I move:—
That a sum not exceeding £239,600 be granted to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending the 31st day of March, 1951, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Office of the Minister for External Affairs, and of certain Services administered by that Office (No. 16 of 1924), including a Grant-in-Aid.
The amount of this Vote shows an increase over the similar provision last year. The increase amounts to £80,000 odd and the particular subheads under which the increased expenditure arises are shown in detail in the Vote.
I propose to begin by dealing with the strictly financial aspects of this Vote. My reason for adopting this course is that the fact that we are now spending more than before on our external affairs has been the subject of criticism by Deputies opposite. I know that they have compared the present expenditure on this Vote with what it was when they left office, and have used the contrast to support the charge that money is being spent on our external relations on an unnecessarily lavish scale.
I have no objection to criticism of public expenditure. On the contrary, I realise that that is one of the primary functions of the Opposition in any democratic assembly. But criticism, to be of any value, must be informed criticism. Vague and unsubstantiated charges of extravagance, unrelated to concrete facts, are not only valueless in themselves, but they can be positively harmful to the national interest. I think it only right to give Deputies opposite an opportunity of relating anything they have to say about the increased expenditure under this vote to the specific circumstances which have occasioned it, and, for that purpose, I want to analyse briefly the reasons for the additional expenditure on external affairs—not as compared with last year, because I know that that is not what Deputies opposite are interested in—but as compared with the last Vote which the previous Government prepared before going out of office, the Vote for the financial year 1948-49.
The difference between that Vote and the Vote which I am now presenting to the Dáil is £185,000 odd. I think that, in order to get a realistic figure of the increase, we must deduct from that total the sum of £8,000 provided under sub-head C4 of this year's Vote to cover expenses in connection with the Holy Year. This is a fortuitous and non-recurrent item which does not form part of the normal increase on the Vote and will not appear in the Vote next year. Deducting that £8,000, we get a net figure of £177,000 odd as the amount of the increased expenditure on this Vote since the Fianna Fáil Government left office.
This increase is mainly due to three distinct factors which, between them, account for over 85 per cent. of the increase. The first is the fall in the exchange value of sterling due to the devaluation last September. Certain currencies, of course, readjusted their official exchange rates so as to maintain the previous parity with the £ sterling. But others, including the American and Canadian dollars, the Swiss franc and—although to a lesser extent—the Belgian franc, did not do so. So far as these countries were concerned, therefore, the effect of the 30 per cent. depreciation of the £ last September is that the foreign currencies which we require to pay, not only for salaries and allowances, but for local wages, rents, office expenses and so on, are now costing us 40 per cent. more in Irish currency than they did before. The effect of this is spread over several different sub-heads in the Vote and the aggregate cost is not, therefore, immediately apparent on the face of the Vote itself. I have had the necessary calculations made, however, and the aggregate cost to this Vote of the devaluation of sterling last September comes out as between £50,000 and £55,000. Therefore, approximately 30 per cent. of the increase of £177,000 to this Vote within the last two years is attributable to this single factor of devaluation—a factor entirely unrelated to any increase or expansion of the services provided for in this Vote. I move to report progress.