We built them for ourselves. We are taking whole floors in skyscrapers all over the city for the accommodation of the Civil Service. We are paying for it. We spent public money to get it, while we knew perfectly well that our neighbours were living in conditions which a veterinary surgeon would prohibit for the accommodation of livestock. Let us not run away from that fact. We recently took a whole floor of a skyscraper erected here for the accommodation of the Civil Service and undertook, to boot, to spend £60,000 redecorating it, in addition to the rent we undertook to pay. But in County Monaghan— to leave Dublin for a moment—we have not sixpence to lend to anybody under the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act with which to build a house. The local authority there has gone to London to try to borrow £60,000 from a firm of London financiers because they cannot get a penny from the Local Loans Fund. Is this a record of which we can afford to be proud? If not, whose fault is it? It is the fault of the present Government and those members of Fianna Fáil who represent Dublin city ought to hang their heads in shame because they have not the courage to speak here on behalf of those who elected them to this House.
I admire Deputy Dowling for the manner in which he batters along making the best case he can. He talks of 1,000 sites and says that 1,000 sites are almost as good as 1,000 houses. He is a great old warrior. Any other man in the circumstances would be ashamed to show his face in Dáil Éireann but he keeps battling on. The only positive matter he had to deal with in his speech was the Crumlin swimming pool and in regard to that he has been sent from Billy to Jack in the last few years. God knows when the Minister will make up his mind to do something about it. But there was the usual Fianna Fáil alibi. He was sure it was not the Minister's fault but that there was some civil servant in some dark corner of the Custom House who was frustrating the noble heart of the Minister for Local Government who wanted to give joy to everybody and would do so if he were not frustrated by that wicked villain who was poking holes in the bottom of the Crumlin swimming pool. That is fraud and Deputy Dowling knows it is fraud. He is a courageous old fraud. He is trying to cover the Minister's flank as best he can but the real reason there is no swimming pool in Crumlin is that they have no money. It is all spent and on purposes which reflect little credit on them.
I do not know how Ballymun will turn out. I admit the Minister had bad luck with the weather. I went to see Ballymun and I was nearly lost in a quagmire. That was not the Minister's fault. I do not know how the whole theory of what they call system building will turn out. It is wonderful how calling a rose by some other name is meant to change it. I heard this type of building described as pre-fab and when they were pre-fabs, they were regarded as the appalling expedient to which the British people were driven as a result of the German blitz and the whole hope was to get the people of London out of the pre-fabs. Now we start building larger pre-fabs in Ballymun and we are all meant to stand up and give three cheers and regard this as a most revolutionary discovery and believe that whereas the one-storey pre-fab was the lowest thing you could have, the four-storey pre-fab is heaven.
I am told by architects in this city that the pre-fabs at Ballymun will cost more and last a shorter time than ordinary houses built by conventional methods which any contractor would be glad to undertake. I am not an expert in these matters and not in a position to judge, but I am certainly not fascinated by the aesthetic amenities of Ballymun, such as I was able to see there, and I discount the fact that the site was covered by a foot of mud which was nobody's fault. I do not know if any other Deputy would give us an appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of Ballymun or tell us what the houses or the scheme will look like. We must wait and see. I understand there are £9 million committed there and I hope we get value for our money, but in the meantime let us not forget the thousands of families —not hundreds—who are living in the city three and four to a room. Let us not forget the families living with their parents-in-law and let us, above all, not forget the families and the old people who are living in houses with rats, vermin and damp for their constant companions. There are too many Deputies who are ready to do so.
That refers to Dublin. I wrote a letter today to the Department of Industry and Commerce on behalf of a constituent in County Monaghan asking for a licence to import dutyfree a dismantled pre-fab from a back street in Belfast. The reason for that was that these people have no home: they cannot get a house from the local authority and there are no funds to provide them with a Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act loan. They have no place to lay their heads if they cannot import a pre-fab. The duty assessable on it is only £25 but they are poor people. I do not say that when I wrote to the Department on this matter I did not have some qualms but the people have to cover their heads somehow. They cannot get a house from the county council because the council has no money. They cannot get a loan under the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act. What else can they do? They cannot live under a tent. Deputies are closing their eyes to the facts in rural Ireland at present. Monaghan County Council are negotiating with London financiers to borrow £60,000 because they cannot get it from the Local Loans fund and, so far as I know, that £60,000 is to meet liabilities they have undertaken.
These matters are the responsibility of the Minister but they are not primarily his fault. The fault is with the Government and principally with the ex-Minister for Finance who is now elsewhere. In my considered judgment, there is no immediate prospect of any substantial mitigation of the financial stringency which lies at the root of this whole problem. I wonder how many Deputies realise that on Friday week last a widow woman brought her cow to the fair in rural Ireland not far from where Deputy Reynolds and I live. She sold the cow, she paid her rates and she had fifty shillings left over. It is insane for Deputies to consider the matters in this Estimate divorced from the facts of life relative to the people on whom this Estimate impinges. The Minister for Local Government, of course, has no responsibility to the House for the price of livestock but he ought to keep constantly present in his mind the incomes and the resources of the people who have to pay rates for the services which the local authorities are required to provide.
I warn this House that west of the Shannon and north of the Boyle we are rapidly reaching a point at which the rates are rising at such a rate and the incomes of the small farmers are declining at such a rate that it will be no longer possible to make both meet. I am warning the House now that in so far as the part of the country which lies west of the Shannon and north of the Boyle is concerned, if the price of livestock remains at the level at which it at present stands the people will not have the means to pay their rates. There are many Deputies in the House who know that as well as I do but they try to turn their eyes away.
Heretofore, if we saw a deficiency looming up in the rates the remedy was to turn to revenue and say: "Let the Government make up the difference". The Government are already raising every penny that taxation will yield and I prophesy that revenue under certain headings in this year will show evidence of the law of diminishing returns. I prophesy that the revenue from spirits, one of the mainstays of annual revenue, will show a diminishing return. Let us not console ourselves with the idea that if the incomes of the people in the congested areas fail to meet the rates demand it can be met from other sources. There may not be any other sources. I warn the House that we are at last coming in sight of the real possibility of the public services of this country breaking down.
Mark you, in some degree already the public services have broken down. Is it not a public service properly to house our people? I suggest it is and I suggest that our failure to do so, by almost unanimous agreement in this House, is not due to any illwill on the part of the Minister or to the illwill of any local authority. It is not due to any hyper-conservative approach in the Oireachtas or at local administrative level. It is due to the fact that we have no money.
We can sweep that problem under the carpet by pretending the houses are not unfit for human habitation and leaving the people in them but there comes a time when the estimates are made and the rates struck and the rate collector goes out and the widow woman says: "I will bring the cow out and sell her." She sells the cow, as in the case I have given. In that case she had fifty shillings left over. If the present trend continues the situation could easily arise in which when she had sold her cow she would be fifty shillings short. I warn the House that that day is not impossibly distant.
None of us has ever known of anything like that to happen; none of us has ever come within sight of it. If the situation is as grave as that how come it was not so after the economic war when prices of cattle were much worse than they are now? The difference was this: we had conserved our resources adequately, and I beg of the younger Deputies to wake up to this fact. This country of which we now constitute the Oireachtas entered into the world catastrophe of 1929 to 1931 and came out of it virtually unscathed. Austria was in chaos, Germany was in chaos, France was in chaos, the United States herself was in chaos and the astonishing fact is that Ireland was on an even keel because we had accumulated reserves to meet that situation. Fianna Fáil came in in 1932 and within 12 months they embarked on the economic war and we survived five years of that because we had accumulated then substantial reserves.
We are entering into a far more critical situation now and we have no reserves. We have scraped the bottom of every barrel and that is the heart of the problem with which the Minister for Local Government is trying to grapple at the present time. Most of us see his problem crystallised in housing. That is as it should be but wait until the services themselves break down, or what we have come to think of as the services. The health services have never started to function. I know a child who went to get a pair of spectacles. I saw her trying to read and she could barely read with the print up against her nose. She was three months waiting for an appointment and she has now been waiting a further month for glasses which she has not got yet. It may be due to circumstances of scarcity of money but this is part of the health services which are breaking down. Picture what will happen if that paralysis extends.
You, a Cheann Comhairle, will remember that I warned this House many times of the economic situation in which we find ourselves at the present time and it was a matter of cheerful derision among some of my colleagues on the far side who would not even listen. I am warning you again of another danger which is imminent and you had better face it because it will have to be dealt with if we are not to face a very grave crisis in the life of the State.
I want to refer to some specific matters that have been referred to by the Minister and some that have not. The first thing I want to mention is water pollution. Perhaps the Minister would indicate to me that water pollution comes particularly within his bailiwick. I do not want to trouble him with matters that should belong to the Minister for Health. Can the Minister inform me? I think, a Cheann Comhairle, matters relating to water pollution come within the ambit of the Minister for Local Government. At any rate I shall proceed on that assumption if he does not deny it.
This is a very gave problem for every community. It is a very dangerous problem if it is allowed to get out of hand. I do not know if Deputies are familiar with the system of the Great Lakes in America. There you have Michigan, Superior and Huron, which are practically three inland seas. The United States of America, with the onrush of their industrial development and during the past two wars, simply closed their eyes to the problem of water pollution. I think it is Huron which has now become a dead sea. There is no water life left at all in it. The waters of that lake have become so contaminated that nothing survives in it or can survive. In a populace like London, I think it is true to say that no one ever died by drowning cast of Tower Bridge; they are dead of poisoning before they have time to drown if they fall into the Thames.
Those are the extreme cases of water pollution, but I want to warn the House that we are in grave danger in this country of developing a water pollution problem which would become uncontrollable. What many people forget is that the problem of water pollution is a complex one. If you once allow pollution to take place uncontrolled, powerful vested interests grow up to maintain the pollution. The Swiss have perceived this problem and they, depending as they do so largely for their income on the tourist industry and the amenities of scenery, lakes, rivers and waterfalls, have provided an extremely stringent code. In Switzerland, water pollution is a major offence, and they have not hesitated to say that no matter how powerful or how wealthy the source of pollution may be, having been twice made amenable to the law for pollution, on the third occasion the business is closed down, and I think they are right. They give an offender ample time to mend his hand, and impose an appropriate penalty. If, having met the penalty, he then fails to set right the source of pollution, a further and heavier penalty is provided under the law. However, if after two offences the same pollution is perpetrated for a third time, the business is liable to be closed down.
I want to put it to the House that there are large areas in Ireland threatened with the same thing, partly from unprocessed sewage and partly from industrial waste. It is quite controllable now. In five years' time there would be vested interests so powerful that no local authority would be able to control it, and in ten years' time, if it continues as it does, there would be vested interests so powerful in pollution that the Government themselves would not be able to control it. The tragedy is that, if these matters are taken in time, I know of no form of urban or industrial pollution that cannot be controlled at reasonable cost provided measures are taken to control it before alternative processes are employed which involve pollution as an inherent part of their operation. There is no process in the disposal of waste that cannot be related to a process of purification in any industrial activity or in any urban development plan, but there are dozens of cheaper methods for disposing of polluting materials than processing them before discharging them into public waterways.
This problem is spreading not only throughout towns and cities but in rural Ireland, and it is spreading in some of the loveliest parts of Ireland. Wherever the tourist industry, particularly the transient tourist industry operates, you will find abundant sources of obnoxious pollution, and the tragic thing is that it is not infrequently created by people who imagine they are providing an amenity for transient tourism. Far from that being the case, they are providing a source of derision and condemnation for a tourist population who are directed to accommodation only to discover not only shocking pollution of streams and lakes but grotesquely primitive accommodation of a kind that should not be tolerated in any civilised country which purports to cater for the tourist trade.
Here again the Minister is up against the problem that he is harassed for money. I put it to him that the correction of pollution is very largely a matter which should be a charge on the source of pollution and should not involve either the Minister or the Government in any material charge whatever. I fully understand that it is not reasonable to ask the Minister for Local Government to call on his colleagues in other Departments to introduce Draconian laws to operate as of tomorrow, but what I do say is that Draconian regulations should forthwith be made with notice that they will come into operation in annual stages, and that we should fix a period not more than five years distance from today at which all sources of pollution will be categorically prohibited under the heaviest possible penalty. If we do not, we have no one but ourselves to blame if we see some of the loveliest amenities this country can boast about reduced to the desert which is represented by a lake like the one to which I have referred, or the Thames which disgraces the heart of the city of London.
There is another matter which, I want to warn Dáil Éireann, should now be brought under control. In five years' time it will present an almost insuperable problem, that is, the problem of the abandoned car chassis. In the United States and in Britain, this has reached a problem of such immense dimensions that State governments in the United States and local authorities in England appear to be paralysed by it. In the United States, in certain areas, it has reached such a dimension that it has become possible to instal huge crushing machines which, in some mysterious way, can reduce those chassis bodies to scrap of small compass which is acceptable to smelting mills. But the trouble is that to do that you have to have a very large volume of these abandoned chassis to justify the capital involved in installing such apparatus and it is not to be contemplated that you can instal a central plant in a country like Ireland to which the chassis bodies can be drawn from all parts of the country, because the transport costs would be utterly prohibitive.
Therefore, we are faced with the danger which any Deputy must himself be witness of of travelling rural roads and seeing accumulating, gradually emerging from behind ditches, dumps of abandoned motor chassis. Here again the problem is of a dimension which can easily be brought under control at the present time but, unless it is, it will reach dimensions at which it will be virtually impossible to control it.
Although it is none of my business to tell the Minister how to overcome difficulties of this kind, I suggest that, at present, immediate and urgent steps should be taken that every individual should be required where such debris is deposited upon his property either to remove it himself or to be liable to have the local authority remove it to the town dump at the cost of the person on whose property it is found. It is up to each individual to prevent his neighbour dumping chassis on his field if he does not want to make himself liable. Alternatively, if somebody dumps chassis on his field, nolens volens he should be given the right to recover from the depositor of the abandoned chassis whatever cost or charge the local authority has made for removing the vehicle from his land to the appropriate town dump. Unless you do that, you are going to face a growing problem which in a small country such as this could be extremely intractable and, I can assure the House, is a growing cause of scandal not only to ourselves but to tourists whom we invite to visit the country.
All that I have said in regard to abandoned chassis applies also to industrial waste and rubbish. That is pretty generally accepted by everybody. Few people recognise the magnitude, the growing size, I should say, of the abandoned chassis problem and it ought to be dealt with on the lines I have suggested.
There is another matter to which I want to refer, not for the first time. It grieves me to recollect that I have been mentioning it for 25 years in this House. I propose to go on mentioning it as long as I am a Member of the House. There is a lot of claptrap talked here about the housing of the aged. The aged want to be left at home so long as they have their own homes to stay in. They do not want to be housed by anybody. They would much sooner have their own room with their own things around them. But, we have to face the fact that some old people who are left alone in the world reach a time of life when they are unable to look after themselves. They fall in the fire or in the kitchen and maybe break a hip and their neighbours and friends worry for their safety. I want to point out to the House that that is a problem of quite limited size in rural Ireland. If you were to ask me about the five principal towns in my own constituency or the town in which I live in the west of Ireland, I do not suppose I would be able to name 20 persons in the six towns who fall within that category but because you are old and feeble and alone is no reason why you should be treated like the abandoned chassis of a broken down motorcar and collected and dumped in a central dump for human refuse. To go into the home—it may be the humblest room in the town—and take an old person out of it on the ground that they are too feeble to cook themselves a meal or too feeble to get about the house in safety without running the danger of breaking a limb or maybe no longer able to get out of bed, and carry them 30 miles off and plank them in the county home 30 miles away from their friends, 30 miles away from the place they are accustomed to, and forget them, has always seemed to me one of the most inhuman features of the society to which we belong.
I have often told the story in this House, and will tell it again, about an old personal friend of mine who grew old and had no relatives and I well remember we all of us, neighbours, would send him soup one day and a pie or something the next day and drop in and out to see him but eventually the time came when it was no longer possible to leave him alone because you were afraid he might fall in the fire or break his hip in the night and die on the floor. We decided that the only thing to do was to send him to the county home. He went to the county home. Three or four years later I had occasion to visit the county home on other business. I was walking down the old men's ward when a man hailed me from the bed and I turned round and, lo and behold, there was my old friend. I thought he was dead and buried and I think everyone else thought he was dead and buried. Suddenly it struck me, the tragedy of that old man alone in the county home ward and there was not a living creature who even knew he was alive, except, indeed, the nuns who were looking after him. Good as they were to him, they were not his family, his background, his neighbours.
All that could be resolved if we had a parish charity. If anybody wants to know what a parish charity is, let him go to Castleblaney. There are a good many of them scattered throughout the country, some of them of medieval origin, endowments left in the 16th and 17th century. They have been used to build a group of flats. Some of them have an endowment actually for the people put into them —10/- or 12/- in addition to the old age pension. Others have no such endowment but may have a small flat, maybe only one room and a kitchen. There is provision also for a warden who may be a lady or a man who looks after them. They call in on one another and if one gets bedridden the neighbours who live in the parish charity all lend a hand to keep the room clean and give him a drop of tea in the bed and help him in any way they can. At all times the housekeeper or warden or whatever you like to call the person, who is usually a retired nurse or a retired jubilee nurse or somebody of that kind who is glad to get a comfortable apartment and a modest stipend, helps to look after these old people and they are as happy as larks. They have the right to invite a friend in. If they meet him down the town they can ask him in for a cup of tea. It gives them a pride. They are not always accepting hospitality. When they meet a person down the town, they can say: "Come up and have a cup of tea." Then they are not ashamed later on to visit their friends and spend an evening by the fire in their homes. They are still members of the community. They are not forgotten or abandoned.
I understand the Minister for Health or the Minister for Local Government is spending hatfuls of money rebuilding all the county homes. I believe it would be disastrous if we burdened ourselves with a whole lot of elaborate county homes into which the aged poor of rural Ireland are to be from time to time shovelled when there is nobody left to look after them. These people have votes, but they do not use them—they are too old. They have no families. They have no influence. They are largely forgotten. They are the people who have the most obvious right to depend on us, the elected representatives in Dáil Éireann, to ensure that we do not forget them. If we continue to shovel them into the county homes, it is because we are forgetting them deliberately or it is criminal carelessness. If we remember them, if we intend to see them justly treated, we will find a better way of providing for the few years that are left to them. I can say with a clear conscience that it is not autumnal leaves that have made me so suddenly solicitous for this class of citizen. I was talking on this topic in the green wood as well as in the dry.
I am glad to see, Sir, one confession at least made in the speech by the Minister for Local Government at page 29 of the verbose document with which he supplied us. I thank him for his courtesy in circulating a copy of his speech for the convenience of Deputies. He said:
As regards the changes in motor tax law effected by this year's Finance Act, I think it only right to remind the House that, while it became necessary to draw extra revenue from motor vehicles for general Exchequer purposes, the full income of the Road Fund from 1965 rates of taxation has been preserved for road purposes.
Have ever so many words been used to conceal the simple fact that this year the Government raided the Road Fund? I advise Deputies to note a difference. Whereas heretofore any Government who raided the Road Fund came into this House and said so openly, we are borrowing this year from the Road Fund to meet the exigencies of the taxation situation. I want to suggest to Deputies that this is a formula which has been employed for the first time. Unless I am greatly mistaken, the purpose of that formula is to prepare the House for the entertaining news that the raid introduced in 1966 is to be a permanent feature of Fianna Fáil taxation. I shall wait with interest to see if that is so. If it is, it is a very shortsighted economy. If the tourist trade is to develop, everybody says from all sides of the House that the road system is an essential part of the infrastructure of an expanding community. The paragraph I have quoted from page 24 of the Minister's statement augurs ill for the maintenance of that infrastructure of roads.
The last paragraph I want to refer to is something to which the Minister referred at page 32. He said:
During the year, an agreement was entered into for aerial surveys, at State expense, of built up areas of 1,000 population and over.
Again, 25 years ago I urged in this House that the time was long overdue, not only for the purpose of urban planning but for the Ordnance Survey, for the purpose of archacology, for the Board of Works, for the Department of Agriculture and now, lo and behold, for the Department of Local Government, for an aerial survey to be carried out. What is going to happen, what always happens when you have incompetence running the Government, is that we are going to have about seven aerial surveys, all independently conducted by seven different Departments, all of them from a different height, all of them from a different angle, all of them at a different season. It will have occurred to nobody that, if you do not do an aerial survey at approximately the same season, the same height and the same angle, it is impossible to integrate it at all and it becomes virtually useless except for a specific purpose in the strictly limited area where it is conducted.
In the name of commonsense, if the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Local Government require a survey, if a variety of other Departments are all agreed that an aerial survey is necessary and desirable, is it impossible to get the Departments to sit down together and agree to have it done over the whole country once and for all? In this way it can be placed on the records of the Ordnance Survey where anybody, instead of getting the map of the peripatetic survey to which he is confined at present, could apply for an aerial map of his own holding or any other area in which he has a legitimate interest.
Is that commonsense and economy or is the procedure of which the Minister's proposal forms part the sensible way of going about it? I suggest to the Minister the proposal he envisages in page 32 of his speech is a fragmented, uneconomic and futile effort; but if he approaches the other Minister's to whom I have referred, he may find that by combining resources, not excluding the Department of Defence, it will be possible to get an integrated survey of the whole country which will be of value to all.
I have dealt with a number of minor issues but I come back to the issue which dominates them all. That is the knowledge present in the minds of all of us that there are thousands of our neighbours at this moment living in intolerable conditions because they have no homes. I want the Government to awaken to an appropriate sense of guilt so that they may be actuated with a sense of emergency correctly to marshal our resources in order to remedy this horrible state of affairs. I draw the attention of the House to volume 194, No. 11, of the Official Report of Dáil Éireann for Wednesday, 11th April, 1962, from which I quote:
It is true that for some years— 1957, 1958 and 1959—we had reached a situation in which housing needs had been almost completely, if not completely, met over the greater part of the country. In Dublin and in the other cities, the problem of housing had been greatly reduced by emigration. There was a stage two or three years ago.
—when this speech was made in 1962—
when Dublin Corporation had 1,500 empty dwellings available for people who needed them...
But the people were not there to occupy them. The alibi is then advanced that, with the rapid return of the population from Britain to Dublin and the substantial reduction in emigration, the picture has changed completely. He had not the census figures before him at the time because the author of that paragraph which I have read to the House was Deputy Seán Lemass, the Taoiseach.
Compare the housing situation in 1957, 1958 and 1959 with the situation that obtains today in this year of 1966. Remember that, in the meantime, we have doubled taxation and, since that speech from which I have read an extract to the House was made, have borrowed between £200 million and £300 million. Deputy de Valera's constituency is still looking like a bombarded city, to use his own words. There are thousands of families living four and five in one room and there are uncounted hundreds living in dwellings that ought to be condemned. The Minister may forget all else I say if he remembers that horrible debacle and realises that if he has not a personal responsibility to hang his head for shame, he has joint responsibility, with the other members of the Government who disgrace this country at the present time, to do public penance.
Deputy Dowling asks what are the Government to do, then—he does say that, you know—and he asks me emphatically not to find fault if I am not able to offer them a remedy. There is only one remedy and that is to go away and to make way for other men who could not be worse than what we have got and I give it as my considered judgment that they would be good for this State.
