Two years ago, after the general election, Fianna Fáil were returned with a tremendous majority. My comment then was that as the people had chosen we must accept their decision. I felt that if all the things that were promised in the manifesto, which is now known to rival Hans Anderson's fairy tales, were carried out, we would be doing well. I believed I could gain from some of the promises. I decided to give the Government a chance to put their plans into operation, if they had any plans. For that reason in the last two years, as the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy pointed out recently, I have occupied a back seat watching Fianna Fáil moves. I watched that Minister in particular because, of all the Ministers appointed two years ago, he was the one with the promises which culminated in him taking off his coat to fight the oil giants before heading for China to announce a massive increase in the price of petrol.
During the last two years I discovered that Fianna Fáil announced the promises in the manifesto only in order to gain re-election. They did not have any plan. Obviously, they depended on the ideas of the Minister for Economic Planning and Development. They either accepted those ideas as being the way which the country could make a tremendous surge forward or they knew he was talking through his hat but felt that because he would succeed in getting them returned to office they were worth a try. Whatever the reason, they got back into government and their return to office was followed by a series of mistakes, things which one could not picture happening to seasoned politicians. One would imagine somebody, particularly somebody who has been in government before, should not make the mistakes which have been made time after time, not alone by new Ministers, but by the Taoiseach and the senior members of his Cabinet.
The evening immediately before the last general election the Taoiseach announced, in a statement on television, that he was going to wipe out the dole queues immediately. He was asked specifically when it was going to happen and he said immediately they got back into office. Several times since he has spoken about this problem and as recently as a few months ago he repeated that in a few years' time—it was three first, then he felt that was a bit close and would be within the life of this Government, so he put it back to five; in four or five years—there would be no dole queues. This is probably what Deputy Moore was talking about. Probably he heard the same statement.
I was a trade union official for 30 years. Therefore I know as much about employment, and putting people into employment, as does anybody else in this House. The so-called programmes which have been put before the House and the country in no way are likely to create full employment, about which the Taoiseach spoke also. As a matter of fact I am one of those people who believes that going into the age of the silicon chip will make it extremely difficult to reduce unemployment substantially, but we must aim at that goal. Yet Fianna Fáil, knowing that they cannot do so, knowing that what they are saying is pure claptrap, have repeated it again and again. The fact that they are blatantly saying things that are untrue was evidenced by this morning's antics in this House. I regret as much as anybody else the fact that there was a continuous barrage of interruptions during the time Deputy O'Donoghue was speaking. I can sympathise with him very much because on numerous occasions, as a Minister speaking from the front benches in this House, I was subjected to the same type of barrage by the people now protesting from Fianna Fáil. However, that does not justify it. I do not think it is a good idea. Everybody is entitled to make the statements they want in this House. But I can see the point of people who know that statements being made just could not be true, and indeed the person making the statement knows that what he is saying is pure and simple bluff. Therefore, there is a certain amount of sympathy for those who suddenly find themselves so incensed that they interrupt. But that does not excuse what happened and I regret it as much as anybody else.
To go through the Minister's remarks as quickly as I can—and half-an-hour does not allow very much time for this sort of exercise—my successor is in a Department whose title has been changed from that of Local Government to the Environment, which has consisted simply in having new notepaper printed, nothing else. There has been no effort made to alter the face of the Department, rather simply the need to give the impression that something was being done. The first point I would make in this respect is that the amount of money being made available for local authority housing has dropped consistently. Furthermore the number of houses being built by local authorities this year, in my opinion, will be an almost new low record. Yet we have Deputy Moore coming in here telling us of the necessity to build houses in Dublin, particularly in the city centre.
I should like to remind Deputy Moore that he was one of the people who was a consistent critic of mine when I was allowing over 40 per cent of the amount of money allocated to local authority housing to be spent in Dublin city, when I sanctioned CPOs for areas in this city, including the one he represents, which had been refused by Fianna Fáil predecessors of mine. I would remind the House further that houses being built since the change of Government are simply the result of efforts made by the Government of which I was a Minister, and carried out faithfully by Dublin Corporation. My sympathies now are with Dublin Corporation because I believe they will not be given the money to continue that programme. I believe that the housing situation in Dublin, and indeed throughout the country, will deteriorate badly. I hate to say this but the small man in this country, the working man who would not have sufficient money earned or saved to build a house, indeed, even newly-weds looking forward to building their own homes, have no hope whatever of being able to go into a new house because, first, the State will not provide the money to build local authority houses and, secondly, the price of private houses has gone out through the roof. It costs now twice as much for a site, even in a backward, rural area, as a few years ago would have built a house on that site. This is what my successor has done as Minister for the Environment, and I have great sympathy for the people who will suffer as a result.
Coming now to roads, can anybody in this House say that our roads were ever as bad? They are a disgrace, as one can see travelling from one end of the country to the other. No effort is being made to improve them because the money just is not there. There was a small percentage increase in the allocations this year but then the Government notified the local authorities that for the first time VAT must be paid on road materials and machinery. The end result is that the net amount given for road building and repairs has been reduced, with an appalling situation obtaining throughout the length and breadth of the country.
I do not know what has happened in regard to water and sewerage grants. We seem to have gone back to the bad old Fianna Fáil system of to-ing and fro-ing vis-à-vis the Department, making it impossible to get schemes implemented or off the ground, if that is an appropriate expression to use in relation to water and sewerage. This is the treatment we are receiving from the Department of the Environment, which has been given a new name and nothing else.
I always remember, when our Government were in office, the Minister for Labour, then Deputy G. Fitzgerald, coming in here like a little terrier every time there was even a rumour of a strike, when he was up on his hind legs shouting at the then Minister, Deputy M. O'Leary, telling him what he should do to stop the strike; what he should have done to prevent it, that every strike begun should not have been allowed; that it was his job to sit up all night to deal with them. What did he do when he assumed office? He seemed to have disappeared; he just went; he intervened in no strikes, and they got worse and worse. Perhaps it was just as well he kept out of them. Then last weekend I noted that a terrible thing happened him: he had gone down to Cork and had to come back all the way to Dublin to talk sternly to the oil men on strike. I could not understand why he had not remained in Dublin in the first place because all of us knew that the row would burst over the weekend, and it would have been a very good idea to have made an effort to have settled the dispute here. But to go home and come back again was too much for him; he should not have been asked to do it.
I want to make myself very clear on one thing. I believe that trade unions were and are very necessary. I believe they are representative of a large body of working-class opinion and that it is their job to negotiate wages and working conditions. Having said that, I believe also that possibly they could have more discipline within their ranks. I believe it is wrong that any small group, no matter how incensed they may be about the conditions in which they work or the wages they earn, should, on their own, decide that they will hold, not an area or a section of people, but the whole country to ransom. If they are dissatisfied with the service they are getting from their unions, there is a vehicle by which that dissatisfaction can be brought to the notice of Congress, when Congress can investigate it. And, if they are not doing their job, there are always other trade unions to which they can resort.
I believe also that it is the responsibility of the trade unions to ensure that they give service to those people. There must be a better way than simply going on unofficial strike. I will not agree that the employers are innocent of blame in this charge. Many of them simply allow things to get so bad, refusing to negotiate that eventually their employees become sore, with a resultant unofficial stoppage of work. One of the things wrong is the quickness with which employers who have got into trouble, or when an unofficial dispute occurs, are prepared to negotiate directly with the people who have gone on strike rather than with the trade unions concerned.
I am a great admirer of the trade union movement, having been part of it for so long. They must put their foot down, no matter what Government are in power. They must ensure that they are the people who do the negotiations and that the mavericks who want to go off at a tangent to get something for themselves on the side are not allowed to do so. Speaking as a trade union official of 30 years standing, I believe that the responsibility must be carried by the trade unions themselves. If a trade union official is not doing his job there is always another trade union official who will be able to do it. The ICTU and other groups of unions feel very strongly about this, and if they would come together we might get somewhere.
At present there are numerous strikes and rumours of strikes. There are stoppages for this, that and the other, some of them reasonable, some unreasonable. It is very annoying when I go to get my lunch and there is no electricity, and that evening there is no light because for one reason or another there is no electric power. Because the electricity has been cut off water is not being pumped and whole areas are without water. This is in Ireland in 1979. Some of this is caused by industrial disputes and some by sheer inefficiency on the part of the people running the organisation. Some of it is caused because the Government do not appear to know what they want to do. It is a little bit too much, when we look back at the postal strike, to realise that the terms offered and accepted in the end would almost certainly, had they been offered, have been accepted before the dispute started.
Let us not talk about what the workers who were out lost. They lost a lot and, as one who has been involved in disputes, I know what it costs to a worker and his family. You do not take such a decision lightly and when it is taken things are very hard when you stand up to it. The postal workers were on strike for a long time, and the ramifications of that strike will be with us for years to come. There were the lost orders, the tourists who could not come in, arrangements of various kinds which could not be made, the old folks who could not hear from, talk to or write to their friends and relatives for many months. The people responsible for that were the Government of this country who fought the issue deliberately under the impression that they could starve those strikers back to work. But for the fact that the Presidency of the EEC was coming along today, that strike would still be on. It would be an awful embarrassment if correspondence could not be passed backwards and forwards and the members of the EEC would look askance at the strike-bound country with its Prime Minister, the Taoiseach, as President of the EEC.
The strike was ridiculous and outrageous and it will never be forgotten that Fianna Fáil allowed it to drag on for so long. They could have settled it easily but they made no effort to do so. I would give no bouquets whatever to the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs because, decent man that he is, either he took orders from the Government or, because of his nature, kept his head down. The ostrich act may be all right but it is no way for a Government Minister to behave with a storm raging as this storm was for 18 weeks.
I listened this morning here to the Minister for Economic Planning and Development and I have heard him on a number of occasions previously, but this is the first time that I have seen a brazen, hard-necked person come into this House and say that there was net immigration at present. All the evidence proves that there is emigration of somewhere between 11,000 and 20,000 people per annum and yet the Minister for Economic Planning and Development has discovered suddenly that there is net immigration. He got the IDA to print his little advertisement suggesting that key jobs were available for a lot of people, Irish, British or otherwise, who would come over here to work. If there are any key jobs here they should be filled by the almost 100,000 people who are still unemployed despite the promise in the Fianna Fáil manifesto to do away with unemployment completely.
A bouquet was thrown at the Minister for Education. I will not be too critical of him, and perhaps he is doing his best. The manifesto said that there would be a reduction in the class sizes immediately and that new school buildings were to appear all over the country, but these do not seem to have happened. At present, despite our free education, little children of six, seven or eight years old come home with notes from their teachers looking for £10 and £12 for school books. Multiply that by five or six as the children grow older and that means that very little is left out of £100 for some unfortunate working man. Also, because his child is living 50 yards outside the limit, that child cannot even travel to school on the bus while more wealthy people living further down the road have no hesitation in taking the vacant seats. If the Minister for Education really wants to live up to the reputation which he had before he became Minister as the result of his statements in this House, he will want to do a lot more than he is doing at the present.
The Minister for Finance introduced a budget here. The trouble with Ministers for Finance is that they have come to accept that the budget is not the annual housekeeping account. It is now something to put before the Dáil more or less to please the Government's supporters and to give the impression that something is being done. On two occasions at least the Minister has given a solemn guarantee that there will be no supplementary budget this year. I will wait to see what will happen before the end of the year. One thing he did this year was to remove completely the subsidy on some foods and he also reduced substantially the subsidies on others. The income tax remission which he talked about in the budget has turned out to be the dampest of damp squibs. The tax bands were changed and the people who were paying under the A band are now paying under the B band, and they find that, although they seem to have a higher personal allowance, they are paying more tax out of the same amount of money. The people mainly affected by this are those at the bottom of the ladder.
I do not know whether the Minister for Finance, the Taoiseach or the Minister for Economic Planning and Development was responsible for what happened with regard to the EMS. We had statements and counter-statements. The Taoiseach made statements and the Minister for Economic Planning and Development here and on radio and television contradicted flatly what the Taoiseach said. In some peculiar way the Taoiseach was under the impression that a grant of £650 million was being given and in the same television programme he was corrected from Brussels by one of the television commentators, who shall be nameless, who explained that there was a slight error and that what he was talking about was a loan. A person who does not know the difference between a grant and a loan of that amount knows very little about anything. Then there was the question of the £45 million. We were getting a £45 million grant. We were getting a £45 million subsidy. So far we have got nothing. Yesterday evening it was reported in the papers that the £45 million was to be given and the guess was hazarded that that money was now going to be spent in tax remission. I understand that the £45 million is the interest which will be paid on whatever loan we get and either we will not get that or, if we do get it, it is for the purpose of passing it back again to those who lend the money. Then it will be said that it is not available for the purpose of paying tax.
Lined up beside that was the question of the £60 million which the Minister for the Environment said he was going to give to those who would be converting from oil to solid fuel. I do not believe a word of it. He said that there would be no inspection. There might be the odd spot check, but anybody at all who applied, whether having a house or not, would get that £600 grant, or at least so it appeared in the papers. I am not holding the Government or the Minister responsible for what appears in the papers, but a kite must be flying somewhere which they have used. It is not possible to do what is suggested. The Minister himself in this House last week was very confused over what he had said he was going to give. He said he would make a statement, but that statement does not appear to have been made yet.
I want to deal with the question of oil and petrol. The Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy was reported recently as having said that there would be heating oil supplies available in August. If he said that it was simply for the purpose of taking the heat off the Minister for the Environment. A lot of people were converting, in the hope of getting the grant, to solid fuel and this would be one way of preventing them doing that. I met a lot of people who said they were thinking of converting to solid fuel but if the heating oil was made freely available it would be all right.
Shortly before Easter I had a question down to the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy about petrol and heating oil. He was not present and neither was his Minister of State, Deputy R. Burke. His Minister of State, Mrs. Geoghegan-Quinn, answered the question. For up to ten minutes she berated me about scare stories and said that there was no question of a shortage of any kind, there was plenty of oil and plenty of petrol and it was people like me who were causing the trouble. Shortly afterwards a further question was asked by somebody else and the same reply was given.
I commented on a radio programme that I thought it was appalling that we should be put in the situation where the petrol and oil supplies were apparently almost non-existent and yet the story was being given out that there was plenty available. The Minister then came on the scene. He was supposed to have taken on the oil giants and he was going to tell them off. Again, the newspapers suggested that we would even be able to get supplies of oil from Russia if the oil giants did not toe the line. He was not going to allow them to raise prices. Whatever he did after he left the country and went on his trip to China, we then got a notification that prices were going up. They have gone up twice since and we understand they are going up again.
We also have queues. We have the cowboys, the people who will look for petrol although they have got a full tank, bring it home and fill it into something else, who should not be facilitated in any way. We have queues at petrol stations and people are very badly incommoded. The Minister, so far, has done very little about it. He played around with the £5 minimum amount but that is no answer. While I dislike petrol rationing I firmly believe that if the petrol shortage is as great as it is supposed to be we have got to do something very serious about it. Perhaps the Government may have to think about petrol rationing. The Minister assured me that the coupons were ready if that was necessary.
The question of diesel oil is far more serious because farmers have complained to me that they cannot get enough oil to carry on their normal farming work. The amount of oil they are getting is not sufficient. Somebody who normally got 500 gallons now gets 100 gallons and then he has to waste time going back looking for more which he sometimes gets and sometimes does not. As far as heating oil is concerned I believe we are in for a very cold winter. I am glad the Minister is here because I would like him to make a categoric statement about the matter. I believe he knows there will be a severe shortage of heating oil. He said he would ration it if necessary. He did not say how he would do it but when the time came he would have his mind made up. The people who use central heating oil are entitled to know what will happen.
I am proud of the fact that on 24 May 1974 I made an order that no new house could be built without at least one fireplace which would use solid fuel. If I did not do that we would still be in cloud cuckoo land going around with our little can of oil expecting that the central heating oil would last forever. We should finish this codology about whether or not oil supplies are there and arrange to let the country know exactly what the position is. We are grown up and we should know.
I would like to refer to the EMS. I do not know if people realise that we have reached the stage where we are importing an enormous amount of English goods. We are importing household goods which practically everyone buys in the shops. Nine out of every ten articles sold are British made. We are paying an 8 per cent subsidy on those goods. The Minister for Finance had the hard neck to go on radio and television last week and say that people should thank them because it will give us a better competitive edge by our pound being worth 8 per cent less than the British pound. He said that this was all right and he then referred to Germany, a strong country, and said that we needed a strong currency to be a strong country. I do not know how he added those two together and got them to agree.
The cost of living has gone up much more than the cost of living index shows because things which are not included in that index are being bought every day by our people and we are paying 8 per cent more because the stuff is British. If we want to know what we should do about industry why do we not attempt to manufacture in the country a lot of the stuff we are importing? The Buy Irish campaign, which was started some years ago and on which a lot of money was spent, is a complete joke because people do not buy Irish. I insist every time I can on getting Irish goods but many people do not bother their heads buying Irish at all.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs was very annoyed when the leader of the Labour Party attacked him about the way the troops in the Lebanon are being treated. He was not prepared to do very much about it. We have only to look back and remember that he is the man who was advising the IFO and other kindred organisations about the necessity to have the 50-mile limit. It is written into the Fianna Fáil manifesto that Fianna Fáil thought that a 50-mile limit to protect our fisheries was necessary. Now nobody in Fianna Fáil wants to hear anything about that. If that is the kind of Government we have come to, then what Deputy Harte said when concluding is right. What President Carter has succeeded in doing in America might be copied here. Perhaps the Taoiseach would go away for a couple of weeks, bring his ministers together, have a long talk with them and they might then hand in all their resignations.
