I bow to your ruling, Sir, if you so think. What I wish to make clear, and this is relevant to the first amendment by Senator Lindsay, is that under existing procedure great delays occur. The inspector goes out and inspects the lands. He checks with the owner, finds out the extent of the lands and how they have been used. He may also inquire into the extent of local congestion. He then writes a report which comes up in the routine I have described and ultimately arrives on the table of the Lay Commissioners. Fifty per cent of the cases go no further than the report stage to the Lay Commissioners; the Lay Commissioners decide in 50 per cent of the cases on the report they get from the inspector that the Land Commission should not proceed further in the acquisition of certain lands for the time being. Fifty per cent of the cases, therefore, finish there and then.
In the other 50 per cent of cases, what the Lay Commissioners decide to do is to have compulsory proceedings commenced under existing law. The usual notices are served and published in Iris Oifigiúil, which means that the cases proceed to a court hearing, unless some arrangement is made with the Land Commission in the meantime. For the sake of argument, take it that 50 per cent of the inspections end in the land court; in only one-third does the court decide in favour of the Land Commission. Therefore two-thirds of them, for one reason or another, are adjourned or the court or the Lay Commissioners decide to accept the story of the applicants and allow their objections.
When it comes before the court and the hearing is published in Iris Oifigiúil, it is public property—everybody knows about it. Over all, of the inspections to which I have referred, 50 per cent never see the light of day and nobody knows anything about them. It is a business between the Land Commission and the land owner. What I am asked to do in the first amendment is to publish the name of the owner and the location of the holding as soon as possible in Iris Oifigiúil. In the second amendment, what the House is being invited to do is to prescribe by law that in half of the total number of cases where inspections take place throughout the country, the names and locations of the people and the holdings should be published for public consumption.
We have had already in this House on earlier sections strong allegations by Senator L'Estrange that immediately the Land Commission appeared to take any interest in a holding, there was a vast immediate reduction in the value of that holding. The Senator was at pains to stress the devaluation that occurred on that holding and the great loss the owner was at, consequently. Yet here the Seanad is being invited to publicise the interest of the Land Commission in an individual's holding, even though the Commission, on a report from the Lay Commissioners, have decided no further action should be taken—that this man's land, as far as the Land Commission are concerned, had lost interest.
I suggest to the House that the publication of what really amount to the private affairs of individuals is undesirable. If there is any weight at all in the suggested fears of some Senators that any interest shown by the Land Commission in a farm automatically devalues that holding, such proceedings as are suggested here should be avoided like the plague because we would, through the implementation of this amendment, be indicating to everybody in the country that the Land Commission had inspected the holding and that even though they did not go ahead at that time, the feeling would be that as the Land Commission had once shown an interest in the place, they were more likely to renew that interest at a later date.
Senator L'Estrange's amendment asks that the Minister shall lay before each House of the Oireachtas on 1st January and 1st July each year a list giving particulars of the cases in which he has authorised an officer to make a determination pursuant to subsection (1) of this section. This would have exactly the same effect as I have described when commenting on the other amendment. It would be publishing the names and other details of individuals concerned in hundreds of cases where inspections had been made and in which the Lay Commissioners had decided, on reports from their inspectors, that they would take no further action.
Under the section, what will happen is that the divisional inspectors, of whom there are four for the entire country, will be empowered, on the authorisation of the Minister, to carry out inspections. Where there is an urgent case, the divisional inspector concerned, who has a number of counties under his personal supervision, can forthwith, without further ado, sign a notice empowering one of his junior officers to make an immediate inspection.
Let me emphasise once more that it is as a result of the report of that inspection that the Lay Commissioners will decide to act or not to act: it is still the function of the Lay Commissioners to decide whether the report should be followed up by any further action or whether it should be discontinued. Until now, these matters, unless they became matters of public property by virtue of the fact that they had come before a court where the hearing was in public, were kept strictly between the Commission and the persons concerned. In a number of those cases, private family conditions exist which may be reported to the Lay Commissioners by the inspectors concerned and perhaps it is because of such conditions obtaining in individual cases that the Lay Commissioners, in their wisdom, decided no further action should be taken.
If either or both these amendments were accepted, every inspection carried out under the various Land Acts would henceforth become public property. I can see no reason for these amendments. It is quite true, as Senator Lindsay has suggested, that if, as has been alleged by some Senators, a Minister for Lands would set out to operate this section for the purpose of harassing his political enemies, he would be simply pulling the roof on his head.
Under this procedure, if an inspector of the Land Commission made some inspection which could be said not to have been warranted, I can well imagine the number of questions that would be down for reply on the Dáil Order Paper on the following Wednesday concerning that particular case. We have heard about pressure on the Minister for Lands—any Minister for Lands—but I can tell the House that every Minister for Lands who has and will administer the existing Land Acts must resist pressure where he feels it should be resisted.
There are many powers a Minister for Lands can exercise under existing law, if he wants to do so, for wrong purposes or ulterior motives. The Minister is the political head of the Land Commission. The Lay Commissioners and all the officers in the Commission, except when acting in the exercise of their own reserved powers under law, are the servants of the political head of the Department and any Minister for Lands, any day of the week, must receive deputations about this, that and the other and he has got to exercise his powers and carry the burdens of his office according to his conscience.
On this alleged danger posed to the House by Senator L'Estrange, I should like Senators to exercise their minds in regard to the functions of every Minister for Lands, every day the Dáil sits. Each day he has probably the greatest number of Questions addressed to him by Deputies asking him, as they put it in Dáil terminology, as to the desirability of acquiring certain lands for the relief of congestion. Those questions are put down for the purpose of putting political pressure—there is no other name for it—on the Minister for Lands to have certain lands acquired. Day in, day out, in the Dáil, every single week, we have Deputies heading deputations, exercising political pressure to get the Land Commission to exercise their powers to take over land for the relief of congestion. I do not think it is suggested by anybody that any particular Minister for Lands or the Land Commission are doing anything wrong when they on occasion listen to these representations and check whether they are right or wrong. We get many allegations, it is true, from land-hungry people, suggesting that the Land Commission's powers should be exercised as far as their neighbour's land is concerned. The Lay Commissioners decide whether the allegations made by these people have any foundation in fact or whether they are false. The Land Commission's official goes out and sends up his report. On that report they make their decision as to whether the land should be acquired or left alone.
What the House is asked to do here is to accept these amendments allegedly for the purpose of preventing the Minister for Lands directing special inspections on the lands of his political enemies. There is nothing more farfetched than that suggestion. As Senator Lindsay himself admits, it would be political lunacy. The Minister for Lands who would direct any particular official — who may be a political enemy of his for all he knows because certainly every official of the Land Commission is not a supporter of any political Party—the Minister for Lands who would be so foolish to put that rope around his neck would not deserve to last in his job for very long. That is putting this matter at its worst. Taking the reasoning that has been advanced for the acceptance of these amendments, it is quite clear that not alone would it be wrong to accept them but the effect would be to pinpoint the hundreds of cases of farmers throughout the country whose lands have been inspected and in respect of which the Commissioners, in their wisdom, have decided not to interfere with them.
The position up to the moment is that in such cases the particulars of these people's affairs between themselves and the Land Commission have been confidential. They have not been disclosed to anybody. I suggest to the House that that position should still obtain. Indeed, it would be extremely foolish to interfere with it. As far as the wider matters are concerned, we can deal with them on the section, as you have ruled I cannot demonstrate to the House the reserved functions under the 1950 Act and the changes made in the law under the 1950 Act.