I was making reference to the subject of the European Regional Fund. We get the quota which is allocated to us. There has been a new development in the whole area of the Regional Fund, a very welcome development, but we have some very serious thinking to do here in Ireland.
Reports on Developments in the European Communities: Motions (Resumed).
Debate resumed on the following motion:
That Dáil Éireann takes note of the Reports:
Developments in the European Communities—Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third Reports.
—(Minister for Foreign Affairs).
Go slow about it.
Since we became a member of the Community and since the Regional Fund first came into existence and Ireland was designated as one entire region with economic difficulties, the money has been paid to the Irish Government. Under the terms of reference laid down by the Community, the Government were free to spend the money as they chose on various projects. The Government did this. It was direct spending from the Department of Finance allocated under various headings, for example, arterial roads, harbours, the development of our infrastructures, telephones, industrial projects. I understand that the Naas bypass and the Alcan project in Limerick also were aided from the Regional Development Fund. We got a specific amount of money and spent it as we saw fit. There was no more available and had we chosen to spend this money in another way, for instance, to allocate it around the various local authorities, allowing them to submit their various projects, then at national level we would have to replace by some other means, the other grants which we paid. It would not have added anything to the amount of public spending here. In the area of the Regional Fund we were particularly good at getting all the money available to us.
Of course, there was the question of the British refund. The European Parliament objected to the system by which the Council of Minister agreed to pay direct refunds to Britain. Parliament contended that this was Community money and it must be spent under schemes and directives of the European Community. Therefore Britain had a certain amount of spending which that country claimed was a spending of their own national exchequer, but which the Community will say were grants given to them by the Community under the terms of agreement arrived at. This creates a false impression that Britain was getting more than her share. We accept that she was getting a little more than her share, but what she was getting were refunds negotiated——
That is not the one that you are talking about.
I cannot hear the Deputy.
I am talking about non-quota areas.
I do not know what the Deputy said. There are some areas where we can claim not to have exploited all the resources available from the Community. Many grants were applied for under FEOGA but for one reason or another the promoters were not able to raise the necessary capital. The projects were uneconomic and the money which was allocated was never spent. Sometimes that creates a bad impression.
Taking all these things into consideration the recent report from the Central Bank indicates we had a net benefit of something like £640 million cash flow from the Community last year. That is a considerable amount of money. It is very hard to understand why people are disillusioned when we consider the importance of that amount of money in an economy like ours. At least £400 million of that was aid under the guarantee and guidance section of FEOGA. The total income in Irish agriculture last year was estimated to be around £900 million. The direct transfer of money from Europe was almost equal to half the total income of Irish farmers. It could be argued that if that money was taken away farmers' incomes would drop by half. It is strange to hear people shouting about disillusionment when we consider the amount of money involved, and many people in Europe are themselves disillusioned when that kind of attitude is adopted.
It is not just the question of direct cash transfers which we should study when discussing developments in the Community. I appreciate the concern of Irish fishermen. Spain has a fleet equivalent to 70 per cent of the entire Community fleet. We must recognise that their fleet has been built up over the years and that they have been fishing; otherwise they could not have developed this size of fleet. Before we became a member of the Community and before we had a common fisheries policy we should consider what our fishing industry was like. We had a small inshore badly equipped fleet. The EC gave us assistance with which to catch fish. We have now developed a medium distance fleet. It has been developed with State assistance and considerable European assistance. We have been assisted by way of FEOGA grants and now can freeze and partly process the fish. At present we catch £40 million worth of fish and export £72 million of frozen and further processed fish and employ 1,700 people. The size of the industry, the extent to which it has grown and given incomes to the people involved in it can be attributed to the development of the Common Fisheries Policy. We could not catch, process, preserve or protect the fish before we joined the Community. That is the truth of the matter.
If we are less than satisfied with the way things are now and how they will develop in the future, we should remember that we are considerably better off in a Community with Spain as a member. It might be a little easier to police the Spanish fleet when they are within the Community. We will have it within our capacity to impose sanctions and demand observance of the rules. I recognise, and we all know, that even within the Community there have been instances where the fleets of nations within the Community have not observed the letter of the law. However, we will never know what the Spaniards are catching or landing until they become a member of the Community and until we have our inspectors on their boats and in their ports. If the Spaniards make agreements with us, we will have the power to enforce them and to impose sanctions if the agreements are broken. The experience within the Community is that rules are generally observed if slowly, and we have not known any state to openly defy the authority of the Community or decisions made by the court.
We can make too much of the fears and concerns of people and we can excite fears and concerns which are not realistic. It is just like exporting cattle to Libya. We are glad to export cattle to these regions or to any other middle eastern or third country. It is good to have those markets. Very often we fail to tell people what the Libyans are paying for cattle and how much of the money that Irish farmers get comes in the form of export refunds from the EC. That is another benefit which is generally forgotten in the euphoric moments when we are clapping hands and making deals, deals which could never be made if it were not for the assistance of the export refunds we get from the Community.
The question of world hunger was raised. It is unfortunate that a by-product of this discussion has been the criticism levelled at the EC for its failure to rush in and resolve this problem. I spoke about this before but it was not well heard. What was heard was the criticism of the Community. The Community is not something out there: we are the Community. The criticism levelled against the Community was that it was a monster with barns full of food which it refused to share with hungry and dying people. The truth is the EC does not have food. It does not have within its control all the millions of tonnes of dried milk, butter and grain. All this food has been bought and is held by the intervention agencies. Those agencies hold the food and the Community pays only the financial and storage charges. The Community does not have the resources immediately to hand to buy all this food. If the Community was to distribute this it would have to pay Irish farmers or intervention agencies the full intervention price for these products. That would necessitate having a new supplementary budget at a time when we were in the process of finalising an already difficult supplementary budget. This was not possible.
The EC is more generous in the assistance it gives to the Third World than any other part of the world. Of the £35 billion given annually in such aid throughout the world, Europe gives something like 14 per cent. Total assistance from the EC is more than that of the US, Soviet Russia and the Eastern bloc countries combined. Per capita only the OPEC countries, which are in an enviable position in that they have a ready cash income, are giving more than the EC. We have been congratulating ourselves recently on the fact that we give more per head of population than any other country in the world. That is not correct. What we are talking about is that we have raised more per head of population by voluntary means in the last few months. That is an entirely different thing. We give .2 of 1 per cent of GNP, which is considerably below the amount recommended by the United Nations. Only the Dutch give a figure equal to that which is recommended by the UN. We have a long way to go. Somebody said in this House that we have aroused the conscience of the EC. I think that our first business is with our own conscience and not with that of other peoples or nations in the EC. When we are at the 0.7 of 1 per cent recommended by the UN we can say that we are out in front of everybody else, we have been more generous, we have met our obligations in full.
Debate adjourned.