I intervene lest by silence I might be presumed to be accepting the rather ghostly stories which Deputy Rooney is endeavouring to spin around this Bill. This is not a political Bill in any sense of the term. It is purely a business method of dealing with a particular problem. The Post Office Department say that on the telegraph side they are inhibited from making flexible charges in respect of ordinary or Press telegrams because of the fact that the rates are fixed by legislation and can be amended only by legislation, which involves passing a Bill through five stages in this House and four stages in the Seanad—nine stages in order to change the price of a telegram. Everybody will agree that in 1953, Parliament intervening on a greater scale than ever in social, domestic, industrial, economic, financial and agricultural affairs, it is not a sensible approach to the question that it should be necessary to pass a Bill through nine stages in order to enable the Post Office to fix telegraph charges.
All that this Bill is doing—I do not think Deputy Rooney adverted to this fact—is giving the Post Office on the telegraph side the same flexibility as it has on the postal and telephone side. At present the telegraph legislation is not running in step with the postal or telephone legislation. The telegraph legislation may be said to be archaie from the standpoint of its approach tothe whole question of telegraph charges. This Bill lines up telegraph legislation with postal and telephone legislation. It does not even do that because under this Bill the Minister is merely taking power to revise telegraph charges upwards or downwards at any time it is thought desirable. In order to make the revision operative he has to come to the House with statutory regulations which must be laid on the Table of the House and, presumably, must get the authority of the House, so that at that stage every Deputy will have all the opportunity he wants to express his views as to whether the telegraph charges should or should not be increased and he can consider the matter against the background of the financial position of the telegraph service.
If the Minister had been able to give the House a detailed explanation of the loss per telegram and the general distribution of telegrams, such as was furnished some time ago by the British Post Office to a parliamentary committee in England, Deputy Rooney's views on this matter would have undergone a substantial change. One does not need to go into details but it seems to me, from the figures given by the Minister, that the loss per telegram amounts to much more than the Post Office is receiving for the transmission of the telegram. That situation ought to be corrected. It has not been corrected on the telegraph side for more than 20 years in one case and 40 years in another case. Having regard to the altered value of money in the interregnum, quite clearly there is a case for revising these charges, as I am sure Deputy Rooney would revise the charges in similar circumstances in a business with which he was associated, or as any other sensible person would do.
We must face the problem in either of two ways. The more you develop the telephone service the more you injure the telegraph service. In every country in the world the telephone has proved to be a very serious competitor of the telegraph service and in many countries it is recognised that it is only a matter of time until there will befurther and more serious deterioration in the telegraph position in consequence of development of the telephone. You can probably save the telegraph service and might avoid increased charges to some extent if you damp down or cut back telephone development. Nowadays the telephone is universally regarded as an almost indispensable item of equipment for getting through the business of life and doing the things that must be done from day to day in a quick and efficient manner. There is no question of being able to cut back on the telephone side. In respect of the competition which the telegraph service experiences from the telephone there is no question of a solution being found by reducing charges. Every telegram that the Post Office handles increases the loss. If it handles 10,000,000 telegrams to-day and 20,000,000 telegrams to-morrow the loss to-morrow will be almost twice as much as the loss to-day because there is a loss per unit handled.
The only other way of dealing with the problem is the way envisaged in the Bill, that is, by increasing charges. If the charges have not been revised in one case for 20 years and in another case for 40 years it is difficult to argue against their being revised now. I do not consider that we should continue to accept this deficit, which must be paid in the long run. It ought to be paid by the quite well-off sections of the community who avail of the telegraph service so that as balanced a budget as practicable may be secured in respect of the telegraph service. I am afraid, however, that we will reach a stage, if we have not reached it already, when there is a limit to the charge you can make for a telegram. Britain and other countries feel that that stage has been reached.
I am afraid that the stage will probably be reached under the new charges proposed in this bill, but it is pretty difficult to see what you can do about the matter. However, what is before us in the Bill is to permit the Minister to make statutory regulations permitting greater flexibility in thefixing of telegraphic charges on the one hand, preserving the power of Parliament all the time to be able to examine those statutory regulations, and on the other hand to see whether we are going to allow the present substantial deficit on the telegraph service to continue because of the non-revision of telegraph charges over a long number of years or face up to the problem by increasing the charges, as has been done in every other single public utility in this country, and as has been done by every person who uses the telegraph service, whether he is a private individual or a newspaper proprietor. In all the circumstances, we feel that a good case is made for the Bill, and, frankly, we are in favour of giving the Minister the power under the Bill for use in the way indicated by him on the Second Stage.
