order Paper. As Deputies are probably aware, the individual Estimates for the coming financial year will be discussed in detail during the first four months of the year and when they are passed, they are incorporated in the annual Appropriation Act. Pending the enactment of that Act, the Dáil is now asked, as is usual, to authorise the granting of sufficient moneys in this Vote on Account to enable the public services to be carried on until the 31st July, 1950, approximately.

The amount ordinarily taken in the Vote on Account is about one-third of the total that will be required for the year, the total set out in the Book of Estimates. That one-third is not, of course, inflexible. Here and there are some Votes where payment will fall to be made, because expenditure in relation to these Estimates is heaviest during the first four months of the year. There are other Estimates where the demand is appreciably less than one-third and in these cases we need not take the full one-third. For instance, in the Vote for Primary Education I am asking for about 40 per cent. of the total Estimate for the year. This is to provide for the payment, after the 1st April, 1950, of arrears of teachers' pay increases accruing since 1st January last. That increased pay will start from the beginning of the calendar year. Therefore, I require more than the ordinary one-third in relation to that service. If Deputies are anxious for information in respect of particular Votes where I am asking for more than the customary one-third, or where I am asking for less than one-third, I can give them that information in detail.

There are certain services recorded in the Book of Estimates for this year that show an increase under certain heads. Some confusion may arise here because sometimes a comparison will be made by Deputies with the original Book of Estimates for last year and at other times a comparison will be made with what is shown in the second last column of this volume of Estimates, which shows not merely the original Estimate but that Estimate as swollen by Supplementary Estimates. For the purpose of comparison at the moment I am taking the original Estimate for 1949-50.

The principal increases in the non-capital services are as follows: The Department of Health shows an increase of something over £1,250,000. That is due to the fact that additional grants have been asked for by the health authorities and, under the law, the Central Fund has then to pay accordingly. Primary Education, contrasted with the original Estimate for 1949-'50, is up by £1,070,000. This is due to the increase in teachers' pay and pensions. The increased pay has to be made as from the beginning of the calendar year this year. The Vote for the Department of Agriculture shows an increase of £393,000, due to increased provision for subsidies. The main increase is in respect of butter. The subsidies there are payable on such milk as is produced and formed into butter and the subsidy is paid as the butter is produced.

The Department of Posts and Telegraphs shows an increase of £371,000. That is due to an increased outlay in engineering plant and materials, the conveyance of mails by rail and capital repayment. In a sense this is a fictitious increase because, to a great extent, the Vote will be met by increased revenue. In any event, it shows an increase of £371,000 over the provision made in the Vote last year. Public Works and Buildings show an increase of £280,000. That represents an increase in new works that are not regarded as capital services.

I shall deal with the capital services point in a moment.

The Department of Defence shows an increase of £271,000, due entirely to increased pay. Supplementary Agricultural Grants show an increase of £238,000, and here again is a Vote which is to some extent out of the control of the central authority. It is paid in relation to local rates and goes up as local rates go up. Old Age Pensions and National Health Insurance Votes are up by £246,000, due, so far as national health insurance is concerned to increased expenditure on benefits, and, so far as old age pensions are concerned, to a bigger number of persons in receipt of the pensions. The Department of External Affairs shows an increase of £151,000 mainly due to an expansion of staff, but due also to increased payments, some of which were necessitated by devaluation. The Garda Síochána Vote is up by about £105,000, due almost entirely to increased pay for the Gardaí. The Department of Local Government shows an increase of £60,000 on the non-capital side, due to increases in the housing loan charges of local authorities. There are quite a number of other increases of under £50,000, but I am neglecting these for the moment, and there are also certain reductions, some of which are not likely to be lasting.

The chief innovation in the presentation of the Estimates this year is the way in which the Estimates have been classified for the first time in this publication. Deputies will have noticed for themselves, and the newspapers have called attention to the fact, that the Estimates are divided this year into capital services, the total of which is £12,113,680 and other services which come to the entire sum of £66,013,553. Inside the cover, Deputies will find a note as to capital services and in each Vote, after Part II of the Vote itself, an indication as to whether the full sum for a particular Vote is being regarded as capital, and where there is any sum part of a Vote which is being regarded as capital, the segregation is made, or at least the amount regarded as capital is set out in black type.

This is an innovation in its presentation, but it cannot be an innovation to Deputies who have been attentive to what members of the different Parties who support this Government have been saying for years past and to what has been said increasingly since the group who form the present Government became that Government. For years when in opposition, the people who are now my colleagues in Government were also my colleagues in criticism of the system of finance which obtained during the period in office of our predecessors. We criticised them for the fact that they seemed to be attentive only to finance in so far as finance was used to close down on what might be called the old traditional Budget items. We criticised, and were vocal in our criticism of the then Government for not paying attention to the other side of finance, namely, the use of whatever resources there were, either in the hands of the State itself or which could be induced into national loans by State persuasion, for the development of what, I think, was universally regarded as an underdeveloped country and an underdeveloped community.

Would the Minister quote the reference?

What reference?

The occasion on which that criticism was expressed.

Dozens of times per annum over the past ten years.

The Minister cannot quote one reference.

I will get quotations if the Deputy wants them, but I thought he would have been anxious to quote them against me. Appreciative of that line of policy, we also became appreciative during the past year that there were capital developments which required a good deal of financing, and we set about preparing the finances for these. It has been a normal feature of budgeting since the State was founded that certain subtractions were made of what were called capital items before one arrived at the amount of expenditure said to be chargeable against current revenue. These, on the whole, were small items. In the Budget for the year just closing. I set aside, as proper for borrowing, a sum of £603,000. That was roughly under the headings of certain defence works under Vote 10; certain airport construction moneys under Votes 56 and 61; a very small amount under Vote 53 in respect of afforestation; and a not very considerable sum taken from what was misnamed the Employment and Emergency Schemes Vote. During the year, it became clear to us that the moneys that had to be provided for capital works were very much larger than the £600,000, or even double the amount which, I think, at one time was taken as representing capital items in the previous Budget, and we, therefore, decided to let capital works proceed and then to make the segregation when we were presenting the Estimates in such a way that the public would be aware of what was being done.

Apart altogether from this, in a speech before the Institute of Bankers in November, 1949, the Taoiseach made a very clear and specific reference to the desirability of indicating to the public by means of a distinction between the annual revenue Budget and the capital Budget, the Government's policy on capital investment for productive and social purposes. We show that in the year ahead of us, 1950-51, a sum of £12,000,000 odd will be taken from these Estimates and will represent part of the capital development which is proposed during the year. For the full amount of the capital outlay to be financed by borrowing, regard must be had not merely to this Book of Estimates but to the direct issues from the Central Fund for the advances shown in the White Paper usually published just before the Budget and called the "Estimates of Receipts and Expenditure" for the particular year. These issues would be under the Telephone Capital Acts, the Electricity Supply Acts, a small sum under the Tourist Traffic Acts, a very large sum indeed under the Local Loans Fund Acts, a small item under the National Stud Act, and finally a large sum under the Road Fund (Advances) Acts, 1926 and 1928.

In the Book this year, it is stated that in view of the considerable expansion in expenditure of a capital nature, it has been decided to draw special attention to capital items by means of certain notes and by means of this summary which is given for the purpose of easy reference. A calculation has been made—naturally it can only be a calculation—of the actual charge to voted moneys for expenditure on the services which we extract this year as being capital services. In 1947-48, the amount was £1,233,275, and, in 1948-49, a sum of just under £2,000,000. It is expected that the final provision for capital services of the kind set out in the Book this year, for the year just closing, will be £7,750,000 and the sum that we provide in this way for next year is, as I have already mentioned, £12,113,000 odd.

If Deputies look at the items they will see that they are under the headings of Housing, Land Rehabilitation, Drainage, certain Building Works, Afforestation, and certain Harbour Improvements. I would ask that there be the most careful scrutiny of the separate items under these headings, so that this House may be satisfied, and through this House the public may be satisfied, that these items so segregated are really capital items properly charged in this way to be met out of borrowed moneys and not properly to be met out of the annual Vote on Supply.

I have given the headings. As far as housing is concerned, I do not think I need stress that matter in this House. If there has been any complaint so far it has been that not enough money has been provided for housing or that the public are not aware as to whether or not there is going to be any financial impediment to the housing of the people.

As regards agricultural works, land rehabilitation and certain other schemes, I said that the mere mention of the items clearly indicates that those are items of a capital nature and properly due to be met out of borrowed moneys. The same applies to the items indicated under Fisheries. Forestry has been a matter of contention in this House for years. It has been alleged that there are physical impediments to the better development of the afforestation programme than what has been carried on year after year over the past decade. It has been said that there is a shortage of land suitable for afforestation, or that if the land is there it has been available only at an enhanced price that would raise the cost of afforestation and that might, by reaction, raise even the cost of land for other purposes. It has also been held that it would be wrong to put a lot of money by for afforestation, since no return, if there is any, could be got at all for a number of years. In any event, we are speeding up the programme. In so far as there are physical impediments in the way of difficulties in regard to the type of land, those may remain or may be overcome; but we will see that, in any event, there will be no impediment as far as the provision of the money is concerned. I suggest that that money is properly provided in the way in which we are going to provide it this year.

The advances to Mianraí, Teoranta, and to the harbour boards are small sums in this total, but again I suggest to the House that they are proper items for treatment in this way.

Aviation and meteorological services have been so long entered up in this manner, even small sums being segregated to be met by borrowing every year, that there is clearly no exception in taking them in this way this year.

That leaves attached—and I do want it attached—to the land rehabilitation project moneys we propose to spend this year on drainage. Years ago, there was brought into this House, arising out of the drainage inquiry report, a scheme which I think was supposed to warrant an expenditure of £5,000,000 or £6,000,000; but the Parliamentary Secretary who introduced it here on a particular occasion came back, as if scared of what he had done, and told us that, of course, no expenditure would take place at a higher rate than about £200,000 a year—so the drainage scheme proposed at that time was going to take a generation to accomplish. Arising out of the progress under the land rehabilitation scheme, it was found that, if only for that purpose, more money would be required for the immediate purpose of drainage. We discovered here and there that land rehabilitation was held up by the fact that, where the waters had been channelled in various ways, they could not be run off properly because the outfall had not been prepared properly under the land drainage scheme. We hope that by putting the two schemes together and quickening the pace of the drainage works, the betterment of the soil will occur, through the impact both these schemes will have on the land of the country. Drainage, of course, would obviously be an item for development through borrowed moneys on its own, but we take it into the same area, so to speak, as that of the work being done under the land rehabilitation scheme.

In the same way, the moneys grouped here under Vote 38, sub-head K, grants to local authorities for the execution of works under the Local Authorities (Works) Act, can be regarded also as an addition to or at least an improvement of the land, land already sought to be improved by the land rehabilitation scheme and by the effect of drainage as a scheme. I would ask Deputies interested in land rehabilitation to note the new pace we propose to set regarding drainage and the extra moneys put at the disposal of local authorities under the Local Authorities (Works) Act, as all aiming at the development of the soil of this country and as being truly productive, even in the most austere, economic way.

These services will, at the start, be financed out of the American Loan Counterpart Fund, the presentation here of an Estimate being merely the way of getting the accord or approval of Dáil Éireann to the relevant expenditure. That expenditure will eventually be charged against borrowings and not against revenue.

As a corresponding obligation to what is being done here, in the Budget of this year provision will have to be made for the amortisation, over a period of years, of whatever borrowings are agreed this year and other years to be capital services, the aim being that there should be no permanent addition to the national debt and that these borrowed moneys will be paid off in some period of years related to the period of years over which the effects will be noted. What we hope to achieve by the change in charging these borrowings is a more equitable distribution over time of the burden of housing, land reclamation and these other works I have mentioned, of lasting benefit to the community. This procedure has been adopted with the aim of securing that financial considerations will not impede the undertaking and the rapid completion of those works that are regarded as of urgent national importance.

There is one item I have not dealt with that is, the last item in these capital services, the Transition Development Fund, the sum of £2,000,000. That fund was set up under the Finance Act of 1946 with a capital of £5,000,000, which had been provided by borrowing. The intention was to assist the local authorities and State organisations to meet the exceptionally high costs that were understood to be ahead in the immediate post-war period. The chief purpose was to set housing in motion by aiding the local authorities and State organisations to meet what was expected to be the increased costs likely to last as increases only over a very limited period. The name of the fund indicates that it was to have only a very temporary existence and provision was made in the 1946 Act for its liquidation at a date not later than the end of the calendar year 1948. That date has, of course, been extended by subsequent Finance Acts and the life of the fund has been continued up to 31st March, 1950. The Estimate is that by the end of March, 1950, the fund will have been reduced to a little more than £1,500,000. As against that, there are commitments, on the present scales of assistance, totalling about £3,500,000. The Estimate of £2,000,000 is, therefore, intended to meet the excess of commitments over the moneys that are actually in the fund. The fund as such will be wound up when that sum is exhausted, but I have no doubt that in future years, unless the costs go down considerably, something of the same type will have to be found in Estimates for succeeding years.

I believe that in this House there will be general agreement on the need for housing, drainage, afforestation and the other capital works set out here in the start of the Book of Estimates. We intend to get these moneys, in the first instance, from the American Loan Counterpart Fund. When the money market steadies, I shall make an appeal again to the public to subscribe to a national loan and to provide in that way the moneys required for these services and for the other services. The moneys will be found, first of all, from the American Loan Counterpart Fund, eventually by borrowing and possibly from certain other sources, in other words, Government funds, which are at present ready for investment in some of these projects.

The Government hope that by developing along these lines we may promote the fullest development of the national resources and that we will remedy the social and the economic effects that have been associated with under-investment in this country in past years.

This country is in a very strong creditor position. That strong creditor position ought to be, and is, I think, a guarantee of the ability of the people of this country to undertake a programme of domestic capital development of this type. It is hoped that that domestic capital development will increase national prosperity, provide more employment and help to stem the tide of emigration. The resultant improvement in the national income should lighten the effective charge for the service of the debt which is being incurred and will be incurred in years to come.

Some of these schemes may be regarded as productive in themselves. Some of them have to be regarded as socially profitable. As long as the schemes pay their way, by producing revenue which, over the years, will amortise the debt which has been incurred over the years, that will be all right. If they are only socially profitable, but if they do raise the national income by an amount which is equal to the cost of the services provided, then economically the country has not been at any loss.

At a later stage, either preparatory to the Budget or during the course of the Budget discussion, I would like to draw the attention of the House to a third set of schemes. In England the budgetary arrangements take account of what they call their trading accounting. They have many of these in that country on account of the progress of their nationalisation projects. In this country we have a certain number— the development of air services, some of the factories that have been erected here, such as, for instance, the industrial alcohol factories; the ventures of Irish shipping, Irish steel and anything else that can be called either a completely commercial or a quasi-commercial undertaking. I have often suggested, when I was in opposition, and I am still of the mind, that the full effects of these particular ventures should be revealed to the public. They should know what the public is being asked to spend year after year on these things and they should be told what return, if any, there has been from some or all of them and whether any further return is in future to be expected. However, these will arise on another occasion.

The full financial arrangements for the year will be again brought before the House on the usual Financial Statement which has fallen in the last couple of years to be made round about the early days of May. This particular mass of expenditure ahead of us for the year 1950-51 will be dealt with in its proper time. I think, however, I can summarise what has happened to date with regard to the ordinary expenditure imposed upon the public.

In the last couple of years this Government has found it possible to relieve the country of the beer and tobacco duties which were imposed by the last Government, at a loss to the revenue and a gain to the citizens of £6,000,000 a year. They have also relieved the community of the payment of a small amount of income-tax, at a loss to the revenue and a gain to the income-tax payers of about £1,000,000 a year. Certain other reliefs were given last year by way of alleviation of the income-tax code which cost the revenue something short of £250,000. These remissions amount to about £7,250,000. In addition to that, since this Government attained office, we have increased the amount of moneys that have been paid to the old age pensioners and widows by an annual sum of about £2,400,000. The tea ration was increased, at a cost of somewhere between £400,000 and £500,000. Increases have been paid to the Civil Service, which again cost the taxpayer about £750,000 a year. Last year certain additions that were given to the pensions of teachers, in fact, to the group of pensioners whom I dealt with here recently in a Pensions Bill, and certain improvements in the pay of Army personnel and of Garda personnel all tot up to at least £750,000. We have been able to relieve this community of taxation to the extent of £7,250,000 while at the same time benefits have been given to certain people in the community to the extent of £4,350,000. If those benefits had not been given, the entire saving that could have been made, the economies in relief of the populace, would have been the tot of both these sums, namely, something over £11,500,000. It was decided that it was better to provide these improvements, as these improvements had been promised. That was the situation. We face the year ahead with an increase of something over £1,000,000 as far as teachers are concerned, but that will be built into the Budget statement for next year.

I ask the House to pass this Vote on Account for the sum required.

The Book of Estimates which the Minister has presented to the House, raises some very vital issues affecting our national economy. In considering the effects on the economy of the raising of funds for the Government and of the spending of these funds, it is not sufficient to consider the amount involved; we must also consider, if we are to see the social effects, how it is proposed to raise the money, and how it is proposed to spend it. In this coming year, as far as we can now estimate, it is proposed that we will spend £78,000,000 roughly for the services provided in this Book of Estimates. To that sum we must add at least another £8,000,000 for Central Fund services. Last year, the Central Fund services cost £7,720,000 odd. Also, we may expect another £13,000,000 or £14,000,000 for other issues—Electricity Supply Board development, turf development, and the other activities that are usually listed in the Finance Accounts. If we take the figures in this Book of Estimates, the £78,000,000, and say that we will spend next year on Central Fund services only £7.7 millions and on other issues £12.6 millions, we have a total amount to be raised by taxation and borrowing of £98.4 millions.

If the Minister carries out his intention, it would seem that of that £98,000,000 about £73,000,000 or £74,000,000 will be raised by taxation and £24,000,000 by borrowing. The question people must ask themselves is: What effect will it have on the national economy to add another £24,000,000 to the stream of money? Because that is the effect of spending money over and above what is collected by taxation, whether that money is got by borrowing from the public, by borrowing from the banks or by direct printing off the Government presses. We will have to make up our minds as to whether the financial situation is such as to require an additional £24,000,000 pumped into the stream of money in circulation within the country. There have been a number of Governments in other parts of the world who, like our people, want to see very quick development and all sorts of services increased, and who took the easy way, even though money was plentiful, of pumping more money into the stream and the result was that prices rose, the cost of living rose and the people were worse off in the end than they were in the beginning. We have seen the results in France where the Government had recourse to the Bank of France to print notes for them, yet here we propose to borrow in this particular year an amount of about £24,000,000 at least £12,000,000 of which used normally be provided out of taxation. The question is: Is it a good thing, taking for granted that we want to do all the things appearing in the Book of Estimates plus all the things that will appear in the Budget speech? If we want to do those things, is this the proper way to meet the bill?

In 1947-48 the Fianna Fáil Government brought in a Book of Estimates for about £52,000,000 and we had to introduce a Supplementary Budget towards the end of the year because of the necessity to meet the crisis that occurred in the autumn of that year which affected not only this country but Britain and many other countries. In the event, we spent in 1947-48, the last year of Fianna Fáil, the sum of £58,500,000 odd on the Supply Services, £6,600,000 on the Central Fund Services and for other issues for the Electricity Supply Board, etc., the amount of £8.4 million. In the Budget speech of 1947 I indicated that we proposed to borrow £1,000,000 for capital items included in the Supply Services for that year. In the event nothing was borrowed because the Supplementary Budget was brought forward in order to cut down the inflationary tendencies that were obvious in the country. We met by taxation the £1,000,000 we proposed to borrow and we also met by taxation the very vast additional sums required to subsidise food and other commodities. Let me then contrast the two sets of figures. In the last year of Fianna Fáil for this type of service, for which the Minister is proposing to borrow £12,000,000 this year, we had to set out to raise £58,000,000. As far as I can compare the figures that included £3,000,000 for capital services equivalent to the type for which the Minister now proposes to borrow £12,000,000 and even though we were spending £3,000,000 on these capital services we did not propose to borrow anything in that year except the £1,000,000 and in the event we did not borrow that £1,000,000. We met the situation at the end of the year by raising more money through taxation and the reason we set out to meet the bill through taxation was that we felt it was vital in the national interests not to pump out more money into the inflationary stream. Have we an inflationary or a deflationary situation to-day? As far as one can find out from the Minister, when he is looking for money he says that the situation is inflationary and he wants to borrow money in order to kill the inflationary trend. If we have an inflationary situation at the moment how does the Minister justify the pumping of an additional £24,000,000 into that stream? We all would like to see the capital resources of the country built up, but we must do so in a manner which will not create social chaos. If we create social chaos our last case will be worse than the first.

I believe still that we were right in 1947-48 to meet the type of service for which the Minister proposes to borrow £12,000,000 this year by taxation rather than by borrowing. It would have been very easy to borrow; it would have been very easy to justify borrowing in that particular year. The crisis of 1947 only came in the middle of the year and we could have said that it was completely unexpected and that the best thing to do was to borrow the additional funds required to reduce the cost of living. If we had done that, however, in my opinion, we would have been financially dishonest; we would have been fooling the people into believing that we could improve their situation in an inflationary period by adding further money to the monetary stream. I believe that if the situation at the present time is, as the Minister said in recent months, an inflationary situation we should face up to it and not attempt to meet out of additional borrowing the payment for capital services which should be met by taxation.

The Minister himself is aware of the influence of spending borrowed money on financial stability. In his Budget speech of 1949 he made this remark:—

"The scope and scale of State capital projects raise questions which have a vital bearing on Irish monetary stability, and the avoidance of inflation in the methods adopted to finance these projects is a consideration of high importance."

The Minister gave no indication at all in his opening statement as to whether he thinks the raising of money, for the purposes outlined, by borrowing will have an inflationary effect. If it has an inflationary effect it will be a bad day's work for our people because it is very easy to start an inflationary movement and very difficult to stop it. You have, particularly since the last war, available to any Minister for Finance a knowledge of the technique which will enable him to induce an addition to the currency of the country; but few countries have yet discovered how, effectively and easily, to stop an inflationary trend. Countries have been wrestling with it and they have wrestled with it ineffectively.

I trust that the Minister, in his reply to this Vote on Account, will deal with that aspect of the matter and justify to this House and to the country the raising of this money by borrowing rather than through taxation. It is, of course, a very easy thing for a Minister for Finance and for a Government which give little heed to the future to slide out of their responsibilities and push on, or attempt to push on, the payment for present services to the future.

The Minister has already borrowed considerable amounts of money. We have seen, every year, the amount devoted to the service of debt increased. Last year the amount was somewhere about £4,500,000. I take it that, when we have borrowed the £12,000,000 which the Minister referred to in his opening statement to-day, we will have another considerable amount added to it. We will, of course, be handing the debt on to future taxpayers. The Minister said in his statement that he was proposing to make available out of the Central Fund sums for the amortisation of this £12,000,000 that he proposes to borrow. I think he realises himself that there is little chance of any sums coming into the Exchequer directly from this expenditure which will help to meet the charges which will fall on the Central Fund for sinking fund and interest payments. Will the Minister say that, as a result of the expenditure of this £12,000,000, a single penny will come into the Exchequer for the payment of interest and sinking fund charges? It may be, in the case of forestry, that some years to come, some future generation will be able to sell the timber and get some money into the Exchequer to meet the interest and sinking fund charges; but in regard to all these other items where grants are being made for this, that or the other activity, the Minister and the country must rely on a social profit rather than on a monetary profit, and "social profit" was a phrase used by the Minister.

I should like to believe that these things were going to be socially profitable and not socially disastrous. I am convinced that the expenditure of money which should be got by taxation, but instead is raised by borrowing, can be, in many cases, socially disastrous and not socially profitable. All the items in this list of capital services which the Minister is providing have had their counterparts in the past. We purchased sites for works and public buildings; we had new works; we had unemployment schemes and we had farm improvement schemes, the cost of all of which was met, as I said, in the year 1947-48 by taxation and not by borrowing. There were other services for which we did borrow. We borrowed for the Electricity Supply Board, for telephone improvements, for the Turf Board, for investments in the sugar company, and so on, and from these the country may expect that there will be a monetary return coming into the Exchequer to enable the Exchequer to meet the bill for interest and sinking fund charges. However, in this particular list we will have to depend on a social profit and not on a financial profit.

When we take into consideration the amount involved in the coming year's expenditure we must be rather amazed at the way in which the Minister introduced this particular Vote on Account. In the year 1947-48 we had some activity in the country. We had a number of people addressing meetings through the country at which they denounced as extravagant the sum of £58,000,000 which we were going to spend on the Supply Services. Indeed, they thought it was so extraordinary a burden that they promised, if they were returned to power in the coming general election, to reduce it by £10,000,000. If the promise which they gave then was being lived up to now, that sum of £58,000,000 would to-day be £48,000,000, but instead of the £48,000,000, we find on the back of this Book of Estimates that the Minister is proposing to spend £78,000,000. Instead of reducing it by £10,000,000, they put it up by £20,000,000.

The Minister's attempt to justify the increasing expenditure by saying that they had reduced taxation and had given certain social benefits will not hold water even for a second. Taxation has not been reduced. Even though the Minister proposes to borrow in this year £12,000,000 for items which were formerly met out of taxation, he is going to collect for the Supply Services a sum of £66,000,000, or £8,000,000 more than Fianna Fáil collected for these services. In addition to that, he is going to collect at least £8,000,000 for Central Fund services. How then can the Minister say that he has reduced taxation when, in fact, he will this year collect in taxation at least £8,000,000 more for Supply Services and £1,000,000 more for Central Fund services than Fianna Fáil collected? The Minister has reduced certain rates of taxation on tobacco, beer and wine, but he has collected more money from these particular items than was collected in 1947-48. He has also added a long list of additional taxes, including the increased tax on petrol, the increase in the postal charges and the increase in the national health insurance contributions. The "grey market" in tea, flour and sugar is another method by which the Government are collecting additional moneys. The long and the short of it is that the Minister will be collecting next year, according to his own estimate, at least £9,000,000 more than was collected by Fianna Fáil. The most he can show, taking his own figures, by way of increase in social services, increased pay for civil servants, old age pensions and so on is £4,000,000. He has still this other £5,000,000 to account for.

The fact is that in the last two and a half years or thereabouts there seems to have been no care given to the public purse. We have had increase after increase in the amount for public services and I do not see the public getting very much benefit from it. We had the break made early in 1948 by the Minister for Social Welfare, who demanded on the part of his Post Office Workers' Union that there should be an increase in their pay. That gave rise to demands from civil servants and from people outside, and we had a second run of wage and salary increases. After all the pulling and shoving that went on behind the scenes in the Coalition Government room, we have this increase of £9,000,000 to be collected from taxation from which the social services will get about £2,500,000 of an increase.

When I proposed in 1947 to raise a sum of £52,000,000 for the Supply Services it was called by the present Minister for Defence a "crazy demand" and an "unjust extortion". The then Deputy O'Higgins went on to ask what we had to show for the expenditure and said:—

"We have, for the greater expenditure, pomp and ceremony attached to every Minister, every one of whom travels in a car de luxe irrespective of price. We have a greater number of Ministers. There is the result of 16 years' insane extravagance.”

Deputy Dillon, the present Minister for Agriculture, on another occasion when we were asking the Dáil for a sum of £69,000,000, made the calculation that this represented £23 per head of the population or £140 per family. He asked me if I remembered the time when I was going around from "houseen" to "houseen" in Louth and South Monaghan, and how did I think these people could bear this £140 per family. I wonder how the Minister for Agriculture thinks they can afford not £69,000,000 to be raised by taxation and borrowing, but over £100,000,000. If he thought then that they could not afford £140 per family of State expenditure, even by borrowing and taxation, how does he think they can afford £200 per family in this particular year?

The present Minister for Agriculture was very solemn on that occasion and said:—

"This gentleman—that was myself as Minister for Finance—will be long dead and mouldering before the consequences of his action fall to be endured. This is a very comforting thought for the Minister for Finance, but is scarcely a sound procedure for somebody who is concerned for the welfare of his country."

I expect a number of us will be dead and mouldering before the consequences of the expenditure in this year fall to be endured. There is, however, one consequence that we cannot avoid, because the money spent in this particular year will have its effect in this particular year. If the Minister had a printing press and, with an expenditure of a few hundred pounds, printed £100,000,000 worth of notes, it would have the same effect in this particular year as the expenditure of £100,000,000 raised by borrowing. In the one case it would not have to be repaid and its full effect would be borne solely by the people at present in the country. In the other case, this additional inflationary expenditure raised by borrowing, would, in addition, have to be met by the taxpayer next year and hereafter until the full sum had been repaid. I hope that the Minister for Agriculture will take some time off from telling the farmers they have too much for their milk in order to come in here and explain what he thinks the consequences will be of this expenditure of something in the region of £200 per family and whether he thinks that the "houseens" and "houseens" he advised me to visit in County Louth and County Monaghan will benefit from this expenditure.

At one time the Minister for Finance did realise the importance of keeping expenditure on State Departments within the limits of the public purse and within the limits of what people could afford to pay. Indeed, on the 9th March, 1948, when he was introducing the Vote on Account for the Book of Estimates that had been prepared by the previous Government for a sum of £70,000,000, he referred to that £70,000,000 as "an amazing total" and he went on to say:—

"I describe the Estimate as amazing. I should apply the further terms to it, prodigious and prodigal."

If £70,000,000 was prodigious and prodigal, even though a large proportion of it was for capital expenditure, what now is the Minister's true opinion of this Bill for £78,000,000 which he has presented to the Dáil to-day? He spoke on that occasion, too, of the attitude of the last Government to public expenditure and said:—

"The whole idea appeared to be a complacent system of accepting increases: of not searching out for any possible decreases and of securing them from time to time."

He further said:—

"We want...to ensure retrenchment over as wide a field as possible."

Later on, he said:—

"We shall endeavour to break up this enormous bulk of expenditure that has grown so steadily year by year until now it has reached this enormous sum which, I think, in the last two or three days, has rather stupefied the great masses of the people."

If £70,000,000 stupefied the great masses of the people a couple of years ago, what does the Minister think £78,000,000 will do?

From the point of view of the country, the unfortunate thing about the Government is that it is made up to a very large extent of very clever lawyers who can put a face on anything. I have no doubt that the Minister can argue to his own satisfaction quite the contrary of what he argued two years ago. In the same debate to which I have referred on the General Resolution in 1948, at column 2128, the Minister apologised for having saved only £6,000,000 out of the £70,000,000:—

"If I cannot do better by this time next year"—he said—"I will let the Deputies accuse me of failure."

I do not know whether or not the Minister thinks he has failed. Certainly, from the point of view of the people who voted for the present Government in the expectation that Supply Services expenditure would be reduced to £48,000,000, some of them at least must believe that he has failed to keep his promise now when he presents a bill for £78,000,000 instead of £48,000,000.

Before I conclude my remarks on that aspect of the Minister's statement, let me say that we in Fianna Fáil always believed that every effort should be made to develop our resources. We never at any time allowed want of money to stand between the physical capacity to develop the country and the ability of its people to increase our resources. Eighteen years ago when the attitude of the principal Party in this Government was that we could not afford to build houses until the price of materials and wages dropped to such a point that houses could be built at an economic rent, we turned our back on that particular approach to economics and finance and we said that while there were men available for work and anxious for employment and while there was need for national production, the right step for a Government to take was to put such men to work producing houses or materials the nation might require. We did that in spite of the growing of the Fine Gael, then the Cumann na nGaedheal, Party that we were driving the country into bankruptcy. We increased the national debt to a certain extent. We increased it to nothing like the extent the present Minister proposes in the next few years. To offset the slight additional increase in the national debt, we had 140,000 houses to show at the end of our term in office. If we then had a Government prepared to continue the approach to economics and finance as displayed by the Fine Gael Government prior to 1932, there would not have been in all those years during which we were in office one single house built because at no stage did the price of material or the cost of wages fall to a point at which houses could be built and let at an economic rent.

Every year grants and subsidies were required to encourage local authorities and private enterprise to build houses. We made the money available. Notwithstanding the severe criticism of the then Fine Gael Party that we were bringing the country to bankruptcy, adding to the national debt and depleting our external assets, we pursued that policy with all the vigour we could command. The Minister is in the happy position to-day that, if he has proposals to increase the capital wealth of the community, he will be allowed to put these proposals through without opposition. We do, of course, withhold our right to criticise the manner in which he proposes to raise the sum required. We hope that the Minister will not, even for the most desirable purposes, attempt to raise money in a manner which will create social chaos instead of social order.

One of the reasons why we find it very difficult to get a clear picture of what the Government is about, or what they propose to do, is that there seems to be no acceptance on the part of the various members of the Government that there is such a thing as collective responsibility. If the Minister makes a speech here to-day we do not know whether he is speaking on his own behalf or on behalf of the Government, or whether he has not been pressed and forced into making a certain speech by one or other of the various groups that comprise the Government.

The Taoiseach himself when accepting office on 18th February, 1948, realised the importance of collective responsibility for the Government. He said that

"no Government can be formed within the Constitution or act within the Constitution unless it meets and acts with collective responsibility, and that the present Government would do that".

He went on to emphasise that it would do it "in the spirit and in the letter of the Constitution". We have had, on very vital questions of finance, several Ministers making completely contradictory statements. If we want to raise funds by borrowing—if that is decided to be the correct policy by the Dáil—the people will require to have some little confidence that the person who is appealing for the funds on behalf of the Government is speaking for the Government. There is no more vital thing for the welfare of the community than that they should know where they are regarding public finance. All goods are exchanged in the modern world through the medium of money, and anything that affects the value of money upwards or downwards affects the whole life of the community and affects their ability to settle down to do a job of work. They have to depend on the Government to ensure that the amount of money available to the community is sufficient to enable the community to do its work, but not so plentiful as will destroy the ability of the community to do its work.

The Minister for External Affairs and the Minister for Finance, who is the Minister responsible, have been making very contradictory statements on the question of finance during the last couple of years. I should like the Taoiseach to come in and tell the House which of them is speaking the mind of the Government. You have the Minister for External Affairs making a public speech in recent months in which he alleged that the banks were restricting credit, and in which he said that the banks "have at all times disregarded completely the national interest." He said that the banks "had been given a bad example by the Central Bank." He concluded his speech by telling them "if the banks wanted to continue in their privileged position"—well something would have to be done about the matter. That was not the first time the allegation that the banks were restricting credit unduly was made. It was spoken about by a number of people. Deputy Little saw the chat in the Press about it, and he asked a question of the Minister for Finance as to whether, in fact, there was any truth in the allegation that the banks had restricted credit unduly. The Minister's reply was to the effect that he had nothing to do with it, and he indicated that if, as alleged, they were restricting credit, it was perhaps a wise policy. He stated at column 1330, Volume 112 of the Official Report of the Parliamentary Debates:—

"It may well be that they have, as a matter of policy, decided that they themselves must take certain steps,"

—i.e., restricting credit—

"and with the wisdom of that I cannot quarrel."

He stated further on in the same speech that

"there are certain figures there which would lead people to believe it was a wise policy".

The Minister for External Affairs does not consider it a wise policy. He went to the extent of denouncing it in the terms which I have quoted. What does the Minister for Finance think about it at the present time? What does the Taoiseach think about it at the present time? They cannot continue denouncing the Central Bank Act two and a half years after they have assumed the responsibility of Government and refuse to introduce proposals in the Dáil for remedying whatever bad situation they say exists. The Central Bank Act, in my opinion, gives the Government, through the Minister for Finance, and the Central Bank itself, power to influence the attitude of the banks in regard to the supply of credit. If the Minister does not think that those powers are sufficient to control the credit in the public interest, the right thing to do is not to send the Minister for External Affairs to Cork or elsewhere to make a speech about it but to introduce proposals in the Dáil. The Government must remember that, although they behave in the same irresponsible way in which they behaved when they were in opposition, they are no longer in opposition. They must remember that if they make a severe criticism of things that can be cured by legislation they are supposed to introduce legislation to effect the changes required.

The Minister for External Affairs, also in this matter of collective responsibility, has been denouncing or has denounced by implication from time to time the policy of the Minister for Agriculture. He stated in May, 1948, in a report to the Economic Co-operation Administration that,

"inasmuch as our exports to the Western Hemisphere are negligible, we would have no means of repaying any dollars which the United States might be kind enough to offer us and that hence we may be unable to avail ourselves of European Recovery Programme aid if it is to be by way of loan."

In another report the Minister for External Affairs said that,

"we are exporting to Britain cattle which were reared on land on which wheat should have been grown and we are spending our dollars on American wheat."

What is the attitude of the Government towards borrowing from the United States, towards the getting of loans which must be repaid in dollars and towards the using of those dollars to increase to a very small extent our area of grass—and perhaps that only for a couple of years until it goes back into rushes again—rather than towards using them to build up our agriculture and industries to meet our present requirements and our requirements, particularly, in a year or so when Marshall Aid comes to an end?

There are two ways in which we can get dollars. One is to produce goods for sale to America and the other is to dig for dollars in our own country— that is, to produce from our own soil the commodities or foodstuffs for which we should have to pay dollars if we were to import them, or to make in our own factories the commodities for which we should have to pay in dollars if we did not produce them at home. You have the Minister for Agriculture taking one point of view—that we must continue to concentrate on exporting cattle and animal products to Britain. There is the other point of view expressed by the Minister for External Affairs when he stated, as I have indicated, that the proper way to use our land was to devote it to the production of our own requirements. It would have been all very well for the Government in its first few weeks of office not to have composed its differences on these fundamental questions but it is time now that they should accept collective responsibility and act, as the Taoiseach promised they would act, "in the spirit and the letter of the Constitution" in regard to the collective responsibility imposed on all Governments. People could afford, perhaps, to have in office for a couple of years, just to see what it is like, a Government which displays completely antagonistic attitudes on vital questions but the sort of world in which we are living at the present time demands that the Government should act up to its responsibilities, decide on a policy and give a clear lead to the people at the present time.

The Taoiseach a couple of years ago stated that they were going to act on the assumption that there would be peace for ever, or peace in our time. I saw a couple of days ago that he stated somewhere that the Americans were acting on the assumption that there was going to be war and perhaps before very long. Whether there is going to be war, real, actual, physical war or not, there are difficult times ahead for our country and for Europe. We have the obvious inability of Europe to meet payments for goods in dollars after another year or so. The closing down of the flow of American goods will require great adjustments in the economy of European countries, and particularly of our own country with which, of course, we are mostly concerned.

And in America.

America has at least the goods, an over-abundance of goods, but the position here will be that if we do not set ourselves to the task of producing our own requirements in regard to goods we cannot import we shall have to do without these goods. It is time members of the Government sat down and put their heads together to hammer out a policy for which they will take public responsibility and for which each and every Minister will take full responsibility "in the spirit and the letter of the Constitution", as the Taoiseach promised. Otherwise people will not know from day to day where they are and there will be chaos instead of order.

One other matter upon which there seems to be no great harmony—indeed on which there seems to be great antagonism—between members of the Government is the question of our external assets. The Minister for External Affairs recently made a speech about our external assets in which he said that if the money we sent for "safe keeping" in Britain had been invested at home, we would now have valuable assets at home.

Hear, hear.

I think he criticised the Central Bank also for having a very big amount of external assets as backing for our currency. He must be also aware, because I asked a question recently in regard to the matter, about the external assets in the hands of the Government. We discover that the present Minister for Finance, who had been for many years sedulously denouncing the amount of external assets, has been very assiduous from the time he became Minister in collecting into the Government's hands more external assets. He succeeded, in the first few months of his term of office, in adding £4,000,000 to the bulk of the external assets held by Government funds. Where does the Government stand about external assets? Do they really know what an external asset is or how they can get it back again? Does the Minister for External Affairs know that you cannot realise an external asset unless you buy some service abroad or goods abroad to the equivalent value of the asset you want realised? If the Minister for Finance, who has been criticised in public by the Minister for External Affairs in this matter, wants to take home portion of the external assets held in Government funds, he succeeds merely in transferring it to some other Irish organisation. If he wants to realise £2,000,000 in some of the Government funds, that realisation will have the effect of driving up the holdings of the commercial banks; that is the only effect it will have.

If we want to take home all our external assets, we have to buy goods and services to the complete amount of these assets. I think it is a very proper thing not to be worried about a fall in our external assets which is accompanied by an increase in the growth of our internal assets. If, by waving a wand, we could translate whatever foreign assets we have into machinery and improve land here, I would like to see that done right away, but I think it is very foolish to want to fritter away our external assets without creating equivalent assets within the country. We could go on a spending spree for a generation or so; this generation could, by taking things easy, by not exporting as much as we are importing, within a very few years reduce the amount of external assets to nil.

We have been, for the last few years, going through our external assets rather rapidly. During the war we built them up, but that was no fault of ours, because we could not get the goods or the services. The result was that our external assets increased. Since the war our external assets have been decreasing rather rapidly and, while that trend was all very good for a couple of years while we were restocking our shops and giving our people the supply of commodities which they could not get during the war, I think the time has come when we should see that if we are going to expend our external assets we should do so for the purpose of creating internal assets. In the present situation we should see that these internal assets will be immediately productive.

The Minister for External Affairs could not see how we were going to repay a dollar loan—if dollars were given to us by way of loan. We have accepted dollar loans in the last couple of years and we have accepted the responsibility of repaying them. We have, in this particular Book of Estimates which the Minister has presented to the Dáil, an expenditure that can only be made by borrowing dollars and it is up to us to see that any such expenditure is immediately productive.

The Minister, in the course of his statement, alluded to the report on arterial drainage. That report had a few paragraphs designed to show that, although there are certain portions of the country that would give an immediate return from drainage, there are other portions that would not give a 5 per cent. return of the amount lent. We are providing in this Book of Estimates a sum for the purchase of machinery for draining all sorts of land. The machinery will be paid for in dollars. We should see to it that that machinery is used on land that will give us, in the immediate future, an increased production, production of a type that will enable us to get on with less dollars. The Government should have a definite mind on that matter and make even the Minister for Agriculture conform to the corporate mind on that business.

I hope that the Government will, at an early date, give the country its considered opinion after two and a half years' experience of office on the question of finance—the control of finance and such like matters. It is vital that that should be done and that Ministers should not be speaking with two voices on this matter. I also hope that when the Minister is concluding this debate he will justify the raising of this £12,000,000 by borrowing rather than by taxation. It is untrue to say, as has been indicated in some of the papers, that the two-Budget approach is in any way new. We have had in the past here a segregation made in the Budget as between money that could be borrowed for public expenses and money that should be met out of taxation.

I believe that the Minister is using this idea of newness about this procedure in order to justify something which he could not otherwise justify; that is the borrowing of this comparatively big amount rather than face the political unpopularity of meeting it through taxation. I would recede from that opinion only if the Minister could prove to me that there is a deflationary situation which requires additional money to be pumped into the monetary stream. If that is the situation, I would only ask the Minister why is he going to borrow money rather than print it, as he used to advocate at one time when Government expenditure was rather miserly for his flaithiúlach mind? He made speech after speech here in the Dáil, in one of which he said that no good public purpose should be held up for want of money, even if we had to print it.

I ask the Minister, in conclusion, to answer this question: if he thinks the money should not be met by taxation, why is he borrowing it, instead of printing it as he used to advocate? It may sound very fantastic to a number of people who only know the Minister in his present capacity to learn that that was once his panacea for all our ills— if we wanted more money, all we had to do was to print it. The people will expect the Minister to make a very much better case for the desirability of borrowing this money than he attempted to make in his opening statement. The people are not so foolish as to think that our difficulties can be avoided by borrowing. They all know that the person who borrows has to undertake to repay and that the £100,000,000 which we have borrowed already is costing us £4,000,000 or £5,000,000 a year by way of interest and sinking fund and that if we continue borrowing at these rates, at the rate of about £24,000,000 a year, at which the Minister will be borrowing this year, it will only be another year or two until we have another £4,000,000 or £5,000,000 to pay in interest and sinking fund.

A sum of £4,000,000 or £5,000,000 a year might seem a very small amount to gentlemen who think in terms of billions, but we can throw our minds back to 1947 and to a famous Supplementary Budget then introduced. All that was involved in that Supplementary Budget was £5,000,000 or £6,000,000 and yet we had all the fuss about the taxation on beer, cigarettes and all the rest. It was only a matter of a mere £4,000,000 or £5,000,000 additional. The Coalition may get out of certain difficulties and may be able to keep together as a Government for another year or two by borrowing instead of meeting its proper commitments, but certainly the people will have to pay for it. I appeal to those elements in the Coalition who have some respect for the public interest to see to it that while they remain in the Government they will have a proper respect not only for the taxpayers and voters of to-day but for the taxpayers of tomorrow, and will act not as pirates who grab a ship and want to have a good time on board but in a manner which will help that ship to come safely into port. As I said at the beginning, if the Minister can prove to me that there is a deflationary situation which requires this amount of new money—this sum of £12,000,000, plus the other £12,000,000 which we will borrow for other services—my approach will be different; but if I can see by the absence of such explanation on the part of the Minister that he is merely avoiding a political difficulty by raising moneys which are properly to be raised by taxation, by borrowing, I must feel that he is doing a very bad day's work for the country.

I should like to congratulate Deputy Aiken on having, in the course of his very interesting and long speech, been able to avoid making one single constructive suggestion or trying himself to any policy in regard to these Estimates. He had open to him three different grounds upon which he could object to the finance practice adopted in the presentation of the Estimates this year. He could have objected on the ground that this extra amount of money would cause inflation; he could have objected on the ground that the expenditure envisaged in the Book of Estimates was of an unnecessary nature or was objectionable for some reason or other, or he could have objected on the ground that the capital portion of the Estimates was not properly chargeable to capital. In so far as I could understand him, however, he did not tie himself to any one of these grounds specifically.

He asked for an indication as to whether or not there was inflation. He asked the Minister to tell him whether in his view we were going through an inflationary period or a deflationary period. Deputy Aiken and the members of the Opposition are just as able as we are on this side to determine whether there is inflation or not. One of the errors which I think we have made constantly since we took over control of our own affairs in 1921 has been to accept certain outworn economic concepts and certain tags that have little or no application either to present-day circumstances or to circumstances as they exist here. Frequent references were made in the past to inflation and inflationary tendencies here, but I wonder has anybody seriously examined what degree of control we have over inflation or inflationary tendencies. Inflation, as I understand it, is a situation wherein prices rise because of a shortage of goods and a surplus of money—as it is often put, too much money chasing too few goods. Does that situation exist at the moment? Are prices rising because of a shortage of goods? I am not aware that there have been any increases in prices due to a shortage of goods. Whatever increases may occur in some prices from time to time are either seasonal increases or increases due to external circumstances, due to the higher costs of imports, but not due to a shortage of goods and a surplus of money here. There is no black market in commodities in short supply, but, in any case, is it not rather foolish and futile for us to talk about the dangers of inflation when we have little or no control over inflationary tendencies? There is a far graver risk of inflationary tendencies arising on the transfer of money from Britain to Ireland, on the purchase of property. Likewise, we have little or no control over the labour market. That is determined across the water. Under these circumstances, I think that the reality is that we can do little or nothing to control inflation. Therefore, I do not think that the question of inflation really arises in the consideration of these Estimates, in the first place because there is no sign of inflation here and, in the second place, because we have little or no control as to inflationary or deflationary tendencies here.

I noticed that Deputy Aiken very ably and very skilfully went through his whole speech without once committing himself to the fact that there was an inflationary tendency or that this money would cause inflation. What the Minister for Finance has done in this year's Estimate is a thing that should have been done years ago here. No ordinary person in his sane senses would ever attempt to build a house by paying for it out of his income in one year. No ordinary business person would attempt to carry out capital development out of income, unless it was being done purely and simply for the purpose of avoiding taxation. What the Minister for Finance is doing in these Estimates is to provide for the payment of capital items out of capital over a period of time, instead of paying for them annually. Why, for instance, should capital development schemes that will increase the national income be charged out of revenue in one year?

Unfortunately, since we took over control of our own affairs, for one reason or another, we never seem to have got down to an objective analysis of our economic position. We adopted politically and economically many of the institutions which we had been used to see operating either here or in Britain. We did not seem to appreciate sufficiently that the economic structure, the economic edifice, which operates in Britain is not necessarily a suitable economic structure for us. Is it not time that we should seek objectively, on both sides of the House, to review our economic structure and to plan on a basis that will enable a more rapid development of our resources? We have had control of this part of the country for 30 years. What have we done with the control we have obtained? The population of this country is now lower than it ever was before. In a period of 20 years, from 1926 to 1946, 365,000 of our people had to emigrate. We have permanent unemployment and under-employment in the country. Is it not time that we should try to remedy that? Is it not time that we should seek the reasons for these things? Is it not time that we should try to develop our own resources and be prepared to invest our own money in this country to develop them?

I do not know whether the Opposition intend seriously to oppose the constructive approach which has been made to this question by the Minister for Finance. My only regret is that we were not able to undertake national capital development on a bigger scale than we have. This country has been starved, from an investment point of view, during the past 30 years. I think we should seek to approach this question irrespective of Party politics, that we should seek to appreciate that, if we are to remedy the position which exists at the moment, the position which has existed over the past 30 years, it will require the united effort of all the people. We have maintained here hitherto the most outdated and ultra-conservative method of State finance that could be found in the world. I congratulate the Minister for Finance on having had the initiative to depart from it and on trying to bring us into line with modern practice all over the world.

I do not know whether, in the course of this debate, members of the Opposition intend to criticise the expenditure contained in the Book of Estimates on the ground that it is unnecessary. So far, Deputy Aiken, in opening the debate on behalf of the Opposition, has not criticised the expenditure on that basis. I am proud to be in a Government that is prepared to face first things first, that is prepared to build hospitals and to ensure that people will not be allowed to die for want of care. I am glad to be in a Government which is prepared to increase social services, so that we may be in a position to discharge our social and our Christian duties. But might I remind the Opposition, if they feel tempted to attack these items, of a paragraph which appeared in last Saturday's Irish Press editorial, dealing with this very Book of Estimates:—

"Until they came into power this post-war reconstruction programme had been held up because of shortages of equipment and materials following the war. In the past few years, however, the supply position has eased; the programme is being proceeded with and the bills are coming in. There is nothing surprising about this. These schemes would have cost a great deal of money no matter what Government was in power."

I took it when I read that leading article that in effect the Opposition were saying to the people: "Well, no matter what Government was in power, this money would have had to be spent. Our only regret is that we are not spending it."

Deputy Aiken has talked of our foreign assets and again I noticed he steered around very carefully so as to avoid committing himself to any position. May I ask the Opposition a straight question: Are they now in favour of the repatriation of our assets here?

Mr. de Valera

They have always been.

Well, they did nothing about it.

Mr. de Valera

What?

They accumulated them. They accepted the report of a banking commission which gave numerous reasons as to why it was wise to have these sterling assets. Speeches were made deriding members of my Party and myself for advocating a contrary policy. When, during the last general election, I advocated that policy, Deputy de Valera, Junior, took up his best pen to pursue me in the Irish Times on this question. Of course, I know that that was not the view of the Opposition as a whole. I knew that there were many Deputies in the Fianna Fáil Party who did not agree with that view. May I ask that at this stage we should get a considered declaration from the Opposition as to what their policy is in regard to that matter? The policy of this Government —the collective policy of this Government—has been declared by the Taoiseach. Now, possibly we might get an indication from the Opposition as to what their policy is.

Mr. de Valera

We have not to wait till to-day for it.

Certainly, there has been complete silence as far as this question is concerned from the Opposition. We had a rather ill-considered article one day at the time of devaluation by one of the members of the front bench of the Opposition but there has been complete silence on the part of the other members of the front bench. The debate on this Estimate will, I take it, give the Leader of the Opposition a good opportunity to make the attitude of his Party clear on these issues and to make clear the policy of the Opposition in regard to the Central Bank legislation.

Deputy Aiken referred to the Central Bank legislation and asked why the Government had not taken any action to remedy the position. May I ask this question of the Leader of the Opposition? If this Government is prepared to take action to secure its economic independence, will the Leader of the Opposition support that action?

Take your own responsibilities now.

"It might be a good thing or it might be a bad thing."

Do not dodge it that way.

Do not dodge the column.

The sooner the Opposition realises that their only chance of surviving as a political Party is to have a policy and not to dodge political issues, the better.

Mr. de Valera

Who is dodging?

Test that.

There is no dodging as far as this Government is concerned. The policy of this Government has been stated clearly and emphatically by the Taoiseach.

The speech in Cork is no good.

I do not think that any Deputy would suggest that I changed my views or dodged the issue on any of these matters——

There is nothing wrong in what he said in Cork.

——from the day I was being pursued in the columns of the Irish Times by Deputy de Valera, Junior, during the course of the election campaign, until now, but I do not think that anybody knows what the policy of the Opposition is in regard to these matters.

Mr. de Valera

Of course they do. For 30 years they know it.

Deputy de Valera has become very keen to interrupt me. There has been great peace and silence in this House but, since I started asking him what the policy of his Party was, he proceeded to interrupt me.

Mr. de Valera

Why ask me questions if you do not want answers?

I hope Deputy de Valera will state clearly what the policy of his Party is in regard to these matters and will state it unambiguously so that the people may be able to understand it.

We are dealing with the Government's policy now, and not with the policy of the Opposition. That is what we are dealing with. Stand over your own policy now.

What do you think of it?

I will tell you all about it, as far as you have a policy at all.

I notice the Opposition seem to be very thin-skinned in regard to these matters. Surely they should be able to listen to me for a short while on these economic questions without getting all worked up. I was very glad that Deputy Aiken admitted that forestry might in future provide some return. That too, I take it, indicates a change of front, and a welcome change of front at that, but, no doubt, we will be told that that was also part of the Fianna Fáil policy. If it was, the results were very poor.

Broadly speaking, the policy which underlies the action taken by the Minister for Finance, in presenting his Estimates to the House this year, is to foster any development that increases the national income and any development which brings indirect return as well. It is an important principle. It is a big departure in our State finances. My only regret is that that departure was not made 25 years ago or more. This country would not be in the rut in which it has remained for the last 25 years if that policy had been pursued actively by the preceding Governments, but I hope that now we can consider these matters without irritation, consider them objectively and try to secure at least a basis of agreement on the future economic development of the country.

Tá rud beag le rá agamsa ar an Vóta so atá os comhair na Dála faoi láthair. Ní raibh go nuige seo Bille chomh mór leis os comhair na Dála agus os comhair an phobail. Ní haon iona mar sin go mbeadh daoine ar an dtaobh seo den Tigh imnítheach mar gheall air agus ní haon iona leis go mbeadh na daoine lasmuigh imnítheach go mbeidh orthu an méid seo airgid d'fháil don Rialtas. Fé mar adúrt, bille thar cuimse is ea é i gcóir Roinne an Rialtais. Ní bheadh an scéal ró-olc air sin dá bhféadfáimis a bheith sásta go mbeadh an focal deireannach anseo, dá bhféadfáimis an méid atá le fáil, an méid atá le caitheamh, ag an Rialtas ar feadh na bliana le feiscint sa mheastachán seo; ach, do réir na taithí atá againn ag an Rialtas seo, táimid in amhras go mbeidh a thuilleadh éilimh ó am go ham ar an Tigh seo le haghaidh níos mó airgid fé mar a bhí ar feadh na bliana seo caite. Dar ndóigh ní féidir a bheith cruinn ar fad nuair a cuirtear an meastachán seo os comhair na Dála, ach, im thuairimse, d'féadfaidh níos mó cruinnis a bheith ann ná mar bhí an bhliain seo caite mar ní heol dom gur cuireadh an oiread sin meastachán breise riamh os comhair an Tí seo agus a cuireadh ar feadh na bliana so. Ní thuigim cad na thaobh—agus ní bhfuaireamar aon chuntas cén fáth—a tháinigeadar isteach ar lorg airgid ná raibh san éileamh cheana. Maidir leis an leabhar meastachán atá os ar gcomhair agus faoi dhíospóireacht againn tá baol ann go mbeidh a thuilleadh ag teastáil sar a mbeidh an bhliain istigh.

When listening to the Minister for External Affairs trying to justify this huge expenditure I was wondering what had happened since the time when certain of his associates in the Government used to criticise Fianna Fáil for what they used to describe as their "squandermania". We often heard the word "squandermania" trotted out in this House.

That is unintelligent spending.

Time will tell whether this is unintelligent or not.

That is what the Deputy is afraid of.

It is not.

Will the Deputy indicate what items?

I am going to make my own speech. When the Minister for External Affairs was speaking he referred to interruptions from this side of the House. It is a pity that he is not sitting here, where he would have to submit to a barrage of interruptions from the far side of the House. If anyone has doubts I would advise him to take the Official Reports and he will see that every speech made on this side of the House is punctuated with interruptions because it appears that people on that side of the House are afraid to hear the truth.

They can disprove that by keeping quiet; I hope they will.

On a point of explanation, I had no intention of interrupting the Deputy. I merely put a question which I thought I was entitled to put, but I will know better in future.

I will take Deputy Lehane's word on that, but more than Deputy Lehane were interrupting when I had not gone very far in my speech. There were more and worse interruptions than Deputy Lehane's.

The Deputy might get on with his speech.

The Minister for External Affairs referred to what he called "policy". While he referred to policy he gave us no indication of what it is or what it is going to be. He talked, of course, in a general way about developing the resources of the country, but it is one thing to make a broad, sweeping statement about developing the resources of the country and another thing to come in and tell us how exactly these resources are going to be developed. No indication has been vouchsafed either from the Minister for Finance in his opening statement or from the Minister for External Affairs as to how this great development is to take place. We have heard of housing, but housing is no new development in this country as everybody knows, and for all their talk about development I think it will take the present Government a good while to catch up on the Fianna Fáil programme of house building for certain years, and for that purpose they did not borrow the money. The Fianna Fáil Government built houses for the people without going outside the resources of the State, and here we have a departure from that, an attempt to borrow money for housing. If, however, we condemned or criticised it we would be blamed by certain members of the Coalition for putting a spanner in the works regarding the progress of housing. It is my view that if houses are to be built here—and there are many yet to be built—they should be built out of the resources of the State and not with borrowed money. The Minister for External Affairs suggested that nobody would be so foolish as to expect a person to pay for his house in one year. Well, in point of fact I have seen people pay for their houses in one year and they certainly do not want a house every year. These grants under the Housing (Miscellaneous) Acts are supposed to be paid within a year or so, but I am afraid that it has been my experience since the present Government took over that a period of more than 12 months has elapsed from the time when people made applications for housing grants and the time they were paid.

That is not true.

It is true.

We cannot go into administration on this.

We could give several examples and if the Deputy likes I could give examples.

Get back to the Estimates.

I was just replying to an interruption. One would imagine from the speech of the Minister for External Affairs that borrowing money had become a virtue overnight and that the more money we borrow and lavish the better the people like it. That is, indeed, a very strange philosophy to me. I cannot understand it, because I always am inclined to draw a comparison between what I will describe as proper housekeeping on the part of the individual and proper and intelligent housekeeping on the part of the Government. I, for one, hold that it is bad policy to borrow too much money because, of course, all of it will have to be paid back at a high rate of interest. Even the money that we are borrowing from America, the money that we are getting under the Marshall Aid Plan, will have to be paid back with interest, plus the difference in the rate of exchange between the dollar and sterling. I wonder if the Minister for Finance, and the people who sit behind him, have explained that to the people so far? They have been very silent on that aspect of the situation. If all this borrowing takes place—we can see from the Book of Estimates that it is proposed to borrow over £12,000,000 for what is described as capital expenditure—then I certainly do not envy the Government's successors in office who will have to be responsible later on for the repayment of all this borrowed money. Of course, in the end it is the ordinary people of the country who will have to foot the bill.

The Minister for External Affairs, and I think the Minister for Finance, referred to the development of our own resources. I have already mentioned that myself. I have been looking over the Estimates for the various Departments, and I have examined two subdepartments in which I am very keenly interested. One of them comes under the Department of Industry and Commerce. I find that, while we are told all about the fine schemes that are going to be carried out for the development of our own resources, there is only a sum of £316,000 being estimated for Bord na Móna for the coming year. That appears to me to be a very small sum in comparison with other sums which are set out in the Book of Estimates. As I have said here on more than one occasion, I regard the work of Bord na Móna and the development of the bogs of this country as being all important. I think the time has come when, if members of the Government are going to speak about policy, they should tell us what, if anything, they are going to do towards the development of our bogs and towards putting the turf industry back on its feet again. It appears to me, as it appeared to many people who went before us, an extraordinary thing to see coal being burned in many places and in some institutions—I mention that now for the benefit of the Minister for Health— where turf could, very easily, be used instead. We keep on importing coal ad lib. without turning our attention to the possibility of producing turf and making it available instead of coal for institutions, etc. Dean Swift's philosophy is still applicable. There is no doubt about that. Therefore, I would like to hear a word from the Minister for Finance or from someone representing the Government or responsible for Government policy, as to what is going to be done in regard to the exploitation of the bogs of this country.

As I said here in another debate, while we talk about starting industries —no doubt it is a very laudable thing to start industries and put as many people as we possibly can into employment—I regard the turf industry as being more important than 20, 30, or 40 of these industries. Therefore, it appears to me to be an extraordinary thing to find, when we are presented with the huge bill of over £78,000,000, that there is only £316,000 being estimated for the development of the turf industry under Bord na Móna.

We have been told by the Minister for External Affairs that there is no black market here. I thought that he referred to that in a rather irrelevant way. Well, while there is no black market among the general public, there certainly is a black market being carried on by the Government itself, a black market in tea, sugar, flour and butter. That has already been referred to here. That, of course, as everybody knows, is a device for keeping the cost of living index figure down—to omit certain items such as tea, sugar, flour and butter, that have to be used by hoteliers, restaurant owners and confectioners, the cost of which is passed on in turn to the members of the general public who have to frequent and have their meals in hotels and restaurants. Therefore, as I say, the only black market we have in the country at the present time is that which is being carried on by the Government itself. In certain ways, the price of sugar, tea and the other commodities I have mentioned is more than twice what the people who buy them on their ordinary rations have to pay.

When I was interrupted, I was saying that it was extraordinary to find the people coming here in the year 1950 with a bill of this magnitude who went around the country condemning Fianna Fáil for their so-called extravagance. I remember being in a certain place when I had to give way to a speaker now sitting on the other side of the House who said that the policy he had come to enunciate to the people was one of economy and retrenchment. These are forgotten words to-day.

You forgot them yourself.

I want economy and retrenchment where they should be made; I want money spent where it should be spent. It is being spent in many ways in which it should not be spent. I have mentioned one which I am sure would interest some Deputies opposite.

The cost of living does not appear to have gone down. On the contrary, its tendency is upwards, despite this black-marketing device to which I have referred. Anybody having experience of life in the country as well as in the city can come to no other conclusion than that there is an upward trend in the cost of living. The price of clothes, boots and shoes is higher to-day than it has been for years. I am afraid that there is not a corresponding growth in actual business. Anybody who has experience of provincial towns knows that business at present is at a very low ebb.

Even with cost of living as high as it is, it would not be so bad if an expansion in business were evident. But, as everybody knows, that is not the case. As for emigration, it goes on unchecked. Unfortunately, it has assumed greater proportions in the part of the country that I come from than in other places. I am sure Deputy Spring, who is so much inclined to interrupt, would have a word to say about that.

As I said, there are certain items that surprise me. I have already referred to Bord na Móna. I now come to minor employment schemes and, as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance is here, there is no better time to refer to them than now. I see that the sum provided this year for minor employment schemes is £95,000, the same as last year. The amount provided last year for such schemes was entirely too small, with the result that the schemes carried out were few and far between. When I refer to minor employment schemes, I refer to the construction and repair of bog and accommodation roads, cul-de-sac roads and so on. We have here a sum of £95,000 for minor employment schemes.

Bog development schemes were always provided for under a separate sub-head. This policy of depriving the rural community of benefits which they have been accustomed to enjoy is bad. I always regarded those minor employment schemes as very important and beneficial.

On a point of order. That is not correct. There was £95,000 provided last year for rural improvement schemes.

That is not a point of order.

Well, it is a point of explanation.

Apart from that, the Estimates are not supposed to be before us at present. The Vote on Account before us is not itemised.

I am referring to general Government policy, especially in its application to the rural community.

I think there was a dispute about the amount provided for bog roads or something like that.

In dealing with that, I thought I was within my right in referring to a few items. I am not going to refer to any more. We have been told about this great move which is being made by the Government to repatriate our external assets, but so far I do not see any move being made in the matter. We have heard a lot of talk about the repatriation of our external assets.

If Deputies look at the Vote on Account they will find that it is not itemised. They will find that there is so much for the Local Government Department and so on. All these small items are not given. They are only given in the Estimates.

Surely it is open to us to discuss all the Departments in general?

The Deputy has got the key words "in general", not in particular.

I was referring to the much-vaunted repatriation of our so-called external assets. The Minister or any member of the Government has not given us any indication as to how they propose to repatriate them. It is one thing to say that money must be spent on this and money must be spent on that, but it is another thing to tell us what steps are to be taken to bring back to this country the £400,000,000, or whatever sum it is. If the Minister proposes to borrow money and if he expects the flotation of these loans to attract investors who now have their money invested abroad, the only way in which he can successfully carry out his object is by giving attractive terms and making sure above all that the people will have security for their money here. I am afraid that the experience of the last attempt at borrowing made by the present Government will not entice these people to invest their money here.

This is sabotage.

It is not sabotage. I want to know from the Minister how it was that the 3 per cent. Exchequer Bonds fell as low as 93 in such a short time.

Because of the attitude of the gentlemen who control the money, of course.

As I have said, I am opposed to excessive borrowing. I do not believe it is sound national policy. We are told that this borrowing is to be restricted to capital expenditure, but capital expenditure can be interpreted in many ways and it can sometimes be interpreted too liberally. This is a huge bill to present to the House. It is £20,000,000 more than the bill presented in the last year of the Fianna Fáil régime. The question arises: are we advancing? I doubt it very much. The Minister for External Affairs mentioned the building of hospitals and so on. How many hospitals have we built? I would like to get that figure to find if there is some justification for the claim made by the Minister for External Affairs. How many more do we propose to build? I know that it is good work, useful work and necessary work.

You want to have both ends of the bargain.

I do not believe, however, that we should borrow too much money even for that good purpose. Our borrowing should be kept within the limits of our resources and within the capacity of the people who will have to pay in the long run.

A Chinn Chomhairle, tá an teachta ag rá agus ag athrá an rud céanna.

Is é seo an chéad uair adúirt mé aon rud mar gheall ar oispidéil.

An tríú uair adúirt sé an rud céanna.

Ní ceart é sin. Is é an Ceann Comhairle an breitheamh. It appears to me that my remarks are causing considerable uneasiness on the Government Benches.

Amusement!

I shall now conclude by stating that I consider this Vote on Account exorbitant. I am opposed to all this lavishness on the part of the Government.

Sin é an ceathrú uair adúirt sé sin.

Never were so many words said meaning so little as have been said by Deputy Kissane. It is perfectly obvious that he and his Party find themselves in the extraordinary dilemma of being confronted for the first time in their experience with what might be described as a really constructive and progressive step in the economic rehabilitation of the country. There is no doubt that if this country is to survive, not only will the Government have to pursue the line laid down to-day but they will have to pursue it much more vigorously and much more strenuously. This country is suffering from three grave social ills. It is suffering from under-investment, underdevelopment, and from the stranglehold of the joint stock banks. I warn the Government now that it will have to face not only the problem of finding money to finance capital expenditure but also the problem of finding it at a reasonable cost. At some stage the Government must face the responsibility of breaking the stranglehold of the joint stock banks.

In this new departure, as outlined to-day, I say to the Government: "Good luck." It is neither sound nor rational economy to ask people in the year 1950 to pay for the benefits that will accrue to posterity. Where posterity will gain, then let posterity carry its fair share of the burden. I have preached that doctrine in the past. With no sense of fear or shame, I preach the same doctrine to-day. I think the Government is travelling on the right road. Having taken the initial step, I hope the Government will expand their programme of capital expenditure as rapidly as possible to enable the country to rehabilitate and stabilise its own essential assets, its land, its buildings, and its industries, so that more and more people will be put into employment and into production and given at the same time a better standard of living. I agree that there are certain capital goods which may not give a practical money value in return for capital expenditure.

It is of course true that the liability of a Christian State, such as this State professes itself to be, to its weaker brethren in the form of social services is to make them a charge upon the State out of money borrowed for that purpose. I think Deputy Kissane has misconceived the theory of borrowing because he does not subscribe to the principle that where a nation is credit-worthy it is entitled to borrow within the limits it can afford for such purposes. That is good, sound, economic policy. Nobody on the Opposition Benches could suggest that the borrowings envisaged in the Book of Estimates are outside the capacity of the country to pay. I honestly believe that the efforts of the Minister for Finance to borrow money in the future will be sabotaged by the Opposition as they were in the past. That is neither good for the country nor good for the Opposition. It is no good ranting and raving about stopping emigration or ameliorating conditions at home unless we face the practical issue that these will cost a considerable amount of money. We have the money. We have the credit to raise the money. We can raise more than enough money to make the country reasonably prosperous and to raise the standard of living. We can progressively improve until we reach the stage where, far from facing a problem of emigration, we shall be facing the problem once envisaged by Deputy Aiken of bulging ships coming back with returning emigrants. We have got to face the fact that the real wealth of this country lies in its land. One of the main expenditures under this capital expenditure is going to be on land rehabilitation and drainage. Is there even a crank economist in the opposite benches who would controvert the fact that in those two particular expenditures you are actually enhancing the value of the land and that the money so spent is being spent not only in respect of a potential that will repay us but that it is being spent in respect of a potential which will repay us a hundredfold?

There is no doubt about it that forestry, conceived on a proper national basis, will, in the future—in the maturity of the trees—be a very real economic asset to the country. It will foster the forests as well as having a practical hard cash value. What is wrong with a Government facing its responsibility of having to give employment to its people? What is wrong with a Government facing its responsibility to develop the land of its country? What is wrong with a Government taking the view that we are going to use the credit of our own country to make sure that future generations of this country are going to have the land sounder and better than it ever was before and are going to have, at a future date, productive large forests? That is sound commonsense. Let Fianna Fáil quibble and do what they like, it still measures up to sound national planning on an economic basis.

My reaction to the departure shown in the presentation in the Book of Estimates this year is one of relief. I feel we are going to march forward with the idea of not allowing, under any circumstances, lack of money which we can readily get to impede us in doing what we consider is our duty to the nation and what is best for the nation in regard to its future economic salvation. We have too long been crippled in this country by stupid expenditure. Now we are getting on to a road of sane, planned capital expenditure. If Fianna Fáil are thinking of any political future in this country I would say to them in all earnestness that they had better say "good luck" to the Minister, as I do, or they will get lost.

The position roughly is that because the Government, realising its duties to its people, grapples with the problem, the Opposition try to carp that it is a big bill. A big bill on the capital expenditure side is, to my mind, an indication of sound economy, because it means that this country for the first time is going to put its own money back into this country; that it is going to stop the drift out of this country into all kinds of queer external companies and external industries and external everything else of Irish money. There is no place in the world more entitled to the benefit and use of Irish capital than Ireland, and the sooner we subscribe to that principle the better for this Dáil. I say to the Government in a very earnest way: do not be afraid that you are going to go too big on the capital side. If it is a planned, sane approach to make Ireland a better place for the people of Ireland with Ireland's own money, we are all behind you.

That brings me to a problem which the Minister for Finance will have to face. He will have to face the problem of getting money to finance all these schemes cheaper than the banks will give it to him. We have to face the responsibility that many developments in this country have been stifled and stultified by the lack of proper credit facilities at reasonable rates of interest. If the Government wants to go forward in a large capital expenditure scheme, hand-in-hand with it they will have to take the foul clutch of the joint bank committee off this country and allow people who want to take advantage of progress in their own interests to be able to get credit facilities to enable them to improve certain lands, holdings or industries on their own as part of the general national scheme, and to do it without having to pay exorbitant, strangulating rates of interest.

This is a welcome, wholesome and necessary departure. The Government has started on the line of envisaging full employment in this country— full employment on the basis of using our own resources to improve still further our own resources; to build up the naked wealth, our own arable land, our own grassland, our own forests; to clear our rivers, our smaller rivers and to clear the dykes if necessary so that water can flow freely off the land. If that is bad policy then there is no basis for any economic theory at all. I think it is the soundest conceivable policy any Government could embark upon. It is making better still the real roots and wealth of this country. No voice, not even the most dissolute or stupid voice that might bleat or rant from a back bench of the Opposition, should be raised in any way to curb a Government which is embarking on the broad highway of spending Ireland's money on Ireland, on bringing it home to Ireland so as to make it a better Ireland for the Irish.

Tá cuid mhaith ráite faoin tairiscint seo. Aontaím i bprionsabail le cuid mhaith dá ndúradh ar an taobh eile den Teach. Chuir mé spéis mhór san oráid a rinne an tAire Gnóthaí Eachtracha. Fé mar adúirt sé féin, tá go leor daoine ar an taobh seo den Teach ar an intinn chéanna i dtaobh na gcuspóirí a luaigh sé ina chuid cainte. Bíodh sin mar atá, beidh ceist eile ann nuair a thagas sé san aimsir na cuspóirí sin a chomhlíonadh. Má cheapann sé go bhfuil cuid acu dhá gcomhlíonadh tá eagla orm go bhfuil dul amú air. Níl mé ag clamhsán mar gheall ar mhéid an Vóta seo ach is í an cheist atá ag gach aon duine cá bhfuil an t-airgead go léir ag dul. Tá níos mó airgid anois sna cuntais ná mar chonaiceamar ariamh agus tá i bhfad níos lú le feiceál dá dhéanamh san Iarthair as ná ariamh. Is í an cheist atáim a chur chuig an Aire sa díospóireacht seo cén míniú atá ar an scéal sin. Ní gá dhom ach cupla rudaí a lua agus tuig-fidh gach aon duine go bhfuil fírinne í mo chuid cainte. Is lú atá ghá chaitheamh ar na portaigh san Iarthair. Is lú atá ghá chaitheamh leis na scéimeanna fostaíochta beaga. Is lú atá ghá chaitheamh leis na bóithre móra. Is lú atá ghá chaitheamh ar thionscail na mbreagán. Is lú atá ghá chaitheamh ar scéim na dtithe gloine. Is lú atá ghá chaitheamh ar shaothrú na talún. Is í an cheist atá ag na daoine: Más mó airgid atá ghá sholáthar ó na daoine atá ag íoc cánacha, cá bhfuil an t-airgead go léir ag dul nó cé tá á fháil. Is minic a rinneadh gaisce sa Teach seo faoi fhostaíocht tionscail (Industrial Employment). Ba mhaith liom a mheabhrú do na daoine a cheapas go bhfuil feabhas tagaithe ar fhostaíocht tionscail ón am a tháinig an Comh-Rialtas in oifig go bhfuil dul amú orthu. Níl le déanamh acu ach breathnú ar na figiúirí a foilsíodh le údarás an Rialtais —an sean-Rialtas agus an Rialtas atá againn anois—leis an scéal a thuiscint. Chífidh siad go raibh méadú ar fhostaíocht tionscail sa leath-bhliain tar éis deireadh an chogaidh do réir 3,000 daoine, ach, sa gcéad leath den bhliain a bhí an Comh-Rialtas againn mar Rialtas, bhí laghdú ar an méadú sin ó 3,000 go dtí 500.

Ní gá tagairt a dhéanamh don phointe ach lena a thaispeáint go raibh córas maith, buan, daingean curtha ar bun ag an sean-Rialtas sa tír seo le fostaíocht tionscail a chur chun cinn. Níor theastaigh ach go mbeadh ábhar le fáil ag deireadh an chogaidh chun an dul ar aghaidh a bhí ar siúl roimh an gcogadh a chur ar siúl arís. Ní féidir le haon duine ar an taobh eile den Teach a thaispeáint go ndearnadh aon rud a chuirfeadh feabhas ar an bhfostaíocht tionscail.

I have nothing to say by way of complaint as to the size of this bill. Nobody in my constitutency has very much bothered about the difference between the various millions that are bandied about by politicians. I daresay they are possibly conscious of the fact of their own experience that a pound is not as capable of doing as much for them as before the war, but whatever be the reason, they do not quarrel with the amount of this bill, and on their behalf I am not going to say much about the size of the bill which is now presented. What I do want to ask on their behalf is a question they ask one another and which they ask people like me. That question is: "Where is all this money going?" I have heard a good deal of ballyhoo about spending Irish money on the development of Irish industry, the employment of Irish people and the necessity of keeping them at home. To every word of that I subscribe as a most desirable programme, and we do not inquire too closely as to whether the money is to be raised by direct taxation, to be secured by borrowing or by any other means so long as the good work is done. I want to put to the Minister some of the questions which have been put to me by these people. They say that, despite all this talk about expenditure, less money is being spent on bogs and on turf; there is less money spent on minor employment schemes which kept them going in the winter season; there is less spent on the county roads; there is less spent on the toy industry which the last Government established; there is less provided for the glasshouse scheme and for other things that do not come to my mind at the moment. These people say: "If you are providing more money, how is it we are not getting at least as much, not to mention getting more, as we got before? How is it that more of us have to emigrate than when Fianna Fáil was there—the much-despised Fianna Fáil Government?" That question has been asked. I am afraid I am not able to give them a satisfactory answer, or at least one that satisfies them in any event, that the money is being spent for the national good.

The Minister for External Affairs said that he believed there were many people on the Fianna Fáil Benches who subscribed to the views that he put forward. I would say to the Minister for External Affairs that there is nobody on the Fianna Fáil Benches who does not subscribe to the purposes which he believes are only being served now satisfactorily for the first time under the policy of the Coalition Government but I should like to draw the attention of the Minister for External Affairs to his own report to the European Economic Administration representative, Mr. William Howard Taft, with regard to the progress made in Ireland under the Marshall Plan. Mr. MacBride has told that American representative:—

"While our over-all balance of trade has improved, this was unfortunately not the case as regards our trade with the dollar area. The traditional pattern of Ireland's production does not favour a large export trade with America."

I am quoting this report and I want to relate it to the Minister's statement.

From what is the Deputy quoting?

From a report which appeared in The Sunday Press of January 1st and it is taken from the Minister's report to the European Economic Administration representative in Ireland, Mr. William Howard Taft.

What is the date?

This paper is dated 1st January. I refer to it because I want to relate it to the Minister's remarks about the repatriation of external assets. Perhaps not every Deputy in the House, but most Deputies at any rate, will remember that before the last election the Fianna Fáil Government, and particularly the Minister for Supplies and for Industry and Commerce, was taken very severely to task for the heavy spending of our sterling assets which he authorised when goods became available in the sterling area. The cry went up that we were dissipating the sterling assets of the country to a dangerous extent and that if the Minister were not checked, if he did not stop, we would be left in a very short time without any foreign assets whatsoever. That was the cry of Fine Gael.

I do not want to say that the Minister for External Affairs associated himself with that particular viewpoint, but I will say this to the Minister, that the position which was described by the present Minister for Finance as being dangerous has, in the words of the Minister for External Affairs, now been remedied and the over-all balance of trade has improved; in other words, we have eased off in the tempo of repatriating our foreign assets and we are not now repatriating them as fast as we were when Deputy Lemass got the opportunity with the post-war availability of raw materials and goods. On the showing of the Minister for External Affairs, Fianna Fáil did better in this matter of the repatriation of assets than is now being done. Surely, that is a strange thing. It requires a great deal of explanation on the part of Clann na Poblachta. I am satisfied they have not been able to explain the matter satisfactorily either to their own supporters or to the bulk of Fianna Fáil supporters in the country, that they should have allied themselves with the viewpoint, the outlook or the policy which deprecates the repatriation of assets which went on on a very dangerous scale under Fianna Fáil, and that they should have succeeded in establishing here a Government that to a very large extent checked that repatriation of foreign assets and, as a matter of fact, have allied themselves in a combination that has aggravated the position to this extent, that we are now borrowing, in the words of the Minister for External Affairs, from the United States with whom, he says, we do no trade worth talking about and, therefore, cannot hope to repay loans got from the United States. We are now borrowing from the United States and spending the dollars with the purpose of increasing our exports to the sterling area and still further piling up sterling assets which the Minister believes should be brought home.

I think there is a fundamental inconsistency in the Minister's outlook on this question. If we cannot satisfatorily repatriate all our sterling assets, I think there is an obligation on the Minister to see that we do not incur debts in the hard currency area that we have no hope, on his own statement, of being able to repay; that we should not incur these debts for the purpose of creating assets abroad that in his opinion are of no value to us.

I would like, when some member of the Clann na Poblachta Party is speaking, that he would refer to this matter, because there is an interest being taken in it by the people in the country. We T.D.s and politicians here may think that the people are very obtuse on all these questions that we pride ourselves about having special knowledge of in the Dáil, but T.D.s would be very much surprised to hear at times the average man in the country discussing questions such as this. He reads his newspaper and has plenty of intelligence to see the drift of a course of action, such as is outlined in this report of the Minister for External Affairs that I have referred to.

With regard to the use that is being made of this money, I would like to draw the attention of the Minister to the fact that we are now buying wheat that might be grown on Irish land. It seems to me a very strange thing that we should have two prices and two qualities in respect of tea, flour and sugar. I understand that in recent times a new development has taken place with regard to tea—that the unsubsidised tea is of quite good quality and that the subsidised tea which the ordinary tea drinker has to buy has become very inferior in quality. I do not know whether that position is widespread, but I do know that tea traders are complaining of it, and also with regard to the flour going into an area that cannot grow wheat. These people have had to put up with an inadequate ration of flour. The people who use flour as their principal food have a great cause of complaint with reference to the black market in flour. I know that they have to buy it; they cannot supplement the inadequate ration without buying the flour at 7/-a stone.

I want to emphasise one point, because it is very often referred to in my constituency. I have been asked: "Why is it that if we have a surplus of flour we can afford to have a special grade at 7/- a stone for the people who have more money than they require, and why is it that a democratic institution like Dáil Éireann, with a responsible Government, would not say, when they make these rationing regulations, that the people who have to depend on flour should first be given an adequate supply?"

Surely the Deputy will realise that this is a detail matter, not a general principle?

And the Deputy did not say that in Irish when he was speaking in that language.

I did not refer to that in Irish. I should like to congratulate the Minister on having been able to understand me. I take it that I can also congratulate myself on having been intelligible. I did not refer to it in Irish.

The Minister guessed that.

The Minister understands Irish, if he does not understand English.

The Minister understands Irish and there are a great many more people in the House who understand it than are given credit for it. It is a pity that more of them do not use the Irish they have. If we all used the little bit we have we might prepare our speeches more carefully and we would not have any surplus orations and the job of the Ceann Comhairle would be made a great deal easier than it is.

The policy of Fianna Fáil has not produced all the bad results that are placed at its door. Any time we refer to the difficulties of the war we usually draw forth the jeer that it is an overdone excuse. It reminds me of the Japanese who carried on a war with the Chinese for 20 years but never allowed anybody to refer to it as anything more than the "Chinese incident". The people are expected to believe that the recent world war was only an incident and does not offer any adequate excuse for Fianna Fáil's shortcomings. I want to say to the people who talk of the building of hospitals as something which would not have happened if there had not been a change of Government that the plans for hospitals I know of, hospitals on which work has begun recently, were ready and that the Hospitals Sweeps money was earmarked, but that nothing could be done about it while the war was on and materials were not available.

So far as the Minister for Health has aided the job of building these hospitals I say good luck to him and I give him all the credit due to him; but I want to say also that that very much maligned politician, Dr. Ward, is entitled to a great deal of the credit for the regional sanatorium in Galway. I know the work he did in relation to the selection of the site there. He did a very sound job of work and he got no credit whatever for it.

He cured more bacon than patients.

He laid the foundation of very sound cures of patients and on a very large scale. I also want to refute the statement that the Banking Commission Report in relation to these big national projects does not represent Fianna Fáil policy. We know that housing—one of our big national projects—was not affected in any way by the recommendations of that Banking Commission. Fianna Fáil never allowed any monetary policy, no matter what the authority of the people who framed it, to interfere with the carrying out of worthwhile national programmes. We had the unfortunate position that, in the first half of our term of office, we had an economic war on our hands, and, in the second half, a world war. We have now, I hope, got clear for a long period of all wars and the situation ought to become more favourable as time goes on for a really big national drive.

In so far as the Coalition Government shapes its policy to develop the country industrially and agriculturally and to keep at home the people who are now fleeing out of it—and they are fleeing out of it in greater numbers than when Fianna Fáil was in office— Fianna Fáil will back them. I want to say to the Minister for Finance that he will have to change his policy if he is going to hold any Fine Gael representative from the western areas. On every conceivable front, the Gaeltacht and the poorer areas are being hit. I have given a list of the matters in respect of which there has been a cutting down of money and the Minister for Industry and Commerce gave us some hint, when speaking on the Industrial Development Authority, that this authority would in a special way direct its attention to the Gaeltacht areas. I want to say to the Minister for Finance and to the Minister for Industry and Commerce that they cannot do that too soon. It is bad enough to be without employment; it is bad enough to see all the young people clearing out, as they are clearing out, and, as a result of that clearing out of the able-bodied people, giving a much more intimate interest in social services to the people who are left; but it is far worse to be deprived of hope, and, over the Gaeltacht area I represent, the policy at present being pursued by the Minister has produced that result in the people there.

Leasmháthair a thógfadh ar an dTeachta Mac Phartholáin an méid adúirt sé i dtaobh a cheantar féin agus dearcadh na ndaoine sin ar laghduithe i scéimeanna áirithe agus méadú ar an mbille in iomlán agus cé go n-aontaím leis agus cé go dtéim cuid den bhóthar leis, is dóigh liom go raibh breall air i rud nó dhó adúirt sé. Do thagairt sé do thionscal na mbréagán. Do réir mar feictear domsa ó Leabhair na Meastachán, tá breis airgid á chur ar fáil i mbliana i gcóir tionscail na mbréagán. Tá beagnach £15,000 sa bhreis á chur ar fáil don tionscal seo.

Tá laghdú ar an méid daoine atá fostaithe ann.

Sin ceist go bhfuil eolas speisialta ag an dTeachta uirthi nach bhfuil agamsa agus ní féidir liom é a bhréagnú mar gheall air; ach ní féidir liom a fheiceáll ach amháin an rud atá sa Leabhar seo. Ar Vóta an Roinn sin ar fad, tá méadú £57,746. Is dóigh liom go raibh breall ar an dTeachta faoi sin, cé go dtuigim go maith agus go n-aontaím leis go bhfuil sé de cheart ag na daoine sa cheantar sin a bheith mí-shásta mar gheall ar nach bhfuil níos mó airgid á chaitheamh orthu agus an bille in iomlán a bheith chomh hard.

I dtosach báire, ba mhaith liomsa fáiltiú roimh an scéim nua atá tairgthe chucu féin ag an Rialtas, maidir leis an gcuma ina bhfuil na Meastacháin dá leagadh os comhair na Dála acu. Tá socraithe ag an Rialtas ná coscfar as seo amach aon chaitheachas caipitiúil atá riachtannach chun leasú agus maitheas an náisiúin ar an ábhar amháin nach bhfuil sé ar chumas an náisiúin díol as in aon bhliain airgeadais amháin. Na fiacha a bheidh ar chiste an Stáit de bharr caitheachas caipitiúil déanfar iad do glanadh agus d'aisíoc, diaidh ar ndiaidh, i dtreo is nach mbeidh sé mar obligáid orainn na fiacha do thógáint sa chunntas a raghaidh chun tairbhe na nglún atá le teacht. Is dóigh liom go bhfuil moladh tuillte ag an Rialtas sa mhéid go bhfuil an chéim nua ar agaidh seo tógtha acu. Is oth liom nach bhfuil céim níos faide tógtha acu agus an obair iomláin déanta acu—an ceangal atá againn leis an bpunt sterling do bhriseadh ar fad.

Mar aon leis an dTeachta deireannach do labhair, tá cuid againn mí-shásta ná fuil níos mó dá chaitheamh ar Sheirbhíse na Gaeltachta, ná fuil níos mó dá chaitheamh ar an Ghaedhilg féin. B'féidir gur fearrde dhom gan tagairt do sin ar an Vóta seo, ach fanúint leis na Meastacháin.

Any review that we make of the financial expenditure contemplated by the Vote on Account will be affected by the standpoint from which we approach it. My approach to it initially is an inquiry. Does it disclose an effort to get to grips with the major problems that confront this nation, the major problems that confront the ordinary workers and wage earners? Does this Vote on Account disclose a desire on the part of the Government to tackle emigration, unemployment, poverty and bad housing? I feel that assistance in answering that question is found by reference to the new departure of deciding that capital expenditure should be segregated from the Supply Services. I think that indicates the Government's desire to see proper capital development undertaken, and undertaken speedily.

Deputy Aiken's criticism of these proposals rather intrigued me. I heard the Minister for External Affairs say here that Deputy Aiken had very skilfully avoided coming down on either foot. I must confess that Deputy Aiken left me under the impression that he had come down definitely on one foot. I think the Minister for External Affairs was mistaken and that I was right, and I am reinforced in my belief and opinion after listening to Deputy Kissane. Clearly, the speech that we would have been apprehensive of hearing from the present Minister for Finance two years ago was the type of speech which we heard to-day from Deputy Aiken. If there was any doubt about the tenor of Deputy Aiken's speech, that of Deputy Kissane certainly removed any such doubt. Deputy Kissane came before the House here as the apostle of retrenchment and economy.

There used to be a popular song about the submarine that used to be frightened off by Paddy McGinty's goat. The submarine was no more frightened than some of us used to be when we heard the blood-curdling stories Deputy Aiken used to tell us about Paddy McGilligan's axe, but it is to some of us rather amazing to listen to complaints from Deputy Kissane and Deputy Aiken that Deputy McGilligan is not sufficiently agile and not sufficiently energetic in wielding that axe. Of course, for some reason—it is no part of my function to allot the reason— there is a sort of three-pronged fork utilised by the Opposition in their attacks on Clann na Poblachta in particular and on the Government as a whole. The first prong is: "Oh, Clann na Poblachta and Labour, you are being swallowed up by Fine Gael." That was the 1949 and 1948 prong. The 1950 prongs are: "Oh, poor Fine Gael, you have been encouraged into this mad policy of unorthodox finance and extravagant expenditure by those unorthodox fellows in Clann na Poblachta and the Labour Party." In case that prong might not be sufficient, they have the third prong: "Of course, you are doing this now, you are introducing this Vote on Account, but it is nothing new; all you are really doing is, in a bad way, what Fianna Fáil intended to do." It would be beyond the ingenuity of man to deal collectively with those three separate arguments. I do not think there is much importance in any of them and I propose to leave them at that.

Deputy Aiken wanted to know whether it was justifiable to pump more money into the stream at the moment. He wanted to know if a single penny would accrue to the Exchequer as a result of the £12,000,000 being spent on schemes of capital expenditure. I should like to reply to that query by Deputy Aiken by saying that for every £1 earned by the average wage earner in this State, approximately 4/- goes back by direct or indirect taxation to the Exchequer. I am sure Deputy Aiken is in a position to controvert my figures if I am wrong, but I think he knows my figures are correct.

Deputy Aiken referred to the question of the volume of money, the danger of inflation. Deputy Aiken knows as well as everybody in this House knows that we have no control over the volume of money that can be set at liberty in this country. I praised the Government for the step they have taken in segregating capital expenditure from what might be called national housekeeping. The pity is that they have not taken the further step which would enable them to control the volume of money in circulation because, at the moment, that is something which is controlled by agencies outside this country.

Deputy Aiken put a number of conundrums on the question of collective responsibility and quoted statements made in previous years by members of one of the Parties forming the inter-Party Government. Deputy Aiken and his Party pay lip service to the principles of full development and national self-sufficiency. If Deputy Aiken and the members of the Opposition Party are sincere in their professions, should not they rejoice that there is now on all sides of this House a desire to achieve the same ends and serve the same purposes? The attitude of some Deputies opposite is open to the construction that they are influenced by feelings of annoyance that it has been possible to get agreement on what all of us now recognise as national fundamentals and which are now no longer capable of being claimed as the monopoly of one Party.

Deputy Aiken expressed the fear that the Government, by pursuing the line indicated in regard to capital expenditure, were perhaps creating a situation wherein our external assets would be reduced to nil. Does not he know that in so far as the major portion of our external assets were invested in sterling securities, they were reduced overnight by almost 30 per cent. and that there was nothing that either this Government or his Government could do about it while the present financial system was maintained and while we allowed external agencies to control the volume of money and credit in this country?

Deputy Kissane made a speech here to-day which I trust will be reported in extenso on the front page of the Irish Press to-morrow. If it is I undertake to increase the circulation of the Irish Press because I intend to purchase a considerable number of copies for the next election.

You are very decent.

Deputy Kissane expressed the view—he is a former Front Bench member of the Fianna Fáil Party, so one must have regard to it —that houses should be built out of the resources of the State, not out of borrowed money. I do not know what he meant by the phrase "resources of the State", but I gather, and I think I am entitled to take from his statement, that he objects to the borrowing of money for the building of houses. There is a big number of people in the City of Dublin who will be very interested in that statement, people living in hovels in Dublin City, in broken-down insanitary tenements, seven and eight crowded into one room, where those suffering from tuberculosis are cheek by jowl with those who have not contracted it, where the rats pop up through the floor boards. If Deputy Kissane or any member of the Party opposite thinks that considerations of orthodox finance will stop us getting houses built for those people, they have another think coming. Deputy Kissane probably is not cognisant of the condition of affairs in certain parts of this city—and it is not confined to this city.

Before you came up.

I saw Deputy Kissane come up here for the first time but apparently he did not keep his eyes open. If he had, he would not have made that statement. If that statement represents the view of even some of the Deputies opposite then, as far as the people of Dublin are concerned, they need not come to them to look for support in future. Deputy Kissane came before the House as the apostle of economy, and retrenchment. When taxed, he was inclined to hedge and to talk about wise spending. I would like to put this question to the Party opposite: Does the speech made by Deputy Kissane represent Fianna Fáil policy? I am no apologist for Fianna Fáil but, frankly, I find it hard to believe that it does. If it does not represent Fianna Fáil policy, then for the sake of their own good name and the good name of this House they should repudiate it.

I do not want to approach this Vote on Account from a Party point of view. As far as the Clann na Poblachta Party are concerned, personal loyalties or Party loyalties must take second place to our loyalties to the people who sent us here, and if personal loyalties or Party loyalties conflict in any way with our desire to end emigration and unemployment, to grapple with housing and to put an end to poverty, squalor and ignorance, then personal and Party loyalties must go to one side.

It is a pity that we had not more contributions like that of Deputy Bartley. It was a critical, hard-hitting speech, but it was a reasoned one. It was the type of contribution that would enable the business of this House to be well done, done from the point of view of the nation and not from the point of view of scoring petty personal points. As I already have indicated, with some of his criticism I find myself in agreement, but he made one point and I think he specifically asked for an answer to it and I propose, to the best of my ability, to give him that answer. He adverted to the fact that despite our desire for the repatriation of sterling assets this Government had reversed the policy pursued by the former Minister for Industry and Commerce when he imported into this country goods from Britain and elsewhere which became available at the end of 1947. What he overlooked completely is that that method of repatriating our sterling assets—it is a method—is one from which the most undesirable results inevitably flow. What was done on that occasion was to import consumer goods, some of them unnecessary, all of them capable of being produced and in fact being produced here at that time, and while there may have been an actual process of repatriation it was a process which involved a dislocation of industry here and which caused unemployment.

If we are to repatriate our sterling assets surely the proper way to tackle it would be by using those assets to bring into this country the necessary machinery and tools to enable us to produce even more for ourselves here than we are producing rather than to import consumer goods which, dumped on the market, would cause unemployment here. He perfectly properly quoted the Minister for External Affairs and his reference to the traditional pattern of our economy but I would suggest to him that he is basing his argument on a false premise if he is of the opinion that the traditional pattern cannot necessarily be changed because, in my view, the traditional pattern of our economy is one that will have to be changed in the future. Deputies on this side of the House are wont, in my view, to lay too much stress on the position of agriculture as our basic industry. We know that agriculture is our basic industry. That has been stated and restated ad nauseam. I would like to make a plea to the Minister not to let consideration of that fact obscure from his vision the necessity for giving us an industrial as well as an agricultural arm, and the necessity for the expansion of our industry because inevitably, with the mechanisation of agriculture, with newer methods, even with the development that takes place, ultimately a lesser number of people will be engaged on the land even though the amount of food they produce will be greater and it is necessary that our industrial development will be such as to enable it to absorb the surplus of our agricultural population.

Deputy Collins referred to a point and I was glad to hear it referred to, that is, that while we can get money, the rate at which we are getting it is not an economic one. I do not want to develop in this debate the whole question of our banking system and the control that the banks exercise over the whole economic life of this country, but I would say to the Minister that while the departure displayed in the method of approaching these Estimates, in the segregation of capital expenditure from money necessary for the Supply Services, is a good thing and a step in the right direction, if we are ever to tackle the problem of developing the resources of this country properly we can only do so when we decide that we are not going to allow groups of individuals outside the control of this House, outside the control of this country most of them, to decide what volume of money will be available, when it will be available and at what rate of interest it will be available. I picked up an abridged balance sheet of what any Deputy in this House listening to me would describe, if I named it, as an Irish bank—an Irish bank with its head office in London. They display in every one of their English offices this abridged balance sheet—they have about 20 offices in England and roughly 200 or 300 here—but it is not displayed in any of their offices in Ireland. Out of a total of £76,000,000, £30,000,000 is invested in British Government securities. It is not even possible to discern from this abridged balance sheet if they hold any Irish Government securities, but it is quite clear that they could not hold more than £1,077,000.

Until we get away from that position, while we welcome the step that is being taken to-day, it is still only half the job. Until such time as it is made impossible for the people who take the savings of Irish workers, farmers and industrialists across the counters of banks and then promptly invest them outside this country without an even "by-your-leave" to the Administration of this country: until such time as that is ended, and these people are made to realise that the savings of the Irish people, the bank deposits earned by people engaged in trade, commerce and agriculture in Ireland, are available for the further development of our own economy here, then the step that is being taken to-day, while it must be welcomed and while it indicates a new and a better approach, will not be sufficient to achieve any major change. In so far as the Vote on Account is indicative of a desire on the part of the Government to tackle unemployment and the emigration which flows from it, we must welcome it.

There are minor criticisms that I would like to make. I think it is a pity that there is a reduction of £26,000 in the Vote for Fisheries. I think, too, it is a pity that, without comment, the sum of £292,000 should be voted for our universities. Were I in a position to do so I would say to the authorities of our Irish universities: "Not one penny piece will you get while you pursue your attitude of hostility and opposition to many major matters connected with the revival of Irish." Perhaps I should not pursue that point now. I suppose it could be described as a detail of policy rather than of policy in general, but it is a matter on which I hope to have the opportunity of saying something when that particular Estimate comes before the House.

I should like, first of all, to make an observation on all the wonderful statements that have been made by Clann na Poblachta speakers that the separation of capital issues from current issues in connection with the Vote on Account represents an extraordinary sort of innovation, and that the Government has become much greener and more Irish because it has made the separation in a form which is a purely book-keeping one. I should like to describe that as so much nonsense because at any time, possibly, one could have ascertained from a previous Minister for Finance what the capital issues were and how much was to be borrowed. What we have got is just an ordinary book-keeping convenience. There has been as yet no fundamental change in our economic system, and the Minister for Finance is no more a sea-green incorruptible Republican than any other Minister for Finance simply because he has chosen to make a consolidated statement at the beginning in submitting the Estimates in their present form.

Revert to the amount.

So far as the amount is concerned, the Opposition has a statutory right, on occasions such as this, to point to the necessity of things and to question whether the money can be afforded, to ask the Minister to give all the explanations possible as to how the money is to be found, in what way it is to be raised and so forth. The Opposition is bound, no matter how much it desires development of any kind, economically speaking, and no matter how much it has assisted in the planning of new economic enterprises, in the ordinary way to ask the Minister questions both in regard to the balancing of his programme and how he proposes to raise the money for it. There is nothing extraordinary in so doing, and neither was there in the speech made by Deputy Kissane. The Opposition is bound to take the point of view of asking some incisive questions as to where the money is to come from.

I should add, too, that there has been an attempt made, so far without much success, to give the impression that, for the first time, we are now launching great national schemes of enterprise. We had the Minister for External Affairs reciting what sounded almost a new economic creed which justified his being a Minister of the Government. He said: "Cannot the Opposition agree that we should invest our own money in developing our economic resources and in building up the economic resources of the country", as though he and all the members of Clann na Poblachta were the first people who had thought of it. The actual fact is that over 90 per cent. of all the schemes of national development in this Book of Estimates were devised, planned and thought of by Fianna Fáil—a great many of them in the teeth of the opposition of Fine Gael. In a great many cases, Fine Gael, instead of taking a reasoned point of view and saying: "Can we afford them, let us hear all the facts about our economic position", fought us fiercely when they sat on these benches in connection with all our efforts to develop native enterprise of every kind. If one goes through the Book of Estimates one can see that such schemes as farm and building grants, housing schemes, turf development, road rectification schemes, and electric power development were planned by the previous Government. There are only two new items of importance, the great—and I use the word "great" advisedly—extension of the land reclamation scheme—using Marshall Aid—and known as the land rehabilitation scheme, the local authorities works scheme for the draining of small streams, and one or two minor things. The greater part, if not the whole of these plans, were devised by Fianna Fáil.

Our job here to-day is to ask the Government whether they are planning properly, whether we can afford these and whether the programme is properly balanced. Deputies on the Government Benches talk airily about the great value, from the national point of view, of presenting the amounts to be borrowed separately. I would much prefer the Minister to tell us verbally for what items money should be borrowed, to give us the kind of things now available in nearly all countries in Western Europe enabling the Opposition to check the expenditure properly, namely, current information on the rate of private investment, the rate of public investment, national current production, private savings, and a statement of those factors in relation to Government expenditure and borrowing. The Minister for Finance knows very well that other countries, both those in an initial stage of development and also older countries such as Great Britain, have discovered that there are absolute limits in regard to the amount that can be spent per year as a percentage of the national income of the country.

Practically everybody is agreed, from Sir Stafford Cripps down to the average Tory socialist in Great Britain, that you cannot raise very much more than 25 or 35 per cent. of the national income in taxation. They disagree among themselves as to whether it should be 25 or 35 per cent. We have no information here to-day on these matters. The Government have now been working under peace-time conditions since February, 1948. They have a new Central Statistics Branch. We are one of the few countries in Western Europe which is not presented with a statement enabling us to check those figures and, so to speak, to act properly as an Opposition should in seeing whether we are going too fast or too slow. I should like to ask the Minister how soon he will be able to provide us with these figures.

One could criticise the amount to be spent in relation to deficiencies in various items. I think it is good constructive criticism to ask the Minister whether the programme in regard to drainage is becoming highly unbalanced. Taking the three drainage schemes together, the land rehabilitation scheme, which mainly drains small streams into big streams, the local authorities works scheme, which deals with a combination of very small drains and larger drains going into larger tributaries, which I hope have been drained, and the arterial drainage scheme, so far as I can see from the Estimates—and this is genuinely meant to give the Government constructive criticism—there is far too small an increase in the amount for the arterial drainage Vote as compared with the other two. It looks as if the Minister for Agriculture has succeeded in extracting from the Minister for Finance far too much money in comparison with that provided for the Board of Works arterial drainage scheme. Knowing the likelihood of the return of a very wet cycle of weather, it is a serious matter. If we are to borrow this large sum from the American Counterpart Fund for land rehabilitation, I think that the Minister for Finance should make available to the Board of Works a sufficient sum for a corps of engineers and experts to speed up arterial drainage so that the water flowing down as a result of the Minister for Agriculture's scheme and the local authorities works scheme could be carried away. I challenge anyone to say that that is not sound constructive criticism requiring a reasoned answer. The increase in the provision for arterial drainage, so far as I can make out, is only about £370,000 and that, to my mind, does not seem sufficient.

Another criticism one might make is the fact that the tourist industry for the last three years has been far the greatest industry we have. It may be to a certain extent temporary in character but, in face of that fact, to reduce the Tourist Board grant, even by the sum of £4,000, seems to be ludicrous. Practically all other countries in the world have a special tourist tax even collected from the tourists themselves, which has to be concealed in many cases in the ordinary hotel bill. It may amount only to 2 or 3 per cent. up to 10 per cent. in the case of Italy, but it is sound tourist development. That may not be desirable here because the prices in hotels are high enough already. It would seem to me, however, that, having regard to the investment that must have taken place in hotels and hotel construction, having regard to the fact that it is going to be more difficult in future, if the world becomes more normal, to maintain tourist development, we should spend much larger sums in the right kind of publicity in the right kind of places all over the world to attract people to this country. The Minister for Industry and Commerce recently stated that the scheme for loaning money to hotels for reconstruction and the installation of better water systems had not succeeded. I am amazed not to find in the Estimates some indication that the Minister has that matter in mind.

Another criticism I would make is that the Government have delayed far too long in pushing forward machine-won turf development and allowed thousands of workers to leave this country before they decided to double the machine-won turf scheme. As a result, there has been tremendous emigration from the West and I do not yet see the evidence which I feel would be desirable that the Government really believe in machine-won turf as having a great future both for domestic and industrial purposes.

I do not see from the Estimates sufficient indication that the Government have finally decided on what might be described as a permanent staple tillage policy in order to save dollars over a long-term period. Various mistakes have been made in connection with the prices of tillage products and I have yet to see evidence that the Government have made up their minds about what should be the future tillage policy.

To me, it is quite obvious that sooner or later there will be a crisis in regard to the maintenance and repair of roads. A great deal of restoration work effected in the last three years, restoration work essentially of a temporary character, is beginning to break down, showing the need for a fundamental improvement of the main roads and an equal improvement of the tourist roads. The use of heavy Córas Iompair Éireann lorries on county roads as well as main roads has caused very grave deterioration. To my mind, in the Estimates there is no evidence that the Government are thinking of that matter.

I could speak of many other things. I could suggest that there is not enough money to be spent in assisting national culture both in regard to the work of the library council and other artistic matters. I do not think there is enough money to be spent on technical education or domestic economy teaching, both of which are far behind in this country compared with other countries, both of which were enormously stimulated by the previous Government and need further stimulation with the growth of technical processes in industry and also the need for skilled workers in housing. I should like also to see more money spent in connection with that portion of the health programme relating to assistance to local authorities to build new dispensaries and also the mother-and-child service which should have gone further along the road towards development than it has.

Without speaking in detail on the matter, I feel very strongly that we are not spending enough money on defence. As we have not joined the Atlantic Pact, I think the only thing we can possibly do in order to show where we stand in relation to the world at large is to make our country as strong as possible to defend itself against all enemies and, above all, to make it possible to say that we are not embarrassing any other country near to us with whom we have friendly relations. There is no evidence in the Estimates that we have considered that matter sufficiently.

On the Vote on Account as a whole I would like to say a few words on this problem of our external assets.

Here, again, the members of the Clann na Poblachta Party, and certain members of the Government are trying to present that the change in the attitude of the Government, as demonstrated by the Taoiseach's speech at the annual dinner of the Institute of Bankers at the Royal Hibernian Hotel on November 21st, 1949, indicates some extraordinary growth of national feeling on their part in regard to the use of our external assets. A great deal of the propaganda going on suggests that Fianna Fáil never thought of using external assets and never believed in using them but believed, rather, that if we had to bring back any money invested in Great Britain we would necessarily have to halt our development programme. Some rather ignorant young people have got the impression from Government propaganda that these assets have lain frozen for 16 years and that they are now being used for the first time by a native Government. What a wonderful thing they seem to think that is. One would almost think that we should greet the external assets at Dún Laoghaire with flags flying and bands playing because they are returning home to their own country. There has never been more stupid drivel talked than has been talked in the last few months about our external assets. One does not want to give a lecture here on fundamental economics, but if people in this House choose to try to take advantage of vague statements made by the Taoiseach in order to suggest that the present Opposition, when it was in office, was afraid to use our external assets, then we are bound to give the facts to controvert that.

That propaganda has, in fact, already been answered by the Taoiseach himself in reply to a question by Deputy McCann. The position is that the existence of these external assets enables us to buy goods from abroad. It places us in the position of being a creditor country. To be a creditor country in the world to-day is the best position one could be in. Please Heaven, we shall never choose to be a debtor country so long as we can keep some external assets abroad, no matter what their value is and even though they do depreciate because of devaluation. If anybody wants to suggest that we should become a debtor country, then let him go to the vast majority of debtor countries at the moment and see how they are placed in their economic policy.

The first and fundamental fact is that it is an excellent thing to have some external assets abroad enabling us to trade easily with Great Britain, with whom we have the closest trade relations, and enabling us to carry out a quick and easy exchange, a quick and easy export of cattle and import of iron and steel goods without all the awful complications that ensue if one owes another country money on balance. That is the first lesson we must learn. A country can be a sea-green incorruptible republic and still be a creditor country and hope that it will remain a creditor country. The second important fact is that, if you want to reduce your external assets and bring money home, you normally in the ordinary way would like to see that money used to produce something that was previously imported. That is ordinary, sane commonsense. If, as a result of any Government action, someone sells out English National Loan yielding so much per year and puts that money in an Irish industry to produce nails or tacks and we then import less nails and tacks as a result of that, that is a very good thing for the country. That is what we in Fianna Fáil encouraged for 16 years. There were millions and millions and millions of pounds invested in new Irish industries, all of which were able to produce goods which resulted in our having to buy less from abroad. If, in order to start those industries, external assets were repatriated we were glad to have them repatriated. If the people who started the industries were able to get the money from their own private Irish investments and did that we were very glad to have them do it. and, at the same time, have the external assets; in other words, we were glad to have it both ways if we could. That is ordinary, reasonable, commonsense policy.

It is possible that one might bring back investments from abroad and that results might not show for years. One might, for example, sell out investments in England to purchase machinery to drain some of the bigger rivers; the results in increased production might not show for a long period. I do not see any harm in that. I think it is quite proper to encourage that to a reasonable degree. But it depends on a great many factors related to the economy of the country as a whole. The one thing one must not do is to talk about it in a big, smart way as though automatically it was the right thing every time. One must talk about it in a balanced way. One must see how far the general economy of the country will benefit if one encourages the repatriation of these assets.

We have had here this evening airy suggestions made as though our external assets were in the control of the Government, as though the Government could invite the people, including a great number of farmers and merchants all over the country, to sell out their holdings abroad and put them into Irish enterprises. The fact is, of course, that the amount of external assets under the control of the Government is limited to a great degree and the Government can only influence the repatriation of external assets by what might be described as a generally stable, national, economic policy which will encourage people here to invest in industry here and encourage the farmers to take out some of their deposits and put them into land drainage, aided by the Minister for Agriculture, or into better buildings, aided by both the Minister for Agriculture and the Minister for Local Government.

In all this airy persiflage about the repatriation of our external assets by super-republicans, one has to remember the fact that the banks are part of a 32-county system. If there is any change made in banking policy in regard to external assets or to the percentage of money at call for depositors in this country, one must remember that if that goes too far and if there is more than a marginal change there will be yet one more barrier to the ending of Partition, the separation of the banking system as between North and South. If anybody here wants at this stage of our development to produce yet another obstruction to unity, let him get up here and say so frankly.

That is nonsense, and the Deputy knows it.

If one were to accept the statements of some of the Clann na Poblachta extremists literally in regard to what they describe, in their vague, airy way, as the national control of credit in this country, that would inevitably mean the separation of the banking systems. It would certainly mean that if at this stage of our development the Clann na Poblachta Party carried their policy still further and controlled the value of the Irish pound in such a way as would lead inevitably to a complete split with the Six Counties—in other words, if the pound was valued differently here from its value in the Six Counties—there would be a complete separation in the currency systems prior to the country being united. Clann na Poblachta talk airily about our controlling national credit and changing the system that exists at the present time, but they should think carefully as to whether that is an advisable step to take.

Again, in relation to external assets, I should like to ask the Minister formally what percentage of the savings in the Post Office Savings Bank is at this moment invested in British securities and what percentage is invested in home securities? What changes have been made since the Taoiseach's speech last November to set an example to the country by investing a higher proportion of these savings in Irish securities? Thirdly, if any steps have been taken in that direction, can the Irish securities be liquidated as easily as are the English securities? Is the Minister quite certain that, having made that change, if he has made it, it will be as easy for the Irish people to draw out their savings as it was hitherto?

Obviously the Minister for Finance of the day should take the first step in setting the example to other people. I did not have time, unfortunately, before this debate—I have been away from the House for some days—to tot up the proportion of English investments in Post Office sayings, that can be found in the Library. However, I invite members of the Clann na Poblachta Party and anybody who has been talking breezily about external assets to go to the Library and to examine in detail the paper there and to see the proportion invested in English securities and then to press the Minister for Finance to set the example himself in making this change. That is one part of the external assets that are under the control of the Government. The next is the extent to which they can make the banks here alter their attitude in regard to the use they make of deposits. It is a very interesting matter. There is no reason why the banks should not make quite important marginal changes without affecting the economy of the country. If the Minister or a particular Department wants a few millions more which he has to borrow, the banks could make that money available without necessarily altering their fundamental policy but, as always, one wants to know what is the fundamental policy of the Minister in that regard. A great many people who have heard the Taoiseach speak on the subject of the repatriation of external assets have heard his very harmless and tame reply to a parliamentary question by Deputy McCann on the 1st March last. The reference is col. 939, No. 7, Vol. 119 of the Official Reports of the Parliamentary Debates.

A great many people have been asking what exactly the Taoiseach meant in his speech. They know that he must have been referring to the general policy of the banks in regard to the use they make of deposits. The percentage of money at call in the banks here, the percentage of money that can be taken out at any time by depositors or people with current accounts, is about the same as it is in socialist Britain. It, is a little bit higher if you give one particular definition to money at call—just a shade. It is a little bit lower if you give a particular definition to money at call but, in general practice, it is about the same as it is in socialist Britain. Therefore, any change made in the investment habit of the banks in regard to their deposits must affect the percentage of money at call. One does not want to suggest that the Government are going to make any big change but a lot of people in banking circles and in the business world—people of all politics and particularly supporters of Fine Gael—would like the Minister for Finance to go a little bit further and ask him whether the announced change in policy is going to affect (1) the general investment habit of the banks; (2) by how much and, (3) how much it will affect the percentage of money at call which is a traditional thing in regard to the money of this country. What is the position in regard to the sometimes high deposits which are placed in the banks by farmers and which they may want to withdraw at any time—for instance, in time of distress, marriage, or for a marriage settlement? It would do the country good to have that question answered because of the enormous amount of flap-doodle which is talked about the repatriation of external assets as if they were part of a wonderful new policy.

As I have already said, Fianna Fáil was able to carry out an enormous investment programme without ever having to boast about repatriating external assets. In fact, the situation was that during most of the time of our office the volume of our external assets depended very little on our investment programme, as the Minister for Finance well knows. There was an economic war for a long period. During that time our external assets were reduced. As soon as the world war began, as we could not import goods, our external assets went up. As soon as the war ended—in 1947, as far as I remember—they began to go down again. During the whole of the 16 years, we had an investment programme. It may have been delayed during the war owing to the lack of materials. We went on investing money in national resources. We went on encouraging the public to invest money in industry.

The fact that we were able to start some 1,000 factories and workshops by about 1941 and that there was not an enormous reduction in external assets but only a small one did not mean that we were not good republicans and good Irishmen. The fact that the external assets fell very little in spite of our investment programme and in spite of our development does not mean that we were to be condemned. If there had been no economic war the programme might have gone faster and if there had been no world war the programme might have been completed. However, the fact of the matter is that no matter how much we encouraged the repatriation of external assets we were always accumulating foreign balances because of successful trade relations and the high prices which we got for our cattle. Everybody knows that. There is nothing sacrosanct and there is nothing remarkably national in feeling in repatriating external assets at an enormous rate.

We had a speech from the Minister for External Affairs in which he again adverted vaguely to the necessity for controlling our national credit. One of the troubles about people who talk that way is that they will never go into detail. They will never tell you exactly what they mean. They will never go beyond the vaguest statements. The Minister for External Affairs has talked enough about this subject—to the point that, if there were not a very severe economic crisis in Great Britain and if there were not very high agricultural prices here, the obvious differences in fundamental policy between himself and the rest of the Government would certainly have disturbed national credit by now. It is a very lucky thing for the Government that they have no economic war to contend with; that England is no longer the tremendously prosperous country which she was; that she has endured two severe economic crises during which she has nearly gone bankrupt and that, therefore, it is easier for the Ministers in the Coalition Government to disagree on fundamentals and that it has not worried very much so far the investors and those who control business in this country who would otherwise have been extremely anxious if they heard Ministers talking completely at variance in regard to important aspects of national finance such as questions of changing currency and so forth. Luckily, these days, economic questions are so much controlled by the American Government, by O.E.E.C. and other kinds of international agencies that money cannot fly out of one thing into another. Otherwise, there would certainly have been trouble in this country with Ministers talking in different voices on matters of the utmost importance. One can always make a case for completely controlling our national credit and for deciding ourselves what currency we will have and what will be the value of our £. There are pros and cons in that respect.

With this great campaign to bring about unity, and having regard to the fact that we have got along fairly well in the past 16 years in developing our resources and in developing the credit of the country, we might think twice before we do anything which would still further cause obstruction between the Six-County and the Twenty-six-County areas.

If the Minister for External Affairs can present to this House a scheme whereby we can have complete control of Irish currency, a different system of credit and different customs in regard to bank deposits without prejudicing the situation as between the South and Northern Ireland, he will be the greatest genius of all time. My own personal view is that—I am not speaking in this matter as a member of Fianna Fáil— I think we have gone quite far enough in varying our economic life from that of the North and we should not take any major step until we see how far we can get with the Government's present policy, which is more or less a united policy, in regard to the ending of Partition. As I have said, I spend a great deal more time in business with purely Orange people than do a great many people who talk about ending Partition, so probably I am prejudiced in regard to the banking question, but I do feel most sincerely that the proposals put forward by Clann na Poblachta speakers, no doubt with great sincerity, would involve drastic changes in the economic and financial system of this country.

Not necessarily drastic changes but changes in Ireland's interest.

I agree that it is possible to make marginal changes in investment policy designed to aid national development. Of course, we could argue from now to the end of the debate as to what are marginal changes and what are serious changes. I should like to conclude by once more saying that we in Fianna Fáil are perfectly willing to have the external assets repatriated if to do so is in the national interest.

Fianna Fáil have set this Government a great example in the past 16 years in national investment development. We are here to-day to criticise the amounts spent on individual Estimates and to find out from the Government what their investment policy is, how the £24,000,000 that they borrowed recently or are going to borrow, relates to the retrenchment programme and how it relates to what they estimate current national savings to be, if they have any idea as to what the national income will be in 1952 and whether there will be sufficient savings to give an over-all picture. Sir Stafford Cripps, President Truman and the Prime Ministers of Norway, Sweden and Denmark—I have read the speeches of every one of them —were able to give that over-all picture of national expenditure in relation to savings and production. We should like to hear more about it. We have a perfect right to raise our eyes at the size of the bill presented by a Government, the chief Party of which was going to spend £10,000,000 less each year and which was committed to a policy of retrenchment in every direction.

Deputy Childers devoted portion of his time in speaking on this Vote on Account, to endeavouring to convince Deputies that there was something sinister and disturbing in the various speeches made by Ministers of the present Government. He mentioned the Minister for External Affairs on the one hand and the Minister for Finance on the other. Any Deputy who has taken the trouble to sit in and listen to the speeches which have been made from the Fianna Fáil Benches on this Vote is certainly entitled to ask Fianna Fáil Deputies whether they have made up their minds yet as to what their approach to this Vote on Account is. Deputy Aiken went back with peevish recollection three or four times in the course of his speech to the fuss, as he said, that was kicked up about the Supplementary Budget. Obviously, he had not quite made up his mind as to how he should approach the Estimates for this year. He did, however, feel, and he did not hesitate to say it, that if it were necessary to raise this money, that it should be done directly by means of taxation rather than by means of loans or borrowing. Deputy Kissane was quite blunt about it. He said he thought the Estimate was excessive and he was opposed to it. Deputy Bartley, on the other hand, regretted the various reductions which were made as between this year's Estimates and last year's Estimates.

Deputy Childers raised a number of points. With one or two of these I think I could agree but in the case of the majority of them, I feel that Deputy Childers was merely talking against time. As I mentioned earlier, he spoke of the differences which he saw between the views of the Minister for External Affairs and the views of other Ministers. I think the real difficulty of Deputy Childers and his colleagues is that they have never bothered to study the pronouncements made by the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance since this Government took office, slightly over two years ago. We remember, when we think back on the past two years, the vehement opposition which was encountered by the Minister for Finance when he spoke of eliminating waste and extravagance and when he spoke of retrenchment. The Minister for Finance made it quite clear from the very start that he was not standing for economies merely for the sake of economies or for retrenchment purely for the sake of retrenchment, that he was standing for eliminating waste and extravagance such as existed under the Fianna Fáil Government, saving money on a number of wasteful projects which they had initiated, and turning it into more useful channels, channels which would be more productive for the Irish people.

In replying to the Budget debate in 1948, the present Minister for Finance once more drew the attention of Fianna Fáil Deputies to what his policy was in that direction. On the 25th of May on the Budget debate he pointed out that Deputy McCann had spoken of retrenchment as distinct from economies and he said: "I want retrenchment on certain things. I am not aiming at retrenchment for retrenchment's sake. I want to retrench on certain unessentials, certain extravagances, certain wasteful ways of spending money, in order to have the moneys, which can be levied off the people of the State without doing too much harm, available for constructive work." I think in that phrase the Minister for Finance summarised what his policy and the policy of this Government was so far as retrenchment was concerned. I do not think they have deviated from that at all. I think the approach of the Minister for Finance in the statement he made this evening and in the set-up of the present Estimates, merely goes to show that the Government are endeavouring to implement the policy which was laid down by them over two years ago.

Deputy Childers said there is nothing very extraordinary about the separation of the capital items in the Estimates from other services, that anyone with a pencil and paper could have done that when the Estimates were produced any year. Possibly that is correct in so far as, if a person knew what were to be termed as capital items and if he searched through the Book of Estimates and took the trouble of segregating what in his opinion were capital items and deducted these items from the total shown in the front of the book in former years, he would have got, on the one hand, capital items and, on the other hand, what it was proposed to spend on other services. But, in fact, what the Minister did this year was, to separate the items beforehand. He asked the Dáil this afternoon to study the various matters he had set aside as being items of capital expenditure proper to be met by borrowing, items which, in his opinion, it would not be fair to levy off the present-day taxpayer, and he asked Deputies opposite to look into that list which is given in the front of the Book of Estimates and let him have their opinions as to whether or not those items were properly capital items or not.

I do not think there is one Fianna Fáil Deputy who has accepted that invitation of the Minister. I did not hear any Fianna Fáil Deputy making any effort to criticise this sum of over £12,000,000 on the grounds that it was not proper capital expenditure. Deputy Aiken did say that if the money was to be raised it should be raised by means of direct taxation. I think the Deputy missed the whole point in the new set-up in the Book of Estimates entirely. He did not appear to appreciate what the Minister was doing or inviting him to do. Be that as it may, no Fianna Fáil Deputy, so far as I am aware, has endeavoured to make the case that, in the segregation of the items, those segregated for capital purposes are not properly in that list. I assume that they agree with the Minister that all of the items which go to make up something over £12,000,000 are properly items of capital expenditure. Consequently, the only point left then is as to whether or not it is good financial policy to ensure that these particular projects will be financed by means of borrowed money rather than by means of taxation levied against the taxpayers this year or next year.

Deputy Seán Collins and most Deputies who spoke on this side expressed agreement with the Minister's point of view. So far as I am concerned, I feel that what the Minister is doing is the very essence of a sound financial policy. It does appear ridiculous to adopt the attitude adopted by Deputy Aiken, the man who was for a number of years Minister for Finance, to hold that if certain projects are to be initiated, even if the Minister for Finance of the day has the certain knowledge that the taxpayers will not reap any advantage, good, bad or indifferent, from those schemes—it does seem to be ridiculous in those circumstances that it should be suggested that these schemes should be financed by the taxpayers of to-day and financed by them alone.

The Minister has suggested that it is only right that when posterity will reap a large share of the benefit from schemes now being initiated, posterity should also bear a fair share of the cost. It seems to me that Deputies opposite are rather disappointed that the Minister has adopted that particular attitude, not because they do not believe it is the right attitude to adopt, not because they do not believe it is sound financial policy, but because they would like to see the Minister crippling the people with taxation, as his predecessors did. They have learned their lesson, belatedly though it be, of the Supplementary Budget. Perhaps it is due in no small way to that Supplementary Budget that the Deputies find themselves on the far side of the House. They had hopes the present Minister for Finance might do exactly the same thing. I think the speech of Deputy Aiken to-day demonstrated that that was very present to his mind and the whine we heard was in the main a whine of disappointment—disappointment that the present Minister was not going to make the same mistake as the Deputy made when he was Minister for Finance.

This much can be said for Deputy Aiken's contribution to this debate. He at least put his feet down on one side of the fence. He said he believed all this money should be levied off the taxpayers to-day and none should be raised by borrowing. We heard Deputy Childers's disclaimer that he was in any way representative of the Fianna Fáil Party, and his statement that he was only giving his own personal view in a number of the things he said. I think we may take it that Deputy Aiken, the last Fianna Fáil Minister for Finance, was in fact representing the financial policy of the Fianna Fáil Party and I think we can take it, when Deputy Aiken says to the Minister: "You should not raise this money by borrowing; you should raise it by taxation; it should be brought into your Budget statement and taxation should be increased under your coming Budget in order to raise that money," that that is the Fianna Fáil viewpoint, the Fianna Fáil policy.

Let us examine that for a moment. I do not think I can be contradicted on that assumption. I take it that Deputies opposite still follow the Aiken lead in finance. Let us consider the Fianna Fáil view point on this. There is a sum of £12,000,000 which the Minister proposes to raise by borrowing, because the benefit in a large measure will accrue to future generations. Fianna Fáil say that that is not right; they say: "If we were back there where you are, we would raise every penny of that £12,000,000 in the coming Budget and we would tax the people. We would tax their beer, their cigarettes, their tobacco and their cinemas in order to raise that £12,000,000." Is that not the Fianna Fáil policy in an nutshell?

Not at all. We borrowed £100,000,000 in 15 years.

I am talking of Deputy Aiken's contribution. Deputy Childers was in the fortunate position of not having to listen to it, because I do not think he was here. That was Deputy Aiken's viewpoint; that was the policy enunciated by him.

Do not say that Fianna Fáil has split.

I think any Fianna Fáil Deputy who was present when Deputy Aiken was speaking will agree that I am in no way misrepresenting him. His actual words I have not got, but he did introduce his attack on the Minister's policy by telling us that the Minister should first of all consider whether there was an inflationary or a deflationary tendency and that he should consider what is going to be the effect of pumping another £24,000,000 into the stream of money. He gave us the example of what was happening in France and other European countries. In other words, he left us in no doubt that, in his opinion, the proper thing to do was to meet the bill by means of direct taxation. I take it that Fianna Fáil are still Aiken-minded in finance matters.

The Deputy is not suggesting that there is a split amongst them?

We may come to that later. I have an interesting article here by Deputy MacEntee entitled "Diddlum-Dandy" which appeared in the Sunday Press and when I have followed Deputy Childers a little, I may read some of it. Assuming that Fianna Fáil are still Aiken-minded in finance, we have the position that Fianna Fáil stand for raising this money by taxation. We have had speeches from the ex-Fianna Fáil Finance Minister and from Deputy Childers and other Fianna Fáil Deputies, and I do not think that one Fianna Fáil Deputy endeavoured to make the case that this expenditure was not proper expenditure, that it was not necessary and not good. Deputy Childers, while admitting that he did not speak for his Party, did say that it was the duty of an Opposition at least to ask the polite question whether or not the country could afford it; but no Deputy opposite seriously contested that this amount of £12,000,000 should be spent, and, if it is to be spent, it must be raised in one way or the other. Deputy Aiken did not make the case, in my hearing at any rate, that the money should not be raised and spent. He did say it should not be raised by means of borrowing and should be raised by means of taxation.

We are then back to the position in which Fianna Fáil are still in the same frame of mind as they were in when the Supplementary Budget was introduced in 1947. They would tax the people's beer, tobacco, cinema seats and entertainment of one sort or another in order to raise money, even though that money is for items of a capital nature and though the people of the present day are not to get all of the benefit, at any rate. Deputy Kissane, as I have mentioned, did come out bluntly with the opinion that the amount of the Estimates was excessive and said that, because it was excessive, he intended to oppose it. It is perfectly fair to ask any Deputy who challenges this Book of Estimates because the amount in it is too large where it can be reduced?

If Fianna Fáil are shouldering the responsibility which Deputy Childers has placed on them, of helping in a critical way the Minister for Finance in dealing with the Estimates, is it not only fair to ask them to go a step further and to point out to the Minister in what directions this Book of Estimates, which has been criticised on the ground of its being excessive, is excessive and in what directions they would economise. Would Deputy Kissane revert to the old Fianna Fáil mentality of 1947 in regard to old age pensions, when they refused a modest demand for £500,000 to modify the means test? Would he reduce this Book of Estimates in so far as it is calculated to assist the old age pensioners? Would he cut down on the housing drive or would he delete from it the provisions of a capital nature in respect of the land rehabilitation scheme?

We could do with fewer Ministers.

Would he think it good business to reduce the Book of Estimates by deleting any provision for drainage or Civil Service pensioners? And what about the teachers? Would we get back to the Derrig line in respect of the teachers? Possibly we could revert to the Fianna Fáil scale of pay for the Army and the Garda. There is a wide field open to them. Deputy Kissane says that the Book of Estimates is grossly excessive, and, because it is excessive, he is opposed to it. I invite Deputy Kissane, or any other Fianna Fáil Deputy, to take his pick, to have the courage to stand up here and say where an economy will be effected and to be prepared to face the teachers or the Guards or the Army or the civil servants and say which of these provisions they would cut down if they got back to this side of the House. Would they prefer to get back to the 1947 position regarding old age pensioners? The choice is there. All we want is some Fianna Fáil Deputy to get up here and have the courage to make the choice. There are a number of Fianna Fáil Deputies opposite. Deputy Burke looks thoughtful. Perhaps he is thinking of the Balbriggan widow. Would Deputy Gorry like to make the choice?

The Balbriggan widow has got married again.

Congratulations.

Would the Deputy make such a choice with regard to the Dublin rates?

I should like Deputy O'Higgins to tell us how he proposes to reduce the rates in Dublin.

I could spend many a happy hour in telling you how I would reduce the Dublin rates and I would not leave out Portrane and Grangegorman when considering the matter.

That would be a charitable thing to do.

Deputy Childers—I confess I was not entirely clear as to how he did it—tied up the question of Partition with the Estimates and spent some considerable time in showing that, if the financial policy advocated by the Minister for External Affairs, I think, rather than by the Minister for Finance were to be pursued, we would be widening and deepening the Border between the southern portion of this island and the six north-eastern counties. At the time Deputy Childers was making these remarks, I had this little document in front of me and I wondered if Deputy Childers had yet become a subscriber to the Sunday Press and if he had seen on 13th November last the views on financial policy of the versatile constitutional authority of Fianna Fáil, Deputy MacEntee, and if he had adverted to the opinions of Deputy MacEntee on the devaluation of the £ in relation to the American dollar? He would there have seen the MacEntee policy as distinct from the Aiken policy, that this Government were pursuing a very obnoxious fiscal policy when they devalued the £ in relation to the American dollar, notwithstanding the fact that it had been done in Great Britain and consequently in Northern Ireland. If the MacEntee policy were put into operation instead of the Aiken policy, I wonder how we would stand in relation to Partition and how the Irish farmer would fare in relation to his exports, for instance, to the British market. These are questions that Deputy Childers might prefer to take up privately, behind closed doors, with Deputy MacEntee. I do not think it would be fair to ask him to express his policy on them here.

It is interesting to note that in the article on deflation to which I have referred, Deputy MacEntee put himself on record in the Sunday Press, describing the general policy which is being pursued by this Government since they came into office in these words:

"The real probability is that the Ministers jumped at the chance to manipulate the currency. It was indeed the only, if desperate and dishonest way, out of the difficulties into which the Coalition Parties had landed themselves by the rash and unfulfillable pledges which they gave at the general election and by the policy of economic sabotage which they had pursued since they seized office."

Let us reflect for a moment as to the policy of "economic sabotage" which is being pursued by this Government. The Minister for Finance referred to some aspects of that policy this afternoon. He referred to the fact that something over £2,000,000 was being paid by this Government in excess of what was paid by Fianna Fáil in respect of old age pensions, widows' and orphans' pensions, blind pensions and the like. He referred to the increases in wages which were given through the instrumentality of this Government. He referred to the increases for the teachers, the Guards and the Army. He referred to the fact that, side by side with those increases, the Government had handed back to the taxpayer something over £6,000,000 which Deputy Aiken, as the monetary leader of Fianna Fáil, had taken from the people in the Supplementary Budget. He referred to the fact that the Government had handed back to the income-tax-payers a sum of over £1,000,000 in reliefs under the last Budget. The total of the reliefs which were outlined by the Minister this afternoon amounted to something in the region of £7,500,000. According to Deputy MacEntee, the policy that enabled the present Government to hand back to the Irish taxpayer the sum of £7,500,000 was a policy of economic sabotage.

Remember, that in addition to handing back a sum of over £7,000,000 to the taxpayer, the Government had been able to increase substantially projects of a capital nature. I forget the exact figures which the Minister gave this afternoon. I think that for the year 1947 the sum was between £1,000,000 and £2,000,000. In the following year, it was something like £3,500,000. Last year, it was in the region of £7,000,000 and in the coming year it is proposed that it will be over £12,000,000. It seems to me that unless the Deputies opposite can seriously object that the projects are not good projects and can demonstrate that there is some truth and accuracy in that contention, the House will accept it that the projects are good projects which are likely to increase both agricultural and industrial production and to increase, as they have already increased, the numbers of people employed both on the land and in industry.

If those results are achieved, and I can assert without any hesitation that they are being achieved, surely the money is being well spent. That is what the present Government and the present Minister for Finance have been able to do in something slightly over two years and that is what Deputy MacEntee refers to as economic sabotage.

The Minister and the Government are to be congratulated on the manner in which they have approached our whole economic financial policy. The Minister for Finance in any Government has a very hard task. The present Minister for Finance has a particularly difficult task in view of the type of opposition which he has met both inside this House and outside it by the Deputies opposite. Whenever the Minister did make an effort to economise by cutting what he believed was wasteful or extravagant expenditure, there was an outcry by Fianna Fáil Deputies, by the Fianna Fáil tied Party organ, the Irish Press, and by the Fianna Fáil organisation throughout the country. On the other hand, when the Minister suggests that there should be further development in any direction, we find Deputy Kissane, Deputy Bartley, Deputy Aiken, Deputy Childers in the forefront of those who are crying out that the Minister is going too far and too fast, and that the amount he is raising is excessive. I was going to give the House an extract from a speech by Deputy Lemass but I think I will spare them.

The general idea which the Minister for Finance propounded this afternoon of splitting up the Estimates in such a way that everyone, whether he is a Deputy or not, will know precisely what is happening, will know what items are to be met through the annual Budget by taxation and what items are to be met by means of borrowing for capital services, is something for which he is entitled to be congratulated.

I believe that the real reason why Deputies opposite have not been able to make up their minds as to what they should say in regard to the Estimates is that they know very well that if their own policy, as explained this afternoon by Deputy Aiken, were to be accepted, there would be a very great increase in taxation. Deputy Childers may try to explain away the Fianna Fáil policy or to dissociate himself from it, but I can assure the Deputies opposite that I will make it my business to emphasise, in connection with this Book of Estimates, both inside this House and outside it, that the Fianna Fáil plan of to-day is exactly the same as the Fianna Fáil plan of 1947: Tax-the people, tax them hot and tax them heavy.

Deputy Michael O'Higgins has made a very inspiring speech. He vindicated Fianna Fáil, although I am sure that was not his intention. Deputy O'Higgins belongs to the Party that told us on the hustings prior to the last election that they would provide social services and social amenities and reduce taxation by £10,000,000.

£2,000,000.

Now Deputy O'Higgins tells us that the money asked for in this Vote on Account is money well spent. Deputy O'Higgins, as a member of the Fine Gael Party, has discovered that Fianna Fáil were not such an extravagant Party at all. He has found from practical experience that the inter-Party Government could not cut down expenditure. I thought we would hear something new. I thought we would be presented with some scheme. It is the same Deputy Michael O'Higgins who speaks outside this House about a reduction in rates. When he puts down a motion asking for a reduction in rates, he always qualifies it by saying that the efficiency of the social services should not be interfered with. It is the very same type of speech that he has made on this Vote on Account.

Deputy Con Lehane spoke about a three-pronged fork. He did not tell us anything about the three-pronged fork that he had before the general election. He took a completely new three-pronged fork from under the desk, one which I had never heard of before. The fork I would like to hear him refer to is the one the prongs of which were to reduce the cost of living by 30 per cent., to provide full employment for everybody, to stop emigration, to go ahead with reafforestation at the rate of 100,000 acres per annum, to increase old age pensions to £1 6/- a week. After two years, there is not one word about full employment, stopping emigration, land division and the various other national matters that we expected from the inter-Party Government. One would expect something good would come in their third year.

The tourist industry was criticised by the Parties now forming the Coalition, but they are very glad now to fall back on the Fianna Fáil policy in regard to it. I would like to see the Government taking a bolder stand in regard to the tourist industry and encouraging it more because, in one year, the tourist industry was worth what the cattle trade was worth in a few years.

I am disappointed that we are not being presented with a definite policy with regard to unemployment and emigration. This Government have not been impeded in their work, as we were, by an economic war and by World War II. The State was handed over to them in good condition. As far as housing and other works of a capital nature are concerned, they are progressing very slowly. In general, the Government are proceeding very slowly along the roads paved for them by Fianna Fáil.

There is one matter that is a national problem. I have experience of it in my own constituency. I refer to the problem created by the flight from rural Ireland. No Deputy can deny that that is taking place. There are too many people idle in rural Ireland and, as a result of the policy of the inter-Party Government, more are being dismissed day after day. What about the programme of the Labour Party, the archangels of the workers? When is it to come into operation? It is a case of wait and see. I would remind the gentlemen opposite of their rosy promises during the election. In their third year of office, they have nothing to show for it.

Nor had you after 16 years.

Some day I will be able to whistle the tune that Deputy O'Leary repeats so often. Fine Gael were to perform the miracle of decreasing taxation by £10,000,000 while maintaining social services and everything else. The miracles that were to be wrought by Clann na Poblachta have not yet come to pass. As for the Labour Party, we must wait and see when their big schemes will come into operation, of which we heard so much in County Dublin during the last election. No one was to leave this country; they were to build boats, land was to be drained and rivers were to be drained; everybody was to get electric light; parish halls were to be built and houses were to be built. I do not think there would be a more ideal State in the world if all these things were realised. There is one thing which we in Fianna Fáil never did: we never were so dishonest as to get up on a platform and tell people that we were going to work those miracles, but you come along after three years and say that you cannot do them.

Who said we cannot do it?

You have failed even to make an attempt to do anything. You condemn the policy of Fianna Fáil but you are going back to it and are glad to go back to it.

I forgot the Farmers' Party. They were to go all out for derating and they were to have a special subsidy for everybody who put a spade into the ground. You were to get a special grant if you only went out to dig up the garden. We hear nothing of them at all. I do not know with which side they have gone, whether they have been assimilated into the big Party, whether they stand on their own or whether they have gone with the Clann or Labour, but we hear nothing about them in rural Ireland among the agricultural community. We hear so little of them that their name is not even mentioned. We must take it for granted that their promises have gone the same as themselves. There are a couple of them in flesh and blood in this House but that is all.

We have a problem with regard to the tourist industry and our seaside resorts. There seems to be no national or local planning to cater for our own people from inland parts of the country who want to enjoy themselves by the sea or for the visitors we are anxious to encourage into the country. We will not be able to hold the tourist industry unless we do something to compete with other countries who appreciate its advantage. We should do a good deal more on those lines.

I heard about the roads of Ireland. We were to have marvellous first-class roads and the way we got those marvellous first-class roads was that the people opposite cut the roads grant last year by £2,000,000.

The Deputy is going too much into detail; he should deal with matters of general interest.

Another national problem is mineral exploration. We have heard a good deal about it from time to time and a Bill was introduced recently, but I should like to see more planning by the Government to find out if there are minerals in the country. Some detailed exploration should be carried out. I admit that there is a little but not as much as I would like. The American system of mineral exploration was carried out two years ago in a very detailed manner. The inter-Party Government have a golden opportunity now of testing the mineral resources of the country in a detailed manner. In the United States they went so far as to test every third parish. Of course, the parishes were larger, but I do not see why it should not be possible for us to do it in five or six places in each county, or in places where our geologists state that minerals are to be found.

The Deputy should raise that on the Estimate for the Department of Industry and Commerce.

I want to deal in a general way with another national industry which has not been handled at all although a number of promises have been made during the last two years. I refer to the fishing industry. Promises have been made that better boats and piers, canning stations, quick freezing plants, fish meal factories, etc., will be provided. I should like to see more money in the Estimate for this national industry.

The agricultural and dairying industry is not as it should be. In parts of Ireland I am afraid that we are going back to one side of the agricultural industry. It may be a very good thing for the time being, everybody has to have a chance, but I feel that the plan regarding the agricultural industry which has been adopted by this Government is not a wise policy. As long as people are idle in rural Ireland—and this policy will make more people idle —it is bad for the country. If we are running the people into the towns it will react badly on the country, and as far as I can see that is what is happening. The dairying industry could be developed together with its four or five subsidiary industries in a way that would give gainful employment.

I am afraid that arterial drainage has been slowed up although you can now get plenty of equipment.

£395,000 this year for equipment. Never was there more.

The scheme was well prepared for the honourable Parliamentary Secretary. The road was there for him to travel.

The road may have been there but the drains were not.

I am dissatisfied that he is not travelling quicker, and it will take a long time if he cannot travel better.

There are three major schemes this year.

Rural electrification is another Fianna Fáil scheme as well as arterial drainage, and we are hoping to see in a short time light in every house in Ireland. But what dead hand is holding it back? There are a number of complaints also about the high cost of electricity to the consumers.

The Deputy is going into too many details.

What about the Local Authorities (Works) Act?

The Local Authorities (Works) Act seems to me to be neither fish nor flesh because where there are drains we cannot go under bridges to clean them.

The only hope I have of seeing any improvement brought about is in the putting into operation of arterial drainage schemes. I should also like to know what will be the general policy of the Government in the matter of carrying out improvements on the road and in providing piped water supplies in various parts of the country where such supplies are so much needed. I hope that something will be done in that direction and that when schemes are prepared they will not be pigeon-holed for two or three years before anything practical is done either by a local authority or by the Government itself. Is the dead hand going to be still over this Government in trying to hold things up?

As it was over the last Government.

The last Government can look back on the more than 1,000 factories that it established. During its period, too, it had to fight two wars. When you people were trying to sabotage us, we had to fight an economic war.

If the Deputy cannot get down to the matter before the House he will have to sit down.

Do not forget about the tomatoes.

It is very kind of the Deputy to remind me of one of our great national industries, the tomato industry, which those at the other side are trying to cripple.

It is not in order on this.

If I am not in order in dealing with it, I have nothing more to say.

I think it would be interesting if the Deputy would have a look at the statement furnished with the Book of Estimates which gives the net audited expenditure on public services for each year from 1941-42 to 1948-49, and the estimated net expenditure in 1949-50 and 1950-51. There are in that statement two items which, I think, are very significant and which are a very good pointer to the policy of the present Government. Now the first one that I take is Vote 27—Agriculture. Deputies will see from this statement that in the year 1948-49—this Government was then working on the Estimates prepared by Fianna Fáil— the audited expenditure for that year on Vote 27 was £1,418,285, and that in the year 1949-50, which is now coming to a close, the estimated expenditure was £10,269,640.

Would the Deputy relate that to the Vote for Industry and Commerce and see what happened?

As between 1948-49 and 1949-50 the expenditure went up from £1,418,285 to £10,269,640, while for the year 1950-51 the estimated expenditure on Vote 27 is £15,000,000.

What about Vote 50 in the same list?

I am coming now to deal with Vote 38.

What happened to Vote 50?

I did not know that 50 came before 38. Vote 38 deals with Local Government and Public Health. In 1948-49 the audited expenditure under this Vote was £1,107,726. In 1949-50, the expenditure had increased to £3,223,100, and the estimated expenditure under that Vote for the coming year is £4,382,160. Taking these two Votes together—Agriculture and Local Government and Public Health—the totals for the year 1948-49 were £2,500,000; for the year 1949-50, the first year of office of this Government, the figure was £13,500,000, while in the coming year the Estimate runs into £19,500,000. I said that these were two significant Votes and I think the House will agree with me in that. As regards agriculture, this Government proposes to spend £40,000,000 on the rehabilitation scheme alone.

We have Local Government and Public Health—now two separate Departments—upon which we are depending for houses and hospitals. The things to be done under these two Votes, particularly, are in the nature of capital expenditure. I think it would be well if we just tried to get a grip of what is meant by this business of capital expenditure. It might help to clear the air, I think. It is merely the exchange of one thing for another. That is how I see it. If I might perhaps be allowed by the Chair to give a homely example, I think the one which I propose to give would clarify the position. Assume that a farmer has an annual expenditure of £400 on food, clothing and general expenses, and let us suppose that in this year he decides to buy a bit of land adjoining his farm and pays for it £1,000. Now, nobody can deny that in this year that man has had to find and to spend £1,400, but nobody is going to say that it has cost him in this year £1,400 to live. He has, most surely, spent £400 on current expenditure. The additional £1,000 has been merely converted by him from cash into land. He has not the £1,000 because he has spent it, but he has something solid in the land—in exchange for the £1,000 which he paid for it.

You have there, I think, a very clear example of capital expenditure, and I certainly say that the Minister for Finance is to be congratulated upon the segregation of the moneys which it is proposed to spend during the coming year into items of capital services and other services; capital services of £12 million, compared with the £1,000 that the farmer spent on the adjoining fields, and other services of £66 million compared with the £400 spent by the farmer on food, clothing, wages, etc.

I think it will be agreed also that, suppose that farmer did not have the £1,000 in cash, it would be good business for him to do as the Minister propses to do, that is to borrow, if he could, the £1,000, provided he could get it at a reasonable rate of interest and have a reasonable prospect of repaying it. So far as this country is concerned, there is a reasonable prospect of repayment. This country is financially sound and the Minister need have no hesitation whatever in borrowing a much greater sum than he proposes to borrow. I appreciate that there is the difficulty of the rate of interest which has to be paid on borrowed money. I do not know if it would be quite appropriate to discuss that matter on this Vote on Account, but I feel that I ought not to pass from it without saying that the rate of interest at which the Minister has to borrow is too high. In view of the fact that, I understand, our Central Bank has a very great amount of money invested abroad which yields 1¼ per cent., I cannot understand why money for capital purposes here cannot be got in some cases at less than 4 per cent.

I do not pretend to understand high finance, but I suppose there are many other people in the same predicament. Whether the jargon of high finance has frightened us I do not know. But it seems to me that the goal we are trying to reach is a clear one, the way to it seems to me to be clear, and the difficulty appears to be in the machine to be used. Bankers and financiers hold up their hands in horror and say, "You must not do this and we must not do that because you will upset the whole economic system". What they mean probably is that you are going to upset the theories which they have. They forget that the late Lord Keynes changed his views radically not once but on a few occasions and he was, I think, regarded as an economist of repute.

I was very interested in Deputy Childers' contribution to the debate. I believe that he was genuinely sincere in the views he expressed. I must confess, however, that I was astonished at the defeatist approach of Deputy Childers. He put no tooth in it when he said that there was a very real fear in his mind that, if the views expressed by the Minister for External Affairs here on the question of the control of credit were put into operation, they would be an added barrier to the ending of Partition. I wrote down what I believed to be what he said at one stage when criticising the Clann na Poblachta policy on the desirability of the repatriation of our external assets. He referred to the talk about the repatriation of our external assets as flapdoodle and he added that Fianna Fáil would be satisfied to have our external assets repatriated if it were in the national interest. Deputy Childers' trouble was apparently that the repatriation of our external assets would not be in the national interest. I find it very difficult to accept that point of view. As I said, I accept unreservedly Deputy Childers' sincerity and honesty in his viewpoint. But it is a cause of surprise to me that an able man, as he is, would allow such unreal fears to cocrce him into such a defeatist policy.

So far as the effect that a change in financial policy in the Twenty-Six Counties would have upon our chances, our hopes, of getting back the Six Counties is concerned, I think Deputy Childers should recall that the self same fears were expressed when the Republic of Ireland Act was before this House. I do not think it would be seriously contended now that the passage of that Act here made any change in the outlook of the people in Great Britain and the Twenty-Six Counties. In like manner, I think Deputy Childers should have an easy mind, and I am sure the courageous members of Fianna Fáil have an easy mind that the policy advocated by the Minister for External Affairs here in regard to our financial system would not have the effect which the Deputy thinks it would have. In any event, this has to be faced up to, that if we have got rights and if we have got the power to exercise those rights, then we ought to exercise them.

I should like to revert for one moment to this question of the division between capital expenditure and other expenditure. I think that the Minister for Finance is rather conservative in the figure which he places on capital expenditure. I think that there are items included in the £66,000,000 which might very well be regarded as capital expenditure. It is, perhaps, well that the Minister should be somewhat conservative on this first departure. If we could forget Party affiliations, I think the House would not object if he treated an even greater part of the whole as capital expenditure to be got by borrowing, because a certain amount of the money spent under the heading of "Other Services" will yield certain social benefits to the country as a whole. There will be some real return from them. They cannot be described as wastage, such as would be, perhaps, expenditure on food that one eats or clothes that one wears. Real benefits will accrue therefrom. These will be benefits of a permanent nature and may, therefore, be regarded as a capital asset, as some return that we have of a real and lasting nature for the money that we spend. I think most people will agree that an inspector of taxes would not be as conservative as is the Minister for Finance on this question as to what constitutes capital expenditure. Let me give a small example. A solicitor buys books through the year and tries to get that item of expenditure into his office accounts as office expenditure. The inspector of taxes very quickly says to him: "You have got the books; you have got something for the money you spent; it is a capital item and I shall not allow it as office expenditure against your income." That is a real experience that I myself have had.

Would not income-tax be appropriate to the Budget?

I merely give the example to show that the Minister for Finance has been some what conservative. May I reiterate my congratulations to the Minister for the courage he has shown in this new departure. This will benefit the country. This will give the taxpayer a better realisation of the manner in which the money is spent. It is nonsense to say, as has been implied by the Irish Press, that this £78,000,000 this year is £20,000,000 above the highest figure that Fianna Fáil ever introduced. One would gather from that that the Minister for Finance intended to collect the £78,000,000 this year. Deputy Briscoe and Deputy de Valera smile. The fact of the matter is the Minister for Finance will not call on the taxpayer to pay the £78,000,000 this year. He is admittedly asking for £20,000,000 more than the highest figure in the Fianna Fáil régime, but I think the Opposition will do a good service to the Party they represent if they correct the Irish Press on that and say: “Look here, £20,000,000 increase is wrong.”

Major de Valera

Expand it a bit further, will you?

The people read a few days ago that they would be faced in the coming year with the highest Estimate ever struck by a native Government. It must have been a rude shock to them. Bad as that shock was, however, I do not think it was so bad as the one they will receive when this Estimate is passed by the "Yes-men" behind the present Government. For a long time the people listened to the criticisms hurled against Fianna Fáil. They were accused of squandermania and of extravagance. They were described as ruffians who would not reduce taxation, and so on and so forth. I do not think there has ever been such a feeble case made for any Estimate as that made by Deputy Con Lehane and some of his colleagues. I must say there were a few who had the guts to try to defend this Estimate, even though their defence was a weak and delicate one. Deputy Lehane, as usual, veered away from any proper realisation of his duty. People like Deputy Lehane invariably attack the Opposition. They think that suits the country. They think that in that way the ordinary people will not appreciate what is being done behind the scenes.

Deputy Lehane tried to give the impression that Deputy Kissane was not in favour of housing. We all know what Fianna Fáil policy was in relation to housing. We paved the way many, many years ago. We achieved results on a very, very large scale. Were it not for the war, I think everyone would agree, except perhaps the crooked politicians, that we would have gone a long way in solving our housing problem. We had a housing policy second to none in Europe. The present Government is merely continuing the policy laid down on such a solid foundation by Fianna Fáil. I would like to remind the present Government that there are people at the moment who have houses built and who cannot get even 1/- for them. I have taken up numbers of grants with the Department. The inspector has reported on the houses. The people are entitled to their grants, but until the Minister gets some more money, by either begging or borrowing, not one of those people will get as much as 1/-.

We all remember the campaign during the last election and since against Fianna Fáil because of the manner in which they were spending money. We take up this Book of Estimates and we compare the Estimates for the years 1946-47 and 1947-48 with the present year. We find that, instead of any reduction being made, there is a considerable increase all round. We find that the Vote for the Taoiseach's Department has increased from £17,040 in 1946-'47 to £21,970 to-day. The Vote for the Department of the Minister for Finance has increased from £95,398 in 1946-'47 to £154,430 to-day. The Vote for the offices of the Minister for External Affairs, who had been loudest in his criticism of Fianna Fáil expenditure, has increased from £128,568 in 1946-'47 to £359,350 to-day. I noticed that the Minister for External Affairs was the first individual on the other side of the House to get up to night to defend the present Minister for Finance and his Vote on Account. It would be very interesting if we could be told by the Minister the amount of money the Minister for External Affairs has spent in entertainment in Iveagh House during the last 12 months.

These are details, surely.

I shall not go any further into the matter.

It will arise on the Estimates.

It is only that when they are talking about squandermania it would be very useful to us if we could get the figures which would enable us to point our finger and say that those people who talked most about squandermania are those who are now up to their neck in it and who make no effort to get away from it. We heard a lot of talk during the last general election from these people in regard to the enormous amount of money which was being spent on Deputies' salaries, on Ministers' salaries and of the expense the Oireachtas is to the taxpayers of the country. However, since they got into the cushy nests opposite there has been no word about reducing them nor will there be, while that Government exists.

These are matters for the Estimate. They are not general policy.

When those Estimates are struck annually I, as a Deputy from the West of Ireland, run my eye over a few of the items to see if some assistance is being given to the type of people whom I represent. Although I find that under many headings the Estimates have increased very conconsiderably, I notice that there is no increase for minor employment schemes; there is no increase for bog development schemes; there is no increase by way of assistance for the unemployed who are now living on the promises of this Government for a number of years—they are now in their third year. In spite of that fact, none of these promises have been fulfilled and those unfortunate people have nothing to look forward to now but the emigrant ship. We have had a call back to building. We have had, too, rumours circulated by some of the Parties opposite that buses were to leave one part of my county to travel into Galway. The unfortunate people lined up by the roadside waiting for the buses but they will have to wait a long time before any such bus ever leaves. It is just one of the promises which will never be fulfilled by the Parliamentary Secretary, whom I see grinning across the floor at the moment.

It is difficult to know the difference, when I look at you, between grinning and laughing.

These personal remarks should not be made. The matters are trivial and, in any event, they are not relevant to the debate. The Deputy will have to come to the Vote and not dwell on details.

In view of the fact that the Minister for Finance last year made a considerable reduction on the relief grants, and particularly the matters which I have mentioned, I thought he might have made an effort this year to give us part at least of the amount which was heretofore made available by Fianna Fáil, and I am very disappointed that no effort has been made in that direction.

The Minister this evening referred to undeveloped industries. As I have said, the West of Ireland was pretty severely hit by the Government's action in cutting out hand-won turf. Yet there was a ray of hope for a lot of workers in the West of Ireland in respect of machine-won turf. When the present Minister for Finance came down on them with his axe and closed down the machine-won turf schemes in the West of Ireland, it was certainly the final shot at these unfortunate people. I had hoped that, whatever those Parties might be prepared to do by way of keeping this particular Government in office, some one Party might be sufficiently determined to put their foot down and say: "Unless you are prepared to assist in respect of some of the things which I have just mentioned we can no longer see our way to support you." I am not deceived by their attitude. However, a number of people throughout the country are surprised at their attitude—I suppose not now, but up to very recently—because they expected that they would make some effort to see that the people in rural Ireland might derive a little benefit from the promises which were made to them.

What about Donegal?

I suppose that a lot of promises which were made to the people of Donegal were not fulfilled. I think I have noticed Deputy Blaney raising a number of them from time to time. Donegal was the first constituency in Ireland to give a rap on the knuckles to this Government so they should not be too fond of shouting about it. I should like if we could now have—after two and a half years of promises—some indication as to what might now be done to relieve the army of unemployed that exists at this particular moment. In the labour exchange in Tuam——

In Galway?

Yes, in Galway. The figures there were never as high as they are at the moment. There is not an ounce of employment in the whole of the Tuam area. The county council have had to close down because of the way they were treated by this Government last year and all the gangers and men have been laid off. Yet the Parliamentary Secretary, who is so fond of interrupting me every time I rise in this House to give my views, makes little or no effort to assist these people. I think that the Minister's policy as enshrined in this Budget should be opposed because it is not a Budget that is suitable for the people of this country.

It is not even that.

I mean this Book of Estimates—this token Budget.

It is a Vote on Account.

It should be brought home to him that he has gone back to the old type of Fine Gael Estimate, the type of stuff that was so criticised by his Parliamentary Secretary in former years and by others who are now associated with the Coalition Government. I hope that some Deputies of these Parties will now make their views heard in the direction in which their constituents would be interested to have their views at the moment.

Before coming to some of the details in this Book of Estimates——

Details are not in order.

——the details of the figures in the Book of Estimates, it would be interesting to try to fathom the approach to the administration of financial affairs of the Minister for Finance and some of his supporters who have spoken this evening. The Minister for Finance tries seriously to suggest that a sum amounting to £78,000,000, which is the expenditure envisaged in this Book of Estimates, is, in fact, less than the figure of £64,000,000, which was the amount of the Estimates prepared by the Fianna Fáil Government just before they left office. The Minister's thesis is that Fianna Fáil met all their expenditure out of taxation; but as the present demand is not going to be met by way of taxation, as some of it is going to be met by borrowing, the figure to be considered is, in fact, less. Deputy Timoney, when he was speaking, spoke as if he understood that quite clearly. Deputy Hickey is a Deputy with whom I often exchange views privately without any heat and I think Deputy Hickey will be bound to agree with me when I say that it is far better to meet State expenditure out of year-to-year taxation than to meet some of it by borrowing, because that will entail that an additional amount of money will have to be paid back by way of interest over a long period of years.

Your Party borrowed £100,000,000 when they were in office.

How much?

I shall come to the figures later on. We know the years during which Fianna Fáil was in office. I do not know the exact amount—I shall find it later on—of our annual commitment by way of interest and the repayment of moneys borrowed. I do know that on one occasion when the Dublin Corporation undertook a scheme for the building of a wall in the Clontarf area, the capital expenditure was £18,000. We borrowed the £18,000 with the consent of the Department of Local Government, but the amount of money we had to pay back, over the 30 years' period for which the money was borrowed, totalled £35,000, so that it would have been much better if we had met the expenditure out of revenue, as there was no benefit conferred on the individual ratepayer or the State by borrowing. I do not know whether the Minister for Finance was quite serious in the statement which he made in introducing this Vote on Account when he said that because you are not putting expenditure on the backs of the people by way of taxation, in fact there is a reduction in taxation in the way in which he figured it out.

Deputy Timoney—I am sorry he is not in the House and I hope he will read the report of the debate or that somebody will bring to his attention the error in his assessment of the situation—points with pride to the Estimate for the Department of Agriculture, Vote 27, and he says, quite correctly, that on the last Estimate prepared by Fianna Fáil the total expenditure was £1,418,000 odd. He points with pride to the fact that in the Estimates for 1950-51, the estimated expenditure on Agriculture has risen to the magnificent figure of £15,000,000. He implies by that: "That is what is being done for the agricultural community." If, however, the Deputy will look at Vote 50, the Vote for Industry and Commerce, he will find that the Estimate for that Department in the last year before Fianna Fáil went out of office, was £14,000,000. I wonder what is his explanation of the fact that Industry and Commerce has sunk so low that it is proposed to spend only £2,000,000 this year on the Department?

Does he not know, as every Deputy must know, that it was only within a recent period the wonderful gesture was made by the Minister in charge of the Department of Agriculture to take on his shoulders the burden of the subsidies previously administered by the Department of Industry and Commerce? The difference in the estimated expenditure of the two Departments in those years is due to the fact that there has been a transference of expenditure from the Department of Industry and Commerce to the Department of Agriculture. Yet the Deputy uses that to try to establish that more money is being spent by the present Government to help agriculture. I cannot understand how a man of his intelligence and a member of his profession could stand up and seriously contend that wonderful progress is being made as a result of the increased expenditure in the Department of Agriculture.

The Deputy did not refer to a number of items at the bottom of the page which I am sure would interest Deputy Hickey also. He did not refer to obsolete services, and services not provided for any more and he did not say that, under the first item of that, up to last year, or certainly in the last year that Fianna Fáil was in office, there was an expenditure of over £2,250,000 on agricultural produce subsidies which are no longer expended. May I take it that the purposes for which that money was spent benefited agriculture? If they did, why is it that they have become obsolete? Let the Minister for Finance tell us what is meant by that and then we shall find out where we stand. We do know that the policy in the administration of subsidies, which are now to be paid out of the swollen figure provided for the Department of Agriculture, is that there will be a gradual withdrawal of these subsidies.

Only the other day we saw an announcement—I think it was yesterday, or the day before—that butter is going to cost the public 2d. a lb. more. Rather a strange contrast. The big heat of the battle in the last general election was around the pint of stout. These heinous individuals who composed that Government dared to inflict on the public 3d. a pint. These kindly gentlemen who are so concerned about the well-being and the welfare of the general masses of the public, think it is better to switch the tax from beer to butter. Wonderful manipulations. Watch what is going to happen. You can get certain types of commodities to-day if you pay a far higher price for them than was ever paid before. Let Deputy Hickey, for whom I have a great personal regard, and with whom I enjoy many private conversations, examine his conscience.

He was in bad company with you.

I am not including you among those with whom I have enjoyed discussions. When Fianna Fáil took the responsibility of government, there was a subsidy on bread and flour. To-day you can buy white flour if you can pay the full price without the subsidy. What is the purpose of it? The purpose is to escape as far as possible the commitments involved in subsidising the cost of living in respect of what is the mainstay of the lives of the people. Bread is a very important item. I say that bread with butter is even more important. The people who were saved the tax on beer and stout and the tax on tobacco now find that that tax is transferred; it is inflicted on the people whose shoulders, I suppose, should be best able to bear it—every man, woman and child. Do not tax them on stout, but tax them on white flour and butter.

Do not be codding yourself.

What do you mean? Do you suggest that what I have said is not quite true?

Did you see any tax on bread or butter yet?

Deputy Briscoe should be allowed to speak without those interruptions.

He should confine himself to facts and should not be telling fairy-tales.

If Deputy McQuillan is prepared to say that the statement that appeared in the Press yesterday, made by the Minister for Agriculture, was a statement made by him when he was talking through his hat, I withdraw that, but so far as the ordinary public are concerned, every individual with whom I have come in contact since that statement was made is prepared to pay an increase of 2d. per lb. on butter.

He is being prepared to pay that by you now.

These interruptions must cease, and Deputy Briscoe must be allowed to make his statement.

On a point of order. Is the Deputy entitled to state that the price of butter has been increased when really there has been no increase?

The Chair has no intention of deciding what is right or wrong in the matter of factual statements.

Perhaps, for the benefit of the Deputy, who apparently misunderstands me, it might be better if I were to try to speak even more slowly and clearly. I said that an announcement was made that butter is to go up by 2d. per lb. and until I hear that statement denied or put in another form I, in common with everybody who read the statement, can draw no other conclusion than that it is going to be put up by 2d. in order to help to develop or protect the dairying industry.

Somebody asked me how much money was borrowed by Fianna Fáil when they were in office. I have the figure now and it is a very interesting figure. Fianna Fáil were in office for 16 years. They were the Government, as one Deputy has said, during the period of two wars—and he was laughed at and ridiculed. They were in power during the economic war and the last big world war. Fianna Fáil borrowed, for all purposes, in those years a total sum of £45,000,000. That was in a period of 16 years. The present Government borrowed £24,000,000 in one or two years —since they took over office. The Minister has quite clearly and straightforwardly stated to the House—and anyone who can add or subtract figures can see it quite clearly—that in reference to the £26,000,000 odd, £12,000,000 will be borrowed. It is this sum which is under review at the moment. That will make £36,000,000 borrowed in the two years. Perhaps I had better say three years, in order that Deputy McQuillan cannot say I am misrepresenting the situation.

You are being well briefed now.

Who is being well briefed? The £36,000,000 will have been borrowed within these three years and I would not be a bit surprised—and I make this as a prophecy and not as a statement of fact—that there will be an additional £12,000,000 borrowed before we are very much older, thus making a sum of £48,000,000 in three years.

Does the Deputy who questioned me about the borrowing of Fianna Fáil also know that there is an additional liability on the State as a result of the Marshall Aid loan? Something like £15,000,000 was made available up to a period—I cannot say the exact period, but it would be some six months ago— up to the time of the devaluation. That £15,000,000 has become almost £21,000,000, but lest I might be questioned I will say £20,000,000. That is a sum for which we got nothing beyond that we stood shoulder to shoulder with the sterling area. We took the sock on the chin to the tune of £5,000,000 on that loan alone.

What is going to happen next? I understand this Marshall Aid is to reach £40,000,000 before 1952. By 1952, in addition to the £48,000,000 which I say we are borrowing directly, we will also owe another £40,000,000, plus whatever additional cost there will be on us, and then the interest on the Marshall Aid money will arise. A long-term period, Deputy Hickey. Read the Marshall Aid agreement and you will see how we have to sign the bills, the promissory notes—that is what they are described as. Some people may say that the Minister for Finance was in one of his light moments when I asked him a serious parliamentary question as to whether any commitments had been made about these repayments. His answer then was—and I am sure he regrets to have it on record—"It is going to be so long before we have to repay it, we need not bother about it now."

Remember that, in the matter of finance, so long as we subscribe to the Constitution under which we exist here, we must regard our State commitments as a liability of our own and a liability to posterity. There will be other Dála and a great many of us will pass on, but these financial commitments will remain, if they are not liquidated. Let somebody take a pencil and paper and figure out what our national debt to-day costs us in respect of interest and what we get for it.

Deputy Timoney's speech amused me. He tried to differentiate between what he called capital expenditure and wear and tear items. He talked of the suit of clothes he wore and the food he eats, which could not be called capital expenditure. Go down the country, however, and ask a farmer what he calls the mangolds, turnips, barley and whatever else he feeds to his cattle and he will tell you that that is capital expenditure, because, for everything he puts in, he wants so much extra in the weight of the beast. The beast costs him so much at the fair and he feeds it for so long and its increased weight, when he sells it, is an increase in his capital position, so that I could equally argue that the food one eats is, from that point of view, capital expenditure. It is, in fact, capital expenditure. If you deny the masses of the people sufficient food for their nourishment, thus affecting their health and their future, you must regard the very food they eat as one of the fundamental items of capital expenditure. One can look at all these matters from different angles.

And the Deputy will agree that that will not be the position while certain gentlemen have this power.

The Deputy will not. I have asked Deputies repeatedly not to interrupt. Deputy Hickey can make his statement and should reserve these arguments for his speech.

I am sorry, Sir.

I should like to be allowed to reply to Deputy Hickey, because I think I can guess what he has in mind, without having heard his interjection. He suggests, I think, that, so long as financial control is as it is, there is no possibility of the masses being treated in the way to which I refer. I am not so very far from that point of view, without interfering with the capital structure. I was always very proud to belong to a Party which had for its headline, its first responsibility and its absolute commitment, the welfare of the masses of the people. When Deputy Killilea was talking, he illustrated some of the points which made that possible and proved that argument. The pace at which housing was going on before the change of Government in 1932, as compared with the pace in the years from 1932 to 1939, is proof positive to any person who wants to view the matter seriously and conscientiously that the Fianna Fáil Government, under the Constitution under which we live, which recognises the right of private property and personal liberty, nevertheless went ahead and provided for the masses, not only housing, which is called shelter, but food. In the first year of Fianna Fáil's term of office, when the economic war was on, we gave free food to those of the masses who had not the wherewithal to buy it and we were called communists for doing so, but we did it within the machinery of the financial control under which we live here.

Where there is a will there is a way. I do not say that we have to approach the matter from the point of view of taking everything from the few who have and distributing it to the masses to see how long it will last, so that ultimately nobody will have anything. I do not subscribe to the view which I heard expressed here to-day by the Minister for External Affairs in his aggravated attack on the banks. I do not subscribe to the point of view previously expressed by the Minister for Finance when he was Minister for Industry and Commerce in the Cumann na nGaedheal Government, nor do I subscribe to the view he held when in opposition, when he was almost shaking hands with Deputy Davin and when he had reached the position of saying, as Deputy Flanagan probably advocated at one time: "Do not worry about money. Just get the machine and print all you want."

Deputy Flanagan will make his own speech in his own time.

I say that, within the system we have, we can, if we have the will, see that money is used in the best interests of our people and I say that the Fianna Fáil Government made a very honest effort to guide matters in that direction. We have had some talk about expenditure to-day and the pace of rural electrification. Was it not the Fianna Fáil Minister for Industry and Commerce who introduced a scheme for the expenditure of £20,000,000 over a period of years, £10,000,000 of which was to come by way of subsidy from the State in order that the people of rural Ireland who could not otherwise afford them should be able to get electricity and the amenities which flow from it. I shall come later on to illustrations and examples of a practical application of a proper viewpoint in respect of the treatment of the masses as adopted by Fianna Fáil.

The Wages Standstill Order, for example?

I will come to that, too. The Wages Standstill Order——

The Wages Standstill Order was related to——

It is not relevant.

I must take my directions from you, Sir, so I shall leave that.

You were a very lucky man to get the protection of the Chair.

I would ask the Chair's permission to deal with it.

Deputy Briscoe—on the Vote on Account.

I must preface my criticism of the figures by trying to get the members of the House who are likely going to vote for this Book of Estimates to realise what they are doing and where they are heading. Is it good to indulge in criticism of their predecessors in office and to describe them almost as maniacs in their squandermania when you do not recognise what squandermania is and do not recognise what you are storing up for the future? I could point out, on the basis of last year's figures, by a lot of juggling, that the Minister for Finance sold the property of the State, Aer Linte——

What about the new Parliament buildings you were going to erect?

I will tell you about that, too.

Did the Parliamentary Secretary say that he was half-winded?

£11,500,000.

I thought the Parliamentary Secretary said he was half-winded.

You look more like being winded.

Progress reported; Committee to sit again.
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