When the House passed to other business I was speaking on this motion. It is certainly not the desire of this House to hinder or impede the Minister in taking any steps which he thinks will facilitate him in removing a great evil; nor is it the desire to take occasion to paint the horrors of the tenement dwellers of this city or any other cities. They are familiar to any Deputy who has interested himself in that question. On all sides of the House there is unanimity of purpose to abate that evil. But I urge on the leader of the Labour Party that he ought to drop his proposal, because he is going to obscure the main issue, the really pressing evil, which is that of the tenement conditions.
We had a commission in 1897 under Campbell-Bannerman. We had another in 1914 under Birrell. We had another in 1927 under Judge Meredith. This is the fourth. That is self-evidence of how difficult it is to get anything done. The prime purpose is to end the abuse of tenement rents. Let us not imagine that we can go into that question and simply strike 5/- or 6/- off every tenement rent in Dublin, though we might do that to-day. By attempting to grapple with a delicate problem of this kind in that way we might precipitate much graver evils which would require more urgent treatment, if that were conceivable.
What I want the Minister to do is to face the inescapable fact that you cannot deal with tenement rents until you do away with tenement houses. No rent is justifiable for the class of rooms in which the poor of this city are at present housed. Some rooms that people live in are not worth a penny a week or a penny a year. There are many families in this city living in basements which have been condemned as unfit for human habitation years ago and in which it is illegal to live. The Corporation is doing its best to put an end to that. But, when they come to a family in a basement room and say, "You must be out of that this day week," they are met with the reply, "Where will we go; is it any improvement to take us out of a basement to put us on the kerbstone"? Is it any improvement to take a united family out of the poorest basement room and split it up in the Union? The Corporation, naturally, is driven back to the deplorable confession that it is better to leave people in these loathsome basement rooms than to take whatever measures they are physically able to take under existing circumstances. What we want to do is to wipe the tenement house out.
I want this tribunal to concentrate on that issue because when the tenement rent issue is fully examined it will be driven home to every reasonable man that there is only one solution of the question, and that is to abolish the tenements. I do not believe there is any permanent ameliorative step you can take in respect of tenement rents, because if you fix a rent of 2/-, 1/6 or 6d. and go into the room you will be forced to the conclusion that the room whose rent you have just fixed is not worth anything, because it is not a proper place for human families to live. That is the real kernel of the problem. Let this Commission focus attention on that.
I think the Meredith Commission in 1927 sat at a difficult time. Perhaps this House was not fully representative at the time and there may have been difficulties and doubts in its mind. Let this Commission sit in this knowledge, that it is an authoritative Commission commanding the confidence of all sides of the House, and that whatever it recommends as necessary to be done to get the people of this city and the other cities out of tenement houses all sides of the House will co-operate in putting the recommendations into effect. That is a Commission that will be able to do a job of work. We will tell them beforehand that we are ready to do anything and everything necessary to get the people out of tenement houses and to go straight ahead, not with the desire to be extravagant, but with the desire effectively to abate the evil.
Spread the reference into a wide discussion of the taxation of land values and a whole lot of other contentious political questions and the Commission is still-born, because it knows that whatever recommendations it brings in on these highly contentious questions it will simply be for the purpose of having them tossed to and fro across the floor of this House, grave and legitimate and proper dissension arising between Parties in this House on the issues raised, and that the report of the Commission will go into the limbo where hundreds of other reports have gone. Confine it to one point, tell them in advance: "Your personnel commands our confidence as people competent to solve the problem; that being so, tell us what you think it is necessary to do and we will do it."
That Commission is going to get results. It is going to get people out of the slums and to abate the detestable evils that exist. When that is done, and that is the urgent thing, let us sit down then and discuss Henry George. There will be plenty of time for discussing Henry George when we are all dead and buried, and I think there will always be cracked brains in this country, and in every other country, to discuss Henry George, Major Douglas and every other freak in the world with a bee in his bonnet so long as there are deliberative assemblies in existence. These gentlemen, with their theories, may be all right or they may be all wrong. I think they are all cracked. The fundamental thing that we should all be agreed on is that we now have a chance of doing something, and doing it in quick time, to take off the shoulders of the Lord Mayor and Corporation of this city and of the other cities and towns in the country, the intolerable burdens that are resting on them at the present time. We have the opportunity now of doing that promptly and effectively. Let us do that job now.
I appeal to the Leader of the Labour Party to withdraw his amendment, but in no sense to abandon his intention of submitting it on another occasion. But let us have a unanimous vote now that we want a commission to consider the problem of these town tenants, and let us have a recommendation from that commission as to what is necessary to be done. Let us be unanimously in favour now that we will be ready to do whatever they tell us to make an end of that abuse, and that whereever we will get the money we will undertake to find it: that even, if necessary, we will end the economic war in order to find it.
