Seeing that the mover of the original amendment accepted my amendment, I have only to generally support the resolution as it now stands. I find that those who support it have disagreed very much with one another in their method of doing so. While seconding the amendment of Senator Sir John Keane, Senator Gogarty disagreed with everything he said. He advocated a sort of outlawry on the highways and even in the streets. He objected to the police control of traffic, which, in my opinion, is one of the most useful functions that the police perform in our cities. He would have all control removed and have a regular system of freelance driving of motor cars. I notice that Senator Gogarty also pronounced a sort of panegyric on the railways. He described them as a dying industry. While, of course, the Senator belongs to a profession that regards death on the part of others with a great amount of philosophy, it is true, also, that doctors have often despaired of the lives of people who afterwards survived to attend some of the doctors' funerals. It may turn out that way in respect to the latest medical prophecy.
We all agree that the cost of road maintenance is mounting up at an alarming rate, whilst the roads, notwithstanding what may be said to the contrary, are in many districts deteriorating at a rapid rate. At the present rate they will in a comparatively short space of time, with the growing motor traffic, become quite impassable unless drastic steps are taken. That is the cause of the outcry against the ever-increasing rates and of the demand to make the Government responsible for the cost of construction and maintenance. Before deciding finally who shall bear the responsibility for construction and maintenance of the public roads, it is desirable, in my opinion, that we should consider the question of regulating the use of the highways in the future. We should know clearly where we are going before we embark on huge national expenditure on road construction and maintenance, involving a national burden. In doing this we cannot afford to ignore some of the causes which have brought about the present state of affairs. The introduction of mechanically propelled road vehicles immediately created a new situation. They travel at a rapid rate. They create conditions of danger where previously there was safety, and dangerous turns and sharp corners assume new perils. In the interests both of safety and comfort a new system of road surfacing was necessary, and a more expensive method of road maintenance.
The problem, however, of the light passenger car was not insoluble. The real problem was caused by the introduction of heavy motor lorries and passenger omnibuses with a carrying capacity ranging from 5 to 12 or 15 tons. This inevitably meant that the old system of road was quite incapable of bearing that kind of traffic. It has been stated by previous speakers that the present tendency is to divert all sorts of traffic, goods, passenger and live stock, from the railways to the roads. This tendency is considerably encouraged by the fact that the community places at the disposal of these private speculators a ready-made permanent way, at the rate of about £30 per annum, without any additional cost for maintenance, as far as the permanent way is concerned; without any effective regulation regarding speed limit; without any regulation governing the safe and clean transit of goods, passengers and live stock; with no restrictions as to the roads covered, as to the fares charged, or whether they are compelled to give a certain minimum service to the public, if it does not suit them to do so. This in effect means that the new form of transport is being heavily subsidised at the expense of the community. Subsidies to railways and such forms of transport have always been stubbornly refused on the grounds that they are private enterprise and should be self-supporting. Yet, we are to heavily subsidise what claims to be a rival form of transport, and we do not even go through the formula of demanding that this new transport shall conform to the minimum requirements of the people who provide that subsidy.
Senator Toal says that if the railways are to continue there must be strict State supervision over all rates and fares charged. As far as the Free State railways are concerned, last year the Railway Tribunal imposed reductions in rates and fares amounting to £500,000, and within the year the cost of living had not come down one penny. That £500,000 has gone into the pocket of middle-men. The new form of transport which we are heavily subsidising is left without any form of control. An eminent expert has estimated that the damage done to the average road by a heavy motor lorry is at the rate of 3d. per ton mile. I do not know that that is a fair estimate, but one knows, at all events, that one does not go far on a road for 3d. If that is correct, in the case of a lorry that has a carrying weight of 10 tons the damage done to each mile of road every time that lorry goes out amounts to 2s. 6d. per mile. If that additional charge of 2s. 6d., which is a legitimate charge that the owner of the lorry would have to pay, were imposed or added to the charge already imposed, the cheapness of the new form of transport would not seem quite so apparent as it seems to certain people under present conditions. It may be the policy to subsidise these people at the expense of the community, but if we are to subsidise them at least it is only elementary justice that the people from whom they have taken traffic at the present time should be exempted from paying those as subsidies. It is unfair that you should compel them to pay towards a subsidy to their rivals. That is the crowning absurdity and the crowning injustice of the present position.
A return given in the Dáil recently showed that a sum of £131,000 was paid in 1925 in rates by the Great Southern Railways Company. A very large portion of that went towards road maintenance. The Great Northern Railway pays over £163,000 per annum in rates and they are paying this large sum apparently in order that their competitors may all the more easily try to steal away from them the traffic which these railways have developed over a long period of years. It will be noted that these vehicles run almost invariably parallel to the railways in order to grab up the traffic passing that way, and it is the exception to find them opening up areas in regions that have not been covered already by railways. It is this form of transport that the ordinary citizen is asked to contribute towards by way of increased subsidy. I do not think it matters very much what form that contribution takes. What is the use of saying you are relieving the farmer of the cost of the maintenance of the roads by taking it off the rates and putting it on in taxation? The great majority of the people do not own motors and the majority will not own motors in the future. Many of them have to travel to and fro to fair and market and to church without a vehicle of any sort along roads that have become unsafe, unpleasant and generally hideous because of the motor traffic. Is it likely that they are going to agree voluntarily to this additional taxation in one form or another in order that the traffic may pass from the roads maintained by the railway companies to the roads maintained at considerable expense by the people themselves?
It may, perhaps, be pointed out that these alleged low charges have brought about no reduction in the cost of living, and that is the real test. The cost of living is as high now as it was a year ago, or two years ago, since this motor traffic developed in an intensive way. One thing this traffic has done has been to take a lamentable toll of human life, and it will continue to do that as long as the laxity of the present regulations is permitted. Many drivers of passenger 'buses are what Senator Gogarty would admire — highway outlaws — and they seem to have absolutely no regard for traffic regulations. There is at present, I believe, a nominal speed limit of 12 miles for heavy 'buses, but once they get outside a town they travel up to 30 miles per hour. I had an instance of this reckless driving mentioned to me lately by a friend of mine who was formerly a motor driver in the Army. He was travelling on a motor bus going to Kildare one Sunday, and he said that the driver was in such a condition of intoxication that this friend of mine felt it incumbent upon him to take the wheel. The man was in such a condition that he did not resist; evidently he had sense enough to feel that he was incapable of driving himself.
At present there is no regulation by which the fitness of people to drive can be tested. A railway engine driver has to serve a long apprenticeship, and he is subjected to severe medical and eyesight tests. He has also to submit to a whole series of Board of Trade regulations in the interests of public safety before he is allowed to drive. Yet, it is suggested that the inadequate restrictions that are at present in existence in regard to motor traffic should be swept away not withstanding that we are asked to subsidise this traffic to a very large extent. If we are going to have this class of traffic with roads fit to bear it, surely it is not unjust that these people should be asked to pay a fair quota towards the provision of these roads. The fairest and the most sensible way is to proceed on the old system, that is to make each person pay for the road in proportion to the use he makes of it, and to the damage he does to it. The petrol or fuel tax may effect this to a certain extent but consideration will have to be given to the question of vehicles of exceptional weight which, no matter what the tax may be, will do much more damage, if they are not prohibited until such time as we have roads fit to bear them.
We are often told that this is a poor country and that we cannot afford the advantages, both economic and social, that are enjoyed by the people in more favoured lands. If that is true it is questionable whether we can afford the luxury of two or three different forms of transport and indulge in a form of cut-throat competition for a volume of traffic which has proven inadequate to make one system pay for itself. I do not want to put back the hands of the clock or to retard progress of any kind. Progress will come no matter what the position may be, in its ordinary course, but I do suggest that in order that this progress may be of a really progressive nature, instead of the reverse, there must be some central co-ordinating authority that will tend to make these services work in co-operation and tend to help each other rather than to work towards each other's elimination.
When the Ministers and Secretaries Bill was going through, I ventured to move an amendment providing for the setting up of a Ministry of Transport which would control and co-ordinate the various forms of transport by road, water and in the air, and that, in addition, would have control of the postal and telegraph services. Amongst the opponents of the amendment was one railway general manager, who turned pale at the very mention of State interference of any kind. Subsequent developments may have altered his views, judging by the speeches of railway chairmen at recent meetings of railway shareholders, in which they asked for State protection. If that Ministry were set up, we could in time dispense with the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs. I do not suggest that we should get rid of the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, because he might be a very excellent Minister for Transport. By co-ordinating the control of the various forms of transport and making the lorries feed the railways, it would be possible to effect economies and we could utilise this form of transport in those big regions which are at present not well served by rail and which now will never be served by rail because of the new orientation of traffic. In addition, we could work the Posts and Telegraphs in co-ordination with the railways, because, after all, the postal service is essentially a transport service. The railway stations in sparsely populated parts of the country could also be utilised as postal stations, and you could in that way solve the problem of an eight-hour day where the work is spread over ten hours. If that were the case, well, then, the argument would be, give the man some other work, and what better work could be given them than work of a postal kind, which is transport in the real sense? In that way you would get efficiency and economy at the same time. I raise these questions because they are all inevitably bound up with the question of the upkeep and the construction of the roads, and this question has now reached a crisis which has got to be faced quickly and definitely, unless we are to have a collapse of the present road system altogether. We should decide, before we embark on largely increased expenditure in order to get those great, broad, strong roads, and in order to facilitate the people, what exactly they are to be used for.
The suggested new form of taxes in connection with motors has not been given favourable consideration by the Government. It is difficult to understand why a fuel tax is so persistently resisted. We could, by the establishment of a central authority with full power to control traffic, develop an efficient traffic which would not be open to any form of objection. Motors have excellent work to do. They could open up the districts which serve the railways by taking the produce from those districts to the railways and in turn return bringing commodities from the railways back to the people in remote districts. The Earl of Mayo painted a very proper picture of the service of the motor lorry going round to the farmers' houses, taking the produce from the farmers, and bringing it to the doors of the consumers, and taking back to the farmers from the towns goods and commodities and manures and all such things as they require in the pursuit of their business; but that is not what happens at all. The whole fault of the motor service system is, that the motor comes along and competes for the carriage of commodities, with the railways, over the very routes served by the railways themselves. They take the traffic which was formerly carried by the railways, and in that competition with the railways they receive a subsidy from the ratepayers. The consumers have been referred to by Senator Sir John Keane as if they were a water-tight section of the community, but it seems to be forgotten that thousands of workers and their families, connected with railway transport, consume a certain amount of commodities and, therefore, are of some consideration to the shopkeepers. It is not my place to say anything about the morality of trying to secure, by a form of subsidy, the downfall of an existing industry, in which millions of money is sunk, and which gives employment to thousands of people, in order to develop a new form of transport, the benefits of which to the community are rather problematical. We have not decided on any form of transport. The Government have not faced the issue, and, until they do so, we cannot decide in an intelligent and definite way the question of the proper maintenance of the highways.
