I certainly got the impression that if I had come here with figures that were twice as big or figures that were very much smaller, the discussion would run just on the same lines. It is the right thing to say that there has been delay. I do not know that it is worth quoting the figures again. The Land Commission is dealing one way or another with 700,000 acres of tenanted land out of a possible total of a million and a quarter. Yet there is delay. The Land Commission has vested in the tenants 11,000 acres and it is dealing with 134,000. There is vested in the tenants about 11,000 acres. That is to say, they have got their full 35 per cent. reduction, or 40 per cent., as the case may be. There are gazetted holdings to the extent of 175,000 acres, there are purchase schedules to the amount of 1,154,000 acres, and they are dealing with 1,341,000 acres.
They are dealt with one way or another. Seven hundred thousand acres of untenanted land—that is about half of the untenanted land that can be available. We are at the beginning of land purchase. Personally, I would have considered that the Land Commission had done their work extremely quickly if they had completed their work in, say, five years from now. Deputies should remember, in this connection, that the problem looked on nationally—apart from the cases which Deputy O'Connell quoted—amounts to this: that you have whatever land is available outside the congested districts and that you have the congests, in the main, inside the congested districts. That is, if you like, from one point of view, the smallest end of land purchase. But from another point of view it is the most formidable end of land purchase. The completion of land purchase is rendered much more difficult. We are now the heirs of all the cases that previous Land Acts failed to solve.
In fact, we are heirs to a problem which can only be partially solved by any Land Act. I do suggest that the worst advice the Land Commission could get from me would be to go ahead and divide land quickly. That can be done, provided we solve our difficulties in a certain way. The Land Commission divide an estate down the country. There are ten or fifteen applicants. There is room for only six or seven. They can easily pick out six or seven, and put them on the land, and there will be no talk about it. But these six or seven may not be the right people. It may take a good while, for a great many reasons, to pick out the six or seven people who, in equity, should get the land and say that they should go in. The Land Commission could go too fast. There is going to be a problem in regard to the congested districts in ten years after the land purchase operations are finished. It depends on how land purchase is handled now whether that problem is going to be an extremely big or an insoluble problem in ten years, or whether it will be reduced, at least, to reasonable dimensions.
Deputies should remember also with regard to pending sales, apart altogether from the vesting of lands in tenants, that the Land Commission has divided about 50,000 acres. I would like to give the figure in connection with untenanted land and pending sales —the sort of land Deputy O'Connell was referring to last night. The Land Commission took over from the Congested Districts Board 190,000 acres of undivided land. Of that 190,000 acres there were only 20,000 acres of arable land. The rest was mountain and waste. At present there is 130,000 non-arable acres of land undivided, and 10,000 acres of arable land undivided. That is 140,000 acres out of 190,000 acres. Picture what that means. There is taken over in the congested districts 190,000 acres of land, of which 170,000 is non-arable—mountain, waste bog, and so on. Living all over that land, which consists of cut-away bog, sides of mountain, and so on, there are congests, and there is no land in the hands of the Land Commission anywhere near them on which they could be made economic. That was the position until the Land Act of 1923 was passed. The powers of the Congested Districts Board to acquire land compulsorily were limited, and in the particular case that Deputy O'Connell mentioned last night, where holdings were not vested for fourteen years, here is what happened: The estate is in the middle of that sort of area. That will give you an idea of the sort of land some of it is. The Land Commission buy the estate he mentions. They divide it into what are called "parcels." These "parcels" are for tenants on another estate, which they have not got, and which they had no power up to the 1923 Act, to buy, and no funds available wherewith to buy. They could not vest that land in the tenants until they had purchased the other estate. You have, in the other case, the exact opposite. You have a case where the Congested Districts Board buy an estate and you have a number of tenants with small holdings. You may have thirty or forty congests. The Land Commission may have enough untenanted land to deal with five. There might be no other land available in the area. It would be quite impossible to divide that untenanted land. There would be murder at some stage. There would not be murder now, but there was a time when there would be, at any rate, considerable confusion, and the five unfortunate congests who got the land would not be extremely happy. It would be very difficult to divide that land. It was far better in that case, to leave that land in common until you got sufficient land to deal with the applicants. That is the sort of difficulty that the Congested Districts Board was up against. Rightly, you can say that that difficulty should no longer exist because, under the Land Act of 1923, there are ample compulsory powers. But at least that is an answer to the case that the estate was fourteen years in the hands of the Congested Districts Board. That clears the position up to the year 1924.
So far as the Land Act of 1923 is concerned, Deputy O'Connell could only criticise the Land Commission in respect of this particular estate which he mentioned if he criticised them in respect of the other estates which are not amongst the million acres which the Land Commission have already bought. There is no case against the Land Commission in respect of that estate, except the case in respect of the other estates which they have not bought up to the present. They are dealing with over a million acres of land. Speaking of tenanted and untenanted land, they are dealing with half the land of the country, and before he can criticise them in this respect he must criticise them in respect of half the land of the country. The same remark applies to the point made by Deputy Conlan in respect of the Verschoyle Estate. There are two Verschoyle estates—A.R. Verschoyle and W.T. Verschoyle. They are both gazetted, and the same considerations apply.
