The Minister mentioned the amount paid out in building grants. The grant in 1948 was £275, or £285 if one went to a building co-operative. Prices at that time were in the region of £1,900 gross or £1,400 or £1,500 net. Since then local authorities have been giving grants to help out those with lower incomes. I should mention here that a person entitled to a corporation grant is debarred from getting that grant if he works overtime. The idea then is not to work in order to qualify for the corporation grant. This is something that should be corrected.
The percentage of grants in relation to the selling price is in the region of 10 per cent—£500 on £5,000. The Minister said that the reduction in the floor space had brought about an improvement in the number of houses being built. Houses which cost £1,200, £1,400 or £1,500 in 1948 now cost in the region of £5,000 even though the floor space has been reduced. One gets 10 per cent by way of grant if one qualifies; in 1948 it was 20 per cent. The grants have never increased pro rata with increase in cost. This is mainly due to the Government in the early sixties not spending any money on housing and failing to service land.
Prior to the introduction of the reduced floor space the grant was £275 plus a corporation grant, if one were eligible. One now gets a lower rate of grant for building a reasonably sized house. An 800 square foot house is a box and nothing else. Those who buy houses above the 1,250 mark are very often people with five or six children who would be entitled to a corporation grant. These people now have to pay stamp duty. Unless they intend to put all the boys sleeping in bunks in one room and all the girls sleeping in bunks in another room they must pay nearly £1,000 extra for a house. I admit there has to be a limit, but the limit should be higher than 1,250. Consideration should be given to the number of children in the family. It is a bad investment to buy an 800 square foot house when one has four, five or six children. These people should be enabled to buy a decent sized house at the very beginning. As things are they are prevented from doing this.
I have some experience and I know that a smaller sized house does not necessarily mean a cheaper house. All one does is save on materials. Take the case of a bricklayer. If he has to lay bricks at a corner it is going to take more time than if he were laying a straight line of bricks and there will be extra costs involved. If one takes a bedroom or a diningroom the same number of floor boards, practically, have to be laid and the cost is negligible but the cost of materials is something, I agree. A plasterer will charge a certain amount per square yard for a straight wall but when it comes to corners or cornices the rate doubles. You have more corners per acre than you have in a bigger building and, therefore, again the labour cost is negligible.
I am not against office blocks or churches being built—in some cases too much money is spent on them— but what I am getting at is the cost of houses. When you are building schools, churches, hospitals and office blocks out of the one labour pool then labour is in short supply and there will be greater offers. I do not blame any man for getting as much as he can but his fellow-worker is going to pay in the cost of these houses. We should be more rational and get our priorities right and endeavour to keep down the cost of these houses. If this was done the grant might be better. The price of a house could drop by £400 or £500. I know, of course, that land is very expensive because the Government did not provide serviced land around Dublin.
It is very difficult now to differentiate between what starts out as a corporation house and what starts out as a private house under grant. Shortly after I was elected I came in here and I heard the amount a contractor would charge the corporation for a house after roads were laid and private builders could actually sell the houses cheaper. Now we have a practice which follows that, and I agree with it, that a builder can build 500 houses, do all the work himself and he can sell you the house cheaper. Why not buy the finished article straight away then? The house starts off as a grant house, I do not say the builder gets a grant, but then the corporation come in and buy the scheme. There have been several cases of that in Dublin.
No matter what strike has taken place the Minister comes along and says that they built more houses in spite of the strike. Why is he not honest? The amount of cement used in a house is negligible. During the cement strike many people were short of cement but they got it one way or another, even on the black market, and they used it to build the frame of the house. Work on the houses was able to continue and while no roads were laid they built the houses along where the road would be and when the strike ended all that was necessary was to lay the roads. The Minister gets no credit for that. The reason why there are so many grant houses is that fewer corporation houses have been built. I presume that the figures which the Minister mentioned include the houses which were purchased in Ballybrack and elsewhere.
As I pointed out, the 1,200 square foot house or the 1,500 square foot house is now £1,000 dearer. All these privately built houses are costing people £2 to £3 a week extra if they get the money from building societies. This means that in turn these people look for extra wages and this creates inflation and a round of wages comes back to the Minister who must pay the extra money to the people working in his Department.
If a person is building a house, let it be 800 or 1,000 square feet, the only cost is material. You have to have a bathroom and toilet no matter what size the house is and you have to have a kitchen. You have the same sewerage and water services coming into it and the plumber has to make the same number of bends in the pipes. His time costs the same for a small house as for a big one. I would say that at the start of the scheme there would be no extra saving at all. I know people who are paying £5 for one room and who are looking for a house and any small house would do them. The Minister, however, has panicked and has rushed at the smaller type houses, presumably on the advice of his Department. His predecessor also did this. Another 150 square feet would not mean any greater cost, or certainly very little extra cost.
The Government serviced no land in Dublin from 1960 onwards. A sewerage scheme was laid down in Griffith Avenue and after two or three years it was overloaded. The cost of the land is putting up the price of the houses, which, again, shows how small the grant is against the cost of the houses. If we are going to have this smaller type house we are going to put it into a smaller area. Are we going to have 20 houses to the acre and will that bring down the price? It should bring down the price by about £1,000 but it has not done so. The Government maintain that by forcing small houses on the people the building industry will be able to provide an extra 1,000 houses per year. This is only propaganda. It takes the same amount of labour and you will not always save something on material because the lengths of timber, for instance, are conventional and very often they come in already cut.
