The Deputy will have ten minutes, or if he likes he can make it 11.
Adjournment Debate. - Telephone Installations
I will be as brief as I can and may not go the full 11 minutes. I want to raise a matter that concerns every Deputy in this House and every public representative. It has a certain degree of delicacy about it because it could be inferred that by coming to a public representative, such as a Member of the Seanad or Dáil, an individual is trying to exercise undue influence. I want to raise with the Minister in question the position of people who have attempted to exercise their democratic rights by going to a public representative in relation to requests made by them to a Department of the Civil Service and being told when subsequently they went to the Department that because they had gone to a TD their application had been put back and instead of improving their circumstances they had damaged them.
I have three cases and, obviously, I am not going to raise the names of the individuals involved. In all three cases I was attempting to help people, two of whom are in business and one who had moved from one side of the city to the other in order to live with an elderly relative, to have an existing telephone connection transferred from one side of the city to another. In all three cases I had made representations on behalf of these people in the normal way and in accordance with a practice that had been established long before I became a Member of this or the other House. The constituents on whose behalf those representations were made by me were informed subsequently by anonymous officials in the Department that because I had made those representations the file of the application was now out of their hands, it was somehow or other attached to the Department of the Minister or the Minister of State and consequently there was an indefinite delay. When one of these people asked, "Does that mean that I have done myself more harm than good by going to a TD?" I was named. The réply was not "Because political representations have been made on your behalf"; it was, "Because you have gone to TD X the matter now is delayed indefinitely and we cannot tell you when it is likely to be effected". In all three cases I was not asking for somebody to jump the queue of telephone applications. I am raising three cases in relation to the transfer of existing telephones.
This is a serious matter. I know that the Minister of State is not responsible for the exasperating replies that come over the counter from officials of his Department who are subject to a lot of harassment from the public because of the difficult state of the telecommunications industry, or Department as it is at the moment. I am quite prepared to make all the excuses and to understand all the reasons why these things happen. I want to raise a very clear point here. Either public representatives—all of them, not the ones who happen for the time being to be on this side of the House—of all parties and persuasions are told, as are the Civil Service Commission and certain semi-State bodies, that canvassing not only is of no help but is emphatically a negative factor, or you clear the ground and sort out this kind of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare from below. The first of these two alternatives will make my week's workload easier. I say that with a knowledge that over the last 18 months personnel relations with the Department of Posts and Telegraphs have not been as good as everybody would like them to be, and I am not suggesting that any Minister is responsible for that.
However, someone who moves house from the north side of the city to the south side in order to live with an elderly mother, who is himself a commercial traveller and out of the city four or five nights a week and is already a telephone subscriber is entitled to some degree of accommodation in terms of transfer. Somebody who is running a bed and breakfast business, who takes the overflow of guests of established hoteliers and who needs a telephone is entitled to some degree of consideration when he or she is already subscribing. Finally, somebody running a straightforward business enterprise who moves from one street to another literally within the same exchange code is entitled to the same kind of courtesy.
I said that I would be very brief. I am trying to make a simple point and I sought an adjournment debate deliberately on a night when we would have a vote because this matter does not need to take a lot of time. I make the point on behalf of all public representatives in the context of telecommunications, which will be undertaken by a semi-State body shortly, that the response that came back over the counter, authorised or unauthorised, is damaging to the democratic process in this country. It is a response that puts the unanswerable and unsackable bureaucracy above and beyond the pale in relation to private citizens. The Minister should at least be aware that this is what is happening to me as an Opposition TD and I have reason to believe that it has happened to Government backbenchers and indeed even some Ministers of State.
That is the case I make, and I make it on behalf of public representatives. We should be told either not to write in at all or, alternatively, the position should be clarified. But the present situation means that I have been represented over the counter as having done more damage than good to my constituents because I made a legitimate request on their behalf to the Minister in question.
The answer to the basic question posed by Deputy Quinn—and I am sure on behalf of other Deputies in this House and Senators in the other House—is "yes"; that can happen. But let me endeavour to prove that there is a specific reason that abnormalities occur in a Department operating under the conditions imposed on it. Basically the problems concerning representations by Deputies and Senators to the Department can be illustrated by the fact that in one week of last month requests into the Department peaked at a figure of 2,100. We estimate that in any given year, taking into account that there are in excess of 80,000 applicants awaiting installations—without taking into account those who may apply in the meantime—there are something in the region of between 55,000 and 80,000 representations received. Those in themselves take up an enormous amount of manpower, very scarce in the Department. At this point in time there are being processed in the Department approximately 6,000 representations. In that quantity there is bound to be error.
In regard to the Deputy's allegations that remarks have been made to him across the counter that, by his making representations on behalf of a constituent to the Department, he is delaying the installation of a telephone for that applicant, I should like to know where the Deputy got that information. He may give the Minister or myself that information at any time—indeed the same goes for any other Deputy in this House—and we shall deal very quickly with any such allegation.
I take this opportunity of saying that in regard to the process of application for a telephone it must be understood that the people dealing with it are the engineers, inspectors, technicians, the contract managers and the telephone officers. Indeed I take this opportunity of complimenting them on the way they carry out their onerous task. Particularly I should like to compliment the telephone officers, the people at the counter dealing with the public, who have suffered quite severely from some members of the public, something which has frustrated their work, even to the extent that the Minister himself last Saturday went to their union meeting to discuss the problems of representations and others with them, he had a very sucessful meeting with them.
Therefore, we are working hard at it. We would love to have the situation obtaining in which, if any public represntative or member of the public made a representation regarding an application, to be able to reply spontaneously that the relevant telephone would be installed in 1980, 1981, 1982 or whenever. This is something to which the Minister and I have turned our attention in recent months. The system at present operating is archaic and is absorbing the valuable time of people who could better devote time to other aspects, such as contracting, calling on people for the payment of deposits and so on. I would dearly love to have a situation in which we could render the public better service in that regard.
We have now turned our attention to the possibility of forecasting for public representatives and indeed individual applicants. However, this is a slow process in planning. I can assure the House and the public at large that we shall do our utmost to implement a system of forecasting by which people will know to within as close a time limit as possible when their applications will be dealt with, their telephone installed and so on.
Does the Minister of State think that Deputies and Senators should make representations?
Yes, why not? But we must reverse the system we had in the Department for dealing with representations so that the funnels will not become choked, and we shall do so through a process of forecasting. This is a big change, which will take some time so that eventually we will be able to forecast for everybody—perhaps not to the specific hour of day, but at least give a genuine time limit within which applications will be dealt with. It must be remembered that we are in the process of change, the results of which we hope will be far better than those of the existing archaic system.
With regard to all the talk about certain allegations having been made, I am always wary of anonymous allegations, made by people who will not come forward and give their names to back them up. On occasion it may be true that five were taken out on Ministerial request on foot of representations made but, as far as I am aware, they are few and far between.
That is the situation in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, a very progressive Department, one in which we are bringing about rapid changes. This year we are committed to the installation of up to 60,000 telephones. We hope we will be able to achieve that goal, not for the sake of the political parties in this House but for the sake of our telecommunications system generally.
The Dáil adjourned at 9 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Thursday, 24 April 1980.