The way in which the debate was handled in the Dáil mystified me as it is a debate about an important subject, which is how the community, through the Minister, through the Cabinet, are to fight their way through a period of economic stress probably unprecedented in the lifetime of our State. There is no doubt in anybody's mind, and one is not being partisan when one states that the economic future of these countries, Britain and Ireland, is sliding rapidly to an uncontrollable financial situation partly because of their inefficiency, partly because uncontrollable outside influences leading to inflation. We have the failure of the Common Market and the truly disastrous state of the British economy, which clearly is most unlikely to recover within the next decade no matter who is in Government.
In these circumstances any significant source of wealth in Ireland should be examined with scrupulous care by a responsible Government to try to see how much money they can take out of these mines, out of this property which I emphasise we own, because by a remarkable piece of good fortune we do happen to own the property, and what is likely to face the Government are the financial conditions in which they will lease it to a company in order to mine it, that is assuming they do not set up a State company and do it themselves.
One of our difficulties is that none of us is completely certain about precisely what figures we are discussing here tonight. All we have from the Minister is one figure, and that is the key figure. I think he must try to build on that figure for the rest of us here and in the country because there is considerable interest in this problem, very much more interest outside this House or the other House. There is very much more interest outside among responsible people about this question: What are the facts about the position in relation to mining and, of course, gas and oil? Tonight one of the evening papers has as its headline: "We are going to export oil". Is it this kind of periodic euphoria which grips the leader writers every so often? They are not to be blamed for this because reasonably well-substantiated figures have been produced by conscientious people who are non-partisan and not the slightest bit interested in party politics as we know it.
On the basis of these figures there appears to be enormous, newly-discovered, newly-realised resources of mineral wealth as well as the gas and oil, but particularly mineral wealth which we are dealing with here and of which we were not aware ourselves. I remember when we were in Government we got a report on mining and it made the statement that we should be written off as a country of any significant mineral resources. Now apparently that has all changed and this is where I have been perplexed, in reading the Dáil debate and listening to the comments by the working politicians, by their extraordinary indifference, apathy, apparent unconcern. There is the extraordinary remark by the Taoiseach—I referred to this before about a year ago—in which he said we have no significant mineral resources. I am sure he does not believe that now. That, I suppose, was a left-over idea which he had from so much of what was said in the past about our mineral resources, but I think he had a responsibility to know more about it than he appeared to know then. He certainly has a responsibility to know more about it, to have learned everything he can about it, since that time.
I can only assume from the reference in the Minister's speech that the figures are based on more reliable information available both here and everywhere else—his decision in relation to the fiscal policy. I would ask the Minister to let us have an end to the speculation, the wild euphoria— or is it reality? Is it true? Is it not wild at all? Is it well founded? Have we suddenly come into enormous wealth in this country and all we have to do is to set up organisations, either our own or pay an organisation to establish itself, and all our problems are over—problems in relation to the great subjects that concern us all, the provision of housing, health, hospitals, care of old people, education, communications, which all of us profess to want to find the funds for? These funds at present are greatly limited, there is no doubt about that, and they will become more limited, I would imagine, if the present deterioration in our economic circumstances continues.
Is it true that this money is there and that the only thing between us and that money is a decision on the part of the Government to follow a slightly more radical policy than their predecessors but, at the same time, an essentially very conservative policy of allowing this money to be taken out of the ground by private entrepreneurs for their own use, their own aggrandisement? The 5 per cent who own the 74 per cent are apparently to continue to retain their position, privilege, wealth and all that wealth can buy in our kind of society. Is that the position?
The previous speaker, the Fianna Fáil spokesman on this question, to some extent defended the 20 year taxation relief. It is really indefensible. I do not think anybody could defend the idea. Even to the simplest mind, there could be no defence of a principle to give taxation relief to what is, as the Minister said, a completely wasting asset. There will be nothing there to tax at the end of 20 years and therefore what the Government are doing is handing over the money and taking a small tax on profits, 9 per cent, giving them 91 per cent. Therefore there is no doubt in the world that this outrageous proposal should be stopped without any delay.
The case has already been explained to Deputies that there is no comparison between taxation relief in relation to capital investment, an industry or a factory, and this kind of thing because at the end they may decide to get out. I do not approve of any of these taxation reliefs at all. As you probably know, I believe the State should have its own enterprises. However, accepting that you believe in the private enterprise system and you support these people in the early days of their establishment of industries by giving taxation reliefs, they at least have to leave the factory and machinery behind them, and even if they are a failure you still have those assets, so there is no comparison whatever between this idea in regard to mines and taxation relief for industries, and there never was. There was never any confusion in the minds of the people who mattered most, these were the mining speculators. As the Minister points out, since this completely unnecessary row over the changing taxation system, the interest in mining in Ireland has increased rather than diminished. This is a defence of a totally indefensible position.
I wish to refer briefly to the point made by the previous speaker on nationalisation and his hope that this would not happen. In the first instance, we already own this property and there is no question of nationalising because it already belongs to the State in strict terms of nationalisation.
Secondly, I am always astonished when I hear our politicians deprecating the idea of nationalisation, because of course one of the few remarkably successful manifestations of native Irish Governments since the State was formed has been the various State capitalistic type nationalised industries —not nationalised in the true socialist sense, but certainly State-owned and operated: Bord na Móna, the ESB, even CIE, Aer Lingus, Irish Steel Holdings, and so on. Anyone who wants to quarrel can, because I know their predecessors, private enterprises, were extraordinarily inefficient.
First of all, they are mostly extremely efficient and very well run and we should be proud of these and, as I say, I am always astonished when I hear speakers deprecating this idea because all around them they see the remarkable success achieved by these organisations during the 40 or 50 years of native Government. Secondly, all of these are the tough industries—the ones that private enterprise would have taken if they could have made money out of them, but they could not. They are the public utilities, so therefore there is no money in them and private enterprise did not go into them. But we found the capital, enormous capital. If you relate the capital to present terms, the capital found for these many industries would be quite astronomical now, yet successive Governments, antipathetic to the idea of State enterprise but forced by the disinterest of private enterprise in these areas, went and looked for and got the capital and invested it and created these on the whole magnificent State industries.
Another intinn sclábhaíochta sort of attitude that these people have, positively frightening to me, is this idea that we have not got the experts, we have not got the technical knowhow—this kind of thinking as if we were a totally illiterate society. I can understand that in some of the Third World countries where the poor things, through imperialism and colonialism, have not got any significant educational systems. It is not true here. In fact all our State industries have found the experts and the technicians and they are mostly the product of our own universities and schools.
Therefore I do not think that that speaker made any case whatever against nationalisation, even if the Minister was proposing that, which I am quite certain he is not. I do not think it is a valid point and people should not go on making it. It is thoughtless and does not relate to the facts. We have been able to get people to do these things, so that should not hinder us in whatever decision we take about how to get the most money out of this kind of enterprise. We have never had any difficulty in getting capital and of course it is obvious that when you have resources of that kind you will not have a real shortage of a very essential raw material. There should not be this difficulty.
I digressed to deal with that statement because it is important coming from the leading Opposition party. I really believe that it should be discounted by the Minister in his consideration and his approach to this problem. Through a relative ignorance, we only know what is available to us as ordinary working politicians doing our best to find out the truth with the very limited resources available to us. Could the Minister give us the precise work-up on the figures, £125 million, £120 million over a 20-year period? What is that assumption based on? Is he in a position to say that there is this alleged enormous wealth in, for instance, the Navan mine?
We all know that enormous sums appear to be made by people other than our own people. As I said in my introductory remarks, we are a very poor nation as we are at the moment and we simply cannot afford a penny piece to go out of this country. We can use our powers as a sovereign Government to control the exploitation of this raw wealth or material wealth, and if it is true that vast sums are being made on the international money markets out of Irish mining because those people believe they are going to get a clear run from the Government and that the Government are going to take only minimal profits rather like their predecessors, then that is an extraordinary scandal. If there is this great wealth and if there is at the same time—and there certainly is—this great need in every single Department of State concerned with social, educational and other matters, then it seems to me to be a great scandal that the Government are not acting with greater decisiveness by putting an end to this speculation and money-making at the people's expense. Recently we saw as a result of one deal that Mr. Tony O'Reilly made an enormous sum by buying and selling out shares.
One figure which appears—it is a figure at any rate mentioned—in regard to the mineral zinc lead ore is of course extremely important. This is only one mine, the Navan mine, which has been given as something between 70 million and 80 million tons. It has been worked out from that that this could equal, when mined, a total of £3,000 million. These are such staggering figures that it is very hard to credit them. If they are true, it is a wonderful development for the State. If they are not true, we should be told. This is where the Minister's tax policies are going to bite. How much? What is the size of that bite? How much is he going to take from those people? If there is that enormous wealth there, this figure of £120 million over a 20-year period is, of course, absurdly inadequate.
Some say that the figure of £3,000 million may be too high and that the figure may be £2,000 million or £1,000 million. This figure has been worked out by an accountant basing his assessments on the price of zinc and lead at a particular time. It fluctuates, but mostly it fluctuates upwards. Prices have gone up because the minerals are essential raw materials and mostly they have fluctuated upwards. This wealth has this marvellous reality about it that the longer it is left there the more there should be. Zinc, whatever about other mineral resources, is practically a continually valuable raw material. If one studies the international financial Press in New York, Canada, Toronto and Britain, it would appear that there is some substance in this claim to that astronomical figure of wealth in the Navan mines.
As the Minister said in his opening speech—and the Minister for Foreign Affairs also subscribed to this view—because of the continued increased interest in mining in Ireland, there appears to be good grounds for believing that there is real money in enormous sums in the ground. If that is true, this figure of the Minister's is a paltry sum to be taking out for our people over the next 20 years at a time when we need money so badly.
I have not the slightest pity now, I could not care less about how much we take off these mining speculators, whether they are involved in mining, gas or oil, when I think of the enormous wealth made by exploitation of shortage of essential goods. The inflation which is threatening the whole of the western world at the present time can be traced back to the inordinate greed of these people in exploiting shortage of mineral wealth such as oil, gas and so on.
For anybody to ask us here to have pity on these poor unfortunate mining speculators or oil speculators or gas people is an extraordinary exercise in absurdity when one thinks that we are at the same time responsible, both here and in the Dáil, for trying to provide a properly-structured social organisation with social justice in our society. Money is the key to that and the money happens to be there. There can be no priority given to these people over the needs of the sick, the illiterate, the aged and the homeless in our society. We apparently have moved into that wonderful, unique, special, happy band which happens to have great mineral wealth. We are establishing no precedent when we turn on these people and tell them to get off our backs and that we will not be exploited by them any more. The oil-producing OPEC countries, the Middle Eastern countries, have done so. Kaunda has taken over the mines and taken virtually the total output from these mines for the betterment of his people.
The acceptance of such a tiny figure by the Members of the Dáil—and it would look as if it is likely to happen in the Seanad as well—is quite astonishing to me. I cannot understand it. On the very little evidence given in the Minister's opening speech we have no reason whatever for believing that he is making any serious attempt to get the optimum amount of wealth from this great, new, raw material. In fact—in this respect I agree with the Fianna Fáil speaker—it is a window-dressing affair, attempting to conceal the total betrayal by the Labour Party, who are committed to total public ownership and so on, of their stated political principles.
In this Bill the Minister had an opportunity, on behalf of the Government, of telling the various people who have worked on this subject, and those of us who have been concerned, that we were grossly over-optimistic and that our talk about this great new wealth in the heart of the country was not justified. He could have told us that our enthusiasm was misplaced and that we were misleading the people. Why has he not done this? Why has he not given us more detailed facts to go on as a basis for his £120 million over 20 years? We have had this figure of £77 million made up of the amount of wealth it would mean when mined. That is the Tara mining people's own figure. Therefore this does not appear to be an extravagant figure.
When then does this £120 million in 20 years come in, in the light of the Minister's great need for wealth in practically every Department with which he deals? Even more important to me is why there has been practically total silence on the part of Deputies and the working politician over the years in the Opposition and even in the very short time of a year or year-and-a-half in which we have known about these facts. Why have we had this conspiracy of silence about this wealth which is said to exist?
We must face the fact that this is a multi-million type industry. Enormous sums are at stake for a handful of people. When these people, whether they are involved in oil, gas, or mines, move in they use all their power to confuse, to mislead, to suppress, to bribe, to cajole and to influence the people making the decisions and the people helping the people to make decisions. We have seen the present controversy in relation to the relatively trivial sums involved in recent local government activities compared to this and the way these people operate in a situation like this. I am not saying that that is the reason for the conspiracy of silence, but I believe Deputies and Senators have a responsibility to examine a proposition of this kind in much greater detail than it has been examined up to now.
I can see no basis whatever put forward by the Minister. He has not even tried to deal with another very important factor arising out of the mining industry: what is going to happen to this raw material? Is it going to be smelted in Ireland? Both the Minister and the Minister for Foreign Affairs referred to it in passing in the Dáil. It is vital to know what is going to happen about the smelting of this raw material. Is it going to happen here? Are they going to establish a smelter here in Ireland or are they not? Who gave the Tara Mines people the authority to make contracts with eight different Belgian smelting companies to smelt this raw material? Why did they do that? It is an extraordinarily arrogant use of authority.
It must be obvious to all the Senators that the real wealth is in the smelting. If the Minister is simply sticking to tax on profits of mines, of course, as an expert on tax matters himself he must know that this is open to the most unlimited armamentarium of tax fiddles organised by these terribly wealthy mining organisations who have, pay and suborn talented accountants to fiddle the tax returns. One has the extremes of a company in Tipperary which sells to an offshore company. They sell at $1 and return that as the profit made on a ton of the output. They sell it then in an offshore island company at something like $50 a ton. The tax return is completely fraudulent. Even much more important are the recent discoveries by a House of Commons Committee on the oil industry, the North Sea oil industry, which showed that the British tax people were done out of £1,500 million by the fiddling of the Esso oil company. I think they are the crowd who have just made the discovery in Cork. These are the people we are asked to worry about here by the Fianna Fáil Party and to some extent by the Minister's party. Spare your tears. There are plenty of other people in this country who are more deserving of them.
What is the position about the smelter? Are we getting a smelter? Is the mineral wealth going to be smelted in Ireland? It is when the smelted raw metal is sold that the real money is made. It is sold on the world markets. That is where the real money lies. Is the Minister going after that money? If he is not, why not? This is real wealth and they know it. Tara, Cominco, Oppenheimer, Tony O'Reilly, Mogul and Silver-mines all know that. All of these people know well that that is where the money is.
Why is the Minister not going after that money? What is the reason? Where is his loyalty? Where is the Cabinet's loyalty? The Minister for Health is complaining that he cannot pay the doctors enough to give us a good service. The Government can only provide so many houses. We can only build so many schools, universities and secondary schools. There is a need for more roads. There is not a single Department of State which do not say they cannot fulfil their commitments because it has not got enough money.
The truth of the matter is that this is an enormously wealthy society. Deputy FitzGerald goes to the EEC looking for more money from the Social Fund and the Regional Development Fund. It is time we were finished with all this kind of begging-bowl activity. For heaven's sake, we should learn to give up. We are one of the wealthiest countries in Europe apparently. I believe it is totally irresponsible of the Minister, the Cabinet and the Government if these basic facts I have put here are true and if they have not contradicted them. It is effectively irresponsible of these Houses of the Oireachtas that they should have taken this pitiful figure of £120 million over a 20-year period as the optimum gain from the exploration and use of this new wealth, if anything we hear about that wealth is true.
Of course, these things interest me. The Minister should understand I am not criticising the Fine Gael Party because, as I think I have said many times, they are acting as they always professed to believe they should act: as a right wing conservative political party which believe that one should conserve society as it is and not change it and should preserve the position of the wealthy privileged minority and keep the others quiet by periodic handouts.
I am puzzled. I am less puzzled now, but I am puzzled still by the silence of our friend, the Minister for Industry and Commerce, on his failure to produce his White Paper which he promised to the trade union movement, and to us at our Labour Party Conference when he dismissed my plea for information and for verification or refutation of the points of the statement that I have made. "Heady stuff" he called it. Apparently if what we read is true, it is not so heady at all. But, the Minister for Industry and Commerce was able to survive his conference and the meeting with the trade unions by saying that we would get more information. Yet we have not got more information. Now we have this Bill with no information whatever. As to the true state of this new development in relation to mining wealth, I might tell Senators that an estimate given—and the Minister can refute this if he wants to—is the basic one that I mentioned earlier, that is, £3,000 million. If processed and made into industries based on this raw material it increases in wealth again. It is then multiplied by six or seven if processed into end products and consumer goods, to bring it to something around £14,000 million or £15,000 million. The Minister will understand my puzzlement when I was given these figures. They have been stated on many occasions and have never been refuted by either the Minister for Finance or the Minister for Industry and Commerce.
Why do we agree to let any more of this wealth go than we have to? Why should we support the Belgian smelting company? What is the position in relation to smelting? Is the Minister's figure of £120 million over 20 years based on taxation of the raw material exported to Belgium, the provision of a smelter and then taxation on the sale of the zinc and lead from that smelter? Is the Minister's assessment made on a very much more far-sighted and enlightened decision to carry on from the stage of creating the raw material and using the method at present being adopted by the Norwegians in their exploitation of their oil—a very gradual development and release of this raw material to industries based on this precious commodity? Is that what the Minister assessed his figures on? If that is what he assessed his figures on—£120 million in 20 years—something is obviously very askew and somebody is getting away with enormous sums of money at our expense.
We heard from the Fianna Fáil speaker about how much money is spent on this particular project. The work was initiated by an unpublished geophysical soil survey by An Foras Talúntais. I do not know enough about the intricacies of the stock market to understand what has happened since the initial finding of this great strike. There seems to be something terribly obscene about the way our Government have stood idly by while these people carve up this enormous wealth with the help of their local Irish support organisations of one kind or another.
Where people go into this business here or abroad speculating in mining —the Hughes and all these others— I do not think that they can be blamed for doing this kind of thing. This is their nature. They believe in this kind of thing. They believe in accumulating enormous amounts of wealth for God only knows what reason—but they do that only tf given the authority of the State or the society in which they operate. If they have these crude and insensitive and, in my view, essentially unchristian attitudes to society, which allows exploitation for their own need and greed, that is something which society should and can curb. There are many precedents for it. As in the emerging countries— Kuanda and the Middle East—there are many precedents for it. There is no reason why the State should stand by and allow these people to indulge themselves in their selfishness.
In attacking these people we are criticising the wrong people because it is the Minister, as he shows here in this Bill, who can decide on the degree of wealth which he will concede to these people. Quite obviously I believe that in order to increase the outturn from the mines there should be two forms of taxation—a taxation in form of royalties of anything up to 90 per cent to 91 per cent —giving them a take-out of 9 per cent, which would be perfectly adequate for them instead of the absurd amount being suggested here by the Minister. That figure may sound outrageous.
It is rather like in wartime when one found it very difficult to understand how 1,000 people could have been killed in a bombing raid. Equally, it is very hard to take these things in. I honestly believe that many Deputies and probably some Senators do not still understand what has happened in this country, that this extraordinary thing has taken place. There is no longer the need for this pauperised attitude that, with certain justification, we have had in the past.
We should try to understand that this wealth exists and that the safest way is to collect in the form of royalties for the mined ore body, zinc and lead, at so much per ton to be taken for the State. The rate I suggested is 90 per cent to 91 per cent. Off the west coast of America this was done in the case of a very right-wing state. The oil was offered for sale. The state was able to take 95 per cent and the speculators were quite happy to take what appeared to be a negligible 5 per cent.
The reality is that we are dealing with sums of such astronomical proportions at the present time that 5 per cent to a company of private individuals is still an enormous sum of money. This suggestion of 90 per cent to 91 per cent on royalties is still not an outrageous figure. On top of that there should be a heavy tax on operating profits.
A tremendously powerful programme is being operated at the present time by these companies to deflect the inquisitive public representative from finding out the truth. I do not think it is right for the Government to connive at this manipulation of various things. Everybody is involved so far as I can see. Everybody must be involved whether they be the Press, television, radio or politicians, but in various ways they are all involved whether by laziness, refusing to bother with the problem, taking the PRO'S hand-out, or submitting to misleading information by people similar to those referred to in the present inquiries in local government in north Dublin. This kind of thing is in operation while perfectly honourable, honest Deputies and Senators do not bother to examine the information given to them nor find out whether the information supplied from the other side has any basis in fact. Neither do they insist that their Government examine any such information. What has happened to the Labour Party in this present situation?
Why was all this tolerated by this party which are so committed and whose Minister for Industry and Commerce, Deputy Keating, is the key Minister in this situation? Is this the price of office—£2,000 million for three or four Cabinet seats? They are expensive, and not worth it, if one takes into consideration the achievements to date in relation to prices, health, housing, education, agriculture. Where was the gain for this united front, national coalition? On top of those failures—failure of price control, failure of the EEC—probably the greatest betrayal of all that I know of is this silence just now on this very important issue. There is no doubt in anybody's mind as to whether any of the parties are serious about their protestations of wishing to have the money to do various things in these different aspects of the organisations of the State. It appears that money is there and because of their obsessional commitment to doctrinaire conservative attitudes, they are siding with the oil, gas and mining speculators against the people, against the sick, against the homeless, against the illiterate, against the aged. It seems to me an extraordinary truth to have to accept in our society 50 years after it was formed. But the most unpalatable part of all of that truth is the role in all this of the Labour Party, a party established by James Connolly to create a socialist society, to create social justice for our people and for which the poor man gave his life in the process. That seems to me to be the greatest single betrayal of all of that party since they took office in this benighted Government. This is not being said from hindsight. About a year ago I postulated the inevitability of this kind of a betrayal by the Labour Party when they took their decision.