I am aware of that. In 1984 the then Coalition Government introduced a major roads programme, of which the Athlone by-pass was part. I am delighted to see that as a result of the steps taken in 1984 we now have the Athlone by-pass. A lot of money has been spent on those roads and it is an excellent investment for our Government. At present we get 75 per cent grant assistance from the EC for the construction of those major roads. When one realises that the materials that go into the building of these roads are subject to 21 per cent VAT and when you take into consideration the amount of PRSI and other taxes that are paid as a result of the construction of those roadways, it is evident that the Exchequer gains from every £1 spent. However, the expenditure on those roadways has dropped substantially as a result of decisions taken by Government over the last three years. The amount of money coming from the EC for the construction of roads has increased but the Exchequer percentage has reduced, hence we have this slow down.
In no country in Europe is more money collected from the motorist than in Ireland. When one takes into consideration the amount of tax on petrol and the purchase of a car, the amount one pays, in road tax and insurance, there is no group in the whole of Europe as heavily penalised as the Irish motorist and no group in the whole of Europe has worse roads. Whether it is the main routes from Dublin to Cork, Belfast, Galway or Sligo, we all know several bottlenecks on those roads where time out of number traffic is held up and the whole country is brought to a halt simply because there may be an accident or a lorry may have broken down. That is disgraceful. I do not see any major effort by this Government or by the Minister for the Environment, who is now over four years in office, to try to get this programme up and running and completed. I have already pointed out that road building is a net asset to the country because it helps to reduce our unemployment, we can gain revenue on the amount of materials used, which is subject to 21 per cent VAT, and we get 75 per cent from the EC fund. It is crazy.
We come now to the other category of roads on which the vast majority of houses in rural Ireland are located. I refer to our county roads, where we have the situation that in many parts of Ireland one cannot travel over the roadways as a result of lack of maintenance in the past number of years, particularly the past two to three years, because of lack of sufficient funding to the local authorities. In my own county, Roscommon, for example, at the present rate it would be 20 years before we could resurface all of our county roads. That is an appalling situation. We have some of the worst roads in the country. I know of a situation where a man intends to cut silage on 1 June and the silage contractor will not draw the silage because, as a result of the poor condition of the county roads, his trailers would be badly damaged. We have situations where creamery lorries will not travel on certain roads to collect milk. These people are paying tax and insurance on their cars. They are entitled to a service the same as the man living in a house on the side if a national primary and national secondary route. It is appalling the way the Government have washed their hands of this and left those people without proper ways of commuting to and from their place of work or of conveying their produce to the market place.
Other decisions taken by the Minister for the Environment had a detrimental effect on the progress made by the previous Government. For example, in Dublin we had the abolition of the Metropolitan Streets Commission, which I believe was disastrous and has left the inner city in a shambles. People cannot invest in Dublin simply because they do not know what the future plans are. That commission was set up by the then Minister for the Environment, the then Deputy John Boland, to try to come to grips with the whole question of the revitalisation of the inner city.
The urban renewal plan of 1986 for designated areas has suffered severely as a result of the present Minister for the Environment. The Government abolished the Dublin Transport Authority, which was set up to monitor and control transport, deal with bus lanes, railway routes, the DART service and feeder routes for it, and the whole question of the roads structure for Dublin. I believe it was a retrograde step to abolish that Authority. The Minister seems to be more concerned with abolishing what was done prior to his coming into office rather than making real progress and dealing with the traffic situation here in Dublin and with the development of the inner city to get rid of the ghettos. We hear the sounds, but we do not see action on the ground.
Take also the Constituency Review Commission. Terms of reference were given to them which resulted in the first report being aborted and having to be scrapped. I have my own reservations about the second report. Was it to guarantee two three-seaters in Mayo? How is it that we ended up with a constituency straddling two provinces, two different health board areas, two different regional development areas, two different tourist areas, nothing in common? I find it difficult to accept that that just happened by accident, because the criteria were for minimum change. It was one of the guidelines laid down. Quite clearly, in that particular constituency that was not adhered to.
I am sure my colleagues will forgive me for becoming parochial for a moment, and the Minister of State present will be quite aware of what I am going to say. We have major problems in the Shannon valley. We had the honour of meeting the Minister of State some 15 months ago when we were seeking funding for a major problem in the midlands, where for three months each year a number of families become marooned and totally cut off. The only way they can get to Mass, to work and to school is either by the Army coming in and taking them out by boat. The members of Roscommon County Council made a reasonable case to the Minister of State for a sum of £160,000 to allow those families to be able to commute by raising the roads over water level. Unfortunately, that money has not been made available to the local authority.
How long can we stand idly by and allow people to suffer those conditions annually? The Minister for the Environment, for reasons best known to him, ignored our plea for help. Compare that £160,000 with the huge sums of money that were spent in County Mayo on the route from Castlerea to Castlebar. Roads were raised by four or five feet. No problem, but nothing for the people of Roscommon. Compare that with the money that was given in the Golden Island-Clonbunny area where roads were raised by two to three feet. Again, it would appear that Minister O'Rourke was able to twist the Minister's arm — she was probably friendlier with him then than she is now. She was able to get the money for that side of the Shannon, but there was nothing for Roscommon, or the western bank of the Shannon.
This is an indication of what happened. We got a total of £100,000 for storm and flood damage from the Department of the Environment, a county with the Shannon on one side and the Suck on the other, where huge problems were created; but they were totally ignored by the Minister and his colleagues.
At present a great number of people are living in overcrowded conditions. We have seen fit to ignore those people and their problems. I would draw the attention of the Minister to the plan for social housing. In that plan for social housing we see where the Minister is prepared to give £3,300 to people who are leaving local authority houses and buying their own homes. Five years ago one of the Minister of State's predecessors decided to give £5,000 to such people. That programme was a major success because it got many people out of local authority houses and this released a whole range of houses for reallocation. In this new programme, which is supposed to be progress, we are going to give £3,300. I ask the Minister does he seriously think that in this day and age that programme will work? The Minister should introduce the figure of £5,000, which it was five years ago, plus inflation. The appropriate figure would probably be in the region of £6,000.
It is our view that the Minister has failed miserably to get sufficient funding for the programmes for which he is responsible. He has failed to get adequate funds for roads. He has failed to provide the necessary funding for local authorities to provide and maintain the level of county roads. I would also like to remind the Minister that in 1977, when his party decided to abolish domestic rates, every citizen here was told that that money would be made up by a rates support grant. The Minister knows, and I know, that each year that rates support grant reduced gradually to a stage where it is now no longer sufficient to meet many of the statutory obligations that local authorities have. In other words, the Minister and his colleagues in Government have failed to honour the commitment they made in 1977. The manifesto is still there, hanging around their necks. The commitment was that the money raised in rates would be made up by the rates support grant. That has not been given and consequently local authorities have been strangled for funding. Hence we have the diabolical condition of our county roads with the result that many people cannot commute to work or carry on their normal business of farming and get their produce to the market place.
I will conclude by referring to one other matter which I and my colleagues find totally unacceptable: it is the manner in which the Minister has gone about the allocation of the national lottery moneys which come through the Department of the Environment. We had a paper exercise here — obviously to appease the Progressive Democrats — a year and a half ago when it was stated that the local authority would have to approve every application before it would go before the Minister for the Environment. What did we get? A rubber-stamping exercise where bundles of applications came in from genuine and sincere community groups. They genuinely believed that if the local authority approved them they were in line for money; but of course what was never properly explained to them was that this was merely a rubber-stamping exercise, that the local authority got those applications in, was not allowed to categorise them, was not allowed to give them priority, but that they went back to the Minister. What do we find happening there? The same as happened before. No change was made. All that happened was that local authority time and energy was used and abused. We still have the corrupt situation where money is handed out for doubtful purposes. The Acting Chairman knows that in our constituency money was given for a tennis court. There was no site for the tennis court. The money was there so a footpath was put in which was too high and cars could not back in. That is just one example and I can give you more. That is how money is wasted and this Minister has allowed that system to continue.
The Minister was sincere when he asked the local authority to process those applications but he should have given those local authorities the power to say that of 50 applications there are five priority applications and we are seeking funding for those. If one examines how this funding is allocated one finds that in a constituency which has senior Ministers the amount being allocated per head of population is four times that allocated to other counties. The Minister has also allowed this situation to continue.
The Minister was dishonest with both Houses of the Oireachtas and with the local authority when he asked them to undertake the sham of rubber-stamping those applications. The general public believed that the local authorities had an input when in fact they had none. It was much like the banner headlines we read in the papers last Saturday week, that £124 million was allocated for roads. If one did not read the fine print one would imagine that the Minister for the Environment was giving another £124 million. What he did was call in the county engineers and instructed them to spend whatever moneys they had before the local elections. What is going to happen afterwards? There will not be a penny available for the next six months. Whatever moneys are available for county roads are going to be spent between now and the elections. It is an absolute untruth to indicate that this money is available and that there was going to be a crash programme for three weeks. Who has seen the crash programme? Where is it happening? In my county we have £1 million for county roads and we did not get any additional money. I established that with the county engineer within the last few days. I want to recommend this motion to the House.