I only want to intervene briefly, but I want to warn the House that if any Minister for Finance in this country purports to give an economic review and bases that review on the perversions which the Minister for Finance employed to-day, he is doing his country a reckless disservice, and if the Fianna Fáil Party accept an economic policy, based on the foundations laid by the Minister for Finance to-day, they are starting this country on a steady march to inevitable ruin. No business, no nation, stands still; it either goes forward or goes backward. The Minister for Finance to-day has declared it as his intention to insist on the reversion of the trend. I assure you that the trend has been forward. You ought to realise in time that his purpose is to force the starting of this country on the road back.
I would like to draw the attention of the House to two figures which the Minister quoted to-day. Speaking of our net external assets, he said that they had been diminished by £90,000,000 over the last three years. There is one common source for the sure ascertainment of our net external assets which is familiar to the mind of anybody who concerns himself with these matters, and that is the external assets of the joint stock banks to be ascertained in the quarterly return of the Central Bank. If this is the statistic which the Minister for Finance desires us to believe he referred to I challenge the accuracy of all he said on that statistic and let his declaration stand or fall by its accuracy or its inaccuracy. I asseverate that it bears no relation to the ascertained truth and I believe that the phrase was deliberately formulated to create on the mind of the House and of the country the impression that he was referring to a well-known statistic but provides in the formula employed by him an escape clause which, when his misrepresentations are nailed down, will entitle him to say: "That is not the figure to which I was referring; I was referring to an estimate"—which, admittedly is not susceptible to a precise check.
I take his second figure. He said that the new capital investment in the agricultural industry had only one result; taking 1938-39 as the base year—I refer to the Statistical Abstract, 1950, Table 53 page 57—for volume, not value, of agricultural production as 100, he said that we had barely reached that base in 1950. The latest figure in the Statistical Abstract is for the calendar year 1949. What are the facts? No isolated year is any index of value to anyone who understands statistics. What matters is not the static position of the nation at any given time; what matters is whither the nation economically or politically is travelling. Here is the story.
In 1939 the volume of production was 100; in 1947, at the end of which year Fianna Fáil handed over this country to the inter-Party Government, the volume of production had fallen to 91.9; at the end of 1949, after two years of our administration, the volume of production was 99.7 and rising. If you take the figure for net output, excluding turf, which I do not think can properly be described as agricultural produce, again taking the base year 1938-39 as 100, in 1947 it was 97.1, and in 1949 it was 101.3 and rising.
I ask Deputies themselves to take down the copy of Stastistical Abstract which they themselves have received and let them themselves read Tables 53, 54, 55 and 56, and ask themselves, having read these tables, whether the Minister for Finance has truthfully reproduced for them the facts or has he sought to mislead them into the madness of reversing the present trend of economic development in this country and deliberately embarking on a deflationary spiral which, if we once get involved in it, may lead us not only to economic but to political disaster as well. Let us face it. Fifty years ago, simple people were prepared to accept as something analogous to an Act of God the hardships and suffering and misery brought down on their heads by manipulators of money, who were primarily concerned to maintain the value of their monetary savings and fortunes. The mass of our people will not stand for that now, and God forbid that they should. The wealth of this country should have upon it as its first charge a decent, moderate standard of living for all our people, with any subsequent available surplus as the reward for superior exertion or ability. But no civilised people in the world will accept the doctrine that they are to be made poor, that they are to be condemned to destitution, so that those who possess riches may be confirmed in their title.
The Minister for Finance to-day said that he wanted to deal with the adequacy of the Budget, and that it was manifest that no provision had been made for the charges that would come in course of payment in this financial year under the Budget presented by Deputy McGilligan as Minister for Finance. I propose to traverse that statement in detail. There is full provision made for every charge that can come in course of payment for the financial year for which that Budget is designed under the proposals made by Deputy McGilligan to this House when he was Minister for Finance.
Do not forget that it is only three and a half short years since there was an emergency Budget in this House, designed to raise £7,000,000 sterling additional revenue, and that within three months of coming into office the Government that succeeded Fianna Fáil removed every one of these taxes, raised old age pensions and extended social services substantially. We are now faced with a proposal by Fianna Fáil to repeat in 1951 exactly the same folly as that which they embarked upon in 1947. Providentially, the Supplementary Budget of 1947 was followed by the General Election of 1948 and instead of having had four harsh, difficult and trying years we have had three and a half years of the greatest period of expansion in industry and agriculture that this country has ever known. Do not forget that if you measure the condition of our society by the barometer of population you will find that for the first time in a century, since 1847, the population trend of this country changed last year. Study the population index for 100 years and it will be seen that in every quinquennial census that was taken the population had declined. For the first time in a century, at the last enumeration the population of this Irish Republic has risen.
The Minister for Agriculture purported on his Estimate to give statistical information relating to live stock in this country. He did not tell the House that in that comparison he was either comparing figures 12 months old with figures two years old or he was comparing January estimates with June enumeration. The live stock of this country are enumerated once a year, in June. There is a spot check in January and estimates are made on that spot check. The Minister for Agriculture has not got the June figures yet, but he realised there were sufficient Deputies in this House who would not appreciate that finesse in statistics and he purported to compare like with unlike. I challenge him to produce the June figures when he gets them—for these matters have been proceeding under my hand for three years and I know their trend. I have not seen them. Nobody has seen them. Let the Minister produce them. I will stand or fall on the policy of our Government by what those figures show—and no living man has seen them yet because they are not completed.
The Minister for Finance says to-day that two of the things he is concerned to deal with are the unwieldy capital programme and the balance of trade. Nine months ago the Government of which I was a member surveyed the scene, consequent on months of work, to estimate the position of this country in respect of raw materials and essential supplies. The Government gave a direction—and I challenge the Minister for Finance to deny this, for he has it on the record—to every Department of State, to every local authority and to every man in business to survey his resources and to lay in for our people from 12 months' to two years' supplies, with the injunction that that was not a precept to be belled abroad—for when you are going into a market to buy scarce materials you do not want to proclaim that you are buying under instructions to accumulate a certain good quantity, whatever the cost. But unless we were to face the possibility of widespread unemployment, with a variety of other social evils, we knew it was the duty of the executive authority of this country itself to bespeak supplies and to facilitate all others who could effectively collaborate to that end— and we did it. We directed everybody to throw our balance of trade into glaring disequilibrium so that we would have the stuff. I personally got from the Government authority over and above the ordinary trade channels to go out and buy 100,000 tons of superphospate of lime and bring it in. It has never been done before. Is there no Deputy in this House to discern the fact that, if the Minister for Agriculture was given unprecedented authority to go into the market himself to buy essential raw materials, that was a pretty fair index of the policy the Government was most deliberately following?
Of course, the balance of our trade has been deliberately disrupted in the last 12 months because we wanted to disrupt it. If we had not so disrupted it the goods we had to have would not now be there. The United States of America has set up a vast organisation for no other purpose than to stockpile. The Lord Privy Seal of the British Government has been charged with no other task but to stockpile. The French Government, the Belgian Government, the Dutch Government, the Danish Government and the Swedish Government were all charged to stockpile. Into that maelstrom of scarcity the Irish Government had to move, not disposing of the resources of countries like Great Britain and the United States of America and not disposing of the resources of many wealthy countries with colonial possessions and eagerly sought goods which they could offer as an inducement; we had nothing to offer except money, and mainly sterling at that.
Are we to be rebuked for what we then got for our people, and they are in the country now, the supplies that Fianna Fáil most confidently prophesied 18 months ago we would find ourselves unable to get? Do not the Deputies themselves remember yelling from these benches, where they then sat, that we were going to be left short of all sorts of essential materials? Do they not remember glorying in the fact that the inter-Party Government was going to be caught short? Were they such fools as not to realise that the only reason why we could not blast them out of the way with the facts was because to put the facts on the records was to destroy the opportunity that we were charged to exploit on behalf of the people? What tripe is this the Minister talks about consumer goods? He knows, he must know, that the character of our imports has been under strict and critical review for the last six months lest in the programme of stockpiling there might have been an unauthorised and improvident spending spree on nylons or Dutch jam, or rubbish of that kind.