The Minister cannot kill my amendments by not moving the sections. I am only protecting a right. I am not saying what I am going to do.
I move amendment No. 25:—
Before Section 17 to insert a new section as follows:—
The provisions of Sections 70 to 87 inclusive and of Sections 92 and 93 and of Sections 94 to 101 inclusive of the Transport Act, 1944 (No. 21 of 1944) shall apply to the board as to a dissolved undertaker.
On the whole, I think it is better to discuss this general question on this amendment. This is one of the main issues which arise in connection with the Bill. It concerns the point of responsibility for increasing transport charges, curtailing transport services, or making other changes in transport arrangements of a similar kind.
Deputies will remember that, under the provisions of the 1944 Act, such changes were made by a procedure which terminated with a decision of the Minister. In the case of alteration of maximum charges, classifications of merchandise, standard conditions of carriage and so forth, the company made its proposals, published details of them, and ultimately the Minister, having considered the issue in the light of the Government's proposals and any public representations directed to him, came to a decision for which he was responsible to the Dáil. Similarly, in the matter of the curtailment of services, the closing of branch lines and of stations and other alterations in the scope of the transport undertaking, the company decided upon its policy; it published in the Press details of its decision, made application to the Minister for sanction and the Minister gave or withheld that sanction, it being open to him to refer the matter to the Transport Tribunal established under the Act for an inquiry.
The whole procedure was designed to remove certain obstacles to the alteration of charges and conditions of operation which had existed previously and at the same time keep in the hands of the Minister, as representing the public interest, the ultimate decision, a device which ensured that the Dáil could, and frequently did, express its view on the matter in question.
The Bill before the House, as it stands at present, is designed to give the company power to deal with these matters on its own responsibility, both in regard to the alteration of charges, the variation of services, and maintenance of branch lines and stations. The new board can act on its own responsibility, taking the course it considered best, without being responsible to anybody, except in a very general way to the Minister. The Minister is not required, however, to sanction any specific act and consequently cannot be challenged by the Dáil in relation to it.
Following the Second Reading debate, the Minister decided to change his proposals in that regard and he now proposes to move amendments designed to establish a transport tribunal to which the company will apply whenever it desires to raise charges or alter railway services, and whose consent must be secured by the company before the changes are effected.
Now, these are three alternative methods of dealing with what is the kernel of our transport problem and, having considered the two alternatives which the Minister has given us in the Bill and in the amendments, I am strongly of opinion that the procedure laid down in the 1944 Act is still the best. It is obviously desirable to release transport undertakings from the onerous restrictions on their freedom of action which were imposed by old time legislation, in the days when public transport services were almost entirely confined to railways and canals, which, because of their nature, had an effective and complete monopoly, each in its own area. The legislators of various countries were naturally concerned to protect the public against exploitation by these monopolies. Transport legislation for the past 50, 60 or 100 years was all based upon the assumption that public transport was operated on a monopoly basis and that legislators had not merely the duty but a considerable responsibility in protecting the public against these monopolies.
That situation changed fundamentally when the monopolies of the railways and canals disappeared with the emergence of the motor car and, even though subsequent legislation passed here was designed to re-create in part the monopolies of the transport undertakings by giving them certain exclusive rights in the matter of the operation of transport services by motor vehicles, nevertheless we know that the old situation has passed, that the monopoly which formerly existed is permanently broken and, so long as we permit private lorries and cars to operate freely, it can never be fully restored.
The change in the transport situation was not immediately followed, however, by changes in the law or even in the outlook of those responsible for making the law and it was reluctantly, and only in a piecemeal fashion, that we released the transport undertakings from the restrictions which were formerly imposed upon them, which it was necessary to maintain in the old situation but which were merely a handicap to their survival in the new. The easy course to take at any time was that which the Minister favoured when framing the Bill—release them from all these restrictions, let them charge what they can and let them run whatever services it pays them to run. That, of course, has a great deal to recommend it.
I heard Deputies argue here yesterday in favour of differential freight charges for the purpose of encouraging national economic development, for the purpose of facilitating specific forms of production or the cheap distribution of particular goods throughout the country. I do not think these Deputies have fully appreciated the problem of our transport undertaking. In the days of railway monopolies, railway charges were fixed upon the principle of charging what the traffic could bear. Every schedule of charges was prepared upon the basis of ascertaining the highest rate which the traffic would bear and still be available. If the traffic ceased, the rate was too high and the task of the railway managers was to find the point at which the traffic would still be available while yielding the highest revenue to the company.
Frequently in the past I discussed with transport managers here the possibility of framing charges on another system, on a cost plus system, on a differential system intended to encourage export trade in particular goods, and to discourage import trade of other goods, to facilitate the decentralisation of industry and so forth. Always I came up against practical difficulties which made the adoption of any other system of freight fixation impossible. Once you examine the position logically you must find that that is inevitably so, because if every charge is based on what the traffic can bear, then any alteration must tend to involve a loss of revenue to the company. You cannot cut one charge to encourage some form of trade and hope to recover the lost revenue somewhere else if the charges elsewhere are fixed at the highest rate which the traffic could bear. Therefore, we could take a chance so far as the railways are concerned in releasing the companies from official control in relation to maximum charges. But still it seems to me that it would be desirable, so long as we give a legal monopoly, to have some authority with power to ensure that there was no discrimination between one citizen and another; that whatever charge the railway company considered necessary or thought possible to maintain for the transport of a particular type of merchandise would be available under equal conditions to all using their services. Clearly the introduction of an element of discrimination would be regarded as publicly undesirable even though on many occasions in the past the railway operators here asked for a change in the law which would permit of that, not so much as it involved discrimination between one individual and another but in particular as it involved discrimination between one town and another, or one port and another, where they were losing trade to seaborne carriers, or in other special circumstances.
In the case of road services, however, somewhat different principles apply. If we take the course of compulsorily acquiring public road transport operators and handing them over to a nationalised transport operator, while prohibiting anyone else without a licence engaging in the haulage of goods for hire on the road, then I think we still have and cannot avoid responsibility for ensuring that there will be some body whose sole concern is with the public interest who will be empowered to regulate the rates charged, the conditions under which the transport is provided and other matters affecting the economy of transport, such as the classification of merchandise carried.
The procedure under the 1944 Act, therefore, was as I described. So far as the law was concerned a great number of statutory restrictions were removed and the company were virtually put into the position that they could charge what they liked, run what services they liked, alter charges and conditions as they liked, provided always that they got the Minister for Industry and Commerce to agree. The Minister for Industry and Commerce exercised his function as custodian of the public interest vis-a-vis the Dáil. The Minister for Industry and Commerce as the public authority who sanctioned alteration in charges or methods of working was in the position that the Dáil could query his actions and could express approval or disapproval whenever individual Deputies had it brought to their attention that the operations of the transport company were having adverse economic effects on their constituencies. It was not a completely satisfactory system. How satisfactorily it might have worked in what might be described as normal conditions we do not know.
The 1944 Act was, as Deputies know, passed before the end of the war. It was passed merely with the intention of creating an organisation which would have the task of transport reorganisation after the war, even though we recognised then that some years would elapse before it could function normally. During the war the exercise of Ministerial control over services or charges was far more directly related to the day-to-day problems of supply rather than any consideration of transport policy. Time and time again I had to give the House assurances that when rail services were curtailed, branch lines closed down, or public road transport operated in some new manner, it was the result of supply difficulties and not because of any attempt to prepare the ground in advance to implement a transport policy upon which the Dáil had not been consulted. Because of the fact that the 1944 device has never been tried out in normal circumstances and because, on the face of it, it appears to be the best device to handle the problems which inevitably arise in the operation of transport services on a monopoly basis, I am in favour of retaining it.
I think that the Minister in his original proposal to leave the company free, not subject to him or any other authority, went too far in one direction. I think that in his amendments which involve the creation of a transport tribunal he is going too far in the other direction. I do not know how he contemplates the tribunal will work. The old transport tribunal established under the 1924 Act was a most cumbersome instrument. Granted that its functions were somewhat different and granted that it was charged under that Act primarily with the duty of arranging a schedule of charges which would enable the Great Southern Railway Company to earn a standard revenue which it had itself determined in accordance with the provisions of the Act, nevertheless it is sufficiently similar to the tribunal which the Minister intends to propose here to enable us to come to some conclusions as to how the new tribunal will work by reviving our recollections of how the old tribunal worked.
The new tribunal will exercise its functions with regard to the provisions of Section 14. Section 14 of the Bill will be amended in a way which will give that tribunal the duty of having regard to other things than the financial result of its decisions. It will be enabled to have regard to their effect upon national economic development and on the conditions of employment of the company's staffs. I must confess that I am rather appalled at the prospect of anything like the old tribunal reappearing again. When the Minister's amendments are submitted to the House, as presumably they will be, and when we have an opportunity of considering them as a whole in the framework of the Bill, I think we shall have to examine then the possibility of amending them in order to eliminate some of the abuses, at any rate, which arose in connection with the operations of the old tribunal. The principal abuse in my view was the practice of having counsel employed whenever any proposal to modify the standard charges, or permit the establishment of special charges, or other alterations, was under consideration. The railway company decided on the tactic of filling the courtroom of the tribunal with a number of high-powered barristers and everybody who was offering opposition to the proposal of the company was either foredoomed to failure or forced to incur the expenditure involved in employing a similar array of legal luminaries to offset the company's counsel.