It is our opinion that the passing of this resolution will mean, to some extent, throwing good money after bad, and will probably further obscure the transport position in the country. The Taoiseach indicated to-day, in reply to a question by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, that a special committee had been considering a number of plans for the economic development of the country in the post-war period. I asked him whether that committee had considered transport by road or by rail as part of the plans, and he indicated that they had, to some extent at any rate, and that this Bill which the Minister has introduced to the House is a necessary foundation—I think that was the word he used—to their work. It is because it is necessary to have a cheap and efficient transport system in the country as a foundation for the satisfactory development of production and distribution here that we are opposed to the passing of this resolution.
Nothing is more important at the present time than to see that every possible step will be taken to reduce the cost of living on the one hand, to see that the overheads which affected the prices which our people had to pay for the necessaries of life are reduced, and that those overheads which raised the prices of our products here and prevented them from adequately and effectively competing in other markets, will be reduced, too. The proposals in this measure are such as will render it impossible to make any serious attempt to reduce the cost of living in the country, or to prepare our agricultural and other industries for effective competition in the markets we will have to find abroad.
The tribunal which considered the general position of public transport in 1939 dealt with the railways, and dealt also with some of the other transport companies in the country. In dealing with the Dublin United Tramway Company it stated on page 108 of its report that that company, whose capital was about £2,200,000 at the time, had proposals for paying back a certain substantial part of their capital inside ten years. The report states in paragraph 254, that the company proposes over the next ten years—the report was written in 1939—"to repay £1,100,000, which, after payments have been made for new omnibuses, will have the effect of reducing the capital and borrowings from their present figure of £2,210,933 to the £1,360,000 represented by the preference and ordinary stocks." Commenting on that proposal, the report says:
"We are of opinion that the company should not be empowered to charge such fares as may be necessary to earn a net revenue sufficiently large to enable this proposal to be carried out. In our opinion it is unreasonable to expect that for the next ten years the community residing in the areas served by the company should be obliged to pay, not only for the current cost of provision of the services placed at its disposal by the company (which cost would include the amounts required for annual repairs and the liability for renewals when they fall due), but also to provide out of current revenue in such a short period so substantial a sum as £1,100,000, of which £682,100 is for the repayment of debentures which have formed part of the company's capital and borrowings for very considerable periods in the past varying from over 30 years to over 40 years."
The tribunal found that the Dublin United Tramway Company at that particular time were proposing to take a substantial amount of capital and repay it, so that the people using their transport system in the city here not only would have to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of the transport system during that time, and pay for the cost of the money invested in the, tramway company, but would have to pay £1,100,000 more than the cost of running that service, and hand it back to the lenders through the tramway company inside ten years. The proposal which the Minister puts before us is infinitely worse than that. He takes the transport system of the whole country, that is the railway and the roads and the Dublin United Transport Company, and he not only proposes to repay £1,100,000 of capital that is in the tramway company but £700,000 in addition, and he proposes to repay, between this and 1960, £8,048,556. There is a proposal that the new company, between this and 1960, will not only pay for its development, pay for its upkeep, and pay for carrying on the transport system of the country, but will also have to pay £9,875,556 as well. The company which is going to take that money out of the pockets of the transport users is a company which, as far as the railways are concerned, has been shown to be paying out moneys in dividends for a number of years past that it has not been earning.
At the present time, instead of putting additional burdens of that kind on the users of road and railway transport, we should be stripping our whole machinery of everything that might put such a burden on them and that might raise travelling rates either for passengers or goods. We should be trying to get out of the shocking position in which we are at present and increase production and make distribution easier, so as to provide a cheaper living for our own people. We will have to find and hold increased markets abroad for our additional production here, so that it may improve our economy, and in that effort we should be free of unnecessary transport charges.
We are resolutely, opposed to these proposals because, in the first place, as well as simply carrying on the difficult business of transport, it is proposed to charge transport users in the next 15 years £10,000,000 more than that business ought to cost. It is only gradually that we are getting information as to what these proposals mean. Before the tribunal which investigated the question of shares, evidence was given which showed that the proposals contained in this measure did not materialise as proposals until September, 1943. The Minister himself, in his evidence before the tribunal, said that in the earlier stages the reorganisation contemplated was a company with a capital of £10,000,000, to acquire compulsorily the Great Southern Railways system. That, apparently, was the proposal until about September, when it was changed. Responsibility seems to be shirked for the proposals as they are at present. It was indicated by several people, including the Minister, before the tribunal that the proposal for a £20,000,000 company came from the Civil Service and not from the railway company or the Minister. When the new proposal was referred to the Government in September, 1943, the attitude of the Government was— as indicated in the Minister's evidence —that the Government had no objection to the proposal. That is to say, the original proposal was that £10,000,000 would be provided, apparently by the Government. That £10,000,000 would have been sufficient to repay in full all the debenture stock and 65 per cent. of the preference and other stock. At that particular time, the market value of those stocks was substantially below that figure. The guaranteed preference stock was quoted in the market in June, 1939, at 30; the 4 per cent. preference stock at 13¼ and the ordinary stock at 9¼. The £10,000,000 would have been sufficient to pay off the debentures and to pay 65 per cent. of the nominal value of the other shares. That was changed and full value was to be given for the railway shares, while the Dublin United Tramway Company was to be taken over and other great developments were to be gone ahead with, of which we have no information of any kind. Under the present proposals, the full capital of the Great Southern Railway is resurrected. Up to September, 1943, it was not the intention to do that but, under the present proposals, it is intended to do it.
These proposals are likely to put an additional charge on the taxpayer and on the country generally. When the original Tribunal of Inquiry of 1939 reported, it stated, on page 84:—
"In particular, it is of great importance that a clear and dispassionate appreciation of the factors affecting the success or failure of the Great Southern Railways Company under the new conditions should be available before any final conclusions are reached as to its future economic possibilities."
The Minister for Industry and Commerce for the time being in 1941 was of the same opinion. He thought very little of Deputy Davin for pressing to have the report I speak of published; but in his public statements here and elsewhere he said that no satisfactory proposals could be put forward until we got out of the present emergency. In spite of the fact that this tribunal, in a spirit of detachment, indicated in 1939 that, even without any of the disturbing factors that the emergency has brought about, it would take five years before any final conclusions could be reached as to the future possibilities of the railway company, we are now asked to give the full nominal value to the capital of the railway company and to hang that round the State here in future in such a manner that the greater part of it will have to be repaid in 1960.
The only basis upon which the Minister rests the Bill is that he will provide a satisfactorily organised railway and road system. We have got no information—good, bad or indifferent—that would lead us to believe that that is so. The former Minister for Industry and Commerce, again in 1941, made it clear that—in his opinion, at any rate—the people responsible for the poor conditions of the railways were the directors of that time, the shareholders of that time and the staff of that time, and he repudiated the suggestion that anybody else was responsible. It is practically to those people that the general ownership of the new transport company is to be handed over. That makes it quite impossible for us to have any hope that there will be reasonable development or reasonable management. From the figures that have been provided, it is quite clear that, instead of a cheaper transport system being provided now to meet the urgent exigencies of the time, we are to be provided with a system on which enormous unnecessary expense will be undertaken, since something like £10,000,000 is to be taken from the transport users between now and 1960, over and above the actual cost of the transport system. We are therefore opposed to the passing of this money resolution, as we believe that it is merely attempting to throw good money after bad.