When I reported progress I was dealing with the problem of the improvement of main roads and I was saying that if the maximum amount of money was to be made available for county roads and even for the less important main roads—those other than arterial roads—every effort should be made to improve the output on the main roads. I was asking the Minister whether he thought standards devised in 1945 for the calculation of the widths, elevations and curvatures of the main roads were still adequate or whether, in the light of present circumstances and the present character of vehicular traffic, they need to be revised, and whether in fact they have been revised.
So far as I remember, the position was that a road where there were over 400 vehicles per hour at peak times of traffic, if the traffic were to be considered in the light of 20 years of progress in vehicular density, would have two carriage ways each 24 feet wide, and where there were over 100 and less than 400 vehicles per hour there should be a single carriage way and the width should be 24 feet. By establishing standards of that kind and anticipating an increase in the density of traffic a great deal of money could be saved both in reserving eventual land for widening roads and in actually constructing the road, and over a period of 20 years the taxpayer and motor user could be saved money. I know that those standards have been adopted. They were more or less sanctioned at the time they were devised and introduced into the Department, but what I am asking is whether the increase in the density of traffic has been noticed by the Minister and due allowance made therefore and whether he considers there should not be some further surveys made in that respect.
I have noticed that there are density indicators along some of the main roads and I would like to ask the Minister for some information as to how he is using them. I should also like to ask the Minister whether the scheme for providing higher training for assistant engineers on methods of road improvement and construction is being continued. It had been the practice, as I understand it, for notable lecturers on methods of road construction to come over here from other countries, to have lectures by our own experts and also to send our assistant engineers on courses where there are laboratory facilities and demonstration facilities, which in a small country like this are not always available. I would like to ask if that work is continuing and if the Minister can give some idea of the progress that is being made.
Having dealt with main roads, we come to the problem of the county roads and it would seem to me that no matter what five year plans have been adopted by various county councils, the traffic upon those county roads is growing at a pace that will make the maintenance cost of stone roads an appalling burden upon the ratepayers unless the work is done more quickly. It would take, it would seem, some 30 to 60 years to complete the surfacing of county roads in many counties. I wanted to ask the Minister whether he does not consider the present manner of financing the improvement of county roads is now inadequate and that there should be some change. I would like to ask him whether he considers that borrowing facilities of local authorities for the improvement of county roads, by means of which they can get additional moneys over and above those provided by the Road Fund and the ratepayers, are sufficient and whether there should be an extension in the amount that may be borrowed or a change in the method of borrowing.
I should like to point out in connection with county roads the urgent necessity of offering some allocation from the National Development Fund as soon as possible so that work can be planned in advance. It is my belief that many thousands of pounds are lost every year through road allocations being given too late. Both Governments are equally responsible for that. It would seem to me that, where roads have to be planned, designed and engineered, the materials purchased, the work laid out, and have that conform to financial practice which may relate to other aspects of Government which are totally unsuited to long-term road planning, some other principle should be adopted.
It would seem to me to be quite within the capacity of the Department of Local Government to tell local authorities that the allocation, for example, from the National Development Fund, if it is coming—and we have not been given any assurance that it is coming—is likely to continue for a period of over 12 months, and other things being equal, that there would be a general continuance of the principle of Road Fund grants for county roads. In that way it would be possible to do more long-term planning.
I understand from the Minister that he is conducting an examination into the standards to be adopted for county roads. I am glad that that is the case because, from reading reports of various county council meetings not only in my own constituency but in others, it would appear that the cost of improving county roads varies considerably from one county to another, not only because of local conditions but because of the actual systems the county engineers in their own right seem to be adopting. That some independent examination of standards should be adopted for the improvement of county roads seems to me to be eminently desirable, and I have also ascertained that the use of machinery for the improvement of county roads varies a great deal, and machines, for example, possibly suitable for roads of that particular width have been found suitable in some counties but have not yet been adopted in others.
I would like now to deal with the problem of non-public roads. Here again it would seem to me that the conditions which we have seen in the community during the past five years are different from those in any previous period and that if ever there was a case for reassessing the importance and the value of the non-public roads it is now.
I understand there are 40,000 miles of public roads and that the Department have estimated that the mileage of non-public roads can amount to 15,000 miles. Various figures have been given in the past 20 years but I do not think the estimate has ever been lower than 15,000 miles. These non-public roads are used by a very large number of persons and the only methods for repairing them were methods devised by the previous Government, at a much earlier stage—that is, grants in the winter time in areas where there are a sufficient number of unemployed to warrant the making of a grant and grants under the rural improvements scheme in which the users of the road make some contribution towards its repair. The total amount of money available under these two heads is, I understand, in the neighbourhood of £500,000 and bears no relation to the enormous mileage of roads and is utterly inadequate to deal with the repair of roads which are now being used for motor car traffic, for tractors and for lorries on a scale certainly never envisaged before the war as inevitable. The use of these roads by motor traffic has altered the importance of the problem. It has made the problem more urgent for consideration.
I would say that whatever Minister is in office—and I speak here without any political bias because no Government have solved this problem yet— must face reality in regard to these roads. Everyone who comes from a rural area is aware of the fact that, whereas some of these roads are being kept in proper repair by one means or another, a great number are falling into a shocking condition and, as a result, the value of the property and the value of the farm residences at the ends of cul-de-sac roads has diminished. There is quite a familiar pattern to be seen in relation to farm properties in the sense that you will find a farm owner buying a farm at the end of a cul-de-sac road which has not been properly repaired and using it as a secondary farm or you will find people living in houses at the ends of such roads with nobody to inherit the property because no one is willing to live down the road. The fact that there is a large mileage of these roads has, I think, made every Minister for Local Government shy of undertaking any major repairs by reason of the appalling financial responsibility involved. The method adopted of leaving it to the voluntary act of the users, in connection with the rural improvements scheme, or of using the yard-stick of unemployment in the area has been felt, up to now, to be the only thing that can be done.
I am glad to say that the rural improvements scheme has expanded in the course of the past few years. More money is being made available and more money is being spent. I think, equally, that if the cost of materials and of labour is examined the actual volume of work that is performed is not what it should be if this problem is to be solved. The reason is known to every member of the House—the difficulty of securing consent to the contribution. There will always be the people who live only a short distance down the cul-de-sac road and who do not want to pay their share for its repair. There are also the people who are content with the road even in its shocking condition. Then there are the people who are either unwilling or unable to purchase cars or tractors and for whom the road is adequate for the ordinary cart which they use to bring them to Mass and to the nearest town. There are all these variations in the attitude of mind of such people and, as a result, there are thousands of miles of non-public roads in this country which are not likely to be repaired under either of the two schemes now in operation for that purpose.
Any Minister can adopt one of two attitudes in regard to this matter. He can continue the present system in which there are these two types of grants for roads. If he does so, he will be aware that, simply by the process of time, the social pattern of life in rural Ireland will alter. People will not be content to live down stone-bound roads with an enormous amount of water accumulation in winter. Gradually the properties will deteriorate in value and the residences will cease to be used. That is what you might call a laissez-faire attitude. On the other hand, he can make up his mind that communications are important, that he wishes to preserve the tradition of people living throughout the land and not necessarily living along the main roads and he can decide to spend a capital sum over, say, ten years and carry out as much of the job as he can of repairing these roads and make grants on a scale that they have hitherto not been available. The only way to do that would be to survey a sample of non-public roads in different counties, to estimate what the cost would be and what the maintenance would be, to establish some kind of a yard-stick in regard to the number of users per mile of road and then say for every class of road in every county where there are over and above a minimum number of users that a capital grant will be made available for the putting into repair of these roads. In that connection, the Minister would have to examine the standards adopted by county councils when they take over these roads—which they do on rare occasions.
As the Minister well knows from the figures available to him, the rate of taking over these roads has been very slow and, under a recent Act which I think is in itself defective, county councils have not been able to take over cul-de-sac roads. I understand that the terms of the Act make it extremely difficult for them to do so and that the county councils are unwilling to undertake that responsibility. The Minister can make a survey and estimate the cost. He can find out what the maintenance would be. I believe it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for county councils to strike the rate for the maintainance of these boreens, these non-public roads, when they have been put into order. The Minister might have to consider making a special sum available from the Central Fund for the maintenance of the non-public roads and that he should recoup the county councils for the maintenance of these roads or make some provision or other so that county councils will not feel that their rates will be burdened by the sudden repairing of a huge mileage of roads which I think should have been repaired and put in order from the very foundation of this State.
Nobody can blame successive Governments for not thinking of everything, but I think successive Governments have failed to face up to this issue. I am quite willing to recognise that the Minister has a difficult problem in this connection. He could take the very hard-boiled point of view, with a certain amount of justification, that you cannot have more than a certain maximum mileage of roads in any county in a condition to bear motor car and tractor traffic and that, if that is the case, then, by a process of the survival of the fittest, the social pattern of the countryside will change until eventually everybody will live on a road in good condition and there must be some migration.
I will not accuse the Minister of being inhuman if he takes that point of view because I realise the nature of the problem. So long as he is responsible for his office, which we hope naturally will not be long, I would like the Minister to make up his mind on the problem, make the necessary survey, make the necessary estimates, and come to the House where, I am perfectly certain, he will receive a sympathetic hearing from the people on this side of the House, because although we did initiate this, whatever it is, £500,000 or £750,000 a year grant for minor relief and rural improvement schemes, we have to admit that we ourselves have not been able to solve the problem. As I have said, the Minister has the alternative of accepting a permanent maximum figure in any county for the provision of up-to-date standards of comfort on these roads or of making a great effort to put as many of these roads into repair as can be done in the next ten years, using special grants for that purpose.
The Minister might also consider whether local authorities should not be allowed to contribute to minor rural improvement schemes if they so desire; in other words, that if a local authority feels it has a particularly serious boreen problem within its territory, some grant should be allowed, not only for rural improvement schemes in the case of link roads when they are being taken over by the local authority but in the case of cul-de-sac roads that are not likely to be taken over by the county council under its present powers. That is another alternative and that, again, involves a possible commitment for the local authorities, but I know of several local authorities which would like to have that power and they would like the Minister to consider giving them that power.
I think I have already dealt with the necessity of planning for reconstruction of roads on a long-term basis. I would like to ask the Minister whether he could confirm that he has definitely changed the rule whereby grants for the improvement of main roads must be wholly expended by the end of the financial year. That seemed to me to be an absolutely lunatic procedure, that because a county council received a supplementary grant for main road improvement or grants in general, all the money had to be spent by the end of the financial year, which makes planning impossible and which makes the doing of good work virtually impossible. I should like to ask the Minister whether he has amended that regulation with a view to getting the maximum amount of work done with reasonable efficiency on the basis of long-term planning and having regard to changing weather conditions.
The Minister made it quite clear that the housing problem was ending in a number of counties and I want to ask him whether he is making any long-term plan to provide other much-needed amenities in local areas having regard to the fact that the burden upon the capital expenditure should become less as time goes on.
The Minister spoke of the difficulty of establishing regional water schemes because of the scattered character of the dwellings in the countryside. I would like to ask the Minister whether he has really examined that problem. An inter-departmental committee was established by the Fianna Fáil Government to investigate and act upon the problem of regional water supplies. Although many of the households of rural communities are scattered, I would like to ask him whether he has impressed upon county councils the desirability of instituting regional schemes where it is technically possible or whether he himself has rather a pessimistic view of the general idea and is content to have things proceed without any direct pressure from himself or from the officers of his Department.
I suggest to the Minister that the present grants for the installation of a private sewerage and water supply for a house or a dwelling which is not connected with the public supply seem to be inadequate in view of the number of persons who apply for these grants. In 1932 there was a tremendous housing problem to be solved and we on this side of the House can, I think, take credit for one in every four dwellings which got these facilities. There is another tremendous problem to bring about a great increase in the number of private sewerage and water schemes for residences throughout the country. Could the Minister tell us if he would consider, for example, some kind of arrangement whereby there would be special contractors for that purpose who would get to know the problem and whether by that means he could reduce the cost?
In 1947 there was a Traffic Amendment Bill on the stocks and as there have been two Governments in office since then I can speak on the matter again on this occasion without political bias. I remember as Parliamentary Secretary having preliminary conferences with the traffic section of the Garda Síochána and with representatives of the Department of Industry and Commerce and, naturally, with officers of the Department of Local Government in preparing an amendment to the Traffic Act of 1933 to bring up to date the whole code of traffic law in force.
Has the Minister had time—he should have had time—to examine how far that Bill has progressed and how many more years it will take before it sees the light of day? Everybody will agree that the maximum fines for traffic offences are utterly inadequate, having regard to the present value of money. There are many other defects in the legislation so far as I know. The red tape associated with the procedure of the Garda Síochána in order to bring a person to court is quite excessive and has been long abolished in democracies where the respect for the individual is no less than it is here.
All those matters were being considered under that Traffic Bill. There were all sorts of very important questions to be considered, where perhaps a Minister with some moral courage could make changes which in the long run would prove beneficial.
Out of about 80,000 traffic offences in the year, I think that half of them are due to unlighted bicycles and it is up to the Minister to decide whether he will continue the system whereby Guards apparently spend 50 per cent. of their time in dealing with this kind of offence, when everybody knows that the law can hardly be enforced; it certainly is not being enforced in that regard, not even on main arterial roads. I am giving that as only one example of the urgent necessity of revising the whole of the traffic leglislation.
I understood the Minister to say that under the present Local Government Bill which is now being put into operation he will be able to make uniform the use of road signs. I would like to know if that also applies to the use of illuminated discs on the road known as cats' eyes, because along the main roads of the country at the present time the system of cats' eyes varies from county to county and from area to area. Nothing would be more useful to motorists at night than to know that the principles which are used for the establishment of cats' eyes on curves or on straight roads are the same in one county as in another. It would involve no great expenditure and be of maximum value to motorists.
I could deal with many other matters in connection with motoring in general but I think the Minister can best deal with the question by letting us know whether he intends to proceed with the Traffic (Amendment) Bill and whether he has considered the various problems that have been raised by the road safety organisations throughout the country and by all sorts of people in that connection.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Agriculture is touring the country during the local elections and his plan is to arrive in a certain area and meet another Fine Gael supporter and then to announce with dramatic effect that the Government is giving over £1,000,000 for sanitary services in the coming year. Of course he does not add that the last Government gave £1,000,000 or somewhere in its neighbourhood for three successive years and that the grant for sanitary services is only a normal renewal of grant made available by Fianna Fáil. I just wanted to make it clear to the younger people in this country that the sanitary services of the Department are not a novelty, something new, and that this talk about increased grants for roads and sanitary services is simply a method of deceiving the electorate as to who is responsible.
Lastly, I should like to say a few words about the library services. I heard the Minister say that the library surveyors have made a report to him of ways and means of improving the library services and I should like to express the hope that the Minister would implement as many of their proposals as he considers advisable. We know that there is a desperate need for improvement in many counties while others, at the same time, are highly commendable and as good as can be found anywhere. I should like to direct particular attention to the fact that there is a need in the library service for the provision of books for children in a great many counties and I should like to think that a great deal more was being done to provide books for children than is the case at the present moment.
In a number of countries abroad the library service is associated with the showing of films on various aspects of national and historic development and I would like to suggest to the Minister that he should ask some authority within the State to consider the greater use of films for the education of our young people. In Denmark there is a very small charge or tax for cinema entrance and about £135,000 is collected each year and there are four independent Danish film units producing films of educational value on Danish history, Danish art, Danish agriculture, on the struggle for Danish independence and on everything that could be regarded as highly desirable for the education of young children in this country.
These films in Denmark are shown as part of the library service by the local librarians in local halls. They are organised in conjunction with local associations which would correspond with Muintir na Tíre and other such organisations in this country. All of these associations make an effort to bring along so many children. It seems to me that it is highly desirable to expand the curricula of the elementary schools. Such an expansion would involve considerable difficulties and I think an expansion of the library services along the line I have mentioned would help out in that respect. I think that the facilities provided in Denmark deserve consideration by the present Minister.
