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Dáil Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 10 Feb 1954

Vol. 144 No. 1

Committee on Finance. - National Development Fund Bill, 1953—Money Resolution.

I move:—

That, for the purposes of any Act of the present session to make provision for a fund to be known as the National Development Fund, it is expedient to authorise the payment into such fund, out of moneys provided by the Oireachtas, of a sum not exceeding £5,000,000 (a) in the financial year ending on the 31st day of March, 1954, and (b) in each of the three next following financial years.

Would the Minister give us the list of the grants, authorisation for which—I presume that no grants of money have gone out—has gone out under the Supplementary Estimates passed last autumn?

Here is the list: for Gaeltacht projects, £250,000; to the Department of Local Government and the Road Fund, £1,000,000; the Works Act programme under the Department of Local Government, £100,000; the Special Employment Schemes Office under the Office of Public Works, £500,000; Cork harbour improvements through the Department of Industry and Commerce, £550,000; road development works in connection with the E.S.B. hand-won turf stations in the West, the project announced by the Minister for Industry and Commerce last year, £200,000; and Dublin harbour improvements, £527,000.

There is then a list in connection with the Department of Agriculture as follows: development of hatcheries, £25,000; progeny testing, pigs and sheep, £88,000; special veterinary research, £25,000; production of foundation stocks of seed, £150,000; cattle progeny testing, £35,000; artificial insemination stations for north-west counties, £40,000; and control stations for eggs and poultry, £100,000. In addition, there is a sum of £20,000 being made available in respect of a railway over the Limerick-Cork road towards the cement factory in Limerick. As Deputies are aware, although sanction was given for going ahead with the works for which these sums were allocated, there are some which will take perhaps two or three years and, in some cases, four years, to complete. The Dublin harbour works for instance, will last for the next three years or more.

Has the Minister got the grand total of these amounts?

The grand total of what I have read out is £3,610,400.

I am certainly amused when I remember the Minister for a whole day before Christmas fulminating about all the efforts which the National Development Fund Bill was going to make in regard to ground limestone. There is not one penny piece dealing with ground limestone in the list the Minister has read out.

The Deputy knows that that is nonsense.

We all knew that the Minister was just flying a kite that day, and the proof of that is here. We all knew, also, that a great deal of this Bill was pure camouflage and propaganda. I said then, and I repeat now, that there was no reason whatever why much of the work which is to be done under this Bill could not be done without any of the powers incorporated in it, and it was merely for the purpose of creating ballyhoo that the Bill was brought in in the way it was brought in. Take the sum of £100,000 allotted to the Local Authorities (Works) Act. What has happened in respect of that money? It has merely been handed over, and, having been handed over, has been utilised in exactly the same way as the moneys provided in the Estimates for this work were going to be utilised. It is a dishonest way on the part of the Government to try verbally and technically to keep within the promise of the Minister for Finance when he said there were going to be no Supplementary Estimates and to cover up their tracks it has been done in this guise.

So far as the Road Fund is concerned, there has long been in existence the appropriate machinery by which moneys could be borrowed for the purposes of the Road Fund which were not there in sufficient amount allowing for the ordinary income. Without knowing the details of the Gaeltacht project, I could not analyse that money, but we do know that there are already in the Estimates provisions for harbour development, and these provisions for harbour development could quite well have been added to these Estimates in exactly the same way. The figures given by the Minister prove conclusively that all this Bill is designed to do is to make good the deficiencies in the Estimates already put forward by the Government and which it was necessary to repair. With the exception of the Gaeltacht projects, which I am not at present in a position to analyse for the reason that details are not available, there is not a single thing that could not have been dealt with by way of Supplementary Estimate over and above the Volume of Estimates already circulated, except that the Minister wished, for political purposes, to make ballyhoo about it.

There are many features of the disbursements envisaged by the Minister on which I should like information. Is it possible for the Minister to indicate from what source certain of the plans and specifications in relation to these projects came? Are they plans and specifications that were on the stocks awaiting merely the transfusion of finance for their completion? I want to know from the Minister whether local authorities are yet advised as to what amounts of money are going to be available to them under these new grants. I want to know from the Minister whether there is any departure that might have necessitated the establishment of this separate Bill. Is there any function to be performed under this Bill for which the machinery is not already in being? Is this National Development Fund Bill to be purely a method of passing a large financial subvention to enable the infusion of finance that is necessary for certain projects under various Departments now stultified by lack of money? If this is so, can the Minister indicate to the House what was the urgency or what, in fact, was the necessity for the departure into this type of legislation? Can the Minister give the House any information as to whether many of the projects on hands by various local authorities of immense consequence to the immediate neighbourhood can hope to have any subvention in aid from this fund to enable them to go on with those projects, particularly in districts such as the area I have the honour to represent, where the spectre of unemployment is becoming serious again and the potential of employment termination is very real? Can people like the Clonakilty Urban District Council who have submitted plans in connection with water schemes and the provision of a new town hall-can projects submitted by Skibbereen Urban Council and the Bantry town commissioners over a period of years—hope that from this money now voted will flow some subvention in aid to enable them to get on with the necessary works, or is this Bill designed purely, as suggested by my colleague Deputy Sweetman, to overcome the difficulty of the introduction of Supplementary Estimates?

I want to leave out at this stage political comment on the Bill. I feel that I would like information from the Minister as to what work is going to be done, and in particular, I want to know what benefits are going to flow and what good is going to inure to my constituency by virtue of this grandiose styled new legislation called national development. Is national development within the concept of his Bill one limited to the political fruitfulness of the area in which the money is going to be disbursed, or is it one designed to give an honest impetus to various areas that are, in fact, trying to advance, whether it be under the aegis of an urban council or a local council? We see already out of the £5,000,000 that this Bill proposes using this year £3.6 million provided for. In it I defy the Minister to nominate any project enunciated by him for which the machinery of continuity of effort does not already exist. The various sub-sections of the Department of Agriculture are able to deal with all the projects that have been grouped under money granted to the Department of Agriculture whether it be for fishing ponds, examination of fish fertility or the quality of progeny of certain spawn. The machinery already exists within the Department for that particular type of activity. All that was necessary was money.

I say, as I said on the Second Reading of this Bill, that there was no necessity, so far as any of the money already voted was concerned, for this large window-dressing and flag-waving of a Bill styled National Development Fund Bill, when, in fact, all the various projects enunciated by the Minister, whether it be Dublin harbour develop-or Cork harbour development, all of which we are more than delighted to welcome in so far as they hold forth a reasonable prospect of this work being gone ahead with and a reasonable employment content for the people in those areas—these projects are welcome; but will the Minister say why it was necessary to bring in this type of legislation to enable him to grant that money?

Was it not possible for the Government, whether by way of advance from Contingency Fund or by way of Supplementary Estimate to the main Estimate, to make these moneys available for the work that they now propose to do? I do not want anybody to feel that I am in any way opposed to spending money at home here on worthwhile projects that are going to inure to the benefit of the Irish people, but I feel that we should do it in a practical way, and if the machinery was already available, as I contend it was, for every project in that £3.6 million already enunciated, why should we create the atmosphere of a National Development Bill that is not doing anything new? I had hoped that the National Development Bill did conceive some co-ordinated plan whereby projects for national development that have for some reason or another been held up or not favourably considered could have been financed not on the basis of an impetus to departmental work already in existence but on the basis of a side by side drive that was going to enable the increase in employment that we had hoped this Bill would immediately effect.

I want to know from the Minister, not in any acrimonious way, what hope, if any, projects that are shelved but which are known to Departments to be of value and of need to areas now have of reaching realisation? Can I go back, can my colleague Deputy O'Sullivan go back, or my colleague Deputy Murphy go back, to the people of West Cork and say: "You have prospects now of getting the recurring flooding of the Island River in the town of Skibbereen dealt with, prospects of getting the question of a new town hall, so long needed, in Clonakilty dealt with, you have prospects of getting various projects in relation to the provision of better hygienic and sanitation conditions for some of your older type of building schemes—you have hope of getting a Grant-in-Aid for these or a total grant to enable you to do it?" Or are we to go back with the story of the deception that the Bill, in fact, carries a title but only provides a way in which money can be poured in to supplement the amount of money that various Departments now find necessary to get in addition to what they got in the Estimates? I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some reasonable hope that these projects can look forward to substantial grants to enable them to be put into operation.

In dealing with the problem to-day of a rapid expansion of local works, whether it be works under the Local Authorities (Works) Act coming directly under the county council or whether it be works carried out under an urban authority, there is an immediate and urgent necessity to decelerate the movement out of rural Ireland and slow down the impetus of mass emigration. That is particularly true of West Cork where there is grave necessity at the present time for the creation of good, solid employment within the area. Local authorities have schemes of practical national value and importance. It is possible for the Minister under Section 4 of this Bill to exercise discretion. I want to know in what direction the Minister's mind is running. Is there any hope that he will exercise his discreation in the direction of making available in the rural areas, such as that which I represent, along the west coast of Ireland and in the various Gaeltacht districts, money to enable the local authorities in these areas to give employment that has some degree of continuity and reasonable prospects of enduring for a period? If that is not the case, then the clarion of trumpets that played in the National Development Bill will become very muted indeed in the realisation that this Bill might be better described as a new method of introducing Supplementary Estimates en masse.

I do not want the Minister to try to hoodwink the House and the public into believing that this Bill has any greater scope or any wider purpose than that shown by the £3.6 million allocated. I do not want a Bill such as this to go on the Statute Book unless the Minister can tell us here and now that it is his desire, as acting-Minister for Finance, to ensure that this money is disbursed throughout rural Ireland to enable projects of national development, shelved or turned down for lack of money, to be put into operation in order to create local employment markets thereby alleviating the unrest and unease which result in emigration from the rural areas to the cities or across the water.

The glorified title given to this Bill by whoever is responsible for baptising it has, I suggest seriously to the Minister, caused considerable misapprehension and misunderstanding amongst members of local authorities. I welcome the financial provisions in the Bill in so far as it is intended to spend money on the carrying out of worthwhile schemes within a reasonable period. I am surprised to learn from the Minister that portion of the money provided will be set aside to carry out schemes, presumably already sanctioned by the Department of Local Government—perhaps a long time ago —under the Local Authorities (Works) Act. I cannot understand why a direct Vote of £100,000, or more, should not have been taken before now instead of waiting for the introduction and passage of this measure.

Members of local authorities were engaged last week, and they will likewise be engaged this week, in considering the estimates in relation to the various local authorities throughout the country. They should have been made aware long before now as to the amount of money that will be available to local authorities for the carrying out of essential schemes. At the private preliminary meetings that have been held by county councils—and this is true of my area—there was considerable confusion and misunderstanding and some misapprehension in relation to the moneys that may be made available to local authorities under this Bill. As a result of that misunderstanding, to put it mildly, in one case a councillor got up and moved a reduction of £14,000 on a particular section of an estimate in the hope that the money that was going to be provided through the medium of an increased rate will now come from or through this National Development Fund. Nobody knows for certain what final amount will be given for the remainder of this financial year or for the duration of the next financial year. In fairness to the members of local authorities, to the county managers and the county engineers and to all those responsible for administering these schemes a circular should have been sent out to the local authorities in relation to this matter long before now.

In some cases meetings of local authorities, called for consideration of the estimates, have been twice deferred. That has certainly happened in one particular county where the local authority representatives are awaiting information that should have been given to them long before now. If it is true and the Minister knows what the facts are in relation to his own particular constituency, that essential road repair and maintenance work is urgently necessary and if the local authorities will not provide the necessary funds out of the rates, surely these are the things that should be considered by the Minister in allocating moneys from this National Development Fund. If that kind of situation is to be considered, a decision should be given within a reasonable time before the end of this financial year. If moneys will not be provided out of this fund for this urgent road repair and maintenance work, then the county managers and members of local authorities should be so informed to enable them to understand the position before the estimates for the coming financial year are finally sanctioned.

I suggest to the Minister that when decisions are being taken in relation to the allocation of grants from the National Development Fund, the conditions, if any, attaching to the allocation of such grants should be made known to the authorities concerned, including harbour authorities. I quite realise that it is impossible for a harbour authority like the Dublin Port and Docks Board to carry out in its entirety the scheme for which over £500,000 is now being provided. I am not interfering with any other area except my own, but there are hundreds of worthwhile schemes waiting to be carried out by the local authorities in my area. There are hundreds of men, particularly in towns and villages, waiting to get employment on that work and the sooner the Minister or the Departments concerned, particularly the Local Government Department, convey to the members of the local authorities or to the county managers and other local officials the amounts that can be allocated and the conditions attached to the allocation of them the sooner these works which are waiting to be done can be commenced and completed.

I should like to ask the Minister if he will say what particular Departments he is concerned with when proposals under this fund will be put up and if he can say in respect of the Departments which have submitted proposals already the total amount of the estimated cost of the proposals put to him by each of these Departments and the total amount that he has sanctioned. We can deal with the matter on the Bill itself, but I should like to ask the Minister in what particular form he proposes to announce in a periodic way the proposals which have been sanctioned and the amount of money involved. I should like to ask him, too, whether this fund will actually be a real fund with money set aside, or whether it will be a notional fund which he will fill from time to time for the paying out of money in respect of calls made on the fund.

As my colleague Deputy Davin has said, the local authorities are about striking the rate now. We had a meeting on Monday and we will have two more meetings. We asked our acting-manager if he had any idea of the amount of money which we would get from the National Development Fund and he said no, that he was only guessing. The result was that we made no progress at our estimates meeting on Monday. We are waiting and hoping that the Minister or the Department will give some idea to the local councils and to the county managers as to what this money may be used for. We were told by our managers that it cannot be used for the roads, that it can only be used for sewerage and water schemes. We are told that this money is around the corner, but the people who are signing on at the employment exchanges are waiting for that money to be provided so that they can get work. We sent up different schemes on several occasions to the Department for sanction without result. The last schemes we sent up were thrown aside and the engineers had to go out again and get a new set of schemes to go before the Department but there is no sanction for them yet.

The striking of the rate will depend on what money we are going to get. We were told that we were going to get money in abundance for schemes of work to give employment which is so badly needed. According to a question answered to-day, there are 700 unemployed in Wexford town, 300 in Enniscorthy and so many hundreds in Gorey, but these figures do not include the rural places where the unemployed sign on at the police barracks. This matter is a great torment to us as members of local authorities. People are clamouring every day of the week to get a job on the roads or to get something going to give them a job.

The Minister ought to make it clear in his reply when the money will be forthcoming and when we will receive it for some schemes which we have submitted to the Department. The sooner that is done the better so as to clarify the whole matter. The striking of the rate will be a very difficult matter this time owing to the extra expenditure under the Health Act and increases in the estimates already provided. We ought to know how we are to balance our budget and the amount of money we are to get. The sooner the Minister gives that information to the various local authorities the better it will be for everybody connected with a local authority.

The Deputies who have spoken have taken two different points of view as to how this fund should be used. Some of them obviously wanted it to be used as a rate relieving fund; that we should immediately tell all the local authorities that the rates are going to be reduced and that they can draw on the fund to provide the money for the works which the local authorities themselves should go ahead with in a county or in a town or city. There was no such intention when this National Development Fund was introduced. There was no intention that it should be used at a rate relieving fund or a fund in relief of rates like the money that we vote for the relief of agricultural rates. It was intended to be used to encourage the local authorities to spend more rapidly on development work where there was acute unemployment.

We pointed out that the necessity for dealing rapidly with a situation might arise with very little notice where normal development work of some sort had ceased, such as the coming to an end of a house-building programme or drainage or water schemes or something of that sort. The fund was intended to help local authorities to meet such a situation and to get ahead with other work of a national development kind as quickly as possible. From that point of view, this fund has been a success. Notwithstanding the fact that it has only been a couple of months in operation, unemployment on the whole has been reduced on an average by about 10 per cent.

No one believes that.

The figures show it.

They do not.

Deputy Davin will never believe anything if it does not suit him.

I have your figures.

The figures are there and, as against last year, the reduction in unemployment is about 10 per cent. I am not saying that it is all due to the National Development Fund but, with the general recovery in certain sections of our economy and the help of the National Development Fund, the trend of employment to worsen and to decrease has been reversed and instead employment is on the increase and we hope to keep it on the increase. While Deputy Davin and some other Deputies said that we are late in telling local authorities exactly how the additional grant will be provided and in what amount it will be provided, on the other hand, Deputy Sweetman and Deputy Collins objected to this procedure saying that we should have instead introduced Supplementary Estimates for all these matters.

The Deputies are perfectly well aware that, if that had been the procedure, instead of being able to give what information we have been able to give to local authorities, they would be waiting for another six months at least. We know how long it takes the Department of Local Government to get an Estimate through the House—two or three weeks. We know how long it takes the Department of Agriculture— sometimes several months. But we have been able by this means to put funds of £1,000,000 at the disposal of local authorities directly through the Road Fund and through the Local Authorities (Works) Act programme another £100,000; also, through the right to draw on the Special Employment Schemes Office to a further extent for the development of such things as waterworks, sewerage and all the projects upon which local authorities usually spend grants of that nature. In addition, we have seen here in the City of Dublin works that would never have been done in the normal way being proceeded with through grants from Local Government out of this Special Employment Scheme Fund and they have had the result of bringing relief quickly to a large number of men now employed on these schemes.

If they had not lain down in O'Connell Street they would not be employed.

If the Deputy had his way they would be lying in O'Connell Street until Tibb's Eve because then he would have a grievance.

They shook you up, anyhow.

Deputy O'Leary has already spoken.

Deputy Davin said there was one member of a local authority who moved to delete a sum of £14,000——

Yes, and I will give you his name if you want it.

——and wanted to find out if they would get it from the National Development Fund. As I pointed out, this fund is not a rate relief project.

It was a road works proposal.

It is not for the relief of rates for roads either. The Minister for Local Government took steps to increase the Road Fund. He took steps last year to increase it very greatly by increasing the vehicles duty and, in addition, he got an extra £1,000,000 out of the National Development Fund in order to go ahead with the repair and building of new roads. That, immediately, will not have any effect in reducing rates but perhaps ultimately it will make it easier for local authorities to keep roads in repair without increasing the rates.

This was to save an increase in the rates.

Deputy Sweetman talked about the fund being a camouflage and said there was nothing in it for ground limestone, for an increase in the use of ground limestone. Deputy Sweetman reads the papers as well as anybody else and knows perfectly well that since I was speaking on the Second Reading of the Bill the Government made an arrangement with the banks that the banks would give advances to all creditworthy merchants and lime merchants to extend their business. He knows also that the Government announced a fund from which the farmers who had not money of their own to invest in lime and fertilisers and who could not get credit in sufficient quantity from local merchants could have resort to the funds of the Department of Agriculture. That was in addition to what has been given for the development of agriculture already under the schemes that I listed here to-day.

It is not intended that this fund should be in substitution of all other funds that the State and local authorities make available for special development. The State is collecting quite a large amount of money in taxation and raising quite a lot of money by way of loan. The local authorities are doing the same thing. This year in addition to all the sums that were being collected and raised by means of taxes, rates and loans, the Government have made this extra sum available as an extra boost to development and useful employment. Even the list that I outlined here would have provided many months of work for the Dáil if we had to wait for the Dáil before giving the Ministers concerned approval to go ahead. It has shortened the usual Dáil procedure. I was quite ready to admit when bringing it in that it was unusual procedure to ask the Dáil to give this open credit of £5,000,000 without having the detailed proposals before the members, and I justified it on the grounds that we felt that there were a lot of useful projects available that would add to national production, and that where there was grave unemployment we should take active measures and unusual measures to put the unemployed to work in order to create means of further production.

And the Minister admits having found £3,500,000 worth of grave unemployment?

No one ever denied that unemployment was a grave problem in this country and worse than the lists at the labour exchanges appear, because in addition to the unemployed listed at the unemployment exchanges there are also the people who have left the country because they could not get work.

Owing to the Fianna Fáil Government.

Let us forget that. There were more people leaving in one year under the Coalition than in the three years of this Government. Forty thousand went in one year.

That is not true.

The greatest since before the Famine.

They were pilgrims during the Holy Year.

All the Coalition did about unemployment was to set up a commission to inquire into its causes as if they did not know already. We are trying to do something about the problem. We are not only trying to take people off the unemployment list registered at the exchanges, but we are also trying to provide opportunities to the greatest extent that our resources will permit and offering alternatives to emigration to the young people growing up. Some of the projects I have already announced will have some effect in achieving the results we desire.

Over and above this £5,000,000 and over and above what the Government and the local authorities are spending, there is the possibility of private individuals in this country using their own capital or using the capital they can raise in order to promote productive enterprises.

I was dragged in on the Second Reading of this Bill to point out that the farmers have a very big fund at their own disposal—of £70,000,000—on which they are getting only 1 per cent. or 1½ per cent. interest. I pointed out that in their own interests, the interests of their children and the community as a whole they should put some of that money to work in liming their lands if liming is necessary, adding fertilisers if fertilisers are necessary, buying machinery and generally improving the productive capacity of the soil.

I pointed out that it was the cheapest loan they could get. The cheapest credit was their own money on which they are getting 1½ per cent., and if they invested it in the proper way in their own soil they might get some hundreds per cent. benefit from it. I gave an instance where the expenditure of £2, all other factors being equal, made a difference of £100 in increasing production in one farm over six crop years. It is foolish for the farmers to keep that money in the bank. It is foolish for them to raise money, if they have got money in the bank, in order to apply to the soil the constituents it wants for maximum production.

The Minister is perfectly right, but they will not believe him.

One of the difficulties is this. Why I went into the matter so much the last time was that unfortunately the Deputy put in a Minister and kept him for three years who did not believe in it himself and who said so. He tried to convince the members of this House to the contrary when I was reading the facts, disclosed not for the first time by the Department of Agriculture, that an application of a couple of pounds worth of lime could have such results.

I hope the farmers will not only believe the truth of this matter but will act on the basis of the truth. It is in their interests that they should do so. It is foolish that they should be led off by Deputy Dillon or anybody else into leaving their money in the banks at 1½ per cent. when it could be invested in soil improvements in a manner which would give them several hundred per cent. in certain cases.

He did not tell them to put it in the bank.

Mr. O'Higgins

He did not.

He denied the fact that the expenditure of £2 worth of lime could, in any case, give an increase in production of £100 worth in six crop years.

A lot of the money they have in the banks came from his policy which was to leave them use it as they wished. He made it possible for them to spend it on ground limestone.

A lot of the money they had in the banks he used in order to buy maize from America for dollars. He put a debt of $40,000,000 on their shoulders and he used the dollars to buy maize to sell for sterling.

Does the Minister for Agriculture not buy maize?

Deputy Dillon encouraged them to go out of tillage to the extent of 500,000 acres from 1948 to 1951.

There was more tillage than the Minister proposed under the Marshall Aid programme.

Thank goodness it is in the reverse direction now. I hope that this fund will help the good work along and that to the extent it is drawn upon in the next three or four years it will help not only the people in the country but in the towns as well and put them on the road to increased prosperity.

Resolution put and agreed to.
Resolution reported and agreed to.
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