I am pointing out where the revenue has been found. If these increases in prices had been obtained by direct excise duties on these several commodities, it would have produced in revenue a sum in excess of £6 million a year which is surely in excess of the total amount required to provide the benefits set out in the Estimate. In that way, we could have got all the revenue necessary for these increases without putting a penny on essential food, fuel or clothing. I suggest that if the sound philosophy of equitable taxation had been the guiding light of the Government instead of this cynical approach to the matter, we could have ensured that the social welfare beneficiaries would have got a real advantage from these improvements instead of the illusory advantage which resulted from giving these benefits with one hand and taking them away with the other hand by increasing the cost of living.
People cannot live without bread, cannot live without the essential necessaries of life and to tax these at the same time as you increase social welfare benefits is to take from the people with one hand what you pretend to give them with the other. I feel that the Minister for Social Welfare ought to concern himself deeply with the growing problem of the rising cost of living. That is one of the principal elements of the whole social welfare of our people and it is those sections of our community for whom the Minister ought to feel a primary responsibility who feel that grevious burden most acutely.
There is one other matter to which I wish to refer. I do not believe the Minister for Social Welfare can wash his hands of responsibility for the social welfare of our people whether they reside here or abroad. We have sent to Great Britain approximately 300,000 boys and girls between the ages of 18 to 25 over the past seven years. It is common knowledge that, in addition, thousands of boys and girls of much more tender years have gone to Britain. I want to suggest to the House that their social welfare is the concern of this House. I am not asking the Minister to draft any new legislation or even by regulation of his Department to take a positive step in this regard. I know that it is inappropriate and impermissible to advocate new legislation on an Estimate but the Minister has it in his power, and it is his real duty, to recognise the social problem of our people who are in Britain at the present time, who are uncared for, but whose parents are here and whose families are here and who ought to look to us when they have no one else to look to, to help them in the social peril which they meet when they are forced to emigrate.
I tried to raise this matter on the Estimate introduced by the Minister for Justice but our difficulty is that everybody washes his hands and says: "It is no responsibility of mine." I want to press on the Minister for Social Welfare that it must be his responsibility. I recognise that if the Minister did concern himself directly with those residing outside the jurisdiction, it would create a problem but the nature of this problem is one which perhaps could best be tackled not by official ministerial action but by ministerial encouragement and a readiness on his part to help in the co-ordination of the kind of effort that would give valuable results.
What is our problem? Our problem is that young Irish boys and girls go to Britain largely from rural areas in this country and find themselves catapulted into a social background with which they are wholly unfamiliar. Girls either fail to secure employment or lose it and then fall into bad hands and may either find themselves in trouble, possibly brought before the courts, or even betrayed and abandoned to the streets. Boys in unfamiliar surroundings find themselves in conflict with the law, find themselves brought before the police magistrates and friendless and then find themselves under the handicap of that record in any subsequent search for work.
I believe the majority of these young persons who get into trouble get into it for two reasons. One is that, being themselves very young, they venture forth into the unfamiliar surroundings of Great Britain without proper preparation. I suggest to the Minister for Social Welfare that he should concern himself forthwith to bring home to the parents of children who may be contemplating emigration that young persons, but especially young girls, should not be allowed to go to Great Britain unless they have an immediate prospect of suitable employment and unless they are going to live with relatives or trusted emigrant neighbours who can be depended upon to look after them.
The great disaster, from any information I have been able to collect upon this, is that the young unprotected girl arrives over in London, or Birmingham, or Liverpool or Glasgow without a job and without a home to go to; she finds herself sometimes in most unsuitable lodgings; whatever modest sum she brings with her begins to fritter away; she may meet unsuitable companions in commercial dance-halls and, before she knows where she is, she is in trouble. The tragedy very often in cases of this character, even where her distress is discovered by charitable organisations and an effort made to get her to go home and put the whole thing behind her, is that one not infrequently finds that the young girl does not want to recover contact with home; she wants to be forgotten. She is ashamed to come home and, instead of grasping the helping hand, she is inclined rather to reject it.
The same situation in large measure applies to young boys. If they go into unsuitable lodgings, and fail to get work, or lose the job they have, they may begin to drift and, as so very often happens, if they are in gravely unsuitable lodgings, their natural tendency is to drift into the public-house; there they get drunk and get involved in some squabble or brawl. Forthwith, they acquire a police record and, thereafter, their history may be painful in the extreme.
Now, what can we do about it? I make first the suggestion to the Minister that he has an obligation to bring vividly to the minds of parents the kind of problem that exists and the precautions they themselves ought to take for the protection of their children. But is that enough? I suggest to the Minister it is not. I suggest that those of our young people who have gone wrong impose an obligation upon us; we have a very grave duty to do the best we can to help them. I am not prepared to say that should necessarily involve the Minister in making large financial contributions to existing associations, however well intentioned and I put forward this suggestion for consideration. I think what is urgently needed in Great Britain today, from the point of view of our young people, is a suitable personnel, that is to say, social workers who are prepared to undertake the very formidable burden of effectively making contact with these young people and keeping contact with them, (1) to keep them out of trouble and (2) thankless as the task may appear, when they are in trouble, to extend a helping hand and keep after them until they can turn them from the road on which they have been travelling, get them back on their feet again, restore them to normal life and to the place in society they ought to occupy.
Work of this kind is now proceeding. Charitable bodies, like the Legion of Mary, are engaged in this work at the present time. Two inadequacies exist: a great many of the social workers are people relatively senior and it is very often extremely difficult for seniors to carry conviction to a young girl in trouble that they really want to help her. Youngsters in trouble are liable, however mistaken, to see in a senior person a critic rather than a sympathetic friend, and so it becomes even more difficult for social workers, who are seniors, to make the kind of contact that it is so urgently necessary to make.
The probation officers of the British police courts are already heavily over-taxed and, in any case, they do not know our people. They are, I understand, splendid public officials, who do superb work, but they have too much work to do; they also lack the understanding, which is very natural, that might make all the difference between failure and success in helping our young people who get into trouble. I, therefore, want to suggest to the Minister, for consideration at least, whether it would not be within the range of practical politics to promote here something on the lines of the peace corps promoted by the late President Kennedy for quite a different purpose. He propounded to his young people in the United States of America that there was a great social task awaiting them in South America and other parts of the world, where it was not money that was primarily needed but young people prepared to do work that no one else could do, young people who were prepared to do it for a limited period from a purely disinterested motive, none other than to help their neighbours.
Now, I do not deny that when I first heard that concept formulated by the late President Kennedy, it seemed to me to be outside the scope of practical possibility in that it appeared to be much too idealistic an approach, but I was wrong. In fact, it has had a great measure of success and there are thousands of young Americans at present serving all over the world, for no reward at all, for a strictly limited period, giving their services voluntarily to help their less fortunate neighbours in the underdeveloped countries of the world. I wonder would the Minister not take example from this idealistic adventure?
If we are to make contact with the largely forgotten immigrants who are in trouble in Britain, what we want now is personnel to rescue them from whatever perils they may have fallen into. I should like the Minister to consider the question, after consultation with the existing charitable organisations, as to whether a similar organisation, a peace corps from this country, might not be a very material help to these charitable organisations which are at present struggling with this problem in Great Britain. I suggest to the Minister it might be an advantage to consult the probation services of the administration in Great Britain as to whether they would be prepared to accept supplementation of their functions by voluntary personnel of this kind. I recognise it is an idealistic approach but I have very little doubt that if the thing could be organised it would be well nigh the perfect approach to this problem.
Surely Deputies on all sides of the House will agree with me that the time is long past when we can pretend that this problem does not exist. I do not want to exaggerate. Some well-intentioned people are inclined to inflate this problem to an unrealistic dimension and in their warmness of heart and their desire for reform sometimes I am afraid their exaggeration tends to repel people who would be prepared to make a realistic contribution but who are not prepared to be stampeded into action by what they feel is an exaggerated version of the facts. I want to keep the problem in proportion.
It is essential to realise that according to all the best authorities 85 per cent or even more of Irish people going to Great Britain get along very well. They become integrated into the society in which they live and earn a good living. In some cases they come home and in other cases settle down in Great Britain and experience none of the difficulties to which I refer. However, if we can agree— and I am afraid we must accept it is true—that up to ten per cent of those who go to England do encounter the kind of difficulties to which I have referred we shall have to recognise that in the last seven or eight years there are 30,000 of our young people in danger of trouble.
We cannot simply pretend that problem does not exist. I am not saying there are 30,000 in trouble; I am saying there are 30,000 in danger of trouble. Some of them are already in trouble and some of them will get into trouble if we do not take steps to provide some machinery that will protect those who are in danger of getting into trouble and will redeem those who are already involved with the law or divorced from the social pattern to which they properly belong.
I could use stronger language to emphasise the gravity of this problem. I deliberately forbear from that for I believe this is as well understood by most Deputies as I understand it. However, I cannot too strongly emphasise the obligation upon us to recognise the existence of this problem and to try to find a means of contributing to its solution. If the Minister has any other better proposal in mind I am quite prepared to hear it with sympathy and to support it.
The only thing I urge that the Minister can no longer properly do, if he is earnestly to discharge the duties of the Minister for Social Welfare, is to deny the existence of this problem or to declare that inasmuch as it exists outside the jurisdiction of this Government it is none of our concern. The fact that these young people are living outside our jurisdiction does not discharge us from our share of responsibility for them. We may claim we are not responsible for the conditions in Great Britain which have caused this problem but we cannot turn our backs on the fact that these young people in order to get their living believed it incumbent on them to seek it in Great Britain. We cannot turn our backs upon the fact that these young people are our neighbours' children. In those circumstances they belong in a very special sense to our community. If everybody else has forgotten them, they are entitled to expect that they will not be forgotten at home. If the Minister has no better suggestion than the one which I adumbrate to him today, then he ought to give the suggestion I am making his most careful consideration.
I am in a position to say that at this time steps are being taken by certain voluntary workers to try to co-ordinate the efforts of voluntary bodies already operating in this sphere. I should be glad to hear from the Minister when he is concluding the debate on this Estimate an assurance that he is prepared to interest himself in and sustain voluntary effort along these lines. If he does I believe he will find there are people who are prepared to make their contribution, who are not primarily looking for money but who might, in the event of their being able to organise a sort of peace corps for this work, want some help in providing the bare subsistence necessary to keep workers of this kind in the field. If that were the nature of their request I would commend it very warmly to the Minister for Social Welfare.
Whatever steps the Minister ultimately determines are appropriate to the resolution of this problem I should like to hear from him an assurance on behalf of the Government that we no longer assume that what happens outside the jurisdiction of the Government of this country is no concern of ours. I am appalled when I hear people giving exaggerated descriptions of this problem to find myself in the position in which I am constrained to say that our Government know nothing about it, accept no responsibility for it and are not prepared to provide any information or satisfy any inquiry in regard to it.
If we could resolve now to end that situation a good day's work would be done and if, further, we could resolve to provide the personnel to stretch out the helping hand that is necessary for those in trouble and the helping hand that would protect those who are now in danger and must fall into trouble if that protection is not forthcoming, it would be a very happy thing for this country. I cannot imagine that Oireachtas Éireann will be content to leave this matter unprovided for much longer. If this Minister is not prepared to solve the problem then I hope an early successor will put the work in hand.
