In this Appropriation Bill we are accounting for a very large sum of money. The amount for the health services, about £37 million, is a very formidable sum. Naturally, one expects that with such a large sum of money involved it should be spent to the best advantage. The main concern should be the patient. Everything in the health services should be directed towards helping the patients. I referred already to the inability so far of the Government to provide a dental service for those between 12 and 14 years.
I referred to the amount of money for the telephone service and emphasised how necessary this service is in rural Ireland. I regret that the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs has found it necessary to ask ratepayers, apart from contributing in their ordinary taxation, to contribute in the rates towards the provision of local telephone kiosks in various areas. This service had been paying its way all along and often had a surplus of money and it is wrong that places such as Ballyhaise in County Cavan, where there is an agricultural college, should be without a telephone kiosk. It is not fair to ask the people of Cavan to provide one.
The Parliamentary Secretary said we were expecting too much from the Government. With all due respect, I should like to point out that the people of County Cavan are not built that way. We have put a fair amount of effort into it and if he wants evidence of that he should check on the number of times various towns in Cavan won the Tidy Towns Competition. Those results were not attained by Government grants; they were attained through community effort by the citizens of the county. I am sure the Minister has some knowledge of this as his grandfather was a Cavan man. That pinpoints the fact that we are not always crying for handouts. We make a good local effort.
With regard to the Department of Local Government, I deplore the fact that in recent years we were denied amenity grants which were of great benefit to rural Ireland. They helped provide amenities for many years. Counties such as Cavan. Monaghan. Donegal, Louth and Leitrim are problem areas. The Government, after six or seven years of trouble in that area, should be considering some way of granting special facilities to such areas. Now that we are in the EEC—the Taoiseach has told us that members of the European Parliament are to be elected from both sides of the Border —it should add to greater co-operation on both sides of the Border. There are many fields in industry, tourism and transportation in which we could play a prominent part. The local authorities in Cavan, Monaghan, Leitrim, Donegal, Tyrone, Derry and Fermanagh met in Enniskillen for talks recently. Such talks are very necessary for those areas. While we up north may not have the right end of the stick we feel that quite an amount of the finances collected by way of revenue go to the east coast or down south. It is necessary to give a greater injection of capital into the western and Border counties. As chairman of the regional development organisation of Cavan, Monaghan and Louth, I can say that about 13 per cent of the unemployment of the country is in that area. We have been badly hit because of the recession in the footwear and textile industries. I am also aware that an industry in Bailieboro is in trouble. While these may not be big factories they are in sparsely populated areas and are tremendously important. Any financial injections the Government can afford to give to keep people in employment there would be welcome and would eventually pay dividends.
Quite a substantial amount of money is devoted towards local government. Local authorities are charged, among other things, with providing houses and one method of assisting people to build houses is by Government house grants. The time is overdue when these grants should be substantially increased, particularly because of inflation and the fact that people in rural areas build houses because of need. Giving grants for building houses in this manner is better than putting people in a queue for local authority housing. It is better to encourage an individual to select his site and become the proud owner of his own home. The State should encourage him because, eventually, the State will reap the money back in rates and so on.
Group water supply schemes agitate us a lot in Cavan. Two years ago Cavan County Council sanctioned the appointment of an engineer to act as a liaison officer between the county council and the organisers of group water supply schemes but the Local Appointments Commission have not, as yet, appointed an engineer to do that work. We would like these schemes to proceed as quickly as possible in view of the fact that agriculture is so important, and the fact that we have such excellent creameries as Killeshandra, Bailieboro' and Lough Egish in that area. Those co-ops give great employment and make a great effort to foster and help design group water supply schemes so as to ensure their suppliers will have piped water.
The Government, or whoever is in charge, should ensure that the Local Appointments Commission appoint somebody to this post. We are not aborigines or anything like that in Cavan or Leitrim; we are just ordinary people. The climate is fairly good and the people are nice. If an engineer ventured down there he would survive and his family could live in the area in reasonable comfort. We cannot tie such people and tell them where to go. Many of them feel it is a vocation to go abroad but at the same time it should be a vocation for them to stay in their own country and give the benefit of their experience to local communities.
Another point that has crept in recently concerns planning permission. The planning Bill has not gone through both Houses yet but I am very perturbed that often when people are applying for planning permission in a small town they are asked to sign a contract saying that they will provide £1,000 or £2,000 for a car park in the area. I know a man who bought an adjacent premises with the intention of expanding it and, eventually, when he looked for his planning permission he was told he would have to provide this money. County councils provide car parks at places of worship. This is a necessary amenity. In small towns, especially in a county such as ours where the population has been falling steadily over the past 20 years and where people should be encouraged to stay, there should not be this unnecessary imposition of an extra £1,000 or £2,000 to provide a car park. The provision of that car park should be a matter for the primary road section. In housing estates the general policy is to try and provide green spaces.
I do not know what is causing the hold up regarding grants for main roads or primary roads. In my own county some money was provided for a bridge but I notice that we have tar barrels on a small stretch of the main road. They have been there for almost 12 months and are almost eaten with rust. That is not good enough. It is a national primary road and, because of the troubles in the Six Counties, it is being used much more extensively than it might have been in days gone by. It carries an enormous amount of manufactured goods from Killeshandra, Ballinamore and Ballyconnell up to the city.
Let me again make reference to the road here from Clonee into Dublin. I do not know whose baby it is, but it is there for quite a long time and somebody is responsible to the citizens of the north west for forcing us to try and negotiate difficult, narrow dangerous bends behind big articulated lorries on their way into the city with manufactured products from County Cavan. It is no wonder indeed that we in the regional development organisation of Cavan, Monaghan and Louth are trying to get grants to make a regional road that would take us out to Greenore and by-pass Dublin city altogether.
There is a fair amount of money in this for educational facilities for our people. In the past we were very generous. We have now come to the stage where we are providing not only primary education but post-primary education for our people. This is a good thing. People at post-primary level can now go up to the third stratum and they can complete a course in third-level education. That is something our parents dreamed of lonk ago. It is of great benefit to rural Ireland and to the country as a whole. We fully realise it is a very costly business. Any efforts that can be made to pare down the cost without interfering in any way with the efficiency of the service would be very welcome.
In many areas buses are taking pupils to schools, some of them to national schools and more to post-primary schools and taking them into towns. If they operated in the other way there might be a new look at this whole venture. In the midlands somebody decides to close five or six national schools and take the children into a town. That immediately causes a traffic hazard. It may be said it is giving a better service. I do not think it is. The first day the school opens it is all right but after that it is certainly a hazard for the children and it is difficult on the mothers. Pupils would be much better at home in their own areas in two or three or four teacher schools in rural Ireland. If the tendency was reversed and we tried to get them to come out from the towns into rural Ireland we would be giving a good service and we would be helping to preserve rural Ireland as it is.
There is not much difference between town and country now that we have rural electrification and so on, and I do not see any reason why it should be necessary to take these children into the towns by bus. Within a year or two the manager or the management board have to erect a prefab and then there is a call to have a new wing built on. In Dublin city new housing estates are springing up and then they are faced with the problem of providing new churches and new schools. Together with the burden of paying for a new house, for a newly married couple that is a very heavy imposition. It should be avoided especially in the years of a young married couple's life when they need the money and are trying to rear a family.
The same applies to post-primary education. So far as the top stratum is concerned we in our area find that if you draw a line from Dublin to Galway—I said this before—there is no university in the northern part of the country. There are universities in Belfast and in Coleraine, but in the whole western area, covering Monaghan, Cavan, Donegal, Leitrim, Sligo, Longford, Louth, Meath, there is none. It is wrong that the national university constituent colleges should have been placed in such a manner as to exclude that whole area. I am quite sure there are many people in our area who would benefit from third level education. There is a move, and a good one, to provide colleges of technology such as we have in Sligo and Dundalk. There should be a centre in Cavan, but there is not. This has been a disadvantage to the citizens of both Cavan and Leitrim. There is a vast area between Longford and Cavan and Leitrim that would benefit immensely if the Government decided to provide a college there. I wrote to the Minister on this matter and pointed out to him that it would be much better if he would add a building to the present college in Cavan rather than to extend, as he intends to do, the college at Dundalk and the college at Sligo. In that way he would give the people of Cavan the chance of doing the first year or second year at home in their own area and they would only have to travel for the third year. The number of people who go to those colleges now is very small because they have to go to live in those areas.
I mention these few points not by way of criticism but because they would be of immense benefit to the area and might cut down the educational bill as a whole. As a public representative and as chairman of the vocational education committee in Cavan, I realise that education is a very costly business, in particular the provision of rooms and transport and the various aids which are necessary if we are to make progress. Anywhere there is overlapping we should try to eliminate it and have as much co-operation as we possibly can at post-primary level.
Some money has been allotted for tourism. At present tourism is at a rather low ebb mainly because of the fact that we have had very severe budgets. Petrol is much dearer here than it is in the Six Counties. So are our butter, food, drink and, indeed our hotel prices. In many hotels it is impossible to get a meal unless you call at a particular time when they say you should be hungry. Owners of public houses should be encouraged to serve "pub grub". I do not know how we would get over the difficulty of bringing members of the family who are under age into a licensed premises.
To go into an hotel at present you would want to be a millionaire or very near it. Prices are very high and unless you are there at lunchtime it is very expensive. If you have to dine a la carte you do not know where you are going to get the money to pay for it. You might find yourself working all week for the price of one meal. That is not good enough in a country with a good climate which can produce good food and which has sold into intervention thousands of tons of beef that was lying off the coast of Cork or Kerry for quite a long time and then taken to Russia. The Government have helped the hotel industry in the past and we would like to see them doing well. It may be a question of staff or of money but there is such a thing as courtesy and there is such a thing as providing meals for people who are travelling, not alone tourists but our own people.
While I am on this topic I should like to mention the question of people who supply boats on the River Shannon and various other rivers. It was pointed out to me recently by a man who wanted to book one of these boats for a week that it cost him £100. That would not be too bad if they were charging those prices to Germans, Austrians and so on, but an Irish person might like to spend a few days in a boat on one of the rivers. That is an exorbitant price. Those boats would not be rented out unless they were being taken for the whole week. That is very wrong because those people were helped by the State to buy some of these cruisers.
There is a good potential in farm guesthouses if they could be encouraged rather than the hotels. A traveller could go to one of these guest-houses and get a meal there that he will enjoy whether he is rich or poor. There is no use in issuing fancy brochures and telling people about the great scenery that is in some particular area. From my own experience— and I am sure many people will agree with me—I find that if you are hungry you are not interested in the scenery, but if you get a meal then you can enjoy it. It is the first essential. If we want the hotel and tourist industries to recover we will have to encourage people to go into this industry and provide good meals at anytime. Tourists are very important to us because they buy drink, cigarettes and so on, and when they are on holidays they do not want to be told they have to sit in a room for maybe two hours before they can be served. That is not the type of service to give to our people. I do not know how that problem could be solved, but it is affecting our tourist industry. The tourist industry is only in its infancy, especially in my own area where there is cross-Border co-operation in regard to the lovely lakes and the interest taken by English and Continental people in fishing particularly. I know there are several towns in England from where you could send maybe 10,000 people into any county in Ireland. English people are very nice no matter what we may say about them, and they are very welcome. They are not looking for anything grandiose. They are quite content to sit beside a lake and fish, and even when they catch something they often throw them back in. Such people should be encouraged, and when we are discussing a Bill like this the Government should look into the matter.
Hamlet said, "There is something rotten in the State of Denmark" and I think that applies to our own State. I do not want to be overcritical, but there is something radically wrong when a Government after three years in office have succeeded in escalating our balance of payments from £5 million to about £365 million, and have borrowed millions of pounds at exorbitant interest rates and when there are 120,000 people unemployed and thousands of teenagers who do not know what they are going to do. I am not saying this in order to cause trouble, but a public representative must certainly be concerned about a situation such as that. Any Government worth their salt must try and solve that problem. It is no good saying that it is a matter for the Opposition or some other group to come up with a solution. It is the Government who are in charge and they must give a lead. The Government have been imposing wealth tax, taxes on farmers and so on, and while they may think that such taxes were popular at the time and worth implementing, they will have to sit down together and find a solution. This will be very difficult for them to do because the Fine Gael element and the Labour element in the Government do not seem to me and to many other people as an outsider, to dovetail.
The immediate task for the Government is to restore the confidence of the Irish people in themselves. That is very much needed. One method of doing that would be if the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs would inject some national spunk into our television and radio services, so that we could stand on our feet and not be ashamed of being Irish that we could say a few words of Irish and sing Irish songs through the media in a country where 50 per cent of the people know the native language. We should not be ashamed of the traditions that have been handed down to us. We should not always be suffering from this imported politeness and trying to be more English than the English themselves. The time has come when, if we want to assert ourselves as an independent nation in Europe, we will have to be more concerned about our image as a nation. We should be patriotic enough to buy the food, clothing, drinks and so on that are produced in our own country. We should also encourage Irish songs, the Irish language and everything pertaining to Irish life.
As the Taoiseach has said, we will be sending representatives to Europe. We should be very careful to ensure that those who go to Europe will be representing not England but Ireland, that they know their own language and have pride in their own country. It does not matter what their political outlook may be; we just want them to be good Irishmen, and we cannot be good Europeans unless we are good Irishmen. By good Irishmen, I mean living as good Irishmen. I do not mean advocating violence. The Government can play their part in this by using the media at their disposal. It may perturb some people to learn that the Government seemed to make an effort to take Radio na Gaeltachta off the air altogether or put it on at a time when people could not listen to it. That is not good enough. We should be proud of our national heritage and ensure, without forcing people to do so, that we keep it. Television and radio have a tremendous influence on our youth I have seen programmes for children between six and nine years and there was not one word of Irish in the whole programme. This is disgraceful, seeing that it is being taught in the schools. What we should be aiming at is to have not alone Irish included but French as well. At that impressionable age those children could pick up languages, which are no great burden for anybody to carry.
A language is the hallmark of a nation. It is important that it should not be disregarded. If we want to restore confidence in our economy the Government will have to tighten their belt, shake themselves out of the lethargy in which they find themselves and try to instil confidence in the people, give leadership and reduce the number of unemployed. If we on this side of the House can do anything to help in that matter, irrespective of what policy may be, we shall only be too delighted to do it.