I move:—
That a sum not exceeding £5,604,260 be granted to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1959, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Office of the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs (45 & 46 Vict., c.74; 8 Edw. 7, c.48; 1 & 2 Geo. 5, c.26; the Telegraph Acts, 1863 to 1953; No. 45 of 1926; No. 14 of 1940 (secs. 30 and 31); No. 14 of 1942 (sec. 23); No. 17 of 1951; etc.), and of certain other Services administered by that Office.
The net Estimate for 1958-59 amounts to £8,840,260, being a gross total of £9,367,798, less Appropriations-in-Aid of £527,538. It does not, of course, include provision for the recently announced increase in Civil Service remuneration. The net provision represents an increase of £176,760 on that for 1957-58. As, however, the justification for the Department's existence is the services it sells to the public, expenditure is meaningless except when considered in conjunction with its revenue. Actually, the yield of postal, telegraph and telephone revenue payable to the Exchequer is estimated at £8,350,000 for 1958-59, which is an increase of £350,000 on the 1957-58 figure —an increase appreciably bigger than the increase in expenditure originally estimated for. I may also say that, on a commercial account basis, the Department has made a small profit in 1956-57 for the first time for many years—and expects to make a bigger, though still a modest one, in 1957-58.
However, I will return to the financial position later on.
Looking through the sub-heads of the Estimate, the more substantial variations—those of £10,000 or more— occur on the following:—
Sub-head A (3)—Salaries, Wages and Allowances (Provincial Offices). The decrease of £29,000 arises mainly from staff savings secured by reorganisation of the telegraph service and by revised postal arrangements.
Sub-head E (5)—Conveyance of Mails by Air. The increase of £30,000 is due to increased traffic, which, of course, is reflected in increased postal revenue.
Sub-head G (1)—Stores. The increase of £26,000 is due to a number of items which include the greater incidence of motor van replacements, increased price of petrol, smaller user for telephone development and the fact that reserve stocks are not available for drawing upon as was done last year.
Sub-head G (2)—Uniform Clothing. The increase here is £20,000. In 1957-58, reserve stocks were drawn on for part of the year's requirements; this cannot be done this year.
Sub-head I (1)—Salaries, Wages and Allowance (Engineering). Provision for new posts and normal increments are the two most significant factors in the increase of £24,000.
Sub-head K—Engineering Materials. The decrease of £33,800 is mainly due to increased telephone capital relief, partly offset by an increase of £10,000 in the provision for replacement of motor transport.
Sub-head L (2)—Contract Work. The decrease of £15,000 is mainly due to smaller expenditure on heating, lighting and telegraph equipment.
Sub-head M—Telephone Capital Repayments. Money for development of the telephone system is provided by issues from the Central Fund. These issues have to be repaid by annuities extending over periods not exceeding 25 years. This sub-head contains full provision for the annuity payments to be made, during the year. The increase from year to year—the present figure is £100,240 more than 1957-58— is a natural consequence of the expansion of the telephone system—an expansion which in its turn leads to increased revenue.
Sub-head N (1)—Superannuation Allowances, Pensions, etc. The increase of £14,500 is due mainly to an increase in the total amount of annual pensions payable.
Sub-head O (2)—Civil Aviation and Meteorological Wireless—provision and installation of equipment and operating and maintenance charges, rent, etc. The increase of £16,000 provides for the replacement of the instrument landing system at Shannon Airport and increased maintenance costs.
Sub-head T—Appropriation-in-Aid. The decrease of £18,070 in receipts is the net effect of a number of decreases and increases the biggest single item being the fall of over £20,000 in receipts for the sale of old stores, which is ascribable to a fall in the prices of non-ferrous metals.
Mail services operated satisfactorily during the past year. On the closure of part of the G.N.R. and of the Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties' Railway, suitable alternative arrangements were made for the conveyance of mails by road transport. The volume of letter traffic in 1957 increased slightly compared with the previous year but the fall in parcel traffic which has manifested itself in recent years continued. Exactly the same trends were noticeable in the 1957 Christmas period.
The general reorganisation of postal services in rural areas was continued. A six-day frequency of delivery and a better standard of service were provided in the head office districts of Bantry, Ennis and Naas and in parts of the Carlow, Limerick and Mallow districts. Reorganisation of the balance of the Carlow, Limerick and Mallow districts and of the final section of the Waterford district will be completed shortly. It is hoped to commence work during the current year on the remaining five districts which have yet to be reorganised.
Special postage stamps were brought out during the year to commemorate the centenaries of John Redmond, Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Admiral William Brown and the tercentenary of Father Luke Wadding. There will be two commemorative issues this year, one marking the centenary of the birth of Tom Clarke, first signatory of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, and the other the centenary of the death of Mother Mary Aikenhead, foundress of the Irish Sisters of Charity.
Public telegraph traffic has continued to decline but at a diminishing rate. During the past 12 months, the number of telegrams handled was 2,080,000 odd, which was 47,000 or just over 2 per cent. less than the figure for the preceding 12 months.
The reorganisation of the service has progressed further. The principal change involved, namely, the replacement of morse point-to-point working by a modern teleprinter automatic switching network between the main centres, based on a telegraph automatic exchange at Dublin, is now virtually completed. The telephoning of short-distance messages directly from originating to delivery office has also been extended. The two measures have enabled a large amount of the expensive retransmission work at intermediate centres to be eliminated. The fall in the level of traffic in conjunction with the new techniques have already made it possible to reduce the operating staff by 180, or roughly by one-third, and further reduction will be effected within the coming year. In addition, the full time delivery force has been reduced by 158 or about 44 per cent.
Delivery of telegrams represents a very difficult problem in small towns and rural areas where the number of telegrams, in many cases only a few a week, does not warrant the employment of a full-time messenger. The normal alternative of delivery by casual messengers on a fee basis is not a very satisfactory system, but it is the best that can be devised without incurring exorbitant delivery costs. The question of improving the position is, however, receiving constant attention. More extended use of motorcycles at larger centres is proposed and experiments are being carried out in certain areas to determine to what extent certain kinds of non-urgent telegrams can be delivered in batches or by next post without disadvantage to sender or addressee.
The measures of reorganisation which have been effected and the increase in charges have reduced the telegraph loss substantially—from £378,000 in 1954-55 to £195,000 in 1956-57, the latest year for which audited figures are available. But the loss is still heavy and every effort will be made to reduce it still further.
The one bright spot in this picture is the telex service, which still continues to grow. During the year 28 subscribers were added to the network, bringing the total to 63, which is over four times the number with which the service started little more than two years ago. The total telex traffic during the year amounted to some 72,000 messages.
Growth of the telephone service was well maintained during 1957. Local calls at 95,750,000 and trunk calls at 14,500,000 showed increases of 4 per cent. and 5 per cent. over the corresponding figures for 1956. Almost 9,000 new subscribers' exchange lines were installed, which was little short of the previous record figure, despite storm damage in the early months of the year and the effects of capital restrictions.
As Deputies are already aware, the telephone service, in common with other services which look to the Exchequer for their capital borrowings, has had to reduce the amount of capital works that it would otherwise undertake. The best use of limited capital is being made to provide for subscribers' installation work and for necessary extensions of the exchange and trunk system.
There has been no falling off in the demand for telephones. Applications received in 1957 for new and removal telephones at 9,600-odd were greater than ever before and recent figures show no evidence of any slackening in this respect. The bulk of the increased demand is for residence telephones which, as compared with five years ago, is up by 70 per cent. over all and more than 100 per cent. outside the Dublin area. The number of waiting applicants for telephones at the end of February, 1958, was 3,400, of which 1,450 were in course of being provided with service.
In Dublin, telephones are being provided with little delay in the central city business area, apart from some isolated "pockets" of difficulty which are dealt with as they arise. Over a large part of the Dublin suburbs also, there is little delay in providing service, but there are some areas where there is difficulty in providing lines, mainly because of shortage of underground cables.
Outside Dublin, telephones are installed fairly soon after application at the larger centres where the plant position permits, but, in general, it is not practicable to deal with individual applications as they arise. In order to secure the highest rate of connection, a planned programme is in operation for clearing waiting applications on an area basis. This means that once an area has been cleared, construction staff cannot be sent to that area again for a fairly considerable time and subsequent applications, even those which do not require much work, must go on the waiting list.
Needless to say, exceptions must be made for certain priority applicants, such as doctors, but it is necessary to keep such exceptions within strict limits, if the engineers are to be allowed to proceed with their planned clearance programme without frequent diversion of staff to attend to isolated new applications. Apart from this, the general body of waiting applicants are entitled to expect that exceptional treatment will not be given to particular applications without very good reason.
Forty-one new telephone kiosks were erected in 1957 and about the same number will be provided this year.
In 1957, over 8,800 miles of trunk circuits were added to the trunk system, and at the end of the year trunk circuit mileage was some two and three-quarter times greater than it was ten years ago. During the coming 12 months over 8,000 miles of additional trunk circuits will be constructed throughout the country. The bulk of this will be obtained, not by erecting additional wires, but by fitting three, six and 12-channel carrier equipment which enables additional conversation channels to be obtained from existing wires. Returns show that over the greater part of the year some 86 per cent. of trunk calls are connected within five minutes and over 96 per cent. within 15 minutes. The remaining 4 per cent may, of course, cover much longer delays in particular cases. However, the routes on which long delays occur are known and they are receiving priority attention.
The exchange services were improved during the year by the conversion to automatic working of 12 manual exchanges, including Limerick, Sligo, Drogheda, Naas and Longford, and by the extension and/or modernisation of over 100 other exchanges. The conversion of Galway exchange which has been in hand for some time will be completed later this year. Because of capital restrictions further conversion of manual exchanges to automatic working is being limited for the present to cases where manual operation cannot be continued without undue difficulty or deterioration of the service, or where automisation will show substantial savings or other advantages.
It may be of interest to Deputies to know that the range of dialling facilities is being gradually extended. Bray, Greystones and now Naas subscribers are able to dial trunk calls themselves to Dublin subscribers; later this year, Dublin subscribers will be given the facility of dialling to subscribers at these and other exchanges outside the Dublin local fee area. The experiment whereby Athlone subscribers have been able to dial to Dublin, Cork and Waterford automatic areas themselves has worked very satisfactorily to date and the question of extending it is being considered.
Long distance dialling by Athlone subscribers has been in operation since March, 1957, and that was the first time that subscribers in any town in these islands were able to dial over such a distance. I mention that as an illustration of the point that while we must naturally draw heavily on the experience and experiment of other bigger and wealthier countries in determining what we can do in the telephone service, we need not necessarily lag far behind them in putting new techniques into operation; as in this case we may even be in front of some of them.
While the extension of trunk dialling on a national scale is something we can only plan for at this stage, it is important that the planning should be on the right lines. The Department has accordingly availed of the facilities offered by the United Nations' Technical Assistance Scheme to secure the services of a foreign expert for a limited period and I am glad to say that a distinguished engineer from the Netherlands' Post Office is now in Dublin working with and advising my engineering staff on the problems involved in the eventual conversion of our whole local and trunk telephone system to automatic working. The technical assistance scheme has also been availed of to send two of our own engineers abroad to study this and certain other specialised branches of telecommunications.
Post Office Savings Bank deposits during 1957 amounted to £15,143,000, a decrease of £149,000 on 1956; withdrawals amounted to £14,513,000, a decrease of £178,000. Estimating the interest for the year at £1,828,000, the total balance due to depositors at 31st December, 1957, was £76,000,000 approximately as compared with £73,500,000 at 31st December, 1956.
Deposits by Trustee Savings Banks during the year amounted to £604,000, a decrease of £169,000, and withdrawals amounted to £586,000, a decrease of £104,000. The balance to credit of the banks, including interest, at the end of the year was approximately £11,750,000. Appreciable withdrawals were made from the Post Office Savings Bank and by the Trustee Savings Banks for reinvestment in the National Loan, Savings Certificates and Prize Bonds.
Actual sales of Savings Certificates in 1957 at £3,244,000 were £920,000 down on last year's record but still were higher than in any other year. Repayments of principal and interest totalling £2,663,000 were £289,000 less than the previous year's total of £2,952,000. The amount of principal due to Savings Certificate holders at the end of the year was £21,792,000. At the instance of the Savings Committee, a new inducement to save was introduced on 2nd December last in the form of Savings Gift Tokens. Issued in denominations of £1 and 10/- and incorporating a greeting in the design, these tokens are valid for deposit in the Post Office Savings Bank or for the purchase of Savings Certificates; they are not exchangeable for cash. Sales of these tokens during December amounted to close on £2,000. This is a reasonably good response to something new that will naturally take some time to become established with the public as a new method of gift giving.
The only significant addition to the long list of other services given by the Department was the sale of Prize Bonds. Our post offices throughout the country played a big part in this, being responsible for just under 35 per cent. of the total of the three Prize Bond issues to date. As a whole, there was little change in the other services though the increased popularity of newspaper competitions was responsible for a large jump in the number, though not the value, of postal orders issued. A melancholy factor is the unabated decline in the number of dog licences sold. This decline has marched step by step with a rise in the number of wireless licences. Perhaps it is cause and effect.
Last year, new post offices were provided at Athenry and Cootehill and the reconstruction of Kilkenny Post Office was completed. Work is in progress on the erection of new post office and telephone exchange buildings at Galway and Letterkenny and on automatic telephone exchange buildings at Dundrum, Stillorgan Road (Dublin) and Skerries. Reconstruction or improvement works are in progress at Loughrea, Castlebar, Nenagh and Donegal Post Offices.
During the coming year, it is expected that work will commence on new post offices and telephone exchanges at Droichead Nua and Youghal, new telephone exchange buildings at Ennis, Cork City, Kinsale, Midleton and Walkinstown and new district sorting offices at Crumlin and Churchtown.
Progress has been made in considering the proposals for the new central sorting office at Dublin and the way is now clear for the preparation of the contract drawings by the Office of Public Works.
The number of staff specifically provided for in the Estimate, 16,064, shows a reduction of 363 on the number for the previous year. As against this, a lump sum provision has been made under sub-head I (1) to cover the employment of additional men on telephone development work. It can be taken, however, that the net reduction in staff employed will be over 200. The reduction is mainly in the postman, post office clerk and telephonist grades and is due to the telegraph reorganisation and revised postal arrangements.
The departmental council set up under the Civil Service Conciliation and Arbitration scheme continues to do much useful work in fostering good relations between the Department and the staff. During the year, the council dealt with a variety of subjects including up-grading claims, the launching of a new staff suggestions scheme and the treatment of redundancy arising from the telegraph reorganisation and the closing of railway telegraph offices. Of 11 subjects on which discussions were completed, agreement was reached on eight and part agreement on one.
The staff suggestions scheme is open to all members of the staff and replaces an older scheme which was confined to the engineering and stores branch grades. Under the new scheme, awards may be made to members of the staff for suggestions related to the improvement of organisation or methods of work. The response to the scheme has been encouraging and to date a total of 352 suggestions have been received. Of these 70 have already qualified for award and 155 are still being examined.
Working methods and organisation in the Department are under continuous review with the object of increasing efficiency and reducing costs. To take one instance, the telephone accounts sections are now run on a mechanised system, the particular arrangements adopted having been decided upon after careful trials of a number of alternatives. We are able to prepare accounts more speedily under the new system; in addition it has given us staff savings of the order of £20,000 a year. In another sphere new arrangements for registration and filing of documents in the secretariat have effected considerable savings in accommodation and furniture.
As I mentioned earlier, the Department's working during 1956-7 resulted in a small profit—£30,891, to be exact. This is appreciably better than the forecast given by the then Minister when the Estimate was being discussed last year; in point of fact, that forecast underestimated the amount of postal revenue we would receive. However, it is pardonable to err on the right side. For the year just ended, we expect to make a somewhat bigger profit, but it will be some time before a firm figure is available.
The circumstance that a profit has been made in each of the last two years, even though modest in comparison with the size of our operations, stands out as a happy contrast to the rather dismal picture of the losses incurred in each of the previous nine years from 1947-8 to 1955-6. For that transformation, all my predecessors are to be congratulated. The balancing of the Department's accounts has been one matter on which successive Governments have seen eye to eye; all have taken the line that the money to pay for the running of the Department must come from those who use its services and not from the taxpayer.
Notwithstanding the increases in costs that we have had to contend with, our charges are reasonable by contrast with other European countries and our standards of service can stand similar comparisons. Two factors which have helped us in maintaining charges at a lower level than might have been otherwise possible are the steady increase in postal and telephone traffic and the unremitting efforts to find more efficient ways of doing things in all branches of the Department.
The recent increase in Civil Service pay has, however, introduced a new factor into the situation. I have not yet had time to study the position closely; but it seems clear that there is not enough margin in the present profit level to absorb the extra expenditure. That being so, ways and means of redressing the balance in the accounts must be found, since, as I have said already, no Government could accept the idea of asking the taxpayer to subsidise the Post Office. Since I have not had an opportunity to go into all the factors involved, the most I can say, at this stage, is that the situation caused by the recent increase in costs must receive most serious consideration.
To conclude, I should like to express my appreciation of the zealous and efficient service given by all grades of staff during the past year.
