On this side of the House we express serious concern about the manner in which the Minister is handling his responsibility with regard specifically to the question of sanitary conditions in Dublin city houses and other matters that were raised at Question Time and which we will state were not in accordance with the facts.
In our view evidence has been building up for months. The Department of the Environment, this newlynamed conglomerate which was promised to be a forward-looking and socially-committed Department, have been backward-looking and reactionary. Worse than that, in recent times the Department have become inaccurate and undependable.
Question No. 5 on the Order Paper for last Tuesday asked the Minister if he was aware that more than 3,000 dwellings in the Dublin city area are without bathrooms, that there are 2,419 with outside toilets only and 707 dwellings have no separate toilets at all. We asked the Minister what proposals he had in respect of this major sanitary and hygiene deficiency. My surprise can be imgained when the basis for those figures was questioned. Far from saying that there was a problem and that the Department were concerned and were doing something about it, the implication was that the figures were somehow conjured out of nowhere. I indicated the source to the Minister in order to be helpful. He replied by saying that he had checked with Dublin Corporation and that there was no basis for those figures. There was some interruption from the backbenches. The whole exchange could only be interpreted as questioning my integrity in regard to the way I put the question and the basis of the evidence I used.
I promised to deliver to the Minister within 24 hours the basis for my figures. Unlike some of his promises, I duly delivered on mine. In the meantime, I took the precaution of double checking with Dublin Corporation, who once again assured me that the figures they had presented were accurate. As a matter of fact, the figures were presented to Dublin City Council in reply to one of our particularly hard-working aldermen. Alexis FitzGerald, at our meeting last March. I can see no excuse whatever for the Minister for the Environment getting up here and ignoring the problem by saying in his reply "the data available from the census and other official sources" could not show him that the figures we brought to his attention were accurate.
The Minister then referred to the grants scheme, which is irrelevant to many of those dwellings which are rented accommodation. I asked for an apology and an explanation at that time which were not forthcoming. However, the Minister today feeling the heat I presume, was gracious enough to write to me to assure me that my integrity was not in question. He said:
I would like to say most categorically that in replying to your question and supplementaries I had no desire or intention to reflect on your integrity or to cast doubts on your probity.
I accept that. However, the issue is still basic and the Minister has not responded to it. He implied in his letter that he may have been misled by the fact that the dwellings in my question were local authority dwellings and it was reasonable to conclude by the way I had framed my question that I was referring to all dwellings. That is a fair enough point. My question asked:
if he is aware that over 3,000 dwellings in the Dublin city area are without bathrooms....
That is a simple question but the Minister's answer was "I am not so aware". There was no question of qualifying his answer or introducing the distinction which he subsequently introduced. I should add that he puts the whole thing in a totally new perspective by saying in his letter:
...the total number of dwellings, public and private, in the city which are deficient in various respects in sanitary facilities is greater than those in respect of local authority dwellings only.
In other words, the problem is much worse than the one I pointed to. He also said that local authority dwellings are at most 35 per cent of the total housing stock. A reasonable arithmetical deduction would show that there are in excess of 10,000 of both local authority and private dwellings which are without what I consider to be minimal hygiene facilities, which is a scandalous situation.
I ask the Minister, in view of this extraordinary slum-like implication, to consider introducing an emergency Estimate in order to do something about this scandalous neglect. My question referred to dwellings without bathrooms, toilets and separate toilets, in some cases in back yards. Surely in 1978, when we can afford money for some of the grandiose schemes the Government are borrowing for, we can at least afford the dignity of hygiene facilities for the people of this city. It is not important what age the houses are, although this will probably be introduced as an argument, what year the stock is or anything else. The basic fact is that we have a real sanitary problem in Dublin. I am not worried about the sanitary problem in our short discussion this evening, although it is a major concern. We are here to discuss the inaccuracy, the lack of veracity and the repeated assertion that there was no basis for my figures when a simple telephone call to Dublin Corporation would show that that was not true. A second issue was raised out of that Question Time and, with your permission, Sir, I intend to allocate some minutes of the time at my disposal to Deputy Mitchell to deal with it: that is the question of the bonding of a particular construction firm which the Minister referred to in his reply.
