I move:
"That the Estimate be referred back for reconsideration."
I think perhaps one of the outstanding reasons for the reference back arises from the fact that reference to the Economic Statistics issued with the Budget of 1961 reveals that income, including wages, salaries and profits, from agriculture, forestry and fishing is, in terms of pounds sterling, as set out in Table X of the National Income, 1956-60, less in 1960 by some millions than in 1957. Over the same period, the value of those pounds has declined by approximately 12 per cent., or 2/6d. in the £. Therefore, not only has the total income from agriculture, forestry and fishing declined in terms of money received but it is also true to say that those engaged in agriculture, forestry and fishing are getting fewer pounds of lesser value in 1960 than in 1957. Yet if we turn to the rate position we find—and I am taking the most recent figure supplied by the Minister in his statement—that the figure is £22.3 million. We find that the rates in 1939, that was before the war, were £6.2 million. In 1954 they were £15.9 million, in 1955, £17 million, in 1956, £17.7 million, in 1957, £19.7 million, in 1958, £20 million, in 1959, £20.5 million, in 1960, £21.4 million and this year, £22.3 million.
That represents the total rates collected by all local authorities, including county health districts, urban districts and county boroughs. The House will observe that the total increased from £15.9 million in 1954 to £22.3 million today. That is dramatic. When we turn to the increase that has taken place in respect of the rates in county health districts, we find that before the war they were paying £3.2 million, and as of 1954 they were paying £8.8 million. In 1961 they were paying £12.06 million in rates. I have not got a breakdown of the total rate collection for county health districts, urban districts and county boroughs for 1961, but it is clear for all to see that the accumulation of burdens that are piling up on those who seek to make a living on the land are breaking those engaged in agricultural industry, especially those engaged in family farming.
The net result of that is that a very substantial number of them are clearing out of the country because they can no longer pay their way. That has had the consequential result that the towns depending on those rural areas for their livelihood are finding that the population from which they made their living in the past by providing services is steadily dwindling. In some area, to my knowledge, the rate has been in the order of 25 per cent. of the population in the hinterland of some of these country towns. I have in mind towns like Ballybay, Clones—which has its own particular difficulties arising from its propinquity to the Border —and towns with which I am familiar in the West of Ireland. While at the same time the population in these areas is going down with a consequent disastrous abandonment of the land from which families have emigrated and a reduction in the volume of trade passing through the towns, the burden of rates continues to rise and the circle is becoming more and more of a vicious circle with the passage of every year.
I am quite satisfied that if we are not to have a social revolution in rural Ireland, of a very disastrous and irrevocable kind, some means must be found of relieving the ratepayers in rural areas from the burdens they are at present carrying. I shall have some reference to make to some of the Minister's further proposals for increasing those burdens before I sit down.
I want to refer to those paragraphs in the Minister's speech in which he referred to housing. I have often admired the brazen audacity of Fianna Fáil in connection with their housing activity. Let me give some round figures. The total number of new houses built with State aid, as set out in Table 150 of the Statistical Abstract of 1960, in the four years from 1954 to 1957 inclusive, was 42,465 houses, giving an average per annum of 10,600 houses. Remember while that was being done the Fianna Fáil benches in this House were being made ring with protestations that housing was breaking down in Ireland. At the same time 10,000 houses per annum were being erected with State Aid.
I remember the loud hullabaloo that was going on about the inability of anyone to get employment building houses at that time, and the Taoiseach, then Deputy Lemass, and Deputy Briscoe drowning all the crocodiles in the Zoo with their floods of crocodile tears over the disastrous situation. I refer now to Table 152 of the Statistical Abstract. In 1954 there were 7,000 men working on local authority housing schemes. In 1955 there were 6,000 and in 1956 there were 6,000. Then Fianna Fáil hove in view, and remember they hove in view pledged to provide work, pouring forth lamentations all over Ireland that the women of Ireland looked to them to provide work for their husbands. We had an average of 6,000 men employed in local authority housing schemes. That is leaving out all private houses and leaving out all State-aided houses. These were local authority housing schemes being built by Dublin Corporation, Waterford Corporation, Limerick Corporation and the county councils.
As I say, in 1957 Fianna Fáil hove in view. The average number of men employed on local authority housing schemes dropped from 6,000 to 3,500. They did not really get under way then. They could not stop the programmes that we had inaugurated. But by 1958 they had really got control of the situation and the number of men then employed was 2,500 and by 1959 it had dropped to 2,200.
What became of the men? They have found out now because there is a great campaign to pour out money to build anything from office flats to anything else on which money can be spent in Dublin in preparation for a general election. Now it is found that the men were driven to emigrate and are not here. The skilled workers are not there with the result that many building operations that should be going forward are not going forward because the key men are not available and, when the key men are not available, the unskilled workers cannot be employed. That is one of the most cynical and disreputable transactions of which this country has ever been witness.
The average number of houses built with State aid in the four years from 1954 to 1957 was 10,600 per annum. In the three years since Fianna Fáil came into office, 1958 to 1960 inclusively, the number has dropped to 6,100 per annum. Now I do not expect them to blush for shame at their own disreputable and fraudulent record in that regard, but I do want to put on record—it is good for the common policy of the country that it should go on record—that that kind of dirty fraud degrades the public life of this country. If that kind of confidence trick is frequently repeated the voters of this country will be right to say that they would not believe the gospel from a public man; and Fianna Fáil have succeeded in persuading a very considerable number of our young people to believe, so gigantic was the fraudulent confidence trick that Fianna Fáil perpetrated in regard to housing and employment, that you cannot now believe anything a public man says in the political life of Ireland. That is disaster and I am not at all sure whether in our generation it is disaster we will be able to repair. I am not without hope that we may recover the confidence of the younger generation and convince them that that kind of fraud is not the practice of every element in the public life of this country. There are still some people who recognise the obligation to tell the people the truth without counting the cost.
When the Minister was making his statement he said at Page 5:
As regards advances under the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Acts, .... I have made arrangements with the Minister for Finance whereby issues from the Local Loans Fund will now be available for the purpose of making such advances to persons whose incomes do not exceed £1,040 per annum, instead of £832 per annum as was previously the case. At the same time, I hope that local authorities in a position to do so will continue to explore sources other than the Local Loans Fund for the purpose of making these advances, in view of the various other demands on the resources of the Fund.
Again, I want to put it on record that in 1956 Deputy Noel Lemass was Chairman of the Finance Committee of the Dublin Corporation. In pursuit of a sinister conspiracy, Deputy Noel Lemass combined with Deputy Briscoe, at present the Lord Mayor of Dublin, to frustrate the purpose of the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Acts and to deny facilities to hundreds of citizens of this city who wanted to build houses, who wanted to employ their neighbours, and who had every right to do so. They were denied the opportunity of getting their houses. Their neighbours were denied the opportunity of getting employment. All that was the result of a sinister and discreditable conspiracy between Deputy Briscoe and Deputy Noel Lemass.
Deputy Lemass announced that he would, as Chairman of the Finance Committee of the Dublin Corporation, sanction no application for a Local Loans advance unless the moneys to finance it were already provided by way of loan to the Corporation. It is well known that any such procedure simply suspends the operation of the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Acts. Deputy Noel Lemass had guarantees at the time, on the strength of the Irish Exchequer, that there would be available to the Dublin Corporation annual sums from the Local Loans Fund, a source to which they had never had access before, sufficient and adequate to meet every application made to the Dublin Corporation for a Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act loan. That was a dreadful thing to do.
Mark you, the House should remember that up to about the year 1956 the Dublin Corporation was not given access to the Local Loans Fund; they were expected to raise their own revenue by loans floated by the Corporation itself. In the extremely difficult situation then obtaining in the world as a result of the Suez crisis, and a variety of other international upheavals, it was felt that to send the Dublin Corporation to the public money market at that time might involve them in the payment of an excessively high rate of interest with consequent burdens and charges on those who sought accommodation under the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act procedure; and the Government not only advanced money to the Corporation but told them that over the next three or four years they could confidently budget in the certainty that they would get from the Government by way of accommodation some £4,000,000 to £5,000,000 per annum.
The answer applicants were given, when they applied for accommodation consequent on that undertaking was: "Not one penny piece until the money has been placed in the bank account of the Dublin Corporation". That was the reply, although it was notorious that a loan under the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Acts could not be paid out to the applicant for six to eighteen months after the application had been sanctioned. Now that was an iniquitous thing to do. It resulted in the emigration of thousands of our people who could have been profitably employed at home. It held up housing for a most deserving section of our community and it shamefully depleted the resources of our people in skilled operatives to carry on the desirable building undertakings which, from time to time, a socially progressive community should have in hand.
I have been told by the Minister for Local Government that one of the reasons why there has been this dramatic fall in the total number of houses built or building, with State assistance, is that the back of the housing problem has been broken. It is true that in those difficult years from 1948 to 1957 we did pour out money on an heroic scale in building houses and many of the orthodox economists thought we were improvident. One thing we certainly were not was improvident. We knew exactly what we were doing. We knew the burden the people would have to bear. Having known the slums of this city, and other cities of the country, since our childhood, we said perfectly deliberately and calmly, that this was an expenditure which we considered to be a first charge on the resources of this city. We thought it was more important to build houses for the people than to rebuild Dublin Castle. We thought it was more important to build houses for the people than to buy Boeing aircraft. We thought it was more important to build houses for the people than to erect places in the Phoenix Park.
I sometimes walk the streets of Dublin today and look at some of the old sites that I knew, and that the late Deputy Alfie Byrne knew, and in relation to which he was never content to rest until something had been done to remedy the position. I look at them now and I remember them as he saw them and as he spoke for them in this House and I rejoice that our Government had some share of responsibility in wiping out the hideous conditions that then obtained and in answering to the people for the costs that had to be met. When I am told the decline in the building of State-aided houses can be accounted for by the argument the Minister makes, I think of the vast areas which have never been reached upon.
We are now contemplating a £30,000,000 scheme to bring piped water down every road in Ireland. No one has ever asked himself apparently who will maintain the pipes after they have been laid. Is there a Deputy in this House from rural Ireland who is not familiar with the water scheme in a rural town?
Is there a Deputy here who has any knowledge of a town like Ballaghaderreen, Ballybay, Clones, Castleblayney or elsewhere who does not realise what the meaning of a piped water supply is in maintenance in a very restricted area? You bring water by pipe into a country town; you have a water main from the lake or reservoir from which you draw your water and the main runs through the streets. If there is a break, to survey the whole length of a main appears a simple job but it can take you months to find where the water is going.
We are going to spend £30,000,000 to bring water down every road in Ireland and nobody seems to bother to walk up the boreens leading off the roads and look at the houses to which we are going to bring the water and ask why is it that many of the most hardworking farmers are living in houses that are antediluvian in the accommodation they provide. Has any Deputy ever asked himself that question? They can get grants from the Government, from the Department of Local Government. They can get grants from the local authority and yet they do not. Why? Because they cannot afford them. They have not got the capital sum to put down to pay the balance to the contractor.
Who can say the housing problem in this country is resolved if we are building flats in the city of Dublin costing some thousands of pounds per flat and rightly accommodating the citizens of Dublin but leaving the person living in rural Ireland, the small farmer, in a house which would be condemned as unfit for human habitation if it were within any urban area? Go and ask these people why do they not improve their houses and they will tell you they are not worth improving. Ask them why they do not avail of the grant and build new houses and the answer is: "Who is going to pay the contractor the balance? I have not got it."
It is fantastic to say the housing problem is resolved until we have brought within the reach of the small farmers a scheme whereunder they can build reasonable houses, providing modest accommodation on terms it is possible for them to meet. I hope to put such a proposal before the country. I have no doubt, now that that is being adumbrated, Fianna Fáil will do their best to think up another one between now and the general election. The difference is that the proposals we make result in performance; the proposals they make begin with promises and end with disillusion.
Now I want to talk about the water supply. I introduced the first scheme in this country for the provision of water supplies to rural houses. It is no harm that we should go back over the history. There was a Deputy here once, Deputy O'Donnell, the Lord have mercy on him. He came into this House as an Independent Farmer Deputy from South Tipperary. I very well remember he was in this House in the ‘30's. Deputy O'Donnell would get up to speak on the Estimate for the Department of External Affairs but would end up talking about water supplies to houses in rural Ireland. He would get up to speak on Defence and would end up by speaking about water supplies to houses in rural Ireland. The plain fact is that many of us thought he had a King Charles's head, that he was a bit cracked on the subject of water and could not keep away from it. But one of the results of his activities was that long after the poor man was dead and in heaven, I could not get out of my head what Deputy O'Donnell used to say, which corresponded with my own experience.
The more I thought of how passionately he was attached to this cause, the more it began to dawn on me that Deputy O'Donnell was right, that one of the most cruel inadequacies in the amenities of rural Ireland was the inaccessibility of running water to a farmer's wife. So, when I was Minister for Agriculture, I succeeded in getting the Government to agree to a scheme whereby if any farmer wanted to bring water into his house, the Government would pay half the cost up to a maximum of a £100 grant. I know there were a great many schemes of that kind carried through and are still being carried through. That meant that a farmer could dig a well, could instal a pressure pump or an electric pump, put a tank on the roof and bring the water into the kitchen. If that operation cost £150, he was entitled to a grant of £75; if it cost £200, he was entitled to a grant of £100 and if he had to pay £250, the maximum grant was still £100.
That was followed by a scheme inaugurated by the Department of Local Government. They are operating another scheme to facilitate individual farmers and groups of farmers to bring water supplies to their houses from a common well. The construction and protection of the well is part of the scheme in respect of which they are entitled to claim recoupment.
There is a third problem in the country. We all know of this. There are certain areas in rural Ireland where the sub-strata of the soil is such that well water is not to be found. You will find such an area in the vicinity of Castlepollard in County Westmeath, another such area in the Burren of Clare, another such area in the vicinity of Cong. There are areas of that character, well defined, scattered here and there, mainly associated with a limestone rock subsoil, badly fissured, which will not retain water. I am prepared to concede at once that in those areas special measures are necessary and that we should be generous in our readiness to assist the local authority which is responsible for an area of that kind, because in those areas you might have to go three miles for water. That is an area where it is perfectly justifiable to design a plan to try to bring water, by pipe, if necessary, over a wide area, because living in that area without that amenity becomes extremely difficult.
But seriously, to set out to bring a water main down every road in Ireland is not only illusory, but it is fraudulent because, if you did bring the water main along every main road in Ireland, you would leave half the farmers just as far away from the water as they are now, and, having paid the rate necessary to meet the capital cost of the main water line, they then have to pay, in addition to that, so much per thousand gallons of water or, if they wanted to put a trough in a field, have to pay an annual charge in respect of the trough.
If we really are serious about effectively bringing water to every house in rural Ireland, why on earth we do not, if necessary, double the grants we are prepared to give for the individual water supply or the group water supply I cannot imagine. If we did that then, once you had dug your well and installed your pump, you had free water for the rest of your life, except for whatever the electricity charge was for working the pump and the pump does not work except when you are drawing water from it under one system or for the period taken to fill the roof tank under another system. If you do not want to use the electricity, you can put up what is installed on every ranch from Kansas to Los Angeles in the United States of America, that is, a windmill pump. Now that we have rural electricity, the installation of an electric pump is sensible, because the cost of operation is insignificant. If you do not want to pay for it, you can use the wind as it is used throughout the whole of the rural areas in the United States. The important thing is that once you have the water, you have nothing more to pay. If it is a group scheme, once you have installed the group scheme, that is the end of your expenditure. There is no annual charge in respect of water mains, rent or anything else.
It would be a thousand pities if we are to spend £30,000,000 over the next ten years, half of which is to be provided by the Exchequer and half by the local authority, I think, not to spend that money on an effective drive to multiply group schemes and individual schemes. If we did that, I believe we would very quickly bring water effectively to 90 per cent. of our rural homes.
I ask any Deputy who has any knowledge of rural Ireland to tell me what percentage of water supply will be made available to rural homes if the pipes are brought along the sides of the main roads? How many farmers in rural Ireland have their houses on the main roads? Speaking as one who was responsible for sponsoring the first scheme ever operated in this country for the purpose of bringing water to the country homes, I want to put to the Minister that his concept is daft. If this money is available, it should be applied to the development of the existing schemes under the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Local Government, for the provision of water to rural homes, and we could achieve four times the maximum result that he can ever expect to achieve by bringing the water mains along the roads of Ireland. At the same time, the water would be made available free to those who availed of the scheme and there would be no maintenance problem for the water mains, thousands of miles of which the Minister is now proposing to conconstruct.
All that being said, we can confine ourselves unanimously to the necessity for a scheme based on water mains along the roads in those areas where the substratum of the soil is such that the construction of wells is impossible. I offered as a typical example of that kind of area the Castlepollard area, the Burren of Clare, Cong, and I think there is an area which I recall somewhere in West Cork.
I am looking now at North Cork where a cost of £2 million to cover 71 per cent. of the houses in North Cork is envisaged. We are told the average cost for the whole country is to be in the order of 5/- in the £ on the rates. That is the average; what it will be in certain areas God alone knows. The people will also be paying for the rest of their lives in respect of water supplies—for ever from the first day they turn on the tap. I am for the free water. I strongly object to providing £30 million for water for which I will also be paying all my life, as will my children, my grandchildren and their grandchildren after them.
I want to refer to some of the more detailed matters to which the Minister referred. He speaks of the conditions of the beaches in and about Dublin. I raised that question in this House 15 years ago. I know of nothing more futile than telling the mass of the people who go to the seaside on Sunday to put their litter in bins. They will not put their litter in bins; they never have put their litter in bins either here or anywhere else in the world. There is not any place in the world that has not erected yellow bins, blue bins, bins in the shape of elephants, bins of attractive design, and ultimately the story has always been the same—the litter eventually ended anywhere but in the bins.
In any case a good deal of the litter consists of material no one considers to be litter. Does anyone ever realise what maintains the hairpin industry in existence? Has any Deputy ever asked himself what becomes of all the hairpins? They are strangely indestructible. If you try to destroy a hairpin, you find it is the most indestructible thing you can imagine, and yet women buy them in millions of grosses. What becomes of them? No one knew the answer until they went to clean up the boardwalk of Atlantic City. They tried to apply a certain form of vacuum cleaner and the Atlantic City boardwalk but hairpins choked the vacuum cleaner and they found they had to conduct the preliminary operation of removing the hairpins with magnets before they could clean the boardwalk.
I do not say that all the litter on the beaches of Dublin consists of hairpins but a good deal of it consists of material which is simply lost. People should bring home their lemonade bottles. They do bring home three, but perhaps the baby has gone off to build sand castles with the other two or three and they become mislaid or are covered by the tide, and they go home with three out of the half dozen.
Someone else has brought milk bottles and they are used to take water from the sea to build structures in the sand. When the time comes to go home, no one can find one of the milk bottles. It is in fact rolling to and fro with the tide and when the tide recedes, the milk bottle is there or there is broken glass on the sand for someone to put his foot on.
There is no way of dealing with this problem unless we employ what is used on the great beaches at Sydney in New South Wales, on the coast of California and in Long Island in New York. We must turn to their experience there. The problem there had become utterly intolerable and had to be dealt with or the beaches would have become uninhabitable. I am informed they have dealt with it completely effectively and that it can be done. I understand it must be done by a process of mechanisation. Unless that is demonstrated to the local authorities here by some central authority, I do not think any local authority will want to take it up. There is a system now by which, as you move a machine down along a beach, all the sand to a depth of some inches actually passes through the machine, which eliminates all debris, glass and foreign material of one kind or another and which retains and returns the sand to the beach. Short of that, there is no effective system of making beaches, used by large numbers of urban populations, habitable after a certain period. I suggest to the Minister that if he wants to get something serious done about that, some central authority will have to be asked to demonstrate that system to local authorities.
I doubt if it will be necessary on the beaches in places like Kilkee and Bundoran. Even were it necessary, it certainly should not be as necessary to do it as on beaches approximate to large cities like Dublin and even Waterford. There, it may be necessary to do it several days during the tourist season; but it is not impossible, even if it were done at much more infrequent intervals in other centres, that it might prove adequate. There might be some collaboration between several tourist centres to employ one unit of equipment which could be used at less frequent intervals on different stretches of strand.
But I see this reference to this problem turning up so regularly over the years that I begin to wonder is anybody serious about it. It is a matter of real concern, just as important as the matter referred to by the Minister when he spoke of the desirability of providing camping sites, properly equipped. I think clean beaches and decent camping sites are a very necessary part of our tourist drive, if it is to be truly effective. I hear everybody pay lip service to it, but I often wonder does anybody intend to do anything about it.
The same doubts cross my mind when I hear the Minister talk about swimming pools. I have been listening all my life to schemes for providing swimming pools in this city of Dublin. All my life I have walked along the banks of the canal and it has always struck me that if ever there was an ideal swimming pool available, it is the canal, if it were properly maintained. But instead of its being maintained for that purpose, I see it being filled in. There is a stretch of canal running from beyond Mountjoy Jail up to the Basin. I walked along that all the days of my youth, and it then became superfluous. If that had been taken in hand and turned into a clean, properly maintained swimming pool, it would provide a gala ground for thousands of children in the city. All you had to do was line it with a bit of cement and employ some elderly gentleman to look after it, or two elderly gentlemen, retired pensioners, chlorinate the water, empty and fill it at regular intervals, and it would have been a great luxury. But, instead of that, for the past 30 or 40 years, the children of the city have been "lepping" in and out of the canal, dead dogs, dead donkeys, and all, because there was nowhere else for them to go. I have seen them plunge into it up at Rathmines Bridge, where the old flyboats used to stop— all the way down from Portobello along the various stretches of the canal. They would put the heart across you. How they do not all die of appalling diseases, I cannot imagine.
I cannot see why, at this time, we cannot take stretches of the canal and make them fit for the children to swim in. I do not think they want elaborate baths. I believe the vast majority of them would be delighted with the canals, if they were fit for them to go into. I heard Deputy Sherwin say —Deputy Sherwin is a person for whose sagacity I have considerable respect; at present I am confining my admiration to his sagacity—that children frequently get drowned in the canal. That causes me some anxiety. But I am bound to say this: no matter how careful you are, unless you put children in cotton wool, they will meet with accidents if they live a normal life. If you had stretches of the canal properly prepared to serve as public swimming places for children, you could take precautions and provide some kind of life saving service in periods when large numbers of children use the canal. But that will not avoid the occasional circumstances of children going to bathe or swim at a time when nobody expects them to be swimming. If you are not prepared to take that risk, you cannot have baths at all.
Little children, or indeed grown people, can drown in suprisingly shallow water if they get a cramp at the wrong moment. The trouble is that little children and youngsters will leap into the water on occasions immediately after their dinner or tea, which is a time they should not do it. You may get an odd case where a child gets a cramp and drowns in spite of the most elaborate precautions you can take. But I am bound to say I think you ought to take that risk.
We all have that kind of nightmare to live in, that as soon as children get out of the pram and begin to run off for themselves, your first instinct is to fence them in for fear something will happen to them. You then realise you cannot fence them in all their lives. Sooner or later, they have got to meet the ordinary hazards of life. All you can do is to try to introduce them to them with all the circumspection you can, and advise them and counsel them, but, in spite of that, they will do some daft thing. They would not be children if they did not. You cannot keep them in cotton wool all their lives.
The canals are part and parcel of the city of Dublin. It is perfectly possible to make considerable stretches of them safely acceptable for children to swim in, with adequate sanitation and proper chlorination. If it is desirable, as the Minister has declared, that we should forthwith make available to the bulk of the children of this city bathing facilities as distinct from the Olympic standards that might be required in big municipal swimming baths, I believe we would get a better return from going to work on the canals, quicker and cheaper, than we would get anywhere else. I believe it could be done safely for the children and at a cost that could readily be met.
I want to say a short word about town planning. Town planning is a good thing in theory, but it is getting a very bad name in this country. The people who live in an area where the county council have had the misfortune to adopt town planning discover that if they want to put a stone upon a stone, they are liable to run into the town planning authority. They discover that to get any decision out of that anonymous gentleman may take from six to 18 months and that it is extraordinarily difficult to find out who he is. He usually turns out to be an architect or engineer living anything from 50 to 100 miles away, whose concern it is to provide a decision as to whether you can erect your petrol pump on a particular site or whether the end of your barn is not too near the public highway in accordance with the town plan adopted 20 years ago. If town planning is to retain its good name in this country, steps should be taken to provide that it will not become a clog on new construction or adaptation, and there is that tendency at the present time.
The Minister speaks of the necessity for the bringing of main roads, particularly arterial roads, up to a proper standard as still being a big problem, the solution of which will yield major benefits by saving time, fuel consumption, wear and tear on vehicles, as well as reducing the number of accidents. I wonder does it reduce the number of accidents? I think the slaughter on that part of the Naas Road which was turned into an autobahn in the course of the past few years has been heavier by far since it was turned into an autobahn than before these improvements were carried out. In any case, I wonder, with our density of traffic, is it necessary to spend the hundreds of thousands of pounds that are being spent on what are called main road improvements as distinct from main road maintenance? If we could get the maintenance of all main and county roads kept up to the standard at which it ought to be kept, I would not be one bit worried if some of the vast operations that have been going on in rural Ireland, the elimination of curves and providing autobahns, were long postponed.
I do not believe we have the traffic density on the roads in rural Ireland to justify the millions of pounds we are spending on these huge mechanised operations. I have a certain sympathy with engineers. Since the huge earthmoving machinery has been invented, there is something positively exciting in the realisation that at last that curve in the road is no longer their master. You can now hit the hill right in the middle and go clean through it, whereas before it was a feature of the scenery. No one had any more thought of moving it than of moving the Rock of Cashel. Some of these hills were named after the contractors who went bankrupt 50 years ago trying to cut pieces off them. There are two or three hills in the countryside where I live which are called after the contractor who went broke trying to cut the top off them 40 years ago by manual labour. They have stood there as a challenge to successive generations of engineers. Since they had burst so many contractors, nobody would ever try them again, and now they have discovered they can go clean through them.
I have seen work proceeding in certain counties which leaves me breathless, valleys being filled up, hills being levelled, and the net result is that somebody will take about 90 seconds less to cover two or three furlongs than he did heretofore. He will save those 90 seconds by travelling that much faster and being required to take that much less care, and I do not know, at the end of it, if he will be very much better off.
We are all rushing into this actuated largely by what we read in the American and British newspapers about their traffic problem. Their traffic problem is not our traffic problem at all. The traffic problem in the United States relates to States like California, New York and densely populated areas like Pennsylvania, where the numbers of motor cars are vastly multiplied. But when you live in Colorado or Idaho, both of which have a much denser population than Ireland, there is no traffic problem. We live in the shadow of what we hear is going on in places like New York, Pennsylvania and even Florida and are too much influenced by what we hear is happening in England when the populations of London and Birmingham begin to move to the coast on Sundays and bank holidays.
We have no such problem. There may be a slight degree of congestion on the road from Dublin to Bray for a couple of hours on a Sunday or holiday. There may be a slight degree of congestion on the road from Wexford to Rosslare on holidays and weekends, but perennially you can travel the rural roads of Ireland and meet little or no traffic, certainly no traffic that creates a problem, except for the specialised type of traffic like the articulated lorry, which is two lorries functioning as one. However, that is a separate problem with which we have been dealing for long enough under the road traffic legislation.
There is no part of Ireland that I know where there is a problem of travelling for long periods bumper to bumper. I have seen that in New York; I have seen that in England; but I do not believe anybody has ever seen it here except on the day of a race meeting or some local event. You can even get to the Galway races very handily if you do not travel at the crowded hour before the races begin. Therefore, I would suggest to the Minister that when people lay it down to him as a hypothesis that we are behindhand in the bringing of our main roads, particularly arterial roads, up to a proper standard, if that envisages an intensification of the large arterial road schemes, it is something we ought to think about again. I doubt if it saves much time; I doubt if it saves much fuel; I doubt if it saves much wear and tear on vehicles; and I very seriously doubt if it reduces the number of accidents. One thing is certain, that arterial roads do not improve the attractions of rural Ireland and there is something to be said for that if we are serious in our efforts to encourage tourists to come here who want something different from the autobahns they have left in Pennysylvania and from which they have sought to escape when they elected to take their holiday here instead of heading for Brighton, Bournemouth or Cornwall.
Is it not interesting to read on page 19 of the Minister's statement that the capital expenditure of local authorities had reached its peak of £18.9 million in 1953 and is now down to £8 or £9 million? This, under the Government pledged to expand social capital expenditure. You remember the old warrior proclaiming that that was the test by which they would stand or fall. Does the Minister for Defence remember that: "We will reduce the numbers of the unemployed and arrest the national haemorrhage of emigration"? Social capital expenditure has declined in this particular sphere from £18.9 million to £8 million or £9 million and has been stabilised at that figure. That decrease has been due principally to the fall in capital expenditure on housing. At the same time, you get a typical figure. The numbers of men employed have fallen to an even more dramatic degree.
I think the Minister for Local Government is responsible for the Vote in this House associated with the crippling burdens of rates that help to make survival on the land of Ireland almost impossible for those who get their living there. I think he is responsible for the Vote associated with the greatest instance of fraud that has ever been practised on the people of this country. I think he is associated with the Vote under which measures are taken by the Government of which he is a member which are largely responsible for driving thousands and thousands of our people into the industrial slums of England who would not be given the chance of earning their living here.
If that indictment is true, he ought to share with the Minister for Industry and Commerce, who is responsible for the cost of living which also has made its contribution to that tragic migration, the sleepless nights that any conscientious man should have if he felt that he had contributed to the picture I read to the House of what many of those emigrants have been brought to in the slums of London.
I think we ought to refer this Vote back because we ought to try to bring home to these Ministers, before they get the five years' holiday which I hope they will get next September or October, a full sense of the realisation of the great crime they perpetrated against our people in seeking to solve the unemployment problem in Ireland by shovelling our people into the slums of Notting Hill, hoping that, having done so, that is the last we would ever hear of them and they can point to the statistics to prove that in any case they were no longer unemployed in Ireland. I wish to God that many of them were unemployed in Ireland rather than earning their living in the employment to which Deputy Blaney, Deputy Lynch and Deputy Lemass, the Taoiseach, have helped to send them.
