Deputy Dillon, as he was then, continued:—
"Is it any wonder that Deputy Giles——"
—he is over there now—
"should say to the Minister: ‘Do you remember the time when you were going round from houseen to houseen in Louth and South Monaghan? Would you have told a countryman and his wife, with three or four children in the kitchen, that you were struggling to get control of this country in order to get the opportunity of spending on their behalf £140 a year..."'
—and the same Minister struggled and went from chapel gate to chapel gate in this country to get a hold in this country in order to put 40 per cent. on to that £140 in respect of each family. It is a great idea. He continued:—
"Take the average ten-acre farmer west of the Shannon. Of how many of them could it be said that their weekly income is £3 per week?"
—since they got the Minister I think it has fallen by about 30 per cent.
"We are blessed with a Minister for Finance who glories in the fact that in the next 12 months he is going to spend on their behalf £140 in respect of each household consisting of a man, his wife and four children. He is mixing things up. He is beginning to believe that all the households are like Raglan Road residences and forgetting that the bulk of them are like the houseens in Louth and South Monaghan in which he was glad to take refuge 20 years ago..."
Further on he said:—
"It is very easy to sweep it into the Exchequer and it is great fun to go around spending, providing a little dole for this one and a little benevolence for that one, but it is very bad finance."
That is what the present Minister for Agriculture—then Deputy Dillon—had to say in 1947. Notwithstanding those fine sentiments, he will come in here, probably, in the very near future and give his blessing to this Budget. He continued further:—
"But the Minister announces blandly that the total debt of the nation now is £100,000,000—"
—I wonder what it is now? Apparently, something like £45,000,000 has been added to it in the past two years. Here is something that I thought I would see between the well-known tightness of the present Minister for Finance and the ideals which the present Minister for Agriculture held when he was an ordinary Deputy here. I should have thought that this Budget —and the last Budget—would have been somewhat on the lines of what the then Deputy Dillon said in that speech:
"Does it ever occur to him—"
—he meant the then Minister for Finance—
"that in times like these there is a very grave duty upon him to start repaying what he borrowed in years gone by".
I wonder if the Minister thought of these sentiments when, inside a period of two years, he increased the expenditure from £69,000,000 to £109,500,000? I suggest that the Cabinet should take this speech, which was made by the present Minister for Agriculture in 1947 when he was an ordinary Deputy of the House, and examine carefully and seriously what he suggested. If they do that, it is quite possible that there will be a change of heart on their part and that they will come in here with completely changed minds about the Budget as it is before the House this afternoon. Further, in the same speech we read this:—
"If my memory serves me well, somebody once approached Adam Smith with that dilemma and said:
‘Can you tell me, sir, if people go on spending more than they are earning and if they never take any action to try to repay their debts, must not a state ultimately go bankrupt?'
"Adam Smith's reply was:
‘Well, sir, it takes a long time and a great deal to bankrupt a country!'"
I think the rate of the rake's progress has doubled in the past two years. It is a pretty good lift from £69,000,000 to £109,500,000 in two years on this job.
"And this gentleman will be long dead and mouldering before the consequences of his actions fall to be endured."
This is a Budget in which we are borrowing on the labour and work of our children and of our grandchildren. We are going to live well and they will have to pay for our extravagance. That is the actual position. The Government have started off operations with the definite decision: "We are going to have a good time and we do not give a hang about who comes after us." That is the spirit in which this Budget and the previous one was introduced. That is their attitude. Everything they can lay their hands on—every asset that was in this country—has been wrecked. Not content with that but, according to this Budget, the central authority is going to rob the local authorities. The roads of this country are the property and the obligation of the local authorities. These people remind me of the gentleman who got a farm in conacre and who thought he would come in and knock out of it three or four or five cocks of wheat in succession and then throw it over. If I were to use the words of my dearly beloved friend, the Minister for Agriculture, he was out to mine the land. Those boys are mining the roads.
Let us see in that respect what the position is. First of all, as regards duties, I will quote from a reply given to me by the Minister for Finance on Tuesday, 2nd May, when I asked him to state the revenue derived from import, excise or other duties on mechanically propelled vehicles and parts therefor in the years 1944-45 to 1949-50. I find from that reply that the Government collected in customs in 1949-50 £993,300 and in excise £122,500 or, roughly, £1,150,000. I asked the Minister for Local Government, on the 19th April last, if he would tell me the position as regards motor taxation. He told me that in 1949-50 they collected £2,552,000 and that the estimate for 1950-51 was £2,600,000. In 1947-48, the last year Fianna Fáil was in office, the income under that head was £2,000,000. There is an extra £600,000 now.
I was very anxious to know how much the Minister for Finance was pulling in on petrol and I asked him would he state the revenue derived from petrol taxation in the years 1944-45 to 1949-50. I find that last year the Minister collected £3,213,000 in petrol taxation as against £1,514,925 collected by Fianna Fáil in 1947-48. In motor taxation and petrol taxation the Minister has collected £2,313,000 more than the Fianna Fáil Government collected.
This extra motor taxation means an increased number of vehicles on the road, and the increase in the revenue from petrol taxation means more wear and tear on the roads. You would think a Minister who is receiving £2,300,000 more than his predecessor got would take his claws out of the Road Fund. The fact is that he is again taking from the Road Fund this year £300,000.
Added to that enormous sum which he is collecting from motor users, I think there would be about £800,000 by way of duty on Irish produced motor tyres. The tyre that is made in Dunlops in Cork must pay duty to this Government and there would be another £800,000 of revenue from that. I have not definite information on that point, but I have a question down for next week. At any rate, without counting that, the Minister receives from motor users this year an income of £7,713,000. Out of that enormous sum he is giving back, roughly, £2,000,000; he is giving that to the local authorities to keep the roads in order.
That position can lead only to one thing. According to the statements of our county engineers in Cork, the roads are steadily deteriorating and are quite unable to cope with the kind of traffic from which the Minister is drawing practically £8,000,000. The Minister apparently has decided, like the gentleman who took the conacre, to wear away the roads belonging to the local authorities, to turn them into pot-holes. As anyone can see on the rural roads at the present time, the water, instead of being in the channels on the sides of the roads, is in the centre of the roadway. The Minister's cure for that is to collect all he can and give nothing out.
The money collected in this manner is being used in other ways; it is going in other directions and to people who are far less entitled to it than the local authorities who are being robbed in this manner. The roads are the property of the local authorities. The local authorities are responsible for them and they will have to endeavour to keep them in order. The Minister's attitude towards these roads is "Well, we have succeeded in getting into office; let us gather in all we can while we are there, rob everybody, and let the next fellow foot the bill." It is a very fine, a very good idea, if the Minister can get away with it.
What is the position of the people who will have to foot the bill? I will again quote the Minister for Agriculture in regard to our principal industry, and the means he has taken to remedy the things he considered were wrong.
Speaking in this House on 18th June, 1947, at column 2041 of Dáil Debates he said:—
"There remains beet—the blessings of beet! Some day, and not in the far distant time, our people will have to ask themselves whether it is in the best interests of the community as a whole to continue the production of sugar from beet in this country at an annual cost to the community of £3,000,000 sterling. That is what it costs in normal times to keep the beet industry going in this country. If, instead of growing beet and converting it into sugar, we import refined sugar into this country there will be £3,000,000 sterling more for the National Exchequer and that £3,000,000 can be used to increase children's allowances in every home in Ireland from the 2/6 per child to 5/- per child."
That is another quotation from the present Minister for Agriculture, then Deputy Dillon. Since the farmers of this country were blessed by that Minister for Agriculture the area under beet has gone down by some 10,000 acres. Recently the general manager of the sugar company stated that we would have to import from Cuba, or from wherever we could get it, 36,000 tons of foreign sugar. We will have to pay for that sugar £12 a ton, according to the statement made by the general manager, more than the Irish farmer and the Irish labourer in the sugar factory are paid to produce sugar here. For that we shall have to find this year £1,000,000 odd in dollars. I must admit that the Minister has done a pretty swift job in the two years he has been in office. Anyone who looks at the kind of stuff we are getting in the sugar bowls in the restaurants here and compares it with the product of our own factories must realise the difference in more ways than one. The income from that particular industry of ours has been reduced by that amount through this gentleman's activities.
This gentleman also talked about potatoes at that time. At column 2050 on 18th June, 1947, he said that there was a surplus of potatoes in South Monaghan—a very serious surplus— caused by this atrocious system of giving a guaranteed price for potatoes. The Minister came into office. He was very fond of potatoes. He started his activities two years ago. He advised the farmers to grow potatoes. They grew them. On the 18th June, 1947, he was looking to Deputy Smith to find a market for the surplus that he said existed in Monaghan. I wonder what kind of market he found last year. What is the position to-day? Dear old Ireland, the land of the spud! We had a statement from the Minister for Agriculture a few days ago that the price of potatoes now was £20 a ton. Why? In order that our friends across the water would not have to go without, this gentleman travelled the Continent; he went to America and Canada and to the Sandwich Islands looking for spuds. He was quite prepared to pay the American people dollars, and the dollar is after all a respectable coin, for spuds and to sell those spuds to Britain for sterling. In two years the Minister for Agriculture has succeeded in bringing about that condition of affairs.
We have to import sugar at £12 a ton extra from Cuba and Formosa and we have to travel the world looking for spuds. Last year you had the position where the Minister could not find a market anywhere for Irish spuds and this year, when he wants to buy them, he cannot get them.