I think the Minister will recognise the justice and reasonableness of the requisition upon him to tell us how much of the £15,000,000 to which he refers in one paragraph as the total capital investment, represents grants from An Foras Tionscal, how much represents foreign capital investment, and how much represents domestic private capital investment. It may not be possible to give a figure accurate to a couple of thousand pounds. A global figure representing these three elements would, I think, help us materially to weigh up the value of the investment that has so far taken place because we will then be able to look at it in the context of an expected employment of 5,500 men and 4,500 women.
I have heard it said that if you are a citizen of Japan, or Germany, or Greece, you will be received with a red carpet in Foras Tionscal; but if you are a citizen of Mayo, or Cork, or Waterford you are treated with scant respect. In so far as my experience goes, and in so far as my information goes, there is no truth whatever in that suggestion. So far as I know, Foras Tionscal will receive a proposal for industrial development from people at home or abroad with equal enthusiasm and with an equal readiness to help in its realisation.
I think, however, the Minister should face another problem, which is being mooted at the present time and which is causing a certain amount of anxiety; that is, the employment of juvenile labour without the intention of retaining it after its training has been completed. If there is no substance in that apprehension, then let it be explained and dismissed. But there is no doubt that many people believe that of that 4,500 women and 5,500 men, a not inconsiderable proportion will be more aptly described as boys and girls. That, in itself, may not be wholly objectionable if these trainees are going to be retained in adult employment when their period of training has been completed. If, on the other hand, a high proportion of that employment represents apprentices who will not be offered permanent employment at the end of their apprenticeship, then I think such a labour practice would have to be investigated.
Deputy Corish said a very grave thing. He said he understood some of the foreign capital coming in here came in with a strong prejudice against normal trade union practice. That would be a very grave situation and the Minister will have an obligation to remind Foras Tionscal they should inform intending investors that our practice is to regard the trade union movement as a responsible and permanent element in our society and that there is no section of our community which would look with favour on any proposal to initiate a movement designed to destroy trade union activity in normal labour relations in this country. The sooner that is made perfectly clear to everybody, the better industrial relations we can look forward to. Any misapprehension in that regard will simply give rise to labour unrest and upheavals which could spread and create endless trouble for all concerned. It is much better for people who intend to invest in industry here to know that industrial relations here are largely based on a responsible trade union movement and that any attempt to short-circuit or avoid that will only beget labour unrest, which nobody wants, and which rational labour relations can easily avoid.
There is another matter to which Deputy Corish referred. Maybe I am too understanding in this regard. He spoke of a letter that had received a good deal of publicity in which a firm had seemed to imply that it challenged the right of a trade union to plead on behalf of its employees. I saw a copy of that letter. It was widely circulated. If one wants to understand it in that sense, then one certainly can, but the impression I got of that letter was that it was written by somebody who thought he spoke and wrote English perfectly but who in fact did not. He spoke it fluently and wrote it fluently but he did not understand fully the idioms he sought to employ.
Having a bowing acquaintance with more than one foreign language myself, I realise how extremely dangerous it is to try to be idiomatic in any other language than the language which one learned as an cliabhán, as we say in our own language. That letter struck me as the letter of a person who overestimated his own mastery of the English language and in his attempt to inflect idiomatically, he in fact used turns of phrase which were well calculated to give grave offence to somebody who fully understood the language: yet the letter was so fluently written that it might mislead many who read it into believing that the man who wrote it understood all the implications of the turns of phrase he elected to employ.
That is a serious danger. There can be no more deplorable misunderstanding than to take a false meaning from what another man says, because, although many people have not yet learned it, it is not what a man says that really matters—it is what he means. Therefore, before losing one's temper with one's neighbour, one ought to be quite certain not only that one has heard what he actually said but that one understands what he really means.
I know nothing is easier than to say that is all hooey but labour relations can be poisoned on either side. The employer can be misunderstood just as readily as the worker. If we enjoin strictly on employers the obligation fully to understand the problems of their workers, there is a corresponding obligation on responsible trade union officials and workers fully to understand what their employers say and, more important, what their employers mean.
I have asked the Minister to give us certain particulars by way of breakdown of the £15 million referred to. I will ask him for another specific piece of information. He said on 31st January, 1962, there were 70 projects in the undeveloped areas in production which have been assisted by Foras Tionscal. Could he tell us at this stage what assistance those have got and what actual employment they are giving as at 31st January?
In addition to those specific matters, I want to raise a much wider matter. It is not primarily associated with the Common Market; it is associated with the whole development of the world around us. We are passing through an extraordinary revolution and I am conscious of a certain Cassandra gift which haunts me. It is some considerable time since I first told Deputies in this House that they would live to see the day of the free passage of men, money and goods throughout the free world. When I first told Deputies that, I was looked upon as a traitor by the Fianna Fáil Party and as a visionary by a great many others. Of course, if anybody suggested now that the free passage of men, money and goods was not a good thing, the Fianna Fáil Party would all obediently stand up and denounce him for treason again. I told you that was coming; now it is here, the free passage of men, money and goods throughout the whole of Europe and the younger ones amongst you may well see it not only throughout the whole of Europe but throughout America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and most of the free nations of the world.
That development is relatively insignificant compared with another development that is silently creeping in upon us like the tide, that is, the process of automation. Many of us have heard the word "automation" and have read about it, but I think very few people in this country realise what a monster it will be if we do not prepare a suitable cage to contain it and suitable harness to control it. Taking the long view, I believe if suitable measures are taken by mankind to make automation serve mankind, it can bring great blessings in its wake, but if it is allowed to march in upon us unprepared, it can precipitate as great disasters as the industrial revolution did 150 years ago, and the tragedy of it is that I do not think people will wake up to this situation.
Let me tell a story. I went recently to Germany and in the course of my peregrinations in Germany, I visited some large factories. One factory was a great steel factory which consisted of four great workshops, each of them 200 or 300 yards long built around a square. In the first workshop, there were 200 or 300 men working. They were making steel pipes. In the second workshop there were 200 or 300 men making steel pipes of a different diameter. In the third workshop, there were 200 or 300 men working mainly at the production of steel pipes but with a certain diversification into contract jobs as well, and that was very significant. Then we came to the fourth workshop which had been built within the past four years. I saw the sheet steel come in at one end and I went to the other end of the factory and I saw coming out, like drops of water falling, a 40 foot length of steel pipe every second of every minute of every hour of the day. How many men were working in that workshop? Fourteen: fourteen men in white coats. I said to the proprietor of the factory: "This fourth unit must be a great economy to you." He said: "It is, provided one thing—that I have a customer waiting for every length of pipe that comes out every second of every minute of every hour of every day because, if I have not, this workshop must close down. In regard to the other three, I have all the flexibility of a labour force. If the demand for a particular pipe is not there that any one of these workshops is producing, I can get contract work. They are all skilled men and I can put them to that. I can even lay them off for a while, if that is necessary. At present, we are working three shifts a day. I can always cut down one shift in that shop but in this shop it must not stop because, by reason of the vast capital investment, it will eat up in a week the profits of a month. Therefore, I must have a demand to keep it working its entire normal working time."
What does that mean if we look far ahead? Does that not mean that over a whole vast range of industry, production must be matched to immense consumption? One might think that this was a peculiarity of one particular branch of industry, if one did not read the current literature of the situation that is developing in the United States of America.
I think I am right in saying that in the past ten years the production of coal in America has increased by 25 per cent. and the labour force involved has declined by 50 per cent. The menacing character of this whole development is that while one can understand it in relation even to steel pipes or bars or coal it is now passing beyond that stage to the point where, by the most elaborate processes, the very manufacture of electronic equipment, which heretofore had been regarded as involving the very quintessence of human skill, is becoming automated. It is coming to be discovered that once you get the prototype, automatic equipment is more reliable in the manufacture of complicated delicate machinery, which heretofore was indissolubly associated with human skill, than the most skilled operative because it can so be fixed that if it begins to do something wrong, alarm bells will ring, lights will go on and the machine can be stopped until the error is detected. It eliminates the possibility of the human frailty which may falter at some stage of a difficult technical process.
How are we going to fit large-scale industrial development here with that prospect of automation? I think you will find that the sorts of large industries that developing countries such as ours yearn for at this time will be wholly impossible for us ten or fifteen years from today.
I saw another process in one of those factories, which I shall not describe in detail, which, up to six months ago, had occupied 40 men in three shifts per day. The entire process is now carried out by two men sitting at a thing like an organ console and pressing buttons. Every step that hitherto occupied the close attention of forty men in three shifts is now discharged by two men sitting at a newly-installed machine which, for a variety of reasons, could replace forty men. Very well. What are we to learn from that?
It seems to me that we have to learn a lesson. I am not so sure that the economists or the scribes of the Grey Book are infallible. The economists and the technicians only too often allow themselves to be dazzled by the statistical information they now possess. It is the fate of the unfortunate politicians to be the people who have to think not only of tomorrow but of people as well as things.
I am wondering if we have not got a very valuable industrial potential in the very areas Foras Tionscal are designed to serve. May I put it this way? In our special circumstances, might we not be better to make gaskets rather than motor cars? I do not think, if you take things like gaskets, that it will ever be economic to automate that process; the capital investment bears no relation to the end product; and, probably, for all foreseeable time, an end product of the value of a gasket will be met by all the ordinary industrial processes with which we are familiar today whereas an end product as valuable as a motor car will become more and more and more the subject of an automated process.
I suggest that there is a real prospect for relatively small industries concerned to produce an essential but not readily automated product in a country such as ours.
There is another thing. Are we not better employed producing blankets from Irish wool rather than yarn from imported Australian merino? Our future in the industrial picture rests largely upon industry founded on our own natural resources in which I include agricultural produce and its by-products such as native wool, the processing of meat and the production of industrial goods the nature of which virtually excludes them from the possibility of economic automation. But what I want to warn this House of is that the future industrial policy of this country—and not only of Ireland but of every country—can be formulated only in the light of the knowledge of what is going on and in the realisation that the silent tide of automation is rolling on much more quickly than anyone in this country at present suspects.
I have recently seen it alleged on high authority in the U.S.A. that their present level of unemployment is going to continue for the foreseeable future because no inroads that expanding production can reasonably be hoped to make upon it can keep pace with the progress of automation and the consequent displacement of labour. One body of trade unionists in New York have recently established the necessity, I think, of a 24-hour working week. I do not say that is directly the result of automation—I do not believe it is— but I believe that we are moving into a world which many of us in this House will live to see where a 30-hour working week will be regarded as nothing remarkable in a fully-industrialised community.
That will give rise to other social problems which it may be profitable to discuss on another occasion but the point I am trying to bring to the Minister's attention and especially to the attention of my colleague, Deputy Barry, is that what seems today a highly-skilled industrial area may be the first to suffer when the full impact of automation comes upon us and what seems today to be a deplorably underdeveloped area into which an industry is being brought by the operation of Foras Tionscal may prove in the day of wider automation the more stalwart survivor in the icy blast of automated competition.
I think there is a great social advantage in placing an industry in a small country town. You would want to live in and know country towns to understand the full significance of that proposition. Our whole structure of society in rural Ireland has been built up on a populous countryside, with towns and villages mainly occupied in the service of the surrounding families living on the land. In the past five years, a quarter of a million of those people have gone; between 200,000 and 250,000 have left the country and they were the biggest consumers in the families from which they went and they have mainly gone from the areas which Foras Tionscal is concerned to serve. I do not see any of my colleagues from Monaghan here: if they were, they would tell you of the spectacle of Newbliss——
