At Question Time today, the Minister for Health was asked by Deputy O.J. Flanagan when work will commence on the reconstruction and improvement of the county home at Mountmellick and what is the cause of the delay. The Minister read out, as his reply, from a document which I assume was prepared for him. He said in his reply:
The scheme for the reconstruction and improvement of the county home in Mountmellick is a major undertaking involving heavy capital expenditure. It provides inter alia for the internal reconstruction and renovation of the existing old workhouse buildings, additional accommodation for patients including a new infirmary block, central heating and improved sanitary accommodation.
His reply goes on:
By reason of the nature and scope of the scheme, formulation of the local authority's planning proposals and their detailed examination in my Department have necessarily taken some time but I am glad to say that planning is now in its final stage and that the local authority should be in a position in the near future to invite tenders for the carrying out of the approved works.
I describe that reply as nothing but utter rubbish. Further, I want to say that the Minister had the most astounding audacity to come to the House to read out such rubbish.
He says that this is a major undertaking involving heavy capital expenditure. I accept that it is. I want the House to ask itself this question: How much more will this work cost when it is done eventually than it would have cost had it been done when I ordered it to be done in 1957? The increase in cost which is necessarily involved is the result of the decision which I shall refer to in a few minutes.
The Minister's reply goes on to say that "by reason of the nature and scope of the scheme, formulation of the local authority's planning proposals and their detailed examination in my Department have necessarily taken some time." I am sure they did, but I was there as Minister for Health to watch the time that was consumed and I assert here that the planning by the local authority was completed and approved by the Department in 1956. My then advisers, whose advice is still available to the Minister, advised me that I could authorise the local authority—as I did—in 1956 to proceed, as a matter of urgency, with this work.
The Minister goes on in his reply to say:
I am glad to say that planning is now in its final stage and that the local authority should be in a position in the near future to invite tenders for the carrying-out of the approved works.
I should like to know what happened to the instruction I gave as Minister for Health to the Laois health authority some five years ago to proceed with the construction of the county home in Mountmellick. What dead hand lay upon that work? Why was my instruction countermanded and on what basis does the Minister now, five years later, come into the House which he assumes knows nothing about it, to say blandly that the local authority should be in a position in the near future to proceed with that work? I should like to assert that the reconstruction of Mountmellick County Home should have been completed certainly by 1958 and it would have been completed, had not the Government changed in 1957 and the present Government come into office.
There is no reason why the work should not proceed. The money was there, earmarked and carefully put aside for this and other proposals. The Minister chided me at Question Time today that in order to finance this and other schemes, I had mortgaged the Hospitals Trust Fund. If the Minister chooses to use those terms to describe the policy I initiated, I am quite willing to accept them. I assert to the House that after careful consideration, after availing of the advice which was available to me in 1956, I drew up a new hospital programme consisting of certain matters which I regarded as having urgency throughout the country. I decided that the programme would be financed on the basis that the Hospitals Trust Fund would continue and that in the three, four, or five years that programme would need for completion, the income into the fund would continue at not less than something around £1½ million a year.
I cannot be exact about the figures as I am talking merely from recollection. The programme I drew was drawn up on the basis of that faith and I should like to know from the Minister whether the faith I expressed in 1956 was ill-founded? Is it correct to say that nothing has happened since to make my estimate and that of my advisers appear in the slightest degree inaccurate. Certainly the income of the Hospitals Trust Fund over the years since has in fact exceeded the estimate upon which this programme was based. The result has been that into the Hospitals Trust Fund each year since the Minister assumed office has gone at least £2 million. It has not been spent as it should have been on building hospitals for poor, old people, providing the people of Mountmellick with the necessary sanitary services and new infirmary blocks which they urgently needed five years ago. It has not been put to projects of that kind; instead, it has been invested in stocks and shares by the Minister for Health and it has in itself been earning income.
That may be prudent finance; it may be the kind of conservative approach the Minister believes in; but I have little doubt that the people outside the House will agree that it has been very bad from the point of view of the country. All the hospital programme that was available—it was on the Minister's desk when he succeeded me—has been scrapped from beginning to end. No worthwhile project has continued or gone into operation and most of our county homes that were in an appalling condition when I visited them—as I did in many cases as Minister—remain in the same condition. Poor, old people in the county home in Mountmellick have continued to suffer under conditions which are primitive in the extreme.
On the other side of the ledger, because of the kind of mentality displayed by the Minister in the decision he took, we know what has happened in the building trade and other trades in the last four or five years. It is because of that mentality that some 30,000 to 40,000 of our people have emigrated each year.
