Deputy Briscoe moved the adjournment of the debate. Since he is not here and, since no other Deputy has offered, I am calling on the Minister to reply.
Export Promotion (Amendment) Bill, 1974: Second Stage (Resumed).
Question again proposed: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."
I want, first of all, to apologise if I inadvertently delayed the House. I did not expect to get in quite so quickly.
First, I should like to thank Deputy Brennan, the Opposition spokesman, for his welcome for this Bill and for a constructive and interesting speech which ranged quite widely over quite a few areas of our economic history. I should like to add my voice to that of Deputy Brennan and Deputy Briscoe in complementing the officers of Córas Tráchtála. I said in my opening speech that Córas Tráchtála has 15 overseas offices. In my period in office I have had the pleasure of visiting eight of them and what we found in Córas Tráchtála, in the Industrial Development Authority, in WIRS and, indeed, in Bord Fáilte and other similar agencies, is a measure of the maturity of the country. We all welcome the fact that we have people of real vigour and real professional expertise, people who make an extremely good impression in comparison with similar agencies in other countries. I have had them complimented to me many times by other nationals. It is a pleasure to record this and it is a pleasure to find the same opinion expressed on both sides of the House.
Deputy Brennan and I are at one in the need for experts. We have a small economy, in some ways a fragile economy, peripheral, delicate in some ways, and this is a major source of concern in the evolving free trade circumstances Deputy Brennan described last night. At the same time we have real vigour. We have in many areas people of entrepreneurial flair, courage and dash. We have an export record which is a source of pride throughout the whole country. When one has export success one recognises that the inputs come from very many sources and I am pleased that the general recognition of the role of Córas Tráchtála in this regard has been a successful one.
When Deputy Brennan turned to the difficulties of the present he was talking about something that constitutes a headache for everyone, for people in the Government, people in the various semi-State agencies, for people in industry and for the community as a whole. In many ways this is a quite exceptional and desperate time. There has been nothing quite like it economically since the end of the war. We have a world-wide raging inflation. I welcome, as much as Deputy Brennan, the sign that commodity prices have topped out and are now, hopefully, declining a little. We have had the extraordinary speculation in commodities. We have even had some material shortages. We have interest rates at world historic high levels. We have the uncertainties that are damaging, as one sees, very acutely, for example, in Britain, to investment confidence and, therefore, to actual investment.
We have recently passed through oil shortages. Apart from the question of price, there is the possibility that this danger may recur. We have a whole collection of things—stagnation with inflation, with material shortages, with commodity speculation, with world high interest rates, with investment uncertainties and, indeed, with stock market collapse that has cut very deeply into the resources of many potential investors. Now we see in the United Kingdom, which remains our biggest market although there is a welcome diversification away from a lopsided dependence on it, the danger of a recession. Indeed, we already know that some of our exporters into that market are experiencing difficulty. We have this great difficulty of forecasting, which is not confined to Ireland but is worldwide, at a time when all the rules are breaking down and all the economists' pet theories are being put in doubt. This also is not confined to us. In the most recent issue of Business Week, an American business magazine, there was a comparison by major US forecasters between the forecasts they made six months ago and the actual outrun. The only thing common to the top 100 forecasts in regard to their economy was the extent of their error.
This is an exceptionally difficult time. In regard to our volume of exports and the tremendous efforts made to cope with these difficulties, we have had a great response from our people. This shows our economic, industrial and exporting maturity because the people of Ireland, who are not faced with these difficulties all the time, are not even recognising to the full extent the crisis which exists in the world. It has disrupted other countries more than it has disrupted ours.
It is also proper to pay tribute to an activity in which CTT participated at the worst of the time of shortage, of three-day weeks in Britain and the oil shortage. We had a hasty "lash-up", to use slang, of ad hoc organisation between the Confederation of Irish Industry, the Industrial Development Authority and Córas Tráchtála, both of which latter organisations had a network spread throughout the world to identify shortages of raw materials and then to use that mechanism in which CTT played a very useful part, to put our industrial consumers in contact with suppliers in world markets. Although we got down to desperate shortages at certain moments when supplies of raw materials were at a very low level, we lost very little production because this lash-up mechanism with the Confederation and two semi-State bodies worked very well. All of the participants are to be complimented for keeping the wheels turning and for keeping employment and exports up.
It is a measure of our maturity— and I am not claiming any Government, personal or Department of Industry and Commerce credit for this —that at this moment we are coming through tremendous upheavals very well. Inflation is savage and world-wide. Very recently one of the reporting agencies on prices, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, put out statistics for the OECD countries which include countries other than the large Community countries. In the table showing the rate of inflation in 1971, we ranked third from the top. For the most recent 12-month period for which figures are available we ranked eighth from the top. In other words, instead of being the third most rapidly inflating of all their listed countries which we were three years ago, we are now the eighth most rapidly inflating country. That is not to minimise the terrible perils and, indeed, the hardships on the poorer sections of the community, on which inflation bears most heavily, but it is to claim that in comparison with other competitor countries our position is not remaining the same. It is not getting worse but, in fact, is getting better when measured against other comparable countries. This is not a cause for self-congratulation but it leaves something which one can advance as evidence that the measures we are taking in a desperate situation are having some significant and, in fact, quantifiable degree of success, though not nearly as much as we would like.
I want to deal with two points which were made by Deputy Brennan and Deputy Briscoe. Since I have been talking about inflation I will deal with Deputy Brennan's point first. I do not purport to quote his words exactly but I understood him to say that wage demands constituted the biggest contribution to domestic inflation. I do not want to disagree with him totally and say that is not true. There are always a number of causes of domestic inflation from one year to another, and from one country to another. The primary cause varies from year to year and from place to place. In other words, I do not agree that it is possible to say, in regard to Ireland for example, that in the recent past, wage demands constitute the biggest contribution to domestic inflation.
The Deputy is properly drawing attention to a real problem. If we cannot continue to get a calm wages situation, and if we cannot get National Wage Agreements in the future, it is thinkable that wage demands might become the biggest single contributor to domestic inflation. I have no doubt, and I am satisfied that there are unanswerable figures to validate the point I am about to make, that in the past two years the major contributor to domestic inflation was the high cost of imported oil and other raw materials. I hope the day will not come when wage demands in Ireland are the biggest cause of domestic inflation, but it is possible that it will come. It certainly has not been so in the recent past.
For the record of the trade union movement and, as I see it, justice towards the sense of responsibility being shown by workers in their operating of National Wage Agreements, I disagree with that analysis. Imported inflation was due to the cost sometimes of speculation in commodities and sometimes the action of the Arab States about oil prices. I have no doubt that over the past few years this raging inflation has been the cause of imported price inflation and not a cost push inflation as a result of workers' demands. That is not a matter of contention but I wanted to get it on the record.
Deputy Briscoe asked if the actual sum of money recommended in the Bill was cumulative. It is. That sum of money dates from the first Act of 1959. The total of £15 million has not yet been expended; £13,800,885 has been expended to date and the balance is due to be expended. This would exhaust the £15 million. We are adding £10 million. We have to do that from time to time by an Act of the Oireachtas to give us the power to make an annual allocation to Córas Tráchtála. The £10 million addition, if it is approved, will not be given to Córas Tráchtála.
As I said in my opening speech, the actual grant-in-aid provision to be made in each financial year of this amount will, of course, be included in the Vote for my Department which will come before the Dáil in the ordinary way. In other words, there is a double mechanism. One has to give the general right to Córas Tráchtála to receive these moneys. Then one has to allocate them by the annual Vote year by year. The total is a cumulative total since the inception of Córas Tráchtála under the Export Promotion Acts.
Question put and agreed to.
Agreed to take remaining Stages today.