When concluding I quoted a sentence from the Minister's speech which I regarded as being at the heart of the Bill. The Minister said that it is an essential part of our industrial strategy to strengthen and develop our existing domestic industry. That is a very unnecessary statement. In the past the IDA have been criticised for fostering foreign enterprise virtually to the exclusion of domestic enterprise and people like myself have criticised Irish private enterprise for being singularly lacking in enterprise. The Minister should have said that the central part of our industrial strategy is to strengthen and develop our existing domestic industry. The word "essential" as used by the Minister is an apology for past policy and is an admission that private enterprise has lamentably failed in the past and is not really regarded as providing the major portion of our job requirements in the future.
The Minister also referred to sectoral restructuring. Irish industry generally is open to the severest criticism in this regard. The previous speaker, the former member of the Fianna Fáil Cabinet which led us into Europe and opened up the Irish economy, which had been fostered behind tariff walls, to international free trade said that they had been given all sorts of information about the effects of free trade in EEC conditions. The CIO reports during the early and mid-sixties spelt out in graphic detail the sectoral restructuring which was necessary if certain Irish industries were to be protected from the full severity of free trade. Free trade was first introduced under the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Area Agreement as a deliberate prelude to the EEC. Free trade was fully introduced on our entry into the EEC. Those reports went unheeded and were disparaged and Irish management paid the penalty for that by being made virtually extinct in many cases, and Irish workers pay for it through continuing redundancies. Traditional industries, mainly the textile industry, the clothing and footwear industries have been affected. The restructuring which was necessary, and which would have been undertaken by aggressive and far-sighted management, even without the aid of CIO reports and Government incentives did not take place, because management was to a great extent introspective.
Many middle-aged people, with growing families, now on the dole queues can thank shortsighted management for their present position. Sectoral restructuring is essential if an economy is to adapt to changing conditions. Theoretically, it was supposed to happen under market forces, but that does not always occur. Under market forces existing industries can disappear and a product will be supplied from outside the economy. We are talking about the continuation of the supply of a product by Irish workers and the so-called impetus of the market does not automatically take place. It requires the outside intervention of an agency such as the State to ensure that that happens. This is being provided for under this Bill. There is now assistance for amalgamations and for acquisitions by way of loan guarantee and interest subsidy for the capital required.
The Minister said that it is hoped that this Bill will encourage the financial institutions to be more forthcoming in financing industrial restructuring. This is a quiet, but explicit criticism of Irish financial institutions which have been lacking in the provision of working capital for new enterprises, and in providing necessary finance for the restructuring of existing industry. The financial institutions were as shortsighted as Irish industry in not foreseeing what would happen. I hope the Minister's quiet admonition will be taken for what it is. It should be a stern warning to Irish financial institutions that they must be more involved, more aggressive and more far-sighted in relation to industrial restructuring. They cannot be passive in a situation where the necessary changes do not take place rapidly enough, if we are to maintain our market position. The financial institutions set themselves up as the guardians of the whole system and they are open to very severe criticism for having failed in the role which they so generously gave themselves.
This Bill makes provision for specific investment in research and development and in product development. The Minister referred to the fact that since 1970, 350 projects have been approved. The Minister also referred to the fact that per capita investment is low in research and development, by European standards. The grant limit is being increased from £15,000 to £50,000. That is not an inordinate amount of money when one thinks of the cost of highly qualified researchers and the equipment they very often use.
It is indicative of the lack of innovation in Irish industry and its lack of enterprise that our investment in R and D should be so low. You can judge the health of various economies and even individual companies by, in the case of an economy looking at the amount of GNP devoted to R and D and, in the case of a company, the amount of total sales allocated to R and D. In the middle 1950s the number of scientists engaged in research and development here could literally be counted on one hand. Even today the total scientific labour force engaged in research and development is lamentably low, and we have slow economic growth because of slow industrial growth.
The Bill also makes provision for equity participation by the IDA in industrial projects with a new limit of up to £1 million. It makes provision, too, for joint ventures. Both of these provisions are to be supported and welcomed and not least by members of my party who might be expected to have some ideological objections to such activity by the IDA. I have none whatsoever.
A very welcome innovation in the Bill is the establishment of project identification for import substitution. The Minister made the point that, in the past 18 months, the IDA went to about 400 Irish firms with specific propositions for import substitution. That is a lamentable commentary on the lack of enterprise by Irish industry. The IDA, who are not a moneymaking operation and whose primary aim is the creation of employment for social purposes, had to go to Irish companies in the past 18 months with 400 specific propositions for import substitution.
I often think if we spent as much time, energy and money on import substitution as we spent on export development we would be in a far healthier position. It was economic stupidity on the one hand to seek to develop export markets while, on the other hand, permitting our own domestic markets to be captured and eroded by competing imports. As it was opened up progressively, the domestic market became the captive of foreign companies and our own companies originally supplying the market were swept away without any policy of keeping them in business. This project identification unit inside the IDA is to be welcomed in the sense that at least it will provide Irish industry with an element of enterprise which that structure has been lacking in itself up to now.
The previous speaker referred to the second point I want to make in a brief general context, that is, a national development corporation, a proposition which has been put forward by members of my party from time to time and to which the Taoiseach referred at the IMI conference last Saturday in Killarney. It cannot be seen outside the context of planning. I do not intend to go into planning in any great depth or detail now except to say the words of Professor Louden Ryan at the end of the IMI conference are worthy of note. He said everybody at the IMI conference was talking about the necessity for planning but nobody had defined what he meant by planning. It reminded me of Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1890 saying: "We are all socialists now." That is easy to say if one does not give a precise definition of what is meant by a socialist. We could use his phrase and say we are all planners now, provided nobody asks too accurately what is meant by planning. The Opposition, the IMI, the IFA, the financial institutions and the trade union movement are all in favour of planning.