The total amount concerned in this Vote is the sum of £350,000, of which £100,000 is a revote from 1933-34 and the remaining £250,000 is for a new grant for this year. As the House is aware, the revote is part of the machinery which was constructed out of the first big Relief Vote in 1932-33 in which we put aside a sum of about £150,000 for the purpose of financing relief works, schemes like Local Government schemes, public health schemes and things of that kind, in which a considerable amount of detailed work in the way of preparation and plans and so on would have to be done in the year previous to the year in which the work was actually done. We have carried that on each year since. It was once £150,000 and we have now reduced the revote provision to £100,000. We do not propose to reduce it below that.
Last year the total amount was £500,000, but that included a Supplementary vote of £150,000. The money will be allocated, broadly speaking, on the same system and principles as it has been allocated in previous years. A map is being prepared and will be put up in the Dáil showing the territorial and quantitive distribution of every penny of this fund, with schedules showing where all the money has gone into every district and everything else. That map is put up for two reasons, one, so that the Dáil may know what has been done with the money and, two, in order that 152 other Deputies will have an opportunity of constructively criticising what has been done and enabling us to do better. It would be very extraordinary, in spite of the efforts which we have made, if we did know in my office as much about the actual circumstances of all the districts in Ireland as all the Deputies in the House, and in putting up that map I am asking them to go over it in relation to their own particular areas. I am not asking them simply to come along and request more money for those areas; I merely ask them to tell us whether or not the distribution in those areas has been a proper distribution, having regard to what they know of the existing circumstances. You will see laid out on that map the work done by the Local Government Department and by the Department of Industry and Commerce—road work and minor relief schemes etc. The object of setting those out is so that the work of the departments will not overlap. If, for instance, the Local Government people are doing road work out of the Road Fund in a particular area, then the allocation which ordinarily would go to that area at that time from some other fund would be transferred somewhere else. Again, we will try to concentrate the actual relief works, not merely in the place but at the time in which they are most required, and that is in the winter.
We ran up against a rather curious thing when we first tackled these schemes and that was in relation to the road work done by County Councils and the work done out of the Road Fund. We found that you got a maximum of road employment at the period at which there was a minimum of unemployment. An effort has been made to transfer that this year and, as a result, the characteristic has been completely reversed. The maximum amount of employment out of both local and State funds on road work to-day, apart from money voted actually for relief, is taking place at the time at which employment is most required.
There is one difficulty, however, which has been introduced into the system of concentrating work over the winter period, and that is the unemployment assistance register. The fact that there will be a considerable number of people on the unemployment assistance register even during the summer months will tend to some extent to mean that there will be less concentration on the winter months, and the principle will remain the same. One other portion of the work also does not lend itself very well to winter work. The money which is now being spent on peat development for commercial purposes comes under that head. Where we were merely doing roads into turbary for the benefit of the individuals concerned in the turbary, they were prepared to put a little bit of extra enthusiasm against the weather difficulties and drive the roads through, even in the bad weather. But as we have to have the production of peat available according to an industrial programme, it is necessary to do more of the peat development work in the summer than would be done on a purely unemployment basis.
The main lines of use of relief money are peat development schemes, reclamation of land, mineral exploration and development, archæological excavation, minor marine works and minor relief works. The only new one in that list for last year was archæological excavation. The total amount spent was not very great, something like £1,750, but extremely valuable work was in fact done. Nothing of the spectacular kind was done. We did not find a tomb of Tutankhamen or anything of that kind, but in practically every one of the works which were done definite advance towards really sound scientific knowledge was obtained.
Links of various kinds, stretching back into pre-history, were made more exact, and some new ones were found. In two or three cases the existing and very strongly held archæological beliefs were changed. One delusion which I think was quite common was very fortunately dispelled. That was that the very fact that archæological remains in Ireland had for a period of years been rather violently and brutally rifled had destroyed the value of archæological research in Ireland has been completely dispelled. Evidently the people who raided for gold were not sufficiently concerned to destroy the sources of really important information. It has been found that the evidential value of the remains which we now have is of extraordinary importance. In nearly every case we have succeeded in pushing considerably further the limits of our known pre-history here, and I think we have also largely added to international knowledge on those lines.
I now come to the peat development schemes. About £65,000 was spent upon those schemes last year and it is hoped to spend approximately a similar amount this year. Those schemes are simply and solely for the purpose of rendering peat more economical and more easily available for commercial purposes in the country. The peat schemes have run up against considerable difficulties but these difficulties are now being very definitely got over.
The reclamation of land and miscellaneous agricultural schemes have had expended on them something like £26,000. A sum (of £14,000) was made available for the provision of seed oats, seed potatoes and manures for specially poor districts. A sum of £12,000 was provided from the Department of Agriculture to encourage the tenants on uneconomic holdings in the congested districts area to improve their land. Grants varying from £1 to £5 were given by the Department of Agriculture, who supervised the spending of that money and saw that it was well and properly used in the improvement of the land. In practice, somewhere about four or five times the amount of labour which is paid for under a grant of this kind is expended by the tenants and the owners of the land in improving their holdings. This is one of the most promising directions in which money can be spent.
In relation to the archæological survey and archæological investigations, we have to express our thanks to the Department of Defence, who lent their aerial survey for the purpose of not merely examining the specific works in which we were engaged but in opening up the ground from the point of view of further works. It is remarkable how large an amount of additional information can be got through an aerial survey. This survey in Limerick actually did discover a new pre-history burial ground of which none of us had any knowledge but which is now giving very valuable scientific results.
On the minor relief schemes some 1,800 separate works were undertaken, costing about £120,000. Deputies are all familiar with these works. Their great advantage over practically every other work we have, is that you can break up, accurately divide and accurately apply the relief fund to particular areas in proportion to their necessities. We have had extremely few complaints during the year though we have certainly done everything that was humanely possible to invite them. I do believe that this scheme is now working as fairly as human limitations will allow. I want to ask the co-operation and assistance of the House for this work, so that anything that is wrong should be brought to our notice, that anything which can be improved upon can be brought before as with a view to that improvement.
The Unemployment Assistance Act, as Deputies know, was introduced in the winter of last year. For the first time it gave possibilities for an accurate social survey of the whole country. If and when that information, fully digested, is available it will, I think, be possible to put upon a scientific basis and a basis over which one can stand, a system of fair and equitable distribution of any fund which the Dáil puts at our disposal for the purposes of relief, both from the point of dealing with seasonal and sporadic relief and dealing with the much larger and more serious problem in this country, the problem of endemic poverty. That information was not available at the beginning of last year's relief work campaign nor has it been fully available to us at any time since.
As Deputies know, the Employment Exchanges were set up for an entirely different purpose. They were set up for the purpose of finding valuable and useful employees on the basis of their commercial value for the ordinary employers. Gradually they were changed over under the new system of registration which came into force in 1932 which trebled the register. They were turned over to work which was of the exact opposite kind. In addition to the work which they hitherto had to do they were asked to find for relief work, for artificial employment, people not upon a basis of their suitability for the employment purely on a commercial basis, but on the basis of their need. That facility was not available to us when we first started a relief scheme, but during the second year it was very considerably extended and very considerably availed of.
We tried during the second year, and we did very largely succeed in changing over from the system by which men were recruited on the job by those responsible for the job to a system by which they were very largely recruited by a central organisation which had no contact with and no interest in the individual concerns of the individual schemes. In my opinion that was an immense improvement. Unfortunately, at the very time when we were starting last year the new scheme of unemployment assistance men, the Labour Exchanges were completely overwhelmed with work. It was impossible for them in practice, however much they desired, and I believe they were entirely willing and anxious to do it at the time, to give us last year the service which they had given us in the previous year. In addition to that, while we were deprived of the efficient central service of these widely-distributed and highly-informed organisations, it became necessary to correlate relief work recruiting to an entirely new standard— that was the standard of unemployment assistance. We lost the Labour Exchanges as a recruiting base, and we lost the old basis upon which we used to select labour. We were not able to get from the Labour Exchanges during that period that accurate information in relation to the distribution of people on unemployment assistance which was essential to the complete success of recruiting under the new scheme. However, as I told the Dáil at the time, we would do our best in the matter, and we did.
In certain districts recruiting under that system has been a complete success. In other districts it has been very far from a success. In some cases 90 per cent. of the men on relief schemes are men on unemployment assistance. In other cases there is a very much smaller proportion. The House will recognise that you cannot get 100 per cent. on these schemes, because sometimes you have to have tradesmen and other people of one kind or another. While they are essential for the scheme, they may not be on unemployment assistance. In certain cases up to 90 per cent. has been taken. We took a check early in the system and found that there was 48 per cent. on the schemes. We took a check later and found it was 59 per cent. A later check showed that it was still rising. In other words, the proportion of unemployment assistance men was gradually improving over the place.
We hope that next year we shall have at our disposal the knowledge and machinery of the Labour Exchanges, not merely for the purposes of telling us who are unemployment assistance men; but to enable us to recruit them and send them directly on to the job. Whether that is going to be attained or not I do not know, and I cannot promise. But that is what we are working towards. I desire to say quite definitely that in my opinion, if there is to be any large system of having unemployment assistance men on relief works, the fullest and most effective co-operation of the Labour Exchanges, not merely in the collection of information, but in the actual recruiting of the labour for the particular jobs, is essential.
Sometime in December last year we sent out a questionnaire to every man in the unemployment register. In addition to that, we sent out a special questionnaire to those people who otherwise would be on the unemployment register, but were temporarily engaged on relief works. The object of that was to get an accurate territorial and occupational census of the whole of the people who had up to that date been swept into the unemployment register. Unfortunately, we did not get 100 per cent. return from that register, and in addition to that we did not get it at anything like the peak point. I think there were about 114,000 men on the register when we took the census and the total eventually ran up to something like 130,000. For that reason it has been necessary in a more limited form to repeat that questionnaire for the purpose of getting on the unemployment assistance basis a new territorial map of the distress or necessity in the country as a basis upon which in future to issue relief moneys.
Of £367,779 actually allocated last year, £133,000 was allocated to the Department of Local Government and Public Health for public health works of various kinds. £26,000 was used for land reclamation and the provision of seed potatoes, manures, and seed oats for specially necessitous areas. About £2,000 was spent on marine works— that is small piers and things of that kind. £7,500 was spent by the Department of Industry and Commerce on mineral development and exploration; £64,500 on peat development and £2,000 on miscellaneous works. In addition to the ordinary forestry work of the Department of Lands, £1,500 was given to fit into special difficulties The various works of the Department of the Office of Public Works accounted for £7,700, and minor relief schemes covered £122,000.
That is all I can say on the matter in relation to last year's campaign. I am asking the Dáil for its constructive criticism of that work. I repeat what I said on a previous occasion, that no man is an enemy of this Government who brings either to the Department or out in the Dáil anything which he knows to be wrong in relation to the administration of relief work; and that no man is a friend of this Government who knowing anything that is wrong for any purpose whatever keeps it back. It is difficult in relation to about 2,500 schemes of relief work to say that everything is watertight, but we are doing our best in that matter. We ask the co-operation of the House to help us to see that the work is well done.
