To my mind this Bill does not meet the necessities of the hour at all. I said so to the Minister on another occasion. In so far as the Minister, or anybody else, thinks it is going to be a success, I give it my blessing, but I shall be very much surprised if much advantage is taken of it. My objection to the Bill is that a local authority cannot do any cleaning up, or compel any cleaning up to be done, without acquiring the site. That brings me to the objectionable matter mentioned by Deputy Allen and Deputy Belton. The site must be acquired. At present I cannot see the local authority of which I am a member wishing to acquire five or six little bits of sites in a village down in County Roscommon, because they do not want them. They want authority to clean them up very badly, and now they are getting that authority, but they must acquire the sites, and if they cannot get them by agreement, they must adopt this round-about method of compensation by arbitration which has in the past held up quite a lot of important work.
The Minister pointed out to me that the Bill as it stands will be very useful for dealing with towns in which houses require to be built and in which sites have been allowed to go derelict, and that in such a case, the sites should be acquired. I say certainly that the local authorities ought to have the power of acquisition, but they ought not to be compelled to acquire, and that is the fault I find with the Bill. I had hoped that when a Bill of this nature was brought before the House, it would deal in an omnibus fashion with the matter of clearing up nuisances all over the country, because, in most small towns, we have dead-ends of streets with old motor cars and debris of every description and condition piled on them.
This Bill will clear them up, but the site must be acquired, and in order to acquire the sites certain conditions must be complied with. The owner must be found, or, at least, an endeavour must be made to find him, and in that respect there are three conditions laid down here. One of these conditions is that you may publish the matter in the local paper. I hope that the district justices, in taking the view which Deputy Belton hopes they will take of another matter, will agree that that is sufficient notice because it is the notice I should like to see given in the cases of some of the small towns in which there are dead-ends which do not belong to anybody, but which did and may still belong to the landlord, wherever he or his representative may be at the moment. I hope the Bill will be useful and will be availed of, but, to my mind, it does not meet the necessity of the hour. In so far as it is useful, I wish it Godspeed.