If one did not know the Taoiseach to be a very skilful politician, one would be inclined to take at its face value what he said here this evening, being almost bewitched by some of the statements he made. I have been listening to these speeches from the Taoiseach for over 30 years now and, when they are all over, there are still emigrants leaving the country, still workhouses, still people living in slums, still unfortunate old age pensioners trying to make ends meet on miserable pittances in rat-ridden warrens in this city and many cities and towns up and down the country. So far as the masses of the under-privileged are concerned, speeches of this kind simply pass over their heads and do very little to touch the main economic problems which beset ordinary men and women of no wealth and no power in this country.
Tomorrow, after reading the Taoiseach's speech here today, every old age pensioner will be as poor as he is today, and he will remain so until August next, when he will get 2/6d. a week increase, while his acquaintances, the members of the judiciary, will have £30 a week credited to them since November of last year. The old age pensioner will be expected to take the view that he should not notice these little incongruities in the Government's method of mathematics. Some of these speeches are read by people on the boats going out. They will say: "Yes, but all this does not prevent me from having to go to England, whither economic necessity is driving me." It will not prevent homes in the west and south-west being closed up in the next 12 months when the owners move out because they cannot subsist in this year of 1962 on the impoverished standard of living available to them in these areas which yield nothing but heavy dividends in poverty, misery and squalor. Thus, I think we have to come back to realities and to realise that if this country's problems could be solved by speeches by Government Ministers and by eloquence on the part of some of them, we would have no problems at all, either today or in the past. But what are the hard facts of life? I ask myself one question and I hope some Government Deputies following me in the debate will answer it.
A Budget ought to be subjected to some tests. May I apply this test? What does this Budget do in a substantial way? What does this Budget start or create in a substantial way or where does this Budget leave us? I suggest these are not unfair questions. Somebody ought to tell us what this Budget does in any striking or spectacular way over and above the Budgets we have seen in other years.
I can see nothing in this Budget appropriate to the circumstances in which we live or appropriate to or providing for the much more dangerous circumstances into which we are likely to move. The Taoiseach says this Budget provides for the transfer of purchasing power from some classes to others. If we take up that phrase — the transfer of purchasing power from some classes to others — and apply it to the social welfare classes, what do we find? We find that out of a Budget of over £160,000,000, the social welfare classes — the old age pensioners, the widows, the orphans and blind persons — will get £1,000,000. A sum of £1,000,000 more of the £160,000,000 will go to these classes, commencing in August next. To refer to this Budget as redistributing purchasing power while these insignificant allocations are made to the neediest and most distressed sections of the community is surely a travesty of the meaning of words.
This Budget, in fact, leaves the main problems of the social welfare classes untouched and they will not be solved by this Budget or by the many portions of flowery speech delivered by the Minister. I suppose that, being a country in Western Europe and life for us being cast on this island, away from the main stream of European traffic and out of touch completely in very large measure with the developments in Europe, we should tend to look inside rather than outside. The plain fact of the matter is that it is only two years since the Taoiseach was in Paris and in Brussels pleading there that we were one of the five underdeveloped countries in Europe; that when you come to think of Ireland, you have to think of Ireland as something like Greece, like Turkey, like Finland, like Portugal; that we could not accept the rules of the E.E.C.; that our economic fabric was such that it was incapable of bearing these new burdens; and that we wanted to be regarded as the poor relation of the E.E.C. in Europe since we could bear no heavy burdens which would be appropriate to full membership of the E.E.C.
That was the position two years ago. I never believed that was a proper assessment of our position or in which to present us to Europe. I do not believe we were as helpless as all that — but that is what the gentleman opposite said. I can understand that, at the time, they were probably jockeying for position and hoping to get into what was then described as the Free Trade Area within which they could manoeuvre much more easily than within a much tighter E.E.C. It was never a fair way to present it but it was the way we were presented and paraded all over Europe, that is, that we had to be bracketed with the underdeveloped countries in Europe, some of which had been devastated by the War, and that our economic strength and fabric were only about the same as of countries which were always undeveloped or especially weakened by the ravages of war.
Now, we are asked to believe what the Taoiseach says. Now, all of these figures are set aside. We are now, economically, one of the rather muscularly-developing countries in Europe and development is taking place so rapidly that within a short time we shall not be able to realise the precise economic strength at our disposal. I do not believe that story at all. However, I shall come to that in a few minutes.
Personally, I am glad, and we are glad as a Party, that this country can continue to produce more in industry and agriculture. I am glad we can export more in industry and in agriculture. I applaud and support every measure calculated to strengthen the economic fabric of the country. However, it would be more than foolishness for us to exaggerate the situation and particularly to exaggerate it merely for political reasons in this House and before the electorate when the consequences of doing so may be far more serious so far as national development is concerned.
One would think from what the Taoiseach said that most of our problems had been solved; that, if they were not, then in any case they were inconsequential and could be attended to at some later stage but that we had reached almost the top of the hill; the zenith was there before our eyes. It was now a matter of consolidating our position and at the same time of developing all that had been achieved. Let us look at some very significant features of our economic development.
Take the question of employment. I have before me here a publication described as Economic Statistics, issued by the Central Statistics Office. In this booklet, by making a calculation. I find that in 1956 there were employed in industry and in agriculture 1,163,000 and that, by 1961, that figure had fallen to 1,119,000; in other words, a drop of 44,000 between 1956 and 1961. Or, if you take 1955, you will find that there were employed in 1955, 1,181,000 persons. In 1961, the figure was 1,109,000 — a drop of 62,000 between 1955 and 1961.
Can anybody pretend to be happy with a situation in which we lose, between 1956 and 1961, 44,000 people in employment and, between 1955 and 1961, we lose 62,000 people in employment? That is obviously a very unhealthy symptom and that symptom is not reproduced by any of the free countries of Europe. What the Taoiseach did not tell us is that we can find no parallel for that situation in any of the six countries with which we are going to join in EEC. That is a situation which has obtained in this country for many a year. That is a problem which we have not solved. That is a problem to the solution of which this Budget makes no contribution and that is a problem which, if we are ever to develop our resources to the fullest, must be tackled. Otherwise, we shall have all the outflow from that problem which is large scale unemployment at home, large scale emigration abroad and all the frustration that goes with a large pool of unemployed men and women in any country.
One remembers that, in 1957, the Government Party, with all the éclat and aplomb of the Taoiseach here this afternoon, issued a policy statement in Cork in which they warned the electorate to put out the inter-Party Government, to put Fianna Fáil back in office because Fianna Fáil had a plan to end emigration for all time and to provide 100,000 new jobs within five years. One hundred thousand new jobs in five years and emigration was to end — that was the promise made in 1957 by the Fianna Fáil Party in Cork. I quoted from that promise before. I have had it written into the Dáil records lest it should be lost to posterity. That promise was made in 1957; yet, in 1961 we find that there are 62,000 fewer people employed in industry and agriculture than in 1955. Just as that promise made in Cork in 1957 was never fulfilled, I believe that many of the promises made to-day by the Taoiseach will also find themselves in the limbo of forgotten things, once the hurly-burly of this debate passes by.
The Taoiseach now says emigration is easing. Something that affords considerable consolation, it is said in the Budget speech, is that emigration has fallen off considerably. We have had replies to Parliamentary Questions all indicating that it was impossible to devise any means of effectively checking the level of emigration. You might make a guess at it by nothing movement of passengers over sea and land but no reliable check could be found. We were told there was only one reliable indication and that was the figures provided by the census. Let us take these. The census figures were issued last year. They showed that compared with 1956, 215,000 persons had emigrated in the previous five years. When you recall that the number emigrating in those five years represents the entire population — not merely the electorate — of Kildare, Wicklow, Westmeath and Longford, you get some picture of the way in which this country has been denuded by emigration in the five years during which Fianna Fáil were supposed to be providing jobs for another 100,000 persons.
What we have done between 1956 and 1961 was to empty four counties completely of their population in an emigration sense. We have reached a stage after 40 years of self-government in which the population is now lower than at any time since population figures were first compiled and we are the only white country in the world, much less in Europe, which is losing its white population. These are disturbing developments which do not indicate progress but a deep-seated malaise which must be tackled vigorously if the nation is to survive and if we are to devise, especially in the new circumstances, a viable economy.
I want to refer to the social welfare benefits which the Taoiseach mentioned. My complaint is that these benefits are too low and the device of showing percentage increases and comparing these percentage increases with the increases in the cost of living is simply making a political ally out of recent scientific discovery. The application of plain fact to the matter shows that old age pensioners are expected to live on 30/- per week.
Can anybody imagine an old age pensioner in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford or in any town or rural cottage in Ireland trying to exist for seven days on 30/- when one remembers that person must provide himself with food, clothing, light, pay rent and have the other small things which are the attributes of civilised living? The conditions of life for that person are appalling. Yet that is the maximum we can afford. Even after the speech of the Taoiseach, which paints such a brilliant sunlit economy, we are still going to give them no more than 32/6 a week and we expect them to live on it. Ought we not in 1962 realise that these rates of benefit are far too low, that even if they got 5/-a week it would not be too much but that in fact we should endeavour to lift these pensions to £2 a week as a minimum and we should endeavour as quickly as we can to lift the rate even above that figure?
To-day our old age pension rate is the lowest in Western Europe. Our social welfare services generally are below standards in Western Europe and even of countries that have been devastated by war. When we get all these fine phrases from the Taoiseach and look over our shoulder, we find that the most depressed classes in the community have a standard of living which is capable of very substantial improvement. The real test of the Government's heart in the matter is to find that out of a Budget of over £160 million, the additional sum they can give the old age pensioner, the blind pensioner, the widow and the orphan, is only £1 million. That sum is totally inadequate and it is difficult to imagine that in a Budget of such dimensions more money could not be found to relieve the plight of these classes who have the sympathy not only of the public but also of the Oireachtas and who will not get more than they are getting under this Budget.
The Taoiseach seems to think that this country had a magnificent record in the percentage which it spent on social benefits. I answer that by saying that our social welfare benefits are substantially below those of the Six Counties; they are below those in Britain; they are below those in every free democracy in Western Europe. So long as they are, there is no justification whatever for anybody in this country to presume to take pride in what we have achieved when so much remains to be done for that unfortunate section of the community.
What are the figures in relation to our expenditure on social welfare services? In 1957-58, we spent 24.8 per cent; in 1959-60, we spent 23.8 per cent; in 1961-62, it was down to 22.3 per cent; and, if my guess is worth anything, it is probably not more than 21 per cent. for this year. Not only are we failing to give these people an adequate competency to sustain them in old age and adversity, but we are spending less money on social services.
The Taoiseach referred to the housing programme and said Fianna Fáil had now restarted the drive and that we could expect titanic exertions. Earlier, when the inter-Party Government were in office, some Deputies, including, I am sorry to say, one of our own, were misled into believing that money was not then made available to Dublin Corporation for the purpose of proceeding with their housing plans. I have here answers to two Parliamentary Questions, Nos. 38 and 39 on March 27th last. They provide some interesting material in that respect and I should like to quote them for the purpose of the record.
The Dublin Corporation was provided with money by the Government in 1954 to the extent of £3,182,000. In 1955, the figure provided was £2,778,000; in 1956 it was £2,500,000; in 1957, £2,687,000; and in 1959, £1,136,000. In 1960, the sum provided was £881,000 and in 1961, £841,000. So the Corporation, which received from the inter-Party Government £3,182,000 for housing in 1954 got, in 1961, from the Fianna Fáil Government only £841,000. That does not show any niggardly attitude towards meeting the Dublin Corporation in respect of housing requirements by the inter-Party Government.
Let us now look at the number of houses and flats built by the Corporation in the past few years. In 1954, the Corporation built 1,922 houses and flats. In 1956-57, they built 1,564; in 1959-60, they built 505; and in 1960-61 the figure was 277. For the first 11 months of 1961-62, they built 320, so that though there are well over 5,000 houses in the city of Dublin to-day and it is impossible for a man with a wife and two or three children to get housing accommodation from the Corporation, the facts are that only 320 houses and flats were built last year, according to the Minister for Local Government, whereas in 1954-55, when complaints were being made about the inter-Party Government, 1,922 houses and flats were built.
That does not seem to me to prove the inter-Party Government was in any way lax in providing money for housing. All it proves is that certain people were able to participate in a ramp at that time and get away with it for the time being. These are the clear figures and in the interest of truth, they ought to be disclosed, so that they can be quoted on future occasions whenever the same lie is unstabled for a canter by the same people who raced that lie on the last occasion.
The Taoiseach mentioned the report of the Committee on Industrial Organisation and the preparations which were being made to see this country through the tempests and vicissitudes of the Common Market. I have read the report of the Committee on Industrial Organisation and I must say I agree with its terms very broadly and very generally. I think it has approached the problem in a realistic way and that, without much verbiage, has given the Government and the country a report on what must be done if we are to face up to all the problems of adaptation of our industry to the needs of the future.
In fact, if we never had a Common Market, we ought to have a report of this kind and whether we are admitted to the Common Market or not, whether or not we ever heard of the Common Market, we should, I think, have done many of the things suggested in this report which has been subscribed to by a variety of people — employers, trade unionists, economists and well-known civil servants. It seems to get at some of the basic problems confronting the country industrially and it seems to me also that unless we adjust our agricultural problems speedily on the line recommended by the Committee, we shall have a very painful association with the Common Market.
I should like now to quote one or two comments from the Report. It opens strikingly enough and, I think, gives the red light, by saying:
Irish firms and industries will survive under free trade only if their products are competitive in design, style, quality, delivery dates, marketing techniques and price with those available from other countries within the EEC. It would be unwise to assume that local patriotism, consumer ignorance, market friction, permissible restrictive practices or any other consideration will modify this conclusion significantly.
It follows by saying that in their present state, many Irish firms and industries could not survive freer competition from imports. At a later stage, it urges the necessity for applying the re-equipment programme which it indicates earlier and it says:
It will take a certain period before this equipment can be got and consequently it will be a certain time before we can meet the competitive impact of association with the Common Market.
It says this means that if a firm decided now to re-equip on a substantial scale, the new equipment would not in most cases be operating efficiently before mid-1964. It continues by saying that relatively few firms or industries are at present making decisions designed to prepare them for freer trade. That is the report of the Committee which has spent some time in interviewing industrialists, in examining the problems they have found and distilling the views they got in the hope of being able to find a practical policy on which the country could rely for its approach to the difficulties created by the Common Market.
I have said on many occasions, in this House and outside it, that our decision to enter the Common Market would be, for this country, a most excruciating exercise and that nobody, in this country or elsewhere, could give this small country any assurance that we would not meet a competitiveness and a toughness in trade such as we have never experienced before, that many of our industries will not be able to face for long the fierce competitiveness which will be produced by the Common Market. Although we have discussed the whole question of the Common Market in the Dáil and there have been arguments here and elsewhere, as well as Press articles and letters written to the newspapers, I still find that the misunderstanding and the confusion which our entry into the Common Market will involve have not been cleared up for the ordinary citizen.
To many of our people, the basis of the European Economic Community is not known or understood. Even industrialists do not seem to know what it means for their own industries, nor have they any plans for dealing with the situation which will obtain in the future when they will have to sell their own products against giants in the same field of production, when they will have to sell their products in the Irish market which, up to now, has been solely reserved in a great many cases for Irish products alone.
From time to time, I read in the Press articles from people who have taken a strong interest in the Common Market. I saw recently a statement made by one of our economists who, I think, is strongly pro-E.E.C., Mr. Garret Fitzgerald, in which he said that it was almost impossible to exaggerate the changes which membership of the Common Market could bring about in our way of life. He said that no aspect of this country's life would be left untouched and that clearly the main opportunities for export under these new conditions will lie in the agricultural field where we, as a low-cost producer of such farm produce as cattle and beef, mutton and potatoes, barley and milk, are in a fairly competitive position. The viewpoint of this economist is that our membership of E.E.C. is going to mean a very substantial change in our industrial life and that it would be impossible to exaggerate this change.
I pass from that to an article which appeared in the Farmers' Bulletin last year, by the Minister for Agriculture, from which I take it that the views expressed were not only his own views but the views of his Department. He said there was a kind of illusion that so far as agriculture is concerned, the Common Market is going to be a very desirable place for Irish agriculture. He added that it was very important that we should be clear and realistic about the present position of import markets, not only in Britain but on the Continent of Europe. He said that some people who do not appear to have studied the matter thoroughly are under the impression that there are vast undeveloped markets on the Continent and added: "But I can assure them there are not." He said that Continental countries were practically self-supporting agriculturally and that we must remember that the six countries of the Common Market were about 80 per cent. self-sufficient in the kinds of food that are produced in Western Europe.
If you follow from that to an article written by the Secretary of the German Department of Agriculture you find that he refers to the fact that, globally, the six countries of the Common Market are self-sufficient in regard to their requirements. Five of them were completely self-sufficient but there was a margin in Western Germany for certain kinds of agricultural produce into which the other five wanted to get. These five are being followed by ourselves, Britain, Denmark and other countries. France has a substantial frontier with Germany and France has the strongest agriculture in Europe so that we have no doubt that if there is a market in West Germany for agricultural produce, the French will not be long about filling it.
My complaint is that speeches which are made in the artificial atmosphere of dinners and banquets about meeting the challenge of the Common Market, thereby stimulating enthusiasm, are made by people who have no idea of the competition facing them. One would imagine from all the talk there has been about meeting the challenge of the Common Market that this is a kind of a situation in which bravery and Irish muscle will suffice to sustain the Irish, no matter where they are. It is no such athletic occasion at all. We are going to meet in this Common Market, fairly and squarely in competition, people who have an industrial tradition hundreds of years older than ours is and who have got a home market to sustain them many times greater than the home market we have got.
All this idle talk about meeting the challenge of the Common Market leaves me cold. I wonder what these people think when they go to their offices the following day and try to assess the situation. Many of the people who make these speeches have never been inside a European factory and, if they have been inside one, they have not been inside two. They do not know how their competitors are organised and they have no knowledge of the set-up of the large-scale industries with which they will have to compete in the future.
You must remember there are in Germany today a number of factories in which there are 300 or 400 engineers working in offices on their own at the drawing board, doing no work whatever except at the drawing board. The whole object of these people is to find out whether the article made by the firm can be produced as a cheaper commodity than at present; whether if instead of having it as it is, you could make use of an alloy; whether there is any cheaper method of producing it by other types of machine gadgets; whether you could not possibly take out a section that gets worn and fit in another section which could be replaced when worn instead of replacing the whole part. They work day in and day out on planning for that. In many of our industries, we have not got an engineer at all, but here is a squad of 400 planning from morning to night for 52 weeks of the year.
It is because our people have not realised those dangers that I think it is somebody's job to bestir them. I appreciate that perhaps a politician is not the best person to do it, particularly if he is in Government, because people will say: "You are bringing disaster on us again." But it should be done and it will have to be done; otherwise, there will be a long and widespread area of real suffering, once we get into the middle of the Common Market. We ought to start by saying that the Common Market must be known and understood, not just in the Department of Industry and Commerce and in the Department of Finance and in the boardroom of Government Buildings. The Common Market must be known and understood in the factory, in the field, at the meetings of the directors; but, above all, the dangers of it must be known and recognised at tripartite conferences representative of employers, workers and the Government in which everybody should have a full appraisal of what dangers have to be met and the plans to meet them. Failure to recognise the simple fact that we must start well down the line will exact a heavy toll from us in confusion and dislocation and subsequently in unemployment and under-employment.
Our first task must be to get clarity as to what the real position is. Looking at it from a purely Irish point of view, in my view, it would have been better if the issue of the Common Market had never arisen. Nobody here asked for its establishment. Nobody here pioneered its advent. Nobody saw that a European Common Market provided a solution for our economic difficulties. In fact, though we never called it so and clearly did not recognise it as such, we have had the best common market for the past 40 years, a common market into which we can send practically all our industrial goods free of charge and at the same time, impose a duty on the goods produced by the country which is letting in our goods free of charge.