It is pleasant to find, on a measure such as this, which is not contentious, that we can ramble a little outside the actual scope of the Bill and discuss, in this case, the general principle of rates remission and rates imposition. I would appeal to the Minister, with Senator Honan and other Senators, that when he is considering permanent legislation he would deal with the anomalies and injustices that at present exist. The value of this Bill is not the fact that it extends the remission of rates for another two years to a limited class of people building houses, but the fact that it gives us an opportunity of drawing the Minister's attention to certain things which perhaps he can be induced to include in legislation in future.
The difficulty I find with Bills is that you have to take them or leave them. Generally, you have to take them and it is resented if you make suggestions or criticise. Whatever is in the Bill, that and that only is all you can deal with. Very often what a Bill does not contain is the most important thing. One such thing has been mentioned here, that is, the revaluation of houses immediately they are improved. There is an injustice in that and there is a bad tradition behind it. It is the same idea as I think existed when the rack rent was imposed. The minute an Irish person does anything to improve his own conditions or amenities by his own effort somebody comes down on him and says: "You must not do it or you will be sorry for it."
I cannot understand it. Take the case which has been mentioned by Senator Douglas, where a woman wanted to extend her house. Probably it was a small house. She wanted an additional room. Plans were drawn. The first thing the council thought about was, not whether the plans were good or bad but for how much more they were going to rook this woman. Obviously, that was the intention of the local authority because they never bothered to see whether the room was built or not. They merely put the file and the plans on the record and said: "Let her build away but we will refer it to the rates department."
I want to call the Minister's attention to another matter. Before I do so I want to say that we frequently hear about what the poor, the wage-earners, the agricultural labourers and the labourers in towns and cities are getting from the rates; that they are getting houses subsidised by the rates. This Bill reminds us that anybody who builds is getting a subsidy from the rates. Let us be fair and say that. It is only the poor who get a subsidy from the rates when a corporation or a local authority build houses for them. In this case everybody covered by the Bill gets some form of subsidy from the rates. I do not begrudge it to these people but they are the very people who begrudge it to me if I happen to be living in a labourer's cottage.
This is the matter to which I want to direct the Minister's attention: I could bring the Minister outside the city boundary, to County Dublin, to a housing scheme which complied with the local authority's housing regulations. The housing regulations stipulate that houses must not be built to a greater density than seven to the acre. A building contractor takes a large tract of ground and builds the houses in blocks of four, the blocks being so close together that you could hardly elbow your way between. In order to make it seven to the acre, he leaves tracts of ground to the extent of three or four acres lying here and there in the middle, neither gardens, parks, nor anything else. They are breeding grounds for vermin and dumping grounds for rubbish. The contractor complies with the regulation that over the whole scheme his houses are only seven to the acre. He gets away with that. He has less footpaths, less railings and less sewers to construct. He has put the back gardens up against each other with only a strand of wire dividing one row of houses from another.
There is no back entrance to any of the houses. To-day I saw men wheeling barrows of manure and carrying buckets of manure through halls three feet wide, through the kitchens, to the little gardens at the back of these houses. That is because the county council was satisfied when the contractor complied with the letter of the law and not with the spirit. In front of these houses there are spaces of four and five acres lying derelict. When the Minister is bringing in future legislation these difficulties should be dealt with.
A great many people are certain that when the ground rent and the rates are fixed, the ground rent is fixed over the whole area. The people living in these houses are paying ground rent for vacant derelict sites in front of their houses. It would have been of more benefit to them if they had bigger gardens and back entrances although it was an advantage to get remission of rates.
