The Vote on Account has always provided an opportunity for review of Government policy generally. Both through the Budget and the Vote on Account we have been able to get some picture as to the direction in which Government policy is moving because both the Budget and the Vote on Account can be used as instruments of national policy and of national economic development. It should be possible for one to see, through the Budget and the Vote on Account, a clear picture as to the direction in which the State is moving. I propose to look on the Vote on Account from that standpoint and to refer to some aspects of our national activities especially in the light of promises made by this Government as to how they would apply their energies and talents towards solving our problems in the economic field.
During the last general election, I remember saying that I would stake my political future on a belief that if Fianna Fáil got back to office the first thing they would do would be to abolish the remainder of the food subsidies. I made that statement in public; it was reported in the Press and heard by many people not of my political views, but the moment it was made the present Minister for Justice, the present Taoiseach and the former Taoiseach not only repudiated the suggestion that Fianna Fáil would do anything so perfidious but they asked the rhetorical question: did I think they were so stupid as to do anything of the kind? I quoted that speech in this House before and there is no use in building a monument to the denial any higher than it is in the official records at present.
In any case, the promise was that Fianna Fáil would control prices and maintain food subsidies and a positive assurance was given by people occupying Ministerial posts and by the present President that, even if they thought of doing it, it was a bad thought and that Fianna Fáil were not so politically foolhardy as to contemplate doing any such thing. Therefore, one was entitled to feel that was a promise made to the electorate at that time. It was on the basis of that promise, plus others to which we shall come later, that this Government was elected. What has happened in the meantime to keep the promise? Let us see in what way the Government has implemented the promise that they would not abolish the food subsidies, then amounting to £9 million, and that they would control the cost of living.
One of the first things they did was to abolish about 150 price control orders which had been imposed by the previous Government to keep prices down and to protect the interests of the consumer. One hundred and fifty of these were wiped out virtually overnight. In their first Budget, subsidies on bread, flour and butter were abolished and there are now no subsidies on these commodities. The Government put £9 million into their pockets which was previously utilised to control these essential commodities. There is now only a subsidy on one of these commodities but it is not for the Irish people; it is for the British people that we are now heavily subsidising the export of butter and we are selling it in Britain much cheaper than here although, of course, we could have continued to subsidise butter here. We abolished the subsidy here and continued it on the butter that we export to Britain.
Look at the index figure movements since 1957. In mid-February, 1957 the cost of living index figure was 135; in mid-February, 1961 it has moved up to 149; in other words, an increase of 14 points in the past four years. That fourteen points has meant for a large number of people—the small farmer, the person on static rates of income, the self-employed person, a large mass of unorganised people—a debased standard of living because they have no elastic method by which they can adjust their incomes in order to compensate for the rise in prices nor have they any economic strength such as trade unions have to compel better remuneration in order to protect and compensate them for rising prices.
The result of this increase of 14 points in the cost of living has been that the country has been faced— inevitably and properly—with demands by trade unions for increased wages because if you permit the cost of living to rise, or deliberately direct it to rise by Government action, the obvious corollary to that is that you must pay compensation to those affected by your action. Compensation was denied to a very large number of people but the trade unions have been able to get some compensation for the rise in prices, though it is true to say today that a very large section of the community are enjoying a standard of living which is substantially lower than they enjoyed in 1938 and that their remuneration today, allowing for the increase in the cost of living, is in fact less than it was in 1938.
If one looks at comparisons with other countries in OEEC, we find that so far as this country is concerned, it is pretty high up among the list of countries where the cost of living has risen substantially. Many other countries in Europe have been able to maintain price levels lower than we have. Many of them have been able to hold their cost-of-living index figure at a lower level than we have been able to achieve. Proof of that is to be found in an examination of the cost-of-living consumer index in which you find that out of the 200 items comprising the index, the price of over 150 commodities has increased in the past four years. The biggest blow of all is, of course, the deliberate action of the Government in increasing the price of bread, butter and flour, the staple foodstuffs of large masses of our people, large masses which have suffered heavily by the decision of the Government to repudiate the promise which they gave at the last election.
I want to pass from that now to the subject of emigration. No subject looms larger in public discussion and in the Press than emigration does. At a meeting in Galway recently, the Taoiseach felt compelled to refer to emigration in these words:
Emigration will always be with us. There will always be young men and women who will answer the call of adventure, who will want to see the world. But the problem of to-day, as it has been for so many years, is that too many of our young men and women are forced to emigrate to get a living.
He went on to suggest a possible remedy:
Wage standards here will have to be raised in our industries to be more or less comparable with those in neighbouring Great Britain. Living standards for the men working in agriculture will have to be brought in line with those obtainable by men working in factories.
I suggest that is a clear indication by the Taoiseach that he realises that the problem of emigration will not be solved by relying on our present methods or by patriotic appeals to people to stay at home, if staying at home means regular visits, week after week and month after month, to the employment exchange or running the hazard of intermittent employment at reduced wages which do not provide an answer to the ever-present economic wolf at the door.
That is not the only reference to emigration we have had during the past year. Many members of the Hierarchy have been compelled by the facts which they have witnessed with their own eyes to refer to emigration as sapping the moral fibre of our people and calling into question the ability of the country to maintain its independence and the viability of its economy. These members of the Hierarchy refer to the fact that parishes are denuded, that priests have had to be withdrawn from parishes because of the extent of emigration. In certain areas the Garda Síochána have been reduced in numbers because of emigration. Whole families are leaving the country. Homesteads are locked up and families are drifting elsewhere in search of the livelihood they are unable to get here.
We have seen newspaper articles day after day and week after week referring to the suppurating wound of emigration and the havoc it is wreaking not only on our population and our economic development but also on the very existence of the nation; it is challenging the very existence of the nation to remain as a cohesive, independent unit. We had the extent of the problem measured recently in a report of the British Overseas Emigration Board. It was stated in that report that the national insurance data showed that of the total of 170,000 immigrants from all sources over 64,000 were from the Republic in 1959; in 1958 the figure was 58,000.
We gave to British immigration statistics 64,000 souls in 1959 as against 58,000 in 1958. From independent Commonwealth countries there were 35,000 immigrants; from the British colonies there were 30,000 immigrants; from all foreign countries 45,000 immigrants. The picture we have is of the British Commonwealth providing 35,000 immigrants, the British colonies providing 30,000, the rest of the world 45,000, while we provided no fewer than 64,000, as if we suffered here from a problem of excess population or a problem of living space in either a physical or economic sense. The report states that these figures do not include nonworking dependants. The figure may have been much higher than the figure given for adults alone.
Let us look at the matter from another angle. I asked a Question recently to ascertain the number of Irish-born residents in Great Britain at the latest date for which the information was available. The information given to me was the result of the British census of population in 1951— ten years ago. At that time there were 517,000 Irish people from the Republic living in Great Britain. There were another 178,000 from the Six Counties. There were 20,000-odd from Ireland whose origin, so far as nativity is concerned, could not be classified. That was ten years ago. Members of this House have lived through the past ten years and they know the extent of the tidal wave of emigration. If we add our emigration figures to the 517,000 Irish people, born in Ireland but living in Britain in 1951 the fact must be that approximately 1,000,000 of our people, born in the Twenty-six Counties, are living in Britain to-day, or more than one-third of our entire population. It is because of that, as well as other things, that we get the figures we have now where population is concerned.
I asked a Question recently directed towards ascertaining the population at the last census taken in 1956 and the estimated population since then. The figures are interesting. In April, 1956, we had a population of 2,898,000. The estimated population in April, 1957, showed a drop to 2,885,000. In 1958, it dropped to 2,853,000; in 1959, to 2,846,000; and in 1960, to 2,834,000. In other words, between April, 1956, and April, 1960, we lost 64,000 of our population. But that is not all. We lost as well the entire natural increase in population, which during the past five years amounted to approximately 28,000 persons per year. Therefore, if you want to make the calculation, you make it on the basis that we have lost 64,000 on our net population figure, plus the entire loss of the natural increase in population.
If we take the census figure in April, 1951, for this portion of the country, when there were 2,961,000 persons, and compare it with the present figure of 2,834,000, we have lost in the 10 years 127,000 of our population, plus the entire natural increase in population, about 27,000 or 28,000, for each year of the 10 years.
Can anybody find a more depressing, a bleaker or less heartening picture than these figures reveal? What I cannot understand—and I do not profess to be able to plumb the mentality responsible for it—is why, in the face of this catastrophic fall in our population and this catastrophic loss of the natural increase in population, we got from the Fianna Fáil Party a pamphlet published in Cork during the last election in which it was stated:
Quick action is needed to avert national disaster... The present spate of emigration is the most serious problem now facing the nation. The recent census report has shown that the situation must be righted quickly if disaster is to be avoided. In contrast to the inaction of the present Coalition, Fianna Fáil have been preparing plans for the day when the Party will again take up the reins of Government.
The pamphlet goes on:
The full employment proposals recently announced by Fianna Fáil show how the Party intend to deal with the problem of emigration by providing work for our own people at home.
These words were then added in heavy type:
The Fianna Fáil plan proposes an increase over five years in the number of new jobs by 100,000. This would result in full employment and the end of abnormal emigration.
There is the promise. There is the Fianna Fáil special Cork plan for ending emigration and providing 100,000 new jobs. With the 100,000 new jobs you would have an end to emigration and everything in the garden would be lovely. Four years ago last month this Government commanded a very substantial majority in this House and have had that majority ever since. So far as its Parliamentary strength is concerned, there is not the slightest impediment to the Government implementing the plan to provide the 100,000 new jobs and thus end emigration.
But what is the position? As far as emigration is concerned we have now reached the lowest level of population this country ever had, notwithstanding the Fianna Fáil promise to end emigration. When that promise was made we had 2,885,000 people. Twelve months ago it had fallen by 64,000 plus the natural increase in the population. So much for curing emigration. I see no evidence, nor has anybody been able to direct me to evidence, of the provision of 100,000 new jobs. I know that the Minister for Transport and Power, when he gets loose at week-ends, can flood the country and the newspapers with statistics. Every time I look at his statistics I am reminded of a comptometer machine out of order. He grinds out the most crazy statistics, all to suit the particular toy with which he is playing at the time. But when we come to the more important statistics we will see how the Minister for Transport and Power will explain them with his calculating machine efforts. I would advise him to tell us what has gone wrong with the plan to provide 100,000 new jobs promised in Cork in 1957. So far, it has not been perceived by anybody, not even by the authors of the plan itself.
The Taoiseach said in his speech at Galway, and it has been said by many other people who have given the problem close study, that the fundamental cause of emigration is economic. Husbands simply do not abandon their wives and children and go to live in "digs," sometimes pretty poor "digs," in the built-up areas of Britain merely for the sake of getting to see what these overcrowded places are like; nor do they relish the prospect of keeping two homes just to see what it is like to be paying a landlady for inadequate comforts and plenty of discomfort in other lands. They are driven in the main by economic considerations. So long as economic considerations are the basis and the stimulus behind our emigration, we have got to find a remedy for it; and the only way it can be found is by providing work for our people at home and by raising living standards here so that the living standards of other countries do not provide too irresistible an attraction for many of our people who do not enjoy these living standards at home.
If we are to provide work and improve living standards, that means the development of our resources under every head. I am glad, of course, that in the past we have spent such large sums of money on houses. I believe that has yielded a substantial dividend in human happiness and has paid a good social dividend to the nation as well, while at the same time providing valuable employment, particularly in periods when no other employment was available. I am glad we built more hospitals, more sanatoria and that, generally speaking, we have spent considerable sums of money in the development of that side of the national estate, bringing with it, I think, dividends of a social character which have improved the health of the nation and which have made a very big contribution towards raising the standard of living of our people.
But I think we have reached a stage now in which, apart from that kind of work, valuable though it may be and desirable though it is that it should go on, we have got to search for schemes of development which can be tested and judged against the background of the work these schemes will provide and the conditions which it is possible to provide for those employed on them. If we are to do that, we have got to look, in the main, to our two sources of activity, agriculture and industry, perhaps with the development of State enterprises in various other fields into which the private entrepreneur is not prepared to go because he is unable to see the future in a reassuring way.
Let us turn to agriculture. I heard Deputies on the benches on my left say that agriculture provided the best source of offering additional employment to our people. A big question mark has to be put there. Many question marks have to be put there if you think agriculture will provide a substantial improvement in employment in the near future. I frankly do not think it will. I think the statistics will show to the contrary.
In this country 40 per cent. of our people are employed in agriculture or as near to 40 as does not matter—38½ per cent. That is, four out of every ten people are employed in agriculture. Agriculture plays a predominant part in our whole national development, our national life and our national activity. We tend to see things, inevitably, through agricultural spectacles because, as I have said, four out of every ten people you meet are engaged in agriculture whereas less than three out of ten are engaged in industry. It is inevitable, therefore, that agriculture will play an important part in the nation's development.
In Britain, only five per cent. of the people are engaged in agriculture, as against 40 per cent. here. From that, one can get a picture of the contrasting systems in the two countries. In Denmark, our biggest rival in the agricultural-dairying field, approximately 23 per cent. of the people are engaged in agriculture. If you take Denmark as a serious agricultural competitor on the one hand, if you take Britain which provides the market, and if you take this country competing on the British market against the Danes, you can see what our position is. We start with a situation in which we employ 40 per cent. of our people in agriculture, the Danes 23 per cent., the British only five per cent.
I read in the papers this morning some more statistics by the Minister for Transport and Power about the amount of carcass beef and other stuff that was exported to Britain and the increases were about 300 and 400 per cent. Of course, any simpleton, and only because he is a simpleton, can get figures like that. That is an insult to people's intelligence. If you start at zero and agree on a unit, if it is a penny and somebody gives you a penny a day for doing a job and at the end of a month you get tenpence a day for doing a job, you can say you have got a 1,000 per cent. increase but you have got only tenpence at the same time. Somebody ought to take the Minister for Transport and Power in hand or take that machine of his in hands and give us broad national statistics instead of the kind of angular things that he grinds out for his own edification.
Look at the facts in agriculture over a period and then you find the real situation. Between 1929 and 1959, a period of 30 years, a long swing, the output of agriculture has increased by approximately 12 per cent. Take 60 years as the normal span of human life. You find that agriculture increased by 24 per cent. during your lifetime. There is the monumental achievement in agriculture—a 12 per cent increase over 30 years. I do not believe there is a country in the world where agriculture has increased by a lesser percentage than that. If we produce beet to-day that we did not produce in 1929, well and good, that is so; take credit for that to-day, but we have lost large portions of land which have gone out of other crops. The net result is that over 30 years agriculture has increased by approximately 30 per cent. and employment in agriculture has fallen heavily and continues to fall.
The latest figures show that approximately 10,000 persons per year are leaving agriculture because there is no employment for them there. If that happens in a highly developed country such as Germany, America, Great Britain, they can find alternative employment in secondary industries, often in manufacturing the agricultural machines which have displaced them on the land, but when you displace 100 Irish workers on agricultural land because of the introduction of agricultural machinery you provide additional employment somewhere in England, or Germany, or America, in the manufacture of agricultural machinery. Our industrialisation is simply not able to take up annually the loss of employment in agriculture. It has never been able to do so. It is not able to do it to-day and there is no indication that it will be capable of doing it in the foreseeable future.
Is it any wonder that these people have left the land? In 1939 we had about 2,000 tractors. The horse, a familiar sight in the fields in those days, has been largely displaced by the tractor and to-day we have, not 2,000, but 40,000 tractors. One can see that they were not bought for the sake of driving around the farm. They were bought to cheapen production on the farm, to displace labour, and they have done that so effectively that on an average 10,000 persons leave agriculture every year. Mechanisation of agriculture is displacing the land worker. He is not going into the town or the city: he is going elsewhere because the towns and the cities have their own unemployment problems. He seeks a living where he knows there are vacant jobs. Indeed, to a very considerable extent that has happened even in the case of road-workers, who have been displaced by the introduction of foreign road-making machinery. Many of these workers who previously got a livelihood on the roads now look on while foreign-made machines do their work and displace them.
What we have to ask ourselves is the simple question: Can agriculture arrest this decline of 10,000 per year in the number employed in agriculture? So far, the answer has been "no" but if emigration is to be mitigated and ultimately arrested then agriculture must play its part although it would be a slowly effective part having regard to the problems to be dealt with. These problems in agriculture involve a reappraisal, perhaps, of our whole agricultural potential.
At one time it was thought that grass was the enemy of the Irish people. Bad grass can be the enemy of the Irish people as bad grass is the enemy of every people in the world but good grass can be an asset to the Irish people and to all peoples because good grass is the raw material of the livestock industry. What we have to do here is to concentrate on the production of better grass to give us better livestock and in that way get from the land greater wealth than we get from the neglected lands of our country to-day. But even the improvement in livestock and the improvement in grasslands will make no substantial contribution to the plight of the small farmer, and that is an unenviable plight today.
If he is to be helped, he has got to concentrate on products which will give him a good return, concentration on grass and livestock is beyond the area of land he has at his disposal and beyond his financial resources. He has got to concentrate on products which will give him a good return and because of that fact, I commend to the Government and to the nation the excellent work of the Irish Sugar Company in proposing to set up pilot plants for the production of fruit and vegetables for sale to the market of 50 million people which we have next door to us, people who are not capable of growing these products themselves and who have to import them from many parts of the world.
The small farmer has to be encouraged to remain in the production of milk and of pigs and pig products. It is these that will give him a better return than any other form of agricultural activity. All farmers, big, small or medium, have need of constant technical and scientific advice. It is necessary that our farming community should be able to pick the brains of the world so that they can apply to their own lands modern methods which have proved to give satisfaction elsewhere. Too much emphasis cannot be placed on the necessity of bringing to the aid of our farmers modern techniques and knowledge which will enable them to increase their production and to get the best possible value for what they produce.
I have been gratified, and I am sure that all of us have been gratified, by the growth of industrial production and the expansion in industrial exports. I do not think anyone will attempt to gainsay the fact that this impetus in industrial exports has been largely motivated by the tax concessions which are very substantial and attractive and a very generous contribution by the State and the people to those engaged in the production and export of industrial goods. These tax concessions have induced many people to go into the export market who would otherwise have left that market alone. The inviting of foreign investment and technical knowhow to this country is showing results, especially when it is linked with the facilities provided in the form of taxation reliefs on profits from exports.
There was a time when it was very unpopular to invite foreign manufacturers to come here and manufacture goods which we could not produce ourselves. Very many more than one member of the Fianna Fáil Party nearly had apoplexy when they heard of the idea. Now all these loves and hates are over, so far as that issue is concerned. Everybody now seems to have grown up to the realisation that if countries all over the world are satisfied to invite foreign investors to help them, there cannot be anything wrong in the idea of the dwindling Irish nation protecting itself against further annihilation by inviting foreign technicians and financial investors to come in. It is only a very few years since some people on the Government front bench said that inviting foreign investments to this country meant selling the Irish nation. The absurdity of all that must now be obvious to all and I do not want to cause blushes by quoting the names of the distinguished gentlemen who used language of that kind.
It is a good thing that many of our old firms have now gone into the export market and are showing a new enthusiasm for export. It is also a good thing that it is possible for them to share in the tax concession which has been made generously available by the people and the State to encourage the development of industry and the employment of more people in their own land. However, there are many who are still not availing of the export possibilities and there must be some deliberate, conscientious systematic drive to require those people who can produce goods to try to sell them in the export market. It is only in that way that we can hope to expand our industrial potential.
Our own home market is a small one but it is the home market price that very often helps the export of goods to outside markets. We have a small home market which, in numbers, is not any greater than that of many large cities in the world. It is on that home market that we have to base our exports. It will absorb a limited quantity of our goods, but we have to try, not only to find export markets for all the goods we produce, but markets which will buy our goods at rewarding prices and not simply take them because they carry substantial subsidies.
I now get back to what I said before by way of underlining the fact that, despite their commendable expansion, our industries are still incapable of taking each year the number of people leaving the land, to say nothing whatever of the 20,000 new jobs that are necessary to give employment to the outturn of our schools and colleges every year. So long as our industrial position is such that it can make no contribution to taking up the sag in employment, then, whether we like it or not, a solution for unemployment will be found in one way only—by way of emigration. Those who are not willing to emigrate are costing us substantial sums each year by way of the small allowances made available under the Social Services Act to people who are compelled to remain idle because of economic inertia.
A continuance of the industrial drive is vital and attention must also be directed to new methods of increasing grass lands and livestock and to new products in general. The twelve per cent. increase in our agricultural production in 30 years is appalling and more especially when you remember that we have a British market of over 50 million people at our doorstep. There are other fields of endeavour in which we can make a contribution towards the relief of unemployment. There is the development of our tourist industry, the development of our peat resources and electrical development. All these could play, and are playing, a useful part in the provision of employment at home and the development of the nation's resources.
What worries me in connection with all this is that while we discuss these problems at home and are not conspicuously successful in solving them, there has emerged in Europe two trade blocs, the E.E.C. representing the Six and the E.F.T.A. representing the Seven. We are members of neither bloc; we are among the undeveloped countries of Europe and we are numbered among the forgotten five of the O.E.E.C. bloc of countries.
My fear in connection with the development of these two large trading blocs is that it may seriously impact upon our development here. Britain is a member of the European Free Trade Association and in the course of time, by the repeal of tariffs, the other six countries there will be entitled to have their industrial goods, and maybe in time their agricultural goods, exported to Britain free of duty. If we get into the E.F.T.A. with the British or into the Six of which Britain is not a member now, we shall be compelled to repeal our tariffs, to reduce them proportionately.
Both these groups have decided to repeal their tariffs at the rate of ten per cent. per year. They may be prepared, in the case of an undeveloped country such as ours, to allow the repeal to take place at a lesser rate but, one way or the other, whether we repeal at the rate of ten per cent. a year or five per cent, a year, we will then be marching systematically towards a situation in which there will be complete free trade. If we are in a group with the British, whether it is the Six or the Seven, we must face the situation in which British goods and the goods of all their partners will be entitled to come into this country free of duty.
It may very well be that a firm like Guinness's could compete with them all. It may very well be that some of our older concerns engaging in indigenous activities might be able to compete but I am as certain as I am standing here that a very large number of our industries will not be able to compete against the highly mechanised, highly rationalised and highly capitalised countries which will form these trading blocs and that for these industries, which are not able to compete, there will be a rather dismal future. As the Taoiseach said recently, we must start dismantling our tariffs and many industries may have to close down.
That is a serious situation because once we are compelled to allow British goods in here free of duty—and that seems to be an essential and integral part of the Seven and the Six agreements so long as Britain is a member of it—unless we do something between now and the day we reach that stage, grievous harm will be done not only to our industries but to the prospects of our people being employed at home. All this might well kill, unless we are careful the way we tread, the possibilities of further development in the export market. I believe the development of both these groups separately will be serious for us and may prove to be fatal in some respects unless we can, as I think we should be able to do, get the British to recognise our special position as it was recognised under G.A.T.T. because of our proximity to Britain.
In this whole matter I take the view, not a Party view but a national view, that we are all together, because whatever happens by the wrongful development of these two blocs and because of any unprofitable association by us with either or both blocs, will impact upon every one of us. It will not just hit one Party or two Parties; it will hit the whole nation and give us problems that will not be solved for many a day if it does not completely destroy the possibility of maintaining the viability of the economy.
I said before in this House something that will bear saying again, that we ought to recognise that nobody owes us a living in the world; nobody cares how we get on in the day-to-day effort to maintain a balance and to maintain the nation's integrity. The world will expect us to help ourselves. It will not expect us to do nothing but blame the other fellow whoever he may now be. I do not think the world is in any mood either to understand or sympathise with us if we do not do the best we can for ourselves.
Much has been done. One may complain this has not been done and that has not been done which should have been done. Somebody once said that the best way to measure progress is not to look at how far more you have to go but to stand and look back at the distance you have come. If that test is applied to our efforts over the past 40 years, we will see what has been done in the field of housing, hospitals, sanatoria, roads, water, electricity, peat, air, shipping and other services. All that represents a very substantial achievement for our people or, indeed, for any people. However, we must recognise that the world has also moved on. We have done nothing that has shaken the world. We have done nothing better than the rest of the world; in fact, we have gone slower in many respects, particularly in industrial and agricultural development, than the rest of the world or even the rest of Europe.
If we are to maintain our stand and our association with Europe, not as a permanently undeveloped nation but as an equal partner in the European comity of nations, we must resort to ceaseless striving by our people to strengthen and develop our economic fabric. Frankly, I do not see today that we are taking the necessary steps to give that kind of aggressive leadership to our people which is so necessary to beget their goodwill and their enthusiasm. I see nothing happening, for example, to capture the enthusiasm of men and women, of adolescents in the small towns, in the villages or in the rural areas. Life for them just runs as it did 40 years ago. Their lives are just as bleak. Unemployment is a permanent resident with them; wages are low—inevitably low in the small, isolated communities. There are no industries and the small farms provide only a meagre living for the small farmer and practically no improvement in his standard of living.
If any Deputy cares to check that, let him go to any town in his constituency which has not got a new, attractive, and developing industry. He will find life there is as it was 40 years ago. The problems are the same as they were 40 years ago. The standard of living has not risen as it ought to have risen in the period of 40 years.
It is extremely difficult in these places to generate, capture and maintain any real enthusiasm among the people. I think there is scope for some kind of evangelist to galvanise these people into action on the basis that, unless the nation can work hard and utilise its energies to the fullest, there is a danger we shall slip back so rapidly that we shall lose touch with the pace of progress in the civilised world around us. Until we harness the enthusiasm of the small people in the small towns and villages, I am afraid we shall continue to have a substantial number of unemployed persons, emigration will continue and this day 10 years our population will be even lower than it is today. I regret if that should be the course of development. We are all in this together. The whole nation—and the Government has prime responsibility in this— ought to decide on some way in which we can avoid these rocks and try to get unity at least on the essentials on which we agree so that we will get a dividend in which the nation as a whole will share.
Notice taken that 20 Members were not present; House counted and 20 Members being present,
