I move:
First Schedule: To delete the figure 6d. in line 5 and to substitute therefor the figure 8d., and to delete the figure 7d. in line 8 and to substitute therefor the figure 9d.
The effect is to make the reduction one penny in these two cases instead of threepence. The meaning of it, in effect, is that instead of reducing the contributions by the body of employers by £112,000 the figure would be reduced by £30,000 less than that. It is not possible, outside the Department, to give anything in the way of a precise figure, because we do not know the relative proportions of the various classes of contributors who pay to the fund. I want to ask the Seanad to consider the case of unemployed persons and the desirability of improving their position as contrasted with the position to-day and to allow provision to be made by keeping the fund somewhere approaching its present level of income, so that an improvement can be made in the benefits paid. This is not the time or place to go into detail regarding the class of improvement that we would desire, but my suggestion would be, if there is £80,000 or £90,000 available within the next year or two more than is necessary to meet the present demands upon the fund, that it would be a good service if, let us say, the money were spent upon extending benefits beyond the period of twenty-six weeks to unemployed men who have dependents.
I want the House to take into account the case of many hundreds, in fact thousands one might say, of men with families who have been dismissed from their employment for many causes. In numerous cases they have been dismissed through the trade they have been following, perhaps for twenty years, having gone out of fashion and therefore their services were no longer in demand. Take a man of forty or fifty years of age who is accustomed to a particular class of work, who has a family and who is thrown out of work. For the twenty-six weeks he is waiting and expecting and hoping to get replaced in employment and the hope is not fulfilled. Then he goes off the unemployment fund. If he has, let us say, a wife and four children and is entitled to receive twenty-six weeks' benefit, there is a sudden drop in his income from the 24/- which he has been receiving in unemployment benefit to nothing and he has immediately and of necessity to become an applicant for home help.
I suggest that it is not good for the State that that man and his family should be reduced to that condition as rapidly as is the case at present, and that we would be doing a good service, if we had the funds available, as it appears we have, to extend the benefits in that way so that that man and his children would, at least, have some improvement in the conditions allowed by the present scheme of benefit. We still retain, by such a proposal, the insurance character of this scheme.
I am not proposing to go outside the insurance character of the scheme, but I am proposing that, having a premium income, as we may call it, we can give the improved benefits which I suggest should be by extending the period for men with families depending on them. We might reduce the sum paid in benefit after the six months, but it is surely a desirable thing that these benefits should not entirely cease. I only make that suggestion as a desirable way in which the surplus could be expended. The difficulty that I see—and I shall state it quite frankly —is that if the amount of the contribution is reduced now, and if the demand upon the fund continues it would be very much more difficult for the present Minister or his successor to come forward and ask for an increase in contributions. As the demand will be insistent, the inevitable alternative would be to provide an increase out of taxation rather than out of contributions.
The case the Minister makes which seems to have had the greatest appeal is that this reduction of contributions would provide a fillip for industry. I think that is worth examining. I find that there is, roughly, about a quarter of a million persons eligible for paying insurance contributions. Not very much more than half of that number are engaged in what might be called industry. How it can be said that industry receives a fillip by the retention of the distributive trades' share of the unemployment contribution, or the national local government service, insurance, banking, public utility organisations, professional services and so on, is more than I can understand. To relieve that type of contributor, to the extent of nearly half the total number of contributors. cannot conceivably benefit industrial output or prosperity. We have, therefore, the position that we are going to remit these contributions in respect of half the number of those paying without any possible hope or expectation of a great fillip to industry.
There is another aspect of this question of a fillip to industry. I would put it to the Seanad that there is a greater likelihood of Irish industry being benefited from the expenditure of, let us say, £100 by 100 men going to shops for family requirements than from the expenditure of £100 by one man upon imported luxuries or semi-luxuries. The £100 that goes to the average workman and his wife is, to a much greater degree, a help to home industry than that same £100 en bloc spent as it is more than likely to be spent on luxuries or semi-luxuries, these being much more likely to be imported than domestic necessaries. From the point of view of a fillip to industry there is a much greater chance of that fillip coming from the distribution to people who will spend that sum over the retail counter, than from the retention of that sum by the employer, expended as profits are expended, or as improved dividend returns would be spent. On each of these grounds I think the case for maintaining the fund nearly up to its present level is a complete one. Whether from the point of view of the recipient of unemployment benefit or from the point of view of maintaining or assisting Irish industry the advantage lies in the wider distribution of the fund through the extension of the unemployment benefits.
