I am afraid I shall not be able to pursue this debate on the lines of the previous speakers. I trust that the political halo has now been dispensed with and that we may really discuss the Bill in the hope that it will be an improvement and will meet the housing needs of the people in the future. I am hopeful, too, and, indeed, quite confident that some of the people who have spoken entirely from the political point of view will come back later on to volunteer the same very helpful criticism and suggest helpful amendments, such as they have done in regard to other legislation passing through this House. I hope also that the Minister will forget about the political halo and will be prepared to open his mind and ears to such useful suggestions and amendments as may be put forward from one side of the House or the other because this is a Bill which affects the poorest and most necessitous people in our country.
The Bill has been described as not being spectacular but I think it has a much better recommendation than that. I would describe it as being progressive, combining the best concepts of previous Housing Acts, progressing with the advancement and with the conditions obtaining in modern times. adapting itself to the changing conditions and closing up, as far as possible, some of the loopholes of delay and frustration in previous Acts. I would suggest also that it dovetails into recent legislation, particularly the Land Act, so that if we take into account the terms of the Land Act—if and when it can be implemented—the housing position will be greatly changed. It is a pity that the Bill cannot be taken on its merits and I hope that later on, as the debate proceeds, and particularly in Committee, we will have a very different approach.
One of the points made early in this debate was that the Minister should relax some of his control in connection with the administration of the Housing Act. I speak in this matter, having experience different from any other person in this House, because it was my duty and my life's work to prepare and carry out housing schemes—small as they were in number as I shall tell the House later on— when it was absolutely necessary that I should know all the ins and outs of the Housing Acts. I can tell the House some of the difficulties in regard to implementing them. One of the things I regret, and which I am satisfied the Minister will not entertain, is that overall control should pass from the central authority—from the Department or the Minister—to the operating bodies, as I would call them, the county councils, the county boroughs and urban councils. We have 27 county council authorities operating in this country. I am not quite certain about the number of borough and urban councils but I would imagine they would be somewhere in the neighbourhood of 60. All those authorities are made up of ordinary people like ourselves, differing in views and political outlook and some of them, possibly, having different motives behind their approach to discussion and operation of the Housing Acts in a local authority. Some of them, like ourselves, are reasonable. Some of them, like ourselves, are unreasonable but it was suggested that blanket authority should be issued, somewhat in the nature of the authority issuing to CIE, Bord na Móna, Aer Lingus and such other bodies. But the same thing does not apply at all. I hold that the authority exercised by the Minister and by the Department of Local Government is exactly on a par with the authority exercised by the executive authority of CIE, Bord na Móna, Aer Lingus or any other body and any diffusion of that authority would be entirely wrong.
Another matter I should like the Minister to bear in mind is supervision. Schemes are held up through excessive supervision. I would make one suggestion to the Minister—and I think it should be incorporated in legislation —that, in accepting tenders for houses, the lowest tender need not necessarily be accepted because our country, during recent years, has had to turn to a number of people who became builders with very little experience and no real strict code of training in repairing war damage in England. They made quite considerable sums of money and came back to this country, becoming builders and contractors overnight. My experience has been that no amount of supervision or effort will make a good contractor out of a bad one. Consequently, I think the advice of the local engineers should, in all cases, be adopted if the local engineer raises objection to the acceptance of a tender or a contractor he does not consider entirely satisfactory from his previous experience.
The objective in the construction of any house or cottage should be a lifetime of at least 100 years. We should build them up to that standard, and some of the houses that are being built are not up to that standard, in my opinion. Indeed, a standard of 100 years is too low. Many of the old mud-walled cabins that still remain throughout the country have had a lifetime of more than 200 years. Anything at all in the nature of emergency building with inferior workmanship, turning out inferior houses, should be avoided.
It was suggested that in some cases contractors could be got to build houses for local authorities for considerably lower sums than for private house building. The suggestion was made that the contractor, knowing the amount of the grant and the supplementary grant, took that in as part of his profit in his tendering and did not give the benefit of strict tendering to the person building privately. I do not think that is so at all. Contracts for local authorities are large and the contractor knows that the supervision that will be exercised by a private individual who is having a house built for himself will be extremely strict. The owner will be glad to see the house growing and he will be on the building every day if possible, so the supervision is much more strict.
Furthermore there are higher standards of finishing and fitting in private houses than in local authority houses. The final reason why prices may be higher, and justifiably so, is that the private individual tries to enforce a strict time limit for the completion of the house. Taking all those factors into consideration, I can see a perfectly good reason why contractors cannot build houses for private individuals at the competitive price at which they can build groups of houses for local authorities.
In the debate last week, blame was laid at the door of the Minister and the Department for the conditions that obtain in the city of Dublin. People are not inclined to realise and study the problem as it exists. Most of the houses in the centre of the city are 200 or 300 years old, and would normally begin to show a certain amount of deterioration because of weather conditions and atmospheric influences. The biggest cause of the collapse of quite a number of old houses in the centre of the city of Dublin is the change in traffic conditions, the weight, the intensity and the speed of traffic. Traffic is being diverted off the main, central wide streets of the city, and is being concentrated in one-way streets, and the weaknesses of the foundations of those old houses are immediately found out by the vibration of the fast heavy traffic. That is really the reason, and nobody can be held to blame, neither this Minister, nor this or any other Government. This has arisen out of changes in traffic conditions in the city.
I think we can count our blessings because we have had so much peripheral building in and around the city of Dublin to allow people to be housed out of the crumbling houses in the centre of the city, and to enable the Government to have proper up-to-date planning schemes. Another point is that one house in a row of houses may become dangerous and it is immediately taken down. This hastens the decay or deterioration of the adjoining houses, and in a very short time the whole street has to be stripped down. When those houses have to be taken down, there should be very realistic thinking about their replacement.
I read or heard last night that Dublin Corporation have suggested that a number of vacant areas in the city should be reserved for car parks. I do not agree with that and I think the Minister should give very serious consideration to it. It is estimated that the population of the city of Dublin will increase to one million within the next 20 years. It would be quite wrong to spread the population out into satellite towns around the periphery of Dublin. We should aim at rebuilding flats and houses in the centre of the city so that people can be rehoused in the centre of the city where they will be convenient to their jobs and where transport will cost them less. I feel that we should very definitely rule out the taking over of large areas for car parks. If we are to have car parks, we should have multi-storied buildings to accommodate them.
The question of roads in developed areas was also raised on the last occasion. I suggest to the Minister that he should include in this legislation, or in some future legislation, a provision that the final grant will not be paid until the full development is satisfactory to the Department and to the local authority. In my own town an area was developed by a private speculator and the roads were not completed. The people who occupy those houses were put to great inconvenience because they were not completed. The local authority could not take over the roads because they were not suitable for taking over. In future, it should be a definite condition that the entire development must be entirely satisfactory before the final grant is paid. It must be remembered that the developers and the occupiers have the advantage that they get a partial remission of rates for seven years. The local authorities are put to great expense if they have to take over roads and construct them for the benefit of speculators.
I welcome the section in the Bill with regard to flexibility of allocation. This was a matter that caused considerable difficulty. Of course, the final say in the allocation of houses in the country, in any case, rests with the county medical officer. He was tied up by certain regulations which rendered it impossible for him now and again to give houses to deserving cases with large families, if there were an applicant who had a pulmonary disease or some such condition.
I also welcome the condition with regard to resale of land for private cottages. This is welcome. Sections 62, 102 and 106, where power is given to take over particular houses which are no longer used, is necessary and is welcomed. Senator Cole urged that the grants for reconstruction of houses should be increased and thought it unreasonable that a person with a valuation of £25 or under would be entitled to a grant and a supplementary grant, amounting in all to £900. I agree that it would be advisable, and it would possibly help in the solution of the housing problem, if the amounts for reconstruction were increased, but I cannot agree at all that the provision of £900 by way of grant and supplementary grant to persons with a valuation of £25 is ridiculous.
I think it should be retained and farmers, like everyone else, should be encouraged to build their own houses with grants and loans. They will then be much more house-proud and much more inclined to maintain those houses in good condition. I agree with the increase in area to 1,500 feet. Indeed, Senator McAuliffe and my colleague, Senator Lenehan, showed how those regulations can be got around. When there is a garage, or such building, adjoining a house, all you have to do is break a wall from the house into the garage and then you have an extra room in the house. That should not be necessary and if a person with a big family wants an extra bedroom, it would be much better if it were provided in the beginning instead of resorting to any of those techniques, even though we had resort to them ourselves and used our own ingenuity.
I am all in favour of the differential rent system. It should be universally adopted. I know cases in which cottages were built 20 years ago. They were let at something like 5/- or 6/- a week. There is £40 or £50 in wages coming into some of those houses every week. In the same row of cottages, you may have a man with a large family of seven or eight children who is maybe a roadworker or a labourer and is earning £9 or £10 a week. This man who has a big responsibility with young children has to pay the same rent as his neighbour in whose house there may be five or six people earning, the total income amounting to £50 or £60. The differential rent system is quite reasonable. I think that the flat rate was operating unfairly to the relief of the well-off at the expense of the not so well-off.
Another point I should like to make has been mentioned here already, that is the necessity for controlling the rent of flats. When houses are converted into flats, there should be some control of the rents at which they are let, bearing in mind the initial cost of building, the reconstruction costs and allowing the speculator ten per cent or 12 per cent on his total outlay. In my opinion, once you go beyond that, it is entirely unreasonable to exploit those poor people, as they are being exploited. I cannot understand why some people are happy with that kind of money. As I say, if you take into account the original value of the house, reasonable costs for converting it into flats and any capital outlay on it and give a total profit of ten per cent or 12 per cent, it should be quite reasonable. This would cover the cost of maintenance of the flats and any charges which have to be met.
Senator Fitzgerald mentioned that he would like more control for the local authorities. There is more control being provided for them under this Bill. This control, as I suggested, will be exercised by the Minister and his Department. Local authorities are blamed for delay in implementing housing schemes and acquiring sites. None of the Senators here have had the experience I have had of trying to get sites. It is a most difficult thing to get people to agree to give sites for what we call labourers' cottages. In the first place, they felt it would reduce the value of their land because you brought in a colony of people into one corner of their holding. In the next place, in very many cases, when you acquired a small site for individual cottages, you found the people from whom you acquired the site did not have title. You had possible three generations before you got established title for that particular plot. Local authorities cannot build on any plot until they have clear title. That is possibly not understood by most people or, if it is, people forget about it and are critical of the local authorities on this account.
Much of the delay in connection with housing schemes by local authorities is caused by the planning department. I would be inclined, in this connection, to agree with Senator Cole that we have planned ourselves out of reason and commonsense. The local authorities should be allowed to acquire and develop sites and exercise reasonable control over the distribution of houses on those sites. They should leave the sites available for private individuals who would be enabled to build their own houses by way of loans and grants. A certain amount of criticism was levelled at my own county. It was inspired by my colleague, Senator Lenehan, and it followed on the disclosure by Senator Fitzgerald that 5,278 cottages were built in Meath. That discloses, of course, the fact there was a good amount of employment, that you had people who could take over those cottages and find a means of living in that particular neighbourhood.
I am glad of the fact that one-acre plots can now be sub-divided. At least, they cannot be sub-divided until they are in the hands of local authorities. If the property is vested in the tenants then you have to buy out on the tenant's terms if you are going to use the plot for additional purposes. This is desirable because all through the country those one-acre or half-acre plots are now derelict. They will not even sow vegetables in those plots. It is extraordinary but true that nine tenths of the vegetables consumed in the towns in the County Mayo are brought down from Dublin, and I understand that there is a shortage of vegetables in Dublin and we are getting them from Holland or Belgium. The allocation of large plots for cottages is at the moment just a waste of good ground.
I agree about dower houses, but I think it would be more desirable that an additional room or two rooms should be built so that the old people who would go into the dower house would still have the care and attention of their families living in the main house.
I can give some figures now illustrating the position in County Mayo because a survey was carried out there in 1962. Up to that time cottages or houses could not be provided for small landholders. The survey reveals an extraordinary position. In the whole county, where we have about 45,000 dwellings, there were 4,894 substandard. Of these 3,439 or 70.2 per cent were houses where there were no children under 12 years. Of course, there were many degrees of substandard houses, from the comfortable thatched house which was not serviced to miserable hovels. The hovels in the entire county would be in the low hundreds. Sections 5 and 6 of the Housing Act, 1962, provide a legislative basis for dealing with the worst cases of hovels in a complete manner by harnessing the goodwill of voluntary organisations, and that has been done. The St. Vincent de Paul Society and other voluntary organisations have helped in providing one-room houses to replace those old hovels where the people agreed to that being done. Many of them will not agree to leaving the old houses. Some of those one-roomed or two-roomed houses may not be very aesthetically perfect but they are effective.
Regarding the 1,455 substandard houses with children under 12 the valuation in most cases was less than £5. There must be some effort made to rehouse those people. You have to take into account the Land Act under which it is proposed that in the future viable holdings of 40 acres of arable land will be the order of the day. If you are going to try to house those 1,455 people who are in substandard houses with children, you will find that as the operations of the Land Act develop you will have built more houses than you require. In this matter you must have the closest liaison between the Land Commission and the local authority, and it would be very difficult, of course, for the Land Commission to disclose that they intended to migrate A, B, C or D because this is going to create a regular furore within their Department. There must be a certain amount of delay, and I think that that delay in advisable.
Having this in mind, you have a provision in section 44 of the Bill that the county council can be subsidised to the extent of 66? per cent in connection with the provision of sites for housing any person whose valuation is under £5. Mayo County Council feel that that figure is entirely too low. I will be glad if the Parliamentary Secretary will take a note of that particular point. They feel that the valuation should be more in the neighbourhood of £15. If you have in future a tenant getting anything like 40 acres of arable land the valuation is going to go up. It would be much better that he should have an opportunity of building his own house with a loan and a grant than that the Land Commission should do it and put it on to his rent, which would make the rent entirely out of his reach, or that the local authority would do it and he would be only a tenant rather than the owner in the house.
There is another suggestion made by the county council of Mayo to meet those cases where people are living in miserable hovels. It is very difficult to get them to move, but if they can be moved they should be housed in the neighbourhood of towns where you would have some charitable organisations that will help them, look after them and visit them in their old age. The only alternative is to move them into the county home, and that we do not want. There should be colonies built of small one or two roomed houses for old couples. We should be careful that they will be built in areas where there are active voluntary organisations who might be able to help those people in the closing days of their lives.
Another provision in the Bill I think is very commendable. That is the power to take over houses that have been built and left uninhabited in good condition, where people have gone away. I know some cases where people came home from America and with their own money and with the aid of a grant and a supplementary grant built houses, then locked the door and went away to America. Within my own lifetime and in my service in the council, even within the last 25 years, I have known houses built with loans and grants which have been left derelict and are now in ruins. Even the roofs are off. The provision for taking over those houses in the future and putting tenants into them and keeping them occupied, particularly during the period while other houses are being built, is an excellent provision in this Bill.
Another question is that of itinerants. I was surprised to hear Senator McAuliffe suggest that substandard houses be used to house them. If houses are not fit for the tenants in them they should not be tenanted by itinerants. The question then arises as to whether we should provide good type houses for itinerants. In Mayo we provided cottages for itinerants and after one winter we found the floor boards pulled up and burned, the balustrades and staircases pulled down and burned. Even the doors were burned.
Itinerants as we see them in Mayo are mostly dealers and they all have horse-drawn or motor-drawn caravans. They need small, developed caravan sites. They object to large sites. An investigation has been carried out among 55 families. A majority said: "We are interested in a house; we are interested in work". As far as my experience of them goes, their interest would be to use the place for one winter and then go off again as is their wont. The question, therefore, is entirely one of providing small caravan sites. One of the things we found out was that they were antagonistic to large type camp sites. They do not want to inherit the earth.
I do not agree with my neighbour, Senator Lenehan—I am sorry he is not here. He said 98 per cent of the people in his area were adequately housed. It is a fact that during many years in that area people availed of Gaeltacht and other grants and built reasonably comfortable houses. But the houses were never serviced—they still are not. Admittedly, they were a big change from the old thatched houses where sometimes animals were bedded at the end of the house. The houses were good, with slate roofs and were built in the most favourable conditions: a handyman in the district did all the building and, to use a local expression, he turned the key in the door for £40. In other words, he built the house from the foundations, doors, windows and roofs being provided by the person for whom the house was built. Though many of those houses look nice in the countryside, they are not serviced. Many of them now qualify for improvement grants and many people have added a room or two, but they still do not come up to Senator Sheehy Skeffington's standard of a fully serviced house as we accept it now.
During the years, while 5,200 rural cottages were built in Meath, the total built in Mayo was 839. The people in Mayo were all small landowners and until 1962 we were prevented by law from building cottages for farmers or agricultural labourers. We could build them for tailors or jockeys all right. During my time I encouraged the county council to vest those cottages in every case in which a tenant was willing. We felt that if they did not own their cottages the tenants were not too anxious to maintain them. If a hinge fell off from a door they would allow the door to pull off the other hinge before they thought of repairing it.
Of those 839 cottages, 758 have been vested, leaving 81. Sixty of those have a purchase scheme prepared and a purchase scheme is being prepared in respect of the remaining 20. In a short time all rural cottages in the county will be vested in the people living in them. We have a world rates record in Mayo, 82/- in the £, but cottage repairs cost only £200 to the county council. I am sorry to hear that people feel the council have been negligent, that the officials have been negligent.
Recently, advertisements were issued inviting applications from people in the sizeable towns, with populations of between 1,200 and 1,500, if they required cottages. For the entire county the total number who applied was 23. Of those, ten were from Crossmolina where there is a power station with electricians and other mechanics, three were from Belmullet and nine from Claremorris. Therefore, I do not think it is fair to say we have been negligent.
There are one or two other points on which I should like to speak. It was mentioned that the stamp duty was one of the deterrents to vesting cottages. In regard to rural cottages, vesting can take place on the payment of a sum of a half crown. In the three urban areas stamp duty and solicitor's fees are charged on the full value of the house. I think that is unreasonable and entirely unnecessary. I know it has operated against the vesting of urban cottages, that the cost of stamp duty and solicitor's fees runs to over £100.
I should like to pay tribute to the facilities made available—and which have been largely availed of in my county—for helping people to build their own houses. The House will understand that we can feel a certain amount of pride when I tell them that Mayo County Council has already paid out of its own funds more than £1 million in supplementary grants. I have that figure from the Manager's report to the county council at the estimate meeting this year. That figure means also that the State has paid in grants alone more than £1 million. That should be borne in mind when people are criticising the Government, or any Government, operating under difficult circumstances. They might look back with pride on the fact that, when the facilities were there, they were very generously donated and handed out to the people to help themselves—£1 million from the State and £1 million from Mayo County Council to help those people to build their own houses.
There is one final point I should like to make. In section 26 of this Bill supplementary grants can be paid to farmers with a valuation of up to £60. Supplementary grants can be paid to officials or workers with a salary of £1,045 only; an increase from £832 in the previous Act to £1,045 in the present Bill. I suggest—and it has been recommended to me that I should make this case in the Seanad—that that figure of £1,045 for a worker, an employee, an engineer or any other person who is not working on the land is entirely too low and bears no relation whatsoever to the farmer with a £60 valuation. I would recommend— and I should like a note taken of it— that that amount for officials and employees should be increased to £1,400. Let me take the case of a man in my own profession. A man in my profession, an engineer, is very lucky if he qualifies at 22 years of age, having spent at least four or five years in a secondary school and at least four years doing his university course. It is the universal experience of young engineers that they never get a permanent job until they have been at least five years in temporary employment, which brings them up to getting their first permanent job at 27 years of age.
Those young people in the country would at least like to have some place of their own. They would like to settle down, marry for love and work for riches, but they cannot provide themselves with a house because their commencing salary would be something in the region of £1,300 or £1,350 and they are way above the limit fixed at £1,045. I mention engineers because I know the salaries at which most of them start and they would be working a couple of years before reaching £1,400. But if you want to help young professional people at home you must give them reasonable facilities for marrying and settling down at a reasonable age, and that is under 30 years of age. One of the ways in which that can be done and in which young people can be encouraged to stay at home is to give them the means of providing themselves with their own home with the aid of supplementary grants and loans which they would be able to repay from their salaries over the years.
