Say so and have done with it. All I want to point out is that there is now going to be very usefully released a sum of £1,480,000. That brings us to six of the sweeps. There have been no less than ten sweeps passed by the Minister for Finance. Of these there are four, including the present Derby, that will have to be paid. The Cesarewitch of 1932 and the Grand National of 1932 should be paid, and there is no rhyme or reason for holding up these sums amounting to something like £1,300,000. I am not a prophet, but I am told that the Derby will be almost equal, if not equal, to the Grand National. When that amount comes in, as it will do the week after next, the total amount that the Government will then be putting into the Trustee Account and holding up from the hospitals, and which the hospitals require to go on with the schemes that they originally hoped to finish, will be not less than £1,803,000. It is nothing less, I say, than a disgrace that that amount of money is going to be put into an account and held up, for the Minister for Local Government to do whatever he likes with. That is really what the meaning of the Act is, that he is going to put this amount into an account in the name of trustees who are to be no more than office boys. He is to tell them where to invest it. If they do not know where they are to invest it they have to ask him, and he, in consultation with the Minister for Finance, will tell them where they will invest it. That is what I read out of the Bill. The Government took very good care, when they were in retrospective mood with regard to the holding up of the money, to take hold of all that could come to them. For the last four sweepstakes they have got no less than £825,633, and if next week's Derby yields anything like what the previous one did they will have got £960,000 at least. The Government are giving £100,000 for milk to poor children, with which I entirely agree, but they are giving no credit for the means by which this money is raised. There was not a single word in the Budget about the £825,000 from the four sweepstakes since this duty was imposed. Let me mention—and I think it is only fair that I should mention it at the present moment when people are talking about unemployment—that there are no less than 3,800 people employed on the sweeps. They draw not a large salary many of them, but still they are drawing sufficient to keep the home fires burning. In addition, last year for the first time the revenue of the Post Office cleared itself. I have not any doubt that the reason why they were able to clear their accounts was because of the amount of money they had made out of the sweeps in postage stamps and telegrams, which was a very large amount indeed.
I would say that I entirely support and back up what Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney has said, that it is a great shame that not less than £1,800,000 will be put in the hands of trustees, for the Minister for Local Government to do what he likes with, because at least three of those sweeps have gone through the ordinary legal formulæ. As far as this section is concerned the Committee of Reference is done away with. I hardly feel calm enough to say what I should like to say with regard to what the Government has done in connection with this Committee of Reference. I am not a politician, thank goodness, and I would have been very pleased to think that there was no political game in this. There were three men appointed—they were not friends of mine and I did not agree perhaps with their appointment—who had made themselves familiar with the details of hospital maintenance and management. They had got all the figures from the various hospitals throughout the Twenty-Six Counties at their finger ends. Not only that, but one of the men had gone to four foreign countries, inspected the hospitals there, and made himself absolutely au fait with all the modern developments of hospital building and management. Without a moment's notice those three men, who had made themselves acquainted with this work, were told to go, and in their place three men were put in who did not know anything about hospital management. I do not think anything more disgraceful could be done by a Government than to descend to a political dodge of that sort. I am very glad that I am not a politician, because I could not possibly stand over that. A man who is rejected at an election has got a job at £800 a year, and he knows absolutely nothing about the work. The man was taken off a farm and put into a job he knows absolutely nothing about. I defy anyone to stand up and offer any sort of decent apology for such an action. The Committee of Reference has to end if this Bill passes, as I suppose it will. The Committee of Reference is to terminate. Within a month or two before its termination the Committee of Reference, which was working and could have worked off another couple of these schemes because they had all the details at their finger ends, is sacked, and other people are put in. It does not matter about the cost because the other men were costing as much, but at all events I consider that it is an extremely disgusting thing to put three men out when they had made themselves familiar with the details of these schemes, and to put in three men who, I venture to say, know absolutely nothing about what they are put in to do.
