Dáil Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 10 Dec 1941

Vol. 85 No. 9

Committee on Finance. - Vote 41—Local Government and Public Health.

Minister for Local Government and Public Health (Mr. MacEntee)

I move:—

Go ndeontar suim breise ná raghaidh thar £114,230 chun íochtha an Mhuirir a thiocfaidh chun bheith iníoctha i rith na bliana dar críoch an 31adh Mhárta, 1942, chun Tuarastail agus Costaisí Oifig an Aire Riaghaltais Aiteamhail agus Sláinte Poiblidhe, agus seirbhísí áirithe atá fé riaradh na hOifige sin, maraon le Deontaisí agus Costaisí eile i dtaobh Tithe do Thógáil, Deontaisí d'Udaráis Aitiúla, Ildeontaisí Ilghnéitheacha agus Ildeontaisí-i-gCabhair, agus muinearacha áirithe i dtaobh Oispidéal.

That a supplementary sum not exceeding £114,230 be granted to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending 31st March, 1942, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Office of the Minister for Local Government and Public Health, and certain services administered by that Office, including Grants and other Expenses in connection with Housing, Grants to Local Authorities, sundry Miscellaneous Grants and Grants-in-Aid, and certain charges connected with Hospitals.

The details of this Estimate are set out in part III of the Estimate. The supplementary amounts are required for grants towards the supply of assistance in kind to recipients of home assistance, the provision of equipment for emergency cooked food centres, grants under the Housing (Financial and Miscellaneous Provisions) Acts, 1932 to 1941, the acquisition of lands under the Acquisition of Land (Allotments) (Amendment) Act, 1934, and an amount to make good an anticipated short fall in the Appropriations-in-Aid.

The amount required in this financial year, under sub-head J (4), for the payment of grants towards the supply of assistance in kind to recipients of home assistance is £100,000. Subject to the passing of this Estimate, the amount will be apportioned amongst the public assistance authorities on the basis of the number of persons in receipt of home assistance in February of this year, that is, last February. These provisions came into operation on the 1st October. In determining the allowance in kind to be granted, the local authorities were required to have regard to other allotments in kind provided under the free milk schemes and to persons in receipt of unemployment assistance, widows' and orphans' pensions, national health insurance disablement benefit, where such recipients were also receiving home assistance. Under sub-head L (3) the sum of £8,000 is asked for to defray the capital cost of the equipment which is required for the emergency cooked food centres.

Under Section 2, the sum of £500 is asked for to implement the provisions of the Housing Act passed earlier this year, providing for the extension of grants to private persons and public utility societies up to 1st April, 1942. It is necessary to have this Supplementary Vote in order that the money required should be made available. I may say in that connection that the number of houses completed by private persons and public utility societies up to the end of September was over 31,000. Naturally, however, building by private persons has declined during the past year. The number of houses built by such persons from 1st April, 1941, to the end of September last was 697, as compared with 1,043 for the same period in 1940. It will be appreciated, of course, that the difficulties which exist in regard to the supply of building materials have reacted very adversely upon private building. Under sub-head T an additional sum of £10,000 is required to meet the cost of providing additional allotments of land for private persons for the production of food. The original Estimate was based on the assumption that the number of such allotments to be made would be approximately 10,000. In fact, the number of existing allotments, I think, is over 23,000 of which 19,600 have been alloted to unemployed persons at nominal rents. The amount required to make good the estimated shortage in the Appropriations-in-Aid is due to the fact that we will not receive the anticipated recoupment from the Road Fund in respect of staff which it was thought might be required but which we found ourselves able to dispense with.

Mr. Brennan

Would the Minister say if this £100,000 for grants towards the supply of assistance in kind to recipients of home assistance is in addition to the sum which we have already provided towards home assistance?

Mr. MacEntee

Yes. Perhaps I misunderstood the Deputy. In addition to the amounts which have been provided for supplemental allowances in kind to be paid to recipients of unemployment assistance, widows' and orphans' pensions, and national health insurance disablement, the Government requested the home assistance authorities to provide similar allowances to persons who were in receipt of home assistance, and, towards that, stated that they were prepared to make a grant of £200,000 for a full year. The scheme only came into operation on 1st October last, and consequently we have only a half-year's provision to make in this financial year.

Mr. Brennan

We did not, in fact, make any provision for that particular thing until now?

Mr. MacEntee

Well, it was made in the Budget.

Mr. Brennan

That is what I thought. What really worries me about this thing is that we seem to be estimating badly.

Mr. MacEntee

No.

Mr. Brennan

Are we not introducing something new at the moment?

Mr. MacEntee

No.

Mr. Brennan

Now how does it come that we have to provide another £100,000 now?

Mr. MacEntee

The Deputy will understand that no new service can be provided for in the volume of Estimates prior to the enactment of the necessary resolutions in the Dáil. The volume of Estimates, of course, is circulated prior to the close of the last financial year. This service was only adumbrated in the Budget for this year, and, while there has not been any hold-up in the operation of this particular service, the money is now required to reimburse the home assistance authorities for the moneys which they have spent up to this.

Mr. Brennan

I understand. With regard to the provision of money for cooked food, would the Minister inform me what are his plans with regard to this matter? To what cities do they extend, or do they extend to all cities in the country? What are we providing for, in fact? With regard to S (2) —Grants under the Housing (Financial and Miscellaneous Provisions) Acts, what really surprises one at the present time is that there is a necessity at all for the provision of further grants for housing, seeing that the difficulties in building houses are becoming more and more acute every day, and that building has practically come to a standstill at the moment. Of course, the reason for it probably is that there is a time lag for the payment of grants generally, and that some houses may have been completed possibly for a year or even more, but payment of the grant may be held up.

Mr. MacEntee

That is so, and there is a certain number of houses too in the course of construction.

Mr. Brennan

I am sure the Minister does not anticipate any new building. I am afraid on that particular heading matters have come to a standstill. Generally speaking, of course, we feel that this Estimate is a necessity. Although we do not like the bringing in of Supplementary Estimates, they are necessary from time to time, and in the period of emergency through which we are passing I suppose it is natural that we should have those things.

Mr. Byrne

With regard to L (3)— Provision of Equipment for Emergency Cooked Food Centres, might I ask the Minister does that apply also to municipal authorities; or supposing we decide that a certain school has space enough to cook food, and equipment is wanted in that school for the cooking of food for the school children, will the Minister say whether that equipment will be supplied to those school managers who adopt the School Meals Act? Can a school be taken as a food centre if food is provided for children in the school, and will provision be made under this grant for equipment, boilers, stoves and all the other necessaries?

Mr. Corish

I should also like to know to what extent this is to be carried out through the country, whether it is to apply to every municipality, or, as Deputy Byrne has asked, whether it is applicable to schools or not. In Wexford, we have adopted the School Meals Act; the children are supplied with certain money to buy food, or with food as the case may be. This year we have endeavoured to secure that more food will be supplied to the children, but the difficulty is that there is not sufficient money to buy equipment and still supply the foodstuffs. One wonders if the Minister will extend this to the different municipalities to enable things like that to be done. I should like the Minister to give some explanation as to what it is proposed to do with this money; whether it is to be confined to Dublin or is to apply to every municipality in Ireland.

So far as the question of housing is concerned, there is very little building being done at the present time. Not alone is that due to the fact that building materials are scarce, but the cost of building is very excessive at the moment. A private person might build a house, but I think building by municipalities is coming to a standstill. A house that cost £400 two years ago would cost £500 to-day. That has a very serious effect on the rent of a house. If you take a slum dweller out of a cheap house and put him into a new house, the rent that will have to be charged will be out of the reach of that person. I would therefore ask the Minister to consider the advisability of increasing the subsidy. I do not think it will cost him so very much more, because there is not likely to be the same demand for housing in urban areas as there was a few years ago. There are some municipalities who are prepared to proceed with the building of houses, even though they are dearer now. They all look to the Minister for help.

As the Minister knows, in towns like Wexford, Sligo and Kilkenny the subsidy is only paid up to the amount of £350; that is to say, that for a house costing £400 or £500 the subsidy is only paid on £350. The complete cost of the sinking fund and interest between £350 and £500 or £600, as the case may be, must be met either by the tenant or the council responsible for the building of the house. That is a very serious impost on both. I am sure that the Minister is anxious that the building of houses should be continued and that the Department are always ready to help housing and always desirous that housing should be continued. But they know by experience that, within the last two years anyhow, there has been a considerable slowing-down in the building of houses, entirely due to the fact that the subsidy is not large enough and that the cost of house building at present is very high.

Mr. MacEntee

Deputy Brennan asked me in regard to cooked meals whether this was intended to apply only to county boroughs. Deputy Byrne asked if a grant similar to that made to local authorities would be made available to private persons. The position is that the order, as originally issued, applied only to county boroughs and empowered those county boroughs to draw up schemes for the provision in an emergency, if the circumstances required it, of cooked meals. The reason why it was considered necessary to confer such a power on the local authorities lay in the fact that it was anticipated that the fuel shortage might become so acute that even persons, who normally would be able to provide their own fuel and have their meals cooked in their own homes, might find it necessary, by reason of the fact that fuel was not available to them for that purpose, even though normally they would be in a position to purchase such fuel, to have recourse to some sort of public centre for the cooking of meals. It was anticipated that the need was more likely to arise in the larger urban centres of population than it would be in the smaller towns and villages. Accordingly, the order, at the outset at any rate, was confined to the county boroughs. But provision was also made in the order, under Section 9, to enable the Minister for Local Government and Public Health, on the application of any sanitary authority, for the purpose of the Public Health Acts, 1878 to 1931, by order to confer on such sanitary authority the same powers. The position, at any rate up to the moment, is that no authority, outside the Borough of Dun Laoghaire, the Borough of Drogheda and one other urban district council, has felt it necessary to apply to us to have such powers conferred upon them.

The issue which Deputy Byrne has raised is quite another matter. This order, as I said, is not intended to be eleemosynary in its nature. It is not intended to provide free meals for people who are distressed or in necessitous circumstances by reason of the fact that they may be unemployed. It is intended to meet an emergency which might befall any household where, for one reason or another, the normal supply of fuel was not available. Accordingly, those who avail of this service will have to pay a charge which will defray the full cost.

Deputy Byrne has referred to the provision of free meals for school children, which in general are only given to the children of those who are in necessitous circumstances. I have no reason to believe that the existing provision in that regard is not sufficient; at least, so far as Dublin is concerned, we have not had any official representations from those competent to speak for the municipality in regard to this matter. In the light of that, and, bearing in mind the fairly widespread charitable facilities which exist in the City of Dublin for the provision of cheap meals, I am not satisfied, at the moment at any rate, that it is necessary for us to go to the extent which has been foreshadowed by Deputy Byrne and equip all those charitable organisations at State expense to provide those meals. In fact, I have been making an investigation into this matter, which has been kept under very careful and constant supervision in the Department so far as the larger centres of population are concerned, and my information has been that recently the demand for the provision of what I might describe as take-away meals, meals which are cooked and taken away by people for consumption in their own homes, has fallen off to a marked degree. In addition we have to remember that provision has been made for a ration of fuel upon a uniform basis to all householders. With whatever reserves there may be available in the houses of those who are in employment or fairly constantly employed, this ration appears to be sufficient, with a certain amount of care and thriftiness, for the ordinary working-class household. It may be insufficient for larger houses.

Certainly at the present stage I do not think there has been any demand made on the Minister to put into operation this emergency cooked food service.

Mr. Byrne

I did not say anything about charitable institutions. I asked if schools were willing to provide a hall for giving food to school children would they get equipment.

Mr. MacEntee

The fact is that the City Manager is responsible for preparing schemes of this sort. He has made what I should consider ample arrangements to meet the demand which we might anticipate even in a period of grave fuel scarcity. If he comes to us and says that, for the purpose of his scheme, it is essential that he should equip certain buildings other than those which have been already equipped, then the matter, of course, could be dealt with on that basis. The request would have to be put up by the City Manager, and it would have to form part of his general scheme. It would quite clearly have to be part of the general scheme. He could not, for instance, by a sort of subterfuge or sidewind, ask us to sanction the installation of cooking equipment in institutions or places which, quite obviously, did not come within the framework of his general proposals.

With regard to the question which Deputy Corish raised as to the additional encouragement which we ought to give to those who are prepared to undertake the building of houses, I can say that I fear, from the knowledge I have at my disposal, that the principal obstacle in that respect is going to be a shortage of materials. The number of houses which at present are being built by private individuals and the number being built by local authorities is such that these houses will absorb the full supply of certain raw materials which at the moment happens to be in sight. The number of houses being built by local authorities on 1st September of this year was about 2,400, and it is a coincidence that, in the same month of 1939, the number was 2,464. This is current building, and there has been no very great difference between the two figures, but I think that, in view of the rationing of timber and other supplies, we would not be able to provide for any greater number of houses than I have indicated, and it may in fact turn out that we shall not be able to provide even for so many as 2,400 per year. However, that would be only in the event of the position in relation to supplies taking a rather more unfavourable turn than we have reason at present to think it will.

Vote put and agreed to.

Vote reported and agreed to.