I beg to move that the Trade Union Bill, 1935, be read a Second Time. This Bill is a very brief one. I think the House will regard it as a very simple measure. It is non-controversial. It performs one simple act. It rectifies the omission of four words from the Act which was made law 65 years ago, the Act known as the Trade Union Act, 1871. That Act was founded upon the report of a Commission of Inquiry into the law relating to the conduct of trade unions in the country. The Commission which was so constituted was set up on the initiative of a Conservative Administration in Great Britain, and the subsequent legislation was passed by a Liberal Government in Great Britain, but though there was a change of Government between the date of the setting up of the Commission and the passage of the necessary legislation founded upon the report of that Commission the Bill passed through the British House of Commons as an agreed measure. That Act, as I say, is known as the Trade Union Act, 1871. It was a British Act, and it contained the restriction which this Bill now seeks to remove.
Since the change of Government in 1922 the British House of Commons have amended the Trade Union Act of 1871 by the deletion of the four words which it is now sought to have deleted through the medium of this amending Bill here. Therefore, all this Bill really does is to delete from the British Act of 1871 a provision which has already been deleted by the British House of Commons from that Act, so far as it applies to Great Britain. I think it will be seen, therefore, that there is nothing very revolutionary in the proposal which is contained in this Bill. Under Section 7 of the Trade Union Act of 1871, for some reason which is not clear even in the report of the Commission of Inquiry which investigated the problem with which that Act dealt, trade unions are restricted to the ownership of land not exceding one acre. Perhaps in the circumstances and conditions of 1871 a restriction of that sort caused no inconvenience of any kind to the trade unions which existed at that period, but with the passage of time, with the growing influence, and increasing membership and standing in the national life of the community, trade unions have found this provision in the Act of 1871 a serious inconvenience to their rights to hold property for the benefit of their members and for the conduct of their business as trade unions.
In Great Britain the difficulty had been got over, prior to the amending of the Act there, by what can only be described as in the nature of a subterfuge, namely, by permitting the local trustees to hold property on behalf of the local branches of the union. It was possible, under the Trade Union Act of 1871, for each local branch of a union to be deemed to be a trade union. Consequently local trustees were appointed for the purpose of holding the local property on behalf of the local branch of the union. That meant that if a union had 500 branches it had trustees for those 500 branches, and each of the branches could hold one acre. In that way it was possible for the union to hold 500 acres of land, and thus overcome the real difficulties which confronted it, due to Section 7 of the Act of 1871. But in Great Britain the practice in that respect is substantially different to what is the practice in the trade union movement here. The Irish unions invariably vest their property in national trustees, with the result that all the property held by local branches of the union is vested in national trustees, and where the area of land occupied by the head office of a trade union and the area of land occupied by the local branches of the union exceeds one acre, the union find themselves in a difficulty by reason of Section 7 of the Act of 1871, which restricts their lawful ownership of land to an amount not exceeding one acre.
I think it will be apparent to the House, therefore, that this restriction is not merely unjustified, but that, in the circumstances of to-day, it imposes upon the unions an impediment on their normal development, and a restriction which is not imposed upon any other group of workers or any other group of employers in the community. For instance, I think it will be generally admitted that the establishment of holiday homes by trade unions, the establishment of sports fields by trade unions, and the establishment of convalescent homes by trade unions, are developments in a direction which should merit the commendation of all Parties in the House, and merit the commendation of the community generally. But if a trade union to-day desires to purchase two acres of land for the use of its members as a sports field, or if it desires to establish a holiday home, or if it desires to establish a convalescent home there, it is prohibited lawfully from doing so because of the fact that the area of land comprised in that holding exceeds one acre. Under Section 7 of the Act of 1871 the unions are prohibited lawfully from holding land of that kind. An inconsistency, and one which places Irish unions in a particular difficulty as compared with unions registered in Great Britain, is revealed by the fact that the Act of 1871 has been repealed in Great Britain. I think it will be found that under the Act of 1871, as now amended in Great Britain, a union which is registered there might be entitled to hold, and probably would be found to be entitled to hold, 1,000 acres of land here, but a union registered in Ireland and still subject to the Act of 1871 in its original form would be prohibited from holding 1¼ acres of land here. In that respect an obvious anomaly arises, which should not be allowed to continue in our legislation, seeing that it has been removed from the legislation in Great Britain, and seeing that it places the unions registered in Ireland at a disadvantage compared with the unions which are registered in Great Britain.
The difficulty with which this Bill deals is not an imaginary or a problematical one. Recently a trade union which had held certain property in Dublin desired to dispose of that property to a State Department. The State Department concerned was particularly anxious to acquire the property for the purpose of its own requirements, and the acquisition of the property was entrusted to the Board of Works. The legal advisers of the Board of Works asked the union in question to indicate the amount of land which it held as a trade union. It was then found that the trade union held, in fact, an area of land exceeding one acre; whereupon the legal advisers of the Government Department concerned took the view that, since the union was not lawfully entitled to hold land exceeding one acre, it could not show a direct title to the property in question. Although the Department was anxious to acquire the property, and the union was anxious to dispose of it, it was found that it was not possible to carry through a sale of that kind. The difficulty was only overcome by a rather circuitous method of conveying the property from the union to the Department concerned. By the deletion of the four words from the Act of 1871 in the manner suggested in this amending Bill the House will be giving to trade unions no greater facilities, no greater powers and no more special privileges than are possessed by every other group of workers in the country. This amending Bill seeks to give the workers organised in trade unions no advantage which workers organised otherwise have not got at present. In that respect I think it will be seen that the amending Bill contains provisions for forming a simple and, I think, an uncontroversial Act. I therefore ask the House to accord the Bill a Second Reading, and hope that the case I have made for it will be one which, in equity and fair play, will commend itself to all sections of the House.
