This debate embraces a wide area. In a sense, it is a second debate on the budget. I wish to comment on the Bill from an administrative point of view but, first, I will make the point that, although I shall not be repeating the very valid points made so far in the debate from this side of the House, that does not mean, as the previous speaker said, that one is not impressed by the strength and the cogency of these various arguments.
What strikes one first about the Finance Bill this year is that it is very different from the other Finance Bills that have been introduced by this Government. If one makes comparisons at any level one finds a strong change in emphasis on the Minister's approach on this occasion compared with his approach in the budgets for the earlier years of this Government.
I do not think that I am being cheap in any way when I say that there appears to be a peculiar coincidence that this should happen at this time. This change can be referred to as a deep-rooted change of heart but it is inefficient, incomplete and, may I say deliberately but in no way slightingly, incompetent. It is a change that recognises the reality of the situation.
During their early days the Coalition seemed to be dominated by a type of dectrinaire left-wing teaching. Much out-dated dogma and action based thereon was played to what was considered to be the most populated gallery. We have seen the result of all that. If we recall the budget of 1976 and the earlier budgets and if we analyse the situation what I am saying becomes very clear. Those budgets were designed to hound what were referred to as the rich classes, particularly in the private sector. In addition, there was a multiplication of public expenditure. Deputy Gibbons has referred to the spending of public moneys for the sake of popularity without there being any proper controlling of such expenditure. Also, there was the indiscriminate indulging in borrowing which leaves us with a massive national debt. These policies were based on a point of view which was not practical and which was based on false theory. Matters are so bad now that whichever government will be in office in the future will be faced with a critical situation on more than one front.
To revert to the change of heart that we are witnessing, in the past the Minister talked continually about the effects of inflation and found excuses in the generality of inflation in the world, particularly in Europe. He now at last seems to recognise that one of the things stoking the fires of local inflation was his taxation policy, and this year he comes in to try to undo the damage done by a false concept which he apparently had in the beginning and the implementation of it in regard to the whole question of taxation. He said "Government and private business are allies with different but complementary functions, sharing a common interest in the welfare of society". The Taoiseach has harped on this theme outside the House as well.
It is a terrible pity for this country that those thoughts were not more in evidence when the Coalition took office and embarked on their programme of running the country. It is a terrible pity that that was not realised in time before many small private businesses had closed up, before the impact of taxation, personal and otherwise, was such as to stultify growth in that sector. It is a pity that those thoughts were not applied in the agricultural area which Deputy Gibbons has been dealing with in another way. A little recognition of the true nature and basis of Irish farming might have left the State much more healthy than it is today. I am not going to repeat in detail the reasons. They have been given through the debate and anyone who wants to peruse the debate will find them. There was a misconception here with regard to the real basis of the Irish farming industry and as a result precipitate and one-sided taxation policies were adopted, the cumulative result of which has been unfavourable to agricultural industry. I leave it to those who know the details involved to speak of that. I claim no such expert knowledge, but I can and will say that following on any mishandling in that area of our primary product, food for our people, there must be inevitably an adverse effect on consumer prices. Nothing the Government have done in regard to agriculture has effectively improved that situation.
There are things in the Bill and in the budget that it is right should be done and I am glad they are being done, but I am sorry that in many cases the measures for the beneficial provisions that we are enacting in this Bill are necessary because of mishandling by the Government and are nothing more than an attempt to redress or make amends for the mistakes of earlier years, particularly in the financial context.
It is a pity that we find ourselves here with this situation. If the policy that prompts this type of action here today had been generally adverted to when the Coalition came into office, then we might have a budget and a Bill that would not be, so to speak, a frantic, last-minute remedial effort but a constructive contribution to the development of the economy of the State and to the relief of all citizens who are naturally suffering from inflation and all the other things which are problems for all of us no less than for the Government of the day.
I have referred to the phrase, "Government and private business are allies with different but complementary functions". What a pity that was not recognised earlier in the context of this doctrinaire socialism with its inefficiency, its expenditure and the payments that each and every one of us must make out of our pockets in the form of taxation as a tribute to the out-of-date as well as erroneous pet theories of certain groups. This is what has happened. It is playing politics at its very worst. The Minister said:
It has become clear that traditional long established business catering in the main for the home market and not hitherto enjoying tax reliefs commensurate with those enjoyed by modern manufacturing industries producing for the export market ought to be helped by an improved tax climate.
That was certainly not the situation, particularly when the Corporation Tax Act was being put through. What was done there? It was represented as a benefit, and in certain ways it was, but in the net it came out in Committee that there would be a little bonus rakeoff for the Exchequer. This Bill in this respect and the Minister's speech give me much material for argument. In my younger days in the House I would have been only too glad to keep the House for hours with fact against fact and item against item. That I do not intend to do today. The point I make is that there is a change of thought here and it would not be right for me to pursue that to the point where it could be said, `Oh, well, the right thing has been done and you are complaining about that as well as the wrong thing". Again I am glad to say that pro tanto—and it is only pro tanto—I am not to be taken in any way as considering that this Finance Bill and the budget are a marvellous contribution to the solution of our problems and a marvellous relief to taxpayers. I fear it does not solve our problems and with regard to inflation and other problems such as the problems in labour negotiations that are and will be confronting all concerned in the years to come no matter who is on the Government benches it will be found that some very necessary reliefs have been given and I am glad they are there because they represent some evidence of rational thinking which, late and all as it is, is to be commended and encouraged. Unfortunately that is not sufficiently sustained to convey any hope that it will continue and that more realistic views will prevail than in recent years.
That is the first reaction one has to the Bill and the budget. In regard to the actual situation in general terms, I cannot share the Minister's optimism, particularly in regard to unemployment. I sincerely hope he is right. He informed us in his introductory statement:
The EEC as a whole expects unemployment to rise this year. There are only three exceptions to this discouraging picture—Ireland, Germany and Holland. With the growing momentum of our economy we anticipate that our unemployment figures will over the next few months fall below the 100,000 mark for the first time in two and a half years.
I should like some reassurance on a few points in that respect. I should like to be sure that the figures he has taken are a realistic reflection of the true state of employment and unemployment here. Obviously some convention has to be adopted when dealing with figures of this nature and I am not suggesting for a moment that any other procedure can be adopted, but I am asking whether the method of computation of the figures is realistic.
Dr. Geary and his colleagues recently in a report, in a television interview and widely reported on radio and in the Press, appeared to show that the true figure is considerably higher. Indeed, I have a figure of 150,000 echoing in my mind. Unemployment, like a lot of things, is unfortunately a reality and I hope the Government realise that and that they will not mishandle this reality as they have others by relying on conventional measures. Unemployment is still a menacing problem for us, quite apart from the general situation in the community.
There seems to be a discrepancy between ministerial statements on employment and unemployment and the figures daily reported. Again I ask the basis on which the Minister can make such a statement. I ask is it realistic in real terms. Many Deputies have spoken about this major social problem, and Deputy Gibbons a few moments ago only echoed what a lot of people are thinking when they point to what is happening to young people, to those whom Deputy Gibbons referred to as the educated unemployed. This is a frightening problem. It is a problem of a generation in its prime, the ruling generation of the day, considering that when it has passed its prime it will pay in another way for its failure in its prime.
I do not think Deputy Gibbons used the word "revolution". I have used that word in other debates. One does not want to create scares, but I ask every Deputy to think of his responsibility and of what will be the likely consequences of the continuing output from our schools of people who have been equipped to think, who have the youth and the energy and the desire to make their way in life but who find themselves in an environment where they cannot exercise their intelligence and their abilities or fulfil their mission in life as human beings. Traditional alternatives are denied to them. The need for these alternatives were regretted by us in the past, but at least they were safety valves and it was our great hope in the past that we would no longer need these safety valves, that here there would be a great future for the younger generation, that there would be an opportunity to make Ireland an example of human progress, of what virile people could do in their own country when they had the room to do it. Sadly, that ambition has not been realised.
Instead we have the menace of these pressures on us. There is not a Deputy among us who has not had young people coming to him almost pathetically pleading for some outlet, some job. It is no longer a question of looking for plums but for something that will keep them from being beggars. With the realism of youth they realise that if they are living on subsidised social benefits, no matter how generous they are or how comfortable they may make their personal situation, dependence on them is degrading in status—they are reduced to the status of beggars.
These are frightening things, yet here we are with the annual budget, with the millstone of debt around our necks, neglecting the fundamentals. I mentioned the agricultural sector, for which I do not claim any competence to speak with any expertise. There are other industrial areas also and the situation there has been largely contributed to by the concepts of this Government since their inception, by their false ideas. One finds it very hard to see how adequate remedies for youth unemployment can be found and implemented in what I conceive to be the very short time left to the Government. Deputy Gibbons warned that, unless this Parliament and the people through their representatives can cope, our system will be found wanting. We have a deep-rooted change in mentality which I welcome and hope will continue. I regret that this change has come at such a late hour. The Minister for Finance said in his speech that a careful balance will have to be maintained to preserve a sensible level of public expenditure and a tolerant level of taxation. That is another small indication of a return to reality.
The Book of Estimates will show what is left in the area of public expenditure. Remembering the Leas-Cheann Comhairle's sensitivity to speakers drifting towards Estimates, I will anticipate his having to admonish me and I will not pursue it, except to refer to the source. What about the efficiency of the public service, and the extra load of work that has been generated by what this Government have done? What have this Government done to what was a very efficient and expeditious Department, the Revenue Department? Tax law was changed indiscriminately and tax was loaded on to all sorts of people. The Minister seemed to have a fix on what he called tax evasion. In the end a lot of the tax evasion was created by the Minister, because he killed the goose that laid the golden egg. Very serious problems have been created for the Revenue Commissioners by these changes in tax law, and delays have bedevilled them. A Department which could so pride themselves on their efficiency in the past are having to swim very hard in an adverse current. A huge amount of unproductive energy is going into the administration of practically every business. Many accountants are more than busy because of the Bills the Minister has brought forth and this Dáil has undiscerningly passed.
The public service bill has gone up, but has public service efficiency gone up correspondingly? If it has not, it is not all the fault of the public service itself. Every Deputy who votes here is responsible. Every Deputy on that side of the House is responsible for the legislation he voted through in support of this Minister for Finance. There is a limit to making the Minister the scapegoat. Everyone behind the Minister is as responsible, because without them these things would not have been done. No Deputy can wash his hands of responsibility. In the eyes of the public all Deputies, because of this performance, will be critically viewed by the public. If changes come or are forced by the young unemployed or anybody else, it will be because of the way Parliament has been divided into two groups who have marched to the tune of a Minister and the Government of which he is a part.
We have overdone the system where a Minister comes in and insists on his point of view and his cohorts, with the discipline of the Prussian Guards of old, will march behind him into the lobby. That may be very admirable discipline, but is it good parliamentary practice? The inevitability of a Government and an Executive taking an attitude towards the House—an attitude, which unfortunately, has been growing over a large number of years in democratic parliaments—that the minions are simply to be commanded has resulted in a reduction of the status and usefulness of the Members. To all intents and purposes they are ignored and the Minister is thrown completely into the hands of the administration, the permanent service.
Very often in cases like that it is an illusion for the Minister to think he is anything himself but a rubber stamp. There is a certain irony in this. If Ministers and the Executive will insist on reducing Parliament to being a rubber stamp they, in turn, become rubber stamps for the permanent administration. I say that advisedly but, nevertheless, without the slightest adverse reflection on the administration. The reflection is on us, on Deputies in this House. The administration have their job to do. They have their sphere. They cannot do our job. In effect, we are asking them to do both.
As I say, I am slipping imperceptibly from the substance to the administrative forms. Now I come to them directly. In the old days, in the original conception, a Finance Bill was meant to implement the budget. The legitimate contents of a Finance Bill were the necessary amendments of rates of taxation reliefs, the type of things which were strictly budgetary, and also amendment of tax law but with discrimination. There it stopped. I remember Deputies from the Parliamentary Secretary's party complaining with some of the rest of us, when they were on this side of the House, that too much was being slipped into Finance Bills; there was too much legislation by reference, too much loophole-plugging and too much slipped in for the mere convenience of the Administration.
I fear that, in spite of those protests from parliamentarians on both sides of the House in the past—and the Leas-Cheann Comhairle will remember some members of his own party who spoke very strongly on these lines —we have now come to the stage where we have a budget, a budget debate and then a Finance Bill which, in effect, is the financial legislation for the year which is a complicated document and difficult to handle in the form it is in because it is largely legislation by reference, and it covers a very wide field. In turn, the debate on it becomes a second budget debate which, again, is wasteful of parliamentary time.
I wonder will the Leas-Cheann Comhairle permit me to make this reference to Estimates. I made it the other day in an aside. While this is going on, while we are having the duplicate budget debate, to some extent ineffective—we have a mass of legislation in this Bill which needs disentangling—at the same time the House cannot find time to discuss the individual Estimates and to take the expenditure and the accounts of the State in any kind of ordered fashion. I want to point out to the House that our financial business has got into a chaotic state, a haphazard state. Very often in panic we are bringing in and passing financial legislation at the expense of the homogeneity of the whole code. This is something which must be looked at in a broader way.
The Leas-Cheann Comhairle might be very much within his rights if he told me I cannot pursue that very far and perhaps I should take it up on the Appropriation Bill. The Appropriation Bill usually goes through in ten minutes before we break up for a vacation so, again, I will ask your indulgence, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle, in making this reference. Suffice to say— because I want to keep within the rules of order—that there is a very urgent need for a thorough look at the way this House does its financial business, not only from the public point of view and the point of view of the control of public expenditure and the point of view of the control of the Dáil in that area, but also from the point of view of the administration who need stability, who need certainty, who need to be in a position to have an estimate of when they can bring business to the House and when they cannot. I have seen this matter from two points of view here in the House itself and in Committees. In fairness to the civil service, they are suffering very much from the problems resulting from—and I am a Member of the House and I share the blame as well as everybody else—I can only say the inefficiency of Dáil Éireann in handling the financial business of the State.
Strictly within the rules of order, this should be a rather difficult Bill to discuss on Second Stage. The Second Stage should be short for two reasons. The substantive matters I have mentioned should have been disposed of in the budget debate. The Finance Bill should have followed more quickly. There has been an inordinate gap between the two for whatever reason I know not. If we were doing our business efficiently, the Finance Bill should have followed more the budget in which case the substantive discussion would have taken place on the budget and a businesslike Bill would be before us and we could dispose of it in a businesslike manner. Instead, we had what I have called an inordinate delay. We have had a second budget debate and now we have a complex Bill which cannot be disposed of in an orderly and businesslike fashion because of the way we are placed at the moment.
In fact, it is very difficult to dissect it. Instinctively anyone who has had some acquaintance with the method of operation of our finances says: "There are things in this Bill which are proper to a Finance Bill and there are other things which are not. Can we sort them?" On looking into it, I find we have developed to a stage where a cleancut sorting is not very easy. If we look at the contents we find that the first three sections are amendments of something else. In these cases they are proper to a Finance Bill. Then we go on to corporation profits tax. Part of the amendment is very proper to a Finance Bill in so far as it relates to the rates of incidence of tax. I question whether much of what is put in in regard to corporation profits tax is proper to this Bill. We went to the trouble of trying to order our taxation legislation by having an income tax code as embodied in the Income Tax Act, 1967. I think that is the date but I am not quite sure. We have a Corporation Profits Tax Act. We have a Wealth Tax Act. We have a Capital Gains Tax Act and a Capital Acquisitions Tax Act. All these Acts were nicely ordered and had the semblance of being what you might call a homogeneous code. Here we are amending the lot of them, income tax, corporation profits tax and capital gains tax. There is reference to the Wealth Tax Act. That could be quite legitimate in a Bill of this nature.
This Bill has developed into a complex mixture of what should be in it and what should not in so far as it contains legislation which should more properly be separate. It is confusing and mixing up existing codes that we have set up. It seems to me to be not exactly orderly. If one thinks of the Finance Bill as being narrowly a Bill to implement the budget, all of what I have said is sustainable. I can, however, understand somebody taking issue with me in regarding a Finance Bill in that light. That would bring me into a wider area.
I should like to make a suggestion en passant. The way we are developing we may need two types of Bill, a Finance Bill immediately after the budget and something that I might call an administrative Bill that would deal with some of the complications, that would plug loopholes, deal with certain types of evasion and other adjustments of that nature. Where there are specific statutes, conceived as consolidated measures, such as the Corporation Profits Tax Act or the Wealth Tax Act or the Capital Gains Tax Act, it would be preferable to amend them specifically. It would not take very much more time and it would stop duplication in debate and make the job of the Chair, which incidentally has become much more difficult as a result of our approach to this kind of business, a much easier matter.
These are general points. Specific matters will and should arise on Committee Stage. The Bill should be largely a Committee Bill. As I said, I did not intend to make a long contribution to this debate. I have commented essentially on two things: the change of attitude of the Minister and the Government at this time and the relative improvement that is evident in the measures before us and in the budget. I have also commented on the House's responsibility in financial matters and the deficiencies which I conceive in that area. I have commented on the adverse situation from the point of view of resources, and the national debt in particular, and the menacing problems of employment and unemployment, growth and output as against decline. These problems must be faced by the Government.
Finally, I must ask this question. Whoever brings it in, what does the next budget hold, particularly if it is to be brought in by the present Government? I must say that I would be disturbed at the attitude of a Government and a Minister who have had such a record over the past four years —misconceptions and severity resulting in serious financial load and embarrassment to the economy as a whole and specifically to the individual citizen, whether he is regarded as a taxpayer, a consumer, a worker or anything else.
We find then such a budget on the eve of an election and it is conceded that in any event this year, or at the latest the early part of 1978, must see a reference to the people. It is not unreasonable to express a fear and to wonder if when the next budget comes in it will be as favourable or whether the cup being brought home, so to speak, then the doors may be locked and the penal and damaging measures that we on this side of the House protested against two and three years ago will be enforced.
With all that in mind, can something like that be expected if this Government are returned? These are legitimate thoughts. Anyone who asks this question is asking a reasonable question. If he wants a reasonable answer let him study the facts and the record and assess them for himself. I would be very disturbed merely as a citizen—I am not talking about my present capacity—in the days before a budget to be introduced by the present Minister for Finance and his Government. I would be very much afraid. I would hope that such fears would not be grounded but I fear the situation has got so bad that the problem confronting the next Government, no matter who they are, will be intimidating indeed. It behoves us all to approach this election with our feet on the ground and with a cool assessment. As Deputy Gibbons said, where youth and the educated unemployed are concerned, this election may be one of the most critical in the history of the State.