I should like to congratulate the Department responsible for the introduction of this Bill on the consideration that is extended to Deputies in accompanying the Bill by a White Paper. That is a practice that I should like to see more generally followed. It is not a very intricate Bill but it is a rather lengthy one and one that has reference to so many previous Acts, that, I think, each of us found the White Paper particularly helpful in the historical survey it gave us and in saving us the time and labour of looking up previous Acts. That certainly was appreciated by the majority of Deputies. In addition to that, I think the Parliamentary Secretary's method and manner in introducing the Bill is worthy of appreciation. We had this Bill introduced by a person who gave every evidence of regarding Parliament rather than Government as the legislating authority, the real authority.
All too frequently we have Ministers coming before us and introducing legislation in the style of people who, in laying something before Parliament, tell Parliament either to take it or leave it, that there is no view but the one view, that is, the view of the man introducing the Bill. We had a Parliamentary Secretary introducing this Bill, who gave every evidence of the fact that he appreciated that this body was a deliberative Assembly, that it was the legislative Assembly of this State, and that the Deputies were present as representative people and people who had some knowledge of the question before the House. I heard very general appreciation of the manner in which it was introduced and I think it is well to put it on record. I should like to see some of the Ministers as understudies to the Parliamentary Secretaries rather than the Parliamentary Secretaries as understudies to Ministers.
This Bill has been discussed to a very great extent as if it were either a drainage scheme or a drainage plan. There is no drainage scheme and no drainage plan in this Bill. What is in the Bill is an essential and desirable preliminary to any drainage plan or scheme. In the main, it is a kind of machinery Bill, a Bill which clears the way for, as we all hope, a multiplicity of drainage schemes or plans. The Bill does away with a multiplicity of drainage boards and I think drainage is a national problem which has to be centrally designed and centrally controlled. The multiplicity of drainage boards, with a great number of separate charges, were in their time worthy of trial, but I think the underlying idea of this Bill is a sound essential to any general advance with regard to drainage.
Like other colleagues of mine who spoke, I happen to come from a county which has experienced the great blessings which can come through a drainage scheme. One of my carner recollections is a picture of the village I was born in as an island, with miles and miles of water on every side. Deputy Flanagan has referred to the fact that he recollects in his own area going to school knee-deep in water. I remember driving my father, who was a doctor, to calls at one end of his district and, for months of the year, when he got out of the trap there would be an upturned tub with a plank leading to another upturned tub and across that plank he would reach the house, the inmates of which would have retreated upstairs on account of the flooding below. All that has been changed through a drainage scheme, and I agree with the Deputy who says that no value in cash can be placed on the different living circumstances of people who formerly lived in a flooded area and who now live in a comparatively dry area. The amenities secured for these people have a value which cannot be reckoned in pounds, shillings and pence, quite aside from any enhancing of the value of the land.
There are certain aspects of the Bill which may not justify some of the great hopes expressed. I heard one Deputy in his enthusiasm for the Bill, with a kind of bland and simple faith which I certainly cannot share, urging the House to let the Bill through rapidly so that the work could be begun. I envy that kind of simple faith and enthusiasm, but when I see that the operative factor inside the Bill is the Board of Works and that the confirming Minister is the Minister for Finance, I do not think that speed will be the outstanding feature. The Board of Works is a body which does sound and excellent work, but I think all Deputies will agree with me that the words "Board of Works" and "speed" are not synonymous. Neither is the Minister for Finance the particular Minister whom one would pick out to be the confirming authority when it comes to the speedy and lavish expenditure of money.
The initiating department to initiate a drainage scheme and the planning department, after the Bill becomes law, will be the Board of Works, and the only authority which can confirm a scheme will be the Minister for Finance. I do not see speed enshrined in the Bill and I do not see expenditure on a lavish scale. However, at least, it plants somewhere the power to initiate and build up schemes, but let us not overlook the fact that, where the Bill gives power to the Board of Works to initiate schemes and to the Minister for Finance to confirm schemes, at the same time it gives the opposite—it gives power to the Board of Works to hold up schemes and power to the Minister for Finance to hold up schemes.
My experience of Governments, present and past in this country, and my experience of Governments in other countries, is that any expenditure governed by the Department of Finance will necessarily depend on the times, and after every war it is reasonable to expect that there will be a slump phase, a phase where economy rules the roost. Do not let us forget that, with that phase in front of us, the only authority which can confirm a drainage scheme after the passage of the Bill, the only authority which can say "Go," is the authority which will be most cautious, most conservative and most nervous with regard to public expenditure. I think it is regrettable that inside this scheme all the powers of initiative were taken from any other body and confined within the one body. However, I am prepared to accept the fact that the pros and cons have been very fully considered, and if I had to choose between leaving the powers of initiative inside every county, the financing to be done mainly from within that county, the country to be drained piecemeal, and a national plan, in spite of my criticism, I would rather have the central idea and the national plan.
There are portions of this Bill that have given rise, I am sure, to discussion of a controversial kind within every Party, and the same applies outside the Parties. One of the big things that this Bill is doing with regard to the future is abolishing the past system of special drainage rates and replacing that by a common flat rate within an administrative area. We hear the argument that a number of people who do not benefit will have to pay. I think it is true to say that that applies to nearly every public scheme at the moment. It is true also to say that the areas that are most heavily and most permanently flooded are, because of these very conditions, the poorest areas and, if drainage were to depend on the capacity of the poorest people to pay the major share of the cost, it would be nonsense to talk of going ahead with a drainage scheme. On the whole, reckoning the thing from the point of view of the man in the distant town and of the farmer who is not directly benefiting, I think that the fairest scheme is the scheme adopted in the Bill. It is the only scheme which will make general big scheme drainage possible in this country, namely, to meet the maintenance charges by a flat rate.
When discussing the abolition of special drainage rates, I said that the areas most subject to flooding are the places where we get the poorest people. The same applies to counties. The counties most cursed with swampiness and flooding, stagnant pools and bogs, are the counties in which drainage will be most necessary. A suggestion was made by one Deputy that in future there will be an outcry against the striking of the rate in these counties.
I would not sympathise with that kind of thing, but I would suggest that the Parliamentary Secretary, between this and the later stages of the Bill, might give special consideration to counties where a full-scale drainage scheme might impose a drainage rate that would be unreasonable in such a county, and that, while adhering to the policy of a flat rate charge, he might consider in certain counties having a maximum over-riding rate. When that particular rate is reached, then any maintenance charges over that rate would be met, we will say, out of central funds. I would imagine that if an alteration along such lines were adopted by the Parliamentary Secretary, it would apply to very few counties, if any. The maximum rate should be a reasonable rate, and, except drainage rates are very costly inside any county, the maximum over-riding rate should be very rarely passed.
There are some portions of this Bill to which I take a certain amount of exception; it is more an exception on the lines of principle. With regard to the maintenance of drainage works in future, we are laying down the principle that the maintenance work will be carried out by the Office of Public. Works, but that local funds will pay. That raises a principle of a certain amount of importance. The generally accepted theory or standard in democratic countries is that you do not pay without a certain amount of representative control. Here we are adopting the policy of "pay and have no control". Control goes out of the hands of the county councils, as I read this Bill, and their particular privilege in future will be the privilege of paying the bills. We are preparing the way to launch a scheme of national drainage, planned centrally, carried out centrally, maintained locally; all local bodies are completely passed over until it comes to writing the cheque. It strikes me that there are a number of rather obvious links between the Office of Public Works and the rivers that are to be drained that are passed over entirely in this Bill, one of the most obvious being the county surveyor and his staff of assistant surveyors.
Like everyone else, I look at it from the angle that I would understand. If we were introducing a national tuberculosis scheme, where the central authority was going to plan to make provision for treatment, and the maintenance of patients afterwards was to be left to be financed by the local ratepayers, but with no control, supervisory or otherwise, I would oppose that scheme on the ground that it would fail from birth because the local tuberculosis officer in each county was completely omitted from the scheme. It would fail. Now we have a drainage scheme. That scheme will be centrally planned. We are all with you there. The work will be carried out centrally and paid for centrally. I think that is sound. The maintenance afterwards will be paid for locally and directed centrally. In dealing with that drainage, I put it to the Parliamentary Secretary that there is no group of persons in this country with more knowledge of drainage requirements, drainage problems, the supervision and direction of maintenance, than is to be found inside the body of county surveyors and assistant surveyors in each of our counties. I think it is in one of the minority reports that it was suggested that a resident engineer should be appointed for each drainage zone. I do not know whether it is necessary to go as far as that. But, with regard to the planning of schemes, with regard even to having some function in carrying out of schemes, certainly with regard to the maintenance of schemes, I think that somewhere inside the four corners of the Bill room should be found to make use of the knowledge and experience of county surveyors.
There have been references to the Barrow drainage scheme. I do not propose to go back into that. The Barrow drainage scheme as an engineering achievement was a mighty successful piece of work.
It was an example that gave courage to this Parliament to go further with drainage schemes. I remember, as a child, people from my neighbourhood going over, year after year, to London every time there was a change of Government. The same people went across —the M.P.'s. for Leix, North Offaly and South Kildare, and a number of representative local people—to try to get the Barrow drained. Every time the Government changed across the water, over they went again and every time they came back with the same reply—that it was too costly a scheme, too vast an engineering undertaking. Having grown up in that atmosphere, it is certainly a proud recollection to look back and think that, before this country had a Parliament for as long as four years, that great scheme that was too vast an engineering undertaking and too costly a scheme for the mighty British Parliament was undertaken and put through.
I was glad to hear Deputy Davin say that, no matter what agitation was on down there, he always held and expressed the view that the scheme was a success, that it benefited all the affected people to a greater or less extent. If there was any fault in that scheme, it was a fault of optimistic finance, thinking that the percentage that was to be levied off those who benefited could be met through a special rate. The finance of the scheme was too heavy to be met in that manner and this Bill is correcting that to a very great extent.
There is the question of arrears. If the faith and hope that Parliament has shown in this Bill is to be justified, if we are going to have drainage on a scheme based on a comparatively rapid expenditure of £7,000,000, then I think the scheme should not be, as it were, open to criticism because of its tightness with regard to a few years of arrears. In the Barrow drainage area, for one cause or another—either through lack of maintenance, through incapacity to pay, to the extent of one man standing beside another, through all these cases mixed together—there is at the present moment an accumulation of six years' arrears of a very heavy rate. I am mentioning this now as it has been dealt with to some extent; but other Deputies know that, even at the height of a general election, when possibly it might have gained votes, I resisted in public at every meeting the total demands that were made by that body.
I am putting this to the Parliamentary Secretary now. There are six years of heavy arrears unpaid. If there were only one or two years' arrears, I would say it was a matter to be taken seriously by the individuals. If any of us here owes a few hundred pounds, that is a subject for worry; it is a subject that keeps us mentally active planning how to pay it off; but if any of us owes a couple of million pounds, we would not lose a minute's sleep about it: it is too fantastic to think of us paying a couple of millions. That is a fair illustration of the situation which has grown up along the Barrow valley. Big finance was involved in the scheme at its inception. This is a scheme boldly proposing to tackle drainage problems in a big financial way. Do not have it held up here, there or anywhere by niggling with regard to arrears. The annual charges have been substantially reduced. The Parliamentary Secretary has sufficient files in his Department to know what the problem of arrears amounts to. I am not putting forward a demand, as I do not like basing a case on the fact that bargains, contracts or laws have not been complied with. Perhaps the Parliamentary Secretary, at a subsequent stage, would be in a position to make some provision for this.
With regard to the panel of drainage arbitrators, I know that it takes some nice balancing to decide whether to have part-time men who are engaged in professional practice or a few men who would be, as it were, in a judicial capacity, paid an adequate salary and prohibited from practising. On the other side of the water, the policy adopted is the policy of arbitration through independent individuals, who are not in competitive practice and who are under no obligations to individuals. I do not know which is the sounder way to go about it. In very major questions, such as the loss of water power for immense industrial organisations, brought about through the lowering of water as a result of a drainage scheme, it is scarcely reasonable to leave that entirely to the views of a part-time arbitrator and deny the individual any right to appeal to any court in the land. If we are adopting a system of part-time arbitrators, a man who just functions now and then, a man whose main interest is advancement in his professional practice outside and independent of drainage schemes, when big money is involved, when big losses may have to be faced by an individual, the least we should allow is the right of appeal to some of our courts.
I would like the Parliamentary Secretary, in the further stages of this Bill—and I think it is necessary to say this—not to confuse criticism with opposition. There has been a vast amount of criticism. All the criticism was directed towards the production of a better Bill. The Bill is generally welcomed. If there are doubts as to what will happen after the Bill, then, giving expression to those doubts may, possibly, tend to expedite Departments that are not customarily very swift and to rendering more swift those Departments which show a certain celerity at present.