I do not think that there will be very much controversy this year about this Estimate. In the first place, there is an election coming on and, in the second place, there has been a change in the managerial system, so I think this Estimate will go through the House fairly easily. Those of us directly interested in public bodies are all satisfied with the progress of housing throughout the country. In most counties the quota of housing will be nearly reached in the next five or ten years; within that period we shall be able to say that we have solved the housing problem.
There is a section of people in this country who should be catered for by some means or another. The working classes and the very small farmers have been fairly well catered for by grants and through local authority housing schemes, but there are the small farmers with valuations from £20 to £30 for whom very little has been done in this regard. Many farmers of that type are not able to avail of the grants because of the necessity of getting a loan as well and I think we should try to build houses for those people and let them to them at reasonable rents because these people are not able to build their own houses.
As far as my county is concerned, we have built a large number of houses over a long period; the county is fairly well dotted with labourers' cottages. But I am afraid that we are not concentrating sufficiently on village schemes. The villages in this country are an eyesore. There has been no build-up in them during the past 12 years. I think the time has now come when we should concentrate on a plan for villages. I am satisfied that the local authorities are not very anxious to give particular attention to village planning, but I believe that when we are planning for our villages we should not build a standard house; we should have two or three types of house.
I believe also that our villages will never be built up unless there is a definite plan. We have in this country such people as private doctors, dentists, veterinary surgeons, nurses and single teachers who, when they start out in life, are rather poor and I think we should be able to cater for these classes by building a better-class house in the villages. When these people go out to earn their living initially they can find no place to live in villages and they veer into the bigger towns and the bigger towns are enlarging year in year out while the villages are staying as they were.
We should, accordingly, bring more attention to bear on our villages. By doing so, we will be ensuring a more reasonable amount of prosperity for them. Since the advent of modern transport, traffic rushes through the villages, with the result that the villages have been having a lean period for years. The danger is that leaner periods lie ahead and so I would ask the Minister to concentrate on getting the local authorities to build up the villages.
The countryside has been fairly well catered for in the past few years. We have enough labourers' cottages now even from the point of view of farmers looking for accommodation for their workers. We could also have a smaller type of house in our villages to cater for the old couples and even for the old pensioners, bachelors and maids, who are at the moment living miles away from the villages and churches. These people could be brought into the villages where they would be near churches and shops and the cottages in which they lived could accommodate agricultural workers.
There are scores of these people in my constituency living miserable, lonely lives. They could be catered for in reasonably small houses at rents they could pay. I believe that if they were moved into the villages they would be able to enjoy the facilities that would mean a happy ending to their lives. I suggest that we should concentrate more on the building of smaller houses for our old, sick and infirm who live in these country areas, and that along with that we should have a plan for the building of a reasonable class of house, something better than a labourer's cottage, for the type of people I mentioned, young people starting in life who cannot build a house of their own. The ordinary small man in a country area starting in life cannot afford to pay 35/- or £2 a week for a house.
I must complain about the manner in which the streets in many of our villages and towns are allowed to deteriorate. I know at least two such towns which are a disgrace. One is the town of Trim. You can hardly drive a motor-car through the streets of this town because there is a camber on it which is most dangerous. You would be almost thrown out of your car on trying to enter these streets. Another example is the town of Kilcock. Along the canal bank you will find a street which is a public disgrace, while we have the loveliest and smoothest of roads each side of the town. No effort is being made to give the people facilities in this direction and the county councils should look into this matter.
I have heard discussion here in connection with tinkers and the way they camp along the roads. I am not one of those who stand for eliminating this class of people without trying to do something for them first. I know that Northern Ireland passed some laws in recent years prohibiting these people from camping and the result was that they crossed the Border and came to Southern Ireland. Meath in particular has a very large number of these campers. They are now going into larger camps and you will often see 30 or 40 caravans and numbers of cars, motor cycles and bicycles along the road.
Being a young State, we ought to concentrate on building houses for some of these people and give them a certain time to avail of them. If they do not co-operate then, perhaps, the only thing left is to burn their vans. Right beside me there was a poor old couple living in an old caravan. The caravan went into disrepair and they were in a miserable plight. I put a proposal before the county council to give these people a chance of a cottage like anybody else. After a little controversy they were given a house and they have settled down and are as fine and decent a type of people as you could meet. Their sons are working locally and everybody is satisfied. It is quite right to give such people that chance. I would ask the Minister and the Government to make some effort to house some of these people and get them off the roads. Of course, they may not take very well to a house at first but if you provide them with a house at a reasonable rent they will not want to camp at the side of the road.
We all realise these tinkers leave a lot of dirt and rubbish along the road when they are decamping. There is very little the Guards can do with them—they seem to be outside the law—but I am satisfied the majority of them are decent poor creatures and are not as bad as they are made out to be. Complaints are often made that their horses will wander around people's land. If you meet them and talk to them in a reasonable way they will take the horses out and will not put them back again, but if you kick up a row they will eventually get the better of you. Another reason why we should try to accommodate these people in houses is that Ireland being held up as a great tourist centre, it does not look well when Americans and other tourists come here to find these caravans on the highways and the byways and all the dirt that the tinkers leave behind. I hope that something will be done in this connection before many more years pass by.
I have another complaint as far as my county is concerned. Every other county, whether in the North, West or South, seems to be able to get a fair amount of money from the National Development Fund but my county gets nothing either from the tourist point of view or through any of the other means of spending this money. I would ask that if we do put up a scheme for my county, and we will, that it will be considered favourably. On the eastern seaboard, from Mornington to Laytown, there is as fine a stretch of sea coast as there is anywhere else in the country. There is never a penny spent on it and I am satisfied we are fairly heavy ratepayers in that part of the country and are entitled to a fair share of that fund. There is a vast amount of development work that could be done at Laytown and Bettystown. The people there are entitled to that.
Right beside Laytown and Bettystown there is Butlin's Holiday Camp. There was nothing we could not do for those people although they came in as complete strangers. We constructed new roads for them and almost put carpets under them. We thought nothing of spending tens of thousands of pounds and rightly so, perhaps, in view of the return which resulted. However, the people born and bred in the areas along our sea coast as are much entitled to facilities as Butlin's Camp or any other camp. Therefore, I would ask that at least some of the National Development Fund should be allocated to County Meath. The strands at Laytown and Bettystown are very safe and healthy seaside resorts for family groups. They are perhaps the safest strands in Ireland for children and they should be developed properly.
Another grievance I have is in connection with our broken bridges. We suffered very severely in the recent floods and many of our bridges were broken and had to be completely replaced. It was a big problem and is a problem still because half of those bridges have not been erected yet. I understand we are now going to spend the best part of £30,000 under the Local Authorities (Works) Act to repair those bridges. I suppose it is only right we should do that but when we take that £30,000 and spend it we will find at the end of the year that the money we should have for the relief of our unemployment and the drainage of the streams into the rivers, will be gone.
I can understand money being spent locally on the repair of the smaller bridges but some of those bridges are on main thoroughfares and should be a national charge. I ask the Minister to see to it that if the repair of these bridges is not to be a national charge, we will at least get, at the end of the year, the grants we are entitled to to make up for the money that we have to spend on these bridges.
For a quite a number of years, I have complained strongly of the failure of Governments to remove the dangerous death trap, the Enfield Bridge, on the main Dublin-Galway road and I have said that I would hold the Minister responsible for any deaths that took place there. A death took place there not 18 months ago when a man ran into the bridge and was killed. The parleying going on and the delays taking place in trying to find agreement with people who will not agree are a disgrace. There is not a Minister or a Deputy who has travelled from the West but knows that that bridge is a menace to life and there is no excuse whatever for this Government or past Governments allowing the bridge to remain as it is. Whatever are the obstacles in the way, they should be removed and work on it should commence immediately.
There are accidents occuring there monthly and deaths taking place every year or two and we are the criminals so far as they are concerned, because if the bridge were repaired—and it could be repaired—these lives would be saved. Even if it were to mean the saving of only one life in 50 years, it would be worth it. People should be given a chance to drive along that road in safety, but this is the worst bridge on the journey from Dublin to Galway —there is maybe one other bad one— and yet no effort is being made with regard to it. I have raised the matter at our council meetings and in this House, but there is always something in the way. When we want other things done, however, we can cut all the red tape and get them done. I hope that in this case the red tape will be cut and that the bridge will be repaired in the coming year.
Deputy James Tully spoke of local government affairs, and, being a new Deputy, he traversed many of the old tracks which we covered when we were new Deputies. I am glad that he is standing for the county council in my county and I hope he is elected, because, having been elected, he will find that, when he has been harnessed to his task, he will sober down like many of us and become amendable in relation to many things which must be done and many responsibilities which he must shoulder and stand over. It is all right to shout from outside about things which are not being done, but I hope that when he has been harnessed to his task he will pull his weight as a member of a team and get many obstacles removed which now stand in the way of a better life for all of us.
With regard to the allocation of cottages, I am satisfied that the best day's work ever done was the taking out of the hands of county councils of the allocation of cottages. In the years gone by, when Fianna Fáil were in full control in my county, it was a rare thing for any person who was not of the proper colour to get a house. It was the late Doctor O'Higgins who brought in in our county a scheme of allocation of cottages which is working satisfactorily there to-day. No matter how houses are allocated, there will always be grievances because for every cottage available, there are six and seven applicants, but I would not give back to the county councils their powers in this respect. In present circumstances, the scheme is about the best that could be devised for the allocation of cottages. The perfect system cannot be devised, but there is a vast improvement since the new scheme was brought in.
The county manager has the final say in this matter but the local doctor starts things off. His report goes to the county medical officer whose report, in turn, passes to the county manager and he sends out a circular to each electoral area in which cottages are being allocated and asks the opinion of the four, five or six councillors for the area on the different applicants. The councillors give their confidential report and it is more or less on that basis that the houses are allocated. Deputy Tully said that he could not for the life of him see how certain people could get cottages while others were passed by, but, in fairness to the county manager, I must say that I always found that any proposal which came before me was marked 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 and there is no question that if we were asked to do it ourselves, we could do it any better. I would almost say that we should let well enough alone because I do not think it can be done better.
The matter of roads was a very controversial subject for some time, but now with the Minister's change over of grants to secondary and third rate roads, we find that roads are not such a vexed question. Every council tried to avail of all the grants, whether free or almost free, they could possibly get and no one could blame them. All these grants were given to the main roads, and, in the case of the main road from Navan to Dublin, a lot of repairs were carried out and a vast amount of money spent on it. The job done is perfect job, but it was a job that could have waited for years. They went into virgin soil and made new roads and the amount of material and money expended was beyond the capacity of the people. There was no earthly need of it for the next 20 years.
There is scarcely ever an accident at a turn on the road and everybody knows that it is not at turns that the accidents take place but on the straight stretches like those being made at present. Around Dunshaughlin village, there is powerful machinery and the manner in which the road is being put in is almost the same as paving the road with gold. I do not know whether the money comes from the National Development Fund or from local funds, but it is a public disgrace to do it. The engineering staffs we have there and the machinery in use are the best, with qualities of which we can be proud, but, at the same time, they are qualities which could be used in work on different roads.
Our secondary roads in many cases are very badly neglected, some of them being nine feet wide, when they should be 15 feet wide, and I hope the Minister will see to it that any money there is to spare for the repair of roads will be concentrated on the repair of secondary or county roads. The sooner the developments being carried out at present are completed the better and the sooner this passing through virgin land is cut out the better. The country is too small for this type of what I call Hitler roads. We do not want them. Let us cater for the ordinary people and let us meet their wishes as best we can.
We in County Meath have made a fair effort to meet the wishes of the people living in quagmires at the end of lanes and boreens, who are paying the same rates as people living on the trunk roads. We have embarked on a scheme which will perhaps land us in trouble and expense later on, because we raised a loan of £30,000 for the repair of these old boreens on which seven, eight and ten ratepayers live. We intend to repair them and to take them up as public roads and it is only just and fair that that should be so. It is no one's fault if he lives a quarter of a mile down a boreen which is only a mud track which he cannot get out of, unless he sells out completely, and we do not want people to sell out and leave the country areas. We want to concentrate them there because they are moving from these remote areas as fast as they can, and every effort of the Government and the county councils should be directed towards giving these people reasonable facilities to get to and from their homes.
When threshing time comes, most of these people cannot get a threshing mill in, and there is no hope of getting a combine in. These people have to drag their wheat, their oats and their barley out on to the main road or a secondary road and thresh it in someone else's field. That is a huge expense on these people. I suggest money could be well spent in that direction.
Things are going reasonably well but I appeal to the Minister to concentrate on the manner in which we have to spend the £30,000 under the Local Authorities (Works) Act on the repair of bridges. Dublin got a fair share of compensation for flooding. We in County Meath suffered a great deal from flooding. We had 22 bridges wiped out. Thousands of pounds' worth of damage was done all along the Boyne; we got nothing except a few pence from the Red Cross. I am not complaining about that, but the time has come when the Boyne will have to be properly drained. No repair has been done to these bridges so far. I do not know what is causing the delay, but main road bridges should not be left lying derelict for eight or ten months. The local councils say they are making all the speed they can; but the Department of Local Government has to sanction.
There should be no hold up in a case like that. People at the moment have to make a detour of five, six, or seven miles in order to reach a particular destination. There has been too long a time-lag in the repair of those bridges. This work should be paid for out of some fund so that we might be able to save the few pounds we get from October on to do minor drainage schemes in order to provide employment. If something is not done we will have a very big number of unemployed looking for work at the end of this year and we will not have the money to provide it for them. I hope the National Development Fund will come to our aid. We have never got a penny out of it. I hope we will get a fair share in the current year.