Seanad Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 9 Dec 1925

Vol. 6 No. 1

PUBLIC BUSINESS. - THE RIVER OWENMORE DRAINAGE BILL, 1925—SECOND STAGE.

Mr. LINEHAN

I think it is very desirable that the Minister should give some explanation of the exceptional circumstances under which this Bill is brought forward and why it is not treated in the same manner as the Arterial Drainage Act passed last year. It is brought in specially, and it is proposed to expend a sum which I am told is up to £50,000 for the purpose of conferring a benefit which is valued only at £8,860. It is proposed in the Bill that the occupiers of the land to be improved by this drainage scheme should only pay interest on the sum of £8,000 while the ordinary tax-payer of all the other counties will be called upon to contribute some £41,000 for the completion of this work. There may be some reason given by the Minister when he speaks on the subject why this extraordinary proposal should be accepted by the House.

It seems to me, looking at it in the ordinary light and from what I could gather from a study of the Bill, that it is very bad economics to spend £50,000 for the purpose of producing an improvement valued at £8,860. I do not wish to oppose the Second Reading of this Bill for the reason that probably the work will give so much needed employment, but on the Committee Stage I will propose that if this work is to be of great benefit to the locality, the owners of the lands benefited should pay, if not the entire, the greater portion of the cost of the work, and that there should be no sums levied on the rest of the Free State for a contribution to this work. If this proposal is carried it will lay down a precedent that all the other counties in areas needing drainage may come to the Treasury here and ask subsidies to help them to carry on the work. The end of it will be that the total will be of such a large amount that the finances of the Free State will not be able to stand it.

The proposal practically is that the Secretary to the Department should call on his own constituents in Kerry to pay, in their taxation, a considerable sum of money for the carrying out of such work as this, whereas if any works are required to be done in Kerry there is no guarantee that the Minister for Finance will come to their assistance as he is doing in this Bill. We all know that a very large area of Ireland needs to be drained. There are several schemes already on foot for the drainage of various districts. We all know that the Barrow scheme will cost a very large sum of money, and if we pass this Bill in its present form we will be laying down a precedent that where these works have been carried out, the people concerned, whose lands are improved, will have a claim on the public purse for assistance in carrying out such work. As far as I can gather from this Bill, it is only proposed to prepare a scheme after the Bill has been passed. I would much rather that a draft scheme was submitted to this House before we passed this Bill, because there are several Senators who, in my opinion, are fully competent to inquire into schemes of this description.

I gather from the report of the proceedings in the other House that there has actually been expended already a sum of £10,000. Surely we must consider that that sum of money was not spent without some plan and without some scheme being in existence. We cannot conceive that the Board of Works went blindly into this expenditure without having some definite plan or scheme before them which they were trying to carry out. I suggest, before we take the Committee Stage of this Bill, that whatever plans are in existence should be submitted to the Seanad.

There is a further point to be considered in connection with this scheme. I observed from returns given in the Dáil by the Minister for Industry and Commerce that the wages to be paid under this scheme, and for the carrying out of this drainage, are to be 30/- per week without any housing accommodation or without any perquisites whatever. Now, I consider that the time to settle and arrange the details of any work that is to be carried out is before the scheme is passed. When the scheme is going through is the time to settle the wages to be paid, and to find out whether they are sufficient or not. Although I do not intend to oppose the Second Reading of this measure, I propose, on the Committee Stage, to put down some amendments so that the points I have dealt with may be fully discussed.

Colonel MOORE

The only thing I want to say about this is that I would like to know where the river Owenmore is.

Professor O'SULLIVAN

It is in Sligo.

Colonel MOORE

Yes; but there are two or three Owenmore rivers in Sligo, and there is at least one in Mayo. All that we have got in this Bill in reference to Sligo is that the people of Sligo are to pay for it, but if it turns out that the Bill applies to the river Owenmore in Mayo I expect that the people of Sligo will not approve of that. What I suggest is that we should call this by some proper name such as Owenmore (Sligo), but even there you would be in difficulties, because there are two Owenmore rivers in Sligo. I leave it to the Minister, however, to get out of the difficulty.

Professor O'SULLIVAN

In answer to the point made by Senator Colonel Moore, I should say it is natural that there would be plenty of rivers in the country with the name of Owenmore, but this particular Owenmore river is in Sligo and flows into Ballysodare Bay. The people of Sligo will not have to pay for this particular scheme any more than, as Senator Linehan would say, the people in Kerry will have to pay for it. A certain limited number of people living along this particular Owenmore river in Sligo will have to pay, and I suggest that, whatever doubts may be in the minds of Senators on this point, there are none in the minds of the people living beside this particular Owenmore river. It is their question, so far as the benefits and charges are concerned. Senator Linehan raised the question as to why this particular scheme was being treated exceptionally. I confess that one of the reasons was to prevent it becoming the precedent that the Senator feared. In reality, in this particular case, we are merely carrying out a contract that was entered into before the war.

The Owenmore drainage question is not, as I suggested in another place, quite as old as the Barrow drainage question, but it is nearly as old. The first evidence I have seen in connection with this goes back to the year 1846. It was agitated again some 30 years afterwards, and again some 20 years later. However, it only became a real live question when the Congested Districts Board took up the matter in the year 1913 or 1914. That Board prepared a scheme, and that particular scheme is actually in existence. They not merely prepared a scheme, but, as happened in most of these cases where arterial drainage had to be undertaken, they found it practically impossible to get the consent of everybody, and hence legislation, or what is equivalent to legislation, is necessary to compel those people who were anxious to hold out against the scheme and against improvements of this kind, to come in. It was for that reason that the scheme had to be brought within that very cumbersome code that we discussed here on a previous occasion. I was going to say the last session, but I understand that it is a controversial matter whether it is the last session or this session. But it had to be brought in under that particular code. A scheme was put forward when the people's consent was got as to the amount of money they would have to pay. The scheme had gone to the extent of getting the consent of the people, and a bargain had been entered into to carry the scheme through by the Congested Districts Board acting as promoters and providing a loan of the money. The scheme was at that time to have been carried out by the Board of Works. Then an event occurred for which neither the Board of Works, the Congested Districts Board nor the people along the Owenmore river could be held responsible—that was the European War. It was that that postponed this particular question.

After the war, the Department of the old Government, the Congested Districts Board, again took up this particular scheme and again urged on the Treasury that it should be undertaken. They pointed out that a bargain had been entered into, that it ought to be carried out, that this was a congested district, and that unemployment was rife there—unemployment which continues there up to the present. They pointed out that a bargain had been made, and that neither morally nor practically could there really be an increase in the amounts that were being levied. That was the proposition then that was before our Government when they determined that this particular scheme had to be treated separately. As far as possible it is brought out of the code that we passed at a previous date this year. It follows on that as closely as possible. Assuming that the preliminary steps if the agreement had been taken as they actually had been taken before the outbreak of the European war, which prevented the carrying out of this particular work, it is therefore because there was a bargain, and because the bargain had been rendered inoperative by the outbreak of the European war, that this scheme is being treated in an exceptional manner.

So far as the other schemes are concerned they will all come up for discussion. As the Senator knows, under a Bill recently passed the farmers, who themselves can be promoters of a scheme, will have an opportunity of getting some help in the way of financial assistance from the Treasury. But the circumstances there would be completely different. There is no bargain entered into, and naturally the financial clauses will be different. This will not be a precedent. The Senator need not fear that. This is carried out merely because it was a bargain. It is merely the fulfilment of a bargain, and that is the reason it is being carried out.

There were some other points raised by the Senator. He raised the question of 30/- per week. Now the wages to be paid there were based on a scale several shillings higher than the agricultural wages paid in Sligo. This is agricultural work, and agricultural labourers will work at it. There is no suggestion by the people working there that the wages are insufficient, and not merely there but in other districts. I suggest that if this question comes up here it will refer not merely to this particular district of Owenmore, but to various other drainage districts throughout the country, either in connection with restoration work or new drainage work. I put this to the Senator. If we pay a wage much above the agricultural wage—remember, the summer is the time when the work can be carried out, and the time for carrying on the work is a matter over which we have no control—if you pay these people wages much higher than are paid the ordinary agricultural labourer, you will make the restoration in existing districts, and the bringing in of new districts, economically impossible.

The only other question raised by the Senator was the question of plans. Does he mean whether the plan is a technically approved plan or not? I suggest it is not the business of the Seanad or the Dáil to carry out the administrative work of a Department. They can get rid of the Department and put other people in its place, but it is not the business of a deliberative assembly to carry out the business of a Government Department and to act as an Executive. Therefore, I could not consent to lay on the Table technical plans of these schemes. Remember this applies not merely to the Owenmore scheme, but to the one hundred and twenty petitions from the County Councils in already in connection with drainage schemes. It would apply to every one of these as well as others which would come in and, possibly also, to existing drainage work, and it could apply quite as well to the re-building of the Four Courts and the Custom House. I am quite sure if the Senator would only reflect for a moment he would see the impossibility of my falling in with that suggestion.

Mr. BARRINGTON

It seems to me, from all I heard since I came into the Senate this evening, that this is a Bill not entirely on all fours with the proposals that came before us, as the Parliamentary Secretary says, last session. In that case the County Councils were making themselves liable for the rates, but in this case there is a large sum to be voted by the public, and the whole procedure seems to be very closely allied with that class of Bill known as Private Bills and which are invariably submitted to a Joint Committee of the two Houses to deal with. I do not know why that course is not adopted here. I have a great deal of sympathy with, and share a great deal in, what Senator Linehan has said, and I think this would be a very proper case in which the whole Bill might be referred to a Joint Committee.

I do not know why a special case should be made out for this district in the County Sligo. The Parliamentary Secretary alluded to it in connection with the Barrow, but the two cases are entirely different. The Barrow is a very large river dealing with the drainage of a great many counties, and it is more or less a national question. The Owenmore river is a comparatively small river, benefit from which will be derived entirely by the County Sligo, so that it is more or less a local matter. The Parliamentary Secretary also alluded to the bargain that had been come to. It is all very well to make a bargain with people when they are to get large sums of public funds. If they find that they are to get considerable sums of money they are prepared to make any bargain and agree to it. It is another matter whether this House and the Oireachtas as a whole ought to agree to that bargain without fuller information. We have not enough information here, and it seems to me a right and proper course to refer this Bill to a Private Bill Committee.

EARL of MAYO

I should like to call the attention of the Senate to what has been said by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance. First of all he pointed out that this was an old matter; it has been inherited by the Free State from the Congested Districts Board. It has been, so to speak, passed on—a liability attaching to that very old body which was taken over by the Free State. Senator Barrington says he wants the matter referred to a Joint Committee on Private Bills. If Senator Barrington wishes for a Joint Committee on Private Bills, on a matter that we have inherited from the Imperial Government, I do not see how any drainage scheme in the country is going to get through at all. Impossible !

I will deal with another point in this debate, and that is the question of plans. This is such a very old story. These plans were in the hands of the old Congested Districts Board and the Board of Works, and I have no doubt if the Senator wishes to see these plans they would be shown to him if he only went to the proper office to see them. But as for putting plans on the Table in an assembly of this sort, to enable Senators to see these plans and to go into them, that reduces everything to an absurd state of affairs. I hope Senator Barrington will not press for this Joint Committee, because really it would be impossible to deal with the business of the Free State in that manner. Somebody said, I think it was Senator Linehan, that drainage in the Free State is a very important matter. It is indeed a very important matter, and I say thank goodness we have got a Government that has pluck enough to come forward and to deal with a scheme well thought out and with other schemes that are brought upon the tapis, I do not wish to say any more, except that I think the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance has explained the whole thing in an admirable manner.

Mr. LINEHAN

Just one question. What does the Minister's Parliamentary Secretary estimate will be the total cost of this work, including the money already spent, and exclusive of the £8,000 the tenants have to pay back?

Professor O'SULLIVAN

The total cost, including everything, is estimated roughly at £50,000. That includes all. As regards the point raised by Senator Barrington, I think Senator the Earl of Mayo has answered his argument. There is no more interference with private rights in this Bill than in any other drainage scheme the Government will have to deal with. The procedure laid down, where private rights are interfered with, under this particular Bill, follows exactly and absolutely, word for word, I believe, the lines of procedure which is adopted by a general arterial drainage scheme.

Question—"That the Bill be now read a Second Time"—put and agreed to.