I should like to make a few observations of a general character on this Estimate. I think the Minister should tell us from his experience since he introduced the new postal rates what burden he expects them to impose upon the community in the course of this financial year. We have got into a rather unfortunate habit in this House of imposing taxation under a wide variety of names, and so concealing the real burden of taxation that the people have to bear. The evil of this system is that when we call taxation by another name we forget that it is taxation and has to be paid by the people, and it is only on the occasion of the Minister's Estimate that we have any means of discovering from him what is the exact size of the burden that his particular taxation has imposed upon the people. I think it is very important for Deputies to realise that.
In respect of every other taxation the Minister for Finance is required to come before us and to give us an informed estimate of what he expects the taxation to yield and, at the end of the financial year, we are in a position to question him here in this House as to the result, the out-turn, of the taxation and compare it with the estimate that he gave us, and in that way maintain some check on the total burden the people have to carry. When we increase the price of bread and price of butter without recourse to the Budget at all, it seems that the charge that the people have to bear disappears, and when we increase postal rates, unless we raise the matter now and ask the Minister to tell us what the total measure of the burden is, we are very liable to forget that it has ever been imposed.
I, therefore, would like some information from the Minister as to what his personal budget, that he introduced before the Budget of the Minister for Finance, will raise from the people so that all of us, when we are considering the total taxation burden, can add the extra postal rates to the £1,000,000 which consumers have to bear through the increased price of butter, and to the charge they have to carry as a result of the increase in the price of bread, none of which is mentioned in the Budget of this year, or of the year before.
There is another matter that I want to mention. I think the Post Office is entitled to congratulation when it achieves reform and most of us will agree that, in respect of trunk calls between the city of Dublin and the city of Cork and provincial centres, the service has greatly improved over the last ten years. But, I am afraid that headquarters are only too prone to forget that there is a great deal of cross-country communication which is very important to people living in the country. One of the phenomena of the telephone service is that it is much quicker to ring New York from a town in County Mayo than it is to ring a town 12 or 15 miles away from where you are. I think it is a source of recurrent amazement to someone so unsophisticated as myself to have the experience of calling an American city from a country town in Ireland because, as a rule, you get it in a phenomenally short time and, as a rule, you can hear the person speaking as clearly as if he were in the next room But, what is absolutely frustrating is that after having that experience you simply call somebody whom you regard as your neighbour in the country and you discover that it takes anything from three to five hours to get through. There must be some serious flaw in the trunk system as between one provincial centre and another to account for that anomaly.
We are constantly talking in this House about capital outlay which is not self-financing and we are constantly being warned by the economists that capital outlay which is not self-financing has to be carefully studied to see can it be borne by the national economy. If there is one form of capital outlay for which the Exchequer has always received the fullest recompense, it is the trunk telephone service and it often astonishes me how slow the authorities are to add to the existing facilities because I believe all experience, not only here but in Great Britain and the United States of America, has been that the more facilities you provide, the more custom you get. I would urge on the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs that he should not hesitate to press forward with the amplification of existing trunk facilities because nothing is surer than that these facilities will be abundantly availed of and I assume that if they are more and more availed of they will likely provide sufficient revenue to permit of a reduction in the charges and that will beget more business as well.
I want to make a suggestion to the Minister which I think is worth consideration. At present there is one rate for trunk charges in the day-time and after 6 o'clock there is a substantial reduction in trunk charges. I wonder if it would not be good rate and having a period, say, from the day, having the existing day-time business to provide three periods in 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the reduced rate and then having a period from 9 p.m. until an early hour the following day at a very much lower rate.
That would serve two purposes. There are a good many people who have to wait until 6 p.m. because in the ordinary nature of things they cannot readily afford the day-time rate and you get a considerable volume of business which comes on the lines between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. A great deal of that business, I imagine, could just as readily wait until 9, 10 and 11 p.m. If you want to have a chat with an absent friend or want to ring somebody up about a matter that is not of high urgency, you ordinarily wait until the day-time rate has lapsed and you can speak at the evening rate. A great many persons would be glad to wait until 9 p.m. to carry on conversations of that kind, if there were a further reduction and as the bulk of the trunk lines must be idle during that period, it seems to me that it would be a great relief to the trunk line capacity between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. to adopt that course. A great deal of new business could be generated if people got a really bargain rate in the late hours of the evening, of which they might avail. That is a matter to which I would direct the Minister's attention.
A question has been raised here about which all of us who are experienced in public life must know something. When the Post Office service was first started in the 19th century, there was a very different attitude everywhere to social obligations, and there were very few enterprises employing people who considered that they had any duty whatever to provide superannuation. There were no old age pensions. In fact, the thing that marked out the Public Service from all other services was that it did provide its established servants with a degree of security that no other employment offered and, of course, partly as a result of that, during the 19th century and the first half of this century, they drew into their service a vast body of men of very high calibre who were prepared to forego the higher reward of mercan-the life for the essential security of the pension rights which established civil servants enjoyed.
It is becoming abundantly clear now that the obligation to provide superannuation is so universal that that distinction between the Public Service and mercantile service is disappearing and it is becoming proportionately more difficult to draw into the Public Service the kind of men we want. We have had to advance and increase salaries steadily in order to get the right kind of men. In respect of the higher civil servants. we have sought to put that right by raising their remuneration. When the State was founded, a Secretary of a Department had £1,500 a year. Now some of them have nearly £4,000, for no better reason than that, if they had not, we would not have them.
In that process of evolution, one section of the Public Service seems to have been wholly forgotten, that is, temporary postmen. I meet men marching along the road and some on bicycles who are old enough to be my father and they are still temporary postmen. They are faced with the prospect that if they ever lay down the bag and hang up the bicycle they have nothing and, although they have given, in some cases, over 40 years' service, no provision is made for them at all. I do not know is legislation required to alter it.