The purpose of this Bill is to effect a number of miscellaneous amendments in the Road Transport Act of 1933. Some of them are not of very great importance but one or two of them deserve special mention. The purpose of Section 2 is to deal with a peculiar type of case which arose here and there throughout the country. A person who carries his own merchandise in his own vehicle is not required to have a merchandise licence. In certain cases, however, businesses were controlled by companies. One company owned and controlled by the same people carried on another type of business as another company. The working arrangement in the past provided for the goods of one company being carried in the vehicles of another. That practice became illegal under the terms of the Road Transport Act, unless the company with the vehicles received a merchandise licence and, consequently, became public carriers, accepting all the obligations of public carriers. The most typical case of that kind was where certain people in a town owned a garage or motor equipment establishment and a general merchandise business and where, for private reasons, they had transformed themselves into limited liability companies, having a separate company for each business. One can easily see how it became the practice to use the vehicles of the motor company to carry the goods of the other company and how convenient that arrangement was. With the enactment of the Road Transport Act, it became impossible to continue that arrangement. To meet this difficulty it is proposed to provide that, where a mechanically propelled vehicle owned by a company is used for the carriage of merchandise the property of any company which is in the same ownership or under the same management, such merchandise shall be deemed for the purposes of the principal Act not to be carried for reward. The difficulty would only have arisen where individuals had transformed themselves into limited liability companies. It would not have arisen in the case of persons acting as individuals. There is no reason, from the transport point of view, why those concerned should not be facilitated by this amendment.
Section 3 provides one of the main amendments which the Bill is designed to effect. Under the original Act, an existing carrier was entitled to get a licence authorising him to conduct a road transport business with vehicles of the same total unladen weight as those which he possessed for the purposes of that business during the qualifying period. The great majority of businesses were carried on with one vehicle only. Out of 1,200 or 1,300 licences issued, over 1,000 were issued in respect of road transport services carried on with the aid of one vehicle only. A large number of those transport operators had a very popular type of vehicle called the Ford one-ton truck and, consequently, they got licences for the one-ton standard weight. That truck is not now available and the general tendency is to use motor vehicles of greater carrying capacity. When the original Bill was introduced in the Dáil, a Deputy suggested that it would make for administrative convenience to provide a minimum unladen weight of two tons and to allow operators to vary their equipment under that weight. We foolishly rejected that suggestion at the time. We found out by experience that, if we had adopted it, it would have made a great difference in the administration of the Act. It would have made administration much more simple than it has been. We are proposing to effect that change now and the purpose of this section is to provide that any person who is licensed for an unladen weight of two tons or less will be deemed to be authorised to operate vehicles up to two tons unladen weight. That will prove a considerable convenience to a number of people who had licences for unladen weights of less than two tons and who have been unable to replace their old vehicles with new vehicles of the same unladen weight, and were, consequently, debarred from continuing in the transport business.
The purpose of Section 4 is to effect a purely drafting change in the original Act. Sections 5 and 6 are designed to deal with another problem—to provide a method by which we can enforce the provisions of the Road Transport and Road Traffic Acts throughout the Saorstát on persons operating merchandise or passenger services across the Border, that is to say, persons with headquarters in the Six Counties. The only method by which we could effectively deal with breaches of the Acts by these operators would be to stop the vehicles at the Border, arrest the operators of them and interrupt the service. This would cause considerable inconvenience not merely to the persons actually detained but also to the passengers in the bus or the owners of the merchandise being carried upon the vehicle. Consequently, it was considered advisable to adopt another method. Under this method, we propose to issue licences to the persons conducting these services for importation of these vehicles into the Saorstát and to take power to withdraw these licences if, for any reason, it appears to be desirable to do so. By that device, we can secure that those persons will conform to our laws. The device is intended to be used only for that purpose. It will not cause any inconvenience to persons using these services, or to the persons operating these services except they take action which is in conflict with the statutory requirements of the State. The device is a simple one. It will prove much more convenient to operate than the only method open to us at the present time and it will enable breaches of the Road Transport Act committed by those people to be dealt with in a satisfactory manner.
