I would like to begin on that aspect of the Estimate on which the last speaker finished, that is, the question of the conservation of wildlife. Much is being done in this regard at present but much more could be done. Somehow or other when I hear people talk of preserving wildlife I cannot help thinking that in some cases their only aim is to preserve it until such time as the birds are big enough or numerous enough to be shot thereby reducing the stocks to the level of a few years previously. It is a tragedy that many people who are genuinely interested in the preservation of wildlife think there is nothing wrong with that attitude. If something could be done to change such an outlook, it would be of much help in this field.
The Minister could do much more regarding bird sanctuaries. Recently one such sanctuary was established at the mouth of the Boyne. For many years in this House I had been appealing to the Minister and to his predecessors for the establishment of a bird sanctuary in that area. It is interesting to note that when it was established some courteous official of the Department sent me a notification to the effect that this was being done but he did not extend an invitation to me to be present for the official opening although he mentioned that the Minister would be present on a certain Sunday at 6 p.m. for the purpose of opening the sanctuary. As it happened I had an appointment to attend a State dinner at Iveagh House on the same evening so that I was unable to be present anyway.
This game sanctuary should result in much good in the area but it would have been of much greater benefit if it had been made much larger than it is. The Minister should know that having a sanctuary on the estuary of a river with very little cover except what seabirds use is not the ideal situation. There is a sizeable portion of woodland and scrub above the town of Drogheda which is used by birds but which is being shot to pieces by sportsmen—sportsmen spelled with a small "s". It was a great pity that this portion was not included. Either somebody boobed or there was some reason for leaving it out. Now that wetlands are disappearing from many parts of the country as a result of arterial drainage, a greater effort should be made to provide game sanctuaries.
Under the heading of the Forestry Division, the Minister has done much for tourism in introducing nature trails. I am sure that natives as well as tourists would agree that the idea was a well worthwhile one and that the expenditure involved was well spent. There are some marvellous views from the various vantage points as well as from the different parts of the trail which would never have been revealed to the public if the trails had not been made. It is possible to see birds and animals now which otherwise people would not have known existed. There are picnic areas on a number of the trails but I would suggest that many more be provided. They do not cost very much but are a wonderful amenity to the public.
The Minister has been most courteous both inside and outside this House. Therefore, if I am critical of the Forestry Division or of the Land Commission, what I am criticising is a set up that has been handed down not only to the Minister but to various other Ministers and which is impossible to shake. Like the Minister, most of the Department's officials are courteous men who will be as polite as possible under the circumstances. That being said, I can never understand why, in a country in which employment in rural areas is a social amenity, it should have been decided by the Department some few years ago to change completely the system of employment with the result that the number of people employed by the Forestry Division is decreasing year by year. It was a great mistake to have introduced a system whereby the Forestry Division now employ contractors to do work which was done formerly by direct labour employed by the Department.
There are very few examples that we can take from across the Border but, if we would take one, it would be to note that in the North a contractor would not be allowed inside a forest. Up to a few years ago, when it was found necessary to thin a forest or to cut timber, employees of the Forestry Division carried out the work and they did so in such a way as not to interfere with standing trees. No branches were broken but the position now is that the contractors fell timber in the way that is most convenient for them. Their purpose is to make money as quickly as possible, but the result of this is that much damage is being done. Up to three years ago it was unheard of that planting would begin on ground that had not been cleared properly, but nowadays contractors leave branches of trees on the ground and people planting replacement trees are expected to plant them through those loose branches.
This is wrong. It may be labour saving and it may be saving the Department money but in a couple of years' time when those trees grow up—they have a certain amount of shelter when they are starting—if somebody drops a match or a cigarette anywhere near the area the lot will go up in flames because there is a pile of rotting dry timber lying on the ground. This sort of thing is partly responsible for the damage done to the forests of this country through fire.
Something has gone wrong with the maintenance of people in employment and also in recruitment. I refer particularly to the fact that if people are employed in any job, and particularly in a State job, it is ridiculous that after ten or 15 years somebody can decide that money is scarce because a national wage increase has been granted and that money can be saved by knocking off a few unfortunate labourers who are paid the lowest rate in the land. Somebody will decide to save money on them and nobody above the rank of forester will be interfered with. I am not suggesting that the Department should start a purge in their offices but surely even they must admit that it is ridiculous when a man who is dependent on under £20 a week to maintain his family is laid off because his colleagues have got a wage increase and apparently there is not enough money to go around.
In addition, a system has been built in over the past 12 months to which I object very much. If the Minister listens to me, he will agree that there is justice in my comments. In any job that I know of that a man has been employed in over a number of years, if he is doing the job properly—he must be or he would not be retained in that job—he has a right to precedence in that job over somebody who started much later than he did. It is ridiculous when we see men with ten and 15 years' service being laid off. Why is this happening? It is because the forestry personnel say: "He is a single man and there are married men who have to be retained." I am a married man and have reared a family so I know the difficulties a married man has in rearing his family and looking after them but I do not think it is right that any employer—I believe no employer should be allowed to do it— should knock off somebody who has been in the job for a good many years simply because somebody with more family commitments than he comes in after him.
The State are wrong and they are setting a bad example by introducing that system. They are doing it at the present time. Perhaps if Deputy Blaney were here he might be able to tell us the reason why this happens in Donegal more so than anywhere else. I am not saying the Minister knows anything about it as he could not be expected to know the ins and outs in relation to the employees of the Forestry Division. It is wrong that men who have been employed for so long should be laid off. Nobody says they are bad workers. Somebody just says that the work is getting scarce which means that money is getting scarce.
A 25,000 acre plantable reserve has been maintained for many years by the Department. Sometimes they have difficulty in getting up to it and sometimes they have more than the requisite 25,000 acres. It does not matter one way or the other because none of us, either in Government employment or anywhere else, would be prepared to accept a situation that when we have been working for years in a job we should be dumped out because somebody sitting inside, who never saw us felt that somebody would have to be let go and, therefore, because the particular man was not married and had not a family he should be let go. I want to record my objection to that. I have already done so on another front in this House. If a person has been in a job for a number of years he must be suitable. If somebody has to be let go, the person with the longest service should be retained. If the person is not suitable say so, and let us have done with it but, for goodness sake, do not let us use this excuse to dump the man out. I am sorry I have to raise this issue here but I do not seem to be getting very far with it elsewhere.
There is also the question of the amount of bonus payments which those people get. The Forestry Division, having a number of excellent administrators, should be able to deal with small matters which come up in a relatively short time. I would not burden the House or the Minister with those complaints if it were possible within a reasonable time to get a reasonable answer but when I find Government officials using a device for the purpose of creating a situation that it is impossible to get an ordinary decision which a private employer would give across the table within a couple of hours discussion, when I find the State using the set-up which they can use for the purpose of deferring these things, then I feel the place to raise it is in the national Parliament with the Minister who is responsible listening to it.
A bonus system was introduced some years ago. While it had the effect of earning more money for the men concerned, it also increased the work output and had a rather peculiar effect. It had the effect that the people who were not prepared to work very hard were squeezed out not by the Department but by the people working with them because it was a group bonus scheme and in this way the Department proved themselves very clever. They pushed out a number of people who otherwise would have remained a long time in employment. The bonus depended on an adjustment being made each time there was a wage adjustment in the bonus scheme. Innocently, we felt that the State would make that adjustment. We did not bother to check until recently when we were horrified to find that every time an adjustment was made, with one exception, it was made against the workers in the employment of the State. The result is that there is quite a sizeable variation and now when the matter has come to light they say: "Now we will give you a couple of pence to make it up". If those men had been paid over the years, they would have collected quite a substantial amount of money so I think the State will have to step up to their responsibilities and make up for the short payment which they gave to the people concerned.
There is the question of differential rates for various people which, should be purely a matter for trade union negotiation. If we have month after month to try to get a decision on those things and seem to be getting nowhere with the matter, there does not seem to be anything else to do except try to interest the Minister concerned so that he will say to his senior officers: "Look, get this thing cleared because if it is not there will be a bigger row".
I should also like to refer to the question of protective clothing. It was agreed nearly 12 months ago that protective clothing would be issued but it has not been issued yet. When we ask we are told that it is ordered through the Post Office and that the Department of Posts and Telegraphs supply protective clothing to all the State Departments. When I put down a question in the House the Minister got a reply to give to me which said that it was because the trade unions concerned had not given the list of foresters to which the clothing was to be distributed. I should like to point out that the list of foresters are those employed in every forest in the country. Every forestry worker in the country is entitled to protective clothing and there is no point in giving it to him next April or May. He wants it now when the weather is bad. It is ridiculous to say that the State could not get supplies of protective clothing between last March or April and the middle of December.
We also have a situation which would not be found anywhere else but with which the State do not find anything wrong. A pension scheme and a gratuity were introduced recently. In normal circumstances if a man is drawing a wage, it does not matter what he is doing his pension and gratuity is based on whatever wage he has over a period.
There are people employed by the State who are also on what they call fire picket over periods of 15, 20 or 30 years. When they come to retire they are told that the State only takes basic pay into account. The same happens with regard to service pay. The State does not want to take this into account when making up pensions or gratuities. These are petty points. It should not be necessary to raise them here but they must be brought to the attention of the Minister.
The Minister has stated that he has offered additional incentives to people for private planting. If one looks at the debates about the Department of Lands since I came into this House, it will be noticed that on every possible occasion I suggested that additional incentives should be given to people for such planting. I also stated that the farmer who has land which is not suitable for normal agriculture or grazing, and who does not plant it with trees, is a fool. He would receive many bonuses, apart from the fact that such planting would give him much-needed shelter for his land. Most such farms need additional shelter. In many such cases if a farmer uses the right kind of timber he could drain his land much better than by digging expensive drains. When the timber matured he could sell it at a good profit.
I have told the story before about the situation in Austria. It has been a long-standing practice there for a farmer to plant an acre of timber when a girl is born into the family. By the time the girl is 21 years old she has a fine dowry. Irish farmers could do something like that. The value of 21 years of timber-growing would be considerable. I am sure that no one would be inclined to refuse such a dowry. Such a scheme might even increase the marriage rate.
The Minister is taking a step in the right direction when he gives additional grants for planting and for scrub clearance. Grants have been given for scrub clearance under the land reclamation schemes. The Department of Lands are the right Department to deal with this problem. The encouragement given for the growing of more hardwoods is to be praised. I do not know whether the planting of poplar is to be encouraged.
Perhaps the Minister should examine the problem of getting smaller portions of land which could be taken over and planted. Some years ago we talked about the idea of taking over cutaway bogs. While this was considered an excellent idea, someone suggested that in view of what had happened at Glenamoy it was felt that the land would be put to better use. I do not believe that land can be put to better use than growing timber. Every effort should be made to encourage such planting. There are small portions of land which are of no use to farmers. In such a case a farmer may not want to engage in private planting. Can anything be done by the Department to have the land used for State planting?
There are a number of areas about which there has been much discussion. I understood that an agreement had been reached in respect of one of them. I refer to a piece of land in the mountains below Dundalk. There is a considerable amount of State forest there. There is also some common land. I understood that although there was tremendous difficulty in trying to trace the original owners, the Act which I describe here as the "Blowick Act", has eased the problem in regard to the purchase of such land. I thought that this Act was to be used for the purpose of acquiring this land. This land is still being used for grazing sheep and the number of people using it is getting smaller and smaller. Has the Minister any information about that land in the Cooley Mountains? Are there many such areas in the country which could be taken over and planted?
I am interested in this problem for two reasons. I believe that the planting of timber should be encouraged in every possible way. I also believe that the employment given in rural areas in the forests should be encouraged. I know of areas which have no employment other than that provided by the Forestry Division. It is a pity that the number of people so employed seems to have dropped.
The Land Commission work under very difficult conditions. Anyone who is a Deputy, a Senator, a parish priest or a county councillor, has to deal with people who believe that if pressure is exerted in the right direction they will be given a farm of land. I believe that political influence should not be used. It is wrong that politicians particularly should attempt to influence people with regard to the allocation of land. Having said that, I must add that from time to time most peculiar circumstances arise and people like Deputy Bruton, Deputy Hilliard and myself, who hold the same views on this matter, find it extremely difficult to tell somebody that no political influence is being used, when such people can point out to us land which has been given to someone who could not possibly qualify for it unless he had been helped in some way by a politician who had the authority to give such help.
The Minister for Lands, to my own knowledge, has never been involved in anything like this. I have never heard anybody mention Deputy Seán Flanagan's name as being a person responsible for wrangling farms of land for his friends. The same cannot be said of some of his predecessors. When one finds a farm of land being divided and the best of it being given to somebody who is a nephew, a brother or a cousin of a Minister it is difficult to tell someone who feels entitled to a farm in that area that there is no political influence being used. Such a person would tell me that I did not know what I was talking about. The fact is that I probably do not know the circumstances in such cases. This has caused much annoyance to Land Commission officials. I have my own quarrels with them. I can be fairly tough if I find somebody is trying to make a fool of me. A person may be doing something which he feels is all right, but when I start to check back it may appear to me as if I am getting the "run around". I may get a letter from a man who tells me that 12 or 20 of his neighbours and himself would like a farm which is to be sold in a particular area to be taken over, and that they would like to be considered for a part of it, and if I sent that information to the Land Commission and if the Land Commission simply wrote back to me and stated: "I am in receipt of your letter, we will have the matter investigated and we will let you know whether we are taking over the farm", I would be satisfied. But if within a couple of days I get back 20 printed letters in 20 envelopes, each addressed to me and saying: "With reference to your recommendation in regard to so-and-so, I wish to inform you his application will be considered in conjunction with all the applicants", either somebody is terribly obtuse in the Land Commission or they think I am a damn fool.
This is the sort of thing I do not like. I do not write to the Minister because I know he has far more important things to do than to deal with day-to-day matters. My letter is addressed to the Land Commission because I know ultimately it will find its way to whoever is responsible for these matters. The least I would ask from a State official is that a letter to a Member of this House would be typed stating that the letter had been received and that the matter is being considered. That is all I want. Later, I would expect an acknowledgment telling me that the farm is to be divided or that it is not, and that the man I recommended either would get a farm or that he would not. It does not happen that way, not because the Minister tells the official to do it in a certain way. A bad old system has grown up in the Land Commission which has been handed down from one group of civil servants to the other. I do not think this is the way their business should be done.
I am sorry if I appear to be critical of civil servants. I have to meet them and to talk to them on the telephone and I find them most courteous, but they are hidebound by a system which should be changed and I think the man to make that change is Deputy Flanagan, the Minister for Lands. From his experience as a Deputy he knows this sort of thing just does not wash. I do not want favours. I do not want the Land Commission to do for me what they are not doing for anybody else but I should like the courtesy of an intelligent reply, something I do not get.
We have plenty of trouble on the question of employment, which has dropped. Various systems have been adopted. Long ago a good strong ditch would do and two men were supposed to build two sections of it in a day. If they did not, somebody else came along the following day and did it. Now there is a different system. It might be all right because the cost is added to the price of the land and the person getting the farm would be quite happy to do a better job on the fence later on. What I am coming to is that the men doing the job, they are State employees, should be paid a decent rate, and if the man in charge, who has to go to a great deal of trouble to see there is good output, has to travel 25, 30 or 35 miles—I know of a case where a man had to travel 44 miles—it is unreasonable to give him a travel allowance of only £1.25 per week. He has to pay for his petrol, his tax and his insurance. A miserable increase of 50 pence a week was offered. The Land Commission in this matter should realise they are in 1972—1973 is only a few weeks away—and bring things up to date. If civil servants in offices are allowed car hire for the type of work they do there is no reason why another type of worker in State employment should not get the same type of allowance. He is entitled to it and I would ask the Minister to look into it and have this anomaly straightened out.
There is the question of the division of land among what are known as local deserving applicants. Some years ago the Minister for Lands said he proposed in future to divide all land among local people except that earmarked for migrants. This has been done up to a point. However, we had one or two incidents which I regret very much. I refer to the Smith farm at Decoy, Darlow Cross. It was not taken over because the owner of the farm did not leave it. Eventually when he left, some of it was divided locally and the remainder was earmarked for migrants.
With some of my colleagues from the country. I took a deputation to the Department. We did not go to the Minister because we would be wasting his time since all he could do would be to give us the facts. From the records, it appeared there was a possibility that local people would get the remainder of the land and the farm building. The possibility was so obvious that we spent half of the discussion time talking about how those people would take over the farm buildings. Those people left with the impression that the Land Commission were not considering bringing in a migrant. Within a week, however, a migrant came in and he ran into a good deal of trouble.
Now, there are no people as neighbourly or courteous as the Meath people. No matter where you come from you are welcome. If they had not that attitude there might not be so much migration into the county. Indeed, I have heard people from the Minister's county say: "If you come to Mayo you would not get the reception we get from you". This man came in and was given the house and the farm buildings which a week earlier were under discussion as possibly being allocated to local people. Those people rightly felt they had been made fools of, and one can imagine what we felt, having taken them up here. The Minister had made a statement that this kind of thing would not happen and the local people felt that somebody was breaking faith with them. That migrant revealed that he had been waiting four years for that farm. We should like to find out where the original untruth came from. Worse than that, the man had built himself a house during the last four years. I asked numerous questions about this to try to get to the bottom of it. I produced for the Minister an authentic list of the people living in the area, and God knows if they were not entitled to additions to their little holdings I do not know who was. Many of them were as badly off as those living on the seaboard in Mayo or Galway. This kind of thing causes a certain amount of ill-feeling between the Land Commission and local people, particularly when it concerns the last farm to be divided in the locality. If the Land Commission know that they will have to do something which will be unpopular, they should say so.
The organisation known as the Land League seems to be in pretty bad odour with the Land Commission. Some people apparently accuse them of committing illegal acts from time to time. I will not, in this issue or in any other issue, back up people who break the law. I am prepared to give full backing as long as we stay within the law. If somebody wants to break the law they can count me out. I believe that most of those people but not all of them—certainly the people who lead the organisation and whom I know—are law-abiding citizens. The fact that they meet often and are very insistent on what they claim to be their rights should not be held against them. The Land Commission would be far better if they attempted to reach agreement at local level, because these are people who live around farms, in the main, and who know exactly what the situation is. Rather than have a row over a farm every effort should be made to reach agreement at local level, so that eventually when the farm is divided everybody is happy that the best that could possibly be done has been done.
The Minister has from time to time pointed out that there was a one-mile limit for people who had small farms, that only those inside that area would be entitled to land if there was any available for them and that landless men or cottage tenants would have to be within a half mile. We have discussed this here and I have put down numerous notices of motion here in this regard. I thought there was a ray of light, because the last time we discussed it the Minister said there was no reason to stick strictly to the mile or the half mile. Some of his officials still do not seem to have got the message. If somebody who lives 100 yards outside the mile from a farm is considered ineligible, I cannot understand why it is considered all right to go 100 miles or 200 miles to find somebody to whom the land can be given. This attitude is wrong and is resented very much. I would suggest that when a farm is being divided the officials should operate in a circle around the area and keep going out in ever-widening circles until everybody whom they consider is entitled to land has got it, and when the amount of land is finished that is it.
The cost of the land is now a big problem and, with things the way they are, we are wondering whether we will soon reach a stage at which it will not be possible for anybody even to take land. I want to tell one story which some people have been repeating again and again. Land Commission farms are not presents. They are not given for nothing and the annuity which must be paid on a farm is very high. The only person who gets a present is the man, usually from the west, who has a couple of acres and a house, and who, because he had his own land vested, which he gave up in order to break up the rundale system, is given a fullsized farm of 40 to 45 acres in County Meath. The farm is vested in him within a matter of months; he sells it and goes away. It is the same as winning the Sweep, and we have had far too many of those people over the years. However, the normal man who comes to live on his farm must pay for what he is getting. While the migrants who came there, the men who worked on the land or people who swapped farms, got their land at half the annuity —and Fianna Fáil made enough capital out of halving the annuities in the early forties; it is one of the things we heard at elections year after year when I was a gosoon—they did not make so much noise about it when they increased the annuity to the full amount for the local people under the 1965 Land Act. One man coming from the West, the South or the North of Ireland pays £12 an acre for a farm, but his neighbour who comes from beside the farm and who, perhaps, has worked on it all his life, has to pay £24 an acre. If that is cherishing all the children of the nation equally I do not know what is meant by the phrase.
Now that most, if not all, of the land is being given to local men, another look will have to be taken at this problem. It is not right that people should be asked to pay the amounts per acre they are being asked to pay at present. If the land costs £20-£25 per acre and rates have to be paid on top of that, the man that goes into the farm would want to have a fair amount of money or backing before he would be able to make a living on it at all. Either the period of repayment will have to be lengthened or the amount of the annuity to be paid will have to be reduced. It is very difficult for men to live on what they have left after making this sort of payment.
Another question I would like to ask the Minister is, why does the Land Commission hold land so long? I have had questions down here over the years and the usual answer I got was that they were waiting for another farm to come up in the area; they were waiting to buy more of a farm, for instance, the Kohlln estate in County Meath which they bought in three parts. The Land Commission have always insisted that they are losing money on the land. Why do they not divide it within a reasonable time. Deputy Ó Moráin, when he was Minister a few years ago, solemnly assured the House that no land would be kept longer than two years. There is land now in the possession of the Land Commission for ten years, some of it for six, some of it for eight years and so on.
I would ask the Minister to find out why this is being done, because it does not make sense. People who were originally expecting to get holdings, and possibly will get holdings, may be gone past their best, as they say themselves, by the time the land is given to them. If the land is acquired for division, do not have people fighting over who gets the grazing of it, who is entitled to take portion of it each year, old spites growing up and, in addition, certain gentlemen with political aspirations arriving in the area and sitting down in the hearth with a stick or in the dust at the side of the road dividing the land for them, every time they feel there is an election coming along. If land is taken over it should be divided and that should be the end of it.
There is another matter on which I have had numerous rows with Ministers for Lands in this House, and that is the provision of the 1965 Land Act which limited the amount of land that could be bought by a foreigner to five acres. It is the famous section 47, and I was hoping Deputy Haughey would stay in the House until I had reminded him that at a by-election conference in Galway he announced this section was being introduced into the Bill after a Labour Party proposal that a foreigner be confined to ten acres under the same circumstances had been beaten by the Government on a vote. Then a by-election came along, and by-elections are wonderful things to cure all sorts of ills, and I think the Deputy who was returned as a result of that by-election is in the House at the present time.
