This is a Bill that more or less reached this distance without my being able to say what I should have liked to say about it on Second Reading debate, so I will deal very briefly with the points of general interest which I think should be considered before the Bill is finally allowed to pass. I may say, to begin with, that I am not opposed to this Bill. On the contrary, it is a Bill which, at all events, in the legislation it implies, commands my general assent, and my chief ground of criticism of it is that it is inopportune in the sense that it would come more logically after the foreshadowed reform of public administration. At all events, in the counties, it might be said by the Minister that no revolutionary change in local government is proposed. We will continue to have county councils, and, if I remember rightly, the chief reform of local administration in the counties will be the establishment of a county manager system of administration analogous to that which we already have in Dublin. I may say that I heartily approve of the extension of the principle of county manager administration to the counties, but, even if no revolutionary change is contemplated with reference to the counties, I think we are on the eve of substantial changes in the local administration of the City and County of Dublin. We should like to know what those changes are going to be, and in particular what area will be under the jurisdiction of greater Dublin when the Government has finally made up its mind upon this question, because I think a knowledge of that fact is germane not only to this Public Assistance Bill but to the whole subject matter of public assistance, of which this Bill is only a small part.
One of the forms of public assistance is the assistance by the State and by the ratepayers towards the provision of houses for the less well-to-do classes at less than economic rents. In fact, that assistance goes so far as to account for some two-thirds of the annual costs of such houses once they are built. That is a valuable and important form of public assistance which has reference to the general problem of public assistance to which this Bill also refers.
Now it is a matter of common knowledge that it would be much less expensive to build houses for the workers on virgin sites some distance away from the present congested city area. But these sites are not now under the jurisdiction of the municipal authority, and the Housing Committee at present in session cannot take into account the desirability of such sites, because it does not know what the future territorial limits of its jurisdiction will be. It is also a matter of common knowledge that one of the difficulties about housing poorer citizens some distance from the city is the cost of travel to and from their work. Another tribunal is at present investigating the problem of transport in general and, doubtless, the particular problem of suburban transport, and I suggest that the problem of transport, especially suburban transport, is related to the problem of housing, and the problem of housing, in fact, is part and parcel of the general problem of public assistance.
It would be desirable, I think, if only the territory in the City of Dublin were wide enough, to establish one or two satellite towns, preferably some distance out along the old Great Southern and the old Great Western Railways and to connect those satellite towns with Dublin by a local suburban rail service, which at present is practically non-existent on those two lines. Everyone familiar with the matter is aware that rail transport, especially suburban transport, for season ticket holders is the cheapest of all forms of suburban transport, and the problem of housing workers in healthy surroundings some distance away from the city would be much less difficult and expensive from the point of view of the people, as well as the point of view of public authorities, if some scheme of this kind could be contemplated by the municipal council. But at present it cannot contemplate any such thing, because it does not know what will be the future limits of its jurisdiction.
Further, there is also, I think, a general problem of public administration which might be adverted to in this Bill, because this Bill is, by implication, related to the general problem of public administration. There is, I think, a certain lack of co-ordination between the various social services on which the taxpayers' money is being spent. At the moment I think it is true to say that old age pensions are administered under the auspices of the Department of Finance and that the persons concerned primarily are pensions officers who are customs and excise officials. National health payments are, I believe, under the Department of Local Government. Unemployment assistance is administered by the Department of Industry and Commerce. If I am wrong in any of these points, doubtless the Parliamentary Secretary will correct me. Military pensions are administered by the Department of Defence. Poor law relief, or public assistance in the narrow and technical sense of the term, is administered by the local authorities under the supervision of the Department of Local Government. Now all this chaotic departmental administration of the various beneficent activities of the State is bound to cause a lot of waste and loss and greater expenditure to the taxpayers in general than would be the case if the whole matter were better co-ordinated and better arranged.
But, besides the taxpayers' point of view, there is also the point of view of the individual citizen. Under the present system, there is no guarantee that individual citizens are getting all their rights in the matter of social services. Some families may, by excessive cuteness, what they call wangling, get more than their rights; but other families are probably getting less than their rights. The trouble is that the ordinary citizen does not know to whom to apply for information covering the general scope of all the social services of the State. A case came before my notice lately of a widow who may or may not be eligible for a widow's pension. I dare say that if I undertook laborious legalistic research I could ascertain whether that person is eligible for a widow's pension or not. But the point is that she is typical of perhaps thousands of cases. For such people there ought to be some common central office where all the information would be coded and co-ordinated and where they would apply as a matter of course for information governing their cases. It is impossible for the individual citizen to know all about our existing chaotic system of social services. The problem then is one not only of reforming a bit of local administration, but of co-ordinating the whole of our central administration in the matter of social services, with some reorganised form of local administration in which the local county manager would play a central and what one might call a focal part.
If I might conclude by making a few recommendations, which ought to be kept in mind when the whole problem of public administration in relation to public assistance is being considered, they are these: I should like to see the county manager under the future county council system having an office, of which he would be the supervisor, and that office should be a kind of local focus in every county for all the beneficent activities of the State, whether they take the form of so-called public assistance or of so-called social services. I should like to see associated with the county manager, though not necessarily under his departmental control, certain civil servants belonging to the Central Government, but seconded at a certain period of their service for this local duty in connection with the administration of the services in the county. I think one advantage that would result from such local concentration of knowledge of all the social services and their effect on citizens would be that the State would have a single central office in each county which would have all the knowledge of all the effects of all the social services on the citizens generally and would have, and be ready to produce at a moment's notice, a complete picture of the social and economic condition of the people in the locality.
Another advantage that would result from this temporary association in the case of individual civil servants, but permanent so far as the system is concerned, with local activities would be that we would teach our civil servants to know something about the real conditions of life in the country. At present civil servants are too much concentrated in Dublin, and the only Central Government civil servants who have a local office in the country that I can think of at the moment are the people who are charged with relieving us of our surplus salaries, in other words, inspectors of taxes. It would be a good thing if some of the other departmental officials had to spend part of their official life down in the country. It might help to counteract that excessively urban point of view which dominates government not only in legislation, but also in public administration. May I illustrate what I mean? I have felt for some time that my somewhat lurid picture of the effect of the agricultural depression on agriculture in general——