I have had attributed to me by Senator I'Estrange and his Fine Gael pals that I could use that power. Of course I could: I could give every person in Mayo an addition. Let Fine Gael put that in their pipe and smoke it. Paragraph (e) of that section in the 1950 Act gives another excepted matter:
the determination (other than any determination arising in or being part of a rearrangement scheme) of the price at which land is to be sold to any allottee;
The subsection goes on, in paragraph (f):
the determination whether a tenant or a proprietor would be or would not be entitled to require the Land Commission to resume or acquire the whole of his lands and provide him with a new holding and the determination of the new holding to be provided for a tenant or proprietor whose land is resumed or acquired by the Land Commission;
It goes on right down to subsection (2) of the same section of the 1950 Act giving the excepted matters. Subsection (2) states:
any power or duty for the time being vested by law (including this Act) in the Land Commission or the Lay Commissioners may, save in relation to accepted matters, be exercised or performed by—
(a) the Minister, or
(b) any officer of the Minister or the Land Commission for the time being authorised, whether specifically or by reference to a class of such officers, in that behalf by the Minister.
Therefore, under that Act of 1950, with the exceptions I have enumerated, the Minister for Lands can exercise every other single function and has the right of delegation of powers to officials of the Land Commission.
It has been suggested during the debate on this Bill that every civil servant in the Land Commission is a creature of the Minister for Lands. If that is so, he or she has been a creature of the Minister for Lands since the passing of the 1950 Act; it is not under this Bill that they became creatures. Under another subsection of the 1950 Act, subsection (8), the following is provided:
the Minister or such officer (as the case may be) may cause the document to be sealed as aforesaid.
So, under this section, in dealing with any rearrangement scheme anywhere, I have the power, and my predecessors had it given to them by the then Government, to appoint an officer to prepare rearrangement schemes, to pick out—if the Minister had that mentality—the people who would participate in those schemes. That power was given under the 1950 Act by the people who now criticise section 27 of this Bill and that power was given in repeal and revocation of a power that had been for all time reserved to the Lay Commissioners until the enactment of that section in 1950.
I am not here seeking power to take over land. That is being reserved, as it always was, to the Lay Commissioners. I am here taking power to give land in rearrangement schemes. That had been a power specifically reserved to the Lay Commissioners but was taken from them in 1950 and given to the political head of the Department. It may be argued and suggested that rearrangement comes through agreement, among other things, between the participants. It involves agreement between participants only insofar as the participants are concerned. If one individual refuses to participate, you can rope him off and leave him in his mess and proceed to rearrange the others.
Where there are ten people in a rundale village, if the Minister for Lands had the political mind that has been suggested here, he could forget five of them and pick out his own five boys and rearrange them. If I were so minded, the Fine Gael Party provided the power for me in this section of the 1950 Act. It was that power I attacked in the Dáil in 1950—the power to remove certain functions from the Lay Commissioners and give them to the political head of the Department — the power actually to pick out the people who would participate in a rearrangement scheme.
That is 15 years ago—it does not appear to be so long ago, but time moves on—and every excerpt quoted here from my speeches in the Dáil then were on the same issue—attacking the advisability of giving such powers to the political head of the Department. I have explained the urgent reasons for the enactment of this section. I have, I think, demonstrated to the House the desirability of the Land Commission having this power.
Somebody has asked in what cases will inspection notices be directed by me. The simple answer is: all cases. What happens under this section is that the Minister for Lands will, by virtue of the power given to him by the Oireachtas under this section, forthwith after the passage of the Bill sign a delegation of power to each of the four divisional inspectors enabling them to operate this section. For the benefit of some Senators who may not be familiar with the organisation of the Land Commission, for administrative purposes, the country is divided into four. In charge of each of these four areas is a divisional inspector. When this section becomes law, the Minister for Lands will simply sign an authorisation allowing these divisional inspectors to sign inspection notices. They, in turn, will authorise their officials to go in immediately and furnish a report to the Lay Commissioners, whose job it still will be to decide in any case whether land should or should not be taken for the relief of congestion.
I have already informed the House that in practice 50 per cent of these cases in respect of which inspections are made are not proceeded with further. When the Commissioners get the report from the local official, as a result of the inspections I am talking about, they decide that the land should not be taken. These men are like judges on the bench. They know nothing about the circumstances of these cases, sitting, as they do, far away in Dublin. Senators should realise that naturally they rely on the report of the individual inspectors who, despite the allegations that have been made, generally speaking probably have some file in the local office dealing with that particular area. Apart from the urgent case, they will usually have in the local office information about the type of cases sent up for inspection and general local information about the area concerned. Indeed, in many cases partial settlements may have been made from time to time in the areas in which these cases arise. The Land Commission may have been waiting to acquire further lands and so to write these areas off their books for all time.
These are the objectives of the section. This is how it will operate. For those who are interested in the relief of this problem, the effect will be to enable quick inspections to be carried out in urgent cases. Therefore, land urgently required for the relief of congestion which now escapes the Land Commission net will come into the hands of the Commission. I suggest that those who have any genuine interest in the urgent problem of the relief of local congestion should back this section to the limit. Indeed, this Bill would be much poorer without its inclusion.