It was difficult to follow the drift of some of the remarks made last night. The points which should have been dealt with, both by the Minister and the spokesman for Fine Gael, seemed to have been overlooked. I do not know if it is recognised by the Government or not but the main talking point in the country at present is the questions of prices. Deputy Donegan complimented the Minister on the introduction of the Prices Bill, 1972. In fact, there were two successive Prices Bills, subsequent to which the Minister for Finance said it was impossible to control prices. Either the Minister for Industry and Commerce was codding the House or the Minister for Finance did not know what he was talking about. I would say that the truth lies in what the Minister for Finance, Deputy Colley, said because so far there does not appear to have been any attempt to control prices. The prices spiral which had already begun gained impetus with the introduction of decimalisation. We were assured that there would be no undue increase in prices as a result of decimalisation. We know what happened. Prices went mad.
An amusing comment was made during the week that the new halfpenny is being phased out. The new halfpenny is as dead as the farthing was before the new halfpenny was introduced. People will not accept a new halfptnny in change. One finds new halfpennies on the floor in supermarkets and on the streets. Even the children will not pick them up, they are of such little value. The new penny is now being phased out. It was suggested recently that the only useful purpose for which the new penny could be used was as a marker on a golf course green. Not alone is the smallest coin of no value but the usefulness of the second smallest coin is disappearing.
The Minister must seriously consider what is happening in regard to prices. I asked a supplementary question yesterday about the list of commodities a shopkeeper must display. One finds in a shop a price list for about four or five items whereas there may be 100 items on sale. In effect, there is no price control except on a very limited range of goods and even in respect of those items the price varies from shop to shop.
Inspectors visit certain shops weekly and examine shelf prices. I understand that it is sufficient to inform the inspector that the supplier has increased the cost of the retailer and the inspector says that is fair enough. That is not price surveillance. There should be very tight control.
The Minister may not view this matter in the way I do. He has experience of retail sales but he has no experience of shopping with a very limited amount of money for the necessaries of life for a family. People who can afford to buy only the bare necessaries of life find themselves increasingly unable to do even that because of price increases. Having regard to all the talk about our being an affluent society, is it not a reflection on every one of us that there are so many people who have to count their few shillings and find that they have not sufficient to buy what they need? It is too bad that people have to fall back on charitable organisations for the necessaries of life. For this I lay the blame fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the Minister responsible for the Department. The Minister being a decent man would not wish that this situation should continue. Opposition Members have no power in this matter. The Minister has the power.
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions agreed, for the second time in succession, to accept a series of wage increases, negotiated on the basis that they would cover the cost of living at the time of the negotiation, not taking into account what the State takes in income tax, increased cost of insurance stamps and so on. It is not fair that workers should be asked to continue to accept restrictions if the cost of consumer goods is allowed to increase without control. Those who have to do the shopping tell me that every time they go into the store a whole range of articles have been increased in price.
There is one matter in particular in regard to which I would ask the Minister to give me a reply today or, if he does not get the opportunity to reply to the debate today, to write to me on the subject. Does the Minister know what the situation is in regard to coal prices? Polish and German coal is being imported. It is almost impossible to buy English coal. The price being charged is the price for English coal. Is the Minister aware that while he sanctioned two price increases for coal in the last 12 months, there was a third price increase imposed without reference to him and that this has been allowed to be charged and that the increases he sanctioned have been added?
The price of coal affects the very poor who buy coal in small quantities. In rural areas people can buy turf or briquettes but in the towns they buy coal. Not everybody has central heating or electrical heating. I am reliably informed that a very inferior type of coal is being foisted on people at a highly inflated price. I would ask the Minister to have the matter investigated and to let me know the result. I am not an expert in this matter. I can only repeat what I have been told but my informants are reliable and I would take their statements as being factual.
The Minister referred to the prospect of redundancies reaching 11,000 by the end of next March. I do not want to introduce sentiment into the debate but the fact cannot be ignored that people are now finding themselves out of employment, people who believed that their employment was guaranteed for their working life. A few years ago there was a substantial floating population of casual workers. These were people who did not have a constant job and who worked for a month, a year or a couple of years in one job and drifted on to another when that was finished. Now a high proportion of our work force are being put in the position of casual workers. I passed the Gardiner Street employment exchange this morning. It would make one weep to see the line-up of able-bodied men who are going there not because they want to go but because if they do not go they do not get money to buy food for themselves and their families. It seems to be accepted that it is all right to have lost 11,000 jobs, that things will be better later on.
Deputy Donegan was very hopeful last night. He thought that in a couple of years' time the country would be great. He did not seem to worry— perhaps I am being unfair to him— about what will happen to the people who will become redundant before this great day arrives. I know that over the last few years particularly, the number of people who have lost their jobs have come mainly from agriculture. I noted that when the Minister for Labour was introducing a pay-related social welfare scheme he deliberately excluded agricultural workers for that very reason. It does not matter whether they come from agriculture or from a factory that has closed, it seems to be accepted by the Government that we are not able to catch up on a number of jobs that are being lost and for many years to come we will have a large number of people who will be unable to find regular employment.
I know the absolute despair of a workman who finds that the job he thought was there for him for as long as he could work is gone and that he must go home to his wife and family with a few pounds which will last for that week. If he has, as so many young people do at present, built a house and is paying an annuity on it or is paying a high rent or has bought a car to travel to work or has bought many items on HP the Minister must understand how he feels when he finds he can no longer pay for those things. The first thing that strikes him is that from then on somebody else owns everything he has been building up over the years. He may find that the "gripper", as we called him, will come along. He may be sued for nonpayment on his car or on his house unless he can find alternative employment. The Minister in his brief offers no prospect of alternative employment. This is what I find fault with more than anything else. Apparently the aim of full employment is no longer one which should be talked about because the Government do not believe it is attainable.
We heard Deputy Donegan last night talking about the necessity to accept that this is a private enterprise society and that anybody who suggests that things should be dealt with in any other way is wrong. I do not think he knows the facts. There is more State ownership in this country than in any other country I know of outside Russia. That should go on record. I still think there is not enough public ownership, which may be a slightly different thing, because industries are closing down which could be saved. I mentioned here last year an industry which closed down in my constituency throwing 145 people out of work. The loss to the State was estimated in the first year, apart from the loss of production and the upset to the people concerned, to be somewhere in the region of £¼ million. Yet nobody had done a cost benefit analysis to find out whether or not the £60,000 which the owner had suggested might be made available should be made available to keep those people in employment. Subsequently another factory with 43 people closed down. The workers decided they would not take it. They took over and they are now running the factory and making money on it. If anybody wants to know how Irish industry can be saved they should take a look at the Crannac furniture factory in Navan where workers are working for themselves, turning out a first-class product, exporting most of what they produce and proving, in spite of all the statements of people who thought they knew, that that factory can survive and that factories such as that can be saved if the right action is taken.
When this factory got into trouble I went to the Minister and he was very helpful. He and his colleague, the Minister for Finance, arranged discussions with officials from the Department of Finance and the Department of Industry and Commerce. Eventually Fóir Teoranta agreed to consider giving assistance by way of loan. I took the owner of that factory to Fóir Teoranta who made an offer of a very substantial sum for the purpose of saving the industry. The offer was not taken up. When I took the workers there I was told that money was the biggest objection. Although discussions in regard to the availability of that money were held in June and subsequently early in July and a definite promise of a sum was made in July, it is now mid-December and that money is only now trickling through. If Fóir Teoranta is Rescue Limited, Fóir Teoranta would not rescue very many if they were involved in a sea drama. They will not rescue many industries if their attitude is to sit down and think it over. The people involved cannot sit down and think it over. They must take a decision. If people are put into well-paid jobs, and I believe they should be well paid, to make quick decisions they should take those decisions and they should not put them on the long finger. It is not right for somebody in a good job to go home on Friday at 5 o'clock, not worry and pick up the threads on Monday morning. The time to deal with those things is when the firm is in trouble. Fóir Teoranta can do an excellent job and in this case did succeed in putting up this money, very belatedly, to prevent the factory from closing but they will have to move faster if they are to do the job for which they were set up by this House. It will not do for months to pass by. Do not forget that the men themselves put £200 each which was given to them as redundancy payment into that firm. That is a lot of money to an unemployed man who has been earning about £20 a week. They put that in without looking backward. They took a chance on saving the factory and saving their jobs. It is not good enough for any State board to say: "We must tie up this and tie up that." There were legal men on both sides. The facts were very clear and it should have been tied up immediately.
Deputy Donegan was talking about conditions being laid down as to who should run the factory. Possibly occasions may arise when somebody by mismanagement is allowing an industry to run down but if somebody in an office in Dublin city makes a decision according to what he merely thinks on the lines of "Sack this fellow and everything will be all right," I think that is wrong. I am not blaming the Minister for what happened in this case because he was more than helpful. There was nothing he could do that he did not do but if there is an outfit set up to do this work, it should do it properly.
As the time is very limited, it would be unfair to the Minister and the House if I were to take up time unduly but I want to refer to two other matters. One of these has been referred to by Deputy Donegan, the mining lease in Navan. I am particularly interested in this matter as the Minister knows because of the fact that in the main it will give very substantial employment in my constituency and in Ireland. As the Minister well knows, the position is that originally one firm did an amount of prospecting with the Minister's blessing and discovered ore. I honestly believe that the ideal thing would be if the State could invest money enough to discover the ore, of which there are I believe a tremendous amount of types in this country, but I am a very practical man and I believe it is a pipedream to suggest that the type of money required can be produced because in every case there is an element of risk, and if there is an element of risk, there is the element that if the Government invested very substantial sums they are likely to get their knuckles rapped if the project turns out to be a failure. We had the example of St. Patrick's Copper Mines in Wicklow which is now under new management and apparently prepared to pay its way. The price of ores goes up and down on the world markets and what is a paying proposition today may not be a paying proposition tomorrow.
The original firm which prospected in Navan, found the mine and purchased most of the land around it. They did, in fact, apply for a mining licence and then somebody else came in. I described it here before as the nearest thing I could think of to the old claim-jumping acts carried out when mining started a century ago. They got possession of a portion of land and the position is that the people who found the original mine and were anxious to get into mining production have applied to the Minister for a licence, and while the decision to give or not to give the licence is being considered, a tremendous amount of money is tied up and a tremendous amount of money is being spent which could otherwise be spent on developing the mine. Every day that passes very substantial amounts of money are being lost by what I will call the parent company because of what is happening.
If the State could do it, it would be the ideal thing but I do not believe the State can do it, and, therefore, what the State should do is to make every effort to get a reputable company working mines and get a fairly substantial royalty from them. As has been proved by the mines already in operation, the State can get a substantial royalty and the Minister says he proposes to increase the amount of royalty. That is a matter for the experts and I do not propose to comment on it, but I honestly believe that it is a stupid decision that because a case has been taken against the Minister in relation to a very small portion of the mine field many months ago and a judge decided that he would give a decision before the end of August, that decision not having been given yet, the Minister says he can do nothing about it.
I believe that in this case the Minister has clean hands. What he has done has been perfectly above board but what I cannot understand is why he should have to wait because I believe that the portion in dispute—and 95 per cent of the area is not in dispute— is, in fact, so small that it is not a viable mine anyway. It could not possibly be worked on its own and no matter what way the decision is given, the people working the mine will ultimately be the company to whom the Minister has said he intends eventually when the arrangements are made to give the licence. Would it be that the committee from which the Minister is awaiting a report on the type of royalties to be collected has not made a report? Would that be part of the reason the licence has not been given rather than a matter of waiting for a court case? It appears to me that this must be the position and if it is the Minister has his own way of dealing with it. He should get the matter in. He will be dealing with businessmen who know their field and will fight their corner very hard, as I am sure will the Minister's officials, and a reasonable arrangement can be made.
My main concern is that while this is happening there is a high incidence of unemployment in that area. There is a prospect of up to 500 jobs being created and I do not want to see them created in ten years time. I want to see them created now. Deputy Donegan referred to what is happening with regard to Drogheda port and inferred that he knew a lot more about it than I do. Maybe he does. I do not propose to comment on what he knows or does not know, but I do know that Drogheda Harbour Board very nearly lost the export of the ore from the mine by the fact that they just did not do what they should have done. If Deputy Donegan is a member of the Harbour Board, he should have taken his part as a business man. He should have been leading in having the matter dealt with. It was only when the company took over and bought the land that any progress was made. Unless there is to be some arrangement made, and pretty quickly, it is ridiculous to suggest, as has been suggested, that a couple of million pounds should be spent in building a new harbour at Mornington. I welcome the idea of a new harbour at the mouth of the Boyne. It will give a new lease of life to Drogheda and the surrounding area, including most of County Meath, but it is just not good enough that the matter should be brushed to one side to await the decision of a judge who for one reason or another has not found it possible from August to December to give a decision on what would appear to the normal person to be a very simple matter. A judge gives a ruling on what he considers to be the law, on the facts of the case as the law governs them, and in this case the Minister knows as I do what the decision should be. There is no doubt at all about it and for that reason I feel that delaying it any longer is very ridiculous.
Deputy Donegan referred to the erection of a smelter. I know that an application has been made by an individual to erect some type of plant at the mouth of the Boyne. He says he is going to import ores from Africa which he will refine and re-export, employing 40 men and, he says, going up to 400. The Minister and I both know that the only reason that could be given for erecting that type of plant at the mouth of the Boyne is that it would be directly on the line of export of the product of the mine at Navan. If somebody wants to make a quick buck out of this he should not be allowed to make it, and while I, like Deputy Donegan, would very much like to see a smelter erected in this country which would take not alone the product of the Navan mine but of all the other mines so that we could get the real cream, it must be remembered that the cost of such a smelter would probably run somewhere between £50 million and £100 million. Somebody suggested that the State should put that money up but I do not know where the State is going to find it. I do not know of any company at the moment that could produce that kind of money. There has been talk about redundancies running at the rate of 11,000 and I would appeal to the Minister to give the people concerned some hope of obtaining a job. Ultimately there will be at least 500 jobs available in the mines at Navan.
In the case of one mine, nothing has been sold because of some technical details. The firm that is associated with the Navan firm have been paying the wages of a fairly substantial labour force for a long time. If there are two leaks in a bucket from which water is pouring out and if no water is put in, very soon you will have an empty bucket. I should hate to see a promising mine such as that in Navan being abandoned because someone cannot make up his mind.
The Minister spoke about AnCO training. The Minister could do a good job if, in conjunction with the mining company, he would arrange for a training school for people who would be engaged in mining in that area. There is a very bright future for the young and the not so young who could be trained to work in the mines. There will be good technical jobs available and I should like to see the local people employed. The board of the Tara Mining Company are 100 per cent Irish and I am sure they would give their full co-operation to such a scheme. I would ask the Minister to consider this and see if something could be done about this matter.
The Minister's Department could be debated here for a long time. In theory, many millions of pounds must be passed by this House before 5 p.m. today and I do not want to delay the House unduly. However, it would be unfair if we did not refer to the fact that there are 75,000 people unemployed and that there will possibly be 11,000 more redundant before the end of March. There is not a hope in the world of achieving the extra 55,000 jobs between 1973 and 1977 to which the Minister referred. In fact, he said we would have to step up the number of extra jobs but I do not know what he meant by that because we are losing ground as it is.
Last night Deputy Donegan spoke about worker participation in industry and it appeared he was opposed to this. He referred to what is happening in Denmark where a certain percentage is put by each year for the workers. According to the Deputy's reasoning last night in a very short time the workers would own the factory and he was not prepared to agree to this. Deputy Donegan is a decent man, he is a good employer and has an interest in his constituents, including his own workers and other workers in the area. However, anyone who thinks in 1972 that worker participation in industry is not coming fast does not know what he is talking about. It does not matter if it comes under the heading of profit sharing or if it is a share in the actual value and work of the factory. The State could help in this; if they put workers from the shop floor on the management teams in the State industries it would set a headline that would be followed elsewhere. Putting a senior trade union official on the board—I am not objecting to that because it seems to be the only thing we can get now—is not the same thing as putting a worker on the board.
In connection with this matter, I should like to quote the example of Crannac. Many people said that it was impossible for a group of workers to run a factory because they would know nothing about it. What happened was the lorry driver became a salesman because he knew where orders could be found; the man who had been working under supervision was able to point out to his colleagues where losses were occuring. The previous employer would not listen to a suggestion made by a worker about how to deal with any matter because it was not regarded as the worker's business. In many industries there could be a substantial improvement in output and a considerable reduction in costs if the Government would set the headline by insisting on worker participation in State industries and if they would encourage private enterprise to introduce it. Worker participation has started and before long it will be the accepted thing.
The Minister must realise that in the EEC we will face intensive competition, if not in 1973 most certainly in 1974. As time goes on we will find that a large number of industries in Europe who need that little extra area to dispose of their products will find that Ireland—a little corner about which they had thought little—has a population of four million customers. We have evidence that people will buy what is the cheapest and the best and this is one of the reasons why the "Buy Irish" campaign seems to have failed. There are those who think that because an article comes from abroad automatically it is better. Continental firms will send their goods here and there is nothing we can do about it; bit by bit they will take over the Irish market. It would be a good idea for the Minister to set up another commission to investigate the areas where we are importing completely and not making any effort to supply the home market. If private enterprise is not prepared to invest, it is the responsibility of the State to do so by supplying at a fair price what the people want.
The "Buy Irish" campaign is only being whispered about now. Even the State will not stipulate Irish materials for State-owned buildings and in the case of grants there is no stipulation about Irish materials. In a short time the emphasis will be on European materials and the "Buy Irish" campaign will no longer be a protection, if it ever was a protection.
Perhaps the Minister is doing his best but it is necessary for him to look at his Department and see if the stage has been reached at which he should be able to think of new ideas and things which should be done which are not being done. That is the responsibility of the Minister. It is not enough for him to produce a 30 or 35 page brief, an excellent brief as far as it goes, but a brief which did not deal with the things a Minister in his position should have attempted to cover in this debate. No matter who produced the brief, I give the Minister credit for editing it. I am quite sure it contains his ideas.
If we were in a situation in which prices were not rising I would expect the Minister to say very little about prices but, in our present situation, at least one-third of his brief should have been devoted to prices and to telling us exactly what the Government think should be done about them.
If redundancy was not such a headache the Minister might get over the problem with just a passing reference but, with the scale of redundancies what it is, it was not enough for the Minister to devote a couple of paragraphs to telling us that there would be another 11,000 people out of work at the end of next March. That is not good enough. There should be some master plan on how the problem should be dealt with. There was a time when we talked about the First Programme for Economic Expansion, which, incidentally, was not a bad one, and the Second Programme for Economic Expansion, which was very quickly forgotten, and the Third Programme; someone asked recently in relation to the latter if, when it was finished, we would have a Fourth Programme. We all of us realise now that this thing of attempting to write down the impossible and expect people to read and accept it is so much old hat. The days when that kind of thing could be done are gone.
The time has come now when the Minister and his officials—a fairly intelligent group of people—must sit down and decide in what way he and they can ensure that those things which are going wrong can be rectified. I have attempted to point out a few of the things that could be pretty easily rectified. I do not expect the Minister to shovel money into enterprises which quite obviously will never be a success. The Minister will have to carry out a cost/benefit analysis of every substantial industry which appears to be running into trouble to see whether or not it would be cheaper, and better for the country, to allow the industry to go to the wall. Unless the Minister does this, he is not doing his job properly.
He should also be able to find out whether there is massive duplication of production and attempt to channel such production into other fields of activity. The word "rationalise" has become an in word. Rationalisation is ideal but it must always be remembered that, when one talks about rationalisation, right up in the No. 1 place for consideration must be the people depending for their livelihoods on the particular industry. It is no comfort to anyone to see a very successful industry closing down and, at the same time, the State paying out by way of benefit of one kind or another large sums to people who would much prefer to be working. If portion of that money were given by way of grant or loan to the industry it might put the industry in the position of being able to keep going.
Perhaps I am being hypercritical. Perhaps the hurler on the ditch can see things which are not apparent to the players on the field. The Minister and his officials have always been very courteous to me. Admittedly, I do not bother them very much, but I think I should put that on record because we get that kind of courtesy all too rarely. My real criticism is that there will have to be a fresh approach to the job the Minister is doing and that fresh approach must come quickly.
