I cannot embark on the general discussion of the Business before the House today without saying a word with reference to the tragic matter of which the Taoiseach has just spoken. The special circumstances of the tragedy surrounding the passing of our colleague has, I think, moved us all most deeply. None of us would wish to embark on the Business of this day without reiterating what the Taoiseach has just said and expressing in very special measure our sympathy with the widow and family of Dr. Humphreys and affirming our deep grief at the tragic passing of one who was a colleague of us all.
In the concluding words of his Budget Statement, the Minister for Finance invited us to contemplate his records during the past four years and to pass judgment upon them. I think it a fair test of any man's policy or any Government's policy to ask yourself not what have their intentions been but what have been the results of their activities. I accept that test.
I note that the Government have a unique and unprecedented capacity for talking themselves into a state of euphoria designed by the quotation of endless statistics to persuade themselves that everything is lovely in the garden and that all sections of the community are as happy as larks and as prosperous as the day is long. I wish I could agree with him that that is so from my observation and my knowledge of the circumstances in which my neighbours are living.
It is true, and it is something for which we have every reason to rejoice, that some stimulus has been given to our industrial exports in the past three or four years. When we come to examine those exports, we find that the increase consists very largely of the additional output of the copper mines in Avoca, of the oil refinery and of the increased exports of established industries of this country which have substantially been evoked by the policy of tax concession on exports inaugurated in the Finance Act, 1956. Even the turf briquette factories inaugurated in 1956 by the inter-Party Government have made their modest contribution.
However, to speak of these things, gratifying though they may be, and to forget that there is a thousand million pounds of our national wealth invested in the agricultural industry, in the land and the people who live upon it, and that that industry maintains 350,000 families, or did so before the catastrophe of emigration struck the small farmers of this country, is in my judgment economic and social insanity.
I propose to suggest to the House to-day that, examining the present Minister's record even in the past four years, not to speak of his rather remote record in the tragic days when he was Minister for Agriculture, the consequences for the fundamental industry of this country have been little short of catastrophic.
It has never been the practice of Fianna Fáil to furnish us with one Budget. Their consistent practice, and perhaps it is good politics but it is certainly not good economics, has been to provide us with a Budget but to supplement that by a series of other charges which operate to remove from the annual Budget a portion of the taxation which the people have to bear. Looking back over the four years of the present Minister's financial administration, I want to remind the House of the facts. In this year in which we are speaking, the fact is that over and above the Budget which we have now to consider, we have also provided that, through the Social Welfare Acts, the employees of this country have to pay £2 million per annum extra for their insurance stamps and the employers have to find as much more, an amount of £4 million per annum in addition to the taxation provided in the Budget.
But if we look back over the whole four year period, the facts are that, since 1957, this Government have put upon the people of this country £9 million for the cost of their food when they removed the food subsidies in 1957. In three separate stages, they have added £3 million per annum to the cost of the tobacco consumed by our people. They have put £750,000 extra taxation on the price of beer for those who consume it. They have put a million pounds in extra taxation on petrol. They have increased postal charges. They have increased E.S.B. charges. They have increased transport charges, both for passengers and goods and the rates payable on rateable property in this country have increased by £3½ million over the same period.
The Minister for Finance, in his concluding observation, states: "despite the removal of the food subsidies wage and salary earners are now immeasurably better off than they were and the position of the social assistance groups has been improved." Without accepting that proposition for one moment, I want to invite the House to consider that there is one striking omission from that phrase. There is a reference to the wage and salary earner, to the social assistance group, but there is no reference to the 350,000 families who live upon the land. Bearing in mind the fact that of those families a very substantial number live in Monaghan, Cavan, Donegal and the province of Connaught and the counties of south west Munster and that 90 per cent. of the farmers living there are self-employed, they have had to meet their full share of all the charges which I have described as having come in course of payment since the present Minister took office and they are being asked to meet them all today from a smaller income than they had in 1957.
The consequence of that impossible demand that is being put upon these people is visible for all to see. In hundreds of small farms throughout this country, the padlock is going on the door. The farmer and his family are emigrating from the land and this country is not only the poorer by one family irrevocably gone but economically the land that family left has virtually gone out of production when it is set in conacre and left for three or four thin store cattle to graze on.
I warn this House that there is a social revolution taking place over a large part of this country which I do not believe any sane citizen of this country would desire. I am not at all sure that the Taoiseach does not desire it. I believe that there are elements in the Fianna Fáil Party who have made up their minds that the time has come to get rid of the small farmer. The small farmers of this country are becoming the kulaks of Ireland. If that is the purpose of the Fianna Fáil Party, they ought to stop and ask themselves what the consequences will be.
It is not a new idea. Lord Lucan had that idea in 1840 and the people of Castlebar and West Mayo fought him with their bare hands. There are few living in Mayo who do not remember the story of the Christmas Eve when the master of the workhouse in Castlebar sent a message to the sheriff's bailiff to stop knocking down houses on the Lucan estate because there was no more room in the workhouse for man, woman or child. That gives a picture of Lord Lucan as a brutal, cold and inconsiderate man. I do not believe he was. He had the idea that the small farmer was an anachronism and that the right way to deal with the situation in the West of Ireland was to clear him off the land, to reorganise the farms into large blocs, to bring in Scottish managers and to allow the tenants to return as paid employees to work on the large farms.
If we are to talk in nothing but terms of statistics and production, pounds, shillings and pence, there may be strong economic arguments for that position, but what I suggest to this House is that, in a human society, there ought to be other considerations than cold figures and a complete preoccupation with production. If we are to accept, as the end of all human life, maximum production, then we had better make up our minds to the fact that we have been outstripped long ago by the insect world. The bees can leave us trotting after them. They live to produce—they have no other function.
It is a chastening thought to remember that, when the bees have done their best, somebody comes and takes their production from them, and their only destiny in life is to start all over again. I do not believe that is the destiny of the small farmers of this country. I believe their way of life has a value to our society. I believe a property-owning agricultural community is a far safer foundation for a Christian society in this day in which we live than a discontented proletariat living under an oligarchy of men who grow progressively richer and richer as their servants get poorer and poorer.
The time is coming when we will have to make up our minds which objective are we going to work towards. The present progress is towards the liquidation of the small farmers of Ireland. I think that is a deplorable trend. I think that unless this House wakes up to whither it is going, we may go so far as to find our course of conduct irreversible. If that should ever transpire, it would be a great disaster for us all. I do not want Deputies to imagine that these are apprehensions born of a too lively imagination. I want to sustain them from the cold print of the economic statistics issued prior to the Budget of 1961, compiled not by a poet or by a dreamer but by the Central Statistics Office. Anything more remote from human feeling it would be very hard to find. I speak of the body as a corporate entity and not with reference to the individuals who constitute its personnel and who know as much about the country as anyone else amongst us.
On page 11 of the publication to which I have referred reference is made to national income and expenditure. Bear in mind the farmers represent 350,000 families with an investment of £1,000,000,000 of our national wealth. This paragraph, dealing with national income, has it to tell:
Preliminary estimates indicate that, in current terms, national income increased by about 5 per cent. from £502 million in 1959 to £528 million in 1960.
Mark the words that follow:
The greater part of the increase of £26 million took the form of increased employee remuneration which accounted for £17 million. About £4 million represented increased income of farmers and their relatives and £4 million went to other domestic categories.
I think it is dramatic enough to realise that out of an estimated increase of £26,000,000 of national income, agriculture, the greatest industry in the State, employing more people than any other individual industry, had £4,000,000 as their share.
Further down on the same page we read:
All domestic sectors showed increased income in 1960, but the increase was greatest in the industrial sector, in which the total income was £11 million, or 8 per cent. higher than in 1959. Moderate increases also occurred in distribution and transport, public administration and defence and other domestic sectors. Agricultural income...which had shown a partial recovery in 1959... increased by about £5 million to £129 million, which is only slightly below the level reached in 1957.
Mark those words—"which is only slightly below the level reached in 1957." These are the people who must pay their share of the £9,000,000 which was put upon their food, the £3,000,000 per annum put upon their tobacco, the £¾ million if they drank beer, the appropriate part of the charge for petrol, postal charges, E.S.B. charges, plus £3,500,000 in rates per annum. Well may the Minister for Finance comfort his heart that all other sections of the community have had their incomes adjusted to help them bear their share of the burden, but agricultural income, including salaries and wages, is slightly below the level reached in 1957.
It fills me with astonishment that nobody in this House in the Fianna Fáil benches has the courage to get up and call upon his own leader to face that situation and correct it before irretrievable damage is done. So long as I am here, and so long as this Party is here, we will continue to protest with all the emphasis we can command against the liquidation of the small farmers of Ireland. We will continue to protest against their being called upon to bear burdens that no other section of the community has ever been asked to bear. We will continue to protest against their being asked to bear burdens alone which other organised sections have indignantly refused to bear without a corresponding adjustment in income.
I thought at one time that it was possible that Fianna Fáil, stumbling into this dilemma, forgot that, when these immense additional burdens were being piled on, it was not enough to adjust wages and salaries; it was not enough to correct, even to a limited degree, the social service payments reserved for the unemployed, old age pensioners and others, inadequate as these adjustments were. None of these adjustments gave any relief whatever to the small farmer working for himself with the help of his family, and compelled to pay all—the small farmer who, in 1960, finds himself with an income slightly less than that which he enjoyed in 1957. That alone, in my judgment, constitutes a sufficient indictment of the Minister's four year record as Minister for Finance.
I want to examine now the euphoria in other sectors that he seeks to create. I remember—and the Taoiseach cannot blame us for recalling—that when the Taoiseach was deputy-leader of the Opposition, he undertook to our people that, if given the opportunity, he had a plan which, over a period of years, four or five years, would provide 100,000 new jobs. That promise was made early in 1956 or towards the end of 1955. When he made that promise, there were 1,163,000 persons employed in Ireland. Four years later, there are 51,000 fewer persons employed in Ireland. I do not want anyone to take those figures from me; I invite them to consult page 27 and page 22 of the economic statistics to which I have already referred and in the Tables appearing on those pages, they will find the figures of which I speak.
Many Deputies imagine, however, that if they could confine themselves exclusively to the industrial sector, they would have a more striking tale to tell. If we were to accept all the protestations of Fianna Fáil at face value, who could blame their followers for believing that some marvellous revolution had taken place in that sector of our economy but if these Deputies will turn to Table 16 of the same economic statistics, they will find that in manufacturing industry, 191,000 persons were employed in 1955, and that five years later, the number employed in manufacturing industry is 190,000—1,000 fewer than were working here six years ago. The total employment in all branches of nonagricultural economic activity—which includes mining, quarrying, turf production, manufacturing, construction, commerce, insurance and finance, transport and communication, public administration and defence, electricity, gas and water, and other economic activity—was 726,000 in 1955 and in 1960, it was 699,000.
There is one field which, on superficial examination, appears to be highly satisfactory, that is, the number of persons on the register of unemployed. That has gone down steeply but read that in the context of an emigration during the past four years of 200,000 boys and girls between the ages of 18 and 25. Does anybody in this House want to see the unemployment position resolved by shipping our people abroad to get work in Birmingham, Bootle and Manchester, so that their names can be removed from the register of unemployed in Ireland and the Fianna Fáil Party can triumph in this dramatic solution of the unemployment problem?
Oliver Cromwell could have made that boast in his day when he drove our people "to hell or to Connaught." He could have gloried in the fact that the register of unemployed in Leinster had shown a most dramatic improvement but I do not believe anybody in this country would share his triumph. They regarded that as a tragic event in our history, but at least that amounted simply to a transfer of some of our people from the rich part to the poor part of Ireland. This operation represents the transfer of our people from our towns and cities and rural homes to one or two-roomed tenements in industrial cities where living may be more remunerative in terms of cash received, but anyone who suffered the shock I suffered when I saw a programme called "Probation Officer" on Independent Television last Monday week will recoil with horror from some of the consequences of that emigration that has been thrust upon our people in the past four years.
Does the cost of living figure interest the Fianna Fáil Party? It has gone up since February, 1957—the year Fianna Fáil supplanted us as the Government and almost the month they supplanted us. Since that date, the cost of living has gone up by 12 points. I do not believe that anybody outside this House except a certain select few fully understands the meaning of the term "points." What it means is this: every 10/- a person had to spend in 1957, is now worth only 9/- and for every family which has to pay the weekly bill the cost of living has taken two shilling out of every £ since Fianna Fáil took office.
There will be people in Ireland who will rejoice at the reduction in income tax and who will blame them? There will be people in Ireland who will rejoice that they are no longer liable to sur-tax and who will blame them? But there is something crude and unlovely to my mind, in the gesture which makes these provisions and, in the same instance, claps £1 million on tobacco and flourishes an increase of 18d. in the old age pension—the price of a stamp, 3d. a day, or rather less. There is something a little incongruous in that. I do not know what the public will feel about it. I suppose it is better than nothing but I cannot help feeling that in the context of the Minister's speech, eighteen pence increase in the old age pension is not a very liberal provision.
I see the Minister makes play of the fact that he is providing additional help for agriculture. Let us examine it. He is going to increase the grant for lime but what is the increase going to be? It is going to be the restoration of what he took off three years ago. I told him when he took it off that he was making a grave mistake, that it was a reduction which would reduce the consumption of lime. I urged upon him that I had gone as far myself as it was prudent or practical to go in trying to use the lime subsidy as economically as possible by restricting the area over which lime might be carried so as to avoid gross overlapping in one lime-grinding factory and another. But, not content with that, they reduced the subsidy by 4s. a ton and now we are all meant to throw our hats in the air and praise them because they give it back.
We are told they are going to increase the subsidy for cow byres. Is public memory so short that we are expected to forget that it is only three and a half years ago since they themselves abolished the double byre grant? Is not that so? They were warned from this side of the House at that time that that was an obscurantist, silly thing to do and was well calculated to check the progress of the bovine tuberculosis eradication scheme with which the double byre grant had been associated. They now discover that they have got to put it back but they are putting it back three years too late, just as they were three years too late and allowed the precious years of 1952, 1953 and 1954 to pass without doing anything about bovine tuberculosis eradication.
I sometimes forget the measure of the folly of this Government but recently I was listening to a broadcast in which I participated with Mr. Joe Carrigan from America, in 1950. It was not until I heard the broadcast replayed over again that I realised that I then said to him "We are now about to embark upon the eradication of bovine tuberculosis in all our cattle in Ireland." That was in the Autumn of 1950. We went out of office in the Spring of 1951 and when I returned to office in 1954 not one step had been taken to advance that programme. To expedite it, we introduced the system of double byre grants so that anyone who was active and vigorous in participating in that scheme would be allowed to get a double grant in respect of his cow byre. That was so powerful an inducement that we were falling behind in providing the money. We had allocated close on £½ million per annum for that purpose and had a backlog of about 18 months work to do. Applications were being filed and we were doing them as opportunity came.
When Fianna Fáil came into office they cut the Gordian knot by wiping out the scheme. Now, three and a half years too late, they propose to go part of the way to restoring it and we are all meant to throw our hats in the air and bless them for their beneficence.
I understand we are to have another £1 a ton off potash. I would ask Deputies representing agricultural interests in this House, outside the intensive tillage areas, how much potash is put out or should be put out upon the land of Ireland? One cwt. to the statute acre per annum.