Deputy Briscoe gave notice that, on the motion for the Adjournment, he would raise the subject matter of a series of questions which, summarised, requested that loans negotiated or applied for before March, 1956, should be charged for at the old rate of interest.
Adjournment Debate. - Small Dwellings Acquisition Acts—Rates of Interest.
On the Order Paper to-day there appeared six questions dealing generally with the question of small dwellings acquisition loans and rates of interest. The Minister chose to bulk the six questions and to answer them together. I want to state that Question No. 44, at least, should have been answered separately because it dealt specifically with a question different from the matters raised in the other five. I shall come to that later.
The Minister, in answering the question to-day, adopted a very lighthearted approach to the matter, showing complete disregard for the dislocation of employment and complete disregard for the fortunes of those who are engaged in the building industry. He proceeded to use an argument which was entirely false but I do not propose to deal with his reply at length. I shall take only specific items. The Minister stated:—
"I am aware that the facts are as stated by the Deputy but the circumstances are entirely different because at that particular time there was no regulation governing the rate of interest which would be payable by the borrower."
This was in reference to the statement pointing out to the Minister that his predecessor, under very similar circumstances, had agreed to give borrowers who had borrowed up to a certain date, in good faith, the loan of the money required at a rate of interest less than that ruling as a result of the increase in the rate of interest.
The Minister says that the circumstances were entirely different. Why? He says that the Minister of the day, in 1952, took care—remember the expression, "took care"—that all future advances would be governed by the rate of interest at which money was borrowed from the Local Loans Fund and that for that purpose the circular of 1952 was issued. The Minister, apparently, replied to these questions in complete ignorance of the facts or, if it was not in complete ignorance, in complete distortion, because his predecessor issued the circular in October, 1952, and actually gave the remission in the increased rate of interest in November, 1952.
The Minister says later in his reply:—
"The position of borrowers now is exactly as it was in October, 1952. In the circumstances and in view of the letter issued by my predecessor in 1952, I see no reason for giving any further concession."
The Minister, not wishing to meet in equity and justice a situation which had arisen before and which was met with generosity by the Government of the day, attempts to put the blame for his not wishing to do so now on the shoulders of his predecessor although his predecessor made that gesture and gave that concession after the issue of the particular circular. I hope the Minister accepts that as being in accordance with the facts and realises that it does not release him from his obligation to meet the present situation.
In regard to Question No. 44, the specific point was at what rate of interest Dublin Corporation will get the promised £1,000,000 from the Local Loans Fund. It was promised and at the time it was promised it was understood that the rate would be 5¼ per cent. I have tried to find out what the rate will be. The Minister says to-day that it will be the rate ruling at the time of the giving of the loan. This £1,000,000, of which Dublin Corporation have not yet received one shilling, is promised in two moieties. The first moiety was promised for mid-April.
As requested by the Deputy.
I am coming to that and I shall deal with that. The Minister will not get away at this stage with misrepresentation of the situation. He will carry his own responsibilities on his own shoulders. He will not shift it on to innocent people by a certain amount of what I may call play on words.
They look it too, do they not, if the Deputy is their spokesman?
I am the spokesman for myself.
Good.
I give the facts, as I see them and as I know them to be, and I challenge the Minister to prove that what I am saying is in any sense wrong. We were promised this £1,000,000 in two moieties, £500,000 in mid-April and the other £500,000 in mid-August. It was at my suggestion, at a deputation to the Minister for Local Government and the Minister for Finance that, in order to bridge an immediate serious crisis, £1,000,000 should be made available until the availability of capital would be ascertained and until the Minister for Finance might have completed what he called his survey of the situation. Does the Minister deny that that particular proposal was made by me?
No.
Very well. I made the proposal at this conference to get over an immediate crisis so that, if £1,000,000 were made available, we might be able and would be able, in connection with small dwellings, to carry on until about October.
What happened? The other day I signed with the Lord Mayor of the City of Dublin a mortgage between the Dublin Corporation and the Board of Works. In that mortgage, there is no fixed rate of interest stated. It is a mortgage which says that the rate of interest is to be that ruling when the money is given.
Is the Minister prepared to guarantee that the rate of interest in August will be the same as it is to-day, or is he prepared to say with regard to the applications with which the £1,000,000 is mainly to deal, that it is for applications approved since last November, entered into by people as contracts, in good faith, at the then ruling rate of interest? I have asked him that question and there was no answer to it. I ask him now to tell us, when replying, will the rate of interest for that £1,000,000 be 5¼ per cent. and no more, so that we can conduct our business in the corporation in a businesslike way. That money is promised to us now as from 1st May. I hope we will get it so that we can proceed to carry out our contractual obligations with our applicants and our contractors who build these houses.
I have perused the Dáil Debate in connection with matters of this nature raised when we were in Government and when the different Parties of the Coalition made up the Opposition. I shall not read the lengthy debate arising from questions and answers during questions and an adjournment debate, but I should like to put the matter on record. The Official Report of the Dáil Debates, Volume 134, is full of protestations against the Fianna Fáil Government for not maintaining the rate of interest for those who had applied for loans at a certain date and who found later that they had to pay higher rates of interest than those obtaining when they made their contracts.
I should like to put on record from that volume the following passages: columns 275 to 276, columns 395 to 407, columns 676 to 679, columns 901 to 907 and columns 1291 to 1295. I put those on record and I challenge the Coalition groups to say whether there are any possible grounds for the Minister and the Government refusing to accede to the representations made that people who made applications up to a certain date and whose applications had been approved should be entitled as in the past, where the precedent had been established, to get their loans at the rates of interest ruling at the time they made their contracts.
The volume is full of these protestations. The Tánaiste, Deputy Norton, was most vocal. The late Deputy Byrne, Deputy Peadar Doyle, Deputy Seán Collins—none of them is here at the moment—Deputy James Larkin, Deputy Seán Dunne, Deputy Cowan, Deputy Rooney, who has just run out, General Mulcahy, Deputy Sweetman, Deputy Cosgrave, the present Minister for External Affairs, were the people who were in full sound as if they were out hunting the fox. They belled us and bellowed us into doing justice to these poor people.
I want to refer to a letter which appears in the evening papers to-night. I want to make——
I want to know where this is going to lead to.
I will put it this way——
The Adjournment motion is merely an extension of the question. Through the Adjournment motion, I have given the Deputy an opportunity of extending his case and the Minister an opportunity of extending his reply. I cannot allow the Deputy to quote from papers.
Very well; I will not quote from the papers. There was a meeting in the O'Connell Hall at the time this battle was on and the Attorney-General, Deputy McGilligan, then said——
I cannot allow this to go on. I am concerned only with the Deputy's question and the Minister's reply. This is putting a general blanket on the question. This is an extension of a question put to the Minister in order to allow the Deputy to extend his case and the Minister to extend his reply. The Deputy must confine himself to that.
It was indicated in the papers that the Attorney-General and Deputy MacBride had intimated——
The Deputy is going outside the scope of this debate. I must ask the Deputy to resume his seat, if he tries to evade the Chair in this way.
I have asked the Minister, first of all, in view of the precedent established in a similar case in the past, to meet the present situation. The Minister, in reply to the question this afternoon, adopted the same lines as he adopted this morning when he said that Dublin Corporation asked for only £1,000,000 and that, therefore, they were blameworthy, knowing full well the Dublin Corporation asked for £2,000,000 for Small Dwellings Acquisition Act loans. In that connection, I want to ask the Minister to tell me and the House with regard to this £1,000,000, which is a tide-over sum and which will not allow any further applications to be considered for small dwelling loans after the end of May, if he is going to give this money at the rate of interest expected by the corporation at the time their representative deputation met himself and the Minister for Finance.
I want the Minister to stand up to the situation and not to let a tragedy develop in an area where there were 15,000 operatives directly and indirectly engaged in housing. Four thousand have already gone to England and 5,000 are due to go in a few weeks, if this crisis is not resolved. At the moment, there is only 15 per cent. of normal employment in this business and house builders are threatened with complete extinction, if this problem is not solved. This matter relates, first of all, to the rates of interest available on old applications and it relates further to the availability of money to continue the schemes. I shall not rob the Minister of his full time for replying. I want him to be specific, not evasive, and to tell us what is happening in a straightforward fashion. He must take the responsibility on his own shoulders in connection with this matter of Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act loans.
If there is one thing I cannot stand more than another, it is crocodile tears and I accuse Deputy Briscoe now of shedding crocodile tears. Let me give the history of Dublin Corporation and the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Acts. In the month of November last, Dublin Corporation were given the opportunity of floating a loan for £6,000,000. They knew the rate of interest and the investing public knew the rate of interest at which the loan would be subscribed.
Did that include money for small dwellings loans?
Wait a minute. I now publicly accuse Deputy Briscoe of sabotaging that loan. That loan was under-subscribed. The Government and the banks had to subscribe to and underwrite that loan in full and the money which could have been made available to-day by the Government to the corporation had to be made available then to underwrite that loan fully. I did not know then that Deputy Briscoe was capable of sabotage.
What about the Irish Press?
Will the Deputy go back to the children he has to teach and leave the high finance to the financiers of the Fianna Fáil Party? I now accuse Deputy Briscoe of sabotaging that loan. I made an appeal to Deputy Briscoe and to the Dublin Corporation members and said I would do everything possible to see the loan was a success. The same appeal was made to the Cork Corporation, and I now want to pay a public tribute to Deputy McGrath, the Lord Mayor of Cork, who accepted my views at that time. As a result of the joint efforts of Deputy McGrath, the Cork Corporation and myself, the Cork loan was fully subscribed. I was not aware of what Deputy Briscoe had done until last Saturday night when he addressed a meeting in Jury's Hotel at which he said it was not the duty of the corporation to provide funds under the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act, but to administer them, knowing full well that whatever funds were available to the Dublin Corporation should have come out of that loan.
Surely such funds were not included in that loan.
I beg your pardon. The Deputy knows they were. I say now, and he confirmed it on Saturday night, that he sabotaged that loan. As a result of the sabotage of the loan, the Government had to come to the rescue of Dublin Corporation and they had to find the finance to underwrite the loan. Not only did they do that, but, at the request of Deputy Briscoe and his friends, they gave a grant of £1,000,000——
They have not got it yet.
They will get it and on the dates asked for by the Deputy in the month of May——
Mid-April and mid-August.
Would the Deputy please control himself? The Deputy is not able to take it.
Order!
We offered you £500,000 as a first instalment on the date you requested and we told you that you would get the remainder in the month of August on the very date you asked for—£500,000 on each occasion, making a total of £1,000,000.
At what rate of interest?
I will come to that afterwards. I am satisfied that not only did we do more than we are entitled to do, but if the Deputy had played his part in seeing that the loan was successful, we would have had available for the corporation the money to underwrite the loan. When only last week Dublin Corporation came back to the Government, no greater critic could be found of what the Government were doing than Deputy Briscoe. At the very time the Government were making available £3,000,000 for housing purposes in the City of Dublin, the Deputy, as a member of the housing committee was criticising——
I am not a member of the housing committee. Your facts are all wrong.
The finance committee.
You are wrongly briefed.
I am not briefed at all; I am speaking from practical experience of what I know. I now say that Deputy Briscoe has done more damage to the housing problem in Dublin, done more damage to depress the unfortunate applicants for grants, and has done more damage in endeavouring to create unemployment amongst the labouring classes in the City of Dublin than any other man I know——
What is the rate of interest?
Will the Deputy keep quiet, please? I never interrupted the Deputy once.
The Minister was not able.
This Government has done more than any Fianna Fáil Government ever did. They have given Dublin Corporation access to the Local Loans Fund for the very first time, and I say now—and I say publicly—that, as far as housing is concerned, Dublin Corporation is no worse off to-day than it was this day 12 months.
With regard to what Deputy Briscoe said about interest, I have already announced the Government's policy on this matter, in reply to the parliamentary questions put down by Deputies to-day. I also gave at considerable length the facts as to the difference between the circumstances obtaining in 1952 which governed the decision then taken and the circumstances now obtaining. Deputy Briscoe now contends that, subsequent to the issue of the circular letter of October, 1952, Deputy Smith, as Minister, created a precedent contrary to the terms of that circular by giving the concessions announced in the Dáil in November, 1952. That is not so——
It is so.
Will the Deputy please keep quiet? The issue of the circular was an essential preliminary to the grant of the concessions. It was intended to ensure that local authorities would, as from the date of the circular and forever afterwards, make prospective borrowers aware that the terms on which they would get their loans would be governed by the rate of interest obtaining at the time that the instalment, from which their loan was obtained, was issued from the Local Loans Fund. The circular was also intended to limit the scope of application of the contemplated concessions to applicants for whom there might have been commitments before the rate of interest was increased. The then Minister thus took steps to ensure that no moral obligation would, from 1952 on, rest on the local authority or the State to incur loss to the rates or the taxes by cushioning the adverse effects of any increases in interest rates which might occur from time to time.
Deputy Briscoe makes the point that I did not answer Question No. 44 in full. I said that the rate of interest on loans to local authorities, including Dublin Corporation, would be the rate prevailing at the time of the issue of the appropriate instalment from the Local Loans Fund. As regards the rate at which the loans will be made available to the applicants, this is a matter for the local authority. They are empowered to charge 1/2 per cent. in excess of the rate at which they borrow. If the housing authority decide to make loans available to any class of applicants at rates lower than they are empowered to charge, such a decision may be open to criticism from the ratepayers, but it would not require my sanction. What will Deputy Briscoe say if the rate of interest in August next is lower than it is now? Will the Deputy advise Dublin Corporation to refuse to accept the lower rate?
It could be higher.
Supposing it were lower? Would the Deputy refuse it and advise the corporation to accept a lower rate? Deputy Briscoe's colleague, Deputy Smith, was the man responsible for that circular. I am merely acting on the circular. I am now saying that, if Deputy Briscoe has any interest in the poor people of Dublin and the people who are entitled to these loans, he will, for goodness' sake, in the interest of the City of Dublin, remain silent from now on——
For goodness' sake! I am going to fight for the people interested.
He is endeavouring to create a crisis that never existed.
Do not be talking nonsense.
When I am trying to do something for the City of Dublin by advancing £4,000,000 from the Government, something no Government has ever done before——
We have always done it.
Will the Deputy please keep quiet?
Order!
When I have succeeded in getting the Government to advance £4,000,000 to Dublin Corporation and when I have succeeded in entering into what appear to be successful negotiations with the building societies and insurance companies, Deputy Briscoe again steps in and tries to sabotage that.
How did I sabotage that? Did the Minister call the conference yet?
The conference is in session for weeks back.
It is not. The Minister never called the conference.
Order!
Is it in order for the Minister to state deliberate mistruths?
I can assure the Deputy that, when he knows what is going on, he will be less likely to call me a liar.
I did not say that.
The Deputy implied it. I can assure the Deputy—and I know it hurts—that that conference is going on and that the negotiations are being very successful. That hurts the Deputy, does it not?
I will be very pleased, if it is successful.
The Deputy will be very pleased! The Deputy now accuses me of not having called one meeting of the conference——
Let the Minister call the conference he promised to call— the conference between members of the corporation and these concerns.
I said there would be preliminary negotiations between the officials first.
That is different.
I am not going to give the Deputy an opportunity of sabotaging it at this stage. I hope I have made it clear that I am merely acting on the circular letter issued by my predecessor, Deputy Smith. I stand over it and I am making no apology for it at this stage. You cannot lend money at less than the rate at which you can borrow it. I think that is very reasonable. It is good finance. The Deputy, of course, as he put it to the Minister for Health to-day, is concerned with the spending of money. I am concerned with trying to save the ratepayers of the City of Dublin——
Stop talking rubbish.
The Deputy to-day put a question to the Minister for Health which I answered on behalf of the Minister. I am not going to put a plaster on the back of the ratepayers of Dublin. I am here to protect them against the Deputy and his colleagues.
There are a few minutes left yet. Small dwellings do not cost the ratepayers a halfpenny. They save them money.
The Dáil adjourned at 11 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Thursday, 26th April, 1956.