No. The sensible thing to do would be to derate the holdings under £20 and place the burden on the Exchequer. That burden is not insubstantial. I want to draw the attention of the House to the facts revealed by the Minister's speech. The total amount of the agricultural grant has increased from £2.91 million in 1946/47 to £11.14 million now. That includes, of course, a growing degree of relief for agricultural land but it also reveals the staggering rate at which the rate burden is rising in rural Ireland.
We are all inclined in this House, certainly I am, to think of rural Ireland as consisting exclusively of farmers, large and small, but I am a shopkeeper in rural Ireland as well as being a farmer and I live amongst small shopkeepers and householders in a country town. I represent a constituency in which there are four or five medium-sized towns and a very large number of smaller towns, in all of which there are people struggling to keep little family businesses together or trying to maintain a home. For all of these people, the burden of rates is piling up steadily and when we from time to time pass legislation here taking over under the central Exchequer, parts of the burden on the land, we are only too prone to forget that that does nothing to relieve the residents in rural Ireland who live in towns and villages.
When we advance on the road of completely derating small holdings and substantially relieving the rates of larger holdings, we are forgetting a quarter of the population of rural Ireland, that is, people who have a home or a small family business who I suggest to the House are now suffering a virtually intolerable burden to which sooner or later we shall have to turn our minds. I think this is the appropriate time because as we provide legislation to relieve agricultural land of rates, we reach the stage where the Minister for Local Government concludes his speech by saying:
The Exchequer will, this year, bear more than 63 per cent of the total rates on land in county health districts as against 57 per cent in 1963/64 and 45 per cent in 1956/57.
Above that, he says:
More than 77 per cent of all rated holdings of agricultural land in the State have valuations of £20 or less and under the proposals in the Bill, 80 per cent of the rates on these holdings will be borne by the Exchequer.
That creates the impression in the minds of a great many Deputies that the rate burden is now being substantially taken over by the central Exchequer.
While that may be true in respect of agricultural land, with special reference to the small holdings, it certainly is not true of the residents of small towns and villages and we are allowing the rate situation to get out of all control. There are some counties in Ireland today levying rates of £3 in the £. When we think of a person operating a small shop in rural Ireland, who has a wife and children, doing his best to make a living with a valuation of maybe £10 on his house and property, and realise that the increase in the rates from 20/- in the £ to £3 in the £ has imposed upon that man a charge of 10/- a week, then we appreciate that is a very formidable burden, and I think if anybody brought into the House a proposal that we should levy a tax of 10/- a week on them all there would be a revolution. These are decent people. They are hard working people. They have families to raise and make provision for and I want to avail of the occasion of this Bill to say a word on their behalf.
I want to suggest to the Minister that these people are being squeezed out of existence and the impact of the growing rate burden upon them is becoming out of all proportion to the burden borne by anybody else. We sometimes are inclined to say: "Look at the people in the city of Dublin or the city of Cork. Look at the rates they have to pay and look at the relatively large valuations upon which they are paying them". What we forget is that the person who is paying rates on a valuable property in the city of Dublin has an advantage because every year he pays the rates the capital value of the premises on which he pays them is sky-rocketing. But take the person with the small shop in Clones, Monaghan, Castle-blayney, Carrickmacross or Ballybay, on whom the rates continue to rise and who has no corresponding capital appreciation in the value of the premises on which he is paying rates. If he tries to sell he very often finds it extremely difficult to get a buyer because the small country towns are not showing any tendency to expand. On the contrary. With improved transport facilities the custom and trade tends to move more readily into the larger centres.
I make two suggestions to the Minister. When we reach the stage of derating up to 80 per cent the holdings under £20 valuation, and when we realise these holdings represent 77 per cent of all the holdings, does he not think the time has come to finish the job? The second suggestion I make is that, while it is a good thing to face the fact that small agricultural holdings can no longer bear the burden of rates, as rates are today and threaten to continue, that proposition is equally true for the small householder and the small business man in the towns and villages up and down the country. Sooner or later that fact will have to be faced, but, in the meantime, if we again turn our backs upon the problem, there are small people in the towns and villages of rural Ireland who will be crushed out of existence.
I have always been obsessed since I came into this House by the tendency which grows upon us all to think of problems globally and forget the impact on obscure individuals who are our neighbours. There is no use telling a person who is driven out of his business, who ceases to be independent and has to go out and look for a job in middle age because the little business will no longer bear the burden of growing costs, that you cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs. That is a very nice theory, provided you are not the egg. We should be constantly vigilant in this House that we do not approach this problem with that philosophy. This is a small enough country and we are close enough to one another to be solicitous for the individual as well as for the majority.
I invite Deputies on both sides of the House to join with me in putting a case to the Minister for the householder and the small business family in rural Ireland, the small shop run by a widow woman or by a small family working together. These people are being crushed out of existence by the burden of rates. We acknowledge that it is necessary to lift 80 per cent of the rate for the small farmer. When are we going to do something of the same kind for the small shopkeeper who is entitled to get his living in rural Ireland as well? If the Minister is not in a position to say that he has any proposals to make about that now, it would be a help if he were in a position to say that the Government are sympathetic to that view because I feel bound to say that if and when we have authority in matters of this kind, we will feel it an obligation upon us to do justice to that section of the rural community as we seek to have it done to those who actually live and get their living on the land.
The other point is with regard to these abatements of rates provided for the relief of agricultural land. I am right in saying, I think, that they do not apply to the rateable valuation of the house or buildings on the land. Now we ought to bear in mind that if the rate burden continues to grow and it is left to operate on the houses and farm buildings on a small holding, we are rapidly moving into a position in which we will be multiplying schemes to induce farmers to improve their houses and put up new farm buildings and equipment, while, at the same time, as the rate burden on these buildings grows, we are discouraging them from undertaking the very kind of expansion we seek to subsidise. That is a silly and contradictory procedure. It shows a complete absence of any planning on the part of the Government.
I do not want unreasonably to expand the scope of the debate but we should bear in mind that in relieving agricultural land of its rates, there are other rate problems which, if they are not discussed now, may go unobserved. They cannot be discussed on the Minister's Estimate because they would involve legislation. I will submit my point and I will readily understand if you, Sir, think it goes beyond the ambit of this particular legislation. I do not think it does. When we relieve the rates on the small holding up to 80 per cent by these grants, if that small holder carries out a scheme of reconstruction under the Minister's reconstruction grant scheme, substitutes a slated roof for a thatched roof, increases the size of the windows, improves the doors, puts in water and so forth, then that house, so far as I know, is liable to a revision of valuation. If he builds stables or out-offices under the Department's Farm Building Scheme, all these become liable.
With rates standing anywhere between £2 in the £ and £3 in the £, it can very easily happen that the abatement we give here is more than swallowed up in the revision of valuation which may result from the improvements which the farmer seeks to carry out. I would suggest to the Minister that while we have made some concession in regard to farm buildings which are immune from rating for a period after construction, we ought to try to ensure that where a house is improved without increasing its cubic capacity, or where a shop is improved internally or externally without increasing the cubic capacity of the building, the Commissioners of Valuation should be inhibited from increasing the valuation.
Subject to those observations, we are in favour of this Bill but we believe that in respect of the 77 per cent of the holdings whose rates are now relieved to the tune of 80 per cent, it would be much more sensible to finish the job in relation to the tune of 100 per cent.