In coming to discuss the Book of Estimates, I turn first to the Estimate for Education and, in particular, to the Universities Estimate. It is some source of satisfaction that at last we find now that our needs for building in Cork have been recognised and that a commitment has been accepted by the Minister towards providing, first, the building, that is, a building for science, including physics, chemistry and mathematical science. We, naturally, are quite buoyed up by that hope and consequently things appear much brighter this year. But there is a feeling that the Government have not yet recognised the fact that buildings do not make a university or an educational institution, that it is the men who count most. Unfortunately, we find that the Estimates so far show no recognition of this essential fact. In fact, we appear to be progressing backwards in that in two years our student numbers have gone up from 1,500 to 1,700 and to almost 2,000 in the current year, an increase in the student body of more than 30 per cent, while the increased grant in the two years is just 15 per cent so that, certainly, that does not provide for the increase in student numbers, much less make provision for the increased cost of living and also for expansion.
We hope the Government will grasp this essential fact before it is too late. It will be too late to grasp this essential fact when the new buildings are there in all their splendour, ready to be occupied and trained staffs are not available to carry out the necessary expansion.
What I say for the institution with which I am connected holds equally for all other institutions in the country. I do not believe for one moment that we are being treated any worse than the other institutions. We can look with envious eyes across the Border and see what is regarded as being the necessary equipment both in personnel and in laboratory facilities and so on in Queen's University, Belfast. The most conservative estimate you could make is that it costs twice as much in Queen's University, Belfast, to train a student as it does here in the Republic.
This is something, of course, that the Government cannot remedy overnight but I appeal to the Government to have a policy of closing the gap. This gap is one to which we will have to take a fairly long term approach. I suggest something like a nine or ten year period. If the Government under this heading were prepared to give an increase of ten per cent per annum in order to close the gap, then we could effectively close the gap in nine to ten years and do it without in any way lowering the standard of our academic personnel.
Of course, closing the gap is not sufficient because these institutions across the border and elsewhere have their expansion plans for the next decade. In addition, we have to keep pace with their expansion plans so that in ten years' time when we hope to be in the Common Market, when we hope that the fruits of the Second Programme for Economic Expansion will have been reaped, we should be able to say that we are devoting as much resources to the training of students per student as they are in comparable institutions in England or elsewhere. That is a target the Government should take.
I do not want to dwell on this unduly because we hope in the coming six months or so to have the Report of the Commission on Higher Education available. I believe that will represent a real landmark in the history of higher education in this country and will be the means of making that break-through to convincing our Government of the necessity for a far greater amount of our resources to be channelled into higher education and, of course, the same goes for the other educational branches to which I will refer in a few moments.
In passing, may I say that I was very pleased to see in the newspaper controversies over the past month or so the suggestion that Army training should be linked up with the university system? In fact, I had formed the same opinion quite a while back and had it reinforced very strongly during a recent visit to the United States where I saw how closely the various defence services there are linked in with the university system, so that each graduate, whether at West Point, Anapolis or Colorado Springs, is trained professionally and has a degree and the better graduates are picked to go on to universities to complete Masters' and, in many cases, Ph.D programmes. That is only as it should be in developing the excellent talent that always lies in a pool of men that are usually attracted to career service in the military services.
It is high time that we saw to that here and it would be a simple enough matter to arrange. After all, it merely calls for the stationing of the trainees adjacent to the university centres during their period of training. That could be done. I do not thing any one institution should be preferred over the other. It would do the Army good to have a diversity of trainees coming from the various centres and it would do our student bodies a great deal of good to be brought into active association with Army students during their formative periods. Of course it should be taken for granted that with the completion of the primary degree period, the better men in the Army graduate class would be given every facility to go to post-graduate schools, either at home or abroad. The whole nation would gain greatly by utilising the talent of the young Army officers to the full. They would afterwards become the captains of industry or make a big contribution from the point of view of industrial management, following in the footsteps of many illustrious Army men before them, of whom Lieutenant General Costello stands as the supreme example.
Again, I find myself very much in sympathy with the growing volume of opinion in the country that the teachers' training colleges should be actively associated with the universities and should be able, during the training period or shortly thereafter, to proceed to a full degree, so that there no longer would be any question of discrimination between the secondary teachers and the national teachers but that they would all be fully qualified, degree-holding teachers. At the moment I believe the secondary teachers are fully justified in seeking a differential based on their more protracted training and also on the fact that this has been in most cases paid for by themselves. Any system that could be evolved should, of course, grant corresponding increments to national school teachers holding a degree, whereby eventually we would have a uniformly trained teaching body without any question of discrimination.
While the Second Programme for Economic Expansion calls for something like 2,000 extra national school teachers by 1970 and also sets as a target a 50 per cent increase in attendance at secondary schools, it should call for more than a 50 per cent increase in the number of secondary teachers because many classes are far too big in our secondary schools and very often an inadequate number of teachers are provided in the schools. There is a great necessity for recruiting teachers and I would suggest that in the coming six years, there should be— there probably will be—a continuation of the slowdown of recruitment to the public service. Many of the positions that absorbed so many of our people in the past, for instance, clerical grades in the Civil Service, are now being vacated through the use of machinery. The talent that would have gone into these avenues should be diverted into providing these extra teachers who are required during this period. The careers open to them should make up for the slowing down of recruitment in clerical and ancillary grades in the public service.
We need to continue the diversification of the training provided by the university centres. This is rather difficult in the smaller provincial centres. We look at the developments in the capital in management training, and so on, and we are conscious of the necessity for these facilities in the provinces. Beset as we are with so many financial difficulties, it is impossible to do this from our own resources and we hope the Government will come to see the necessity for having groups of dedicated men prepared to give students a vocation for management or industrial engineering, to both of which every graduate in this small country should get some exposure. In our industrial life, the opportunities for pure science or for being completely at your own profession are far more limited than they are in richer countries like England and America. Consequently, our graduates must be far more diverse. Any graduate who in any way comes in contact with our industrial life should have some elementary training in economics and industrial engineering so that he is fitted to play the part that is required in our industrial enterprises.
Without taking up too much time, I wish to refer to a few other items. I share with many here an uneasiness about certain features presented by Telefís Éireann and which are very much contrary to everything we hold dear in this country. We do get some excellent programmes which counteract this, but there have been undesirable features such as the desecrations of Shakespeare portrayed recently. There was the presentation of Hamlet in which there were love scenes which would have shocked Shakespeare if he could have seen them. Likewise, there was a presentation of A Midsummer Night's Dream which could have passed for something which was advertising a nudist colony. This is revolting and, worse than that, it is insidious in our set-up here today because once Shakespeare is listed on a Telefís Éireann programme, the parents of children from ten years upwards will say: “You should see Shakespeare so you may stay up tonight to see this programme.” One is embarrassed in the middle of it when sub-teenage children are there to see love scenes that out-Hollywood Hollywood. I have seen some of them and suffered the embarrassment of having to shut them off without causing too much questioning from the child at the time.
There is no need for importing this trash into our Irish life because it is acknowledged that some of the finest productions of Shakespeare have come from Father O'Flynn's group in Cork, from a place popularly known as The Loft. If Telefís Éireann would only come down, film those and release them, I feel certain that they would do far more for our young children in giving them an appreciation of Shakespeare, and I am convinced any rational television authority in the world that cared for its teenage students would be anxious to rent such films from us. Yet, so far, the activities of The Loft have gone unnoticed by Telefís Éireann.
There are many other points I might make. For instance, we enjoy the relays from horse shows, Wembley, White City and so on, but why could we not have some of the wonderful competitions at Dublin Horse Show filmed and reproduced for us during the winter or perhaps on the following night or the following week? All we got, apparently, from that Show was the Aga Khan Cup Competition but there were other competitions all through that week that would have made wonderful material for the long winter nights? I hope and I believe that Telefís Éireann will look far more at the material available in our own country and scan very much more severely what they import from abroad and also consider very carefully the type of audience likely to see what they put on.
I notice in the Second Programme that there is to be extra money spent on, among other things, increasing the hours of daylight broadcasting. As far as I can check in Holland and such places, the hours are far shorter and Telefís Éireann would be considerably improved if its hours were reduced. I see no reason why it should continue from 5 p.m. to 11.30 p.m., if the standard were upgraded and much less of the imported obnoxious stuff I mentioned introduced, and if instead material which the ordinary person could view for a couple of hours were shown. Programmes are far too long and the hours of available viewing are far too long. None of our resources should be spent in the coming period on extending either.
Turning to the big event that has happened since we met here previously, the publishing of the Second Programme for Economic Expansion, this is a very formidable document running to 325 pages. In fact it is not over-difficult reading: it is an elaboration of the First Programme laid before us little more than a year ago. Consequently I was very interested in seeing what changes the representations of the past year had made in the Programme because we were assured 12 months ago that the First Programme was produced relatively tentatively and that there would be many opportunities for reviewing and adjusting targets in the light of the subsequent discussions with groups concerned and that the final programme —this one—would show all those adjustments.
Frankly, I cannot detect any results in this Programme from any consultations in the past 12 months: it could just as well have been published 12 months ago. There is certainly no adjustment of targets in this. The only one that has been adjusted is the agricultural target. In March I addressed myself at length to this target, showing that a target of 2.7 per cent was much too low, that it was an in-between target which was higher than what we had been doing and far below what we could achieve if we made a modernised approach to the problem. At that stage I gave the figure of four per cent as the figure that the National Farmers Association believed was the minimum at which we should aim and which Dr. Crotty, consultant to the Irish creamery milk suppliers reasoned also was the minimum and which I considered was the minimum.
Here, at page 299 of this Book, we find the target has been increased from 2.7 to 3.8 per cent for agriculture in the next seven years. That is practically up to four per cent, the target which the bodies have been looking for. That seems a step in the right direction but, unfortunately, the mathematics of it puzzle and disturb me a little because, as far as I can see, the target was arrived at in this way: the Programme last June called for increased production in agriculture of 33 per cent over the ten year period 1960-1970 and that, worked out at compound interest, meant you had to proceed at the rate 2.7 per cent per annum. Three years have elapsed since 1960 and in those years we achieved an increase of only 3.6 per cent or 1.2 per cent per annum. That left almost 30 per cent to be made up in the remaining seven years and if you do a sum, you find you must have a rate of 3.8 per cent that is, nearly 30 per cent in seven years. That does not really inspire much confidence. I should prefer it if I could honestly believe that target was set as a direct consequence of the endeavours of the Farmers Association and the others to get a four per cent target.
I am further disturbed by the makeup of this target, how this 3.8 per cent is to be produced. The 1960-1970 Programme called for an increase in productivity of 4.8 per cent, to be offset partly by a reduction in employment of 1.8 per cent. Now in the adjustment of figures, the 3.8 per cent is reached by assuming a reduction in employment of only 1.4 per cent, that is, almost one-third of a decrease in the number leaving the land suggested before and there is an increase in productivity from 4.8 per cent to 5.3 per cent. This strikes me as just pure arithmetic because there is no figure or no reason to suggest the flight from the land should decrease in this six-year period. The only fact is that the two figures added together produce the same net reduction in the agricultural population, some 66,000 as was originally expected 12 months ago.
I cannot see that the target for increased productivity can be realised. A percentage of 5.3 per cent is altogether too high because Western Europe in the past 12 or 14 years averaged about four per cent and the USA did likewise. So did we. That four per cent was achieved under very exceptional circumstances. In Europe, it was due to the fact that there was a tremendous drawing of labour from the land by vacancies in industry. Those left on the land had to try to get more and more equipment to carry on. We had rather inflated numbers on the land. Many were included who should never have been in any proper evaluation of the numbers on the land, the infirm, the aged, and so on. It was relatively easy, therefore, to show that four per cent, even though there was a big investment going with it. It will be progressively more difficult to maintain that four per cent increase in productivity in the years ahead. I cannot see any reason for assuming we will increase that four per cent to 5.3 per cent, or a 25 per cent increase in our rate of increase.
I point out these figures to show the difficulties and snags in this programme. It does not matter how the figures have been arrived at but the Government have apparently now set the target at the figure asked for by the NFA. There is one striking difference as between the two. The NFA say this figure can be reached, provided there is no further decrease in the numbers on the land. The Government programme says this figure must be reached and, at the same time, we must lose in the next six years 36,000 from the land. One cannot have it both ways. One cannot get the increase asked for in agricultural productivity without taking proper steps to preserve the numbers on the land. That is the whole key to the situation and every practical farmer knows that that is so.
The situation at the moment is that many are seeking less intensive lines, requiring less labour; with increased prices they are thereby sensibly keeping their own incomes constant while cutting the wages bill and cutting the total amount going out. The best way to ensure increased employment on the land is by ensuring that numbers are stabilised. That is not as difficult as it may seem. It can be done by providing incentives to young boys of 14, 15 and 16 to go on the land, first of all working on it and then possibly getting some land for themselves before they become too old, certainly before they reach 30. That is akin to offering the young lad of 14 or 15 leaving the national school the chance of going on to secondary school and, if he surmounts the obstacles there, eventually entering university, to emerge with a degree. Not all will emerge but many will avail of the opportunities and all will benefit by a better education and become better contributors to the national economy as a result of that education. Young boys, therefore, should be encouraged to go into agriculture.
The most significant and encouraging piece of policy in this Blue Book is to be found on page 118. Article 261 which is headed "Agricultural Co-operation" states: "The Government have accepted Dr. Knapp's recommendation regarding the strengthening of the co-operative movement and have decided that this should be done through the IAOS". We have at last come to realise that our future lies in the co-operative movement. Since the war the co-operative movement has been denigrated. When a semi-State body, An Bord Bainne, was appointed to market agricultural produce—a function that could equally well have been carried out by IAOS—I put down an amendment asking that the head of the co-operative movement should be an ex-officio member of the council. That amendment was rejected.
The intervention of Dr. Knapp is indeed providential because less than two years ago we had a report from a body called the Dairy Produce Committee. That contained a bitter attack on the co-operative movement and it advocated taking away almost everything from the co-operative movement. It is a deep satisfaction to note now that the report has been consigned to the Limbo of forgotten things and Dr. Knapp's recommendation emerges as the blueprint for the future. We owe a great deal to Dr. Knapp for his forthright language in his excellent report. We shall look forward to this strengthening of the co-operative movement.
One factor gives confident hope for the future. That is the tremendous upsurge in agricultural prices. Cattle are up by almost 40 per cent and the resultant increase in agricultural production this year will probably be of the order of £20,000,000 or almost ten per cent. That is a real increase in every sense because it provides real money. It means that cattle have reached a reasonable value though it is not quite as high as the values prevailing in Europe. There is every hope, however, that prices will level out. That provides a kind of bonus issue at the outset of the economic programme. It is one which should provide a great stimulus to the economy.
With regard to economic development, we must really understand this business of subsidy. There seems to be some misunderstanding as to what subsidy really is. Take the example in my own home town, shipbuilding. Suppose a relatively large ship sells for £1½ million and that the added value, due to Irish labour and so on, is £500,000—these are realistic figures— that £500,000 is injected into the economy and by the time it is reported as a statistic, the gross national income has increased by about £800,000. The workers who received the wages for that have to meet their PAYE demands; they also contribute their pennies on the pint and they contribute petrol taxes. In other words, the whole thing is subject to the general taxation structure and that structure seeks to get back roughly one-quarter of this increase in national income. One quarter of £800,000 is £200,000 and consequently due to that activity, there is an increase of about £200,000 to the Exchequer without any taxpayer having contributed any increased taxation. It seems just then, and fair, that if it is necessary to keep an enterprise going that you should have no qualms about having to give portion of that £200,000 to keep it going. Naturally, you would like to be able to have the £200,000 to spend on other national developments, such as education, or on other national projects, but the point is that before you call for increased taxation to keep the enterprise going you have to exhaust the whole of the £200,000. Looked at in that way it can be seen that subsidies are very much misunderstood.
Our problem, unfortunately, is to try to find industries that we can get going and we are not able to shift from industry A to industry B, because B provides a more economic industry. When we get an industry going we have to try to keep it going. While you might reasonably say you could pay up to £200,000 in the example I have given, to keep the industry going before increased taxation was called for, when you look at the psychological damage of closing down an industry like that you cannot put a price on what you would pay to keep it going. It all adds up to the fact that you must be sure that our existing industries are run efficiently. Whether it is CIE, or shipbuilding, or whether it is our universities, or any other activity that is drawing from the public purse, one thing you want to know is that the activity is being run reasonably efficiently. This is where the Government require to do some really hard thinking. We have no satisfactory machinery to bridge that gap so that the members of Parliament can, in Committee, voice any doubts they have about whether an existing industry is functioning satisfactorily or not, where they can get reasonable answers to their queries, or by which efficiency experts can go into an industry and look at it periodically and say that it is running reasonably satisfactory. If it is run in a reasonably satisfactory manner I submit that in our present case we have no option but to keep such an industry going because the alternative is to cut employment by the numbers in that industry, because we do not speak of a replacement industry and we are still looking for more industries than we are able to create. Consequently, every industry which is closed down is a net loss to our economy.
The same applies to this question of subsidies for exports. Take the suggestion that we are paying John Bull to eat our butter. On the surface, it looks quite plausible that we are, because we are selling it at 3/3 a pound, whereas the home price is something like 4/8d. But what is the alternative? Suppose the British market is the best we can get, as I think it is, or at least our marketing organisation is selling efficiently, the alternative to selling it to Britain with a subsidy is to cut back production in that line. That means diverting certain areas from dairy production to beef production because we can sell beef without a subsidy. If you divert 1,000 acres from dairying to beef, assuming efficient work in both cases, the beef will probably have a cost output of £20 an acre while dairying should have about £40: at least it is as likely to have £40 as beef is to have £20.
It means then, the difference between the two, so that we are losing, out of that 1,000 acres, an output of £20,000 by making the diversion. That £20,000, when it circulates throughout the economy, shows up roughly as £32,000 in the national income. The tax laws work on that and they deposit £8,000 into the Exchequer. If you make the switch from dairying to beef the Exchequer is going to lose £8,000, so does it not make ordinary good sense to say that we will not make the switch, we will strike a bargain with the Exchequer and we will use some of the £8,000 to help in the marketing of the surplus butter we are selling abroad? The Exchequer is still better off for the activity as long as our gross liability is under £8,000. That figure would call for the export of about £30,000 worth of dairying produce and mean a subsidisation of about the level of 25 per cent, or, if the producers are contributing a share, as they are on the one third, two-thirds arrangement, it would mean up to 33 per cent, so that at prevailing prices today you could say that there is still a small residue left to the Exchequer after the subsidy has been paid on the dairy produce. Consequently, I feel we should have a far bolder policy in increasing our dairy produce and facing up to its marketing requirements, knowing that thereby we are getting more out of our return than we could get by the alternative replacement available to us.
There are just one or two other points I wish to make. In the application of the Second Programme I would suggest that voluntary and State services should be treated alike. In other words, if a voluntary group which is not controlled by the State is capable of carrying out an activity, whether it is doing it entirely or only portion of it, and the State is doing the rest, it should get as much State help as the State organisation. That has not been our history in the past, as I mentioned in the case of private agricultural schools or, to take the classic example, of the secondary education branch compared with other branches of education where the amounts spent per pupil are, I would say, comparatively speaking, the lowest in the world. They work out at less than half the amount spent on vocational schools and they are less than half of what the cost would be if we did not have such self-sacrificing Orders as the Christian Brothers and the nuns who contribute so much to our secondary education.
I suggest it is unfair to exploit these people by keeping their grants so narrow. If they were given grants comparable to what the State would require to do the activity, if it were doing it itself, I am sure there would be a tremendous development in secondary education and it would be possible by that means to pay the teachers salaries comparable to the salaries they would receive in other walks of life.
On the question of semi-State bodies, I would appeal to the Minister, as I appealed to him last March, to make some use of this House, to set up a Seanad Committee for Economic Development and to assign to it some positive role in the carrying out of the second economic plan, seeing that the targets are reached and making us in this Chamber feel we are playing some positive role in between. Perhaps there could be some means of having a committee to help to see the difficulties of the semi-State bodies, to convey the outside concern to them and in general to lay the foundations for a new approach in dealing with them.
In following Senator Stanford, perhaps I could devote a few moments to listing some of our accomplishments in UCC during the past year with our very meagre resources. Perhaps this is the "commercial" of my speech. An electronic computer has been installed which, we hope, will be of very great service in training our students and also of positive service to industry in the Cork area. A Chair of Applied Psychology has been founded. Its holder has contributed greatly to industrial management in the past and hopes to be able to contribute a great deal more now that he has achieved enhanced status. Courses for teachers have been carried out to the best of our ability and within the limit of our resources. Finally, dental education has been pushed ahead again with the great co-operation of the Minister for Health. We feel that the Cork dental school has turned the corner in going from a part-time establishment to one having full-time staff, now regarded as being absolutely necessary for the development of dental education. We have continued within our meagre resources to try to direct our students abroad to be ready for the period when the Government come across with this plan for bridging the gap between our resources here and those available in England and elsewhere, when this ten-year plan is put into practice to increase our resources. I hope they will do that very shortly after the Report of the Commission on Higher Education.
I think the Second Programme for Economic Expansion is one to which we can all contribute in some way towards achieving the targets set. We in the Seanad would feel very happy to be given some responsibility by the Minister for some work in connection with this Programme.
