When a road is repaired, can it be automatically taken over by the county council and kept in repair or will it be necessary for the county council to do, as they have to do at present, declare the road a public road and take it over?
Committee on Finance. - Local Government (Roads and Drainage) Bill, 1968: Committee and Final Stages.
Section 1 agreed to.
SECTION 2.
Question proposed: "That section 2 stand part of the Bill."
It will still be the same procedure.
Under this section you can repair roads and drains but can anything be done as regards the maintenance of them? Will the local authority be empowered to maintain them in a reasonable state of repair afterwards? In the past there was criticism made of the Local Authorities (Works) Act, particularly by Fianna Fáil members, because no provision was made for maintenance. We all agree this was a good Act which gave good employment. But the argument that there was no provision for maintenance was made on numerous occasions, particularly at the General Council of County Councils. It was the one fault they had to find with it. Is there any provision in this Bill to maintain these roads and drains?
No, the position with regard to these will be the same as it is at present. It is only if roads are taken over that they become maintained roads. We are dealing with non-maintained roads.
The Minister will have had the experience in parts of Wicklow of going up boreens a mile or two long. The people at the end of those roads have to pay taxes and to pay for such amenities as tarred roads, perhaps autobahns and speedways, as well as for sewerage and other services. These people have been neglected. Would the Minister not think the time has come when provision should be made for these people, that when the roads are made and put into proper repair at the expense of the taxpayers and the ratepayers, they should not be allowed to deteriorate again, but should be taken over by the local authorities and maintained? These people have been relegated to the position of second-class citizens for long enough. It is no wonder they are leaving rural Ireland. In the past few days in parts of County Wicklow, I have had to travel up roads where you could not get a donkey and cart. You had to leave the car and walk a mile or so and sometimes even take to the fields.
Would the Deputy state how he fared when he got to the end?
They are nice hospitable people. Many of them who told us they would not vote for us nevertheless asked us in for a cup of tea. I am quite certain we will get a sufficient number of votes there to have Godfrey Timmons here next week to help us make a case that something be done for these neglected areas. Does the Minister think it right to spend the money of the ratepayers and the taxpayers improving these roads and then not making provision to have them properly maintained? It is spending money unwisely.
This road improvement scheme has been in existence already for a number of years under the Special Employments Schemes Office and in many areas, therefore, the greater part of the roads are already improved and, in most cases, down in Cork anyway, taken over by the county council. I want to find out the position about overcoming objections. Most of the cases left in my district are cases where objections arose due to difficulty between parties, due to the fact that the beneficiaries of the households on the roads are not on the best of terms. Where you have five farmers on a road and for some reason or other, one objects to the improvement of the road, what happens then? If the council find that the objection is based on spiteful motives—that is what I am talking about—can they overrule it? Unfortunately, that is the difficulty that exists and I am sure it has arisen in cases all over the country where you have objections submitted and no good grounds given, arising out of spiteful motives, where bad relations exist between neighbours. I do not think it is fair that one person should hold up a scheme. I believe that where an objection is made by an interested party, an obligation should be thrown on that party to sustain the objection, and give reason for it. I am not as conversant as I should be with the terms of the previous Act under which a person can apply for an order to enter on land. That makes for bad feelings. I should like an explanation from the Minister and I should like him to put this matter of objections in a nutshell.
So far as the taking over of roads by local authorities is concerned, Cork County Council have a reasonably good scheme. Where a roadway is improved up to council standards and where there are two dwelling houses or more on the road, it is taken over by the council. I think you cannot go beyond that. It is a matter for individual councils to deal with the taking over of roadways, once they are improved.
I rise to endorse the appeal Deputy Murphy has made to the Minister on this question of objectors when such schemes are proposed. Deputy Murphy has said practically everything I had intended to say. It is about time something was done about those people, particularly the people who, for spite, refuse to co-operate with others who wish to improve the conditions surrounding their homes. This was also dealt with pretty adequately by some speakers on Second Stage. Obviously it must be a very widespread and frequent occurrence since so many people advert to it. In almost every area one can think of, schemes have been rejected just because someone, through spite, would not co-operate with the majority. In some cases the money was put up and still there was the odd man out who failed to co-operate. I should like to add my voice to the voices of other Deputies in this appeal.
I know the Minister does not want to be kept much longer but I have one comment to make. Section 2 refers simply to land and does not refer to dwelling houses. The Minister may or may not be aware of the fact that quite a number of local authorities have been taking over roads and, where there are two or more dwelling houses, declaring them public roads. There are a number of these roads which cannot be repaired by the county councils under the present legislation—which we refer to as the McQuillan Act— because of the fact that they are not properly fenced or because there are gates on the roads. I want to make it clear that this is not a question of the money involved. It is a question of the power to do this that stops the county councils at present. The councils are precluded from doing repairs to these roads because they are not properly fenced or because there are gates. Will the Minister say if he considers they should be done under this Bill?
With regard to the question of maintenance, unless the roads or laneways are declared a public utility and taken over by the county councils, maintenance is a matter for those who are served by them. That is the basis on which these schemes have always operated. If they deteriorate, they can always be dealt with in the same way again. If the councils were to maintain them, it would be equivalent to taking them over. If they are a public utility, this can be done. Generally speaking, I think councils are not inclined to take over all these lanes because of the responsibility which would devolve on them. This scheme is, I think, reasonably satisfactory. Probably it can be expanded to cover a sufficient number of these lanes.
With regard to the question of overcoming objections, in general I do not think it desirable to give county councils the power to use compulsory rights in relation to one of these schemes. Where the consent of an interested party appears to have been withheld unreasonably it would be more desirable to try to use persuasion. Officers of the Special Employment Schemes Office have been fairly successful in dealing with such cases in the past. I do not think compulsory powers are desirable.
You get the contrary old devil who will not agree with anyone.
Deputies seem to know a lot of cases but, in fact, they are very few.
They may not come to the Minister's notice.
The experience has been that only a very small proportion of the schemes were held up because of objections. A check was carried out in 1961-62 and it was found to be about one per cent only of the total schemes. Compulsory powers would require legislation and when legislation proposing any interference with private citizens is introduced, the Oireachtas generally reacts against it.
Surely the common good must come in here?
It does, but the fact of the matter is that there are sufficient schemes in which objections were overcome to carry on with in any case. Generally speaking, where there are objections like this, they are not insoluble, with a certain amount of local leadership and persuasion on the part of the county council officials. These objections are not always without cause and they are, in some cases, the outcome of long-standing disputes between neighbours. For the county council to come in and appear to side with one party to the dispute would be likely to involve an increase in bitterness rather than solving it.
In the case of roads, while it will be a matter for the council to decide what they can do, the Special Employment Schemes Office has in the past proceeded without the consent of an individual objector, provided certain conditions are fulfilled; if the road is clearly defined, preferably between fences, and provided the applicants for the grant have definitely got a right of way over it; provided also that the work on the section of the road through the objecting landholder's land is necessary for the continued enjoyment of the right of way and is confined to the width of the existing road surface and that there is no trespass on or interference of any sort with his land; provided also that the user of the road is not extended so that persons not entitled to use it shall have a right of passage after the work has been carried out, and provided that while repairs are in progress, the objecting landholder is not deprived of the use of the road in a reasonable way on his ordinary business.
The experience is that there are very few of these cases and generally speaking they can be got over. I do not think it is desirable, or has been shown to be so, to give compulsory rights to the councils in this respect. In regard to the question raised by Deputy Tully, land in this section includes a dwellinghouse and it can be used where dwelling-houses are concerned.
Is the Minister not prepared to make any concession or give any power to county councils to take over and maintain those roads in proper repair? Westmeath County Council, for example, puts 4d on the rates each year and we take over something like 24 roads.
They can continue to do that.
But rates are increasing and constitute an unbearable burden now. It is all right for the officials to smile——
Even officials should be allowed to smile.
Yes, but there are people living at the end of roads like these paying taxes and rates and helping to give all other sections of the community proper amenities, such as tarred roads, footpaths and so on. These people are paying full rates and taxes and nobody will come to their aid. It is all very well to say: "Get it out of the rates," but I think there is hardly a county council in Ireland that is not facing an increase of from 5/-to 10/- in the £ in rates this year. That is a heavy burden on the poor people in labourers' cottages, on the small businessman striving to make ends meet and on the small farmers, many of whom are inclined to leave the land. Why would the Minister not agree to put up even a fifty-fifty grant to keep these roads in proper repair? If the county council put up some of the money, should the Department not pay part of it?
The taxable capacity of the people is also limited, although it does increase each year under this Government.
Does the Minister think it fair that rates should go up each year by 5/- or 10/- in the £ while these people cannot get the amenities others enjoy? If you are to cherish all the children of the nation equally, they are entitled to these rights also.
I should like to maintain every lane in the country if it were possible, but it is not.
Should these people then be regarded as second-class citizens?
They are not.
They certainly are. There are some in Wicklow——
This scheme will be available for them. Generally speaking, the amount of traffic on these roads is not very considerable and it will be some years before these lanes again deteriorate to a condition which will call for such expenditure.
In some of these cases there are large families of six, seven, eight or ten and does the Minister think it right that they should have to trudge through six or eight inches of water? There are potholes in some of these lanes a foot deep and if it is raining, there is a foot of water in them. Does the Minister think it right that children should have to trudge a mile or two miles or two-and-a-half miles to school in such conditions?
These are the conditions that this scheme is gradually improving throughout the country generally.
We have schemes for the past 40 years.
This scheme is designed to do the work more efficiently and more effectively. Everything cannot be done at once but these schemes are very desirable and necessary in the interests of the rural community generally. The proposal is to have the three different schemes operated as a single scheme and operated by the local authorities thereby making a bigger percentage of the total money available for actual work. This will improve the position and enable more work to be done with the same amount of money.
When the Minister says that the scheme is designed to operate more effectively and more efficiently, does he imply that it has not done so in the past 40 years? Is it not true that the idea of shifting the scheme to the local authorities is to shift the burden over to the local authorities? Why do not the taxpayers meet their full and fair share of it?
This is fully financed by the Exchequer. The main idea of this change is to reduce the amount of the total money that will be spent on overheads. I should say that because of some of the conditions that were attached to this scheme in the past, efficiency was not the only thing that had to be taken into consideration. For instance, as I explained when introducing the Second Reading, prior to this the money had to be spent in the area where the unemployment existed but now, although the recruitment of workers will still be done through the employment exchanges, the work can be carried out where it is most needed. That is one of the improvements.
The Minister referred to the fact that the overheads would be reduced. While we understand that, as there would no longer be separate offices for the different schemes, does he think it would be possible for the local authority, particularly those who have a big number of schemes and a big allocation, to carry out the work without employing extra staff? In that way, will the cure be worse than the disease?
Will plans have to be submitted to Dublin?
No, I do not think so. The big trouble will be the extra engineering staff, the cost of which will have to be borne by the local authority in the area. Extra staff will be needed for supervising and payments and so on. In my opinion—and I have got the advice of people who seem to know a great deal about this—the cost of this cannot be borne on the margin allowed by the Minister. If that is so, in order to continue the schemes, the council will have to put on to the rates the money required in order to operate the schemes. I am not quarrelling with the Minister about it but I think he should have this investigated because while the amount of money it will cost will be much less than it is at present, I still believe, no matter how small the amount being spent in an area, certain extra technical and clerical assistance will have to be provided and paid for, and I think the Minister will find that no local authority will be able to carry out the scheme on the margin he is allowing, which, I think, is ten per cent.
I would suggest to Deputies that they should not be too ready to accept the contention of some people that the amount being allowed will be too small. Of course, we have not had any actual experience of it being operated by local authorities yet but the Special Employment Schemes Office have had considerable experience of the schemes that are now being amalgamated and it is believed that the allocation for administrative expenses is adequate. I feel that everybody should co-operate to try to ensure that administrative expenses will be kept within that allocation. As I have said, the scheme as operated by local authorities has not started yet and, of course, we will keep this whole thing under review but I am quite hopeful that it will not be necessary to allocate any more than ten per cent to administrative expenses.
Does the Minister not realise that those who have been operating local authority schemes of various types over the years have experience and figures to prove what it has actually cost to run them and on the basis of those figures they have supplied what they think would be required to run the extra schemes? If the amount allocated by the Department for this purpose is only about two-thirds of that which it takes to run the ordinary council schemes, surely the Minister must agree there is something wrong? I would not accept for a moment that we should not be too quick to take the point of view of the people who advise us. After all, we, as local authority members, are agreed to pay those people to advise us on this and other matters and if we take their advice on other matters, we should take it on this. If they come back next year and say: "We have lost money because the amount for supervision and planning was not sufficient or the amount for office work was not sufficient and we require an extra amount from the rates next year", I think that would be a mistake. The Minister, of course, says it may be reviewed and I suppose that is as far as we can get him to go but I feel he should review it pretty quickly. Alternatively, he should compare the rates of the various county councils which will be sent to him and find out if they differ very much or if there is one council which has said he has given enough money.
One final question for the Minister: do all schemes have to be submitted to the Department for approval before the county councils do anything about them?
No.
Question put and agreed to.
SECTION 3.
Question proposed: "That section 3 stand part of the Bill".
Would I be in order on this section in referring to people such as gangers who worked on those schemes in the past? Those people seem to be semi-permanent employees of the Board of Works at this time. When those schemes were run down because of the financial situation, we had a number of meetings in the west of Ireland by people interested. As far as I remember, we sent a deputation to the Parliamentary Secretary in charge of the Board of Works and they more or less got a promise that when those schemes would expand and when they would be handed over to the county councils, they would get an option on employment. I do not suppose the Minister will be in a position to compel the councils to employ those people but I should like him to request the councils to give consideration to those people who are employed as employment arises.
There may be the danger that the county engineer or the district engineer may say: "We have more confidence in the staff whom we have had running our affairs for the past number of years and the position is that we do not need to employ any extra people." If this happened, I suppose it would be good from an administration point of view, but, at the same time, the people who were employed on those schemes in the past as supervisors, gangers, et cetera are looking forward to being employed on them again as far as possible and I should not like them to be disappointed.
I am not aware of what happened in the west of Ireland to the extent that Deputy Gibbons is but I am aware of what happened in other parts of the country. It is true that while occasionally men are taken from the labour exchange to do a job, very often people are employed who are employed by the county council at that particular time of the year and sometimes there is continuation of employment from one to the other. Rather than sending them to the labour exchange the local engineer makes an arrangement whereby they go straight on from one job to the other.
I wonder if the Minister could clear for me this question of superannuation? At the present time the superannuation of a ganger on the scheme or a special man who has been put on because of the fact that he can do a special type of work—building bridges, for instance—and who is seconded by the county council to the special employment schemes for the purpose of doing a job is safe but those who are not so transferred have had extreme difficulty in proving that they had the necessary number of days to qualify for superannuation, although as far as they were concerned, since the scheme has been operated in most counties under the county engineer, they have been continuously employed over the whole year by the county council. Perhaps the Minister might explain. Is it not true that in this scheme those people will, as direct employees of the county council, have their superannuation contributions safeguarded and what is the position up to now with regard to these people?
Deputy Tully is, of course, talking about counties like Meath where the county engineer has, in fact, been acting as agent in charge of the schemes and where county council gangers have been carrying out the work and have, in fact, been in continuous employment. That is the position there but in other places the work has been done directly by the Special Employment Schemes Office and in those cases the county councils have been requested to give priority on the new scheme to gangers or other supervisory workers who have been employed by the Special Employment Schemes Office. For this purpose, the councils concerned will be provided with a list of those people and I have every reason to believe that they will be employed. As Deputy Gibbons said, of course, I cannot actually direct the local authorities to employ them but I am reasonably certain that in every case they will employ them.
The extent of the employment that was available to them, of course, always depended on the amount of work that was carried out in the particular area in any year and I am reasonably certain that this will be the position in future; that they will, in fact, continue to be employed just as they were in the past. When the schemes are transferred from the Special Employment Schemes Office to the councils, any gangers who have the requisite service will be paid whatever gratuity or other payment they may be eligible for under the Superannuation Acts or the Redundancy Payments Act but that would be without prejudice to their continuing employment. As I have said, I am still confident that the local authorities will, generally speaking, employ the same people.
Will any of them be affected by the Redundancy Payments Act?
They may qualify for payments now because this scheme is coming to an end, even though they will continue to get some work in future.
Question put and agreed to.
Sections 4 to 6, inclusive, agreed to.
Title agreed to.
Bill reported without amendment and received for final consideration.
Question proposed: "That the Bill do now pass."
This is a belated attempt by the Government to reintroduce the Local Authorities (Works) Act, but I am sorry it took them 11 years to appreciate the enormous value that Act had in that local authorities were enabled to give money during the slack period of the year. It helped people in that time of unemployment, but I am sorry the Minister could not see his way to do something tangible and worthwhile for the small farmers who will still be left living at the end of the boreen and whose wives and children will still have to struggle through water to get to Mass, do their shopping and so on. I am also sorry to say that at this stage we do not cherish all our people equally and that those people are still being asked to remain as second-class citizens. This should not be when they pay so much in taxes and rates. It is a pity the Minister did not do something worthwhile for them.
First of all, I want to say that the Local Authorities (Works) Act bears a certain resemblance to this scheme. The only difference in my constituency is that this year we are getting £3,500 under this scheme and under the Local Authorities (Works) Act we got £93,500. A sum of £90,000 may be a small matter to the Minister because that is exactly the amount he took away from us through the Road Fund a few years ago because of the fact that we had all our roads black-topped.
Perhaps when the Minister is piloting this Bill through the Seanad, he would give consideration to a certain type of lane which at the present time cannot be done under existing legislation. The type I refer to is what we call spurs. There may be six houses on a lane, five of them on the straight part and one on the part leading off, and because of the fact that it is the only one on that side lane, the local authority rules that it does not qualify. It is not an avenue. If it is an avenue, I believe that the people who own the house should be able and willing to carry out their own repairs. The people on this side lane or spur are people with moderate means and for that reason they should get some consideration. I do not think the Bill as it is at the present can do anything for those people. Perhaps the Minister is not aware that those cases exist. Perhaps he would look at it to see if those people, of which there are a number in each area, could be included where the main lane is included but the spurs off it are not included. The Minister should see if those spurs off the lane can be included because it would be very much appreciated by the people concerned.
The cases to which Deputy Tully refers can be included as part of the whole scheme.
How could they ?
If the rest of the lane is being done.
The rest is already done but the county council do not do the spurs off the lane. As matters stand, they cannot.
I will look into that and see if those cases can be covered. With regard to the other point which Deputy Tully raised, I thought I made it quite clear that the amount which will be available for this purpose this year has not been decided yet.
We were told it was £3,500.
That was a provisional allocation.
The £90,000 may come yet.
It is by no means a final allocation. That was made quite clear. I explained before that this has no relevance whatever to the Local Authorities (Works) Act and I do not think there is any point in going over it.
Deputy Tully enlightened me about that.
As Deputy L'Estrange should know, the Local Authorities (Works) Act deals with drainage only and this Bill deals with roads as well as drains, but it does not purport to deal with the type of drains described under the Local Authorities (Works) Act. The provision for dealing with that type of drainage is under the Office of Public Works, Arterial Drainage Division.
You will drain them when you do the Shannon.
The schemes carried out under that will be specially designed and it will be possible to ensure that they will not do more harm in other places than the good they do in a particular location. This is a different thing altogether. It is an amalgamation of those other three schemes the purpose of which I mentioned at the outset.
Question put and agreed to.