Local Government (Roads and Drainage) Bill, 1968: Second Stage.

Minister for Local Government (Mr. Boland)

Tairgim go léitear an Bille an Dara h-Uair.

Dúirt mé sa Teach seo i mí Mheithimh seo caite gur shocraigh an Rialtas go n-aistreofaí go dtí na comhairlí contae na scéimeanna a deintear faoi láthair faoi chúram Rannóg na Scéimeanna Speisialta Fostaíochta den Roinn. Is é cuspóir an Bhille seo ná é sin a chomhlíonadh tré na cumhachta is gá a thabhairt dos na comhairlí contae. Déanfar an aistriú ar an céad lá d'Aibreán agus mar sin gabhann práinn leis an mBille.

Bille simplí é, i mo thuairim, agus ní dóigh liom go mbeidh aon duine ina choinnibh. Is mór an áis do mhuintir na tuaithe na scéimeanna seo, agus go mórmhór do mhuintir an Iarthair, iad san a mhaireann ar na feirmeacha beaga.

I announced in the House in June last that the Government had decided that the grants operated by the Special Employments Schemes Section of my Department for farmers' roads, bog roads and minor drainage works would in future be administered under a single scheme and that the county councils were being asked to administer that scheme, subject to the general control of my Department. Since then the county councils have been advised of the details of the new scheme and, with very few exceptions, have indicated their willingness to operate it.

The purpose of this Bill is to grant the county councils the necessary powers to implement the new arrangements, and in effect to carry out the schemes formerly administered as the Bog Development, Minor Employment and Rural Improvement Schemes by the Special Employment Schemes Office, which recently became the Special Employment Schemes Section of my Department. The Bill itself is a relatively simple measure. Section 2 confers the power of a county council to enter into an agreement with landholders for the construction or improvement of accommodation roads and bog roads and for the execution of minor drainage schemes to serve land or bogs. Section 3 provides that the expense of the work will be shared between the State and the benefiting landholders. Section 4 authorises the making of State grants to the county councils for the purpose of the new scheme.

I have already, in the course of my reply on 6th February to the debate on the Estimate for my Department, outlined the main features of the new scheme. To facilitate Deputies I shall repeat the main points.

It will be known as the Local Improvements Scheme and will operate as a single contributory scheme. This is a logical step as all the three existing schemes deal with the same type of work. The new arrangement will make it easier to administer the scheme and should help to reduce the costs of administration, thus ensuring that more of the available money is devoted to the works themselves. It will also help to ensure that grants are allocated for the most necessary works. To facilitate participation in the scheme by landholders in the congested Western areas reduced rates of local contribution will apply in cases where the average valuation of the landholders is low. Thus, the maximum rate will be 2½ per cent in the case of valuations under £5, compared with 10 per cent under the Rural Improvements Scheme in the past.

A bulk allocation will be made each year to each county council. Out of this the council will make grants for individual schemes coming within the scope of the Bill, which, as I have indicated, means schemes such as the Special Employment Schemes Office carried out in the past. The council will select the schemes to be done in the year, enter into agreements with the landholders, collect their contributions and then execute the schemes. Priority in the recruitment of workmen will be accorded to suitable unemployed men registered at the Employment Exchanges. Councils have also been requested to give priority on the new scheme to gangers and other supervisory officials formerly employed by the Special Employment Schemes Office. Gangers and others with the requisite service under the Special Employment Schemes Office will be paid the allowances for which they are eligible under the Superannuation Acts or the Redundancy Payments Act.

It is intended that the cost of the new scheme will be met by the State grant plus the landholders' contributions. In calculating the cost the county council will be entitled to include a percentage charge in respect of administrative expenses. Of course, the lower this is, the more of the available money that will be devoted to the actual works. I should say that a prime consideration in transferring the schemes to county councils is the fact that the maintenance of a separate organisation engaged exclusively on carrying out so many scattered, small schemes involved high overhead costs. It is hoped that substantial economies will be effected under this head by using the existing county council organisation. We shall keep this aspect of costs specially under review. I may say that the scheme will not involve any responsibility on the part of the county council for future maintenance.

In addition to carrying out the Bog Development, Minor Employment and Rural Improvement Schemes, the Special Employment Schemes Office acted as agents for Roinn na Gaeltachta in respect of grants allocated by that Department for accommodation roads in the Gaeltacht, and for the Department of Transport and Power in respect of grants for road and drainage works serving bogs used for the production of turf for the hand-won turf fired electricity generating stations in Counties Donegal, Galway, Clare and Kerry. It is intended that the county councils will act in the future for these Departments, and the Bill has been drafted accordingly. The Ministers concerned will make allocations to the county councils to enable them to do the necessary works.

As I have mentioned, practically all the county councils have indicated their willingness to operate the Local Improvements Scheme and I am sure that the very few remaining will shortly agree. I wish to pay a tribute to the good sense and public spirit shown by the councils in this matter. The Local Improvements Scheme, like its predecessors, is designed to improve the conditions under which the farming community live and work. These schemes have proved particularly valuable to the smallholders in the West; indeed in the current year the great bulk of the allocations for the three schemes combined went to the West.

I have confidence in commending the Bill to the House. I should add that, in order to avoid a break in continuity, it is necessary to have the Bill enacted by 1st April, when the county councils take over.

Mr. T.J. Fitzpatrick

(Cavan): This Bill deals with lanes or secondary roads and small drainage schemes. These two matters affect vitally the enjoyment of life by great numbers of people residing in rural Ireland. In my opinion, the next greatest necessity to people living in rural Ireland, after housing, is to have a reasonable means of access to their houses.

There are many people living in what in my constituency are called lanes who find it practically impossible to get, with any degree of comfort, from their houses to the main roads. I know of many cases where women going to the town, going to church or going anywhere else along the main road, wear wellington boots out as far as the main road, and then leave those wellington boots in a neighbour's house on the main road and put on the type of footwear which they like to wear on the way to where they are going. They have to do that because it is utterly impossible to walk the lanes without walking in inches of mud and water. I know how strongly people feel about the fact that they are being treated as second-rate citizens living in these inaccessible places. They are quite happy to live in these places, because that is their tradition as country people; they do not like living in towns, but they do feel badly about the fact that they cannot walk these lanes with any degree of comfort.

So much for the pedestrians. People who have to drive motorcars up to these houses, whether they are the owners of the houses, or whether they are members of the clergy, veterinary surgeons, members of the medical profession, employees of cattle breeding societies, all these people find it very difficult if not impossible to drive in these lanes. Furthermore, if a farmer buys a tractor and he is living on a lane that is used by himself and three or four other people, a couple of whom may also be using tractors, the lane becomes badly cut up and gets into an indescribable condition; yet because it is shared as a common lane by a number of people, it is the responsibility of nobody in particular. Some of them may want to repair it; others of them may not.

Those are some of the examples I should like to put before the House. I think one has to have been brought up in the country to feel strongly about these things. One has to know country people and to be in close contact with them to know their feelings about the difficulty of travelling along these roads or lanes which serve a number of houses and which are the responsibility of nobody in particular. I have emphasised the position regarding lanes more than the position regarding drainage, because lanes affect the everyday life of the people who are living there particularly the women and children in the house. The question of drainage of the small rivers and these local schemes is also very important because lack of drainage is causing the flooding of valuable lands and small holdings.

If I thought the introduction of this Bill was something new and something that would solve these problems, I would extend a céad míle fáilte to it, and I would deal with it in a matter of minutes and sit down, but unfortunately I am not satisfied that this measure which is nothing new, which really is a passing of the buck of the rural improvement schemes further along the line is a genuine effort to clean up or deal with these crying out grievances.

Up to a couple of years ago the scheme known as the rural improvement scheme was dealt with by the Minister for Finance through his Parliamentary Secretary in charge of the Board of Works. We all know that in August of 1965 the Department, for all practical purposes, discontinued receiving or accepting applications under that scheme. We were then told that the rural improvement schemes and the other schemes which were operated in conjunction with it—minor relief schemes and bog road schemes—were being transferred from the Department of Finance to the Department of Local Government.

We all hoped that the Minister for Local Government being in closer touch with rural Ireland than the Minister for Finance, there would be a greater appreciation of the difficulties about which I spoke and a more generous approach to the solving of those difficulties. Far from a speeding up of the works supposed to be covered by this Bill—the repair of boreens, byroads and lanes, and also drainage—there was no improvement whatever. As a matter of fact, things seemed to slow down further. Last year when any Deputy made representations, he was told that as from 1st April next the scheme was being handed over to the local authorities to be dealt with by them.

Again, I suppose, we hoped there would be some improvement, and we commenced writing to our local authorities. So many applications were the local authorities receiving that they stencilled a reply stating that they were receiving a great number of applications which had been allowed to accumulate in the Department of Local Government, and I suppose in the Department of Finance, and that it was not possible for any county council to say when an application sent in now would be dealt with because there was such a heavy list of arrears.

I am afraid I have not much faith in this further transfer of this scheme from the Department of Local Government to the county councils, it having already being transferred from the Department of Finance to the Department of Local Government. I say that because the scheme is to be operated under sections 3 and 4 by finance supplied by the Department of Local Government with some local contributions. I should like to ask the Minister is he prepared to be more generous now in 1968-69 than he was in 1967-68 and than the Minister for Finance was in 1966-67 and the previous year. I do not think he is. The Minister said that bulk allocations will be made each year to each county council. My information is that the provisional sum which has been allocated to the Cavan County Council in this year is £14,000. I put this to the Minister by way of a supplementary question within the past week or two and he did not seem to contradict it. The sum is £14,000 not-withstanding the fact that a sum of £30,000 approximately was spent in the past 12 months. If this is a measure of the grants to be given to the various local authorities under this Bill, I have not much faith in it.

I should also like to say that this measure seems to be a poor imitation of the Local Authorities (Works) Act, 1949, which was introduced and operated by the Government at that time and which was discontinued or allowed to dry up by the present Government on their return to power. This is a poor imitation of that measure because the Local Authorities (Works) Act allowed the local authorities to do the type of work covered by this Bill. Provision was made in the Estimates for grants to the local authorities, but irrespective of the grants, they could go ahead and raise money to repair lanes and roads which they did not take in charge, and do drainage for which they were not directly responsible out of money provided by the rates. There is no such provision in this Bill.

This Bill is confined in its operation, so far as I can see, to such works as can be carried out under the grant which will come from the Department of Local Government, with the assistance of local contributions. As I say, for Cavan County Council, the provisional figure is £14,000. The county council, out of the grant, will have to defrav the cost of the administration of the scheme. I do not know whether the Minister will contradict me or not but I am told that practically all local authorities say that the suggested figure of 10 per cent of the grant, which the Minister says is sufficient to operate the scheme, is totally inadequate because the local authorities will have to investigate many more schemes than will eventually be done. I am told that local authorities are not satisfied that they will be able to administer the scheme within the suggested 10 per cent. That means that the grant will be eaten into in the payment of expenses. I am convinced that this Bill is merely an effort to farm out the administration of the Rural Improvements Scheme on local authorities and to relieve the Department of Local Government and the Exchequer in general of the expense of running that scheme. If the measure of the grant that I have suggested, as applied to County Cavan, is an indication of the type of grant that is being given to the remainder of the country then we would be foolish indeed to be over-optimistic about this scheme.

The Minister admitted to me in the House a short time ago that 80 cases which had not been dealt with in his Department were being handed over to Cavan County Council to be dealt with as from the 1st April. I can tell him that in addition to those 80 something like 40 or 50 others have been received in the county council offices since this scheme was announced. I can also tell him that, without making any allowance for administration, the £14,000, with a small contribution which the smallholders of Cavan would be entitled to pay, would not deal with more than 20 cases in the next 12 months. Unless the Minister drastically revises his provision by way of grants it means that even with costs remaining as at present it would take four or five years to clean up the arrears of applications which have accumulated, never mind dealing with current cases.

In the light of my experience since I became a member of the Oireachtas and particularly in the light of my experience in dealing with constituents in a constituency which is blistered with this type of scourge—that is all I can call it—in the last four years I shall have to await the first year of operation of this scheme and in particular I shall have to await the announcement of final grants for the year 1968-69 before I am in a position to say more about this measure than that I am not very hopeful of it.

Having said that, I should like to take the opportunity to deal with a few problems that have arisen under these rural improvements schemes down the years. You have five people, say, living in a lane and three or four of them are very anxious to get the lane repaired under a grant and co-operate with each other and with the Department operating the grant because they are progressive and want to make life a little more bearable for themselves and their families, but the other one or two, for some reason or other, whether cussedness or not, or because they do not want to agree with their neighbours or because they do not want to spend the money or because they are awkward people, will not co-operate in any way to get the work done.

They will not take off a gate even where a gate is unnecessary; they will not allow a few yards of their land to be removed to increase the width of the road or lane or take off a bad turn. I believe power should be taken in this measure to make it compulsory on a minority to comply with the scheme which is for the benefit of the majority as well as for the benefit of the minority themselves. The behaviour of such people is unchristian; many of them do it I believe out of badness and they have no higher motives than that they would not satisfy their neighbours or the other people living in the lane by having it cleaned up. As far as I know at present, unless all the people in the lane sign to comply with the minimum requirements of the Department, whatever they are, the work is not done. I say that statutory power should be taken here to do it and do it with the minimum of red tape and delay. Adequate protection should, of course, be given so that the rights of these people will not be abused but they should have a very quick and very short appeal to the district court, as was done in the Local Authorities (Works) Act, where compensation was to be assessed and get the matter over and done with. The next thing I want to deal with is somewhat similar——

Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Local Government (Mr. P. Brennan)

Even where they are contributing in the first case?

Mr. T.J. Fitzpatrick

(Cavan): I am coming to the contributory people now. I have been dealing with the fellow who would not allow the lane to be touched and I now want to deal with the point raised by the Parliamentary Secretary. This is a contributory scheme and so was the rural improvements scheme which it replaces. That meant that where six or seven people living in one of these lanes were having it repaired, when the scheme went up to the Department an inspector came down and costed the scheme with regard to the poor law valuation of all the inhabitants of the lane. He went back and, as a result of his report, a certain small contribution was put on each rated occupier in that lane. To give fair play where it is due, the contribution was not excessive. We all had the hard case where a person could not pay but by and large the local contribution was reasonable. The point, however, is that again you had four or five people in the lane who were prepared to pay the contribution but two or three others would not pay. I regret to have to say it was not always the person who could not pay who did not pay. If a person did not pay because he could not pay, very often the others would not mind paying up the difference and indeed the Department very often relaxed the general contribution. But, as I say, in quite a number of cases, people would not pay because they would not satisfy the other people to have the lane done, because they did not want it done themselves or because they were indifferent.

If there is to be a local contribution levy under the scheme—and as far as I can see, section 2 provides for a contribution—it should not be levied in mid-air as it is at present. It should be levied on the rates of the people living in the lanes in proportion to their valuation, with power to the county council in cases of individual hardship to reduce or limit the contribution.

I am making that suggestion to the Minister because I know from my experience that the failure of rated occupiers to pay this contribution has meant in many cases that the work has not gone ahead and the majority are deprived of benefits which would otherwise be conferred upon them. It is no answer to say: "Why do not the people who want to get it done pay up all the contributions?" The answer to that is that very often that is done where a poor person is unable to pay. But, even at the risk of cutting off their nose to spite their face, they will not contribute for somebody who is going to reap as much benefit as they are and who can well afford to pay the contribution.

That is all I want to say at this stage. With those suggestions for its improvement, I am prepared to give the Bill a trial for 12 months. If at the end of 12 months there has been a speeding up of the clearing up of this scourge in my constituency I will, in common with the rest of the country, be the first to stand up and thank the Minister and congratulate him, if he is still in office.

Mr. Treacy

I believe my county is one of the counties which have declined to co-operate——

Mr. Boland

It is agreed now.

Mr. Treacy

——with the Minister for some considerable time in respect of this measure. The reasons must be quite obvious. It is a great pity that when the Minister was drawing up proposals designed to deal effectively with the taking in charge of these roads off the beaten track, boreens and bogroads and minor drainage schemes, he did not bring in legislation in a form which would have really effective results. This is an ill-conceived piece of legislation designed to fob off responsibility from the Board of Works to the local authorities. It is being done primarily because the rural improvements scheme office as we know it can hardly be said to be operating at all in recent years.

The various works they usually performed had come to a grinding halt as the result of the inability of the Department of Finance to make available the necessary capital for the purpose of assisting people to repair roads and do the many other things contained in this measure. A stage had been reached when we were told that no useful purpose would be served by the reception of any further requests for assistance by way of taking in charge of roads because of the long list of schemes to be dealt with—schemes which the Employment Schemes Office could not deal with for a number of years to come. Applicants were told quite definitely that it was futile for them to apply because of the lack of financial accommodation.

I can well understand therefore that the various schemes administered by the Special Employment Schemes Office were a source of great embarrassment to the Government and that they had to find a quick way out. The quick way out was to transfer the work carried out by that Office to the county councils. When the county councils were informed of this transfer of responsibility, it was met with a very cool reception, to say the least. My council was most unwilling to acquiesce in this directive, primarily because it was not being properly funded for the purpose. The allocation of moneys for this purpose was totally inadequate. It involved an extra charge on the local authority which they could ill afford to meet. It is well known that the various schemes to which I refer are schemes which county councils find great difficulty in coping with and down through the years they have relied on State aid for this purpose. These are schemes which simply could not be carried out from the rates, so to speak, from the council's own revenue.

It is only fair to pay a tribute to the Special Employment Schemes Office for the great work they achieved in this regard. They had built up an excellent work force and a very competent engineering section. It is to their credit that they provided many of our people, especially in isolated rural areas, with such much-needed amenities as decent passageways to their houses or farms, drainage of land and construction of bridges and so on.

I am sure it came as a great shock to the Office that they were to be disbanded by the Government and that this new device was being contrived to transfer responsibility to the county councils. The county councils have said that these extra responsibilities of necessity entail extra costs, and most probably will result in the appointment of at least one additional engineer, the appointment of additional engineers at a time when it is alleged that many of these engineers are becoming more and more redundant because of the inability of county councils to proceed with very many major work schemes, particularly in the sphere of piped water supplies, major schemes of road works and piped water supplies for which money is not being provided by the Government. It is appreciated that many of our engineering staff have been unemployed for some years past by reason of the stagnation which has taken place in respect of these major schemes.

Debate adjourned.

Dáil Éireann debate - Tuesday, 27 Feb 1968