It is significant today to hear members of the Fianna Fáil Party themselves express anxiety about a matter to which we have drawn the attention of the Government repeatedly over the past few years, that is, the purchase of agricultural land by non-nationals. It is a deplorable thing that the Government have sought consistently to minimise that situation and even to deny the existence of the problem. Now their own backbenchers are warning them. It is a problem which causes acute anxiety in the country and is there in spite of the denials of the Government Ministers.
I direct the attention of the House to this situation because I think it is not only socially undesirable but may give rise to very undesirable consequences. We seek to promote the introduction of industrial capital from abroad for the purpose of industrial development in this country and our people have no instinctive reaction against the introduction of foreign capital for industrial development and the provision of employment. They have no instinctive reaction against the acquisition of land for the erection of industrial premises or factories and they do not very much mind the acquisition of residences with pleasure grounds annexed to them, but they know quite well the difference between that kind of acquisition and the acquisition of agricultural land. If you asked them to define it they might find some difficulty but there is really no confusion in their mind. They are perfectly right: there is a fundamental difference between the two kinds of transaction and the transaction which is pregnant with evil is the acquisition of agricultural land by non-nationals. That ought to be brought under stricter control so that the magnitude of the problem can be kept under constant review and where it seems, as I believe it now seems, that in certain areas it has gone beyond the limit which it is socially desirable to permit, then the powers of the Land Commission should be invoked compulsorily to acquire that land for distribution amongst congested holders whom it is desired to resettle.
The only satisfactory way in which this can be done is to make suitable provision that any transfer of land which operates to transfer the beneficial ownership of the land to a non-national shall be null and void if it is not registered in the Land Commission. Unless that is done, all sorts of legal devices will be operated in order to conceal the true purchaser of the land. Trusts will be set up and Irish companies will be established and a variety of legal devices employed so as to ensure that the legal title to the land, in fact, passes from an Irish owner to a new Irish owner in the person of a company or a trust but where that is further pursued to the point of ascertaining who the beneficial owner is, it will be found in many cases that the legal owner, who is an Irish personality in the form of a trust or company is, in fact, holding the land for the benefit of a non-national.
The only way in which that can be effectively checked is to declare by law that any arrangement of that kind is null and void and the payment of the consideration will not operate effectively to transfer title to the land. In those circumstances, this kind of transaction will no longer take place because competent conveyancers will realise that the non-national purchaser would fail to get a good title to the land he sought to buy unless there was prior notification to the Irish Land Commission.
If we could get that kind of exhaustive record kept then the true dimensions of this problem would become manifest and the great evil of public malaise which the Minister must himself now realise exists when he hears the backbenchers of his own Party speak of it would be allayed and we would know what the real situation was and be in a position to determine what steps were necessary to bring the problem under effective control.
This Land Bill has some useful proposals in it and some proposals that will want very scrupulous attention on Committee Stage but I want to raise specifically this issue of principle. What purpose have we in mind? Are we trying to wipe out the whole system of tenant proprietor farmers in this country? If we are, we are mad. We have a whole social system built up in this country based on the principle of the man who works the land owning the land he works upon. We arrived at that arrangement after fighting a land war and after years and years of struggle, and subsequently of domestic legislation, in order to give effect to it.
Some of us here remember the air of triumph and rejoicing which swept through this country when the 1923 Land Act was passed which transferred all tenanted land in Ireland to the Land Commission for conveyance to the tenants. Are we to go back on that? Do we want to get the people we settled on the land off the land? I do not. It is very popular continental economists' talk to say that the only way to operate the land satisfactorily— from the economists' point of view— is to wipe all the smallholders off the land, divide it into large sections and operate it on a quasi-industrial basis. That was Lord Lucan's view. It is nothing new.
Lord Lucan took that view in the first quarter of the 19th century and proceeded to do it on all the Lucan estates in west Mayo. His idea was to remove all the tenants from their holdings, consolidating the holdings into 500 acre lots, to bring in Scotch factors and to re-employ the displaced tenants as labourers. The net result was a savage land war, at the end of which it was not the tenants who were gone off. Lord Lucan was gone. I am sure the economist, John Stuart Mill, and others who contemplated that operation deplored the failure of Lord Lucan's plan. Do we? I do not.
Our people were right. They kept a firm grip on their holdings and they have since reared generations of good people on that land. This is a very fundamental matter. I was recently in west Donegal and I came to two houses I knew very well when I first went to Donegal as a representative for the constituency 30 years ago. When I first went there 30 years ago, those two houses were situated on two adjoining small farms and according to the standards obtaining today, the people living there were poor. They did not think they were poor. They were two very independent families and as fine people as one could meet in any part of the world.
Out of these two houses there came, in the poverty which an economist would regard as unsufferable, a university professor, the matron of one of the largest specialist hospitals in the world, two principal teachers of national schools and a very high member of the Irish Civil Service who was universally esteemed. Now those two houses today are receiving into them, I am sure, four to six times the income that they had when I first knew them. Where are the children of those houses now? They are not acquiring, at great sacrifice, the education which their predecessors sought, secured and exploited. They are working in the tunnels of Scotland. There are two or three girls in industrial employment in England. They are earning four to six times as much as their parents ever earned, but they have never passed the sixth book in school and they never will. The girls are working in factories in England and are earning far more than the women of their homes earned 30 years ago. They are lucky to get married to respectable boys in England or they will come home and get married here if they are luckier. Which is the better life?
I think the life these people lived, in dignity and security on their own holdings, and the struggle they made to get education and to aim at higher things for their children were infinitely better than the transfer of those families from those small holdings into the comparative affluence of industrial employment in Great Britain. In that part of the world, they go largely to the tunnelling employment. Not a month passes in Donegal that some boy is not brought home in a coffin because everybody knows that the mortality rate in that work is very high and hence the immensely high wages they are in a position to secure.
Everybody in this country should ask himself what is most important in life. Is it money or is it happiness? I am convinced that the people who knew poverty but who, by their efforts, attained to the positions of professor, matron, principal teachers, and so on, are infinitely better off in that they are truly using the faculties with which God endowed them to the highest possible purpose, with a corresponding satisfaction, than the succeeding generation who, turning their backs on that kind of struggle for higher education, have gladly sought the additional financial reward of prompt enrichment in the ranks of industrial labour in Great Britain.
I think it is true that in many parts of rural Ireland today economic difficulties have become so great, particularly in the case of small farmers, that they have been forced into industrial employment in Britain because the struggle to keep their families at home became impossible. The rising cost of living operated to destroy the possibilities of very small farmers in this country hanging on and they have been forced to abandon the life they would have preferred in favour of industrial employment in Britain so that they can live. That is a great tragedy.
We must ask ourselves now, when considering this Land Bill, what is our ultimate objective. I want to see kept on the land of Ireland as property-owning farmers the maximum number of families the land is capable of supporting. I want to suggest to the Dáil that if you want effective land reform in this country, one of the essential features of it is reform in housing. If we are to have the people firmly fixed on the land, we must envisage a situation in which girls are prepared to marry into farms and rear families. The plain truth is that in the congested areas, particularly, though the houses are decent, time has slipped by. People really have not adverted to the fact that many of the houses are there since their reconstruction after the Famine. They have been there 100 years. There have been adjustments and alterations made but fundamentally the amenities and accommodation are those of the first half of the nineteenth century.
Such houses in our cities and towns have largely disappeared. The Gaeltacht housing scheme brought a great revolution in housing in the fíorGhaeltacht, but outside the Gaeltacht in the congested areas as defined by law, the plain truth is that the general accommodation of the houses on the farms corresponds closely to the kind of accommodation that used to be there for all to see in the thatched houses in our towns and villages. In the towns and villages now, there are no thatched houses left. In the course of the past 40 or 50 years they have all been pulled down and replaced by new houses with modern amenities.
On the small holdings in the country, no such revolution in housing has taken place and unless and until we can promote that revolution in housing on the small holdings, then our hopes of preserving the present social pattern of our society must be illfounded. Therefore I suggest to the Minister that one of the most important reforms required in land legislation at the present time is a clear indication to small holders all over the country that they can build themselves a new house with reasonable amenities and on terms they can afford to pay.
I saw an admirable model of a Land Commission house which was shown here in Leinster House some time ago. I understand that such a house can be built for under £2,000. With appropriate grants from the local authority and the Department of Local Government the net cost of that house could be brought down probably to something of the order of £1,400. If that were spread over a sufficient term of years as an addition to the small farmers' annuity, it should be possible for a very large number of small farmers who really require new houses to arrange for such houses to be built.
I imagine that if this matter were closely examined, the building of these houses could possibly be undertaken by a body analogous to the National Housing Agency, albeit that it might be better annexed to the Land Commission. I envisage a situation in which a farmer would say: "I want a house" and the Land Commission, if they were satisfied that he was in good faith, would arrange for the collection of the appropriate grants from the Department of Local Government, proceed to build the house, then add the cost to his annuity and collect it over the years as the land annuity is at present collected.
There is not the slightest use in giving a grant of 30, 40 or 45 acres of land, unless the farmer is helped to use it to the best advantage. If a family in rural Ireland are provided with 45 acres of land, unless they use that land to the very best advantage, instead of being a blessing, it may be a curse to them. It is no easy job for one man to run 45 acres of land and to get the maximum output from it. Forty-five acres of land is a borderline case. It is too small to be mechanised and it is almost too large to be operated single-handed without mechanical assistance. Therefore unless you install, alongside a comprehensive programme of enlargement of holdings, an adequate advisory service to help the farmers to work the land to the best advantage, instead of doing good, you may be doing harm. Advisory services are not primarily the responsibility of the Department of Lands. Therein is one of the anachronisms of our Government, that the Department of Lands is separated from the Department of Agriculture, because both are so intimately concerned with land.
The Minister for Lands might as well make up his mind to the fact that no alteration in the distribution of land without effective assistance for the farmers to enable them to use it to the best advantage will do any good. The Minister must also face this fact, that no action on his part can hope to have a successful issue unless the farmers are provided not only with advice but with the means to give effect to that advice. I am quite certain that if we are to get effective use of the land of Ireland, particularly in the congested areas, we must provide the farmers living there with credit on the terms they can afford to pay.
I want to suggest that it is quite useless in the Second Schedule of this Bill, which purports to define the areas where congestion exists, to exclude the counties of Cavan and Monaghan. Indeed I would be glad to hear what argument is there for scheduling any particular area. Why are the operations of this Bill or any part of it restricted to that area? Would there be any objection to making the provisions of the Bill applicable to the whole Twenty-Six Counties? If there is insurmountable objection to that course and it is desirable to segregate for the purpose of this Bill the congested areas, then I suggest to the Minister that it is remote from reality to omit Cavan and Monaghan, the two counties in Ireland which have suffered most heavily from emigration resulting from poverty during the past ten years.
I view the provisions of section 10 with the gravest concern and I do not think this is an honest section. We all know when land purchase was proceeding in this country, in many cases the landlord had an obligation to his tenants to maintain certain embankments and works of that character which protected the land for which his tenants were paying rent from perennial flooding. When the Land Commission bought the estate from the landlords, they took over the estate with all its liabilities and then they divided it. On some estates they remembered to apportion out responsibility for the maintenance of embankments and I understand that in those cases there was a suitable abatement of the purchase price and the consequent annuity payable on the land.
In other estates, they did not purport to do that. They divided the land, but the residual obligation to maintain these embankments remained with the Land Commission. For years, there has been litigation and there have been battles going on, the Land Commission claiming they were not liable, the tenants being advised they were not liable, and my experience has been that at the point of starting proceedings in the High Court, the Land Commission have said: "Oh, we will get the Board of Works to do something," and a modus vivendi was found and the proceedings dropped.
I think this section 10 is designed to put an end to all that and instead of saying that these holdings were conveyed to the tenants without any apportionment of the old landlord's obligation to maintain embankments, we are now putting that obligation on the tenants. If that is so, it is a very wrong arrangement to try by law to unload on to the tenant purchasers these liabilities. They were not set out in the original agreement under which they acquired the holdings on which they now live.
One has to read section 13 in connection with section 27. At first glance, it seems to be not an unreasonable arrangement that if the Land Commission, who are an autonomous body with quasi-judicial standing, determine it is desirable to consider the acquisition of a holding, they will not make such determination without proper inquiries and due consideration of all relevant matter and that, having made the decision that they are going to inspect the land and consider its acquisition, the Land Commission should have the right to say to the person: "With the exception of conacre, you cannot during the next 12 months enter into any arrangement involving the letting or sale without prior consultation with the Land Commission."
I do not think that it is an unreasonable stipulation, but when you read it in the context of section 27, quite a new picture emerges. Now there has been taken from the Land Commission what hitherto was a reserved power, what was recorded as excepted matter under section 12 of the Land Act. Now the Minister is to have the power through his four senior inspectors to serve notice. The moment he serves notice now, there may be no dealings in the land, as defined by the restriction, without prior consideration by the Land Commission. That is a very dangerous departure because if the Minister has power to go to anybody in the country and get his senior inspectors to take the step which brings section 13 into operation, that is a power the Minister never has had before and I do not think it is a power the Minister ought to have.
We have always been very scrupulous in this House, and wisely so, to preserve the fixity of tenure, the free sale to which our people have rightly attached such importance at all times. We have consented to some abridgement of that principle if the power to abridge that principle were an excepted service in that it could be exercised only by a quasi-judicial body, the Land Commission, who were not answerable to the political head of the Department for the exercise of that power.
It is now proposed under section 27 to give that power to the Minister's servants, and in those circumstances I think section 13 requires much more rigorous examination. In my view, the amount of time you will save by the operation of section 27 is not worth the candle. We are standing on a rock, and mind you, it is a rock which for 40 years Ministers of three successive Governments—Cumann na nGaedheal, Fianna Fáil, inter-Party, then again Fianna Fáil, then again inter-Party and now Fianna Fáil—have always defended even under vigorous pressure from their own supporters. That rock was that no political head of the Department of Lands would ever accept responsibility for determining what land should be acquired and what land should not be acquired.
I know that the final decision as to whether the land is to be acquired or not remains an excepted matter reserved to the Land Commission, but here we have introduced this new principle that the notice to consider the matter can create a 12 months' restriction on the user of that land. I am prepared to consent to that so long as this question of inspection and acquisition remains an excepted matter, but if it becomes the power of the political head of the Department of Lands to create that situation, I believe we are making a most unfortunate inroad on a principle which hitherto we have all had the wisdom to regard as sacrosanct—that the ownership of land shall not be infringed by the political head of the Department of Lands no matter what Government he belongs to. If the Minister finds himself with the power to direct his senior inspectors to initiate proceedings of this character, his life will cease to be worth living if he is a conscientious man, because the pressures on him to make promiscuous miscellaneous decisions of this character will be well-nigh irresistible.
Sitting here in Dublin, we are only too liable to forget what inspection of such land and a restriction of this kind operating for 12 months thereafter involve in rural Ireland. It means that for 12 months a family are living in an atmosphere of gloom. There is a possibility, there is a prospect hanging over them that the Land Commission will put them out and it is a disruption of their lives which I think it should not be in the power of any man in the public life of this country to impose upon them.
Even if any Minister's senior inspector says: "This is not a holding of this sort; really we ought not to proceed", the Minister, under heavy pressure, is constrained to say: "Nevertheless, leave the matter to the Land Commission". There will be more and more cases in which local political pressure will make that course well-nigh unavoidable and serious injustice will be done and great injury inflicted.
At the present time, the Minister is in a position to say: "I have nothing to do with the acquisition of the land: if you think any place should be acquired, write to the Land Commission and if they think it is right, they will proceed and if they do not, it is no job of mine; I do not want to make them". We all know the fraudulent representations which have gone on here by many members representing to their constituents that they are in a position to divide land. We all know the meetings at dead of night and the promises: "This land is being divided and I guarantee you you will get a stripe of it".
It has always been a source of infinite satisfaction to me to be able to say: "I have nothing whatsoever to do with the division of land; except for bringing your case to the attention of the Land Commission, which is something that will ensure your claims will be considered, I have nothing to do with it. But anyone who says to you that he is in a position to get you land is a fraud." And, of course, they found it out. That is true. Now the situation will arise in which a meeting can be held in any village and a TD faced with a claim that they want such-and-such lands inspected. He is no longer able to say that he will bring the representations to the Land Commission but that he has no power to influence them; that they must decide in their own judgment what is to be done. Now the people will be entitled to say: "You have the power: the Minister who belongs to your Party and whom you say you represent in this constituency, has the power to get this land inspected and that is what we want".
I think that is a very serious and undesirable departure. It is supposed to expedite the process of land acquisition. It may operate to that end but when I hear Deputies speak of the desirability of setting up a super Land Commission, compulsorily to acquire from the Land Commission the land they already have and will not divide, you cannot help wondering will the little extra expedition which Section 27 is designed to produce be worth the candle in exposing people in all parts of the country to a system of political persecution of a most malignant kind if it becomes no longer an excepted function but a political function to determine whose land is to be inspected for acquisition and whose is not.
There is another detail which the Minister ought to consider. I understand the permanent Secretary of the Department has been appointed to the Land Commission. There is nobody better fitted to be a Land Commissioner than he is and there is a precedent for it. The late Mr. Deegan, the Lord have mercy on him, was a Land Commissioner. He was a friend of mine. But there is a difference. When Mr. Deegan was a Commissioner, the powers envisaged in section 27 did not exist. Now we are in danger of a situation arising in which the executive head of a Department, the Secretary, is directed by the Minister to order one of the four senior inspectors to initiate proceedings for the acquisition of land. Then the question of whether the land should be taken or not comes before the executive head of the Department who is now sitting under a different hat and is supposed to be sitting in a quasi-judicial capacity to determine between the owner and the senior inspector of the Department as to whether the land should be acquired.
You have the extraordinary situation of land, in respect of which he has given a direction that acquisition proceedings should be initiated under section 27, comes before him in his judicial capacity to determine whether or not it should be acquired. I think the Minister should review that matter. Personally, I hope he will drop section 27. If he does, this problem does not arise. If he does not, he should face the fact that the precedent of Mr. Deegan being at one time Secretary of the Department and a Land Commissioner is not a satisfactory one in the situation it is now proposed to create. In the absence of section 27, I have no quarrel with the arrangement, but with the operation of section 27, it appears to me we are imposing on an individual an executive and a judicial function in respect of the same matter which it is impossible for one individual faithfully to discharge.
One of the new proposals in the Bill and one for which there is much to be said is the proposal to enable a farmer incapacitated by years or, I gather, by any other circumstance to opt to surrender his holding to the Land Commission in consideration of a pension which will be payable to himself and if desired, to his wife for the rest of her life and in addition—a humane and sensible arrangement—that they may rent their own house and an accommodation garden for the remainder of their days and that there will be special concessions in respect of the annuity for old age pension purposes.
The only question I want to ask the Minister is whether he has made the category of persons eligible to avail of this wide enough? You have a number of odd familiar situations arising in rural Ireland where it is manifestly desirable that persons in possession of a small holding should pass it on to people prepared to work it. You have old spinsters left in holdings desperately trying, by letting some in conacre and grazing a goat, to struggle on. It would be much better if they took the pension and settled in the adjoining town and made the land available to some active person. You have a number of categories of persons other than those who are actually old and incapacitated who, I think, could with advantage avail of this provision, and where the provision is purely optional and the initiative lies with the tenant, is there any objection to making it pretty wide?
If somebody wants to give up land and can advance the justification to the Commission that he is physically unable to work it or for any other reason unable to use it, or, indeed, if he simply wants to give it up and no longer wants to work that land and would prefer to take a pension, is there any reason that he should not fall into this category? What is the use of leaving a holding with anybody who says he is not able to work it or does not want to work it and would sooner be rid of it? The best evidence of that is his frame of mind. As long as the initiative lies entirely with him, as long as we are not proposing that the Land Commission should have power to order him off the land. I see no objection to widening the category very extensively.
I would not be in favour of giving the Land Commission compulsory powers to put anyone out of his home. It is much better to wait for elderly people to die. It is their home and in my eyes, it is quite sacrosanct. It is a good thing to say to elderly people, many of whom we know personally are hanging on beyond the limits of reason and sometimes at great sacrifice: "Look, the sooner you settle down in comfort in the house and in the garden and let the land go, you ought to do it." I think that is a very good idea. I admit you may not be able to be quite as liberal in your proposals to persons who cannot plead old age or other incapacities but I am not sure you could not extend the plan where a person does not plead old age or incapacity but simply wants to give up the land, and elects to take a pension, rather than sell to the Commission, that would be available to the person provided he was prepared to give up house, land and all. I suggest to the Minister that that is worth considering.
I note that the explanatory memorandum states that:
Cash purchases (by auction or private treaty) under the Land Act, 1950, will be open to all the purposes of the Land Acts—and no longer restricted to lands required for migrants or for the re-arrangement of fragmented holdings.
I wonder does the Minister remember when the 1950 Act was going through this House and what he had to say about this business, that it was useless, it could never be used and that it was merely eyewash to mislead the people? The education of Fianna Fáil is a slow and tedious process but it is gratifying to those of us who have undertaken it to realise that slow and tedious as it is, it progresses steadily.