Vol. 226 No. 2
I move:
That a sum not exceeding £725,650 be granted to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1967, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Office of the Minister for Finance, including the Paymaster-General's Office.
On this Supplementary Estimate, the Minister has referred to the fact that for the first time the Economic Research Institute appears as the Economic and Social Research Institute. He has not given us very much particulars about it except to say that its functions will be very widely expanded. I could understand the functions of an Economic Research Institute. Doubtless the Minister read its publications with the same interest as I read them. The majority of them were of intense interest to anybody concerned with public finance but there was a small minority of them which soared into abstract realms of pure mathematics which meant absolutely nothing to me. In fact, I had occasion to make representations to the Director that some of these publications were reaching such lofty realms of abstraction that I could not conceive whom they were addressed to if they were not addressed to the people in the Institute themselves.
Are we well advised, I wonder, in expanding the functions of this Economic Research Institute, the scope of whose functions one could define with reasonable precision, into an Economic and Social Research Institute? I am wholly unable to discern any limit to the scope which one might ascribe to a social research institute. Is there any limit intended? Is there any subject which could come from consideration by this House or by any other deliberative assembly in the country which might not be properly ascribed as a matter of social research? If we turn what has been a highly specialised Institute into a kind of an assembly of inquisition over the whole surface of society in Ireland, are we not going so to dissipate its exertions and its direction as to put it in danger of becoming futile?
The Minister will recall that in its last report the Director had it to tell that one of his great difficulties was to get trained staff. He specially complained of the fact that such trained staff as he had been able to get were almost all from abroad because they could not be found in our schools. Now, are we going to add to this already overburdened Institute the whole scope of social environment and are we ultimately going to end up with a whole lot of benevolent do-gooders sitting in Baggot Street reviewing problems of the blind, problems of the destitute, problems of the aged and lonely, the 101 social problems that one could enumerate without even a moment's reflection? If we are, I think we will overburden the Institute and spoil the highly specified job it had undertaken to do and we will so mix up the expert information on which the Institute depends for its conclusions that we will begin to doubt the value or precision of the published reports which heretofore had been such models of expertise.
I do not think anybody need have any fears on this particular matter. I believe this extension of activity is entirely commendable. I had hoped it was a development which would commend itself to every Deputy in the House. The Government decided in 1965 that there was a necessity for a comprehensive programme of social development in the widest sense, similar or related to the economic development programme. Accordingly we accepted a recommendation which was made to us by a very distinguished adviser from the United States that the Economic Research Institute should be expanded and become an Economic and Social Research Institute with a surveying research unit attached to it. I think it is a logical development and extension of economic programming that you have side by side with it a comprehensive programme of social development. A social research programme was drawn up and the Institute then changed its title and amended its Articles of Association. It is not envisaged that there will be any significant increase in the Institute's volume of economic research at present, at any rate, or in the foreseeable future but we hope that the Institute will, side by side with its existing economic activities which will certainly not be contracted, bring into operation five or six substantial social research projects. These have been sketched in outline and it is hoped that we will have two of them under way early in 1967.
I know there is difficulty today in getting competent research workers in practically every field. I know the difficulties which the Institute have experienced in this regard on the economic side but we hope that because of the development of the social science faculty at University College, Dublin, there would be a supply of suitable workers forthcoming in the future for this new aspect of the Institute's work.
