Very good, but I am quite sure the value of these houses will be appreciating rather than depreciating and those who are refusing to buy them at the present time might be sorry in a few years' time not to have bought them. However, the whole idea of subsidy towards purchase is a concession to the rural dweller and I do not think anybody in the city or elsewhere will deny them that. To extend it to the city would be uncalled for and in present circumstances would not be a wise move.
The question of dangerous quarries and sites around the city—I take it that it is privately owned sites and quarries—was also dealt with by Deputy Sherwin. In this regard there is power to deal with these matters but, if it emerges that such power does not exist to deal adequately with these places which are dangerous to the public, we will have to consider what steps need to be taken to safeguard the public by equipping the Corporation with sufficient power. I agree with Deputy Sherwin that these dangerous sites should be properly enclosed so as not to be a danger to children or anybody else and that the Corporation should have power to ensure that the owners of these sites will take proper steps to protect the public against any danger that arises therein.
The Deputy also mentioned the question of caravans being properly sited and the provision of properly serviced sites. The Deputy and the House will be aware my Department have taken action during the past year and that we have been in touch with all local authorities advocating proper planning and servicing of sites for these caravan owners and occupiers. In the interests of public health as well as in the interests of our tourist industry, it is a most desirable and necessary work which will have to be done pretty soon; otherwise we might find ourselves in trouble due to an epidemic or through finding our developing tourist business going elsewhere if we cannot give them the necessary facilities.
Deputy Corry amongst other Deputies raised the question of the increase in the wage and salary limit for the purpose of qualifying for the S.D.A. house building loans and said that no such increase was given in regard to farmers' valuations. Both the salary and valuation limits came into being as a result of the financial situation in 1956. The farming valuation was fixed at £35 which was raised to £50 in 1957. The salary limit was—I am not quite sure—somewhere around £620 when it was introduced in 1956. It was later raised to £832 and has been increased to £1,040. The complaint was that, the limit of £832 having gone up to £1,040, the £50 valuation should have gone up accordingly. What is being forgotten is that around 1958 a new type of loan was created to be availed of by farming applicants through the Land Commission whereby for the building of a new house they can get up to £200 on the security of their farm which can be repaid over a number of years in half-yearly instalments.
Another difference is that the man working on a salary of £1,000 a year is in a far weaker position to raise money on the basis of his job as security than a man with a farm of £50 valuation. A farm of over £50 valuation is fairly substantial security. From the security point of view, persons in that category are fairly well equipped. The man with £1,000, and nothing else, has very little hope of getting a substantial loan to build a new house, particularly if the house is outside the built-up areas and there would be little hope of recovery should he default. I do not think the grouse about the S.D.A. where farmers are concerned is as genuine as it sounds. They are in a pretty good position to raise money.
Deputy Barrett, while giving the Minister credit for doing whatever was necessary in regard to housing in Cork over the past year or two, took the good out of his praise by saying that he got the same treatment from other Ministers as well. He said, too, that other Ministers gave them more money. If they are not getting as much now it is because they do not want it. If they want more money, and can justify the demand, no difficulties exist which would prevent Cork getting whatever money is required for housebuilding. If they have a case, I am sure they will present it. Then nobody will be dissatisfied.
Deputy Barrett also referred to the unsatisfactory work done by contractors. He complained that this unsatisfactory work is being passed by Local Government inspectors. Surely the inspectors are not expected to act as clerks of work. That is the function of those who engage the contractors. The inspectors' function is to ensure that there is compliance with the regulations. If there is bad workmanship underneath the plaster the responsibility lies with the person who engaged the contractor. Neither is it to be taken that, because the inspector passes the work for grant purposes, that any liability rests on the Department if the work is subsequently found to be in some way defective. No liability is incurred and no responsibility assumed merely by virtue of inspection. It is for the individual who made the contract to ensure that the work is done properly.
Deputy Murphy complained bitterly that the Minister was so busy with the electoral law during the past few years that he had no time for the proper business of his Department. Electoral law is the business of my Department. If I had to spend an undue time on it, that was not of my making. Neither was it my desire. An undue amount of time has had to be expended on electoral legislation, but it is not true to say that other work was neglected because of that. And the time expended on electoral legislation was not, as the Deputy said, wanton expenditure. It was essential expenditure.
Let me enlighten the Deputy as to the other work undertaken in the last three or four years. We had the usual legislation in regard to housing. We had the Road Traffic Bill—the traffic laws had not been revised since 1933 —and that Bill entailed tremendous work in my Department. The Derelict Sites Act was passed. The Housing Acts were amended for the purpose of widening the scope and improving the grants for new houses, reconstruction work, water and sewerage. A planned programme, involving much labour, has been introduced to bring piped water to the rural areas. Work is in progress on a very difficult piece of legislation in connection with town and regional planning. The Bill is at the moment in the hands of the draftsman. A great deal of work has gone into it. We have had no legislation on these lines since 1939. Indeed, the real parent of this Bill is the 1934 Act.
Work such as I have detailed would not, of course, be obvious to Deputy Murphy who must have his dig, on the one hand, and who will give very little credit on the other. It is only fair to the officials of my Department that the accusation of doing nothing other than Electoral Bills in the past three or four years should not go unanswered. I know that my officials have had to work extremely hard and over very long hours in the last three or four years. It is only right that I should avail of this opportunity to pay public tribute to the officers of my Department. In the last three of four years my officials have probably worked harder than at any other period of Local Government administration. Added to that, the normal day-to-day activities of my Department continued unchecked.
The matters that I have mentioned were difficult jobs that have had to be done and in fact so far as we in the Department are concerned are done. The Traffic Bill is with the Seanad at the moment having gone through this House. A Planning Bill will emerge in the not too distant future and will be dealt with by both Houses. I should like to say of the officers of my Department that they have had to work extremely hard on these additional volumes of legislation, bringing up to date laws which have not been touched for the past 20 or 30 years in some cases. Over and above that, there is the revision and codification of quite an amount of other work to do with housing and sanitary services laws, which is currently taking place also. For Deputy Murphy to talk as he has done is utterly ignoring the facts that even he should have been aware of. I just wanted to add these few other facts that I am aware of lest what I say might be so misrepresented as to suggest that I gave any credence to what he said in this regard.
Deputy Murphy also asked, in regard to what I said in my opening speech, what modern methods of road-making are. He supplies the answer when he says the modern methods he is thinking about merely mean mechanisation and the use of more machines to the detriment of the labour content in any particular job and the reduction of the number of workers employed on all our road jobs. I wonder has Deputy Murphy heard— I am sure other Deputies have—of the approach to a great deal of our roads today where the gravel method of construction is in use? Has he heard of the economy that is possible there because we are now getting over two to 2½ miles of roadway done to a reasonably high standard as against the one mile possible under the old stone-rolling system? That is the type of modern road-making I have been speaking about in my opening address.
It does not follow that machines are the be-all and end-all of this road-making programme. Jobs have been done and jobs are being done today, very necessary jobs, which could not have been done without the modern earth-moving equipment which is available to us. They were not done over the past years because to do them manually would have been, if not impossible, so outlandishly costly that we could not think about them.
Neither I nor my Department seek mechanisation in road-making for the sake of mechanisation. Mechanisation is used when it can be shown that substantial savings are possible in road-making and that greater use can be made of the money being provided from the Road Fund and that more roads can be made for the money at our disposal. The idea trotted out that we are merely mechanising for the sake of being able to look at these new machines is so childish that there is not much point in saying any more about it.
Again, let me throw back to Deputy Murphy and others who would have recourse to their own local authorities, that they themselves in their local authorities if they take this matter seriously should consider and investigate in detail the various methods, the mechanised as against the manual method, of doing the various jobs. It is for him and people like him who are members of local authorities and road authorities to get comparable costings. On the basis of these costings and taking all matters into consideration, let him through his local authority direct his council to take whatever line then appears to be eminently the proper one instead of coming here and talking as if every machine that appears on the road is the personal responsibility of the Minister for Local Government and that the only wish of the Minister is to have more machines and fewer men.
If we can have more men and fewer machines and get the roads done, so much the better. If councillors, in their knowledge and wisdom in local councils, can come to the stage that they find the machines they have are finished and can be displaced by men, manually working, thus giving more employment, there will be nobody more delighted than the Minister. I say that regardless of whether I or somebody else will be Minister. Whoever the Minister is, he will be glad that roadmaking can be done more economically and that more workers can be employed rather than machines.
Deputy Lynch of Waterford suggested that there should be higher grants for housing. I do not doubt that anyone could use a higher grant if he got it but I do assert, at the same time, that we have to have regard to the overall situation and that the maximum grant for the building of a new house of up to £300 or £310 is a reasonably good offer on the part of the Central Exchequer and the tax-payer and that being supplemented, as it is in many counties, by a like amount from the ratepayers, gives a sum of around £600 as a start to build a house for oneself.
In addition there are facilities for loans for farmers through the Land Commission or the S.D.A. for the ordinary people through the county councils. While it may not allow of a man providing a house and having money left to put in his pocket out of the subventions he gets, nevertheless, with a bit of effort on his own part—and surely some effort should be expected from the person himself— in providing those double grants together with some form of loan, it is true to say that we are not doing badly for the private builder, the individual builder of his own house who needs a house today. We are doing fairly well, when you consider all the other calls on the Exchequer and all the various jobs that must be done and the backlog we have had to cover over the past 30 years that was an inheritance from those who had gone before us.
We should be a little considerate in our demands in this regard and realise that what we are doing is really something worthwhile and, instead of decrying the smallness of these grants, every Deputy should be out telling his people of all the fine grants they can get and encouraging them to make the effort to supplement these grants and build their own houses instead of writing down the help being given and so discouraging people who need encouragement from making the effort by which, together with the grants, it is possible to build a house today.
Mention also has been made about the neglect of the south-east. This, of course, is from Deputy Lynch of Waterford. He goes on to tell us of the niggardly manner in which road grants are being disbursed to the County Waterford. In particular, he mentions the smallness of the tourist road grant which is going into his county—£5,000, payable annually since 1952 and being paid at the moment. This grant is related to areas of tourist potential, tourist value, classed as tourist areas in which there is situate a Gaeltacht area or congested districts or both. The relationship and the size of the Gaeltacht or congested district to the area of local authority in which it lives must be taken into consideration, and in this regard we have the Gaeltacht area of Ring in County Waterford related to the overall county of Waterford and that relationship gives us the figure of £5,000 out of the annual disbursement of £400,000 to the various counties, notably up along the west coast, from this particular fund. Deputy Lynch is getting his just share of the fund in relation to the size of the area in his county which qualifies that county to get any of this grant at all.
Deputy McLaughlin mentioned the matter of renewal of leases and said that when leases were up landlords were inclined to "lay it on." While it relates to housing, that is not a matter for the Minister for Local Government. If the Deputy directs his complaint to the Department of Justice, I am sure they will be of greater assistance to him than I could be.
The same Deputy also made a statement in regard to the overall outlook on water schemes. He told us he knew of people in a desperate plight, but then he went on to tell us that these same people did not want to pay for anything in the rates. That is a fairly revealing double statement. That can be said of practically everything put before the public—that everybody who would benefit by it wants it but that nobody wants to pay for it. We should be grown up enough to realise that amenities of any kind, whether housing, water or sewerage, have to be paid for. Sooner or later, the community must pay for these things; and for anybody to think they can be had for nothing is a complete fallacy. The sooner those few up in the clouds who believe that come down to earth, the better so that we can decide on what benefits we can afford and how they are to be paid for.
Deputy Wycherley mentioned there were no supplementary grants for the people over £50 valuation. As far as the repair grants are concerned, up to 1958 farmers of over £50 valuation did not have the benefit of reconstruction or repair grants. In the 1958 Act they were brought in, under Section 12 —Grant Procedure. They now do enjoy these repair grants which, subject to certain conditions, are equal in size to the reconstruction grants. Furthermore, they may get supplementary grants from their local county councils, but it depends on whether or not the local county council regulations are such as to admit those over £50. But the local council has the power to make such grants available. If the farmers over £50 valuation in West Cork are not enjoying these grants, they could have the matter redressed by asking their county council to change the local regulations. It is a matter for the local council and not for me, and I could not endeavour in any way to make them bring in such regulations.
I think I have dealt with most, though not all, of the points raised by Deputies under so many heads. Let me again say as I said in my opening remarks that, so far as housing is concerned, lack of finance need not hold up any worthy housing project in any part of the country. Neither is there any restriction on the amount of money available for approved sanitary schemes. That brings me to a recollection of the situation which we found when we took over office a short four and a half years ago. At that time we had a very different situation in the Department of Local Government. Instead of our being able to say, as we can now, that no worthwhile housing project or sanitary service would suffer from lack of finance, we found a different position.
At that time there was a backlog in the Department awaiting sanction of proposals of various housing and sanitary schemes and so on amounting to £1,500,000. We have had to unclog that pipeline and get it flowing again. The fact we have done so is indicative of the proper policy approach we have made in these matters. The fact that we are now in the position of saying that local authorities putting forward proposals for housing and sanitary services can be assured that the money is available is proof positive that the last four years have made a radical change in the situation, and that the serious situation in which we found ourselves in the latter part of 1956 and the beginning of 1957 is now gone. All I can say is that I hope it will remain so and that it will never befall us again.
