The time has come for a factual and reasoned discussion, on the basis of the Second Reading of this Bill, of the economic approach of the Government as against the economic approach of the Opposition to the alleged current day problems. I hope, in the course of what I have to say, to take the main props of the case put by the Government and to shatter their foundations completely, and when concluding to offer what I consider to be a constructive and progressive method of dealing with the situation.
I start on the premise of accepting the case as made by the Government and of asking them which of the two legs of it they are standing on. We have gone through the painful experience in this country of seeing ministerial hysteria and Central Bank conservatism welding together, willy-nilly to arrest development. There is one patent fact in Ireland to-day on which there is no conflict, and that is that a complete wave of depression has hit the country. We have been sent here by the people to discharge, to the best of our ability, the responsibilities which they have placed on us and, therefore, we have to address our minds seriously to the cause and effect of the present situation, and, having done so in a deliberative and unimpassioned way, to try to arrive at a solution of it.
Now, it is perfectly true, and perfectly obvious to everybody, that the Government have been hoisted on their own petard. It is quite clear to everybody, even to the doughtiest and toughest of the hard core of Fianna Fáil support itself, that the Government have run themselves into a serious jam by their own hysteria. They have been caught in that position by their own verbosity, their lachrymose utterances and their own melancholic prognostications and have come back to choke themselves, and their only answer is a vindictive, a savage and a completely unwarranted attack on the unsuspecting ordinary citizen who, if he gave a mandate for anything at the last general election, gave it for a continuance of government in this country by anybody other than Fianna Fáil.
I am not going to digress on the niceties of the busted flush or on the manner in which they were acquired, but I want to state emphatically what I know to be true, and what the vast majority of the Irish people now realise is true, that we have a penal imposition put on the people of the country in this Finance Bill by a minority Government. I say deliberately and assertively by a minority Government. We, unfortunately, as a nation have to pay the penalty of having foisted back on this country as a Government people who have long outworn their usefulness and have long gone past the stage of giving any real service to the country.
The Minister for Finance comes into this House and, with his usual pert utterances, with usual playful, kittenish and adroit phrases, describes the inter-Party Government as a Party on a spree and as a Party of uninhibted spending. I postulate again specifically the question which I put when the General Resolution on the Budget was under discussion: Can the Minister for Finance, can any member of his Government, can any member of the extremely mute back benchers of his Party tell me that there is anything improper or wrong about the assertion that it is the duty of any Irish Government, no matter what Government it may be, to invest to the maximum possible extent that it can the resources of its own people in our own country for the benefit of the country? I want to ask the Minister for Finance in a pointed way: Can he describe to me why something that is regarded as being non-fallacious in normal business should become a fallacy in national business?
We had in this country a very large system of building societies. Under that system we encouraged the people to become the owners of their own houses on the basis of a limited deposit and of amortising the debt by the repayment of interest in capital over a period of 25 or 30 years. That system enabled the occupiers to meet their commitments and, in due course, to become the owners of their houses at the end of the period of the loan. By means of that combination of sinking fund and interest repayments, the houses become theirs without any attachment of debt. What initially might have seemed to be a wall of debt being built up, on the last payment being made becomes the occupier's clear, untrammelled property.
Apply the same principle to an investment of a national character, where the benefits are spread over a period far in excess of the period laid down for repayment. Whether it is the provision of a large regional sanatorium, long-term development in forestry, improvement of the quality of the land, what is wrong with the economic theory of treating the sum so invested in a project that will endure for the continued benefit of the people in the same way as we treat the purchase of a house by a private individual? There is nothing wrong in it. Everybody in the House knows that. When we talk about capital investment increasing the national debt, the Minister for Finance is being patently dishonest, because, at the close of the period over which the loan and sinking fund are repayable, there is no debt, but there is left a salient and positive feature either in bricks and mortar or in the improvement of the land, the value of which to our people will be untold. This is what was glibly and without due responsibility termed by the present Government when in opposition as putting the country in pawn.
There is nothing wrong or improper about an Irish Government facing a situation in which there is a serious deflationary tendency, using all the resources at hand to cushion the people by an improved standard of living and a better way of life against any rude shocks that may arise from that sudden deflationary tendency.
There is the kernel of difference and when the heat and abuse and the clash of personality are taken out of this discussion we come down to an analysis of the basic economic theory. I assert in a positive way that it is the duty of this country, even though we may be criticised for pledging the credit of posterity, to cushion the people against the shock of the day. Posterity, whose credit we are pledging, will be given the enduring benefit of that capital investment. I cannot see any reason why, in those circumstances, the load of cost and the burden of repayment should not be spread over those who will get positive benefits from the investment.
It is perfectly true that the complete intemperance and the ill-considered judgment of an Opposition, which never believed in their wildest dreams that they would be the Government again in any reasonable space of time, have driven them back into a situation where, for conservatism of thought and effort, they would outrival the early Victorians.
Countries are advancing. Nations are becoming more and more conscious of their general responsibility to the citizens. Where a situation threatens a country, where there is rising emigration, rising unemployment, disruption of the normal standard of life, it is the positive and bounden duty of a Government to seize time by the forelock and to ensure that it uses the national credits and resources to cushion the unfortunate people against that devastating and trade-destroying wave.
We have to analyse to-day the question as to what solution the Budget brings to our problems. I say positively that, far from being a solution, it will add immeasurably to our difficulties. What is the effect of penal taxes? What is the effect of increasing the price of bread, butter, tea and sugar? In what way will that encourage increased production in agriculture or industry? How does the Minister for Finance, with all his gymnastic capabilities, conceive that an Irish people earning less, taxed more, their larder raided to maintain services, will be able to produce more and, as the pièce de resistance, save an extra 10 per cent. of what is left?
Why not face stark reality? Why not face the issue as the ordinary man in the street sees it? Why give utterance to grandiose cross-talk as to external disinvestment and internal reinvestment, balance of payments or any other balance, when the crucial matter that faces us is the reaction of the man in the street, the ordinary worker, the small farmer, the ordinary middle-wage group to a situation in which the Government, with savage intensity, demands an extra price for bread, butter, tea and sugar and, in addition, imposes a varying degree of penal taxes?
It certainly will be a reaction that could not be described as being conducive to monumental effort. Where is the encouragement of the will to work? Where is the encouragement of the urge to increase production when some of our major agricultural problems remain unresolved, when industry in fact is damped down and when factories are closing and going on part time. You can kill the goose that lays the golden egg. You can overburden a willing people and the real basis of my quarrel with the Government on this Budget is that that is what they are doing. They budgeted to get a certain sum of money. Any Deputy, Government or otherwise, has only to walk from this House into his constituency to see the damage they have done, to see a people once geared up for a productive effort and a country expanding and urgently anxious to expand further, hit a body blow and staggering in uncertainty as to its future, but in the certainty of the incompetence and unnecessary harshness of the profligate Government which has been foisted upon them not by the votes of the people but for reasons of the political survival of certain individuals.
The issue is clear—whether it is the duty of a Government, instead of crushing people at their whim and caprice, to use every resource they have to help these people over whatever difficulties may lie ahead, because, fundamentally and in the final analysis, the problem of production and the problem of development come back to the individual citizens. What incentive to increased production, to increased efficiency at home, is the continued flight from the land and the continued overloading of the emigrant ship with boys and girls, going now in numbers greater than ever went before, to seek the necessaries of life elsewhere? What solution is that of our problem? Remember that the cumulative effect of this Budget has not yet been felt in all its naked reality, but already Deputies opposite, as well as Deputies here, are being pressed for references and for help in expediting—what? The flight of some young girl or boy out of this country. It is a tragedy for all of us that they go, because, once gone, it is not easy to get them back and our fundamental problem is bound up with the manpower and womanpower which we can put into production, be it agricultural or industrial.
The issue here is simple. This Budget has been attacked in a constructive way by the Leader of the Opposition. He has alleged something of which there has been no coherent repudiation. He has alleged that it deliberately conceals a budgetary arrangement for a surplus, to enable the Government to get by direct taxation the money necessary to keep our capital projects afloat. That is dishonesty to which I hate to see any Government being a party. I would much prefer to see a return of the onetime courage and progressiveness of Fianna Fáil as a young Party, to see them men enough to say: "We were wrong on the capital-issue; we were wrong on the question of capital investment at home, and we admit it. We will not bludgeon our people, but will you give us your support and help us in getting the savings of the Irish people for the purpose of development at home?" You would have got it from us without any restraint, and we could have saved the people these penal impositions, the real devastating, effects of which have yet to come.
I look back and can see vividly the faces of each different Fianna Fáil Deputy as there was unfolded the drastic story of the new taxation, and I can see in those countenances shock, frustration and abhorrence. They know as well as we know that this is something the Irish people do not want, and something which took them infinitely more by surprise than it took us, because we had known of the cavorting of the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance with the Chancellor of the Tory Government. We were able to read into the change in the tone of their speeches that the pattern had been cut for them. It was only for them to fill in the details.
We now know that they have been guilty of the incomprehensible sin of framing a Budget for Ireland, a creditor country with tremendous potentiality, on the same basis as that of one of the greatest debtor nations in the world, embroiled and entangled as it is in tremendous defensive commitments. In this country, none of these considerations obtrudes itself, and, as I said before, it is an extraordinary thing to see the wheel turn its full circle and to find that the people, who once condemned us as an Empire Party, as an over-conservative Party, outstripping us completely and dissipating completely for all time that illusion by their own solid proof of devotion to Foster Place and Thread-needle Street that must be very touching when they relate it to the continuous struggles of generations to wrest the country from their thrall. Sad, indeed, is it that a freedom so dearly won and so hazardously and frantically guarded can be destroyed by an indecent, filthy bargain, of which even the details cannot be disclosed to this House—an indecent union between a Tory Chancellor and a sans bowler hat, sans spats, sans umbrella Deputy Seán MacEntee, Minister for Finance, who might indeed be a ghoulish reincarnation of his Tory friend.
We come into this House arguing desperately and seriously for the survival of our own people, throwing down the challenge that is on the lips of every person throughout the length and breadth of this country—a challenge that meets the Fianna Fáil Party constantly on the retreat—that in a House, where a minority Government rules at the whim and caprice of Independents, they can go back to all their Ministers and ask them for a verdict. That is the cause of the indecent retreat and the reluctance that has now become apparent even in connection with by-elections. You know full well that the people do not consider this Government to have any real policy or any constructive, progressive theory for the development of Ireland for the Irish people.
On the Budget Resolution we had the wonderful, extraordinary statement of the Tánaiste that brought my mind back immediately to shades of Marie Antoinette, but a rather ghoulish reincarnation of that spirit in the present Tánaiste, who blatantly said to this House: "If butter will be dearer, jam will be cheaper; if bread will be dearer cakes will be cheaper." That statement came from a responsible Deputy Leader of the Government, when, in this Budget, they were cruelly raiding, with deliberate and positive intent, the larder of the working man, the labouring man, the poor, the aged, the widow, the orphan and the old age pensioner to complete the savage intensity of their unnecessary Budget.
Where is the argument or the logic to support such a case? We have Deputy Captain Peadar Cowan vociferously applauded and enthusiastically taken to the bosoms of some of the less experienced Fianna Fáil Deputies when he tried to cloak the Government's savagery and stupidity by casting slurs on the bounty of the United States of America. It serves us ill in this House to treat with contumely what was a magnificent gesture of generosity unparalleled in the history of democratic relationships between sovereign nations. The rotten, foul part of the slander is that it was done under the aegis of a gallant captain now with his army disbanded.
What can this little country, bewildered as it is under the shock and the bludgeoning effect of this Budget, think of a tottering Government with its rather unwholesome props? I do not wish to digress into personalities in regard to them. They have their responsibilities to the electorate, but there is one thing sure that they are wedded in a close union with the Government in their determination to avoid going to the people for a verdict. One thing emerges from this discussion and that is that this Government, with all the intensity that is in their power and with all the bargaining powers that are at their disposal, is going to avoid at all costs the verdict of the people because fear welds Deputies Dr. Browne, Dr. ffrench-O'Carroll, Cogan, Captain Peadar Cowan and each and every member of the Fianna Fáil Party, from the Taoiseach down to Deputy P. J. Burke, in an unholy and indecent union.
I want some responsible spokesman from the Government to tell us what is wrong—and that quickly—with the desire of a Government to use the available resources of its own people for improved housing condition, hospitalisation, land, facilities by way of Electricity Supply Board and water schemes for the Irish farmer and the Irish people? What is wrong with that type of investment, giving as it does employment and improved social conditions to the Irish people? What is right with your miserable half of 1 per cent. for the £400,000,000 invested in England and loaned to the people of England at a rate far below the rate we can offer to our own people at home?
Deputy Traynor, the Minister for Defence, came here yesterday to make a defence for the increase in the bank rate of interest. You are fooling no one, not even yourselves. That is dictated to you and forced on you by people over whom you have no control. You are aided and abetted, encouraged and helped by the melancholy and doleful Central Bank, who have forced you to say to the Irish people: "You are eating too much; you are living too well; you are dressing too well; you are too happy and we will damp down on that."
You should be ashamed of yourselves for denying to a progressive Irish people the right to progress, to develop, to march onwards to greater production, greater stability and the better standard of life which is within the reach and potential of our people with progressive intelligent planning. No, the vicious, tortured spite of people who seek only to discredit, whether right or wrong, the efforts of their predecessors is twisting now in your own very entrails because, whether you like it or not, whether you want it or not, before this year finishes, we will have you back to your masters. We are very confident, very sure that we will remove for all time the possibility of having foisted upon Irish public life an incubus of disillusioned, tired, over-conservative old men. Where is the future for this country? It lies in a very simple hypothesis, it lies in the return to the Government of the country of courage and vision, courage sufficient where the needs of the country demand it to brush away the conservative whispers of caution of the Department of Finance and the extolling of gloom by the Central Bank, the courage to reassert belief in the strength of the Irish people themselves, in their will to progress and in their capacity to make the country produce more and make a better State for us all. We urge greater production upon the farmers of the country, slashing the prices, as we did of barley; we urge greater production at a time when we are leaving unsolved one of the primary basic problems of our whole agricultural system: the survival or otherwise of our dairying industry.
Platitudes have been uttered by Ministers, each Minister careful to talk about any Department but his own. We talk of greater production to the Irish farming community then one of the first impacts of the Budget will be on local charges by way of a tremendous increase in maintenance charges in certain institutions. We tell the farmer to produce more while we crush him down a little more. Where is the sanity of that? Where is buoyancy of revenue to be found? It is to be found in encouraging people to do more by getting their willing cooperation, and as they earn more, as their standard of life improves, as the production from each holding becomes greater, then their increased prosperity will give us the opportunity to collect equitably and fairly the taxes necessary to run the State.
This Finance Bill will give effect to the budgetary proposals. The main portion of the money raised will be used for services, a large portion on the administrative cost of the Civil Service, a very worthy body but, I venture to suggest, a very unwieldy one, one which seems to have the capacity of ever increasing, not only in cost but in size. May I draw the attention of this Government, as I drew the attention of the last, to the increasing incubus that is on the revenue? I have no quarrel with the efficiency and capability of the service but I feel that if we ask everybody else to tighten their belts and to make a little more effort we can reduce the administrative cost of the State by getting a little extra from officers in the Civil Service, thereby reducing the necessary intake every year. It will have to stop somewhere or we will arrive at the grotesque position of being a minority group of people surrounded by a large wall of civil servants. That is a problem which I feel the service wants tackled because I think that there are many officers who would like more to do and who, having been given more work, would be entitled to a better remuneration.
