There are still 107 cases awaiting disposal, but the cases already dealt with have convinced the applicants that they have no chance of success under the present Act, and in addition there are some hundreds of cases where no appeal has yet been made to the arbitrator because the men have despaired of getting any redress until the law is amended, and do not want to incur useless legal expenses.
To show you how the Act is operating and how it is a ridiculous farce—I am not saying the Minister intended it to do that, but he is responsible for the amending Act and the original Act—I will quote one case. The Minister's Government appoints the Chief Justice, who in turn appoints the arbitrators. There is the case of Michael Donohue who was appointed on the Tralee and Dingle Railway previous to the Amalgamation Act coming into operation. He was dismissed on the 9/10/'26. His application for compensation was immediately submitted in the usual official way and through the proper channel. The hearing was before the arbitrator on the 9th January, 1928. The Company produced evidence which, in the opinion of the arbitrator, was merely hearsay evidence. According to what I am told, the arbitrator was inclined to rule in favour of the appellant, but he invited the Company to say whether they were prepared to bring evidence other than hearsay evidence and the Company undertook to do so. As a result the arbitrator adjourned the case on the 9th January, 1928, and it has not since come up for hearing. There is a man who, to-morrow, will be two years out of service. He was dismissed from the Tralee and Dingle Railway, and in the opinion of legal advisers he has a clear case. There must be some doubt because if the man had not a clear case the arbitrator would have dismissed it—would have ruled against it. He adjourned the case and the individual concerned has been two years waiting.
As an indication of the manner in which the men have lost their employment, due directly to amalgamation, and still have been unable to get any compensation, I need only cite the case of the painters in the old D. & S.E. railway works at Grand Canal Street. At the date of amalgamation there were 8 carriage painters employed in these works. The works were closed down in February or March, 1925, and the painters, with the other staff, were transferred to Inchicore. By this time every one of the 8 carriage painters have been dismissed, and not a single one of them has got a penny compensation. Three or four of the cases have been before the arbitrator and have been turned down, and the rest of them see no hope of going on with their cases as they are similar.
The point is this: The Act says directly due to amalgamation. If the 1926 Act was not passed, the old D. & S.E. Railway Company would be still presumably running as the D. & S.E. Railway. I know the Minister is a keen debater and he will probably say that as a result of a loss on goods and passenger traffic, there was every possibility that the railway would close down. If the railway carried on, as I believe it could have whether amalgamation came or not, the works would still be going at Grand Canal Street, and these men would still be in employment. Now, they are out of employment and without compensation. The closing down of the Grand Canal workshops is a direct result of amalgamation. These people in accordance with the spirit and intention of the 1924 and 1926 Acts have a right to compensation. They have been turned down. If that was the intention of the Minister, he should have made the position clear that he was asking the House to pass the compensation clauses of the 1924 Act.
Now it is obvious beyond any shadow of doubt that if no amalgamation had taken place, whilst it might be possible to effect some small economy in the number of painters employed by the old D. & S.E., the Company would have to employ at least a proportion of the 8 painters, and could not have dispensed with the lot, so that the majority of the men at least have lost their employment, as a direct result of amalgamation, and yet because of their inability, through the construction of the amending Act, to prove this fact, and because the Company need only prove that there has been a reduction of renewal or maintenance work, they lose their cases.
As an example of the manner in which temporary economies have been effected for the purpose of getting rid of commitments under the Act, it need only be pointed out that in one particular section of the shops at Inchicore, in which a number of dismissals without compensation have taken place, there were employed in 1924, before amalgamation, by the old G.S. & W. Company, 17 men. After amalgamation when the work of the whole of the amalgamated companies had to be done, the staff numbered 30, but these were eventually reduced by dismissal to 18. or one more than the number employed by one of the amalgamated companies before amalgamation.
The temporary reduction of maintenance work having resulted in the Company getting rid of its commitments and legal obligations to the old employees, they can now take on new men without any legal obligation, or take on old men as newcomers and at reduced rates of pay, and in this way the Act has become a futility.
When I tell the House that the majority of these men have periods of service ranging from 15 to 35 years, they will appreciate the terrible hardship to which they have been subjected and the cruel injustice inflicted upon them. If they had been left with their old Companies there was no reason to believe that they would have been disturbed in any way, or at the very worst only a small proportion of them would be without employment. As it is, however, 1,000 men have been dismissed out of the loco department alone, and of these only a small fraction have received compensation.
The manner in which the employees of the Grand Canal Street Works, belonging to the old D. & S.E. Company, were treated is an illustration of the monstrous injustice inflicted upon some of the men dismissed. If amalgamation had not taken place it might have fallen to the old D. & S.E. to try and effect economies in the number of staff employed. Obviously they could not dismiss all their staff, or anything like it. It was doubtful if any reduction could be made, as considerable economies had been effected before amalgamation. If they did effect economies, they would act on the principle of "Last man in, first man out." Now, what actually took place under amalgamation was this: the Grand Canal Street Works were closed, and the whole of the men transferred to the Inchicore Works. By that means many of them lost the seniority which they had enjoyed at Grand Canal Street. For instance, if the senior man at Grand Canal Street had 30 years' service, he would be junior to a man with 31 or 32 years' service taken off another line and put to work with him at Inchicore. Even on the basis of seniority, therefore, he would be liable to be dispensed with before a number of other men would go, whilst in his old employment he could not be dispensed with except through misconduct or incapacity, unless the line closed down altogether.
What happened, however, was that practically the whole of these men of all Departments from Grand Canal Street have lost their employment, irrespective of service. In many cases men outside of Inchicore with much shorter service have been retained. It is clear beyond all doubt that it was directly because of changes of administration due to amalgamation that these men lost their employment, and if amalgamation had not taken place the majority of them could not have been dispensed with. Yet because the Company can plead an economy reason, the men cannot hope to secure compensation, although theoretically the Act says they are entitled to it. To get any compensation they have to achieve the impossible. There are very large numbers of men with service ranging from 20 to 40 years who have become adapted to one particular kind of work, who are now too old to get employment elsewhere, even if trade were much better than it is, and they are now thrown on the scrap-heap without hope of any kind for the future.
It would be much better to scrap the Act altogether as far as compensation is concerned than to make a mockery of numbers of unfortunate men, leaving them to spend large sums of money in futile litigation, without any possible result except failure. The results to hand, so far, and the remarks of the official arbitrator, followed by his resignation, establish a prima facie case for a full inquiry into the working of the Act, unless the Oireachtas is to commit itself to a policy of confiscation of the most cruel and glaring kind. Suffering of this kind is accentuated by the fact that after three years' service the men are not insured against unemployment, the Company being relieved from this obligation on having given an assurance that, generally speaking, railway employment was permanent.
I myself happened to be one of a delegation, and I was at the time a member of the Executive Committee of the Railway Clerks' Association, that waited upon Lloyd George at that particular period. The representatives of the railwaymen were accompanied by the General Managers of the Irish railway companies, and the railway Managers, on the instructions of the Directors stated, in order to get exemption from the Act at that time, that railway employment could be regarded as permanent. In the case of the clerical staff, the companies bound themselves to a deputation, at which I was present, to guarantee three months' full pay during sickness in order to get exempt from the Act.
From that point of view railway employment, at that period particularly, was regarded as permanent. This makes the obligation of the State still more binding and direct to those men whom it has rendered destitute for the purpose of bringing about railway amalgamation in what we claimed to be the interests of the community in general. If the men were insured in the ordinary way, the same as other workers, they would at least be entitled to unemployment benefit on the basis of whatever contributions they had made to that particular fund.
The Act of 1924 secured a smooth passage as far as the Labour Party was concerned, although not looked upon as by any means ideal, owing to the fact that it at least recognised the universally-accepted principle of compensation for disturbance as a result of legislation. Having thus secured the passage of the Bill, the Government came along two years later and shamefully confiscated the protective provisions. It is now time that something should be done with a view to getting back to the principle of elementary justice, and it is for this purpose that this motion is being moved.
In moving the motion and giving these reasons for doing so, I am not moving it in any party spirit—in any spirit of complaint against the Minister personally. So far as I know the Minister's mind, when he was putting the original Act through the House it was never his intention to deprive the railwayman, who would lose his employment as a result of the legislation, of reasonable compensation. He now knows, or ought to know, as I have cited some cases, how the Act has been worked. He knows that the first arbitrator, Mr. Justice Meredith, resigned as a direct result of his bringing in the Amending Act of 1926. The second arbitrator, whose opinion I have quoted, has also resigned. The result is that one hundred old men who retired or were dismissed in the year 1926 are still waiting to have their cases decided by some arbitrator who may be appointed in the near future.