There is just one point I would like to raise, and perhaps I should have raised it on the Committee Stage. Section 35 of the Bill provides that the State may make grants to local authorities in respect of expenditure under this Act up to a maximum of 70 per cent. There is a difference between the machinery in this Bill and the British Bill and the Northern Ireland Bill on which this is largely modelled. In Northern Ireland, for example, Belfast City gets 70 per cent. of the expenditure from the Government and outside Belfast 75 per cent. is paid. Here the matter is left in the discretion of the Minister and I think I am right in saying that the Minister for Defence said that Dublin City would not get 70 per cent. I wonder am I right in that?
Air-Raid Precautions Bill, 1939—Report and Final Stages.
Mr. Hayes
We have offered them 50 per cent.
Mr. Hayes
You have offered them 50? Therefore, under this Bill, Dublin City, in relation to the State here, is going to be in a much worse position than Belfast is in relation to the Six Counties or London in relation to Great Britain. That seems to be a very inequitable situation. The citizens of Dublin already bear a very considerable burden upon the rates which is properly attributable to national purposes. A good deal of Dublin housing expenditure which weighs very heavily on the rates is really to meet a national problem, and I will not for a moment go into how the present Government's policy has aggravated that, but if in addition they are going to have imposed upon them 50 per cent. instead of 30 per cent. of the expenditure upon air raid precautions, that would seem to me a very unreasonable position. The matter is one in which Dublin should be treated by the State here at least as well as Belfast is treated in the Six Counties and London is treated in England. I do not know upon what the Minister bases his 50 per cent. I think one of his colleagues once described Dublin as a rich city, but for those who live in it and have to pay rates in addition to income-tax and other burdens of rents and so on and the general cost of living, it is very far from being a rich city for the ordinary citizen, and his burden is going to be increased by this measure.
I want to say one word with reference to Section 12 of the Bill, which mentions among the matters for which local authorities are expected to prepare schemes the extinguishment of fires likely to result from air attack. That is a matter which seems to be of enormously more practical importance than, shall we say, the provision of gas masks. I want to ask what the Minister has in mind as to the provision of auxiliary personnel for fighting fire in case of need. It is all very well to call upon the local authorities to prepare schemes, but is the Government going to help them by creating a regular force, such as has been created in England, of volunteers who are willing to work as an auxiliary fire service?
In regard to Senator MacDermot's question, the Dublin Corporation will organise an auxiliary fire service, an extension of its present fire-fighting service. That is portion of the activities that local authorities will perform.
In regard to Senator Hayes's speech as to the 50 per cent for Dublin, we have offered Dublin 50 per cent. of the expenses that will be borne both by the State and the local authority. That, as I explained on the two previous stages of the Bill, is a very small proportion of the total bill. In the whole of the country the State will bear about £320,000 directly on the State funds, leaving £180,000 or thereabouts to be borne partly by the State and partly by the local authority.
I do not claim that Dublin is a very rich city, but I think that in comparison with places like Cobh it is rich. In England and in the Six Counties there is the situation that more than half the population is urbanised. That does not obtain down here, and I think that we can ask the people who are living in very backward localities to bear only a fair share of the cost. The people who live in Dublin and who have the amenities that go with city life will have to pay for that in insurance against air raids. Air raids will not affect the people in backward districts, and I think the Government is going very far indeed in asking the people living in backward districts, who all have to pay into the general State Exchequer, to go to the extent of giving 50 per cent. to the City of Dublin. That 50 per cent. is only 50 per cent. of one-third of the cost—about 15 per cent. That is in relation to the passive air raid precautions, not counting the active resistance to air raids from guns or planes.
Before this Bill passes I should like to call the attention of the House to the fact that we are voting £500,000. One might say that £500,000 in relation to what we vote to the Government every year is not a very great amount. Last week, on one day, we were dealing with a Bill to give £600,000 to tourist traffic and to-day we were dealing with this Bill to give £500,000 for air-raid precautions. Those Bills came on at the same time and I would like to refer back to what I said about the Cabinet system which this Government carries on, which they inherited from us, under which each Minister comes along with a case from his Department urging the expenditure of money; each Minister fights his case independently and the Bills come into this House in somewhat the same way. It is proposed in this Bill to vote £500,000. Personally, I do not think it should be voted. We read the papers every day and we know there is a state of tension in Europe. A great number of people seem to take a morbid pleasure in assuming that war is imminent. For the last year I have constantly had people assuring me that knowledgeable people assured them that war was due at such a date. Personally, I believe that that is not so. Of what I know from what I may call the rational data available the indications are not war. I admit that neither I nor anybody else could get up in court and swear to the knowledge that there was going to be no war within the next year. But, in all these matters you exercise prudence. Is any prudence being exercised in relation to the matter here? To begin with, £600,000 is voted for tourist development and £500,000 is being asked for air-raid precautions directed to a condition considered as likely, in which people will have to be running away to hide from bombs. It is quite obvious that if you take the two together there is no real prudence whatever; there is only a waste of money. One may make up his mind on one side that £600,000 is being thrown away or, on the other side, one may make up his mind that £500,000 is being thrown away. You have got to assume that either one sum or the other is being thrown away.
In relation to this individual sum here, at any time since air warfare was developed you could have got up and said it is possible that our State or our country may be bombed from the air, but we have not until the present proposed throwing away money on the thing, not because we said it could not happen, that it is impossible, but because we said, considering the facts that are knowable to us, we see that all the probability is against a situation arising here in which we have to be protected from attacks from the air. That is why we did not do it before.
In relation to the present situation, does prudence necessarily dictate that we should put out this money on this purpose? My own judgment is that it does not. As I have said already, my judgment of the situation inclines me to the belief that there will not be war. If there is war, this country has an enormous lot of disadvantages and some advantages. We have the disadvantage of being next door to England. On the other hand, we have the advantage of having that great market at our door. We have a disadvantage in being near Europe; we have an advantage in being on this side of England and not on the other side. If we were, however, between England and the Continent, and that possible enemies of hers were in active warfare, then you might say there was a very good prospect of our coming into the sphere of active war. Prudence would in that case, in my judgment, indicate, even though we could not afford it and even though it was going adversely to affect the lives of our people, that the throwing away of this money would be wise and we should say that it be given.
The assumption of modern people is that life must be absolutely safe: that is to say, that the whole element of danger and adventure must be eliminated from life. While that is right up to a certain point, life is essentially dangerous. All through our lives we are having to weigh up one against another. There is a danger, for instance, in crossing the road. Road statistics show that quite a large number of people are killed crossing the road. Nevertheless, throughout our lives we have to cross the road. If we are going to spend our lives never crossing a road, then life for us will become very distorted and mutilated. It will be a tremendous hardship on us.
I have seen all sorts of silly articles in the Press on this question, as to whether there is going to be a war between one party and another. We must assume that neither party is completely lunatic, and that if a war is waged it will be with a view to a certain end, one party hoping by that means to attain its end. That is to say, that it will not go out of its way to bring defeat upon itself. I have heard people talking about aeroplanes coming from Germany, facing a widespread barrage in England, refusing to drop bombs on vital points there, with the firm determination that the aeroplanes and the lives of the men in them should be risked crossing England for the purpose of dropping bombs on the Dublin mountains or in Connemara, then returning and facing the same barrage again on their way home through England. I cannot imagine anything like that happening except in the event of a sudden outbreak of lunacy amongst those in control of armies. I admit, as I have said, that there has to be an element of danger in life. I admit that, at the present moment, people like to talk about the precautions that are being taken against this possible, and, I think, unlikely danger.
I think that in proposing to spend this money we are taking a disastrous path. I think that we should weigh up the remote possibility—I can hardly call it a possibility—of our being faced with air bombardment here. I think that a certain amount of damage is being done to the country by throwing out money on this. Personally, I am against this expenditure. I cannot see that it is justifiable at all. We are going now to spend £500,000, presumably on the assumption that somebody who is not formally at war with us, but who is at war with England, and is approaching England from the other side of England, will pass over England and drop bombs on us for the purpose of preventing us sending food to England. I cannot imagine how any sane man, in control of a war that was being waged against England, would say to himself: we must use our air force and send men to their death, we must precipitate loss on vital instruments of aerial warfare, and pass over the real nerve centres and arteries of England, to go over to Ireland and try to prevent the people there sending cattle to England. We know perfectly well that if the Dublin docks were damaged by attack to-morrow, taking this from the point of view of Army control and of the waging of a war against England, it might cause a slight delay in the export of cattle, but if the cattle were vitally necessary to England we could send them to some other port and find some other means of getting them away.
There is what one may call a certain amount of scaremongering going on. One reads in the newspapers of the enormous air raid precautions works which are being carried out in England. I think myself that if the British Government had been considering nothing but actual war protection utility value in what is being done, they would not be pursuing the identical course that they are pursuing. I feel myself—I could not get up and prove it, and this is only my own judgment— that a great deal of this activity that you see going on in England is induced not by well-considered plans of a war precautionary nature but rather as something that one might describe as activity of a placatory nature. You have an Opposition there and an irresponsible Press exciting the people. It seems to me that a large amount of it is really for the purpose of satisfying the people's minds, of making them feel that the very maximum is being done to ensure that they will be completely immune if danger should arise through aerial attack.
As far as this country is concerned, we are told that our Government's policy is one of neutrality. I admit that our Government, in such circumstances as might possibly arise, would not be complete controllers of things. It would not be in the power of our Government to prevent the happening of a European war, or to say that we shall remain completely exempt and immune from the operations of that war. In the present situation in this country, I say that the throwing away of this £500,000 is a very important matter and should only be embarked upon when a prudential judgment indicated that it was prudentially necessary to embark upon it. My own judgment is that it is not necessary. I admit that if we could spend untold millions we might be able to add a certain degree of safety for people here if war did take place. As I have said, I do not think it will take place. Consequently, I am against the spending of this money.
The peculiar thing is this: that if, during the last seven years, instead of throwing money away broadcast on all sorts of schemes—£300,000 on peat development, money on industrial alcohol factories and on 101 other schemes—the Government had been running the country wisely and saying what it must do to increase production, to economise, to put the minimum burden on the people because production was not greater: if, instead of the enormous increase that we have had in taxation and in Government expenditure there had been a reduction during all those years, then I say that the imposition of the additional burden outlined in this Bill would be much less harmful to the country than it is actually going to be. If, in fact, the Government had reduced taxation to a reasonable level, instead of having increased it to a most unreasonable level, then I think that you, members of the Seanad, would have been much more shocked by this proposed expenditure, coupled with the £600,000 on tourist development, than you have been. When a man is living on his capital he is spending wildly. If a man has a certain income and he consumes a certain amount of that every week and puts a certain part aside for a rainy day, he is very careful about his expenditure; but, if things go badly, and instead of living within what he is earning he actually gets into the condition when he is living upon his capital, you will find that he is then spending much more wildly, although his position is much worse that it was when he was putting by a certain amount every week. It seems to me that the position in which we are now is much the same. There was a time when, if we were asked to spend £1,000,000 on this and £1,000,000 on that every day of the week, it would have drawn forth remarks; people would say "Really, this is pretty serious; there must be some drastic necessity for it." But now, a Minister comes in and says he wants £600,000. As I said before, it is like the sweepstake. The Minister asks: can we afford not to spend £600,000 on tourist development and the Minister for Defence will say: can we afford not to spend £500,000 on this A.R.P. scheme.
I think the public mind has been distorted by reading English newspapers and by reading the reports that have been issued by English news agencies in which a whole case has been made to try to exaggerate the danger of war in the first place, and then to try to exaggerate the probability or the possibility of war becoming active in our own sphere. There is such a thing as passive warfare as well as active warfare. This Bill is directed to a situation in which this country will be involved in active warfare. It is not impossible that such a situation should arise, but it is improbable to the extent to make it unwise to vote this money in this Bill. I, personally—if my word carried any weight against what I might call a newspaper-made hysteria throughout the country and against the organised majority in this House—would urge that this further burden upon our unfortunate people be not imposed.
We are told about an amount of £500,000 that is to be spent under this Bill, but, as far as I can judge, that does not indicate the full amount of money that is to be spent. Just last week the Minister explained that one of the reasons for urgency with regard to this Bill was the fact that the Dublin Corporation has already spent £10,000 upon precautions in relation to this matter. From what the Minister said a while ago, I gathered that half of that expenditure may have been upon increasing our fire-fighting apparatus in this city. As far as that is concerned I can quite see that, independent of this war bogey, some of that expenditure may be useful. But, here we are giving 50 per cent. to Dublin and if that is to be done all over the country we are not imposing merely a burden of £500,000 on our people but a burden that is something nearer to £1,000,000. We fling millions about now so easily that we think nothing of doing so. It is about time that we came to face facts. It is about time that we said we cannot afford to go throwing money away until we are satisfied that it is absolutely necessary to impose such a burden upon our people. I, personally, am satisfied that it is not necessary to impose this burden.
I would just like to ask the Minister in his concluding remarks to deal with one question which does not appear to have been considered, that is, the defence, in the case of air raids, of the Shannon scheme. Under Section 11, apparently, the defence of the Shannon Scheme is a duty of the Limerick County Council—there is no special provision for it, at any rate—and I would draw particular attention to the fact that in September last there was in, I think, the Militar Wochenblat, an article which drew special attention to this particular scheme in the event of any attack on this country.
Mr. Hayes
There is just one point I would like to make regarding the financing of this Bill. The radical difference between the financing of this Bill and that of similar Bills in Northern Ireland and Great Britain is that in Northern Ireland and Great Britain a schedule is attached to the Bill specifying for local areas and cities what proportion the Government will bear, whereas here the matter is left to the discretion of the Minister and the Minister for Finance, and they are to gauge it, apparently, in negotiations with the local bodies. The result is that Dublin City is only going to get 50 per cent. of the expenditure. I would like the Minister to elucidate that point a little and explain what he means by stating that it is 50 per cent. of one-third of the total. While people in Dublin enjoy amenities—if I may use the expression—they enjoy the burden of having to pay very heavily for what amenities they have, and they also pay a very considerable portion of the taxation of the country as a whole. In this particular measure, instead of having a right to get from the Government a certain proportion of the total cost of these air raid precautions, that may be reduced to 50 per cent., and if the Minister for Finance can to do it, it may be reduced even more. However, I would like the Minister when concluding to elaborate a little more the point that what Dublin is being asked to pay is 50 per cent. of one-third of the total cost.
After the speech we have heard from Senator Fitzgerald, no doubt we will all go to our homes very calmly and very satisfied that there is going to be no war. I am sure that it will slow down the pressure in armaments manufacture in every European country, and I have no doubt the Dublin Stock Exchange, the London Stock Exchange and Wall Street will flare up considerably when his speech is read in the Press. Neutrality is the policy of this country, but something may happen in a world war that would drag us into the mess, and I think it would be very imprudent if we did not make some preparations for the protection of our people. I do not want to hear from the Minister what arrangements he has made: I think it would be bad policy for him to disclose them. But it would be a good thing if every man in this House who has any idea as to what we should do, when a war takes place, to prevent panic and preserve order should give his view.
It appears to me that evacuation should be one of the principal things, and if half of the people living within ten miles of the Nelson Pillar were moved out around the Province of Leinster, I think the casualties would be very considerably reduced. There is no need to make arrangements like that for the people in Cork City; we will do that fairly well ourselves; I think we have some of those arrangements in hand already, and wise people are making arrangements to evacuate themselves if trouble should arise. Speaking of evacuation reminds me that many of the European cities have made arrangements for the evacuation of their people, and I think the policy they are adopting there would not be a bad policy for this country to adopt also. I would rather see the money being spent in developing agriculture; I would rather see our swords welded into ploughshares; but I think it would be very imprudent if we were to make no preparation and expend no money on air raid precautions.
There are just a few words I would like to say in connection with statements made by Senator Desmond Fitzgerald. I think, first of all, that his speech is a very dangerous speech from various points of view. The Senator gives it as his opinion that there is no danger whatever of this country being involved in a war. That may be his opinion, but I do not think it is the opinion of the majority of the people in the country, or even of the majority in this House. The Senator suggests that his statement, or his opinion, would not have much effect on the "organised majority in this House." I resent such a statement that there is any such thing; but I hope there is a majority in the House of sensible people who will view this thing from the point of view that the people have a right to be protected against any possibility of attack should the war develop. I say should the war develop, and I say that deliberately; as, in my opinion, the war has already started, and it is only a question of when it will extend this far, or extend as far as England, or as far as somewhere which might make it possible for us to be attacked here by some means or other. The Senator made what anybody knowing him and his past would expect from him—a definitely political speech.
It was nothing of the sort.
He says by way of argument that if certain things had happened, he might possibly justify the expenditure of £500,000 for air raid precautions.
I did not say that.
He goes on to tell us that it would cost several millions to put this country in a position in which it would be able to stand up against anything in the way of a deliberate attack. We heard all that from the Minister for Defence on the Second Reading, but the Senator suggests that if it were not for the fact that taxation had been increased to such an enormous extent by this Government, we could, in fact, provide all this money.
I said nothing of the sort.
I suggest to the Senator that he was speaking a little fast and was inclined to become a little excited at times and that if he looks up the Official Report, he will find that that is what he said. If I were to take the same line and to develop my argument on political lines, I would say to the Senator that if his Government had not sent across those £50,000,000 to England in the shape of land annuities, which the people of the country decided should not have been sent, we would then be in a position, not alone to defend ourselves, but the rest of Europe, or very nearly so. I hope the Senator is right in his statement that we are not going to be affected at all by this war, and that it would be impossible for certain European powers to come across England and to attack this country by air, but as I say, the war has not yet developed, and, in my opinion, it is quite within the bounds of possibility that by the time the various armies are lined up, we would find that certain European powers would line up with the possible attackers and that it might be necessary for them to come across England to attack us. In my opinion, the expenditure of this money is justified if for no other reason than as an insurance policy, because if some of the English cities were attacked, and our people heard that the people of these cities were being killed in large numbers by gas attacks, or something of the kind, and if we did not have any precautions taken here to protect our people, it is only natural to assume that the people here would get into a state of terrible panic. Any measures we can take, within the means at our disposal, should be taken by the Government to protect the people not alone against the actual results of a possible attack, but even against the possible results of panic, which would be very nearly as bad.
I do not think the Seanad ought to take the responsibility of rejecting this Bill, even though I confess that I wish we knew more about how the money is to be applied, even though I think the Minister could have given us more information about his schemes without danger to the public safety, and even though I still appeal to him to spend as little as possible of the money on gas masks. The contrast which Senator Fitzgerald drew between the Tourist Bill and this Bill appearing side by side on the same Order Paper is naturally one that provokes an ironical smile, but, at the same time, it is bad logic to say that the money must, in one case or the other, be money thrown away. If you were prepared to say that, you would also have to say that the money which America is spending on its Army and Navy was thrown away, or else that the money spent on the New York World Fair was thrown away, or that the money——
Bad logic!
——which France at the present moment is spending on defence was thrown away, or else that the money she spends on encouraging tourism was thrown away.
The analogy does not hold.
I admit that I cannot see why the analogy does not hold, except that the spending of money on tourism is more of a novelty in our case, and indeed the spending of money on aircraft defence, too, but, as Senator Fitzgerald said, we have to carry on our ordinary lives, whatever we do in the way of defence. I was rather astonished at his suggesting that people nowadays are too much attached to safety and too much afraid of danger. I should have thought that the reverse was rather the case, that the era of "safety first" of a few years ago was definitely over and that if ever there was a time when the world was living dangerously, it is the present moment.
There is just one other point to which I want to refer. There is an element in this country which is doing its best to alter such relations of friendship as we have with Great Britain, and to replace them by relations of hatred, and to put everything in our communications with people on the other side of the water on a basis of force. It is curious that that should be done in this day and age, when it is becoming so excessively dangerous to put things on a basis of force. It never seems to occur to these people, who, I am afraid, include one or two members even of this House, that if they succeeded in their attempt, we should have to consider, on this Bill and on any other Bill for national defence, how to defend ourselves against attack, not from some Continental country, but from England. It is very curious that in all the talk about being protected to some extent against aircraft attack, it does not seem to cross anybody's mind that the direction from which the aircraft attack might take place might be England, and if the element to which I have referred were to succeed in bringing about the change in our relations with England which they wish to bring about, the attack in all probability would be from England.
I do not propose to enter into any discussion whatever as to the direction from which we may expect hostile aircraft to come. This Bill does not deal with that at all. It has nothing to do with foreign Powers, good, bad, or indifferent, and it is not asking the Seanad for money, as Senator Fitzgerald says. It is simply a Bill to enable the Government, with the help of the local authorities, to organise the citizens, so that if hostile aircraft, coming from where they may, should arrive here and drop certain missiles, we will be able to cope with them in the best way possible.
Senator Fitzgerald was going on a line which I think would be fatal to the liberties of this country if it were pursued. His line, generally, is that we may not expect trouble or that we need not be expecting any trouble here. There are other people going around the country at the moment too and they say that anything that we can do to protect ourselves is so small, compared with the scale of the likely attacks, that we should do nothing. A lot of people are neglecting their ordinary duties as citizens in helping to protect the country by excuses of that nature. Now, no matter where the attack comes from, if we value our liberty, we should be prepared as men to defend our liberty. Apart from active defence—that is hitting the other fellow as hard as you can if he attempts to hit you—there is with those modern conditions and modern weapons, a new phase in which the civilian population has to play its part in protecting itself.
We are asking the civilian population to co-operate with the Government and with the local authorities, so that if a hostile attack does occur here the civilian casualties will be reduced to a minimum and the destruction of property will be reduced to a minimum. Whatever danger there is of war here or an attack on this country, that danger will be reduced in proportion as we are ready to defend ourselves. If we have a good chance of escaping from a world conflict with very little defences, we will have a much better chance the more we are in a position to defend ourselves. If we have a good chance of escaping from a hostile air attack with practically no defence at the moment or no air raid precautions, we will have a much better chance that the casualties or suffering will be less if we take precautions.
We are not asking for any vast sum of money to be spent on air raid precautions. It is a matter in which a spirit of co-operation among ordinary citizens is worth very much more than money. For instance, a few thousands of the people of Dublin who would come forward in their spare time for a few weeks or months and take lessons on how to lead the population, how to instruct the general population, how to deal with fires caused by incendiary bombs, how to avoid gas and how to take measures of precautions against high explosive bombs, would count very much more in safety to the city and country than if the Government spent £1,000,000 on it.
In this matter of air raid precautions, the spending of money on the part of the State or the local authority will not in any way compensate the people if co-operation is not forthcoming. Recently the Dublin Corporation issued an advertisement asking for people to come forward as air-raid wardens. They only issued one small advertisement but within a day or two 400 people came forward and offered their services. No matter what may be said in debates such as this as to the likelihood of air raids or otherwise, I think the citizens of Dublin, who have spent so much money on a good water system, on a good sewerage system and so on, will now spend a little fraction of what they spent on these services to safeguard themselves against what may be a very disastrous thing indeed—an air attack.
Senator Fitzgerald talked about hysteria. I do not think the Government has been hysterical at all in appealing to the people to take certain measures for the defence of the country. If Senator Fitzgerald wanted to see naked hysteria he should read some of the speeches made by a very intimate friend of his in the Dáil. Really before the two of them speak again in public they should get together and see if there could be any common measure of agreement between them. Because one of them says that the war disaster, immediate and terrible war, is to be upon us, and Senator Fitzgerald says the direct opposite.
It is not a matter of politics. It is a matter of judgment. I do not let somebody else do my thinking for me.
What is being done to protect Cork City?
Dublin is not the only place for which we are making preparations. I think the people of Cork will have enough good sense to come forward and defend Cork when there is anybody to attack it.
It would just give Cork men another excuse to come to Dublin.
Senator Fitzgerald asked me to give more information. As a matter of fact, I have given in the Seanad here and in the Dáil all the information I have about air raid precautions. It is altogether a new activity in this country. It is practically new all over the world. We have spent certain sums of money up to the present time on laying in a store of gas masks, decontamination equipment, and fire fighting equipment, and we intend to expend more. I indicated in the Dáil and here more or less how we propose to spend a total of £500,000. If that sum is to be spent, it is to be made up of contributions from the rates as well as from the State Exchequer. It may not cover the whole of it. In certain circumstances it would only be a fraction of what would be spent here on air raid precautions. In the present situation, as far as we can we have estimated that about £500,000 will be spent, and of that sum the Government will bear 70, 75, 80, or 85 per cent. Senator Hayes asked me to explain what did I mean by one-half or one-third of 50 per cent. I explained here in the Seanad on the last day that of the £500,000 which we contemplate will be spent on air raid precautions, £320,000 will be spent directly by the State on gas masks, fire fighting equipment, and so on, leaving a balance of £180,000. Of that £180,000 at least one-half will be contributed by the State. The mathematics may not be exactly correct, but they are roughly correct anyhow.
I am not arguing on the mathematics of it.
I think I have now dealt with all the points made. Senator MacDermot raised the question of spending money on gas masks. I think that the money we propose spending is worth spending, because if we have no gas masks, the temptation to a hostile attacking force to use gas would be increased considerably. I think it is a good insurance to spend on gas masks a small proportion or a fair proportion of the money we proposed to spend on air raid precautions.
The Minister has not dealt with the question of the Shannon Scheme.
The Shannon Scheme is not dealt with in this Bill at all. The Shannon Scheme is a direct Government responsibility.
Would the Minister inform the House if he is taking any steps to provide what I believe are technically known as deep shelters as a protection against high explosive bombs as distinct from a gas attack?
No.
Is it not a fact that high explosive bombs are the type of bombs mostly used in air raids as distinct from incendiary or gas bombs?
You probably could give complete immunity to all the population from air attack if you were prepared to spend sufficient time and energy on it, but if we were to do it, it would not be a question of half a million pounds. It would be a question of how many hundreds of millions it would cost. Life would not be worth living if we went that far. I agree with Senator Fitzgerald to that extent.
I am not suggesting that we should do that.
I think, however, if we value our lives we should take some little precaution. If we as a community can take certain precautions to avoid being caught in the open, or to prevent houses or buildings collapsing on us if a high explosive bomb drops in the immediate vicinity, then we shall be fairly safe. We shall be reducing the chance of being hit, as far as possible, to nil. If a high explosive bomb dropped in a neighbourhood in which there were rather shaky houses, it might take a lot of them down. If a person had absolutely no protection, or had not some sort of air-raid shelter, if a bomb dropped on a house or outside it he might be hit with a splinter anywhere within a distance of several hundred yards. If, on the other hand, he had a sheltered trench or a fairly strong protection, a high explosive bomb could drop within a few feet of him and he would be fairly safe. There is no use in talking about deep shelters. If I proposed giving the community complete immunity by air-raid shelters from high explosive bombs, and if I were to put forward a proposition for building deep shelters, then the argument of Senator Fitzgerald would become very strong—that rather than spend all the necessary money and energy on protecting ourselves from death through air raids, we should do nothing. We are asking that something should be done within reason, that we should take some precautions. If a man is building a house, and if he comes to the point in good weather at which the roof has to be put on, he will not say to himself, "Because there is good weather, there is no necessity to put on a roof." We shall at least put the roof on the house, so that if rain should come we shall be fairly dry. I think the spending of half a million pounds, or round about that figure, on air-raid precautions will give us a fair amount of immunity. If we spend that amount properly in educating the people, we can so reduce the risk of casualties or destruction from air raids as to make it not worth while for a potential enemy to attack us in that way.
Is the Minister getting in any steel shelters?
No.
In regard to the trenches he speaks of, is he going to get any trench-digging machines? Is he going to see that the trenches are deep, covered in, and properly equipped, that they will not be like the ridiculous ditches that were dug in London during the crisis in September?
In regard to the steel forms for air-raid shelters that they are using in England, we have, I think, a better substitute made out of native materials. That is a shelter in the form of a beehive. It is very strong, much stronger than the steel shelter. It has this advantage over the trench, that if you go down in a trench in this country in winter-time, you come on water level not more than 12 inches below the surface. If we were to rely on such trenches constructed by ordinary people, we should be in more danger of being drowned than anything else. I think myself that a rather strong structure, as strong as we can conveniently make it, built on ground level or a little over it, which people can enter conveniently, is as far as we can go in providing shelters. If people take that precaution, they would be fairly safe.
Is it the Minister's intention to supply these beehive shelters?
That is another question. In England, in vulnerable areas, they have given these steel structures out to people under a certain income level. We have not got far enough with the Dublin Corporation to make plans for the building of private shelters in private houses. What the final policy will be in that regard, I do not know. I think, however, that the vast majority of our people should be able to provide in their own back yards or in their own back gardens, sufficient shelter for themselves and their families. In the City of Dublin in any of these new flat buildings that are being put up for the working classes, you have a basement which would make a very good blast and gas-proof shelter. The structures are strong and they would be easily rendered gas-proof. The problem of putting up shelters for people caught in the streets, is a problem which the Dublin Corporation will have to examine. That will be one of their first duties. The provision of shelters in private homes is a job for the private individual, and whether any help can be given to them is a matter that has not yet been decided. I think the vast majority of our people, by taking a little trouble and spending a few pounds, could provide shelters for themselves in their back yards or in the basements of their houses that would render them pretty safe.
It may be of convenience to Senators concerned with the Tourist Traffic Bill to know that it is not proposed to take the Bill at a late hour to-night. It will be put down as first business to-morrow.
Agreed.