It is alleged that free sale is being abolished by this Bill. We have the same old story trotted out here about the shocking thing it is to interfere in any way with the three F's. Let us get down to realities now in this year of 1965 and realise that these much quoted three F's have no longer any reality today. Fixity of tenure, free sale and fair rent were relevant in the days when the Irish farmer was merely a tenant at will and could be turned out on the roadside at the whim of his landlord. If he did any improvements, his rent could be increased. He was in the position of a serf.
We are too inclined to forget that we are dealing here with a congestion problem created largely by the fact that our people were driven to these mountain fastnesses in Cromwellian times. The suggestion that there is something sacrosanct about taking over land has really no validity, in my opinion, in this modern day and age. Every Senator who has any experience of dealing with land knows that for many years one could not subdivide a farm and sell it without the consent of the Land Commission. Where was the free sale there? What is not generally known, apparently, is the provision in section 65 of the 1923 Act, which has been the law of this country since that year. I will quote the relevant provision for the benefit of Senators:
Where the Land Commission have after the date of the passing of this Act made any advance for the purchase of a holding or parcel the proprietor thereof shall not subdivide or let the holding or parcel without the consent of the Land Commission and every attempt at subdivision or letting in contravention of this provision shall be void as against all persons and in any such contravention the holding or parcel shall at the option of the Land Commission vest in them.
Every letting of land was subject to a land purchase annuity since 1923, outside of conacre, which I shall deal with in a moment and which does not appear in the Acts at all. Any letting for a year, two years, or three years, was absolutely void not alone between the parties but as against all comers and the Land Commission could, following the passing of the 1923 Act, resume the land.
That has been the law of this land since 1923 and it has reference to all land which is the subject of a Land Commission annuity. I should say that about 90 per cent of the land of this country is controlled under that provision. It is also true to say that, if you bought off the annuity, you were entitled to subdivide without the consent of the Land Commission. That position became known and some landowners found that, by buying off the annuity, they could fragment their holdings at will. What we are doing under the section in this Bill, and it is something to which some Senators object, is making the one law for all the land in the country. The law against subdivision and fragmentation which applies now to 85 or 90 per cent of the land will apply to all land in future. Because of the misrepresentation that has taken place, one would imagine we were seeking some fantastic power. Nothing could be further from the truth. Could there be anything more illogical than the State providing millions—mark you, this is an expensive business—to build up economic units and, at the same time, allowing anybody at his own will and pleasure to fragment his holding in any way he wishes? It certainly does not make sense to me and I am sure it does not make sense to sensible men inside and outside this House.
The building up of these units should be the concern of all of us. The congestion problem poses one of the greatest social challenges we have to meet. The allegations that this Bill will result in a further depopulation of rural Ireland are completely unfounded. As everyone who lives in a congested area knows, there are several vacant holdings; the people have gone out of them because it was impossible to make a living on them. These armchair critics in our cities and towns, living remote from the realities of the situation, who suggest that our people are prepared to starve in holy poverty on valuations of £2 10/- to £3 are just living in outer space. Why should these people accept the standard of living of their forefathers in famine days?
Those who think young people today will accept that situation have really no knowledge of the true position in the congested areas. Already too many of these have gone. One Senator stated that there are 300 in Leitrim on a waiting list for migration. The same picture obtains in every congested area. To suggest that young people today will starve on these units is to ignore the realities of the situation.
The aim of this Bill is to anchor in the congested areas a population which can survive in modern competitive conditions. I have never suggested that one can provide overnight, or even in the long term, 45 acres of good land for everybody. What I have suggested is that that should be the aim and we should go on building towards that national objective. As a matter of policy, some few years back I directed the Land Commission that future migrants' holdings should be created on the principle of 40 to 45 acres of good land. That should be the aim. That has been done.
We all know this is a matter on which one cannot generalise. As I have said on many occasions, what may be an economic unit in one area, depending upon the type of land and the availability of markets and so on, would not be an economic unit in another area. For instance, in Lusk or Rush, outside Dublin, I am sure you could have a very good viable unit of perhaps five or six acres. The pattern changes from place to place and from time to time but I will get on to some of the rather peculiar figures quoted by Senator Quinlan in a few moments.
On this issue of what can be done and what should be aimed at, I should like to quote a report I received on a follow-up study of some migrants. We asked the local agricultural instructor to make a study from the economic point of view of how certain migrants fared and this is what he said of the area in which he worked. The study was made in the year 1962. He said:
There are many such settlements in the country. The owners are all from the congested areas. They have a will to work and have a market for milk at an average price of 2/-a gallon. They have family farm incomes from £700 to £1,000 per year.
That is net.
Even with a smaller price of 1/6 per gallon a well run farm could achieve the same income.
The instructor deals with townlands, in County Kildare, which were divided among these migrants. They were divided and allocated and many had a poor start, but now, because of the tenants and the markets, the district is one of the best small farm areas in the country. He gives detailed particulars of each migrant family that shared in the division of that particular estate in County Kildare. The lands were divided in 1952 and divided into seven farms with buildings; six had dwelling houses and appropriate outhouses. Four of these farms were 34 acres in area, two were 36 acres and one farm was 56 acres. I should say at that time the aim would have been around 30 to 33 acres of first-class land or an equivalent, if the land was not first class arable land.
The farms were allocated to migrants from the congested western areas of whom three farmers were from Mayo, three from Leitrim and one from County Kerry. The first start off was a system of mixed farming and then they went ahead and got into the dairy business and went on with their own milk production. The standard of farming, he reports, was relatively high. All the land is fertilised each year with balanced fertilisers and the feeding stuff needed on the farm is home-produced and the standard of management and stock keeping is good.
He gives particulars of how each farmer works his land and then proceeds to the financial returns for the year 1961. Farm accounts kept during the year 1961 revealed that the output per acre was about £50, expenses were £20 per acre and the return for the farmer for work management slightly over £30 per acre, that is, about £1,000 per year.
This is an economic report by an independent local agricultural instructor whom we asked to follow up on how these migrants, who came from different congested districts, fared on migration. I am sure if Senator Quinlan were here, he would find it hard to accept that this can be achieved on these compact units. These men came from places of ten to 15 acres, generally fragmented and intermixed with other neighbours' land of cutaway bog, and possibly some right of commonage up to the mountain. The report I have read is an indication of what can be achieved by these men, given a reasonable chance on a compact holding. That could not have been achieved by these people on rundale estates in the west. The place is not there for them; the land is not of that quality. The hope for these men outside migration must lie in the enlargement of their units to give them sufficient liberty to produce as much as they can and make a livelihood that will keep them fixed there on the land. That is the object of this Bill.
It is quite true, as some Senators said, that there is a certain amount of consolidation going on in some congested areas amongst some of these people. That has been going on for a very considerable time and more of it will go on. The difficulty at the moment is that where, for one reason or another, one of these small holdings in the congested areas comes on the market, it is the man with the long purse or the local shopkeeper or people of that kind who are able to buy it and cut out this consolidation which would be a good thing.
One of the sections of this Bill which deals with enticing old or incapacitated landowners to surrender their lands to the Land Commission for the relief of their neighbours has been attacked as being a provision to depopulate the west of Ireland. That section is aimed at old men who are living on their own with nobody to succeed them. Anybody who knows the conditions in these congested districts today knows that contrary to the position 50 years ago, when there was a row between Pat and John as to who would inherit the small farm, today Pat and John are over in Birmingham and are not prepared to come back and take the responsibility of keeping the old people. There are hundreds of these cases across the congested districts and when I read and listen to some of these purists talking about what should be done to entice these people to come back in the economic conditions of the day and settle down on £3 or £4 valuations amongst the rocks in the congested areas, I simply conclude that they do not know what they are talking about. Indeed, these very people invariably would starve to death on small farms in Mayo, Galway or Leitrim, inside 48 hours. They themselves take very good care that they will be far away from the snipe grass in the congested districts.
It is of course refreshing to hear Senator Quinlan quoting Peadar O'Donnell and statistics on this issue. For instance, among all these figures he quoted I got rather confused and lost with the learned professor, as, I feel sure, did many other Senators. A typical instance of the fallacy of the figures being chucked about in this way was his suggestion that we here had the largest average of arable land per farm of any country in the whole of western Europe. He suggested the average acreage of arable land held by our farmers was 40. Of course he forgot the imbalance of our population and land ownership and utterly overlooked the fact that 30 per cent of our best agricultural land is held by eight per cent of our population.
If anybody suggested in the area from which I come that the average acreage of the farmers in the west of Ireland or, indeed, anywhere west of the Shannon, was 40, the people would laugh. It is statistics like these, chucked about without any reality, that create all the smokescreens on this issue. He said we should follow certain lines of thinking on this issue and he admired the preaching of Mr. Peadar O'Donnell on how he would attack this problem.
Mr. Peadar O'Donnell was down in my county not very long ago talking on this issue, again, among an audience not composed of farmers, not composed of those living and working on the land. Indeed, the chairman is reported as having apologised for the absence of farmers at that meeting of the groaners' association, but it is refreshing to hear some of the latter day saints like Mr. Peadar O'Donnell coming down preaching to Mayo farmers about the wonderful spiritual values to be achieved by living on those £3 or £4 valuation holdings.
I do say, of course, that our hardworking farmers have a sense of humour and they are entitled to be entertained. They get a kick out of listening to those people who are prepared to come down, at tremendous expense to the management, to solve our problems for us. They do not stay very long: they take very good care to get back to the cities from whence they have come, but we always like visitors in the west of Ireland and it is an interesting form of entertainment.
Some of the criticisms of some of the sections of the Bill obviously stem from misunderstanding either of what is intended under the particular sections or of the existing law. Some Senators were rather inconsistent in suggesting that this Bill is useless for the purpose which I claim it will serve, while at the same time appealing to me to apply it to their own counties or constituencies, even though they say it will become completely ineffective. That does not make sense.
The reason for the definition section and the schedule to the Bill on the congested areas is that the congested areas are already defined under the 1909 Land Act. These are the real land slums; these were the land slums as defined for the old Congested Districts Board. They were areas in which it was found, because of the poorness of the land and the poverty of the people, that special provision had to be made for them in the old days, even to the extent of getting the people seed.
It is in these areas that we must concentrate our attention from the point of view of priority. They are, of course, the areas from which there is the greatest emigration. I do wish we had people like Senator Quinlan to dish out his brand of statistics to people like my parents who had ten of a family. He says it is not necessary at all to spread out land units. He suggests you should go up, put a spire out of these holdings, I suppose. What will you do with the other nine children if you have a family of ten on a holdings of £5 valuation? They must go somewhere, and of course they do. As I said before, in this day and age they will not come back.
Power is taken here to deal with pockets of congestion no matter where they exist throughout the country. We must, of course, start in the areas where the greatest need is, under the section scheduling an area as being a congested area. Once that is done, by whatever Minister for Lands may be there at the time, the individuals living within that area will be entitled to all the rights, all the privileges provided under this Bill for the congested areas. Therefore, where an area outside the present defined area is scheduled, this differential about paying the economic price, through the rent, for the land will not apply. In the same way, these people will be entitled to avail of the self-migration provisions of the Bill and of the annuities for old, incapacitated landowners.
I said in the Dáil, and I repeat here, that the officials of the Land Commission are making an assessment of these pockets of congestion wherever they are outside the scheduled congested areas and they will recommend in due course which are the most urgent to be dealt with. While I accept what has been said by Senators here and by Deputies in the Dáil, that there are congested pockets here and there in practically every county, I do not accept that there are the same problems, the same intensity of congestion as in the counties scheduled in this Bill.
Down through the years there were different caighdeáin as between the people in the west and in the rest of the country. In the west, the object was to build up to a holding of £10 valuation. We succeeded in doing that in 20 per cent of the cases and there are thousands and thousands of cases to my knowledge where the holdings were vested on valuations of £2 10s., £3 or £4 and were left there, regarded, on being vested, as being off the Land Commission books. Where the land was available in the west, the holdings were brought up to £10 valuations and stopped there, but when you came east of the Shannon, the standard was to be £30 to £33 valuation. In the latter cases, the people had, No. 1, far better land with which to try to help themselves and, No. 2, far bigger valuations. The problem was examined by a far different standard and the people got a far better chance than the people catered for under this Bill.
I concede that the land units in the early days of land settlement by the Land Commission of 22 acres and so on were unrealistic and that in places the Land Commission did create new land slums; but a lot of water has gone under the bridge since those days. We are living in different times now. We are living in an age when a man from my part of the country on a valuation of £3, if he cannot get a reasonable living, will not stay there when inside 24 hours he can be across the water earning £25 or £30 a week. These are the economic laws that regulate the situation in this day and age. Anybody who chooses to ignore those laws is simply living in the clouds.
With these conditions, therefore, it is vitally necessary that we take urgent action to consolidate the population in rural Ireland that can exist there in modern conditions and that we give them as many modern amenities as we can to entice them to remain there. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of small vacant holdings scattered throughout these congested areas. Many of them have been let for 25 or 30 years. We have in this temporary convenience letting the worst system of land user in the whole of western Europe. The people who take these lettings are concerned only with getting as much as they can out of the land while they have it without putting back anything into it, because whoever owns it over in America, England or Australia may let it to a neighbour the following year.
I have had letters from some of these people in Australia and America since the Land Bill has been publicised. These are people who have been gone for 25 or 30 years and whose lands have been let. They talk about preserving the old homestead and what a shocking thing it would be to interfere with it. These people have as much intention of returning to the old homestead as I have of flying to the moon. It is this kind of sentimental thinking that clouds issues of this type. These lands are vital in this day and age to try to build up reasonable units in these areas. These absentees absent for so long are just as detrimental to our nation and economy as were the absentee landlords of old. The nation cannot afford them any longer.
We always get the extreme case posed by public representatives of the widow who needs to let her lands for a few years or the man who becomes ill. It is suggested that this Bill and all these provisions are aimed at these classes of people. Of course, everybody knows that that is utterly ridiculous. The Land Commission do not go after anybody of that kind. They do not go after the man who works his own land. Everyone familiar with this problem knows that the man who is a bad user, who has been absent for years and who lets his land year after year for years, is the type of man the Land Commission get after in all these cases.
The Land Commission do not propose under the powers taken in this Bill to set out acquiring the farm of a widow who is left with a young family in tragic circumstances and has to let her land for one year. Indeed, I would like to see the Minister for Lands who would stand over such a policy. I would like to see the number of questions he would have from the local Deputy inside 24 hours of a Land Commission inspector going near an unfortunate person of that kind.
It is necessary to deal quickly with the case of absentees, and therefore it is necessary to take the powers set out in this Bill. As a practical approach, this has already been done: the Land Commission have been asked to compile a register of lands in the different inspectorate areas that have been let for a period of over five years. The intention is that when this Bill becomes law these people will be written to and asked whether they are prepared to come back to their farms or whether they will sell their lands to the Land Commission for the relief of congestion.
As anybody familiar with Land Commission practice knows—I think Senator Lindsay adverted to this fact —in compulsory acquisition proceedings, even under the existing law, where a man represents he is over in England for the purpose of earning some money to build up his stock or that he has some family tragedy and needs two or three years to get on his feet, in every single case the Land Court adjourns his case for two or three years to see will he live up to his undertaking. I have personal experience of hundreds of such cases. It is true that in many of these cases this excuse is just used for the time being. Indeed, there has been much criticism of the Lay Commissioners for leaning over backwards in giving too much latitude to many of these men who have been gone for a long time and whose cases have been held up and no Land Commission action taken.
The fact remains that the practice now is, and will be in the future, that in any case in which any reasonable excuse is made, the individual concerned will get every chance to come back to his farm, provided the Commissioners are satisfied he has the genuine intention of doing so. At all events, a start has been made to get after all these derelict holdings. If a good inroad is made, it could make a very big impact on the economy of the adjoining landowners in the west. I do not say it will provide the desirable target of a family farm of from 40 to 45 acres of good land, but it can make all the difference between making it possible for a man to live there and to bring up his family and his closing the door because he can see no hope of making progress in the future.
I want to tie up this particular provision with another provision that has been criticised very much here, that is, the one which sets out what is a residential holding and that the individual must live on or within three miles of that holding. Again, it is trotted out by those who want to misrepresent that every man who has what they call in Leinster a draw farm and what we call an outfarm, working it in conjunction with the home farm, will have it taken from him if it is over three miles away. There is nothing further from the truth.
Everybody knows that in many instances the outfarm or the draw farm may be an essential part, where it is properly worked, of the home farm or parent holding. It is a regular pattern throughout rural Ireland and there is no intention whatever of interfering with those people who are living there and working their land. It was necessary for me, however, to devise ways and means to make certain ranches vulnerable for the relief of congestion on which we want to create migrants' holdings. Some of these ranches, some owned by people who do not live in the country at all, but London or Paris or in this city, are let and I am saying that these lands should, where required, be at least vulnerable to the Land Commission for acquisition.
We have many a wealthy businessman doing a fiddle with the tax laws by siphoning off money to these farms, by which he is keeping a leg on the bottom for the future. They are not concerned with the relief of congestion in rural Ireland. They are not living there. Others buy Irish farms and are living abroad for one reason or another. In these cases it was necessary for me to find a definition that would catch these fly-by-nights, and this is it. Again, these powers will not be used to militate against the family farm that is controlled by a family company, as some Senator mentioned. There is no intention of touching these people at all. It is very simple and the Land Commission will know the users of the lands and if an individual farmer who is living there and working on it decides to register a family company and give shares in the company as between his family, that is perfectly all right and these people have nothing to fear.
This definition was necessary to get at the class of people I have mentioned. It is essential to step up our migration programme from the congested areas, more essential now than ever. When we have eight per cent of this class of people owning 30 per cent of the best land in Ireland, I think at least those non-residential people's ranches should be vulnerable to the Land Commission for the relief of congestion before other land is touched.
Again, it has been alleged in the Dáil and outside that these are dictatorial powers and are unprecedented. The law for many a year in this country under previous Land Acts has been that if there is congestion in the immediate vicinity of a farm, whether the man is working it properly or not, or even though he is living there and has no other method of livelihood, the Land Commission have the power to walk in and take that land for the relief of congestion. They talk about free sale and the awful powers in this Bill. That has been the law for many a year in this country. The only relief that man has, if the Land Commission decide to use that power, is under one particular section, and if he has no other means of livelihood and is living on that farm, he is entitled when the Land Commission take over to demand a holding up to a certain value elsewhere from them.
It is quite obvious to me that either some people who have been speaking on this Bill in the Dáil or here do not know the existing land laws or they are misrepresenting some of the powers being sought in this Bill in order to create a smokescreen outside. That at all events is the position as the law stands, and you have defences being removed and criticised here in the "adequates" section by some other Senators. When we come to that particular power and that particular section, these again are necessary if we are to make any progress in solving this land slum problem in our time.
Since I became Minister for Lands, I have spent hours every week the Dáil is sitting answering questions by Deputies on every side of the House as to why certain lands are not taken, and as to what are the reasons for the delay in Land Commission action in all these cases. From these very same people when I produced a Bill to cut this red tape and try to make some impact, we have a song and dance about the three F's. It is rather amusing to hear some people talk about their approval of this Bill, but of course you must not touch the landowner. I should like to see the individual who can produce the omelette without breaking the egg but undoubtedly some of the speakers on this Bill have found a way of doing that. While pressing me and the Land Commission to go ahead and make an impact on the relief of congestion, when we seek the authority and the legal machinery, as we are doing in this Bill, to make an impact on that national problem, then the land of every farmer in Ireland is sacrosanct, whether he lives in Dublin or in Timbuctoo. We must get down to realities on this issue.
I should like the critics to tell me what is wrong in making such lands vulnerable, where the owner has offered the land for sale during the previous 12 months. The man had made up his mind to sell that land. For one reason or another, he did not proceed with the sale. If there is a change in his circumstances, as some Senators suggested here, and if he had family trouble and then things worked out all right, I am sure the Land Commission would be quite sympathetic in any such case of particular circumstances that urged him to sell at a particular time and then caused him to change his mind. But if a man has decided in his wisdom to sell his land, what is wrong with making that land vulnerable for the relief of congestion? I do not suggest that the Land Commission will run in with horse and artillery after every man who puts up his land for sale.
This business has been going on down through the years and the landowners frustrated the Land Commission when they went to move in for the relief of congestion. The pattern was this. A man may have his farm let for five or ten years and maybe growing weeds and thistles among his neighbours, and a report is sent in. Perhaps the neighbours go to the Land Commission. Perhaps a Deputy has made representations after getting information from the people concerned and he goes along to the Land Commission to report this matter and to ask them to consider taking over Pat Browne's land in a certain village. The fire starts there with a junior Land Commission inspector. He has to take the story the way he gets it. It goes up to the senior inspector in that particular office. He decorates that file and passes it on to the divisional inspector. We have four of these men dealing with four different parts of the country. The divisional inspector does his part and passes it on to the senior inspector in Merrion Street. He decorates the file and passes it on to the Lay Commissioners. That is for the purpose of signing a notice that simply says to this man: "On such a day, a Land Commission inspector will call to inspect your lands to see whether they are suitable or not for the relief of congestion." The Commissioners have to authorise this. It goes down the hierarchy the same way—from the chief inspector to the divisional inspector, from the divisional inspector to the senior inspector and from the senior inspector to the junior inspector.
This would take six to 18 months after the poor man came in to report on Pat Browne. The junior inspector goes out and inspects this land. He makes his report on the user of the land, gets the history from the neighbours and that report goes all the way up and ultimately reaches the Lay Commissioners. It is on that report that the Lay Commissioners decide whether they should acquire these lands for the relief of congestion or whether they should leave them alone.
The statistics are that under the existing procedure 50 per cent of these reports finish when they come to the Lay Commissioners. There is no further action ordered by them to take these lands for the relief of congestion and of the other 50 per cent of these reports, where they order the publication of the compulsory acquisition list in Iris Oifigiúil and where they make a follow up for compulsory acquisition, in approximately only one-third of these cases do the Land Commission succeed in getting these lands.
Senators may not be aware that last year and for the last couple of years and particularly since I provided for the payment of auctioneers' fees to those concerned, over 50 per cent of the intake of land to the Land Commission is on a voluntary basis. But, that was the procedure.
I quoted a moment ago the acreage of land involved in cases of this kind in a year. In 1964, the number of acres inspected was 102,194. This was on preliminary inspection to enable the Lay Commissioners of the Land Commission to decide whether they should acquire the lands for the relief of congestion or not, because these commissioners have no other way of ascertaining the facts and because the Land Commission in their wisdom are not prepared to take the representations or the allegations either of the Deputy who calls or the tenants themselves who, naturally, are anxious to get anything that is going for nothing. Everybody is. Therefore, the Lay Commissioners have to wait until they get this independent report on the individual concerned from their own inspector and it is on that that they decide. That will still be the law. It is the Lay Commissioners of the Land Commission and only the Lay Commissioners who can decide after the passage of this Bill what land will be taken and what land will not be taken.
What I am doing in this section which is being criticised so much and about which all these allegations are made as to how I will get after my political enemies by having their lands inspected, is that instead of this accruing red tape from the junior inspector to the senior inspector, to the Lay Commissioners of the Land Commission, I am taking power to delegate the signing of this notice to the four divisional inspectors in charge of the four parts of our country for Land Commission purposes so that if the local people come into the local office and say, for instance, that Pat Murphy is advertising his land for sale this week and it is badly wanted for the relief of congestion, that junior official can pick up his phone and ring the divisional inspector, wherever his office is, and the divisional inspector can there and then sign the preliminary notice to enable the junior inspector to go out and make a report on that land. That report, in the very same way as is done now, goes up to the Lay Commissioners and it is on that report and on that report only that the Lay Commissioners will decide whether that land should be taken for the relief of congestion or not.
I pointed out that last year there were 102,194 acres inspected. It is suggested by my political enemies in the Dáil and here that I will burn the midnight oil going through these cases, finding out by the colour of the handwriting as to which of them are Fine Gaelers, and which are Fianna Fáilers and which communists.
This is what is being aimed at in this section and the very people who are my loudest critics in every Land Commission debate in the Dáil, and on every Estimate, about the failure of the Land Commission to move in and to take these farms, about the slowness of the Land Commission, about how crude a machine they were, about how hopeless they were in dealing with this problem, are the men who are preaching the awful thing it is that this power should be given for the divisional inspector to sign a notice authorising the junior official to go in and make a report quickly, to see are the lands of X suitable or unsuitable for the relief of congestion.
Incidentally, this proposition rather amuses me: I will be inundated, according to the Opposition Deputies and Senators, with pressure from my own Party, from my own henchmen. to have all the lands of all my political enemies inspected throughout the length of this land. What is political pressure? Is it political pressure for Deputy Dillon to arrive in my office week in, week out, and demand that such land be inspected for the relief of congestion? He does it and so do 90 per cent of the Fine Gael Deputies and, I am sure, Senators, representing rural Ireland. That is their job. I get questions, week in, week out, in the Dáil asking me why X's land should not be acquired for the relief of congestion. What greater political pressure is there than that? The owner is publicly crucified. The question of his land is put before Dáil Éireann, before the Minister for Lands, and a demand made that that land should be acquired for the relief of congestion. I wonder can we ever get away from the political "mist that does be on the bog" in connection with the land, when we all know that these are the facts and the realities.