Seanad Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 25 Jun 1958

Vol. 49 No. 7

Transport Bill, 1958—Second Stage.

Question proposed: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

Minister for Industry and Commerce (Mr. S. Lemass)

On the occasion of the debate in the Dáil on the Supplementary Estimate for Transport and Marine Services which I introduced on 27th November, last, I outlined in general terms the transport policy settled by the Government following consideration by them of the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Internal Transport which reported in May, 1957. I indicated that legislation would be introduced to give effect to this policy and also to provide for the expected amalgamation of the G.N.R. undertaking within our territory with C.I.E. as from the 1st October, 1958.

The present Bill, however, deals with C.I.E. matters only. Because of the necessity for parallel legislation in the Six Counties and because of the necessity to settle a number of minor but complicated details which arise out of the termination of the agreement between the Government here and the authorities in Belfast, it has been found more convenient to deal with the affairs of the G.N.R. in a separate Bill which got a Second Reading in the Dáil yesterday, and which, I hope, will soon reach the Seanad.

The main object of the present Bill is to implement with certain important modifications the main recommendations of the Committee of Inquiry into Internal Transport. As I have already made clear, the Government have not accepted the specific recommendations in the report relating to the reduction of mileage of railway line or the number of stations nor have they accepted as the pattern of the future railway system of C.I.E. the map which is published in their report. The committee made it clear that they did not intend to specify the particular sections of line or the stations which should be closed down and gave their views in this respect by way of illustration only.

It is the Government's view, with which I feel sure the Committee would agree, that the actual implementation of such a policy could be undertaken only by the Board of C.I.E. who have day-to-day administrative responsibility and access to all the relevant facts. The Bill empowers the board to close down any line or any station for which there is clearly no future and to do so on their own decision and without having to seek the prior approval of the Transport Tribunal. They are, however, given a statutory direction not to terminate any particular rail service except where they have first satisfied themselves that there is no prospect of its continued operation being economic within a reasonable period.

The board are also placed under the general obligation so to conduct the undertaking as to eliminate losses by 31st March, 1964. This means, in effect, that the fate of any particular line, station or service provided by C.I.E. will depend on whether sufficient business is generated to justify its retention and the future of such lines and stations therefore will depend primarily on the amount of local support which is given to them. Local communities will have to make up their minds that they can keep a railway service only if they are prepared to support it.

C.I.E. are being relieved also of the obligation, under the existing law, to provide alternative road transport services where rail services are terminated. It may be that in outlying districts or, in particular circumstances, it would not be economic for C.I.E. to extend their road transport organisation to deal with a small volume of traffic of an essentially local nature. There would be no point in permitting C.I.E. to close down a line where there was not sufficient traffic to justify keeping it open and then putting on them the obligation to substitute some other service, which, by their methods of working, might also involve them in losses. Where C.I.E. do not provide alternative road services, I will be prepared to consider applications from local private interests for such road passenger or merchandise licences as may be necessary to provide adequate services in such areas.

The principal function of the Transport Tribunal set up under the Act of 1950 was to consider applications for the termination of rail services or the closing of unused canals to navigation, and as that function disappears with the granting of complete autonomy to C.I.E. in these matters, there will be no further justification for the continued existence of the tribunal. The statutory provisions under which it was established are, therefore, being repealed. I am sure the Seanad will join with me in expressing my appreciation for the very fair and satisfactory manner in which the members of the tribunal have carried out what must have been at times a most unenviable task.

It is also proposed to relieve the Board of C.I.E. of the obligation to maintain unused canals in navigable condition but they must continue to maintain them for purposes of draining and prevention of flooding. Under the Act of 1950, C.I.E. already possessed the necessary powers to terminate their own canal services, if they should decide to do so.

The board are also being relieved of various obligations, including what are known as common carrier obligations, which have hitherto restricted the commercial adaptability of the undertaking. They will, in consequence, be able to vary their charges, to quote one merchant a lower rate for carrying all his traffic than they might quote another merchant for the carriage of part only of his traffic in the same goods. Whatever justifications there were for the imposition of these restrictions on railway undertakings in the past, when railways were the only practical method by which substantial quantities of goods could be conveyed over long distances, they have been undermined by the development of private road transport since then. It is hoped that this commercial adaptability which is now being given to C.I.E., this new freedom, will help them to stem the loss of traffic from the railways and perhaps even to win some of it back again.

The proposed legislation will relieve C.I.E. of very considerable liabilities. The 3 per cent. transport stock 1955-60, amounting to almost £10,000,000, will become a Government loan and the interest thereon the direct responsibility of the Minister for Finance. The board are relieved of the liability to repay to the Exchequer advances amounting to £1.8 million made in 1956-57 towards capital expenditure and for the redemption of guaranteed bank overdraft used for capital purposes. In addition, provision is made for the write-off of advances totalling £4.8 million made to C.I.E. from the Exchequer up to the 31st March, 1958 to meet transport stock interest.

In short, liabilities are being written off which amount to a total of £16,500,000 and annual interest charges of £632,000 per annum. It may be said that these are only paper reliefs—and to an extent that is so—and that C.I.E. could never have met these charges in any case. That may be true, but these charges are, nevertheless, very real charges which must be met by the taxpayer. These reliefs should contribute to the improvement of the morale of the whole organisation by giving it a financial structure which is realistic and financial obligations which C.I.E. can hope in favourable circumstances to meet in full.

It cannot be expected that any reorganisation measures which the Board of C.I.E. would put into effect would be adequate to achieve solvency immediately and indeed the Bill envisages that the board will not have achieved that position for five years. Financial assistance from the Exchequer will be necessary in the meantime to meet losses. The Bill provides for the payment to C.I.E. of a non-repayable grant of £1,000,000 in each of the five years commencing on 1st April, 1959. This grant relates only to the present C.I.E. organisation. Provision is made in the Great Northern Railway Bill for an increase of £175,000 in this figure to meet the needs of C.I.E. after the amalgamation with the G.N.R. has been completed. It may be that this annual sum will not be sufficient in the earlier years and C.I.E. will have to resort to temporary borrowing to tide them over. I would hope that it would be more than sufficient in the latter years and that C.I.E. would be able to pay off temporary borrowing and perhaps have something left over to carry on with if complete solvency had not finally been reached by 31st March, 1964. These annual payments must cover all the needs of C.I.E., including payment of stock interest, other than capital expenditure. The reorganisation of the undertaking, including the dieselisation programme, is nearly completed and further substantial capital expenditure is not expected. Any capital expenditure which may prove unavoidable should properly be financed from a stock issue.

Compensation is provided under the Bill for staff who suffer a worsening of their conditions or lose their employment as a consequence of the termination or permanent reduction of train or canal services or the substitution of diesel for steam traction. The provisions correspond with those in the Acts of 1950 and 1955 with certain important modifications. The current scales of railway compensation date from an Act of 1924. The generosity of the scales of compensation are, to my knowledge, unparalleled elsewhere providing as they do maximum compensation for life at a rate equivalent to two-thirds of remuneration at the time employment terminates. In 1924, so far as the records show, it was not foreseen that any widespread redundancy would ever arise on the railways and it was, no doubt, thought well to deal very generously with the few cases where it might prove unavoidable. As that Act affected the amalgamation of a number of companies, redundancy was anticipated only in the higher executive grades of employees.

Moreover, the obligation to pay compensation was put upon the railway companies, whose ability to pay the compensation depended on their solvency. Under this Bill, responsibility for compensation in respect of future redundancy is transferred to the Exchequer and becomes, therefore, a charge upon the taxpayer. Nevertheless, the Government do not feel, in the light of the recommendations in the Report of the Committee of Inquiry, that they would be justified in effecting any significant reduction in the scales of compensation, although Senators can understand that I was pressed to reduce them to the level which would apply in the ordinary public services. A civil servant, for example, who became redundant because of the termination of the work on which he was engaged, would not be entitled to compensation on that generous basis. We did, however, feel it to be necessary to remove certain anomalies.

It is difficult to justify a situation in which a man receives compensation at a level as high as two-thirds of his remuneration for his whole lifetime, when, if he had never been redundant, he would have gone on pension, not later than 65 years of age, at possibly a much lower figure.

It would seem appropriate that compensation for loss of employment should apply only over the years of potential employment and that compensation thereafter should be at a lower figure in respect of the pension which the worker could have reasonably expected if he had continued at his work. It is proposed, therefore, that at the age of 65 the compensation pension will be reduced by basing it on 1/80th of annual remuneration for each year of service instead of 1/60th. On this basis maximum compensation will be reduced from two-thirds remuneration to half remuneration at the age of 65. There is provision, however, whereby a redundant employee in receipt of a railway superannuation pension may apply it, in so far as it is sufficient, to effecting a reduction in compensation pension which takes effect at the age of 65. Civil Service and Army pensioners who may be employed by public bodies are liable to have their pensions abated in respect of the remuneration they draw from such employment. It is equitable that that principle should be applied also to persons drawing railway compensation especially now that the cost of such compensation will have to be met by the Exchequer. It is provided, therefore, in the Bill that pensions will be abated while the recipient is in the employment of a Government Department, State-sponsored body or local authority.

In the course of my reply on 5th December, 1957, to the debate in the Dáil on the Supplementary Estimate for C.I.E., to which I have already referred, I drew attention to the findings of the Committee of Inquiry on the subject of staff redundancy in C.I.E. I pointed out that this was primarily a matter for the trade unions catering for railway workers who must reconcile the somewhat conflicting aims of firstly making the employment of their members engaged in railway operation more secure and secondly keeping the maximum number of them in employment. I suggested that the trade unions and the management of C.I.E. should get together for the purpose of working out what the minimum staff needs of an efficient railway organisation would be and should consider what alterations in rules or working methods might be made or what other measures might be adopted to bring the staff employed by C.I.E. on railway operation down to the minimum required for efficient operation and thus make more secure the employment of those who will continue to be engaged in railway work.

I later asked the Chairman of C.I.E. to discuss that plan with the trade unions and to seek their agreement to a programme of reorganisation which could be submitted to me with proposals for the necessary extension of the redundancy compensation provisions to facilitate it. No comprehensive agreement on such a programme could be reached at this stage and following further consultation with C.I.E. and with the representatives of the trade unions I asked the Dáil to approve an amendment to the Bill which is now incorporated in it whereby the compensation may by ministerial Order be extended to cover redundancy arising from any scheme for the reorganisation or more economical working of any department of the undertaking affecting any section or category of workers.

I should point out in this connection that for those who will be affected by the reduction in railway employment which sooner or later will become inevitable, it could well be to their advantage to avail themselves of the compensation provisions which will apply to those losing their employment over the next five years. Having regard to the heavy cost to an already overburdened Exchequer which may be entailed by the present rates of compensation I can, of course, give no guarantee that any compensation provisions which may be introduced to replace those in the present Bill on the expiration of the five-year period will be either as extensive or as generous.

Provision is also made in this Bill to give effect to the recommendation of the Committee of Inquiry for the prescription of minimum fines and the non-application of the Probation of Offenders Acts in respect of second and subsequent convictions for breaches of the Road Transport Acts. That recommendation was directed towards the reduction, if not the elimination, of the abuse of illegal haulage by road vehicles for hire which is at the root of the whole of our transport problem and which is operating to make it more difficult for C.I.E. to secure the volume of traffic which would enable it to operate remuneratively.

The Bill also contains provision authorising farmers to carry their neighbours' live stock for reward by tractor and trailer in certain limited circumstances without a merchandise licence. The opportunity is also being taken to carry out some amendments to both the Railways Acts and the Road Transport Acts to facilitate administration and the operations of the railways. It is unnecessary to say anything about them at this stage. Senators will no doubt express their views on a later stage.

This is one of a series of Transport Bills to deal with the problems of internal transport here and the inability to bring about the situation in which a public transport organisation can operate without heavy subventions from the Exchequer. I have frequently expressed the view that public opinion is moving against the continuation of these subventions. It therefore behoves all those interested in the preservation of the public transport organisation to co-operate in measures designed to minimise the need for external help and to enable the service to be operated without loss.

I think the proposals in this Bill will make it possible for C.I.E. to reach that situation. One cannot be overconfident in view of the disappointment of past hopes but certainly the new commercial freedom which we bring to the organisation, the substantial financial reliefs for which the Bill provides and the assurance of financial assistance at a fixed rate over a definite period should make it easier for the Board of C.I.E. to plan the alterations in the system which will enable it to get into a situation where losses can be avoided.

Dr. O'Donovan

The Minister was modest in his hopes for this Bill. Any person who has read the history of transport in this country since before the last war and particularly the history of the many efforts which the Minister himself has made, and which other occupants of his Ministry have made, must have a great deal of sympathy with this step which he takes to-day.

This Bill has two parts. First, there is a financial mopping-up operation which anybody with anything to do with it will realise is necessary. In other words, if the capital had been left at the high figure, you were just chasing your tail year after year and getting Votes, repayable loans, and so on, which you knew would never be repaid.

The constructive part of the Bill is more important. Before I go on to it, I should like to say a few words about the extent of the financial help now being given to the company. Essentially, although this Bill relates to C.I.E., it deals with the problem of the railways. That problem was first tackled here after the first war. There was an Act of 1924, and there was a slight reduction of capital in the Railways Act, 1927, when the capital was reduced by £1,000,000. When the Minister came into office in 1933, he found a much more serious problem owing to the growth of all kinds of private enterprise operators and the amount of business they were doing. The Railways Act of 1933 reduced the capital, which had previously been reduced from £27,000,000 to £26,000,000, to £12,000,000. That remained the position until the 1944 Act, finally resulting in the nationalisation of the system in 1949.

I always thought that, in 1933, the Minister had two roads which he could travel. He could have travelled along the road of laying down regulations which would restrict the competition by other people regarding hours of work, standards of vehicles and all that kind of thing, and also releasing the railways from the obligations he is now releasing them from, namely, to act as common carriers, to accept traffic offered regardless of how remunerative it may be. But the Minister at that time chose rather the road of trying to approach the problem of the railways from the financial side.

In addition to the Railways Act of 1933, he passed the Road Transport Act of 1933 which should have helped the railways considerably, but for various reasons did not help them as it might have done. When the system was nationalised in 1949—I do not want to pretend that my figures are accurate—the capital was about £16,000,000, and at present—again without being in possession of a more accurate assessment than I have received from last year's report of C.I.E. for the year ending March, 1957 —the capital appears to be about £33,000,000. Hence in effect what the Minister is doing in this Bill is writing off half the capital of C.I.E.

If one looks at the figures on the assets side of the C.I.E. balance sheet for last year, one notices that a great deal of the capital is in fact in the railway system—railway lines and works, £6,500,000; land and building, which I take it would be almost entirely under the railways, £2,000,000; and railway rolling stock, £11,250,000. There is, of course, a serious problem here when one considers, with those capital figures, all the amount of money that is put year by year into the road system.

Again, I can only take figures in the returns of local taxation, but they show that there is an expenditure every year on the roads of something about £11,000,000 or £12,000,000. I have heard a figure of £14,000,000 used, but that, I take it, includes some other roads which perhaps come under the definition of housing development and so on. The figure of expenditure by local authorities on roads in recent years has been about £11,000,000 a year, half of that coming from the road taxes which people pay on their motor cars and the other half from the rates. That is the essence of the problem— how the finances of the railways, with traffic being diverted to the roads, can be kept in order when at the same time there is the enormous expenditure every year on the roads.

The problem was examined, as the Minister said, by the committee which reported in May of last year. Before I go on to that, I would like to say that it has always intrigued me that the Minister did not nationalise the undertaking in the 1944 Act.

Mr. S. Lemass

Looking back 11 years, I find it very hard to answer that question.

Dr. O'Donovan

It is just a matter of interest that it is amazing when one looks at it and sees what took place in 1933, which inevitably led to that result. That is, of course, being wise after the event. The Minister having set up C.I.E., the same then as it is today, did not nationalise it, and when it was nationalised in 1949, he was not in office. I do not understand whether his failure to do so was due to some doctrinaire objection or whether perhaps he was subconsciously or unconsciously covering his tracks.

Mr. S. Lemass

I was not as perturbed about the interests of the private shareholders as my Labour Party successor.

Dr. O'Donovan

The committee which was set up by the previous Government reported in May of last year. I hope that I will not be deemed too critical of the report if I say that the Government put too much pressure on the committee to report quickly. The report is defective. I say that in all honesty. There is an enormous mass of matter in it and it is a tremendous size. If it had been boiled down more and thought about longer, and if the committee had not been so pressed to produce the report, it might have been a better one, but the necessities of the case perhaps made that essential.

The particular point on which I should like to criticise the report is this: their main recommendation was that the present 1,850 miles of railways should be reduced to 850 miles, that about 1,000 miles should be taken out of the system. But the committee, in recommending this for financial reasons, gave no guarantee whatever as far as I can find as to what the effect of that would be on the financial system. They could make no suggestion as to what the result would be, if it had been done gradually, in two or three years' time. That is a defect in a report of that kind.

As the Minister has pointed out, the effect of the reduction of capital is to save the company £630,000 a year. Senators will remember that the chairman of C.I.E. said a few weeks ago that the change of fuel was resulting in a saving of something like £700,000 a year. That is a total of £1,300,000 a year. To that, one must add £1,000,000 a year to be made available for the next five years. That is to say that £2,300,000 a year is essentially the amount of money to be made available from public funds over the next five years for the system. When one examines the history of C.I.E. since the boat was pushed out for it, and it was well pushed out for it in 1949 with an enormous Supplementary Estimate of something like £3,500,000 or £4,000,000—to which were added considerable capital sums since—what was perturbing about it is that there were in that period of nearly ten years one or two years when it looked as if it might get on its feet. Every time there was a sliding backwards in the following year or two. It is perturbing that despite this huge capital investment—and it has been very considerable—the system, from whatever inherent or historical difficulties, does not seem to be able to get along.

The Minister is doing one other thing for the company and that is increasing the fares in the City of Dublin. There was a surplus on that system. It was not possible for me, but it might be possible for somebody, to discover what the exact profit was, but it was generally accepted to be in the region of a couple of hundred thousand pounds. I did see, without any great difficulty, the cost of the extra remuneration of the staff in Dublin, attached to the bus services.

Mr. S. Lemass

Why only the staff attached to the bus services?

Dr. O'Donovan

Because I am speaking about the extra profit which the company will get from the increase of fares in the City of Dublin on the road passenger services.

Mr. S. Lemass

The workers in the Inchicore works have to get an increase, too.

Dr. O'Donovan

Let us deal with the other point at the moment. The Minister can come back to his other point afterwards. According to the report from the Transport Commission there are 4,000 workers engaged on the Dublin road passenger services and the increase which they got was 10/- per week, or about £25 a year. Therefore, the increase was £100,000 a year. Of course, there were other increases. I realise that when you have a wage increase of that sort, you have the spiral of costs. Unless I am mistaken, I did see a statement that, generally speaking, the road passenger fares in Dublin were increased by about 20 per cent. I saw that statement somewhere, but I may have picked it up wrongly. Taking that against the receipts of £3,500,000, 20 per cent. gives us a figure of £700,000.

Mr. S. Lemass

I am sorry to say it was about half of that.

Dr. O'Donovan

It was 10 per cent.?

Mr. S. Lemass

I do not know the percentage, but that is the amount they will get.

Dr. O'Donovan

Very well; I will take the Minister's figures. I could not get the accurate figures myself. It means that the net profits which C.I.E. will make out of the Dublin bus services is being doubled; it is being increased from £200,000 per year to £400,000 per year. As a Dublin man who uses the buses, I must say I object to the fact that part of the service, which was paying for itself handsomely, is to pay for itself still more handsomely. At any rate, taking the Minister's figure, it brings my figure of £2.3 million to £2,500,000.

I agree with the Minister on the whole that the terms of compensation are not ungenerous. Before he said it himself, I had written it on my copy of the White Paper. I did think, however, that at the end of his speech today, it looked as if he was being pressed by the Department of Finance and that there was a reaction of some sort involved. Having regard to the number of people who were employed on the railways and who had some years of service with the railways, I was surprised at the rate of reduction in the numbers employed on the railways. I believe it is difficult to transfer men—say, after they have reached the age of 50—to new work.

My attention was drawn to the fact that when the buses replaced the trams in Dublin, the bulk of the tram drivers who had been used to operating a fixed system, which had only a limited number of gears and so on, became bus drivers. Perhaps if the people had been transferred from the railway part of the system to the bus part of the system throughout the country, they might have had to change their town of residence. It seems to me that C.I.E. has been so substantially supported over the last decade by the State that, to put it crudely, perhaps, the screws have never been put on them to reduce the number of railway workers properly. However, I must say that I agree with the Minister's conclusion, even if there was pressure from some other quarter, but, of course, it may be that the Minister is of that opinion himself, quite independently of pressure.

On the question of redundancy, it is surprising the extent to which people can be transferred from one type of work to another type of work which is completely different. The Minister said, perfectly correctly, that the fate of any local line will depend on the local people. Everybody who has been looking at the development of the transport situation has noticed that the moment it is suggested that a line be closed down, uproar breaks out in the particular locality. The moment the Government gives way, or C.I.E. gives way, as they did in a situation which existed in a certain period after the war, nobody uses the line. They all like to have it there; they like to have the train puffing in at the end of the day, or something like that. One of my colleagues suggests that it gives the town status. There is something like that in it. It is extraordinary how little they use the railway themselves.

The Minister used a phrase which I wrote down myself. He said that he has reduced their liabilities to such an extent that they are now at a level at which they can hope in favourable circumstances to meet their obligations more fully. That is a modest claim on the Minister's part. It is the kind of atmosphere in which the Minister has introduced the Bill and in that atmosphere one cannot make any criticism of the Minister's claims for what the Bill will do.

I noticed the Minister used in his brief the phrase which is in paragraph 5 of the White Paper. It was that "provision is made for the removal of the common carrier and other obligations which restrict the commercial adaptability of the undertaking." A phrase like "commercial adaptability of the undertaking" reminds me of many of the new phrases one sees in relation to capital programme and so on. That is a restriction on the manner in which the company operates the undertaking. There is a similar phrase in the first paragraph of the White Paper that the Board of C.I.E. be reorganised "so as to pay its way." The meaning of it, of course, is to reorganise the undertaking so that it will pay its way. Why then keep it "so as to pay its way?" The Board of C.I.E. are not going to pay their way. Why not put it in ordinary straight English?

But my particular objection is to the "commercial adaptability." I notice that when the Minister got away from his brief, he used a different phrase himself. He used a phrase an ordinary person would be inclined to use—that it would give them more room and would enable the company to carry on its work in its own way.

It has been mentioned that certain more remote parts of the country may be affected by the removal of the common carrier obligation. Quite frankly, I am with the Minister in that. In fact, had it been done in the 1933 Act, the problem would not be as serious as it is. It might be urged that there would have been difficulty during the war period, but that could have been got over by an Emergency Powers Order.

We have all heard stories about people delivering lorry loads of parcels to certain areas and proceeding to leave the fag-end of them at railway junctions to go out in four or five directions. That is a perfectly normal thing. One could recall other more obvious stories about very small loads, but that is beside the point. You will have that in a big system. On the whole, the Minister has approached this matter in a reasonable way but, I regret to say, it is still a very expensive way.

Mr. Murphy

As the Minister reminded us when concluding his speech, this is one of many measures which have come before the Oireachtas to deal with the problem of public transport. All the measures were supposed to solve the problem at the time. I got the impression that the Minister was not terribly hopeful about this measure. However, the fact is that all the measures produced have proved inadequate. They reminded me of slapping a dash of tar on the ship of transport, shoving it out and saying: "You are all right now"—giving hope where no real hope existed, with resultant discouragement to the management and staff whose task it was to try to carry out the wishes of the Oireachtas.

The first measure attempting to deal with public transport in the State was a Bill promoted by the Labour Party in 1924. That was designed to nationalise transport and communications, but it was defeated on the Second Reading by the combined votes of the other Parties in the Dáil. It was quickly followed, however, by the 1924 Railways Act, to which the Minister has referred. All the Governments since have taken steps which have been eventually realised to be too late and too little. I hope that we will not have the same thing to say about the 1958 Transport Act in years to come.

This Bill is an expensive measure, but it is expensive because of the fact that successive Governments seem to have taken no notice of what the board appointed to run nationalised transport has been saying since its inception. The very first report of the nationalised C.I.E. concluded by saying:

"It is out of the question to consider any further increases in rates and fares to enable such deficits to be eliminated and it seems clear that the board's financial position can only be appreciably improved by the application of such restrictions on private transport as will secure to the board substantially increased business."

It said that this would involve legislation and that the board had recently submitted proposals to the Department. Again, in 1954, the board concluded its report by reiterating that view. In paragraph 114, it said:—

"The board is still firmly of the opinion that whatever steps may be necessary should be taken to transfer to the board's railway services the heavy long-distance loads at present carried by road."

There may be a quite legitimate difference of opinion as to whether the proposals advocated by the board were the proper proposals, but the point I want to underline is that the Transport Board, as nationalised by the 1950 Act, had been drawing attention to the problem from the very date of its inception. The first annual report refers to the problem and says what is necessary; but nothing has been done, in effect, until now. The Bill we have before us is expensive because of that neglect and the time lag in between.

I think there will be general acceptance in this House, as in the Dáil, that it is essential to have an organised public transport system. We cannot visualise a free-for-all in transport, as has been advocated, for instance, in the Six Counties recently, but has not in fact eventuated there. The general wish would probably be that the railways should continue to form the backbone of that public transport system. That wish has been expressed by the Minister, even though there may be some doubts as to whether the Bill will produce that result.

Another point on which I think there will also be general acceptance is that it is essential for trade, commerce, agriculture and the public generally that public transport should be run as efficiently and as economically as possible, and speaking of the economics of public transport, I cannot ignore, as indeed Senator O'Donovan could not ignore, the amount of money being spent by this State year after year on the maintenance of the road system in the country. I remember taking out figures some years ago about the average cost of maintaining a mile of road. In 1939, it was £66 per mile; in 1954-55, it had increased by 325 per cent. to £213 per mile. Of that, £82 came from the Road Fund, £39 from the contribution from the Central Fund, notably the National Development Fund at that time, and £91 from the rates. In other words, 45 per cent. of the money spent to maintain the roads in the State came from the local rates. Indeed, onethird of the rates collected throughout the country on an average every year is expended on the maintenance of roads. Some of us feel that the money could be better spent. The money now being spent on the roads was disclosed in answer to a question in the Dáil last week, when it was said that £10,000,000 per annum was spent and that about £4,500,000 of that comes from the local rates.

The point I want to underline is not alone that this is substantial money being expended every year on the maintenance of that transport system or public highway, but also that it is tending to increase. Also tending to increase is the weight of the lorries being put upon the roads. For example, in 1955, there were 35,000 merchandise vehicles licensed for the delivery of the owners' own goods. That rose to nearly 39,000 in 1957, an increase of about 9½ per cent. Looking at the figures for the comparatively heavy lorries, those of three tons and over unladen weight, the increase in the same period was 27½ per cent. I notice that the monsters—eight tons and over unladen weight—increased in number by nearly 50 per cent. Any of us who have travelled some miles behind one of these heavy lorries on a secondary road can readily appreciate why this money has to be spent year after year on the maintenance of our road system. I followed one of these lorries one day and actually saw it breaking into crumbs the road over which it was travelling. It was a big lorry engaged on transporting material for the repair of roads.

The basis of most of the legislation —and particularly the 1944 Act sponsored by this Minister—was that the profits made on the road operations of the public transport organisation should make up for the inevitable losses on the rail side. I think there was considerable merit in that approach to the problem of maintaining a public transport system on an even keel. Unfortunately, it has not worked. The basis of this Bill is, in my view, a refinement of that policy. First of all, the Minister proposes to wipe out the accrued losses to reduce the capital of the undertaking. He is making it easier to prune the rail system. He is encouraging the improvement in economics of rail transport by reorganisation; and he is transferring to the State the cost of compensating staff made redundant. He is also giving more freedom to C.I.E. to compete for traffic available. Lastly—and I suppose most important—a subsidy of £1,000,000 per annum is being provided to enable the undertaking to put itself on its feet.

I must say that I am not very easy in my mind as to what will eventually happen in regard to the rail system. It was all right for the Minister to say that he believes it is necessary to maintain the railways. It is also very easy to make the point that the Committee of Inquiry into Internal Transport were using this map on page 186 simply as the basis for illustration. That is realised and that is appreciated. It seems to me that it will follow inevitably that with the new board being given the power to close branch lines without reference to anybody, provided they are satisfied that their continued operation is uneconomic and cannot be made economic in a reasonable period, practically all the rail system is due for lopping off within the next five years.

Even in this respect there seems to be some sort of contradiction between the section in the Bill which says that and the earlier section which says that the board taking the undertaking as a whole should, after the end of the five years, pay its way. That seems to imply that you will have one good part of the undertaking which is making a profit and other services which cannot make a profit. In dealing with branch lines, the approach of the board must be simply to consider whether their operation is economic and whether it can be made economic in the future. I think it is wrong that the Oireachtas should be asked in an important matter such as this in regard to the maintenance of the railway system to hand over this power to a board. Granted that the board must be the best judges, now, by virtue of the fact that the Transport Tribunal is being removed, there is no appeal, no tribunal for calm assessment of all the factors. There is one simple yardstick, the yardstick which is being given to the board, to judge a branch line as to whether it is economic or can be made economic.

Business suspended at 6 p.m. and resumed at 7 p.m.

Mr. Murphy

When the Seanad adjourned, I was referring to the apparent contradiction in the Bill between the duty laid upon the board of so conducting its undertaking that its revenue shall be sufficient to meet expenditure and, at the same time, saying in another part of the Bill that the board may close a branch line where it is uneconomic and there is no prospect of making its working economic within a reasonable period. If that last measurement is applied to branch lines, I think all branch lines must inevitably be closed. If it is applied to what we would regard as secondary lines, I think, equally, those secondary lines would have to be closed. I would even doubt whether the main line between Cork and Dublin could be regarded as economic.

If that power being given to the board were applied, the board would be entitled, without reference to any tribunal, without reference to the Minister, without the Minister being accountable to the Dáil or being able to give any answer to the Dáil, to close all those lines—the whole railway system as we know it. That is too much of a step in the dark. Whilst I appreciate that, in the changing circumstances, there must be a continuing examination of branch lines and railway lines generally, I think this measurement is too drastic and should be qualified in some way or another.

The other provision in the Bill to improve the economics of rail transport is very important. It will affect the decision of the board as to whether or not branch lines or railway lines will be continued in operation. I refer to the suggestion already made by the Minister and the provision made in the Bill for reorganisation, new working methods and the payment of compensation by the State on any redundancy arising from such reorganisation. It is generally appreciated that working arrangements need to be continuously examined. The principle is accepted that public transport is a service the community are entitled to, and that they should have as economic and as efficient a service as possible. What was a good working arrangement a quarter of a century ago need not necessarily be good in the 1950's. The Minister has already taken the right steps in this direction and has got the confidence of the trade unions in this matter.

I do not want to enter into a discussion of the history of staff relations in C.I.E. The one point I want to make is that if there is to be progress in reorganisation, it must be by way of cooperation between the management and the trade unions representing the staff.

The impression has been created, apparetly, in the public mind that C.I.E. employees, railway men in particular, are hanging around doing half nothing. Perhaps that is understandable. People see railway porters, for example, in stations down the country and think that when the train has passed, there is nothing more for them to do until the next train comes along. I can assure Senators most definitely that such is not the case. There is no question about it. The staff are utilised as efficiently as possible in the existing circumstances. It could be that the methods of work, the way they are utilised, could be improved, but there is no question of the staff hanging around half-idle and waiting for something to do.

Senator O'Donovan referred to the staff of the railways and said that, in spite of the reduction in traffic, the staff has not decreased. This is not the case. I will just refer to the figures in the Beddy report which show that the railway staff in 1926 was nearly 15,000, in 1938 had gone down to 11,000, in 1950 was up to 12,000 and in 1956 was a little below 11,000. I have not the figures for 1957, but I do know there is a further reduction. During the same period, however, the amount of work done by that staff had in fact increased. The same report lays down the tonnage carried in those years. I will quote the index of merchandise which taking the basis of 100 in 1938 gave the figure for 1925 of 108, for 1938 of 100, for 1944, 116, and for 1956, 121. In other words, the staff decreased but the number of tons handled increased.

If we look at another figure, that is, ton miles, on page 30 of the report, we find the improvement is even greater because with 100 as the index for 1938, it had risen by 1956 to 135. There is, therefore, no question of the staff of the railways being kept up, in spite of falling traffic. In fact, the staff on the railways decreased and the traffic carried and the distance that traffic was carried both increased.

That is not to say that people interested in the problem of public transport have set their faces against any further improvement. The Minister can have the sympathy and support of the trade unions in trying to increase further the efficiency of railway operation.

In regard to the possibility of railway closures, there is one further point I should like to make—that a greater effort can be made, and greater progress to support the railways and the losses inevitable in railway operation, by an expansion in the road side of the C.I.E. undertaking. In this respect, I find myself in agreement with what is said in the Beddy report about the preference given by the Board of C.I.E. to rail operations. What they say in their recommendation in paragraph 388 is very important. They say:—

"We consider it should be clearly recognised and accepted that C.I.E. as a public transport organisation should operate its undertaking with strict impartiality by utilising to the fullest extent possible the special advantages of each form of transport. Traffic which can be carried more economically, conveniently and quickly by one form of transport should not be carried by the other."

In my opinion, the railways are essential. There may have to be examination of branch lines as such; there may be some closures; but the railways should be maintained, but it is not in the best interests of public transport that an attempt should be made by C.I.E., in effect, to force on to the railway traffic offering to them. They might induce traffic on to the railways, but there has been a loss of traffic to the road side, or perhaps I could put it that there could have been greater expansion at the road side of the C.I.E. undertaking, with, possibly, some profit on such expansion which would in turn help to maintain the railway system.

In this respect, I would go back to the point I was making earlier about the increase in heavy lorries in the State. The Minister, as well as looking for the measures which he is looking for in this Bill, should examine the position with regard to the increasing number of heavy lorries which are being imported, and being put on the roads in this part of the country. Not alone are they expensive to the economy by exporting capital, but, as I have shown, they lead to very heavy annual expenditure on the roads. It could be that if that expansion were curtailed, there would be a better chance of the railways being able to maintain themselves.

Secondly, the Minister should take the further step which was advocated by the trade unions some years ago, and I think by the Board of C.I.E., that semi-State undertakings and local authorities should be encouraged to avail of the services of nationalised public transport. It seems senseless that money should be invested by such undertakings as the E.S.B. in building up a whole fleet for their own transport requirements, while another semi-State, another nationalised undertaking, is there for the very purpose of providing a public transport service.

Again, we have seen throughout the country county councils sinking vast sums of money in road fleets when the work has been done, and could continue to be done, by the nationalised public transport undertaking. Whatever about the merits of trying to force private individuals to utilise national transport, certainly there is everything in favour of saying to the semi-State organisations and local authorities, another branch of the same family, that they should not engage in the daft policy of sinking money in transport services of their own, when there is a public service there which is underutilised and which is, because of that fact, a waste of the country's resources.

Whatever about the reorganisation which can be carried out by C.I.E. within the next five years; whatever benefits they may get out of this legislation, I feel that even at the end of that period, there will be a need for some form of subsidy to maintain public transport. I think the Minister in the Dáil said that the problems of public transport were common to most countries and should not permit us to indulge in slovenly thinking here. I think our aim should be to have the public transport as efficient and as economic as possible. I do feel, however, that even at the end of five years, there will be some need for a subsidy one way or another, if the service is to be well organised.

If that is to happen I should like the Minister to consider some form of indirect subsidy, rather than a direct subsidy such as is being provided in this Bill. I have in mind what happens in regard to air transport. Nobody says that we are subsidising air transport, but in fact what happens is, as the Minister is well aware, that the State by providing the airports is subsidising air transport to the extent of £500,000 per annum. A full picture is given in the report of the Committee of Public Accounts and in the Appropriation Accounts 1955-56, on page 38.

It will be seen there that the differences between the expenses and the receipts for the two airports is nearly £500,000. The air companies, including Aer Lingus, are charged certain fees for the use of these airports and in that way air transport is subsidised to the extent of about £500,000. I think it should be subsidised; I think it is necessary that we should have air transport in this day and age. The point I want to make is that because of the very fact that this is not regarded as a direct subsidy, the morale of the people managing and working our air transport system is better than that of the people engaged and working in an undertaking such as C.I.E., who are deemed to be inefficient by reason of the fact that they are continually in financial difficulties and who will be told, from one end of the country to the other, for the next five years, that they are being handed £1,000,000 per year to keep themselves going.

Some sort of indirect subsidy should be given and what I have in mind is some assistance for the upkeep of the railways. For example, I see that for the last year for which we have accounts for C.I.E. to earn about £7,000,000 on the railway side, C.I.E. had to expend about £1,000,000 on the upkeep of that part of the highways of the country, on the permanent way. They had to spend about 14 per cent. of their receipts on the rail side to maintain the permanent way. To earn £7,250,000 on the road side, they had to pay out about £309,000 by way of road tax and licences. In other words, 4 per cent. of their income on the road side was expended on road tax and licences.

When we come to look at the canals, we find that between 30 per cent. and 40 per cent. of their receipts is used to maintain the canals. Eventually, the Minister will have to come to a decision as to what railways it is essential to keep open. Having come to that decision, I suggest that C.I.E., or whatever they may be called, should be given an indirect subsidy to maintain those railways. It would be better all round that that should be the approach. It would be better as I said for the morale of the staff.

I will have some other words to say on the Committee Stage of the Bill, in particular in regard to the amendment which the Minister introduced to provide extra facilities for the farming community. That is a matter, however, which can be discussed when we come to the section.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

In order to discuss this Bill, I read again the explanatory memorandum which was given to us, and I noticed that the main object of the Bill, according to this memorandum, is to give effect to the Government's decision "to implement, with modifications, the recommendations of the Committee of Inquiry into Internal Transport", and so on, "to reorganise the undertaking so as to pay its way and to preserve the railways...." Now, I do not feel that the Minister has told us yet why the Government has decided to preserve the railways. That is one point which is sometimes taken for granted, and because it is taken for granted, it is not met. I should like to hear from the Minister some comment as to what are the basic considerations which make the Government decide that we need railways. What would happen if we shut them down? In this same first paragraph, I notice that it is so taken for granted.

Of course, the Minister has referred to this as "one of a whole series of Transport Bills". He did not venture to tell us it is the last. But I venture to prophesy it is not the last by a long way. It is "one of a whole series". Why? I notice that both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are now criticising each other in a friendly way because the other did not "nationalise" transport earlier. The Minister is glad it is "nationalised", and Senator O'Donovan is surprised it was not done earlier. The whole suggestion seems to be that nationalisation is the one way to deal with it. I agree with Senator Murphy on that point. My only fear is that we have not yet had the courage to go far enough.

As I see it, the position of transport in Ireland is that there are too few people in the country. We have a diminishing population. It has not been referred to, but the fact we are losing 50,000 people from a small population every year means considerably less home demand each year upon transport. So we have too few people and too much transport. That really is the position. When I say "too much transport" I mean both private and public. In an earlier speech the present Minister pointed to the advent of the motor car and said that that had produced the problem as far as the railways were concerned. Therefore our problem is now to apportion what transport there is. I do not believe that this Bill or any other Bill up to now has provided the answer.

It seems to me that there are two valid alternatives in trying to deal with the transport situation. The first of these would be to allow full and free competition throughout the field aiming at giving a first class competitive service where it would be needed. One result of this would be that where a need for transport was relatively small, private enterprise would give no service at all. It has often been pointed out that if you were to apply the same system to the postal services you would have excellent services in the bigger areas, but no postal services at all in the remote parts, for the very small uniform fee now charged.

Under such a full and free private enterprise competitive service you would also, presumably, have private maintenance in their entirety of the roads. I am aware that the private motorists, lorry owners and C.I.E. contribute to the upkeep of the roads at present. Figures have already been given to show that this upkeep of the roads is subsidised in fact by the taxpayer and the ratepayer to the tune of about £6,000,000 per year. Presumably, if you are going to have a full and free private enterprise transport service, it will carry the full charge of the upkeep of its own "permanent way"—the roads—not merely of the upkeep of the present roads but presumably also of the vast improvement in the roads which would become necessary if all transport traffic had to travel by road.

It is sometimes forgotten when we are talking about the efficiency of private enterprise in the field of transport that a good deal is done for them in the way of subsidy by ratepayers in the maintenance of roads, and that they do not have that as a complete charge, as the railway has the permanent way.

That would be the first alternative. The second alternative—and the one I personally would prefer—would be the complete nationalisation of all transport in the country with community control, and community planning primarily for community benefit. Any subsidies to be given out, directly or indirectly, would be for the community good, and not merely in order to keep private interests afloat. We would have to have concerted, overall planning, with such things as freight clearing-houses, and full co-ordination of the carrying of goods and passengers, in a single integrated service.

It seems to me that these are the only two reasonable alternatives available, but we, and it has been our practice for many years now, prefer to choose a third. Nobody could call it a middle path. It is not. It is a kind of mixum gatherum of the other two, with a few other undesirable elements thrown in, a fantastic "anti-plan"— you could not call it a plan—in which we aim, first of all, to preserve the railways; secondly, to please the private road hauliers; thirdly, to keep the farmers quiet, if we can; and fourthly, not to annoy the trade unionists too much.

We try to bolster up the railways by giving them not all road transport or freight transport but some of it. We reserve certain materials for them, such as cement, sugar, maize, and, indirectly, certain other things like fertilisers, ground limestone and so on. Then, although we do not abolish all traffic for the private hauliers, we proceed to tie them up with restrictions. We try on the one hand to keep them alive, and on the other to see that they do not struggle very much above subsistence level. We allow them to continue to operate, but only with all kinds of niggling restrictions.

I think it should be said that many of these private hauliers are surprisingly efficient in such circumstances of restriction, tramell and regulation, in which they find themselves by Government enactment. It should be noted that of these private hauliers some 76 per cent. are restricted in carrying to a total tonnage not exceeding 2 tons 15 cwt. Under those circumstances the biggest of them could not in fact have very much more than eight or ten trucks. They are kept to certain areas and only allowed to carry certain types of goods. There is even a clause in the licence that says that when particular hauliers are confined to an area which is within the Gaeltacht, or partly within it, their "employees shall be capable of discharging their business in the Irish language."

In other words, almost everything they do is codified and laid down by law. They are restricted to a certain area, restricted in relation to the stuff they can carry and the places they can go. Quite obviously, that does not give them a very fair chance, yet despite that restriction there are some areas which are wholly exempted from such provision, areas around some of the bigger cities. What has been done in fact, by previous legislation, and is continued as far as this Bill is concerned, is to attempt to legislate for the private hauliers so as to freeze their business at the 1933 position. That is what successive Governments have tried to do, to say to them "whatever you are doing, that you can continue to do, but nothing new." That is extremely inefficient; it is getting the worst of both worlds. It is not allowing private enterprise to do itself justice; and to the individual concerned it is, of course, fantastically unjust.

I suggest that we should have the courage either to wipe these people out of business altogether, if that is what we intend, or else to cease to pretend to be concerned with fair play for them, while trying to keep them tied up in a sort of 1933 strait-jacket, in which it is exceedingly difficult for them to operate in a normal and efficient way. I could cite a dozen examples of the sort of thing you found in 1933 or 1934, but which has long since changed. In East Cork, there was very little carrying of sugar beet in 1933, because the development of the whole industry and its agricultural section had not yet occurred in those days. There was hardly a beet carrier there, if any; the local carriers carried no sugar beet. Therefore, under the terms of our successive legislation, none of them can carry it now, because what they may now carry is only what they were carrying in 1933.

There have been also many other changes—in the weight of vehicles used, in the freight that can be carried, in the condition of the roads which enable approach to areas not accessible in those days, in traffic conditions, changes which, in the terms of the individual licences granted to these men, are not recognised and yet the Minister is not prepared to help them in that regard, but is prepared to allow them only as in 1933, but not give them an inch more than that. That is a most grudging and, I suggest, inefficient way of getting any good out of private enterprise, if private enterprise is what the Minister wants. Whenever the Minister is asked, as he has been asked, to extend the area of operation of certain hauliers, who would now be able to reach further than in 1933, or to alter the provisions for the licensee in relation to certain goods and so on, the Minister—whether the present or previous Minister—takes a sort of non possumus attitude, and says he has not the necessary power. He quite forgets that the 1944 Act gave him power to extend the area of operation and vary certain restrictive provisions, if he “is satisfied” that the existing facilities are inadequate, and so on. I think I am correct in saying that he has never used that power, or has used it extraordinarily sparingly.

In the other House, an attempt was made under this Bill to give the Minister the power specifically to alter the provisions of such private hauliers' licences to facilitate the expansion of their operations to other and wider areas, and to deal with a wider range of goods. That was ruled out of order as an amendment, because it was held to be outside the scope of this Bill. Yet the Government itself subsequently introduced an amendment to alter conditions of haulage, not for the private hauliers, but for private farmers to admit them into the field, in a new section, Section 27 of the Bill, about which I should like to say something en passant.

Section 27 (1) says:—

"Notwithstanding Section 9 of the Road Transport Act, 1933, a person whose only or chief occupation is farming may, without being the holder of a merchandise licence, carry for reward in a vehicle drawn by an agricultural tractor owned by him, and in respect of which a duty of excise at the rate specified in subparagraph (c) of paragraph 4 of Part I of the Schedule to the Finance (Excise Duties) (Vehicles) Act, 1952, is chargeable, live stock owned by a person resident not more than two miles from the carrier's residence if the live stock are being carried to or from a farm from or to a live-stock auction mart or a place where a market or fair, specified by Order made by the Minister under this section, is held, on the day on which such auction, market or fair takes place and they are not being carried in either direction on any part of a public road which is more than 20 miles by public road from the carrier's residence."

Now, this is a concession. It is a concession to the farmers, but look at the way it is wrapped up, almost as if the Minister felt as soon as he accorded the right to haul anything, as it was granted under certain conditions to private hauliers, he must immediately try to tie the hand of the people doing it, for fear they would be able to do it efficiently. I should like to ask the Minister whether it would not be wise to define "agricultural tractor", and find out whether a case could not be made to show that any articulated vehicle in fact might be said to be an agricultural tractor, in default of a specific definition here.

Then you have the provision that such a farmer can carry his neighbour's live stock only if he lives not more than two miles away. If he lives two and a half, three or four miles away, it cannot be done. He can only carry it to a live-stock mart, provided it is not more than 20 miles away in either direction. If the road to the market happens to make a slight detour which brings it outside the 20 miles distance, it cannot be legally done. How are people going to check whether farmers carrying for reward are taking cattle on a public road to live-stock auction marts are outside their rights, because it may be just a shade more than 20 miles outside? In the case of "live-stock auction mart" there is no definition of that either, though admittedly it has to be specified by Order by the Minister, but it remains undefined in this Bill. I mention it as a curious fact, that the Minister has felt it possible to bring in something that looks very much as if it were outside the scope of the Bill and bring it in on behalf of private hauliers who happen to be farmers, under certain conditions, at the very time when he is convinced that to bring it in on behalf of private hauliers who are not farmers would be outside the scope of the Bill. I am afraid that I do not understand why that should be so.

The real reason the Minister brings in this amendment on behalf of farmers is, of course, that he knows that in the present absurd legal situation, all kinds of illegal haulage is being done by farmers, cattle dealers and so on, and his way of dealing with that situation is to make what is now illegal legal. If you find the law is being broken, a good way of ensuring that the law will not continue to be broken is apparently to change the law to suit the lawbreaker. We have had many examples of that in this country, and this is just one more. I am not over-critical of this illegal haulage, though I recognise that it hits the licensed hauliers, because I recognise, as public opinion does, the absurdity of the present legal situation. In fact, that absurdity is so widely recognised, and so often apparent in certain cases brought before the District Courts, that certain district justices are not entirely in sympathy, shall we say, with prosecutions brought under previous legislation.

One effect of this new recognition is the right of the farmer to engage in a certain amount of haulage for reward, which in itself, I may say, is a perfectly logical thing, because it is quite obvious that the farmer should be allowed to work whatever machinery he has bought to the maximum. One effect it that the small haulier who is already being squeezed by C.I.E. on one side, will now be further squeezed by farmers on the other side. It is quite possible that he ought to be squeezed, and squeezed out of business. That is possible. I do not know. I would not presume to judge. It may be that some of the very small hauliers are rather in the position of the huckster's shop, and on the whole represent an expensive way of providing a service, but if it is the intention to squeeze such small hauliers out of existence, ought we not be straight about it, and say so, instead of allowing them to be hit in an indirect way, while at the same time we refuse to bring in any amendment which would slightly ease the lot of the private haulier on whose behalf the Minister, the Government and the State pretend they are concerned, since they issue these licences? Why should we have all this hotch-potch of legislation?

I suggest that it is mainly because the Government and the Minister want to try to please everybody. They want to try to please the big votes and the little votes, and be on everyone's side. They say they are not going to hurt the trade unions because there is to be compensation, that they will do no harm to the small hauliers because they will be allowed to have all they used to be allowed, and they do not want to antagonise the farmers because the farmers are pretty well organised in these days, and finally they want to be considered as supporting C.I.E. because they brought C.I.E. into existence.

They want to try, in other words, in the tradition of the very old story about transport, to please everybody. We are all familiar with the story of the man, his son and the donkey. At first, the man was travelling on the donkey's back with his son walking by his side. Passers-by remarked how unfair it was that he should sit on the donkey's back while his son had to walk so he lifted his son on to the donkey behind him. Then people said: "Oh look at the two of you on that poor animal." The man got down and left his son on the donkey. Then people said that the youth was very inconsiderate to ride on the donkey while the father had to walk. It ended up with the man and his son carrying the donkey.

I venture to hope that in his efforts to please everybody by most chaotic legislation, in a whole series of Bills, as he says himself, the Minister will not wind up by finding himself carrying the donkey.

I should like now to advert to the question of railways. I suggested in the beginning that nobody has yet said why we should preserve them, or whether we should abandon them. I notice that the recommendations of the tribunal committee implied that if a trial period is not successful, after carrying out their recommendations, some of which are implemented by this Bill but not all of which the Government has here accepted, if it does not succeed, then the railways should be abandoned. I should like to hear from the Minister a statement of the reasons why they should not be abandoned. Personally, I do not think they should be abandoned. But it is up to the Minister to say why it is that we as a State do not want to abandon railways. They have a long history here. They are a monument to the early days of private enterprise in this country. It is also true that in the early days they were regarded as a gilt-edged security, and also as a way of making big profits. In those days, it was possible to get one's capital back by investing it in railways in a short number of years. The State took over, only when they were nearly bankrupt. That is what always happens. In this country we do not nationalise when a concern is running well, but we take it over when it is nearly bankrupt. Then people say: "Just look at what happens when the State takes over." When the State first intervened and when C.I.E. was created, it had an enormous task, but it was not given a free hand then, and it is not being given it now.

I do not regard C.I.E. as perfect. But I regard it in many ways as an efficient company. We tend to discount the things it does well, and grumble when the 5d. bus fare goes up to 6d. Yet, it should be recognised by anybody with experience of transport systems in cities elsewhere that, both for service—and I include courtesy— and for price, we compare favourably with most countries, or with most big cities on the Continent. That does not mean it is perfect, or could not be improved, but it is a fact which should be recognised.

One criticism I would make is that ministerial responsibility is not now involved. The Minister can always get up in the House and say: "This is a matter for the company." I should prefer to see a public transport system in State hands, with the Minister fully responsible and answerable to the Parliament. In saying that, I should like to suggest that such a State company ought not to have to apologise if, on certain sections of its service, it finds itself losing money. It may become necessary in certain cases to lose money. It should be recognised that there are sections of the Post Office service that lose money. There are certain uneconomic sections or services which have to be maintained, because the postal and transport services are very similar, in that they represent the life blood of the trading and commercial community, and of the community as a whole.

If there were no railways, it should be recognised that not only would there be a loss of the big capital invested in rolling-stock and permanent way, but that fresh big capital would have to be invested in roads, which are not sufficient in their present state to carry all such increased traffic. You would have serious congestion, and even greater danger on our country roads than at present. You would have to broaden them, and spend very big capital sums on the roads, if you were to drop the railways. That is one reason why we should even be content, on certain sections if necessary, which have a superficial "uneconomic" appearance, to "lose" money in order that the whole service shall be maintained.

I should now like to advert to one or two points of detail in the Bill. I do not intend to speak very much longer. One point is related to the question of the closing down of uneconomic lines. In Section 19 the board is given the power to close down a line if it is satisfied—if "it" is satisfied; the board, not the Minister; it can close it down if it is satisfied— that a line is uneconomic. A lot of postal delivery services would be closed down if that principle were applied to the Post Office. The results of such closing down might be, along the lines suggested by the tribunal, the closing down of railways or such stations. For instance, it was suggested that Tullamore, Athy, Tuam, Roscrea, Tipperary, Nenagh and Ennis would have no stations and the whole of County Clare would not have a single railway in it. The number of stations might well be reduced as suggested by the committee from 194 to 33 stations in the whole of the Republic, not counting the suburban stations in Cork and Dublin.

I am not suggesting that that would necessarily be a bad thing, but we should recognise that the power we are now giving would enable C.I.E. to do that, if they considered that the running of these stations and lines was "uneconomic." I notice that in the 1949 debate—Volume 118, column 90 —in the Dáil the present Minister quoted the Milne Report against the then Minister for Industry and Commerce. This is a quotation made by the present Minister during his speech on that occasion, from the Milne Report. It is as follows:—

"In all the circumstances it is considered that any proposal to close branch lines solely on the grounds that they are at present unprofitable should be rejected."

The present Minister asked the then Minister this question:—

"Will the Minister tell us if he accepted that recommendation?"

—the suggestion was that if a line is unprofitable, according to the Milne Report, that should not be regarded as sufficient reason for closing it. I would throw the ball back into the Minister's court now and ask him if he now accepts what he then asked the Minister, namely, the recommendation in the Milne Report that the mere fact that a line is unprofitable does not justify its closure, that because a line can in present circumstances be shown to be uneconomic it may be closed?

The other point I want to mention concerns Section 23—the power of the company granted under this Bill "to close to navigation" any canal or part of a canal belonging to it, which "has not been used for public navigation for three years or more". Now, it may be the fault of C.I.E. that any canal or part of a canal belonging to it has not been used for public navigation for three years or more. We should consequently be slow to grant C.I.E. this power to close a canal. It may well be a short-sighted policy. The question of immediate and demonstrable profit on a particular item should not be the operative factor. We might be long sorry if we were to allow these canals to close. It might well prove economic again, as is happening I think in Britain and as is certainly happening in Germany, to open them up and extend canal traffic. It is a matter to which we ought to return on the Committee Stage, and therefore I shall not go into it any further now.

I shall conclude by saying that, for these reasons, this Bill seems to me to be a bad Bill. I am of the opinion that the Minister knows it is a bad Bill, but that a good Bill, introducing a real planned economy as far as transport goes would temporarily antagonise too many sectional interests. Therefore, the Minister shirks the issue, and this Bill is for the purpose of putting off the decision for another four or five years. I suggest that the Government is afraid to legislate simply for the community in regard to transport, no matter what interest is crossed.

The Bill appears to me to be rather a panic-stricken measure merely to enable the Minister and the Government to put off facing the facts of our transport situation for another five years or so. That may be valuable for the Minister or the Government, but it is not valuable for the country, while transport becomes more and more chaotic, and will continue to be so, between C.I.E. and private traders, private hauliers, private farmers transporting live stock for themselves, and for their neighbours within two miles to 20-mile markets. I would even prefer complete and free competition to the present chaotic lack of planning; but far better would be a State monopoly with real power and ministerial responsibility, with full power for community planning and answerable to Parliament.

In my submission, we shall have to come to that in the end, but until that day of sanity and courage we shall apparently have to put up with the present extraordinary chaotic and incoherent mixum gatherum. The increasingly chaotic nature of our present transport system is, and will continue to be, a measure of the cowardice of successive Governments, under the pressure of various and often opposing sectional interests, whose selfish demands are frequently directly contrary to the public interest, but whose political influence is far more immediate than any mere question of the well-being of the community as a whole.

Mr. Burke

I wish to welcome this Bill in so far as it is an effort to face up to our present transport problems and to allow the board the liberty to run the transport of this country on more business-like lines than the previous Acts allowed. I remember when some of the Railway Acts went through this House saying to one of the people who was very interested in the problem that now no interest would have to be paid to capitalists and other persons, if the railway companies were not imposing any dead hand on the national transport system. Be that as it may, transport offers a great problem to any Government we have, and this Bill is an effort to face up to the problem.

I should like to say in passing that one of the matters I objected to in the recent Bill passed through this House was the nationalisation of the canals. The Grand Canal was paying at that time when it was incorporated in the nationalised railway company. I understand that provision is now being made to close the canal, if necessary. I ask the Minister to consider handling it back to private enterprise and let private enterprise run the canals profitably as it did for a century and a half or so.

Mr. S. Lemass

I will take you up on that straightway, free of all charge to the Senator or any company who will form.

Mr. Burke

When the canal was taken over, it was a paying concern. Why did you pay compensation, if it was not?

Mr. S. Lemass

I did not. I objected very strongly to paying compensation for it.

Mr. Burke

I think I am right in saying that it was a paying concern seven, eight or nine years ago, and it is a pity that it was nationalised because it is not a paying concern now.

One of the most interesting things that have come out of this debate is the amount of subsidy the farming community have to pay to keep the roads in the condition we require. It appears that they are costing about £10,000,000 per annum. I doubt if the resources of the country are equal to that big drain being imposed on them year after year. Senator Murphy gave figures showing that by far the greatest amount of money was contributed out of the rates, and many of the people who pay those rates also contribute to the Road Fund and to the National Development Fund and other amounts given from the Central Fund. If certain moneys have to be given to the railways to keep them in operation, the Minister should decide whether it is better to give assistance to them in the form of £1,000,000 or £500,000 a year rather than pay £10,000,000 a year out of the rates on the roads. It is a question of what is best with regard to the utilisation of our national resources that matters.

Very heavy lorries are not alone damaging the roads but making it impossible for others to use the roads, because our roads have not been constructed for such large lorries. Senator Murphy spoke about heavy lorries of three tons and over, but some lorries that I meet on the roads must be nearer to 23 tons, and one has to travel ten miles to get an opportunity of passing them. The Minister might be able to restrict the use of these abnormally heavy lorries, for which no roads in this country were designed— not even the present Naas road.

The Minister was quite right to allow farmers to use tractors, not alone for their own use but for the use of neighbours. Thank God, cattle are to-day a very valuable commodity, helping to redress our adverse balance of trade more than any other single item. They are generally sold in local marts, and no farmer is going to risk such traffic on the public roads to-day. It was different 40 or 50 years ago when there was only horse transport. Now if a farmer wants to bring them to the marts, he wants to use his own transport to get them and those of his neighbour safely there. The farmers are not going to put any private haulier out of business by doing such work of national urgency.

In conclusion, I should like to refer to the remarks of Senator Sheehy Skeffington with regard to planned economy. I wonder what sort of supermen would plan this railway authority that he suggests? He took the Post Office as a case in point, but in many countries the Post Office is not run altogether as a national service. For example, in America, which is an example of an efficient country, with a higher standard of living than any other State in the world, the telephone service is and always has been, in private hands.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

And it is chaotic. In some towns in America, you have to have three different telephones.

Mr. Burke

That may be very helpful to the American economy. Their income is about five times as high as ours per head, and I would not mind having three telephones, if I had the benefit of five times my present income. They believe in America that anything a private person can do, the State ought to be given an opportunity of doing. However, that is not a matter before this House. I want to congratulate the Minister on bringing in this Bill, but I would ask him to balance the drain on our Exchequer of the road subsidies against what he has to pay in subsidising the railways.

Our air transport is very efficiently run and any of us who travel by air notice that we get better facilities than on the railways. It is a pity that luggage is not taken care of on the railways in the same way as it is with air transport.

Another thing is that excluding the principal stations, I think tickets should be issued on the trains instead of at the stations. It is ridiculous to have a railway clerk present at small stations to sell two or three tickets. There is a guard on the train and the guard could sell the few tickets required. When you get to the railway station, there may be eight or ten porters, who are permanent employees, coming along to you to know if they can carry your bag. We cannot afford to be carrying all that staff and I often thought that we should have licensed porters, the same as car park attendants, who will deal with that and not have to retain all this permanent staff waiting around to attend on the trains as they come in. As well as getting tips for helping the passengers, they are paid out of the public purse. I think there will be a great deal of new thinking in the next five years and this measure will give the railway authorities the opportunity of doing what they think is best to provide a transport service which our economy can afford.

Tomás Ó Maoláin

I have only a few words to say on this measure and they are prompted by the bandying around of the words "nationalisation" and "public ownership." Senator Sheehy Skeffington suggested that nationalisation was the way to deal with the problem and he seemed to believe that a monopoly would get over all the difficulties. Senator Murphy is also a convinced believer in nationalisation and public ownership as the solution for all the difficulties. We should appreciate the fact, that it is not as easy as all that, and we should not be led astray by the use of words which might confuse the minds of people who are not as well informed as Senators in regard to the position of railways here and in other countries.

I am a firm believer in maintaining the railways, from many points of view, but there is no use ignoring the fact that there is no simple solution to the maintenance and preservation, as a useful national asset, of the railway system in this or any other country in modern times. The dilemma facing all countries at present is how to make the railway systems pay and, at the same time, provide a good service. Nationalisation is not the miracle worker we are led to believe it is, because it has been tried and a few countries may be quoted as examples. France, for instance, has the best railway system in Europe, but the average annual loss on the working of the French railway system over the past few years has been about £60,000,000. Western Germany also has a nationalised railway system and nobody would accuse the German people of being inefficient. They have a tradition of efficiency in business and industry going back a very long time, and one would imagine if anybody could make a nationalised railway system work efficiently and solve all the problems, they could. Unfortunately in Western Germany the railways are also running at a heavy loss. This year, the State will have to provide a subsidy of about £60,000,000 to meet that loss.

If that were not enough, we can also quote a case of one of the most progressive democracies in the world, Canada. In Canada, they have two railway systems. They have the State-owned Canadian National Railways which is publicly owned and which, last year, had a deficit of over £2,000,000. At the same time, the privately-owned Canadian Pacific line is also in difficulties and is asking the Government for certain concessions, including the right to make a 10 per cent. increase in freight charges to try to tide them over the difficulties which face them at the moment. Nationalisation and public ownership, words which have been used here to-night, might lead people who read in the newspapers into the belief that that is all that is needed to solve our problems. They will not by themselves solve this problem, because it is not confined to this country and we have the experience of other countries to go on.

On the other hand, private ownership of railways has run into difficulties also. In the country which has given the greatest example of the successful operation of private enterprise, the U.S.A., the railways have run into very serious difficulties. There, too, the State is being asked to step in to see what can be done. No matter what system is adopted, whether public ownership, private ownership, or co-operative ownership, the railways of most countries are in difficulties and are presenting a problem.

One of the most successful railways in the United States, and one which was the best paying proposition for almost 100 years, was the Baltimore-Ohio railroad, a very lucrative service which ran from New York to Baltimore for years. In recent years, those who read the American magazines could see pictures of the trains; they were all diesel and all electric, with observation cars, excellent food and affording a luxurious service. In spite of all those attractions, and in spite of all the comfort which passengers had, the traffic during the past ten years on that line slumped by 46 per cent. The inevitable happened. The line closed down last month and when it closed down, it had reached the point where it was costing twice the amount to run as the takings brought in, and it was making an annual loss of $5,000,000 a year.

That was in the U.S.A. and that is what happened one railway line which was one of the most prosperous in the country. The United States Government has had to step in. The situation facing the railroads is so serious that the United States Government, in order to preserve the railways as an instrument of national defence, apart from any other reason, is providing short term loans, for the replacement of obsolete equipment and the maintenance of railroads, to the extent of $700,000,000. Unfortunately, amongst all the proposals in their plan, there does not seem to be any miraculous solution which commends itself to the railway authorities in the United States.

The President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which is the biggest in the American Union, described the proposals as being no solution for the imminent bankruptcy facing many of the railways in the United States. If that is the problem in the United States, with its high level of business and industrial efficiency and if that is the problem under the nationalised services in Western Germany, France and in England, too, I do not agree with Senator Murphy's description of the Bill as being an expensive one. Senator O'Donovan agreed with him. I do not think it is.

If the railways are to be preserved and if we are to make an effort to keep them running, then we must be prepared to take steps such as are suggested in this Bill. The only doubt I have is that the losses will be eliminated by 1964. I hope that the belief expressed by the Minister when introducing the Bill that this new freedom might help C.I.E. to stem the loss of traffic from the railways and win back quite an amount of traffic will be realised. I think this is a Bill which will commend itself to the country, to the workers on the railways and to the Seanad.

Professor Stanford

First, may I follow some of the other Senators in offering a little praise to C.I.E.? I personally am a regular traveller by the railway. I am what the Americans call a commuter. I think C.I.E. deserve credit for running the trains, on the whole, well. The trains run on time; they are reasonably comfortable; the officials are courteous and even friendly; and, as far as the line I know, from Dalkey to Dublin, is concerned, it is an efficient and very valuable service. I think they deserve full credit for that. I have travelled a bit on the English suburban lines and they are not run so well on time, and in some cases the officials are not so courteous and efficient.

I also think C.I.E. deserve a very great deal of credit for building the new platform at Dún Laoghaire. That platform is 100 years late, and I cannot understand how the railway companies did not do it before this. Now the service has been very considerably improved by this very necessary addition in Dún Laoghaire. I think it shows courage, and it personally gives me some confidence that a company in their position are prepared at last to make a very necessary improvement of that kind.

Although it may be deemed rather frivolous, I think I should refer to a constant source of temptation to me in some of the older railway carriages of C.I.E.: the fact that I can have the luxury of stopping the train for £5. We were told to-day that the £ to-day is worth 4/3 in comparison with the 1914 £. So I can get for £5 what was originally worth £25, any time I am prepared to use the communication cord. This is not perhaps entirely frivolous: perhaps the company should get round to changing those notices, if they have not done so. Otherwise, it remains the best value in the whole country for £5 that I know. Perhaps if I did try to get the value of stopping the train, it might not work. It is a trifling point but it does give an impression of old-fashionedness that the penalty should remain as it was in 1908. However, in the main, I want to praise C.I.E., as far as I know it, in their running of the trains. They run them well, and personally I have confidence in them still as an efficient, competent company, if they only get a chance. This Bill may help to give them that chance.

I want to raise very briefly one other matter. The Minister is probably a bit weary of hearing about it. I assure him that many citizens of the country are deeply concerned. It is about the canals—Section 23. The Minister has gone a certain distance. He has made concessions on this section, but I think something more should be said and something more should be done. It seems to me to go back to the fundamental cleavage of policy I mentioned when the Minister for Lands was here a few weeks ago. It is the old clash of policy between the landsman and the waterman. It goes very deep. They cannot often work together. It is a fundamental difference of outlook. The fact is that the C.I.E. company are landsmen. I am inclined to think that the Minister is a landsman, too, and has not quite got into the minds of the people who understand the running of the waterways and know their worth.

I think it is generally held, but wrongly held, that the canals are an outdated and outmoded form of transport. It cannot be emphasised too much that that is entirely false. In England to-day, they are developing their canals as hard as they can. In France, in Holland and in Belgium, the canals are being developed and are being used. I know from my own experience that it is a very heartening sight to see well-equipped, well-painted barges pass along the canals laden almost down to the waterline. That is what is happening now in Europe and in England.

Why is it not happening in Ireland? We have a good system; the canals are well planned; and yet, as far as I know, one never sees that sight in this country. Perhaps, in a few years, if something drastic is not done soon, it will be impossible to see it. I must emphasise that this is not an outmoded form of transport. It is one of the cheapest and safest forms of heavy transport, especially in Ireland where we are dependent so much on foreign fuel. We know that during the last war it was the canal barges that brought most of the fuel to Dublin. If we had not had the canals, we would have been in a very serious way indeed. If the Suez crisis had developed, as it might have, we might have needed the canals to bring fuel to us again. The amount of oil consumed by the canal barges is infinitesimally small compared with the amount of oil consumed by buses, lorries, or diesel locomotives. I insist that it is one of the cheapest and safest forms of transport. How can we neglect it as we are neglecting it to-day?

Besides transport—I will not emphasise, this on this Bill but I think we should consider it—there is the tourist aspect. The canal opens up to the Shannon. It is the best way to the Shannon from the east for yachtsmen or boatmen of any kind. There is a chance that the Shannon may be a very fine boating centre in the coming years. Are we going to cut that off completely for boating men coming from England and from Northern Ireland? They will have to go around the South of Ireland or the North of Ireland to get to the Shannon, if we stop this convenient waterway from Dublin direct to the Shannon. Fishermen are interested in it, too. Coarse fishing is being developed in England through the canals. Are we not going to be interested in that? I am convinced, from what I have read in the Press and from talking to people, that there is this grave danger that a magnificent system of canals, which cost millions of pounds to build, may be derelict in ten years time, because the landsmen do not really understand their value as the watermen did who used to run them.

The Minister, in a mood of generosity, made an offer to a Senator a few moments ago, but I do not think many of us will be deeply impressed by it, for a very good reason. If he could have made that offer when the Grand Canal Company was still running, it would have been very different, but the fact is—and here I must blame C.I.E.—they have let the canals go; they have been unfair to the canals in various ways; and I am informed by a reliable source, that there are some five ways in which C.I.E. has deliberately—no doubt, with the best ideals in the world—damaged the canal system. They have broken up the integrated service that was offered by the Grand Canal Company; they have withdrawn advertising; they have deterred travellers and agents seeking business on the canals; they have taken disciplinary measures against employees trying to get water-borne trade; and they have failed to introduce modern methods of handling cargoes.

That is a serious indictment. As far as I can see, it is true. Therefore, I think it is a little disingenuous to imply that you can hand the canals over to someone now as they were when the independent company was running them. You cannot. They have deteriorated very considerably. I think the State, the successive Governments, have contributed to that neglect. It is the clear duty of the present and succeeding Governments to atone for that neglect and to revive the canals. Otherwise, they will be open to a serious indictment by economic historians in the future. This was a very valuable heritage that we took over from the previous Governments of this country. It would be very regrettable if we let it go.

I would appeal to the Minister to think once again on this. I know he is a man who is most earnestly eager to develop all the resources of the country. I think that on this point he has not given that eagerness full rein. I do not know what is holding him back—whether it is that he is fundamentally a landsman or because there is some other consideration in his mind. I would emphasise to him that, if he holds back on this and if he fails to instigate C.I.E. to foster the canals —better still perhaps he could think out some kind of independent, State-sponsored company to run the canals— if he fails in this, he and his successors who follow the same policy, will be doing considerable harm to this country. They will be depriving the country of a very valuable asset.

Mr. S. Brady

I rise to support the Bill and to welcome it. I am a great believer in rail transport. I am a very old member of a local authority and I can remember that, back in 1925, our roads estimate was something like £80,000. Last year, we spent on roads the sum of £450,000. This year, in addition, we had to bring in £14,000 off rates for the county roads, for which we get no grant.

I should like to refer to the Report of the Committee of Inquiry. I think it was referred to by Senator Sheehy Skeffington. If effect were given to its recommendations, we in Clare would be left with no railway system at all. It was well known in Clare at one time that we had a pretty obsolete railway system known as the West Clare Railway. I notice Senator O'Donovan smiling at me. I can assure this House that in recent years that system has been greatly modernised. There is a diesel train now running right back in Clare. We all know how isolated Clare is. The train starts at Ennis and goes right into Ennistymon, to that great tourist resort Lahinch, into Milltown Malbay and back into Kilkee. I hope it will never happen that the recommendations of the Transport Commission will be made effective, as far as County Clare is concerned. I personally believe that the putting of this heavy transport on to the roads is wrong. It is something beyond my comprehension.

Senator Stanford spoke about the canals. We had the Grand Canal system running right into Scariff. I remember the stout being brought from Guinness' and the manures being brought in there also. It was a wonderful method of transport. That fine place is derelict now. There is just a handful of sundries coming in there. We are hoping that in the very near future we will have a big factory in Scariff and we hope that some of the traffic will be diverted to the Grand Canal system.

I welcome this Bill as an attempt to improve the position of the railways. I hope the Minister will fully appreciate our position in County Clare. Clare is a great tourist resort, as everyone knows. It is also a great store-raising county and the trains have served the fairs right back to Carrigaholt, into the peninsula and right out to the sea. It would be a very sorry day for us if the railways were to disappear from Clare. I do not know what the people would do.

In regard to subsidies to maintain the railways, Senator Burke referred this evening, and rightly so, to the fact that about £11,000,000 is being spent on the roads. We all know the reason for that. All the big heavy traffic is being pushed on to the roads—big lorries and trailers carrying 20 or 25 tons—and the roads are being brought up—at least the main roads and trunk roads—to a certain standard, at the cost of the taxpayer and ratepayer, to try to cater for that type of transport. As another Senator said here, the question of transport is a very difficult one. I do not envy the Minister at all.

I have been 33 years in the public life of my county. I was connected with the co-operative creamery movement before I became a member of the county council. I derive my living solely from agriculture. As a farmer, I believe the railways are indispensable. They are not, perhaps, all they should be. However, it is easy to stand here and criticise them. The railways are a wonderful way of travelling and the officials are highly courteous. For people who do not possess luxurious motor cars, the railways are certainly a great boon. I have travelled a lot on trains and nevers received anything but the greatest courtesy from the officials.

I welcome this Bill. I should be lacking in my duty if I did not advert to the Committee of Inquiry into Internal Transport. It actually recommends the closing of the Roscrea line, a main line from Dublin to Limerick. What would happen us in Clare if that happened? I am giving my views to the Minister and to the House on the railway system in Clare. We are purely an agriculture county, a great store cattle raising county.

We have some beautiful health resorts in Clare, I think second to none in Ireland. We have Lisdoonvarna, Kilkee, Lahinch. On the other side, we have the Shannon valley and Killaloe. Then there is that beautiful drive from Ballyvaughan around by Black Head. I do not suppose it can be beaten anywhere. Connemara is on the other side, the Aran Islands, Galway, and so on.

I am a great believer in the railways which I hold are indispensable. I speak as a farmer and I say that even though, at some future date, they may have to get some subsidy. I believe it will be justified. If they are not maintained the traffic will go on to the roads and the roads will have to be maintained principally out of rates and out of the National Exchequer.

Mr. O'Leary

I shall not congratulate the Minister on bringing in this Bill. Away back in 1944, I had experience of what happened when he introduced the Transport Bill. He painted a very nice picture in that year of 1944. After a very long debate on that occasion, his Government were defeated by a vote. The same arguments as are put up to-day and as were put up by the Opposition last week in the Dáil were put up at that time also. The Minister told us at that time about the railways. We were to have faster trains, brighter stations, cheaper fares and more employment. That was his cry then. What have we found since? Any time a railway is closing down, deputations consisting of all Parties go to the Minister.

The concession in this Bill to the farmers is nothing. You could always bring your stuff in your own lorry. There are two cattle marts in my town beside the railway station. What will this do? It will take away the traffic from the station by the tractor. A man can go from South Wexford to Enniscorthy 20 miles, bring his cattle or sheep to the mart, sell them and bring back a load for hire, if he gets it— again taking away traffic from the railways. The railways are lying rusting for the want of traffic. You cannot go on the public road now. You need to be very careful passing 10-ton, 15-ton and 20-ton lorries. The roads were never made for that, nor were the bridges.

Like my friend who has just spoken, I am a member of the county council, we are spending the best part of our maintenance money, a 40 per cent. grant, on maintaining the main roads every year for C.I.E. As a representative of a trade union and as a worker, I believe in the railways as a means of giving employment.

Why did this thing happen in the first instance? When private enterprise put passenger buses on the roads they were chasing one another. Finally, they were dangerous to themselves and to the passengers. The Minister is now taking a wrong step. He is taking over a bankrupt concern and asking the taxpayer and the ratepayer for £1,000,000 a year. Would that be done in any other industry if it were not paying?

We already have redundancy on the railways for the want of business in the goods stores. If you give more concessions to the roads, naturally you will not improve the railways. Look at what has happened.

C.I.E. went into competition with themselves by putting big doubledeckers in fairs against their own railways which we were supposed to keep going. During the great demand for fat horses which were being exported, I saw men buying horses, walking them into their own lorries and bringing them off to Waterford or Dublin. Now we are told this will be a great concession to the farmer. It is only window-dressing and trying to make up lost ground so far as what happened to the wheat is concerned. The miller always sent out his lorries to the farmer's yard for the threshing—free sacks and free haulage. That has been done all the time. Any owner of a lorry could drive his own stuff.

Instead of talking about concessions like that, if the Minister wanted to keep our railways going he should have been more realistic. A country without a railway is no country. You see a goods train passing down and then you see a C.I.E. lorry going along the road with the goods. If you get into a train in Dublin and look out the window, you will see the bus travelling the road alongside it. That is not a wise policy. It is all right to have a bus on a road where no train service is available but to have the two of them competing against each other is folly.

During the emergency I travelled on the train. Greystones was flooded. We had to get off in Wicklow town. Six buses were waiting for the train although there were not 32 passengers on the train—not a load for one bus. There are high fares on the trains and on the buses because the trains and the buses will go whether or not there are passengers. If the fares were reasonable, people would travel, but most people to-day cannot afford to travel. The man with the motor car never bothers about the train or bus, but the plain people are faced with high fares, even in the City of Dublin. I remember a man who wanted a free lift telling the stationmaster that he wanted to go to Dublin and the stationmaster replied that the train would go whether it was empty or not.

Every county council has the same problem of keeping up the roads for C.I.E. Let the goods go back to the trains and to the goods stores. Every day we meet the new Guinness tankers travelling down to Donohoe's of Enniscorthy or some other place. Before the lorry traffic came in that business always went by rail. Giving the farmers permission to carry beasts by tractor and trailer will take a further amount of work from the railways. The Minister is taking the wrong attitude altogether. We remember 1944 when the Dáil was dissolved in the middle of the night on the Transport Bill, and the Bill we are discussing now still deals with the same problem. The whole mistake lies in guaranteeing a company £1,000,000 a year, when men at the top are getting £4,000 a year.

Regarding the redundancy pension scheme, in my own town, I found workers of 65, young men who could draw £2 7s. 6d. a week for five years or £1 for life. What did they do? They came off the railway and went over to England and worked until they came to 70, when they came back for the old age pension. That was not a very great pension scheme after their lifetime, to find those men put off at 65 where they should be working and earning their wages. Nobody likes to be put out of employment at 65 for a miserable £1 per week or £2 7s. 6d. for five years.

Instead of throwing a million pounds into the company, the Minister should take the heavy traffic off the roads. In my time, the ton lorry came in, but to-day there are lorries of 16 tons, and C.I.E. has excavators not with four or eight but with ten wheels which no road surface could withstand. It is surely an insane policy to try to run the railway and have that sort of thing going on. It is bad for the country that C.I.E. is competing with itself.

The railroads were put down before we were born and served the country well, but to-day we are closing altogether a few of our lines. What did our friend from Clare say?—that it would be a bad job for that county to close the railways. It is a bad job to-day for Bundoran. The Six Counties railways are closing down and we are taking responsibility for carrying the Six County people when we cannot run our own railways. Senator Ó Maoláin spoke about America. You cannot compare the Twenty-Six Counties with a country such as that where they have underground railways and so on.

Tomás Ó Maolain

I was showing that the problem was everywhere.

Mr. O'Leary

I remember the present Minister for three long weeks in 1944 telling us the great things he was going to do on the Transport Bill, but it did not succeed. If it had succeeded, the Minister would not be here to-night.

Mr. O'Reilly

Did Deputy Norton's Bill succeed?

Mr. O'Leary

If Deputy Norton had got as long as the Minister, the position would not be what it is now. It was the failure of Fianna Fáil's policy regarding C.I.E. that brought us into the position we are in now. I suppose Senator O'Reilly would cure the situation overnight, if he were Minister. Deputy Lemass has been Minister for 20 years and we are worse than ever as regards transport. I want to see the railways kept going. This concession about tractors is nothing. Does any farmer think he is getting a concession because he can draw his bullock, cow, pig or sheep in a trailer? They are doing that all the time.

Mr. S. Lemass

If it makes no difference, why argue about it?

Mr. O'Leary

Why put it down there? If the Minister wanted to do something for the railways, let him not be afraid, as Senator Sheehy Skeffington said, to do it right, without bothering about half measures.

Mr. O'Quigley

This is a Bill which I do not think anybody can really welcome. One approaches it in much the same way as one would a serious surgical operation. It is inevitable and the result is quite uncertain. That is the mood in which the Minister has approached this Bill, and certainly is my mood. I do not intend to delay the House very long with the few remarks I have to make, but the thing which disturbs me most is the very far-reaching powers being vested in the board with regard to the services which are at present provided which they may withdraw in future. A number of Senators have expressed apprehension at the possibility of the discontinuance of some branch lines. It is a tremendous power to vest in the board, where they have apparently no duty to consult with anybody.

Indeed it may well be that the power is so great and the consequences so far-reaching that because of the absence of any consultation with the Minister or with anybody else, they may not excercise the power. I should be inclined to claim that if there were some provision whereby, after consultation with the Minister and having heard his views, the board would be free to act as they thought best, that might be a better situation than to vest the full and absolute discretion in the board, which may be too much for them.

I notice that in Section 7 of the Bill, which defines the general powers and duties of the board, their duty is to provide reasonable and efficient and economic transport services. That is perfectly clear. It also says "with due regard to safety of operation". That is well within the competence, or should be within the competence, of the board.

Then it goes on—"the encouragement of national economic development." I wonder what that means in its application to the board? The encouragement of national economic development is certainly a matter which is the duty of the Government and the duty of the Minister, as Minister for Industry and Commerce. How are they to have regard for the encouragement of national economic development? With whom will they consult? Does the Minister think they will be bound to consult, say, with the Minister for Industry and Commerce, or the Minister for Agriculture? Would the encouragement of national economic development be furthered by having regard to such items as Senator Murphy has been talking about, with regard to the high cost of maintenance of road services in a particular county? If all the traffic on a particular branch line is to be put on the roads in Clare, let us say, and as far as the economic development of that county is concerned, with high rates, will the board of C.I.E. be bound to take that into consideration?

I notice that it does say "national" economic development. Perhaps they can say that what would affect Clare does not come into the broad picture of national economic development. If the board is to feel itself bound, in any way, to have regard to the limitations within which it should discharge its responsibilities, perhaps this business of the encouragement of national economic development to which they must pay due regard will absorb a great deal of their time. It may well be that that is not a matter on which the board could pass judgment.

If the Minister were to indicate that that aspect of the matter which they must pay regard to would be something into which his Department, or other Departments would enter, it would certainly mean something in the context in which it is here. If it does not mean that the board will examine from the point of view of the economic development of the country as a whole, the implications of any of their actions, then I do not think it should be in the section.

As I say, the large powers vested in the board for making final and irrevocable decisions trouble me and trouble a number of other Senators. Before proceeding to that I want to make this suggestion, that, if the inevitable result of the passing of this Bill, and the authority which is vested in the board, is that certain branch lines are to be closed down, then immediately, on the enactment of the Bill, it should be the duty of C.I.E. to prepare and publish a statement showing the financial position of all the different branch lines, and publish that in the relevant localities. At the same time, they should give some indication as to the volume of traffic necessary to make the branch line a paying proposition and other factors which might be relevant in relation to the decision as to whether or not a particular line should be closed down.

It is only fair to the people affected by a decision to close a branch line that they should be given the opportunity here and now to increase the amount of traffic that will pass over these lines, in so far as it is possible for them to do so. The preparation of such a statement for publication in the local papers should present no difficulty from the point of view of C.I.E., because, I presume, at this moment they know how much each branch line is costing them.

A number of Senators have paid tribute to the manner in which C.I.E. has discharged its functions. I must say I was glad to hear Senator Sheehy Skeffington pay high tribute to the successful operations of the bus services in Dublin, because Senator Sheehy Skeffington must be aware that that was well and truly owned by private enterprise and was very much a profitable concern at the time it was taken over by C.I.E., in the first instance.

I have travelled a good deal on C.I.E. and I do most of my long-distance travelling and all my short-distance travelling on it, both on buses and on trains. I can speak with a fair degree of knowledge of the conditions of those services. I must say it has always amazed me to find so many aspects of the running of the train and bus services so utterly and hopelessly inefficient, as I have found them. Many times I have written to C.I.E. on such matters and I have received courteous replies from the very efficient public relations office, sometimes giving very nice, interesting excuses, and at other times saying that the matters will be investigated. I may say, with some satisfaction, that they have on occasion implemented recommendations which I have made. My point is, that if the officials in charge of C.I.E. travelled around the country on the trains and buses with their eyes open, I cannot see why so many of the things that irritate and annoy passengers, and gives C.I.E. such a bad name among the people who use the railways, continue to exist, as they do. That applies to a great number of aspects of the administration of the railways.

I have come to the conclusion, over the past five or six years, that the officials of C.I.E. who have to do with the day to day administration of the railways, and whose duty it should be to make the services as attractive as possible for the public, never in fact travel upon the railways. I may be quite wrong in that, but if they do, they certainly travel with their eyes shut, or alternatively, with the blinds down. They do not see what is going on. I feel that one of the reasons why more people do not use the trains is the failure to remove a lot of these irritations and to remove a lot of the things which prevent people from deciding to take a train, say, from Westport to Dublin, instead of going by car. Recently I had correspondence with C.I.E. as to why a train can travel from Dublin to Castlebar in four hours but takes six and a half hours from Castlebar to Dublin. That is the kind of thing we are up against. They had something to say about the train coming back at night time being a mail train. I always understood that mail trains were fast trains.

At the junction of Manulla, there is a 20 minutes wait and, at Claremorris, 30 minutes, for no good reason. At Athlone, there is a wait of 45 minutes and at Mullingar one has to wait for the Sligo train to come in, for about 20 to 25 minutes. There is no good reason why these services could not be co-ordinated by the simple device of rearranging time schedules. I believe it is that form of administration which is responsible on the passenger side for the drop in traffic and is a contributory factor to the position in which C.I.E. find themselves.

Indeed, it seems to me that C.I.E. in the past have been in much the same position as the wild student in the university. He has been kept on from year to year by his father and hopes for something better. Even at this stage, you are not telling C.I.E.: "If you do not pass your final examination in five years' time, you will be withdrawn from the university". We are not in a position to say that to them. It seems to me that they have always had it at the back of their mind that, if the worst should come to the worst, all over the world railways are not paying. That is the attitude. I understand that the railways are a paying proposition in Holland. It is not sufficient justification to say that railways in other places are not paying because I believe that, with more streamlining and more efficiency at the top, their losses could be reduced; and if we had to provide a subsidy, at least we would be providing a highly efficient service and there would be nothing wrong in the administration.

It may well be that the time is approaching when, by reason of the changes occurring in the world—more people owning motor cars and so on— we will always have to provide a subsidy for the railway services. I should much prefer that we had to provide a subsidy rather than that we should dismember our railway system and take a completely irrevocable step. I will probably have some other points on the Committee Stage.

Mr. Cole

First of all, I welcome this Bill as an effort to keep what we still have in the railways. I have lived for some months beside a railway practically abandoned, part of the G.N.R. system, and I realise it is a big loss to the country people to abandon these lines. I feel that when we have a loss on a line, instead of putting up freight rates and fares to compensate for that loss, if fares and rates were reduced by half, we would get a considerable amount of the traffic back. I believe that if we did that even to-day, we would get back a considerable amount of traffic.

What happens if I go to a fair and buy cattle? Perhaps there are private hauliers there hoping to get the job of taking those cattle by road. All they have to do is undercut the railways by a few shillings. If the railway brought down their freight rates by half, they would get a great deal of the traffic back; and as Senator O'Quigley said, we should have more efficient and faster passenger trains. That is part of the solution of the railway problem. I could quote instances, as Senator O'Quigley did, of inefficiency on the railways. Perhaps it would be wrong to quote them because they do not concern C.I.E. I know of cases where a train goes out ten minutes before another train comes in. The next connection is some three hours later. I have seen the train I wanted to get go out of the station on another line while I was coming in on another train. That is what has been happening and it has partly disgusted the travelling public.

I could not agree more with Senator Brady that, even if there was a subsidy, we should still keep the railways here. If we do not pay a subsidy, we will be paying in some other way. As I said, I live beside an abandoned railway. The people are paying in other ways for it. The postal service has gone. They have to put transport on the road to take its place. The upkeep of the abandoned line itself will be a problem for the farmers living alongside it. Will the railway company look after that and keep the weeds from scattering all over the countryside? At present a great deal of it can be sprayed from the train.

The rates the railway companies pay to county councils provide another problem. I have not been able to find a figure anywhere but the rates they pay must be very substantial. On the other hand, an abandoned railway line puts extra traffic on the roads and the upkeep of the roads increases enormously. We have that problem in County Cavan where there is so much traffic going north. The expense of travelling is also a big factor for the people living in the area of the abandoned line. The fare on the bus provided as an alternative is practically double the rail fare. You also have the question of employment on the railway. Those five or six points are reasons to support what Senator Brady said, that even if there has to be a subsidy, it is worth keeping the railways going.

I agree with other Senators that it is not right to take the power away from these Houses under Section 19. I would like to see the Minister keeping in his own hands the power to close branch lines. The position has been satisfactory and I think the Minister should reconsider that section.

In regard to Section 27, where the Minister has allowed farmers to carry cattle for themselves and their neighbours in a tractor, the Minister was asked in the other House to make further allowances under that section. I do not think it was suggested that he should allow farmers to carry to and from railway stations. That has been a very important source of trouble for people, particularly in regard to goods going to shows. It could be very important in the future that T.B. tested cattle should be allowed to go in a disinfected vehicle of some sort to a station. It may be important in the near future. The farmer could use his own or his neighbour's disinfected tractor to bring the cattle to the railway wagon; and in that way the cattle would not have to travel on the road. I would ask the Minister to consider that possibility.

Mr. O'Reilly

I was very glad to hear from Senator Brady that the West Clare Light Railway is going so well. I am sure it will bring joy to the friendly ghost of Percy French to know that it is in such good condition.

I remember different Transport Bills in this House and each time we all hoped that the particular measure would solve our transport problems. I hope also that this measure will do so and therefore I welcome it. On a measure of this sort, we have a tendency to pay a lot of lip service and indulge in a lot of wishful thinking. We have criticism of the management and staff of C.I.E., but it appears to me that quite a lot is wrong with the outlook of our people. It is proposed now to give C.I.E. power to close railway lines, without further ado or appeal. It is the people in the area, who would normally use a railway line, and they only, who close that railway line.

If there is a question at any stage of closing the West Clare Railway—I would not like to see that happen, as I would like to see railways in good condition and paying their way—or any other railway, we must be realistic and admit that it is due to the failure of the community there, that that is the determining factor. I could not imagine the board closing a railway line which was paying its way and I know that will not happen. It is only when it fails to pay its way that it would be closed. Therefore, we should not have so much fear of this power which is being given to the board.

I suggest that we are not realistic. We are inclined to want our railways to run, much as children want clockwork trains; we like to see them and have them there, but we do not want to make practical use of them. It may be that, being creatures of habit, we have got out of the habit of using railways. But why did we lose the habit? Was there anything wrong with the management or staffing that made people lose the habit? I am afraid there might have been. We had rather critical and serious statements made here by Senator O'Quigley and Senator Cole. They were realistic in their approach. In my opinion, we have lost the habit, and it will be difficult to recultivate it, of using railways as they should be used. As I said on a previous measure, I have always thought that passenger transport should be the more profitable, as passengers require less handling by paid staff. The passengers will load themselves and that appears to be a great advantage.

In view of the amount of private vehicles and cars, if C.I.E. is to attract passenger transport, there must be a vigorous effort by them to develop a campaign to get people to leave their cars at railway stations and use the trains. I am not aware that, so far, a serious effort has been made along those lines. If people could become accustomed to that, in the knowledge that their cars would be in good hands and in no danger of damage or theft, they might be induced to travel by rail.

On the question of roads, I remember on different occasions discussing this with traders who had lorries and inquiring if they found it more profitable. I was assured by them that their reason for using lorries instead of the train was the supervision and control they had of their own transport service. The fear of not getting as good a service from C.I.E. would appear to be the reason why C.I.E. was not used. I do not think it is more economic, in many cases, for traders to buy and maintain private lorries. If C.I.E. is to attract more traffic, the organisation must be such as to ensure a definitely improved service, as good as or better than could be obtained through private lorries.

I should like to make some reference to the matter of the canals raised by Senator Stanford. While railways are in difficulties in many countries, we have the case of one canal being built at enormous expense to link up the Great Lakes with the St. Lawrence, as a joint project of the United States and Canadian Governments. Even though railways are in difficulties, apparently in America they still find it profitable to invest huge sums in the development of a canal; and these huge sums are being spent jointly by Canada and the United States. I hope, though I cannot see how it can be done, our Grand Canal system can be made use of so that it will become economic. We all wish that. I suppose I am just as much entitled to indulge in wishful thinking on transport as other people who have spoken about it. My wish is that our canals could be preserved in good condition.

Senator Cole spoke about the abandonment of railways, the problem of their becoming derelict with nobody controlling or managing them, the danger of weeds becoming an eyesore, and so on. I suppose that will happen. If it does, it will be no worse than what happens with our county councils. Every May, they put up noxious weeds notices in the post offices, at the same time failing to cut the ragworth alongside the public roads over which they have jurisdiction. That is quite common. It would never occur to county councils to cut those weeds or the ivy on some of our good trees along the roads. It is laughable, seeing that they try to frighten people by putting up notices in May of every year in post offices about noxious weeds but will not control the weeds on their own property. It is only reasonable that the railway company should do what the county councils are allowed to do, though I should like to feel it would not happen.

If we were more practical in using our railways we would not have all the troubles and all the Transport Bills. With regard to Section 27, I welcome the extension of the facility in regard to fairs. It would be most inequitable if the Minister had confined it to cattle marts. Take County Leitrim as an example. There are no cattle marts there. The people there would suffer a grave hardship if they were not allowed to use their tractors for carrying animals to a fair. I welcome the Bill. I hope it will be the last measure of this kind and that it will really cure the ills of C.I.E.

Mr. O'Callaghan

I did not intend to speak but, having listened, I think I have learned something. I listened to the various suggestions put forward for the purpose of helping C.I.E. They are all very interesting. I am sure they will give much food for thought to the Minister and to others interested in the railways.

One thing with which we must all agree is that the Minister has done his level best to put C.I.E. in a sound economic position. I could also add that the tax payers have been generous beyond words.

I listened to every suggestion made to help the railways. Senator Ó Maoláin said there was no single solution that would put the railways on a sound economic basis. Senator Murphy suggested that, with more co-operation between the company and trade unions, some progress might be made. I would add just one thing to that. If the company, the trade unions and the community would co-operate and pool their ideas, more progress might be made.

Senator Murphy also said the roads are kept up by taxation and that the railway has, I think, to keep its own railroad going. I think the railway has a number of buses and lorries. These vehicles use the roads. I am not aware that they pay any special charges except what we all pay for putting cars on the roads. I think they are using the roads just as much as the public generally.

Senator Sheehy Skeffington suggested nationalisation. I will not go into that. I think that perhaps Senator Ó Maoláin answered the point fully and I will leave it at that.

Senator Stanford spoke about canals. I do not know whether or not the saving of the canals would help to any extent in the saving of the railways, but I agree with him that it would be a pity to let the canals go into disuse.

I think Senator O'Leary's remedy for the railways was to find fault with the Minister. He did a fair bit of that. I do not know whether or not that will bring any result, but he did it so well that I congratulate him on the way he did it.

Senator O'Quigley complained of inefficiency in the railway. I cannot say that in my experience I have ever come across any inefficiency or discourtesy from railway officials. I think it is all the other way about. I live on the main line and travel on the main line. Perhaps the main line is better served than some of the branch lines. However, I want to pay my tribute to the railway officials generally who are, I think, efficient and courteous. I have no fault to find with them.

Senator Brady pointed to what would happen in County Clare, if the railways were disbanded. I am in full sympathy with him. It would be a pity if County Clare were left without a railway and if the other line between Nenagh and Dublin were dismantled.

The best brains of the country should be brought to bear on this very big problem. I have some idea of how it might be solved. My way of solving it would be to increase agricultural production. Increase the volume of goods and then the railway will be able to lower their charges. If we increased our flocks and herds and if we increased the quantity of beet, grain, and other produce which we grow, it might be one solution of the railway's difficulties.

I think that to come down too heavily on private transport would not be of any help in solving the railway problem. It would be far more likely to be solved in the way I have suggested, namely, to increase the volume of goods. If we improve the agricultural position, if we increase production, there will be more goods for the railway to carry. They can then lower their charges and the problem will solve itself.

Section 27 has been threshed out from various angles. It is a good thing to allow the farmers to bring animals to fairs and to markets in a co-operative way. If a railway lorry or private lorry goes to some farms, it may not be able to travel the boreen leading to the farmhouse, whereas a tractor might do so. I would, in fact, suggest that the Minister might develop Section 27 a little and permit the transport of beet by tractor and trailer. That would have this advantage, that it would feed the railway rather than do it any harm.

Minister for Industry and Commerce (Mr. S. Lemass)

Most of the Senators who addressed themselves to this Bill recognised that the kernel of our transport problem is the financial difficulty of maintaining the railway system. If there were no railway system to be maintained, we would have no transport problem at all. The question of policy which has to be determined is the extent to which it is desirable to maintain the railway system.

The problem of railway operation can be viewed from one of two angles. It will disappear if we can get more traffic on to the railways. Alternatively, it can be removed by cutting the costs of providing railway services. Senator O'Donovan spoke about the failure of employment on the railways to contract over a number of years, notwithstanding the difficulties which were developing for them. That is not altogether correct, but nevertheless it does represent part of the problem we are dealing with. The maintenance of a railway system involves some minimum number of operatives, no matter how low the volume of traffic passing over it, and a very considerable increase in traffic can be carried without any corresponding increase in the number of people employed or in the cost of maintaining the system.

Indeed, quite a comparatively small increase in the total volume of business available to C.I.E. would wipe out their deficit, if that increase did not bring with it any increase in the operating charges. On the other hand, we have to note that salaries and wages at present absorb 85 per cent. of the total receipts of railway operation, and it is quite clear that the same result could be got, in the matter of eliminating losses, if a system of working the railways could be devised which would reduce the labour force required, the labour cost of maintaining and operating the system.

C.I.E. no doubt will try to operate both methods of solving their problems, and are put by this Bill into a position to do so. They are given freedom to adopt an aggressive sales policy to attract business to their railway system, and, on the other hand, are being facilitated in arranging reorganisation schemes to the extent that the Exchequer is prepared to carry the cost of compensating on a generous basis any employees who may lose their employment by reason of the introduction of reorganisation schemes which will reduce their costs. Whether they are going to succeed in that or not, I do not know, but that is the intention. The intention is to put them in the position in which they can do that.

They are not in that position now, and it is quite foolish to think that you can encourage them to strive along those lines and at the same time, tie them up with a whole lot of restrictions. I could not quite follow Senator Sheehy Skeffington. He seemed to me to open his speech by asking were the railways really necessary, and ended by asking for a provision in the Bill which would prevent the railway company from closing a station or lopping off a small section of line without Ministerial consent.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

I merely asked the Minister to explain the Government's view about the preservation of the railways. I am in favour of preserving them and I felt that the Minister should justify his statement that they must be preserved.

Mr. S. Lemass

Other Senators urged that the railway should not be free to effect economies without ministerial consent, to close a railway station or a line that is a dead loss without the Minister giving them authority to do so. Do Senators not realise the difference between a decision by the C.I.E. Board to close a branch line or a railway station that is losing money and that they think will never make money, and the same decision taken by a Minister and the Government? If there is any prospect at all of preserving the station or the line, it seems to me to depend on business becoming available to it, and if there is to be logical agitation about a decision to close a station or line, should it not be agitation designed to get trade for the station or line which will justify C.I.E. in keeping it open, rather than a political agitation threatening the Minister with a loss of votes, if he does not keep it open, no matter how much it loses?

It is perfectly foolish to bring a Minister into that picture at all. Even the Coalition Government, which was always conscious of political considerations in all these matters, decided to keep the Minister out of it, and substituted the Railway Tribunal which never, so far as I know, refused permission to close a line when an application was made to it, even though the consent it gave was not always acted upon, and which in any case could bring to the consideration of the problem no better judgment than the Board of C.I.E. could bring. If we have to go through this form of procedure of getting somebody else to re-examine the board's decision and confirm it, it is not going to be the Minister, I can tell you, which would be as foolish as it proved in the past.

Mr. O'Leary

They cannot make mistakes?

Mr. S. Lemass

Of course the board can make mistakes. I was listening to Senator Cole and Senator O'Quigley talking about defects in time tables and charging arrangements and so forth. I am prepared to assume that those who determine those things in the organisation of C.I.E., who fix time tables and charging arrangements are fairly intelligent people. They make mistakes, but they make no foolish mistakes, and they do not repeat foolish mistakes. I am always inclined to be amused when I hear people who have no experience of railway management pointing out how they can do a much better job. Finding fault with public transport services is a happy hunting ground for humorists in all countries. In Britain, Punch could not exist as a comic paper if there was not this perpetual field for their activities, making jokes about public transport services.

I was interested to hear Senator Sheehy Skeffington say that the standard of our postal and telephone services was so clear of criticism that it we could only get C.I.E. to work as well as the Post Office, all our problems would be solved.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

On a point of explanation, perhaps the Chair would permit me to say——

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

The Senator will permit the Minister to continue his speech. The Senator will please resume his seat.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

The Minister has misunderstood my point——

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

The Senator will resume his seat.

Professor Stanford

It is only fair to Senator Sheehy Skeffington to say that he did say that some parts of the Post Office were inefficient. He did not give them a blank cheque.

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

We are not here to make invidious comparisons between sections of the Post Office at this hour of the night. The Minister, please.

Mr. S. Lemass

The Post Office is not the standard we should work by. Will Senators look at the problem? Here we have a public transport organisation. It is rather difficult to find people with the technical competence to take charge of that important organisation and run it. Indeed, I feel that we have such a limited field of selection of people with technical competence in that direction that there will be a perpetual problem in filling the top executive positions in our transport organisation. If we transfer those officials to the Post Office and tell them to run it from there, I do not see how they can run it any better as civil servants than as officials of C.I.E.

All that is beside the point. The main point is that C.I.E. railways are losing money because they are not getting enough traffic, or alternanatively, because they are costing too much to run. The obvious answer is to get more traffic and if possible to cut their costs in addition. We are giving the company the power to get more traffic by going out to find it and by removing restrictions which prevented it from getting more traffic in the past. They are getting commercial freedom to quote rates which will get them more traffic and to make deals with people who have a large amount of traffic to offer. On the other hand, they have every inducement to carry out reorganisation schemes on their undertaking.

I believe that over the next five or ten years there will be a contraction in the railway mileage of this country and no matter how we may feel about it, in a sentimental way, it is quite obvious that with the growth of motor transport we have excessive transport facilities in many parts of the country. Indeed, in parts of the country people prefer to use road transport, but there are also people who want to keep the railways as a standby service. A trader with a lorry may well think that some day his lorry may break down and he will want to be able to use the railway. On another occasion he may have more traffic than his lorry will take and he will want to send the remainder by railway. You cannot keep railways as a sort of standby service as it is far too costly. The stations and lines and services of C.I.E. will be maintained and can be maintained only if there is a continuous volume of business available.

Some Senators thought it would be a tremendous disaster if a branch line closed down. Let us take part of North Donegal where the Lough Swilly Railway Company provided a railway service for many years. The railways there have now disappeared. Yesterday, in the Dáil, every Deputy for the area paid tribute to the efficiency of the freight and passenger service now provided on the roads by that company. There is no dearth of transport facilities in the area and there is no dissatisfaction amongst the people. The company is earning a profit and is paying a dividend on its shares, which is no small achievement in this country. We could possibly conceive a similar happy situation in Clare, or West Cork, as in North Donegal where transport facilities, which are admitted to be adequate to meet all the requirements of the area, are provided on a profitable basis, by introducing the same efficient methods of working which that company in North Donegal has provided. Indeed, there was a suggestion that the whole of the transport problem of Donegal could be solved by handing it all over to that one company operating in North Donegal.

Senator O'Donovan started this old hare about the Dublin bus service users having to pay an excessive cost for bus transportation, in order to subsidise the rest of the C.I.E. system. It is quite true that we have an integrated transport organisation operating bus services, road freight services, hotels, canal services and rail services and that not all of these services are paying and indeed that the whole concern is not paying. But some sections do pay. It would be an impossible situation if we had to adopt the suggestion that we should take out of that transport organisation the sections that are able to pay, and set them up on their own, so that the benefits would be conferred on the people of the locality concerned.

It is not true that the recent increases in fares in Dublin more than compensated C.I.E. for the increased wages they are paying in Dublin. There are more people employed in Dublin than bus workers. There are thousands employed in the workshops, making buses and repairing buses, and doing all the engineering operations of the company and the additional revenue which C.I.E. will get from the increased fares will not be nearly enough—it is not enough by 33? per cent.—to meet the increased cost of wages paid in Dubline and the people in Dublin do not appear to me to have any grievance on that score. The main answer is that C.I.E., faced with this increased bill for wages, amounting to £600,000 or £700,000 a year, increased the fares that they felt they could increase and get in more revenue. At the same time they decided not to increase their rail and road freight charges because they felt that the loss of business would be such as not to get in more money.

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

The Minister understands that the debate concludes at 10 p.m.?

Mr. S. Lemass

I do. I will refer now to the canals.

Professor Hayes

Does the Minister wish to continue after 10 p.m.?

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

That matter should have been raised before 9 o'clock.

Professor Hayes

We have no objection to the Minister continuing until 10.30.

Mr. S. Lemass

It will not take me that long. I want to remove some misapprehensions which may, perhaps, avoid discussion at a later stage. As I said I would talk about canals, I will. The section of the Bill dealing with canals is completely misunderstood. It is merely consequential on the proposal to terminate the Transport Tribunal. In the Act of 1950—for which Senator O'Leary voted—C.I.E. can withdraw all their canal barges, and also have the power to abandon a canal which has not been used for three years, by the process of going to the Transport Tribunal and getting permission to do so. As the tribunal is being abolished this consequential provision is necessary in the Bill, but C.I.E. will be given no power which they had not got already—the power to abandon a canal which nobody is using, and over which no boat has passed for there years. I do not see any sense in keeping in existence a canal which nobody wants.

There appears to be a great misunderstanding about the Grand Canal, the only canal which is in use. The Grand Canal was forced on C.I.E. against their will. C.I.E. did not ask for the canal and this idea that there was a sort of compulsory taking over of the canal, against the wishes of the Grand Canal Company, is completely false. The Grand Canal Company were only too anxious to be bought out and I do not know how they persuaded the then Minister to take them over, on the terms they offered, because they were losing money and the position was looking quite black for them. The company used to pay 2½ per cent. on its shares, but in 1949 it missed its dividend and the company was quite worried about their future and persuaded the Minister to buy them out and hand them over to C.I.E.

I remember, speaking as an Opposition member in the Dáil at the time and forecasting that the result of forcing the Grand Canal on C.I.E. would mean the disappearance of the canal. I also remember asking the then Minister to give an example of any canal in the world which had been handed over to a railway company and which had survived. That is what is happening now. The problem in relation to the Grand Canal has not been created by C.I.E. The constriction of traffic is due to the fact that the ordinary private traders have ceased to use barges, but the volume of traffic being carried by C.I.E. barges is the same as ever. It is the private trader who has disappeared, and he has disappeared because he cannot make it pay.

Senator Stanford referred to the war-time experience of the canals. The Department of Industry and Commerce built 30 canal barges to supplement freight traffic on the Grand Canal during the period of war-time scarcity. We had a hard job getting anyone to use them. When the war was over we tried to give them away for nothing but we could not do it. We had to sell them for scrap.

Professor Stanford

Could I ask the Minister a question? Is it a fact that a great deal of fuel did come by canal at that time?

Mr. S. Lemass

The additional transport facilities provided on the Grand Canal at that time were these 30 barges. I have a recollection of the difficulty we had in getting anybody to use the barges or even take them as a gift from us afterwards. At the end of the war, they were all tied up and finally sold off as scrap. Nobody would take them as a present, just as nobody will take the canals as a present now. C.I.E. cannot close the Grand Canal if one boat travels up and down it paying tolls during the period of three years.

Professor Stanford

I do not like interrupting the Minister, but is there any possibility of imaginative development of the canals by C.I.E.?

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

Could that point not be raised on the Committee Stage?

Mr. S. Lemass

I do not know what the Senator means by "imaginative development". You can send by canal any goods you want to send at a rate which is 12½ per cent. less than you can send it by any other method on the C.I.E. system. But let us recognise the fact that C.I.E. lost £65,000 in the year ended March, 1956, according to this report, on the operation of their barges. I do not know that the value of the service they were rendering on the canal justified a loss of that magnitude. It has become greater since then. It is an increasing loss every year, having mounted from £29,000 in the year in which the canals were first forced on them to £65,000 for the last year for which figures are available.

Senator Sheehy Skeffington asked why should we preserve the railways at all. Perhaps I should direct his attention to the report of the Committee of Inquiry into Internal Transport. They said in paragraph 354:—

"As now constituted and operated we see no reasonable justification for the continuance of the railway undertaking of C.I.E., but equally we consider it cannot be demonstrated clearly at present that under changed circumstances the railway undertaking would fail to justify its continued existence as part of an efficient and economically operated public transport system."

Then they set out the reasons why they thought the effort should be made to preserve the railway system and to change the circumstances under which it is operating so that it can be preserved.

First of all, they said that if the general structure of the railway undertaking could be more closely related to the volume of suitable traffic available, it would be possible to demonstrate that it could operate economically in providing the safe, speedy, organised and disciplined method of transport for which railways were designed. C.I.E. set out to prove that road transportation was enormously wasteful, extravagant and uneconomic as compared with rail transport. While the committee did not accept that view, they did recognise, however, that as a technical device for the transport of passengers or freight, the railways had very substantial advantages.

They recognised that notwithstanding all the growth in road vehicular equipment in the country and other developments in recent years, the fact was that the volume of freight passing to the railway was increasing and not decreasing. Indeed, that is the point I have been making all the time, that the difficulty of the railways is entirely a financial one. It is a matter of mounting costs not being covered by mounting revenue. They said it was quite clear that many sections of the line could secure a degree of utilisation which would justify the continuance of these lines, that the traffic potentialities of these lines were such as to justify it.

They pointed out—and this is an argument to which I attach considerable weight—that the total abandonment of the railway system would have very serious consequences on tourist traffic, that tourists would be critical of the entire absence of long-distance rail transport and, because of the absence of railways, might form incorrect impressions about our general amenities. They pointed out that if we were to abandon the railways and try to put on the road the traffic now passing by rail, very considerable capital investment in new vehicular equipment would be necessary. C.I.E. estimated that the new investment required in road vehicular equipment would be of the order of £12,000,000. While the committee were to some extent critical of that estimate, it is quite clear that the scrapping of the capital investment in the railways and its substitution by new capital in the form of road vehicular equipment would be a very heavy burden on the nation's resources.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

Hear, hear!

Mr. S. Lemass

The committee said that the closing down of the railways would create peak difficulties in the handling of freight traffic and that the transfer of peak traffic to the roads would increase road congestion at particular periods, especially in the Dublin area. They said that from the point of view of national security a case could be made for the retention of the railway undertaking in some form to meet war or emergency conditions. They thought the importance of that could be exaggerated, but the Government would attach more importance to the preservation of the railways against the possibility of the re-emergence of wartime conditions such as we experienced before than a committee solely concerned with the commercial aspect.

These are the considerations which led the committee to recommend that this effort to preserve our railway system should be made by trimming it completely of those sections which could not have been made to pay and other changes. These are the recommendations which we have accepted. As I said, we must recognise that the mileage of line operated by C.I.E. will contract in years ahead, but we have not accepted any recommendation made by this committee as to the particular sections of line which should disappear; nor did they themselves put forward these suggestions as representing the outcome of a detailed consideration of the economics of each section of the line. Their view is that these decisions must be left to the board responsible for the management of the undertaking which will have available to it all the necessary information.

Senator Murphy also referred to the deficit on airport organisation. He was referring to 1955-56. He will be glad to know that has been wiped out since then and that there is no element of subsidy there now. The total receipts from airport changes at Shannon and Dublin combined exceed the total outgoings chargeable to revenue, but I concede that the situation has developed only in the past two years. In any event, I find it difficult to accept his view that we must reconcile ourselves to the perpetual subsidisation of the railways. Even if we have to do that, I would prefer to do it in the straightforward way, rather than meet the cost of the permanent way or provide free railway stations or anything of a kind which might be equivalent to airports.

Senator Sheehy Skeffington was quite wrong in his assumption that private licensed hauliers are being confined now to the same tonnage weight for their lorries and the same areas of operation as they had in 1933. There have been frequent modifications of the restrictions applied to them. I am not averse to the idea of trying, at this stage, to endeavour to generalise in some way the conditions attaching to some of these licences. However, we must not think in terms of expanding in a substantial way the carrying capacity of these licences hauliers. We cannot go in that direction and, at the same time, try to preserve the public transport system, which must get more business if it is to survive. These licensed hauliers must not be regarded as a section of people with a greivance. They are a privileged class. They are the only private people in this country entitled to carry goods for reward on the roads.

They got to that position more or less by accident. It was intended that they should have been bought out, with all the other private hauliers, when the 1933 Act was passed; but the process of buying out stopped and these people were left unacquired; and since then they have benefited in their private business by every Act of the Legislature which imposed restrictions upon the carrying of goods by road and intended to benefit public transport operators. I am not going to accept them as people with a real grievance.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

Would it not be much better to buy them out now?

Mr. S. Lemass

The power of compulsory acquisition has long since expired. In any case, I do not agree with that point of view. Our experience has been that it is not a disadvantage to have a limited number of private hauliers who can provide transport facilities of a certain kind. Indeed, a number of new licences have been issued to cater for classes of traffic which C.I.E. is not handling, such as certain classes of fish transport, the carriage of Sunday newspapers, and so on. These are specialised traffics which C.I.E. could not or did not want to take on and for which these private licences were issued.

As regards the concession to farmers to carry live stock to marts or fairs in tractor-trailers, I want to make it clear that I do not intend to be pushed one inch beyond the section in the Bill. I have already been pushed a little further than I intended to go. The danger I saw, when trying to meet what I thought was a reasonable case made in that regard, was that I could never find the point at which I could stick my heels in the ground. For instance, Senator Cole wants me to extend it not merely to the marts but to the railway stations. Senator O'Callaghan wants me to authorise them to carry sugar beet. Every step would open up a logical case for a further step and would produce the situation where the whole transport policy would be undermined.

We are not setting up, as Senator Sheehy Skeffington seemed to assume, another class of licensed haulier. Indeed, the anxiety I have is that these people may develop into a new type of transport operator. If they do, we may have to reimpose restrictions or withdraw facilities. The intention here is to enable farmers to oblige their neighbours by providing transport on an obligement basis and not to enter into the business of carrying goods for reward for the purpose of earning a livelihood. The carriage will be for reward, and there are arguments which justify enabling them to have that authority. Even if, in fact, there were no reward on a cash basis as I pointed out in the Dáil the main deterrent to a farmer facilitating his neighbour in this way was the belief that the Gárda, when he stopped the farmer, would not believe that he was not being paid and there was the difficulty of proving that, in fact, there was no reward.

Furthermore, I want to make it clear that the concession is confined to the transportation by tractors which are taxed at the agricultural rate. Therefore, any deviation from the concession as set out in the section, involves not merely the penalties which this Bill will bring, but also the immediate imposition of the full rate of road tax. That will be a deterent which should prevent any very considerable abuse of the section.

Finally, I would urge most strongly that we should not be induced to depart from the principle of setting up the C.I.E. board as an independent authority free of restraint, free from restriction, free to deal with the problems without having to justify its decisions to any public authority or to any Minister of State. It is true that we all have in our minds still this suspicion of the railway monopolist. That probably was bred into us. It certainly was handed down from our forefathers. That no longer represents the situation which we have to meet. C.I.E. in the operation of a railway system cannot survive unless it can get more business and get back some of the business it has lost. I am not going into the history of why it lost it.

Senator O'Leary spoke of the Act of 1944. That Act never really came into operation. It was introduced in the Dáil during the war about the time at which Normandy was first invaded. It was designed to set up an organisation which would be ready to function after the war, when war-time restrictions and scarcities would disappear. Indeed I had said to those in charge of the organisation that my aim would be, when war-time scarcities began to disappear, to give a preference in access to supplies to the public transport operators, that when new lorries and new equipment were available they would have the first option, that when petrol supplies began to increase they would get a proportionately larger share of the increase than would be given to the private hauliers. They were to be given every encouragement and advantage to establish themselves in the transport business. As Senators know, however, there was a change of Government. My successor, Deputy Morrissey, came to this business, not knowing a great deal about it, and imposed on C.I.E. a standstill on all capital expenditure. Indeed, he directed them to sell six diesel locomotives which had already been purchased; and for a period of 18 months no new capital investment of any kind was permitted to C.I.E. and no alteration of its existing arrangements was tolerated while the Milne Committee was preparing its report.

Senator Sheehy Skeffington quoted a question which I asked based on that report. What I was trying to prove at that time was that after the Milne report was received and widely publicised, not a single one of its recommendations was embodied in the 1950 Transport Act. I take no responsibility for the 1950 Act. The 1944 Act never was in effective operation. The main difference between the 1944 Act and the 1950 Act was, that under the 1944 Act the common stockholders of C.I.E. were private individuals, but they could not get a dividened on the common stock unless the company made a profit, which it did not—and indeed, long before 1950, they had abandoned all hope of it. By the 1950 Act, that common stock was transferred into a State Guarantee 3 per cent. Transport Stock. The only benefit was to the stockholders who got 3 per cent. on stock which previously was worth nothing. Under the 1944 Act, the stockholders elected the ordinary directors, whereas under the 1950 Act they were appointed by the Government. Whether the stockholders or the Government produced the better directors is not now in question.

A Senator

The directors knew nothing about it.

Mr. S. Lemass

I did not appoint them. Do not blame me.

A Senator

The Minister did.

Mr. S. Lemass

No, no.

Professor Hayes

Let us postpone that for the Committee Stage.

Question put and agreed to.

Committee Stage ordered for next sitting day.

The Seanad adjourned at 10.20 p.m.sine die.