I think it was about £70,000. It was very near that sum. There were no loans under the Dublin Reconstruction (Emergency Provisions) Act of 1916 during that period and, owing to the considerable amount of preliminary investigation that is necessary under the Arterial Drainage Act which was passed lately, no issues were made. There was, therefore, a sum of £49,000 available in the fund on the 1st of April. In the current financial year it is proposed to provide the £500,000 set down in the Estimate as a grant-in-aid. That will make a total of £549,000 available for loans to be sanctioned during the year.
The amounts required will be approximately as follows, on the basis of the work which has been done during the past year: £182,000 Land Loans; £97,000 under the Drainage Maintenance Act of 1924; £20,000 under the Arterial Drainage Act of 1925. Deputies will see that this latter sum is very small, but the difficulty of making schemes, of surveying rivers and districts, and of going through all the formalities are such that the amount which it would be possible to spend in this summer under the Arterial Drainage Act will not be large. A very substantial sum may be spent the summer after next. During this summer the necessary preliminary work can be done. Deputies, I think, should realise that we cannot afford to have unduly extravagant drainage schemes. The cost of carrying them out will, in the main, be chargeable on the proprietors of the land. We cannot afford to have schemes done in an expensive manner or schemes that are too dear. Under the Dublin Reconstruction Act of 1916 there will be £25,000. Under the new item already mentioned it is proposed to give loans to local authorities which undertake work in the interests of public health, sewage works, water works, and undertakings of that kind. It is proposed to give loans under that head of about £225,000. Up to the 31st March last £143,000 had been sanctioned for Land Loans. Applications for these loans are coming in daily. The average amount of them is about £100. They are given, as Deputies know, for the purposes I have mentioned—erection of hay-barns, farm dwellings, out-offices, roads, fences, hedging, etc. This, I think, provides a very important facility for small farmers who could not otherwise obtain money for the purpose of improving their land. We anticipate that during the present year about £139,000 for this year and last. In this respect we are simply asking for sufficient to enable the Fund to meet the liabilities which will be undertaken during the year. If Deputy Cooper's amendment were to be accepted, a very substantial reduction would have to follow on these particular loans, because we could not manage to provide a sum anywhere like £143,000. I suggest that they are a very useful thing for farmers. It is money well and profitably spent from the point of view of the country. So far as the Drainage Maintenance and Arterial Drainage Acts are concerned, there is a statutory obligation on the State to lend money for these purposes, and unless we were to hold up the schemes which are ready, particularly in regard to the Drainage Maintenance Act, and which will be undertaken or are already in progress, we must provide the money.
The new departure in regard to the Local Loans Fund is the decision to open it for the purpose of making public health loans. We are providing £225,000. Under the old system, loans to local bodies were quite commonly made from this fund, but I think that owing to the attitude of the banks, which I am not criticising in any way, it is particularly necessary at the present time that we should open the fund for this purpose and enable work to be carried out. The banks are not, I think, willing to go beyond fifteen years in any case. Very frequently they will only go as far as ten years, and if the loan is to be repaid by a local authority within such a short period as that, it means that the work very often has to be postponed altogether. The alternative is that it can only be done when the particular district can manage to make some sort of a case and get portion of a relief grant to help them along. That has been known to be done. For the past ten years the type of work that I mentioned has been very much held up. In view of these circumstances, I do not think that the sum of £225,000 is excessive. Even now, without any money having been voted, and without any definite announcement having been made to the local authorities that we were prepared to lend to them, we have received a couple of applications for sums totalling £26,500. I have no doubt that once this Vote is passed and the knowledge reaches local authorities we will have very large numbers of applications. It is much more desirable that these works should be done and should be made possible by the granting of a loan, than that we should have these local authorities competing for relief grants. The work will be more satisfactorily done under these grants, and I think it is more desirable in every way. It may be possible that the fund will not actually require to spend all these sums during the year. But the arrangement in regard to the Local Loans Fund has always been that no sanctions are given beyond the amount that the fund had actually in hand or that was actually available for it for the carrying out of the work. We think that that is a sound principle. If there is any small sum more than is required it may not be paid over to the fund until the end of the year, and it certainly will be used up very early in the beginning of the following year. There will be no such thing as substantial sums lying in the fund and awaiting disbursement. As a matter of fact, I think it may cause some difficulty—in discriminating in regard to the applications—to carry on with even the sum that has been asked for. However, we think that, on the whole, this will suffice.
Some Deputies may ask whether we will give loans for houses. That question has been given a certain amount of consideration, but it has not been decided yet that it would be desirable to give loans for housing. One of the reasons is that at any rate we will have to be prepared to advance very large sums, very much larger sums than are contemplated at the present time. I recognise that the question of housing must be faced and faced before very long, and that in addition to anything else that we may do for housing it will be necessary later on to make advances to local authorities, advances for reasonably long terms in order to enable them to pursue the housing programme. I think it is desirable, perhaps, to leave that change in regard to the Local Loans Fund over until we have raised the next loan if we need one.
