The Deputy knows the rules of order very well. He practises in a profession which has taught him to keep those rules of order. I am going to say that unless the doctrine of "there are none so blind as those that will not see; there are none so deaf as those that cannot hear" applies to the Minister, he must be aware that there is considerable trouble at times in the passenger traffic between Liverpool and Dublin and between Holyhead and Dun Laoghaire and that the Minister could, if it was not interfering with some of his friends, insist at times that these people provide an extra boat or in the alternative allow Irish Shipping if necessary to charter a passenger boat to bolster up the trade at its peak periods.
There is one thing that the Minister has control over, and I would commend to him for consideration in relation to Irish Shipping—that we build a coaster fleet and that we might extend that fleet to take the tremendous strain off the roads. The Minister should direct the activities of Irish Shipping into the coastal service of tankers to distribute some of the petroleum products that go down the country in those monster lorries, and, indeed, take to the canals. There was consideration given in the Department of Industry and Commerce, before it was divided into this queer partition of Industry and Commerce and Transport and Power, to the possible use of the canals for the distribution by barges of considerable amounts of oil products that are going through the country.
Rather than let those places go derelict, surely the Minister should consider the feasibility of converting the canals into some useful type of waterway, and the possibility of distributing those various oil and petroleum products in bigger quantity by tanker barges on the canals. Irish Shipping could fruitfully engage in the distribution among our provincial ports of those products. It would certainly enter into a very fruitful market if it got the 2,000 ton to 4,000 ton type of ship that would be effective in our coastal trade and our export trade to Britain.
We are told that we are facing the possibility of entry into the Common Market. The Minister will have to wake up to the fact that one of the big impacts in competition is the transport costs we have in getting our goods delivered to market. Every saving that can be made in that line is going to play a very effective part in the building up of our competitive strength in such a Common Market. There is nobody in the world who has a titter of wit or uses an ounce of common sense but realises that, in the future, Irish Shipping will have to be contained within the practical type of work we expect the company to do. I commend to the Minister an immediate reappraisal of the policy in relation to the size of the ships to build, because I am told—and I am sure the Minister if he is aware of it will let us know in his reply—that the situation of Irish Shipping this year is bordering on catastrophic, and that the portents of a bad year this year have been only too sadly fulfilled.
As I said before, Irish Shipping did a very useful job at a vital stage of our existence, but in the light of what one might call the Common Market era, we must examine where its future lies.
I can see on a cursory examination of another company under the Minister's control, Bord na Móna, that there is a fluctuation from year to year between profit and loss, but one will not in any way condemn that company because it has tremendous value in the experimentation and in the research it has carried out and the employment it has given in the area. It cannot be equated with the fantastic figures of loss shown by some of the other companies and, anyway, the ultimate aim of bog development as a consequence of its work is well worth considering as a potential earner in the nation's economy.
Before I get away from my present trend I want to revert to what I can best describe as the most neglected and unfortunate section of the community that I know—the group of some 2,000 CIE pensioners who are on destitution pension level. The Minister is aware of the figure. There are some 1,500 odd on the 12/- level and another 400 odd under 22/-, making in all an excess of 2,000 people who have to live, subject to what they can get in social welfare benefits, on that pittance. Mind you, I want to strike this note very deliberately. They represent the people who made CIE pay and who accepted low wages and long hours. Now they are abandoned on the scrap heap. Surely to heavens, when we talk in airy-fairy language of these big State companies and their operation surpluses, we could readily think how money could be diverted into the channel of ameliorating these people's lot. They are not even accorded the facility by CIE of travelling in their vehicles free to collect these pittances. Often it is costing them the princely sum of one shilling of their 12 to get in and out to collect their miserable pittance.
This has been a very protracted debate because the time has come to pull down the five or seven veils from some of the grandiose schemes of a Government who seem to think it is a seat of empire rather than the controlling entity in a small hard-pressed country that needs very many substantial technical improvements to develop both its industry and its agriculture, and which needs above all a proper appraisal of the extent to which these large State companies will operate within the framework of this nation's future.
I get appalled when I find the Government—as they have done—enshrouding with successive mysticisms the whole of Irish endeavour and of Irish political effort in the past 15 months, enshrouding them in the Common Market veil. This is the Valhalla in which we bury all our mistakes and forget all our broken promises and the forlorn record of dismal failure. On this particular Estimate I feel pretty strongly because I think the Minister, if he bestirred himself, need not be so inept and ineffectual as he sounds in this House at times with his lack of function. I do not believe the Minister is so blind or so foolish as not to be aware of the particulars of some of the policies designed and carried out by State companies under his control. I do not believe he could not, if he wanted to, arrest this drift and get policy back on a factual beam.
I think we are all unanimous on one thing. We would like to see these enterprises survive. We would like to see them justifying the faith and the investment placed in them. I do not think any of us, however, are prepared to subscribe to the continuation of unwarranted subsidies to encourage increasing loss. We face a very vital problem in improving the efficiency of our transport system, whether it be road, rail or sea, so that we will be able to deliver for Irish exporters, to whatever market they must go, their goods in the best possible condition in the quickest possible time. It is to that type of trade that our rail and our road freight systems should be geared. It is to that purpose that our shipping should be geared also. The Minister knows as well as I do, and as well as anybody in this House, that it would be more than adequate for us to have a good type of coaster vessel not in excess of 5,000 tons to do our continental trade. If we can fill them often enough Irish Shipping would be doing very well and the Irish economy would be doing better. Turbines of ships this size plying the seas with cargo would give a sweeter tone than those of large leviathanlike ships lying up silent in some yard waiting for either charter or cargo.
It is time this type of investigation took place. It is time for hard hitting. I must confess that the Minister has got a fair share of that and, no doubt when the opportunity comes for him to reply, he will try to spar back. There is no getting away from the basic fact that, for some queer reason, bureaucracy has gone mad in these State companies and we have more braid and gold in and around the offices of some of these companies than you would find in five armies. Huge administrative machines are being built up, in many cases recklessly and wantonly. It is time somebody got down to analysing how many of these people are wanted, how many are only in sinecures, how real and how necessary is each of these entrepreneurs, whether he is called service manager, area manager, freight manager or anything else, how many of these innumerable braided executives are really necessary, how much could really be saved in these companies by some man doing a full time job of work, instead of creating an aura of mystery about his job and getting three or four assistants.
I am positively nauseated by the capacity for job-making in some of these companies. I am not even prepared to admit that there is any honesty of purpose behind much of it but I am prepared to say that the ordinary Irishman—the man about whom the Minister would not know too much—is getting sick and tired of carrying the burden of subsidisation. The time has come, as I said before, growing pains having ended, when some effort should be made to direct policy and confine activity to a sphere in which they are competent. We have got to get this notion of internationalism out of our heads. We have Boeing jets flying the Atlantic; we have immense cargo ships not only plying the Atlantic but—some of them—on charter in the Pacific; we have them plying up the St. Lawrence River but we have none of them plying between here and England with our cattle. We have not got the kind of basic fleet which would carry the exports we have. No, we will seek the glories elsewhere and sacrifice our people in the effort rather than get down to practicalities and give the country an assurance that there will be reason and rationalism in future policy.
No matter how the Minister tries to wriggle out of it, he has the title of Minister for Transport and Power and if it is a nebulous ministry, or if it is a ministry without portfolio, the Minister should tell us. The Minister, for his own good and for the good of his Party, and because of his duty to this House, should take off his coat and do something and stop hiding behind this mythical wall of "no function". If he does not, he can rest assured that his tenure of office as Minister for Transport and Power will be interlaced with questions, Adjournment Debates and a constantly raised whip by the Opposition to make him do the job he is meant to do.
